Our guest is Karim Marucchi from the Crowd Favorite agency and the FAIR project. 

With Karim’s help, we’re going to try and tell two stories in this episode.

The first story is Karim’s life working with some of the biggest agencies in the world, and selling projects to some of the largest companies in the world. He tells the story of how he sat down and sold Steve Jobs on a website project. 

The second story is about the value of open source and WordPress to those big enterprise customers. Karim is working really hard at the moment with the FAIR project. We’ll explain what that is. The FAIR project is part of Karim’s efforts to bring the benefits of open source to big enterprise customers.

[00:00:00] – Introduction
[00:01:21] – Early career and transition
[00:05:17] – Big breaks: Nissan and Pixar
[00:07:38] – Acquisition and rapid growth
[00:09:25] – European expansion and IPO
[00:11:16] – Integration work and lessons
[00:13:40] – Entering open source and WordPress
[00:16:00] – Crowd Favorite and Alex King
[00:17:49] – Bridging publishing and enterprise
[00:20:00] – Composable and modular architectures
[00:21:18] – Enterprise value: ownership and cost
[00:24:23] – System architecture role and compliance
[00:26:08] – CRA and supply chain security
[00:28:36] – Enterprise practices: updates and SBOM
[00:33:00] – Introducing the FAIR project
[00:33:56] – Enterprise examples and collaboration
[00:39:23] – FAIR adoption and partners
[00:41:06] – Linux Foundation governance model
[00:45:03] – Goal: trusted WordPress supply chain
[00:45:55] – FAIR roadmap: ecosystem and policies
[00:47:56] – Defining moment for the coming decades
[00:49:38] – Follow-up and closing