Open Source Startup Podcast

Ivan Burazin is Co-Founder & CEO of Daytona, the open source developer environment management platform. Their open source manager, also called daytona, has 9K stars on GitHub.

Daytona has raised $5M from investors including Upfront Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into Daytona's plan to be the fastest growing cloud development environment, how consistent and frequent content has become a huge driver of their growth, how bringing successful DevTool founders as angels helped with initial credibility and growth, thinking about the user and buyer's motivations, open source license decisions and the future of open source licenses (MIT + Apache are the only true open source licenses in their perspective) & more!

Steven Tey is Founder & CEO of Dub.co, the open source link management infrastructure platform for modern marketing teams. Their open source project, also called dub, has almost 18K stars on GitHub and is used by teams at companies like Vercel, Raycast, and Perplexity.

In this episode, we dig into starting Dub.co as a side project and how it ultimately turned into a company, their initial positioning as a Bitly alternative, their focus on great design and how that shows up in all parts of their product and marketing, how analytics unlocked much higher ACVs and value for customers, how getting a top Hackernews post helped drive early momentum, their vision to become an end-to-end attribution platform & more!

Lukas Schulte is Co-Founder and CEO of SDF Labs (Semantic Data Fabric), the data transformation layer and query engine platform. They're an open core company powered by the Apache Data Fusion query engine.

SDF Labs has raised $9M from investors including RTP Global and Two Sigma Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the complications and pain points with the Modern Data Stack, shifting left with data (ie. moving more over to the client), competing with DBT by adding a query engine, why building in Rust was important, why their CLI is closed source, the importance of a strong partner strategy as a data company & more!

Sameer Al-Sakran is CEO of Metabase, the open-source analytics and business intelligence platform. Their open source project, also called metabase, has over 38K stars on GitHub.

Metabase has raised $51M from investors including NEA, Insight and Expa.

In this episode, we dig into the company's 10 year journey, what it means to have a "developer friendly analytics platform", eliminating the friction with BI by making Metabase super fast to get started with, keeping the product simple, juggling short-term execution with their long-term vision & more!

Stanislas Polu is Co-Founder of Dust, the platform for companies to create and operate custom AI assistants for a range of use cases.

Dust has raised $20M from investors including Sequoia.

In this episode, we dig into the diverse set of users and use cases for Dust, how Dust spreads within an organization, their unique approach to open source, competing with vertical AI agents, augmenting humans instead of replacing them, predictions on the future of the agent space & more!

Jonathan Schneider is Co-Founder & CEO of Moderne, the platform for code migrations.

Moderne has raised up to a Series A from investors including Intel Capital and True Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the importance of software refactoring and the security and engineering challenges that come up when code isn't maintained, why they started with Java refactoring, their rewrite open source project, how the amount of code created with GenAI has made refactoring an even bigger challenge & more!

James Perkins is Co-Founder & CEO of Unkey, the open source API management platform that helps developers secure, manage, and scale their APIs. Their project, also called unkey, has almost 3K stars on GitHub.

Unkey has raised from investors including Essence VC, Sunflower, and The New Normal Fund.

In this episode, we dig into the complicated API tooling landscape, getting their early start with crypto and AI companies, what great DevEx means to them (simplicity is key), their scalable pricing model, splitting work between Co-Founders, their expansion plan and how they plan on grow capabilities without over-complicating the product & more!

Lukas Gentele is Co-Founder & CEO of Loft, the platform engineering company behind "kubernetes virtualization" to reduce costs and create efficiencies for teams with high (and growing) kubernetes usage. They allow any organization to scale self-service access to Kubernetes from 10 to 10,000 engineers.

Loft recently raised $24M led by Khosla Ventures and previously raised from investors including Fusion Fund.

In this episode, we dig into the company's journey through a shift from being a PaaS (devpod) to virtualization of kubernetes (vcluster), the rapid feedback loop you get from having an open source-based company, why Lukas thinks open source founders should be more commercial from the start & more!

Aliaksandr Valialkin and Roman Khavronenko are Co-Founders of VictoriaMetrics, the open source time series database and monitoring platform built alongside their open source project, also called victoriametrics.

In this episode, we discuss the limitations to Prometheus and how ClickHouse inspired the founders to build VictoriaMetrics, how open source helped them attract their early users and gain momentum, the importance of simplicity and saying no to feature requests that would complicate the product, their approach to an Open Core model, their unique view on funding and why bootstrapping has been an advantage for them and more!

Lars Kamp is Co-Founder & CEO of Fix, the continuous cloud security platform to help detect, prioritize, and remediate critical cloud risks using open source software like their inventory scanner.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of getting CISOs involved early for solutions that touch developers and security teams, the importance of an amazing self-service experience for developer adoption, their focus on transparent pricing & more!

Tim Delisle and Nico Joseph are Co-Founders of FiveOneFour, the company attempting to bring a software developer-like experience to data and analytics stacks. Together, they're second-time founders who previously founded data integration company Datalogue, which Nike acquired in 2021.

In this episode, we break down the software engineering practices that would benefit data teams, their approach to market education (ie. things like templates to get users started), why open source is a requirement for a product like this, where we are on the journey to democratize access to data, their approach to monetization & more!

Tomer Shiran is Founder of Dremio, the data lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI based on open source frameworks Apache Arrow, which the Dremio team created, and Apache Iceberg.

