Envoy has gained exceptional traction since it was open sourced in fall of 2016. Many investors suggested Matt Klein quit Lyft and start a platform company around Envoy. He decided not to. article 
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# Would mean competing with cloud providers
The best opportunity to commercialize OSS lies with projects that can be easily turned into SaaS products. Ultimately, even if software is completely open, many customers are happy to pay for a turnkey solution that "just works" and has a defined SLA with 24/7 monitoring and support. Customers pay for the operational expertise that comes from deeply understanding and running the software, versus the software itself.
Similar to Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, NGINX, and others, "service mesh" Envoy is not easily translatable into a SaaS product. Ultimately, to extract full value the customer must run Envoy colocated with their applications. This inextricably links Envoy to the deployment orchestration system in use. Thus, providing a turnkey "service mesh" Envoy solution essentially amounts to offering a full PaaS which includes orchestration and deployment support.
Providing a full PaaS is synonymous with competing directly with the major cloud providers who are attempting to commoditize "plumbing" like Envoy as quickly as possible. Without providing a full PaaS, ultimately the business boils down to providing services and support (packaging, tooling, observability, etc.) around all of the existing PaaS solutions. Either way, it’s a tough road.
# Motivations
Investors are extremely persuasive. They capitalize on "fear of missing out." However, it's important to realize that the opportunity cost is hugely mismatched between investor and company. As one particularly honest investor said to me (paraphrasing): > If I invest $5-$10M in your company and you fail, I have 30 other investments. It's just a footnote in my investment history. You will spend years of your life before producing any kind of result, good or bad.
When I sat down and really thought about it, the only compelling reason I could come up with to start a company now was to maximize potential income. This just isn’t a compelling enough reason to do something to offset the industry wide impact I am currently having and the potential to see software that I helped create become truly ubiquitous over the next several years.
Ultimately, on a personal level I'm just having too much fun solving tough computer science problems at large scale at Lyft and building a community around Envoy. The bar to do something different is therefore extremely high, and it took a long time to realize that it's perfectly OK to accept that and keep going down the existing path that I'm on.
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SaaS products: customers pay for operational expertise, not software.
Service mesh entangled with application... application entangled with deployment & orchestration... and that means you're competing with cloud providers. Interesting train of thought.
There's an aside at the start that open source business models are difficult. References a blog and talk from Paul Dix, at InfluxData: blog
From that blog I learned a new term: open core. > That is, we have an open source project at the core and a closed source commercial fork of it that adds more functionality (in our case HA, clustering, and advanced security)
And those three look conspicuous... high availability, clustering, advanced security. That seems to be the line Docker chose too. That line is where you start requiring a lot of people, where automation meets realities of its own complexity.