Interview with PenPot CEO Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz on Open-Source Design and Ethical Funding

Penpot's Origin Story

Pablo: Sure, well i think a bit of context here is interesting because Penpot is not something that spontaneously just came to be. Penpot is a design tool and prototyping tool as you mentioned. It competes against Figma, Sketch, Invision, and Adobe XD. It's a bit more pictorial. Not so much Photoshop, although I'm not an expert on bitmap. You could say that there are two separate categories. We are in the pictorial prototype arena rather than the bitmap raster image.

Penpot was not spontaneous, or even a pet project by some people in a garage or anything. This comes from a company called Kaleidos, which you mentioned I'm CEO of. That company is 10 years old and was created to do some experiments around IT and partnering with startups or big corporations that would need that super great talented team and develop their projects, not our projects, but theirs. At the same time we wanted to incubate our own ideas. We wanted to say, "Okay we are all about open source and free software." Actually, the whole name is Kaleidos Open Source.

We wanted to make sure that we had this hybrid mode where we would create software for other people and be happy with them and for them for the future and their businesses on the internet, but also at the same time protect quality time to develop our own stuff. Penpot is just one of those products.

The reason Penpot does exist is because at some point, I think six or seven years ago, Kaleidos was a very developer-centric company. We didn't have UX or UI in-house. We saw the potential for multi-functional teams where you would have design, UX/UI design in general and code working together, but we needed to use open source because that's our ethos. Kaleidos will use open source as an end in itself but also as a means to an end.

We started creating Taiga, which is a project management platform. We're all about processes and how to do stuff; not just what but how we achieve things and team management and all that. So we created Taiga and we were happy to have that agile mindset built in - a tool for teams like ourselves. But as you can imagine, at some point designers at Kaleidos were super pro open source but they said,

"Look we are not first-class citizens in open source. We are happy with Inkscape. We are happy with GIMP. We are happy with some tools, but you developers have everything to choose from. You can choose the best of the best. You live in this paradise world where you don't know how privileged you are.

We agree with you. We are all about open source absolutely but you have to understand that we are frustrated with the professional quality of some tools. We want to achieve parity with you developers."

We came to this point where designers asked the company the company, meaning their peers because it's an employee-owned company, "look could we make an exception and use Figma? For us to have a professional quality design tool?"

We said, Oh no. We knew this was coming. This is terrible news. We understand where you're coming from. We have empathy and we understand your frustration. Is there anything else we could do?"

They said, "Well, we actually tried to make some UI revamps on Inkscape as a product called Rethinkscape, but we don't own that project. It's other developers that know what is best for the tool. So we cannot trust that at some point they will use our. feedback It's not just feedback. It was a lot of work. So no. Sorry, but there's nothing you can do. It's Figma or frustration."

So we said, "Okay we're going to make that as an exception to the rule of using only open source tools, but we're going to develop the Figma-kille as a compromise."

An Open Source Figma-killer

It's a nice compromise. We will allow ourselves to accept that Figma has to to be here, but we might have the ability, the talent, the creativity, the mindset and the ambition to create an open source Figma-killer. We typically say "Figma-killer" and not "Sketch-killer" and not "Invision-killer." People listening to the podcast could say, "Why aren't you saying that?" Well, it's just a shortcut. Figma is the leader. If you aim at Figma, you're basically aiming at the leader. You are doing the collateral effect, which is you could be better than Sketch and better than Invision. This is a nice shortcut for us.

It's very easy to say, "Oh yes let's develop an open source Figma-killer. Fortunately at Kaleidos, we have the talent because this is not your typical tool to develop. When people think of Penpot they have to understand that for Penpot to be successful you would have to develop a web-based platform. So it's browser first. The technology that you you have to use is what the browser allows you to use. It needs to be super efficient in terms of performance. It has to be the slickest UI you can imagine. Designers, you're a designer yourself, you need to have immediate feedback and response in your micro interactions with a design tool. It has to be very very bug free. You cannot accept small errors or margin errors or rotations that are not mathematically perfect. So you have all these challenges.

And then of course you've got online collaboration. So people are joining together to design at the same time from different browsers. from different locations in the world.That has to work flawlessly. If it doesn't work flawlessly, it doesn't work at all. It's great to have a tool just for yourself, but magic happens when you have this collaboration scheme. When people can join not only asynchronously, but actually synchronously.

We released that to the world last February on alpha and I think it was about time that people could enjoy something like Penpot.