Dremio has raised over $400M from investors including Norwest, Redpoint, Adams Street, Sapphire, Insight, and Lightspeed. They are currently valued at $2B.

In this episode, we dig into Tomer's journey from MapR to Dremio, his initial vision for making the data stack more accessible, their first breakthrough with Apache Arrow and a columnar-format approach, focusing first on project-market fit before monetization, adding support for Apache Iceberg, how they're using AI to improve user experiences & more!

Ari Zilka is CEO of mydecisive.ai, the general-purpose observability engine built on OpenTelemetry. Ari was previously the CTO of Hortonworks which built products on top of open source Apache Hadoop and merged with Cloudera in 2019.

In this episode, we dig into the similar patterns Ari sees between Hortonworks / Hadoop and mydecisive.ai / OpenTelemetry, why large enterprises don't want their data to be held hostage and are shifting towards OpenTelemetry, how open source switches costs from vendors to engineering, why he's focused on building the community before monetizing, his view on monetization ("the developer bakes you in, the operator pays for it"), why the "ops" side of "devops" carries the money, and the learnings from building Hortonworks that he's bringing into mydecisive.ai.

Mark Huang is Co-Founder of Gradient, the platform for enterprise agentic automation. Gradient recently open sourced their 4M context window finetune of Llama-3, which is the longest context window available today.

Gradient has raised $10M from investors including Wing VC, Mango Capital, and Tokyo Black.

In this episode, we dig into enterprise readiness for LLM-backed applications today, Gradient's approach to pushing context lengths for foundation models and the benefits to open sourcing their Llama-3 finetune model, their focus on healthcare and finance verticals, how they're finding their place in the noisy GenAI infra space & more!

Umur Cubukcu is Co-Founder of Ubicloud, the open source and portable cloud that can reduce cloud spend by 3–10x. Their project, also called ubicloud, has over 3K stars and provides elastic compute, block storage, virtual networking, managed Postgres, and IAM services.

Ubicloud has raised $16M from investors including 500 Global and YC.

In this episode, we dig into Ubicloud's grand vision of building a cloud service provider, where they're starting, why open source is a massive differentiator for them & more!

Michael Stonebraker is a legendary database system pioneer as the founder of Ingres, Postgres, and now DBOS. His work while at Berkeley and then MIT has been central to many relational database companies.

His new company, DBOS, has raised $9M from investors including Engine Ventures and Construct Capital.

This episode is a masterclass on the history of database systems and digs into the creation of Ingres and Postgres, why he's always focused on commercial applications and specifically industrial companies as users of his systems, why he started DBOS as an operating system to make it easier to build, scale, and secure TypeScript applications & more!

John Viega is Co-Founder & CEO of Crash Override, the open source monitoring platform based on the Chalk project which has 22K stars on GitHub.

Crash Override has raised $14M from investors including SYN Ventures, BVP & Firestreak Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into what being "dev friendly" means, what their best performing content has been, standing out in the incredibly crowded security landscape & more!

Jeff Huber is Co-Founder of Chroma, the open source vector database. Their open source project, also called chroma, has 13K stars on GitHub.

Chroma has raised $20M from investors including Quiet Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.

In this episode, we dig into why vector databases are important for AI applications & why AI workloads are different, how their partnership with LangChain helped with early growth, why data is really the only tool a user has to change modern AI's behavior & more!

John Britton & Mike McQuaid are Co-Founders of Workbrew, the company that provides additional features and support for companies using Homebrew. Homebrew's main project, brew, is a wildly popular open source project with 40K GitHub stars and provides the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux).

In this episode, we dig into John & Mike's history with Homebrew and their time together at GitHub, how Homebrew has kept projects simple over time and avoided feature creep, how Homebrew has managed to get a lot of value from contributors, how their ICP has shifted from mac admins to dev and security teams & more!

Brian Raymond is Founder & CEO of Unstructured, the platform to extract and transform complex data for use with every major vector database and LLM framework. Their open source project has 7K stars on GitHub and includes libraries and APIs that let users build custom preprocessing pipelines for labeling, training, and production machine learning pipelines. Today, they have over 6M downloads and 50K companies using their tools.

Unstructured has raised $65M from investors including Bain, Essence VC, and Menlo Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into Brian's process of talking to 100 data scientists before launching Unstructured, why the long tail of data matters for LLMs, competing with their own open source, why being a "boring company" is valuable for today's LLM stack, why they liked having government design partners, why world-class design & marketing are huge differentiators for open source companies & more!

Jake Moshenko is Co-Founder & CEO of AuthZed, the scalable authorization platform based on Google's Zanzibar white paper. Their open source permissions database spiceDB has 5K stars on GitHub and enables fine-grained access control for customer applications.

AuthZed has raised $4M from investors including Work-Bench and Amplify.

In this episode, we dig into the Zanzibar approach to auth, branding themselves as a database, building for big companies from the get-go, their Hacker News launch and how getting on the front page kickstarted their project's growth, monetizing early & more!

Joran Dirk Greef is Founder & CEO of TigerBeetle, the open source financial transactions database. Their project, also called tigerbeetle, has over 7K stars and is a database designed for mission-critical workloads and performance.

TigerBeetle has raised $6M from investors including Amplify.

