Two decades prior, Dries Buytaert, who later became the founder of Drupal and Acquia, was an undergraduate student at the University of Antwerp. He aimed to utilize his developing coding abilities by creating a communication platform for his student residence. This initial concept gradually transformed into the open-source Drupal web content management system, which subsequently served as the foundation for a commercial enterprise known as Acquia.

Buytaert subsequently secured over $180 million in funding and completed a successful exit in 2019 when Vista Equity Partners acquired the company for $1 billion; however, achieving this milestone required eighteen years of dedicated effort.

While numerous startups are now founded on open-source principles, in the early 2000s, only a limited number of pioneers had emerged, and none had followed the approach adopted by Acquia. Buytaert and his colleagues resolved to simplify the process of setting up a Drupal installation by developing a cloud-based hosted service.

This approach appears straightforward today, but it’s important to remember that in 2009, AWS was still in its early stages as a secondary project within Amazon, rather than the $45 billion industry leader it has become. By 2021, establishing a startup based on an open-source project with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering had become a recognized and widespread strategy. At the time, however, it was an unprecedented undertaking. Ultimately, choosing this unconventional route proved highly successful for Acquia.

The journey from a university dorm room to a billion-dollar acquisition represents the aspiration of every startup entrepreneur. Buytaert attained this success through courage, diligent work, and ambitious vision. His narrative is not only inspiring but also provides valuable insights for startup founders who aspire to create substantial ventures.

Originating from a Classic Dorm Room Setting

Before widespread internet connectivity and ubiquitous mobile phones, Buytaert’s initial goal was to create a unified platform for communication among himself and his peers. As Buytaert explained, “My intention was to develop a sort of internal bulletin board to facilitate communication with fellow students in the dormitory, primarily for coordinating simple activities like ‘Let’s meet for drinks at 8:00.’”

He was also motivated by a desire to improve his coding abilities. “Concurrently, I aimed to gain experience with PHP and MySQL, which were relatively new technologies at the time. I planned to dedicate a few evenings to constructing a fundamental message board utilizing PHP and MySQL, both for educational purposes and to provide a useful tool for our group.”

The resulting application effectively fulfilled its intended function. However, as graduation approached, Buytaert understood that disconnecting his computer and moving forward would lead to the dissolution of the community he had fostered. Consequently, he resolved to make the site publicly accessible, naming it drop.org, though this was unintentional. His original intention was to secure the domain dorp.org, as “dorp” translates to “village or small community” in Dutch, but he inadvertently transposed the letters during the registration process.

Buytaert continued to enhance drop.org with functionalities such as diaries – an early form of blogging – and RSS feeds. Ultimately, he conceived the idea of releasing the site’s underlying software as open-source, giving it the name Drupal.

The birth of web content management

Concurrently with Dries Buytaert’s initial work on what would evolve into Drupal, the market for web content management (WCM) was in its nascent stages. Earlier websites were generally uncomplicated, but they were becoming increasingly intricate during the late 1990s, prompting numerous startups to address the challenges of their administration. Buytaert may not have realized it at the time, but an industry was poised to benefit from an open-source solution such as Drupal.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst who has followed the WCM landscape for over two decades, began his career by authoring a report for Ovum concerning the emerging market for these types of tools. “Web Content Management emerged in the late 90s and quickly became a popular subject during the dot-com boom — companies such as ATG, Vignette, Interwoven, Broadvision, and Open Market — were heavily financed and highly successful during that period. However, this success was accompanied by considerable complexity,” Pelz-Sharpe recently stated. He further clarified, “It’s important to note that WCM solutions were intended for large enterprises with substantial financial resources. They were known for being challenging to deploy, extremely costly to license, and highly profitable for system integrators and consulting firms.”

He noted that by the early 2000s, when Drupal appeared, it wasn’t the sole open-source alternative available, but it represented a significant trend toward providing organizations with choices by making web content management more accessible.

“Dries demonstrated a strong grasp of the significance of effectively managing an open-source community, and subsequently, of steadily improving the platform through numerous small development achievements. This, in turn, fostered the expansion of a large network of smaller agencies and developers that continue to operate today,” he elaborated.

Building an open-source company

Following his university studies, Buytaert began his professional career with a startup in Belgium, an experience that sparked his entrepreneurial ambitions and ultimately motivated him to establish his own venture. Although he continued to develop Drupal, initially as a personal interest, he subsequently pursued and completed his doctoral degree in computer science. By approximately 2007, Drupal’s user base was expanding rapidly, presenting Buytaert with a pivotal decision: to pursue a career in academia or to explore the potential of the Drupal project. He opted to co-found Acquia with Jay Batson, with the goal of providing commercial support for the open-source platform.