Clayton:It was really well received! I remember going and seeing the Product Hunt page. It was all glowing reviews. I was so impressed that I made a first reaction video because it's like oh wow, people are really talking this up. I was glad I recorded it because I got the genuine first reaction.

Pablo: Yeah we saw it! That was great. I was like, "Oh that's a very nice, very cute first impression for a reaction. It's honest. The team was was watching it and taking notes and responding, "Okay so that's okay. That's good feedback. Oh he doesn't see this. Okay, but that make sense. That was good."

And not only you, but a lot of people were sharing their impressions. I have a lot to say about those first impressions in due time when. When you feel it's fine, but yeah only a few months in the wild.

Clayton: After I checked it out and realized this is the real deal and this is quite polished for an initial release is that I got curious. How is this possible? I don't see a pricing page anywhere. With open source tools, especially if you're using them professionally it's one thing to check out someone's pet project and be like, "Wow, that's impressive. You really put a lot into that. That's excellent. It's another to then commit to it and say does this have the longevity and stability that I can rely on this for my work?

That's when I learned about Kaleidos and the incubator program and thought, "Wow, like you said, there's a whole backstory to this project and a lot of thought that goes into incubating it and and sustaining it. I'd love to dive deeper into that aspect of it.

Pivoting to Full-Time Open Source Product Development

The impression that I get is that Kaleidos is for hire and builds out apps, websites and web apps for other companies. I see you've worked in the health space for example. It sounds like you've actually worked in a lot of different industries.

Pablo:That is the thing from the past now, but what you say is absolutely true up until last month. A little trick was we would divert revenue, profit, from this for hire team. How can I say this and not sound bad, but I mean super big projects. So we would be asked by startups with a lot of money and great ideas, but no team to be their team for a couple of years. So we would accept it if the technology was challenging, if the business was aligned with our ethos and it was a big project.

What we would do is we were not cheap. Not super expensive, but you know not cheap. Instead of distributing profits among us we put that money into having teams devoted to our own things to our own products.

That worked okay for some years and Penpit got that sustainability with that hybrid mode, but eventually both Taiga and Penpot have asked, "Can these projects receive full attention?". Full attention means we need to say no to external clients so that hiring thing is over.

So where is the the money coming from?

It's coming from our own savings, some business annuals and some seed VCs that trust and support us and monetization strategies from Taiga that has been working for several years now. We get money from people paying for services for Taiga.

So we have all the resources both monetary and in terms of talent that we need to be fully focused on Taiga and Penpot for the next years. We were very excited that we could make that transition swiftly this year.

So kaleidos.net, if you go now to the website you won't see many traces of the old Kaleidos where you could actually contact us and we could accept your project.

Clayton: Okay thank you. I thought I was losing my mind! When I recently visited the site, I was like "Where are all the big names I remember seeing on the website?!?" So that explains it.

Pablo: Yes, machine learning projects, massive stuff... Yeah all that portfolio, which we're very proud of, but it doesn't make sense to show it. Who would care about that when we are focusing on our products?

It's something that we keep and we will keep. It's a pedigree in a way. Just think, a month ago we just shut it down. Everything that was related to the old Kaleidos.

Now it's all about our incubation process. It doesn't stop with Taiga and Penpot, but it's now 100 percent Taiga and Penpot.

We're very excited about this because it's giving ourselves the opportunity to make a big impact using open source in technology and society in something that is targeted to technology teams. For us the team means design and code. We cannot see them separate any longer. We believe in mixing code and design, engineering and creativity; working together to create great stuff and we think that if you don't have access to great open source tools to do that then the technology that is going to be created will be limited to what certain sectors of society can afford. Paying to design. And we're against that. We are okay with people paying whatever they want to pay, but we are more okay with allowing people to enjoy professional tools that give them everything they need to create their work.

Now we have to be sustainable. We cannot just do this with our savings month after month. We have business models that we are identifying and analyzing for the future.

Of course, when we launched Penpot, on Product Hunt and Hacker News there was great feedback. No haters. Amazing. Some people were saying, "Who could prove me? Who could guarantee that this is not a trap? That this is not a smart move from a commercial software company that is using open source to lure us into their plans? Then make it closed?"

Clayton: It's a bit conspiratorial but it could happen.

Pablo: It's the first in open source in terms of design and and the market is very exciting. Figma has been valued at nine billion dollars a month ago. So I understand people would see this from that particular angle, but then the community would reply with, "But this is the guys that developed Taiga five years ago and do you see any suspicious moves? No. So this is trust. They can be trusted. They've done it before. There's no hidden traps."

