Twenty years ago The founder of Drupal and Acquia Dries Buytaert was a university student at the University of Antwerp. He wanted to put his burgeoning programming skills to good use by building a communication tool for his dorm. That simple idea evolved over time into the open source Drupal web content management system, and eventually a trading company called Acquia built on it.
Buytaert would later raise over $ 180 million and go out in 2019 when the company was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $ 1 billion, but it took 18 years of hard work to reach that point.
When Drupal arrived in the early 2000s, it wasn't the only open source option, but it was part of a major movement to offer businesses options by democratizing web content management.
Many startups today rely on open source, but in the early 2000s there were only a few trail blazers and none who had taken the path taken by Acquia. Buytaert and its co-founders decided to reduce the complexity of configuring a Drupal installation by creating a hosted cloud service.
It sounds like a no-brainer now, but consider that at the time in 2009 AWS was still a fledgling side project at Amazon, not the $ 45 billion behemoth it is today. In 2021, building a startup on an open source project with a SaaS version is a proven and common strategy. Back then no one else had done it. As it turned out, taking the less traveled path worked well for Acquia.
Going from the dorm room to the billion dollar exit is every startup founder's dream. Buytaert got there by being bold, working hard and thinking big. Its story is compelling, but it also offers lessons for startup founders who also want to build something big.
Born in the proverbial dorm room
In the days when everyone had internet access and a phone in their pocket, Buytaert simply wanted to build a way for him and his friends to communicate centrally. "I wanted to build some sort of internal bulletin board to really communicate with the other people in the dorm, and it literally talked about things like 'Hey, let's have a drink at 8:00,'" Buytaert told me.
He also wanted to hone his programming skills. "At the same time I wanted to learn about PHP and MySQL, which were emerging technologies at the time, so I thought I'd spend a few evenings putting together a basic board using PHP and MySQL, so that I could learn about these technologies and then actually have something that we could use ".
The resulting product served its purpose well, but when graduation was called, Buytaert realized that if he disconnected his PC and moved on, the community he had built would die. At that point, he decided to move the site to the public internet and call it drop.org, which was actually an accident. Originally, he intended to register dorp.org because "dorp" is Dutch for "village or small community", but he mistakenly reversed the letters during registration.
Buytaert continued to add features to drop.org such as diaries (a precursor to blogs) and RSS feeds. Eventually, he came up with the idea to open source the software that ran the site, calling it Drupal.
The birth of web content management
Around the same time that Buytaert was developing the foundation for what would become Drupal, Web Content Management (WCM) was a fresh market. The first websites were quite simple and straightforward, but they were becoming more complex in the late 1990s and a group of startups was trying to solve the problem of their management. Buytaert probably didn't know, but there was an industry waiting for an open source tool like Drupal.