In this episode, we discuss why general purpose databases don't scale for high volume transactional workloads - and the need for specialized databases generally, open source vs. source available, the enterprise commercial stack of management, monitoring, security, and identity, their unique take on monetization & more!

Niko West is Co-Founder & CEO of Rerun, the open source visualization engine for streams of multimodal data.

Rerun has raised over $3M from investors including Costanoa.

In this episode, we discuss how Rerun found early success in gaming, why building in Rust was important, how open source expanded the segments Rerun could serve, why they thought about monetization early, the importance of visual and video content & more!

Ketan Umare is Co-Founder & CEO of Union AI, the scalable MLOps platform focused on AI orchestration based on the flyte open source project.

Union AI has raised $29M from investors including NEA & Nava Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the differences between Union AI and Airflow, what's unique about orchestrating AI workloads, bringing software engineering practices to AI & more!

Sahil Chaudhary is Founder of Glaive AI, the platform to build models that are faster, cheaper and outperform general purpose models with the help of synthetic data.

In this episode, we discuss why education is so important for GenAI infra companies at this stage, how synthetic data helps companies move from prototype to production, why synthetic data may be a better approach vs. cleaning data, why they're targeting AI native startups as an initial market & more!

André Eriksson is Founder & CEO of Encore, the backend development platform for startups building event-driven and distributed systems. This is Andre's second time on the Open Source Startup Podcast (first episode here) and, in this episode, we dig into their GTM strategy, why it was important for them to add Typescript support (in addition to Go), whether companies should still build with kubernetes & more!

Avery Pennarun is Co-Founder & CEO of Tailscale, the Wireguard-based VPN that reimagines secure, private networks.

Tailscale has raised $115M from investors including Heavybit, Accel, CRV, and Insight.

In this episode, we dig into what caused the team to reimagine zero trust security at the networking level, why they focus both on individual developers and large enterprises with a bottoms-up and top-down business model, why they leaned into the VPN comparison, how they create a personal tone for their blog & more!

Yingjun Wu is Founder of RisingWave, a new open source stream processing database.

RisingWave has raised $40M from investors including Yunqi Partners.

In this episode, we discuss RisingWave's approach versus Apache Flink and other stream processing frameworks, why stream processing is important for real-time monitoring use cases, why they initially focused on startups and how free support helped develop trust with these early users, key decisions around their product and why Postgres compatibility was crucial & more!

Andrew Hoh is Co-Founder of LastMile AI, the AI developer platform for engineering teams to productionize LLM applications. They take an "open periphery" stance on open source with projects like AIConfig to help developers build AI applications.

LastMile AI has raised $10M from investors including Gradient, AME, Exceptional Capital, and Firsthand Alliance.

In this episode, we discuss LastMile's approach to simplifying AI for developers and why they decided to build an end-to-end solution, LastMile's open periphery approach to open source, where we are on the experimentation-to-commercialization curve with GenAI, why Azure is the top cloud provider when it comes to AI support & more!

Loris Degioanni is Founder & CTO of Sysdig, the observability and container security company behind the Falco and Sysdig open source projects. Both projects are widely adopted, with 7K GitHub Stars each.

Sysdig is a $2.5B company that has raised over $700M from investors including Insight, Accel, Bain, DFJ, Goldman Sachs, Third Point & Permira.

In this episode, we dig into Sysdig's roots in infrastructure and the pivotal decision to focus on security 2 years into the company journey, Sysdig's culture of experimentation (and some paranoia) that has helped make them successful, why they thought about their paid product early & much more!

Russ d'Sa is Founder of LiveKit, the real-time streaming audio, video, and data infrastructure platform for developers. Their open source project, also called livekit, provides the end-to-end stack for WebRTC and has over 6K stars on GitHub.

In this episode, we dig into LiveKit's unique founding story with the idea coming from the founders' experience building a Clubhouse competitor and using Agora, early interest from companies like Pinterest that gave indications that there was a need for an open source alternative to Agora and Twilio, why Conversational AI will be a big driver for LiveKit & more!

Jeu George is Co-Founder & CEO of Orkes, the orchestration engine based on the Conductor project. Conductor was originally created at Netflix but they have since discontinued support of the project. The team at Orkes has forked the project and is building a company around it.

In this episode, we talk through the Conductor journey - from creating the original project at Netflix to forking the project, why an orchestration engine is critical to companies building with microservices, signs that there was company potential behind the project (aspirational companies using it, production workloads, etc.) & more!

Kyle Carberry is Founder & CTO of Coder, the self-hosted remote development platform. Their project, also called coder, enables users to provision remote development environments via Terraform and has over 6K Github Stars.

In this episode, we dig into the evolution of the browser-based coding movement, how Coder massively improved developer experience & productivity, their early focus on enterprise customers & more!

Charlie Marsh is Founder & CEO of Astral, builders of next-gen python tooling. Their first project, ruff, is an extremely fast Python linter and code formatter written in Rust and has 22K GitHub Stars.

In this episode, we dig into why they started with a linter, getting to 8.5M monthly downloads, the impact of building with Rust, how they developed deep 1:1 relationships with their community, growth unlocks (when companies like Hugging Face started using them, for example), how Charlie put his authentic voice into their content, what parts of Python tooling they'll take on next (package manager, testing, documentation) & more!