We were glad to see that we got credit from our past actions. So yeah, there's no trap.

It's just people trying to make sure that design and open source are finally together for the next decade.

Personal Innovation Week

Clayton: Well congratulations on that shift for the business. That's a big deal. It's a big deal and it makes a lot of sense. If people are passionate about the projects that you all have been incubating and it's hard to balance both of those when you're doing work for hire model. Then trying to protect company time to work on essentially pet projects.

I'm most active in the Drupal world and it's common to have what Google popularized, the 10 or 15 percent time to to do what you like. Oftentimes people use that to contribute back to open source, but it's always the first thing to go as soon as the there's a client priority. Of course it makes sense. You're being paid to deliver for the client.

Pablo: We had a hack for that because that 10 percent Google thing was there back 10 years ago when we created Kaleidos. We wanted to be innovative and we wanted to have quality time to just explore and be creative and all that. People told us do the Google 10 percent and we said, I don't think that's going to work. If you cannot commit that time and you cannot do that with peers that also decide to share their 10 at the same time as your 10 percent then it is going to be quite individualistic. Also the scale of what you can achieve is going to be rather small. Google has immense resources so anything small gets multiplied by orders of magnitude. For a company of 15 people you need everyone on board.

So what we said is no to google 10 and we created our PI weeks. PI weeks are personal innovation weeks. Every July and every December the company would stop its daily work for clients. Those projects we would still get paid because because our clients understand there's other value in that and everyone at the same time would suggest projects and work together for the whole week.

Clayton: Like a hack-a-thon.

Pablo: Right, but no prizes, no context, no rules. Well just two rules: use open source and be ready to show something functional by Friday. By doing that we shifted from that 10 individualistic approach to a team effort and guess what? Penpot, Taiga and 200 other projects were born in our now 20 pie weeks.

Clayton: Wow. Nice. That's such a great team-building opportunity. Oftentimes what I'll do is just tinker around, usually on my own, help with a certain issue in an issue queue, but working collaboratively on a project for a week with your co-workers...

Pablo: Yeah I can tell you, this past PI week, just to give you an example. On purpose I looked for people I'm not working with on a daily basis. We created this exquisite corpse project, but instead of literature you know, short tales, it was about drawings. So we created this collaborative canvas where you get just a few pixels from the bottom layer. The bottom part is from the previous drawing and you continue. Then someone continues your drawing and then you put everything together. Real creativity and it's like wow this is amazing!

That happened because of that very intense week. We shared the processes and ethos even if we didn't work together every day we knew that we were compatible in terms of interfaces, like human interfaces.

Now we got eight projects like that one. People don't have to look at this incubation process as always potentially another product you're going to launch. Of course Penpot was, but this could just be a pet project just for fun. Who knows? It could evolve into other stuff, a plugin for Penpot. I don't know, it could be a plugin, but we don't go into the PI week with any objective other than having fun, experimenting and learn together. Then you get things like Penpot.

But again, you cannot just say I'm going to develop a tool like this and just do it. It's no surprise that there are only a handful of tools of that type. You get thousands of e-commerce sites, even tens of project management tools, but you only get half a dozen design tools. That's for a reason.

Ethical Funding

Clayton: The issue for Possible Futures that we're working on right now is the question of funding. We're going to feature a great interview that happened on the podcast Changelog about OpenCollective and how that's helped sustainability of open source projects. There's also the critique penned by Jeffrey Zeldman called Nothing Fails Like Success. In it he makes a good point that i think a lot of us in the industry are now familiar with because it's so front and center which is the trap of when a company takes on so much VC funding that when they have to pay that back, they have to pay that back big time. So platforms like Twitter need to generate so much revenue that they're doing very unsavory things in terms of their business model to scale to that level and keep people's eyeballs even if it means promoting hate speech and fueling the outrage algorithm and whatnot.

Part of what I wanted to discuss with you is that it doesn't have to be that way. What are some other more ethical alternatives for starting a business and growing it and making it sustainable, but in a way that maintains those core values?

Pablo: That's a great question. At Kaleidos, since we were created we quickly came to the conclusion that we were privileged. We were born in financial crisis here in Spain and 2011 was a harsh year, but we could take risks. Why? Because of privilege - we would not have any issues finding jobs andpayrolls and all that. So we said, okay let's use that privilege for good. Let's use it to make sure that we don't have to make compromises we don't like. That we don't have to negotiate and always fall back and concede little by little. Just for money or exposure or whatever.