“I connected with Jay in 2007, and we began discussing and planning our future career paths. I ultimately decided to discontinue my academic pursuits to dedicate myself to launching Acquia while completing my doctoral dissertation. I successfully defended my Ph.D., and immediately transitioned to a full-time role at Acquia,” he stated.

Prior to leaving academia, Buytaert was already collaborating directly with individuals utilizing Drupal. Early DrupalCon events, attracting several hundred attendees, were gaining prominence and drawing attention to the platform. A notable early adopter was MTV, and Buytaert recounts providing their engineering team with complimentary assistance during off-hours, driven by a desire to ensure their success. This experience also led him to recognize the potential for revenue generation through similar support services.

“I believed that for Drupal to achieve widespread adoption, particularly among large organizations, a company was needed to provide comprehensive support, facilitate their success with Drupal, and assist them with scaling – essentially, all the services we now offer at Acquia,” Buytaert clarified.

Raising cash

Tony Byrne, who founded Real Story Group and has analyzed web content management for twenty years, highlights Drupal’s remarkable endurance as a key strength of the platform, attributing this success directly to Dries Buytaert’s leadership.

“Drupal’s continuous development prevented it from becoming narrowly defined. It transitioned from a platform focused on community contributions to a content management system that moved beyond conventional page handling, ultimately becoming a content application platform suitable for emerging PHP developers prepared to grasp the system’s distinctive characteristics,” Byrne explained.

Buytaert and Batson initially possessed only the open-source project itself, alongside a preliminary concept for a commercial enterprise. They developed a presentation and began presenting their concept to potential investors.

“We had Drupal as our foundation, but essentially we approached venture capitalists with a presentation and a financial projection spreadsheet, successfully securing $7 million in funding, which marked our beginning. It’s noteworthy that we commenced coding *after* receiving this investment, a contrast to current practices. Today, a prototype would typically be developed for a seed round, but we directly obtained a $7 million Series A round without a team or any existing code, relying solely on our idea and strategy,” he stated.

A further challenge in securing investment stemmed from the fact that building a business around an open-source project was not a widely accepted practice at the time. Only a limited number of companies, such as Red Hat, MySQL, and JBoss, had demonstrated revenues exceeding $10 million, serving as examples. Convincing investors of this business model proved difficult.

However, with the initial Series A funding secured, they began recruitment and development, continuing to raise capital annually until 2016.

A different revenue model

Before seeking funding, Batson and Buytaert investigated other open-source businesses and discovered that service agreements were the standard method for generating income. They initially adopted this approach for approximately the first year of operation. Subsequently, the pair decided to pursue a more ambitious strategy.

“We underwent a significant shift in direction because Amazon, with its early AWS offerings like EC2 and S3, experienced periods of unreliability. However, we identified a substantial opportunity to provide open-source solutions through the cloud, and we began developing the Drupal platform as a service – effectively pioneering the delivery of open source via the cloud,” Buytaert clarified.

This represented a considerable departure from the conventional open-source maintenance business model. However, this change contributed to the startup’s expansion. “Currently, many new open-source companies operate in this manner, delivering open source in the cloud, and it significantly accelerated Acquia’s growth by simplifying Drupal usage for our customers at a larger scale,” Buytaert shared with TechCrunch.

The company encountered considerable obstacles while attempting to market a service that combined open-source foundations with cloud hosting. Although SaaS companies such as Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow were already established when Acquia launched its cloud service, the primary challenge involved assuring potential customers of the cloud’s safety and security.

Buytaert suggests that the relatively low-risk nature of managing a company website may have encouraged initial adoption of their cloud service, which ultimately proved beneficial for his startup. Indeed, Acquia’s success in transitioning to the cloud was so notable that AWS eventually invested in the company in 2014, though the specific investment amount was not disclosed.

Vista Equity Partners acquired Acquia in 2019, and Buytaert states that this transaction continues to support the realization of his long-term objectives for the company. “It centers on a far-reaching vision and the means to achieve it within a practical timeframe. We are competing with major technology corporations. We are a smaller entity compared to companies like Adobe and Salesforce, and we recognize that attaining our desired position requires access to substantial financial resources, which this acquisition facilitates.”

He recommends that newly established companies embrace similarly ambitious thinking as he did with Acquia, while also acknowledging the necessity of diligent effort and perseverance in building a billion-dollar enterprise, advising founders to consider a 10-year perspective.

Pelz-Sharpe credits Buytaert with successfully establishing both a thriving community and a prosperous company, and with making a significant contribution to the internet as a whole. “While the commercial side of Drupal (Acquia) has achieved considerable success, the Drupal community continues to flourish. The extent to which this is attributable to Dries himself, versus favorable timing and the community’s inherent strength, is open to debate, but without Dries, the Drupal community would not exist.”