Jeff Cross is Co-Founder & CEO of Nx, the build system for maintaining and scaling monorepos, both locally and on CI. Their project, also called nx, has over 20K stars on GitHub.

Nx has raised $25M from investors including a16z & Nexus.

In this episode, we discuss the benefits of using monorepos and the types of teams and codebases it works well for, crucible moments for the company (ie. when they went beyond the Angular framework), learning how to support large enterprise customers by starting a consulting business first, what great DevEx means to them (speed, automatic migrations, scale) & more!

Kyle Mathews is Co-Founder & CTO of Gatsby, the front-end web development platform. Their open source framework, GatsbyJS, is widely adopted with 55K GitHub Stars.

In Feb 2023, Gatsby was acquired by Netlify.

In this episode, we discuss how GatsbyJS was able to grow incredibly fast, what features matter most for front-end development frameworks (speed, approachability, etc.), learnings from going after a smaller portion of the market and over-hiring & more!

Pranay Prateek is Co-Founder of Signoz, the open source observability platform with OpenTelemetry-native traces, metrics, and logs. Their open source project, also called Signoz, has over 15K GitHub Stars and helps developers monitor their applications and troubleshoot problems.

Signoz has raised $7M from investors including SignalFire and Uncorrelated Ventures.

In this episode, we discuss why observability is a good category to use open source, why Signoz started with tracing and then added on other types of observability, the growth of OpenTelemetry and why Signoz decided to build with it, how the release of logs unlocked growth, the importance of simple pricing in this category & more!

Mars Lan is Co-Founder and CTO of Metaphor, the modern data catalog that is described as the "Social Platform for Data." Metaphor was created by the founders of ⁠DataHub⁠ which is known as the leading open source metadata platform.

Metaphor has raised over $10M from investors including Amplify, a16z, and Point72 Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the story behind Metaphor's creation - and why the team didn't build a managed service on top of DataHub, why Metaphor isn't open source, why sales funnel is the biggest benefit of building a company using open source & much more!

For more on Metaphor's story, check out the link here

Moses Guttmann is Co-Founder and CEO of ClearML, the end-to-end AI lifecycle platform for deep learning, machine learning, and Gen AI models. The company's project, also called clearml, provides experiment management, MLOps and data management capabilities and has 5K stars on GitHub.

In this episode, we dig into the process of spinning out a project, the pros & cons of starting with a broad product offering, the closed vs. open source debate for GenAI, LLaMA 2 vs. GPT-4 & more!

Tianqi Chen is Co-Founder and Chief Technologist of OctoML, the compute infrastructure platform for tuning and running generative models in the cloud. OctoML was founded by the creators of Apache TVM, the machine learning compiler framework for CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators.

OctoML has raised $132M from investors including Amplify, Addition, Madrona, and Tiger.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of supporting multiple models, the advancements from LLaMA and Stable Diffusion this year, building the TVM and OctoML communities, predictions on GenAI in the enterprise (hybrid ML, for example), whether GenAI is over-invested in & more!

Toni de la Fuente is Founder of ProwlerPro, the cloud security platform built on top of Prowler, the open source security tool that helps companies implement security best practices including assessments, audits, and scanning.

In this episode, we dig into the importance of good documentation, the industry events that helped Prowler gain momentum, shifting focus from AWS only to all major cloud platforms, the need for patience with open source & more!

Fredrik Björk is Founder & CEO of Grafbase, the API platform for developers to deploy high performance, scaleable GraphQL APIs.

Grafbase has raised $7M+ from investors including Next47 and Uncorrelated Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into what a “unified data layer” is and why it’s needed, how they found their early adopters in industries like e-commerce and IoT, Grafbase "Launch Weeks" and more!

Adam Jacob is CEO of DevOps platform System Initiative and Co-Founder of infrastructure automation platform Chef.

This is Adam's second time on the Open Source Startup Podcast, and this episode is packed with learnings. We discuss the distribution benefits of open source and why some products should be open source and others should not, challenges with the Open Core business model, HashiCorp's license change and the community's response to fork Terraform to create OpenTofu, and much more!

Soren Martius is Co-Founder & CEO of Terramate, the infrastructure-as-code management platform that sits on top of Terraform. Their open source project, also called Terramate, has 3K GitHub stars and adds capabilities such as code generation, stacks, orchestration, change detection, and data sharing to Terraform.

In this episode, we discuss building the Terramate community alongside the Terraform community, focusing 70% of the team's effort on Terramate cloud, how HashiCorp's license change impacts the open source community and Terraform builders, and much more!

Linda Lian is Co-founder & CEO of Common Room, the community-led growth platform.

Common Room has raised $53M from investors including Greylock and Index.

In this episode, we discuss the DevRel role and Common Room's journey from being a DevRel tool to a GTM tool, how Common Room solves a top 3 problem for their users, and much more!

Amr Awadallah is CEO of Vectara, the LLM search engine that's powered by users' own data. Amr was previously the Founder & CTO of Cloudera and brings many learnings from that experience to Vectara, including what to open source vs. keep proprietary.

Vectara has raised $29M from investors including Race Capital.

In this episode, we dig into the importance of ease of use and building for the average developer instead of the Silicon Valley developer, taking an "open periphery" approach to open source, how the GenAI wave is similar and different from the Big Data wave, Amr's 3-pronged GTM strategy including sales-led-growth, product-led-growth, and partner-led-growth, and more!