We had this ethical committee that would evaluate potential projects. Back then we we had this very clear stance that we have a lot of talent and we are not going to put this talent so that people that we are not aligned with benefits. We would think, okay this is a client that is going to develop this product. It's very challenging and a lot of money but do we really want this product to exist?

When it comes to this shift, you said this is a big deal. It is a big deal because we also need to keep that ethos. We need to recognize ourselves. We need to see that we are the same same team, same people. We're getting some some investment, but we know who is actually supporting the project.

We've got a lot of VCs interested in us and we picked the one that we liked, that was aligned with open source and our values and the type of team we are. We have a great deal.

But if you only want VCs for the money you have to to to be ready for those VSs, all those investors, to be there only for the money back. Don't fool yourself. If you only want the money, expect to be asked just about the money.

There are ways to ask for just the amount of money you need to prove something and what we need to prove here is not that we can raise a lot of money. The point here is that we can make this business sustainable, that people can trust that this is going to be scalable, that this is going to continue to be developed and adding new features. This is a really global product.

You mentioned Penpit, but same with Taiga and we don't need any more money than is asked for proof.

If you go and ask for more money that you don't really need or that is intended to just go for the next VC round and this is about a speculation, you're in a different business. You're in a round-driven business model.

It might sound a bit weird, but we're not here for the money we're here for the impact. We like to be to be right. We like to make a point and be right about it. It's really exciting when you say something that you believe. You have a strong opinion and people follow you and you think that by doing that you're creating a better world. Technology is so important for that. This is fundamental for us and this was asked a dozen times internally before the shift. We understand this next move and what entails because in the past we would say no to certain things. We are going to keep saying no to perhaps to a bunch of things.

Clayton: It makes a lot of sense to me that people would and that you all collectively decided on a path that's more focused around impact than just making a ton of money. I've certainly made those decisions a few times now in my career. I knew that I would take a bit of a pay cut to join a worker-owner cooperative or to work with more clients that I was aligned with or work with a smaller team where I had more agency.

It's competitive for the worker in the tech industry, in a lot of areas, and that's one thing I keep seeing in small business owner circles - communicate your values and communicate the impact that you that you want to have because that is one of the prevailing reasons that people choose one company over another to work.

Pablo: That means being very transparent about your decisions and your decision making process. Allowing yourself to make mistakes amd always have full approval.

I've been asked by VCs, "Yeah yeah, that's that's great but do you want to become rich or not?"

This is a serious question by VCs. And we respond, "well no. I mean life is short. Let's just have fun. A bit of money is okay but not beyond a certain point." And they're not interested in investing because if you don't want to become rich, they don't think you have the ambition. The stakes for you are not that big. From VC's worldview, only founders wanting to become rich are the ones that are going to make the business successful. That's their pattern matching.

Clayton: It's a good screening question for them and for you I suppose.

Pablo: Yeah no that's great. Go ahead and ask that question. Instead of 20 minutes we'll just spend five.

Fortunately, more and more those questions are not being asked. Still this is a very Silicon Valley type of question but not only Silicon Valley. In Europe you get that question too, but I think more and more VCs and private investors are looking at the team, how cohesive the team is, how they work together, their values and their ambitions as a collective. Founders are important because they sometimes serve as some sort of leadership, but I think fortunately they're looking more at how to scale up a company and not just fail at keeping the ethos and the culture. That was there at the beginning you know. There's a big challenge though.

Clayton: It's encouraging to see more traction being gained in the ethical investment space and striking a balance between being able to to raise capital to see a project idea into fruition, but in a way that's sustainable where you're not then obligated to earning profits back 10x at the expense of users.

Rather than unicorns, Zebras United is a really excellent movement. Do you have any resources on groups or funds that you all found helpful in that that journey that you've been on?

Pablo: There's nothing like that unfortunately. There's not a structured database, filter segmented for that. It's a lot of hit and miss and chance.

One thing I want to stress here is that we want to win this. It's one thing to not want to personally have any excitement about becoming rich like some VCs are expecting you to do. However, that doesn't mean you don't want to win. We want open source to rule design. We want to really go after all the major players. We are ready to leave a lot of money on the table in the process. We don't have an issue with that at all. We have big ambitions. We're not here to be a category three player or anything like. We dream.

