Ben: I am legitimately super interested in talking to Gabriel Engel, who is the CEO of Rocket.Chat an interesting market. From a commercial open source point of view, I'm interested in getting into the weeds on that. Gabriel, welcome. Do you want to introduce yourself and what you do?

Gabriel: My name is Gabriel Engel. Thanks, Ben, for having me here. It’s a pleasure to talk about something I’m passionate about. I'm the Founder and CEO of Rocket.Chat, an open-source workplace digital collaboration and a virtual help desk for customers. It's this mixture between Slack and maybe Zopping but chats for websites and integrating to everything else. It’s exciting to be here, talk to you, and tell a bit about our story.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the very first commit that got made to the projects and how it came into life?

The origin stories are always the best. The whole thing we started is I had a company. We were building a CRM and trying to create an open-source CRM eventually because we were not happy with SugarCRM. We wanted something more modern using Node.js and MobiDB, anything like a new web stack. Our initial customers keep asking for a way to talk to their customers on their website. My brother had a real estate agency there in Brazil. He was always asking, “I need my agents to talk to the people visiting my website.”

There were some open-source projects for that but none of them had a backend that looked like Slack. The experience for the agents wasn't something pleasant. We thought it was important because when you have a big team, you need to be talking to your customer as easily as talking to your colleague, manager or team. We were like, “Why do you need two tools to talk to?” At the end of the day, just talking or chatting but you have to jump into different tools depending on who you are chatting to. All this data that the company is creating, all those conversations, there are some insights and value in that conversation.