Yury Selivanov is the Co-founder & CEO of EdgeDB, the open-source database designed as a successor to SQL and the relational paradigm. Their open source graph-relational database, edgeDB, has a built-in migration system and a next-generation query language.

EdgeDB has raised $19M from investors including Accel, Nava Ventures, and Pear VC.

In this episode, we discuss how they took a first principles approach to building a truly developer-first database (ie. building with postgres), the importance they put on having a short learning curve for their database, how they think about breaking through the noise of the many competitive developer-first databases that have launched in recent years, why all open source databases should use the cloud model to monetize & more!

Go to edgedb.com to register for the upcoming EdgeDB 4.0 and Cloud launch!

Graham Neray is Co-founder & CEO of Oso, the authorization-as-a-service platform that created open source oso - a batteries-included framework for building authorization into applications.

Oso has raised $26M from investors including Felicis and Sequoia.

In this episode, we dig into the first thing Oso founders built (a programming language created for authorization called Polar), how they decided on the right open source license, how Oso is positioned in the highly competitive auth space, how user requests have driven their monetization strategy, and much more!

Nick Schrock is Founder of Dagster Labs & Creator of Dagster - the open source orchestration platform for the development, production, and observation of data assets.

Dagster Labs has raised just under $50M from investors including Sequoia, Index, and Georgian Partners.

In this episode, we discuss how Dagster is bringing software engineering principles to the data space, what a great developer experience means for data engineers, how to think about launching the cloud version of your open source project & much more!

Paul Butler is the Founder of Drifting in Space, the company focused on making browser-based applications accessible to everyone. They've created Jamsocket, a platform for building applications with session backends, and Plane, the open-source server that powers it.

In this episode, we dig into the future of browser-based tech and how industrial companies will be likely early adopters, the different components of the Drifting in Space platform & more!

Varun Mohan is Co-founder & CEO of Codeium, the AI-powered coding platform for developers.

In this episode, we dig into competing with a behemoth like GitHub Copilot, how developing their own infrastructure has enabled incredible scale, building a 30K person community, and much more!

Pierre Burgy is Co-Founder & CEO of Strapi, the open source Node.js headless CMS. Their open source project has over 55K stars on GitHub and is 100% JavaScript, fully customizable, and built developer-first.

Strapi has raised $45M from investors including CRV, Index, and Accel.

In this episode, we discuss the project's origins and impressive growth trajectory, their community-based approach to product roadmap, why they waited 5 years to monetize the project, why Pierre sees cloud as the best open source GTM model & more!

Samuel Colvin is Founder of Pydantic, the wildly popular data validation framework and cloud services platform. Their open source Python library has over 15K GitHub Stars and millions of downloads per day.

Pydantic has raised $4M from investors including Sequoia Capital and Partech.

In this episode, we dig into Pydantic's growth curve (linear followed by explosive adoption), what a great developer experience means for them (almost B2C-like in the experience), how they engage with their community through things like surveys that help drive the product roadmap, and more!

Hassy Veldstra is Founder of Artillery, the cloud-scale serverless load testing platform. The company's project, also called artillery, has almost 7K stars on GitHub.

Artillery has raised over $2M from investors including YC.

In this episode, we discuss building a company around your own pain point, early signals that there was strong company potential with the project, finding growing communities to align with (in this case, Node.js) & much more!

Kanjun Qiu is Cofounder & CEO of Generally Intelligent, the platform to develop general-purpose AI agents that can be safely deployed in the real world.

Generally Intelligent has raised $20M from investors including the Astera Institute & YC.

In this episode, we dig into the future for AI agents and where they fall short today, why they open sourced their research environment, the importance of market timing when launching a company, Kanjun's views on whether the Agentive AI space is over-hyped & much more!

Paul Dix is Cofounder & CTO of open source time series data company InfluxData. The company's open source datastore, InfluxDB, has 26K stars on GitHub.

InfluxData has raised over $200M from investors including Norwest, Battery, and Sapphire Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into building the category of time series data, how an open source company's monetization plan should tie to fundraising, some of the hardest decisions the team had to make during InfluxData's journey so far & more!

Shivansh Vij is Founder & CEO of Loophole Labs, the modern application delivery platform. They have a number of open source projects that provide primitives for modern development.

In this episode, we dig into Loophole's projects around WASM and networking, their unique hiring process, learnings for ambitious open source founders & much more!

Eliot Horowitz is Founder & CEO of robot developer platform Viam and the previous Founder & CTO of developer data platform MongoDB.

In this episode, we discuss Eliot's many learnings from being a multi-time founder including the importance of extremely fast response time to user questions, the benefits (and challenges) of building general purpose platforms, democratizing access to robots & hardware engineering through better developer tools, and much more!

Ben Rometsch is Co-Founder & CEO of Flagsmith, the commercial open source real-time feature flagging platform. The Flagsmith project has almost 3K stars on GitHub and provides feature flagging and remote configuration services that can be hosted on prem or using their hosted software.

In this episode, we discuss building a startup in a profitable way, why open source matters for feature flagging, finding direction with little signal early-on & much more!