Designers as First-Class Citizens in Open Source

Clayton: Which is a good segue because I want to circle back to the the design and open source space. Our previous issue of Possible Futures was all on the State of Open Source.

There were two major interesting tendencies that are being grappled with: one is governance and funding and the other is how to better collaborate between designers and developers. Like you said, shifting so that designers aren't second-class citizens in the open source world. And like you said, the tools that we have is one one key component to that.

Penpot is already quickly reaching a lot of feature parity with something like Figma. What are some things that you see Figma and other proprietary design tools unable to do that that you see Penpot being able to do? It can be very practical things or it can be more process or philosophical aspects of this kind of work.

Pablo: Well many things. The most obvious one, and it's philosophical, but it has to do with open source and open standards. We use SVG as a native format. We have zero interest in proprietary formats with Penpot. We know SVG has enormous potential. It can can't do everything. Whatever we inject there, basically HTML for text management is the sole thing that SVG handles differently from what you would expect a design tool to to behave like. We want to make sure that data formats and data interoperability is 100 percent future-proof.

Non-open source tools purposefully have this vendor locking strategy with formats. Yeah you can export to SVG, you can import fromSVG, but there's a loss in translation every single time.

Penpot doesn't have any loss in translation because you export SVG, which is the native format. That means that when designers communicate with developers the design, it is already considered the code. So we are in this position where a designer for the first time can consider themselves coders.They can go to the repository, which is the golden standard these days for where the source of truth remains for a project. Indirectly through Penpot, they know that their design is first class citizen input to the repository because you could connect Penpit to your git repository. Developers can just take it, use it, transform it without the constant fear from the designer that something might not be quite right in that translation because there's no translation.

You could try to do that without being open source.

Clayton: That's ertainly what the aspiration is. You open up a Sketch file or a Figma file and you see the CSS generated, you see the exact colors but you're right. Adopting open standards and using things like SVG you are getting closer and closer to a single source of truth that everyone is working from.

Pablo: Just just picture this. A designer considers that certain products are designed and it's finished. They commit and push right to the repository. The ripple effect of that is that it goes into production with no human intervention because it's code. It's valid code. It's not just that you get the properties on a sidebar. Your design is code. It's valid code.

That also means tighter integration between designing code and that creates a more fruitful conversation between designers and developers because the developer then sees value in being welcomed into the design process. The developer will see themselves as I'm welcome here because this is code. When you narrow that gap between design and code magic happens. You have more functional conversations.

Of course being open source gives you the innovation that comes from the community. Open source gives you a global reach. The architecture that Figma had for plugins initially backfired because it was not meant to be open to other people to tinker with. I think they've sorted that out, but Penpot has been given birth with the idea that people will be able to create on top of Penpit. So this contribution framework is important. We should be able to see Penpot grow in unexpected ways for people to enjoy their particular view of what a design tool has to be.

Penpot also gives you by its open source nature- you can run it on your server. Wow, you know groundbreaking stuff. You cannot do that with any other tool. You can have that as a desktop native thing, like Sketch, if you use a Mac of course. Penpot allows you to run your own design Penpot server, which is one of the last few remnants of core tools in terms of productivity for teams that was not allowed to to be in your private cloud. This has to be SaaS.

That's no longer true. With Penpot you can have it alongside all the tools that you're using. You have full control. Design material is sometimes delicate and you have to keep it for yourself. You might want to integrate with your crazy ideas about processing or whatever. So you can run it on your laptop and have a solo experience like a client server and we will eventually have the native desktop experience just by bundling this with probably the Electron framework. That's great and that serves some use cases, a bit corner use cases, but useful nonetheless. But having your own server for the first time opens up a lot of possibilities.

Open source here in design is fresh. It's very very new to the design arena, which has evolved slowly for the past 20 years because open source was not there and collaborative work was not there, in terms of contribution. I think it's great that we have at least one good example of a design tool that can scale up and be for everyone, not just for technical people.

Clayton: And Penpot serves as a really great example really of what can happen when you create a team of designers and developers that are all equally respected and each person's discipline is is valued. You see the result. You get a tool that is really fun to work with and really effective.

There's a lot of people in the open source world who are at that point philosophically, understanding the value of design but I think putting it into practice is difficult still for many.

