Show Notes
"There's software replacing software, and now there's software taking over services. I don't think we've seen anything like this since the Industrial Revolution." - Michael Assraf, Founder of Flamingo
Michael started in the Israeli infantry, then moved to logistics, managing budgets in the hundreds of millions at 18 years old with nothing but Excel macros to automate it.
That early responsibility, thrown at him before he was remotely ready, became the foundation for everything after.
He co-founded a cybersecurity startup in 2016, took nearly five years to find product-market fit, raised $60 million, and walked away as CEO after nine years, right as he felt AI was about to change what software even meant.
His new company, Flamingo, targets a market most VCs don't even understand.
Managed service providers, a $105 billion, deeply fragmented industry where 75 percent of MSPs run under $3 million in revenue with fewer than five people.
He'd learned firsthand that MSPs pay twice for the same problem, once to software vendors and once to technicians. Flamingo was built to zero out the tooling cost using open-source infrastructure instead.
Before shipping a single feature, he launched a free community and vendor directory called Open MSP.
No pitch, no sales ask, just a better way for MSPs to see what open-source alternatives existed for the tools they were already overpaying for.
It crossed 2,000 MSPs on the waitlist before the product even existed.
"People are always suspicious when you give them something for free. But that's exactly the customer profile I was looking for: the ones willing to adopt open source."
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