Quentin de Quelen is Co-Founder & CEO of Meilisearch, the open source search engine platform. The Meilisearch project has 38K stars on GitHub and allows companies to quickly create amazing search experiences with features that work out-of-the-box.

Meilisearch has raised $22M from investors including Felicis and CRV.

In this episode, we dig into the massive TAM for search, working with the Rust community, what an amazing developer experience means for a search product, Meilisearch's roadmap (hint: it involves LLMs and AI-enabled search), Quentin's journey from developer to company leader, the company's focus on diversity & much more!

Robert Brooks IV & Mitesh Agrawal are part of Lambda's founding team which is making GPUs for deep learning more accessible.

Lambda has an initiative to make GPUs available for training an open source foundation model in support of the broader ML community.

In this episode, we dig into the GPUs for open source initiative, why open source matters for foundation models, the Lambda journey from the early days (well before generative AI!) & much more!

Hong Wang is Founder & CEO of Akuity, the application delivery platform for companies building with kubernetes. Akuity works alongside the Argo Project which provides a suite of open source tools for deploying and running applications and workloads on Kubernetes.

Akuity has raised $25M from investors including Decibel Partners and Lead Edge Capital.

In this episode, we discuss the creation of the Argo open source project while the team was at Applatix, the decision to create a commercial company - Akuity - around Argo after Applatix was acquired by Intuit, what it means to have a great developer experience (UI, real-time data, etc.), creating harmony between the open source and paid product, and much more!

Or Weis is Co-founder & CEO of Permit.io, the open source fullstack permissions as a service platform. The company's project, opal, is an admin layer for policy engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) and AWS' Cedar Agent and brings open-policy up to the speed needed by live applications.

Permit.io has raised $6M from investors including NFX.

In this episode, we discuss positioning in a competitive market, product market fit vs. GTM fit & much more!

Abby Kearns has a long history in the open source ecosystem as the previous CTO of infrastructure automation platform Puppet, previous CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, and an active investor and advisor to many open source startups.

In this episode, we dig into the Puppet journey, the role organizations like Cloud Foundry play in the open source ecosystem, her views on open source projects versus products, her advice to open source startups & much more!

Video episode here

Clément Salaün is Founder of Formance, the open source ledger for money-moving platforms. Their ledger is highly programmable and has over 600 stars on GitHub.

Formance is a YC company and has raised over $3M from investors including Hoxton Ventures and Frst.

In this episode, we discuss using open source to build user trust, creating a new category of open source software, the importance of building in a modular way, Clément's framework for monetization & much more!

Dan Jeffries is the previous Chief Intelligence Officer at open source foundation model company Stability AI and Managing Director at the AI Infrastructure Alliance.

Stability AI has raised almost $100M from investors including Lightspeed and Coatue.

In this episode, we dig into the role of open source in generative AI, the benefits and drawbacks to open source foundation models, copyright issues that can come up when training data is visible, the capital it takes to start a foundation model, and opportunities to build that founders should be looking at today.

Full video episode here

Ry Walker is Founder of open source data companies Astronomer and CoreDB. Astronomer is the commercial company tied to the popular open source data workflow management system Apache Airflow, and CoreDB is a database company based on the popular open source database Postgres.

CoreDB has raised $7M from investors including Venrock and CincyTech, and Astronomer has raised $283M from investors including Venrock, Insight, and Sierra Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the Astronomer journey and when things really started to work, what a great UI means in the data space, where the idea for CoreDB came from, his learnings around open source monetization, the benefits and drawbacks of building a commercial open source data company, and learnings Ry is taking from Astronomer to his new company CoreDB.

Kyle Quest is Founder & CTO of Slim AI, the platform to help application developers build secure containers faster. The company's open source project, Slim (previously known as Docker Slim), shrinks container images by up to 30x and makes them secure. It currently has 17K stars on GitHub.

Slim AI has raised almost $60M from investors including Insight & Boldstart.

In this episode, we dig into where the idea for Slim came from (Kyle was trying to solve his own pain), building for multiple personas (in this case, security and developer teams), the shift left movement in security & much more!

Harjot Gill is Co-founder & CEO of FluxNinja, the intelligent load management platform for reliability engineers. The company's open source project, Aperture, provides capabilities such as concurrency limiting, rate limiting, and auto-scaling.

This episode also features Matt Ranney, a principal engineer from Doordash, who is an early adopter of Aperture.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of having strong evangelists of new technology (in this case, Matt at Doordash), the right north star metrics to track as an open source company (production usage is key), lighting many GTM fires & more!

Amjad Masad is Founder & CEO of Replit, the browser-based development environment giving developers the power to build collaboratively with the power of AI on any device.

Replit has raised over $200M from investors including a16z, Coatue, and YC.

In this episode, we dig into Replit's evolution from an education-focused company to a broadly used coding platform, the role of AI in coding (and Replit's AI engine Ghostwriter), why it's much harder to build a horizontal platform & much more! This episode is a must-listen.

Guy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk, the developer-first security platform that helps companies find and fix vulnerabilities in their code, open source dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code.

Snyk has raised $1.2B from investors including Boldstart, Accel, Tiger Global, and Addition.

In this episode, we dig into selling security products to developers, the pros and cons of being open source (Snyk is not!), Snyk's fundraising journey and challenges early on, how Snyk has evolved over the years, the decision to bring in an outside CEO & more!