Pablo: When you go to open source events like FOSDEM and and others you see the open source design track and you see designers struggling with how to contribute to open source projects. There's tips and tricks and all that, but the best approach here - the neat shortcut is not for designers to struggle, to find ways but for developers to actually be very welcoming and respecting that work. That's super fast into the success path.

That's what what happened at Kaleidos six or seven years ago. We decided to take that leap of faith allowing alien people like designers with their very fashionable mindsets and all that, because it's all about fashion it's all about trending things and all that, and we are developing like solid sustainable back-end architectures and all that and. I mean this is this is not how we thought about it, but you could picture it in a very comical way. Who are these people that belong to this other type of breed? We said let's see what happens and it was an immediate success because we welcomed them, we looked for them, we respected them and we gave them ownership, agency and listened. And in a way obeyed when when it was important to do. You are the one that knows what to do.

From that realization comes Penpit. We like to be in that type of team. We want other teams to have it and we're here to help those teams. Sometimes tools help too and so Kalelidos, we experimented with the joy of having code and design together but for real, not subordinated like a feudal system or where developers are still on the top in the hierarchy.

Clayton: It seemed like because Penpot came out of one of the PI weeks and designers planting the seed beforehand you started a project with designers as co-participants and co-leaders from the beginning. That looks very different than what still happens oftentimes which is, let's invite a designer in to design...

Pablo: a logo.

[laugher]

Clayton: Right! Or we need a designer to update our interface. But the design process goes so much deeper than that and so a lot of times designers want to be involved, understandably so, from the ground up. It's like, well back up. If you want me to help you redesign this user interface who are your users? What are they wanting to do? And having a more holistic approach.

The fact that you all were able to do that from the beginning helps it succeed in a true collaboration between the disciplines.

Pablo: Yeah, I think when we created Taiga, which is agile project management, we developed it in a way for developers to make it exciting for designers to go into agile - to do scrum and Kanban and this iterative process where there's uncertainty along the way and you cannot just design everything from beginning to end and then finish. This is this is evolving all the time and for a designer that's tough. So we said, okay we're going to create Taiga to make sure that they enjoy the process, they enjoy the ride and they get it. This is a little trick to welcome them to agile in a way that they can enjoy.

With Penpot we're doing the reverse. We're making sure that designers can welcome developers to the design process respected, appreciated be part of it. So it's nice. There's a symmetry there between the two tools that we have, but it comes out of respect for the other type of mindset.

We hope that with Penpot people will not only have a great open source design tool but also see the potential for that conversation between design and code to be more more more productive, more insightful, more fun and we cannot have that ruled by non-open source software. We believe this is this is going to be big for this next decade and we cannot have open source lagging behind. We have to provide the tool set for that and not just keep developing the next framework, the next database, the next messaging system, the next low-level kernel. I come from that, since 1996. I know what this one's like and it's about time that we go to the non-technical end user tool that enables great processes to happen in a team and open source knows a lot about teams.

So it's not a new concept, it's just that we have to open up what a team means. Once we get that it's going to feel natural.

Clayton: Absolutely. Hallelujah! I am here for all of that. Very exciting. Well we're about at time. Is there anything else that you want to say about Penpot, Taiga, or Kaleidos that we haven't touched upon before we wrap things up?

Pablo: The only thing is that Kaleidos is a nice bunch of people, strong values, a strong culture about open source, sharing, generosity and open source of course. We are committed to this. We have some funding, but most importantly we have ourselves and our passion and our talent we're here for the long term.

We expect big news this year, but also next year. Next year 2022 should be for us big time in terms of uh engagement, in terms of features, in terms of competition, so watch what we're doing, ask questions, participate in whatever you're interested in. If you're into agile and about team processes and all that then take a look at Taiga. If you're into design process and bridging that gap between design and code, go for Penpit. You can go for both of course.

Follow us on social networks and all that. We're very open and transparent about what we're doing - dev diaries and all that. We're a small team, but we have quality time to devote to the community and people coming to respectfully contribute and give feedback. Whether it's requesting a bug, translating something or suggesting a feature.

I just hope you're excited as we are about all this.

Clayton: Yes yes indeed. You are off to a great start with Penpot and Taiga is an excellent project already. The big shift to your business model at Kaleidos is exciting, to be able to pour even more attention and energy into things. I really appreciate you coming on and chatting about all things open source and design and sustainability. There's a lot here that we unpacked together.

Pablo: I enjoyed the interview a lot, or the conversation rather. Thank you very much for that first impressions video Clayton. We really enjoyed it and i also enjoyed this great hour together.