Ron Northcutt has spent 25 years working on the thing most companies get wrong: how an open source project becomes a business without wrecking the community that made it valuable.

He is Director of Technical Marketing at HAProxy Technologies, one of the most widely deployed load balancers on the internet. Before that he built developer relations from scratch at Appsmith, worked as a solutions architect on enterprise deployments for Acquia, and spent 19 years in the Drupal community as a certified developer and contributor. He is a backend developer by trade, mostly PHP, Typescript, and Go... and still ships code.

He is also co-creator and co-maintainer of Omnideck, an open source, local-first workbench for multi-agent AI. He runs models on his own hardware, which has given him specific and occasionally unpopular opinions about how and where to use AI.

Ron speaks on commercial open source strategy, developer-first go-to-market, enterprise architecture, and practical AI for teams that actually have to ship something.

His mantra: nothing's impossible, it just takes a little longer.