Ryan Blue is Co-Founder of data automation platform Tabular and Co-Creator of Apache Iceberg, the open source high-performance format for huge analytic tables.

Tabular most recently raised a Series A from a16z.

In this episode, we discuss the concept of a "headless data warehouse", being a problem-centric rather than solution-centric founder & more!

Douwe Maan is Founder & CEO of DataOps platform Meltano, the extract and load company behind the open source CLI & version control project meltano.

Meltano has raised $12M from investors including Venrock & Google Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into spinning a company out of GitLab, Meltano's cloud launch, making technical data engineers first-class citizens & more!

Shauli Rozen is Founder & CEO of ARMO, the company behind Kubernetes open source security platform kubescape. The project has over 8K stars on GitHub and includes tools for risk analysis, security, compliance, and misconfiguration scanning.

ARMO has raised $35M from investors including Tiger Global and Pitango VC.

In this episode, we dig into the differences in building product for DevOps vs. security teams, how to use signals from discord / slack channels to drive product roadmap, bringing on a VP of Open Source & more!

Ramiro Berrelleza is Founder & CEO of Okteto, the Kubernetes development platform that allows developers to spin up production-like dev environments in the cloud. Okteto's open source project, also called Okteto, allows users to spin up a development container, which is configured like the user's production Kubernetes deployment. Today, it has 2.8K start on GitHub.

Okteto has raised $18M from investors including Root VC and Two Sigma.

In this episode, we discuss the challenges of building with kubernetes, figuring out market timing, how to position for your specific users & more!

Justin Borgman is CEO of Starburst, the “Analytics Everywhere” company based on the sequel query engine Trino (previously called Presto). Trino is a distributed SQL query engine for big data and is used by companies such as Salesforce, Robinhood, Lyft, LinkedIn, Goldman Sachs, and Netflix. Trino currently has 7.5K GitHub Stars.

Starburst has raised over $400M from investors including Index, Coatue, A16z, and Alkeon.

In this episode, we dig into the Presto to Trino transition, recruiting the Trino founders to Starburst, waiting to raise venture capital until there are strong signs of PMF, what PMF looks like (ie. multiple Fortune 500 users), getting competition to compete on your turf, and more!

Vikram Sreekanti & Joey Gonzalez are Co-Founders of Aqueduct, the open-source orchestration layer for machine learning infrastructure. Aqueduct's open source project, also called aqueduct, has over 400 stars on GitHub.

In this episode, we discuss what Vikram & Joey learned from interviewing 100s of data teams, building in the competitive MLOps space, how and why they invest in content & much more!

Curtis Northcutt is Co-Founder & CEO of Cleanlab, the company that helps AI & ML teams automatically find and fix errors in their datasets. They have over 5K stars on GitHub and are already working with companies such as Wells Fargo and Google on ML data quality.

In this episode, we discuss the difference between data noise and model noise, the growing importance of ML data quality with the momentum around generative AI models and applications, how Curtis' focus as CEO has shifted over time & much more!

James Mikrut is Founder of Payload CMS, the React & TypeScript headless CMS. Their open source project, payload, has over 9K stars on Github and provides a Headless CMS and Application Framework built with TypeScript, Node.js, React, and MongoDB.

Payload has raised over $5M from investors including Gradient Ventures and YC.

In this episode, we discuss Payload's early guerilla marketing tactics, listening to your community to inform your monetization model, what developer-first really means & more!

Sergei Egorov is Co-Founder & CEO of AtomicJar, the developer-first testing platform built on top of open source testing framework Testcontainers. AtomicJar provides Testcontainers Cloud which allows users to run tests in the cloud with anything that can be containerized.

AtomicJar has raised almost $30M from investors including Insight Partners and Boldstart.

In this episode, we discuss user demand driving the creation of a company alongside an open source project, using a different name for the company to have the ability to work with other projects, learnings from early scaling & more!

Nikita Shamgunov is Co-Founder & CEO of Neon, the open-source serverless postgres database platform. Neon separates storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage. Their open source project, also called Neon, has 6.5K stars on Github.

Neon has raised $30M from investors including GGV and Khosla.

In this episode, we dig into the Neon founding story of starting a scalable alternative to AWS Aurora, why it's important to separate storage and compute, Neon's partner strategy, Nikita's thoughts on the "DevCloud" movement & much more!

Anh-Tho Chuong is Co-Founder & CEO of Lago, the open source metering and usage-based billing platform. Lago's underlying project, also called Lago, has 2K stars on GitHub and a Slack community with hundreds of members.

Lago is a YC company from the S21 batch.

In this episode, we discuss the state of billing today and why a hybrid and open approach makes sense for many companies, positioning as an "open source alternative to...", deciding what content is worth creating (ie. if your users ask the same question 5x, then blog about it), going through YC as an open source company & more!

Tommy Dang is Co-founder & CEO of Mage, the data plumbing platform that's the modern replacement for Airflow. Mage's open source project, mage-ai, has over 3K stars and lets companies run, monitor, and orchestrate thousands of data pipelines.

Mage has raised over $6M from investors including Gradient Ventures.

In this episode, we discuss pivots, testing product ideas with hundreds of potential users (and asking questions like, "what is the most boring part of your data work?"), why company content should be informative and entertaining, and how to approach selling in a customer-centric way.

Mark Fussell & Yaron Schneider are Co-founders of Diagrid, the platform that simplifies and provides access to the power of distributed systems. Diagrid's founders co-created open source Dapr which Diagrid provides a fully managed service on top of. Dapr has over 20K stars and works on any language or framework.

Diagrid has raised over $24M from investors including Norwest Venture Partners and Amplify.

In this episode, we discuss contributors rather than stars as a strong engagement metric, why Open Core wasn't the right business model for Diagrid, learnings for other open source founders & more!

Will Falcon is CEO of Lightning AI, the platform to build ML models and create Lightning Apps that “glue” together many leading ML lifecycle tools. The company's project, also called lightning, has over 21K stars on GitHub.

Lightning AI has raised almost $60M from investors including Index Ventures, Coatue, and Bain.

In this episode, we discuss the difference between open source traction and company potential, how to hire - especially early on, the importance of learning speed, Will's personal journey as a CEO, and more!

Oskari Saarenmaa is Founder & CEO of Aiven, the fully managed, open source cloud data platform. Their platform combines all the tools needed to connect and manage open source data services such as Apache Kafka, Grafana, MySQL, Redis, InfluxDB along with many others. They have also open sourced a number of projects themselves (see here on GitHub).

Aiven has raised $420M from investors including IVP and Atomico.

In this episode, we discuss automation as a core value, finding a role in the open source ecosystem across multiple projects, the importance of 24/7 support when you have global customers, learning GTM as a technical team & more!

Mike Malone is Founder of Smallstep, the automated certificate management platform for DevOps teams. Their certificate management project, also called smallstep, has 5K stars on GitHub and provides a private certificate authority and ACME server for secure automated certificate management.

Smallstep has raised $26M from investors including Boldstart and StepStone Group.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of staying lean before achieving PMF, where to draw the line on free open source vs. paid product, his learnings as an engineer-turned-founder & more!

YouTube version of the episode here

Graham McNicoll & Jeremy Dorn are Co-founders of GrowthBook, the open source feature flagging and experimentation platform out of YC. Their feature flagging and A/B testing project, also called growthbook, has 4K stars on GitHub.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of having an iterative culture, having a dynamic view on positioning, and the importance of content and market education.

Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz is Co-Founder & CEO of Penpot, the open-source design and prototyping platform. Their core open source project, also called penpot, has over 19K stars on GitHub.

Penpot received a lot of attention from the spike in growth following the Figma / Adobe acquisition announcement. They've since announced an $8M fundraise led by Decibel Partners.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of open standards in getting developers excited about design, why Figma users have been excited about Penpot,  building a community with design and developer personas & more!

Maayan Salom is Co-Founder of Elementary Data, the open source data observability platform which allows users to monitor their data warehouse directly from dbt. Their project, also called Elementary, is built for analytics engineers and today has almost 1K GitHub stars and a rapidly growing community of almost 600 users.

The company has raised from leading Israel and US-based venture firms as well as a number of high-profile angel investors.

In this episode, we discuss having a culture of experimentation, building a community alongside other communities (ie. dbt), using your community for product feedback, the hustle involved in early GTM, learnings from building for a fast-growing community & more!

Leland Takamine is Co-Founder & CEO of mobile.dev, the team behind open source mobile UI testing framework Maestro. The framework, which is a compelling new alternative to Appium or Espresso, has quickly grown to 2.6K stars and a community of >700 users.

The company has raised $3M from investors including Cowboy Ventures, Essence VC, and a number of high-profile angel investors.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of ease of use for getting open source adoption, how community feedback creates a product advantage, the challenges with timing open source adoption, learnings from growing a community, how to time a paid product & more!

Shanea Leven is Founder & CEO of CodeSee, the cloud-based data visualization platform that helps users master the understanding of their code.

CodeSee has raised $10M from investors including Uncork, Boldstart, and Wellington.

In this episode, we discuss how to test messaging, the importance of having a strong GTM strategy early-on, what a great onboarding experience looks like, and more!

Max Howell is CEO of Tea, the platform that enables developers to get compensated for their work. Max is also the creator of Homebrew, the popular package management system.

Tea has raised $8M from investors including Binance Labs.

In this episode, we discuss the founding story for Tea, learnings on building extremely large open source projects and communities, Tea's ties to Web3, and helping open source developers get compensated for their work.

Sam Lambert is CEO of PlanetScale, the serverless MySQL database platform for developers.

PlanetScale is powered by the open source database clustering system Vitess which was originally built at Google to scale YouTube.

The company has raised over $100M from investors including KPCB, Insight, SignalFire, and a16z.

In this episode, we discuss PlanetScale's positioning as a database platform rather than a database, the importance of authenticity and showing off capabilities with every launch, transparency around pricing, proving the ability to scale, looking at the quality of companies and people in the community as a measure of success, thinking about GTM very early, and much more!

Alex Dean is Cofounder & CEO of Snowplow Analytics, the behavioral data platform that transforms data into actionable insights.

Snowplow's open source behavioral data engine, also called snowplow, has over 6K stars and is a developer-first engine for collecting behavioral data.

Snowplow has raised $55M from investors including NEA, MMC, and Atlantic Bridge after being bootstrapped for some time.

In this episode, we discuss the flexibility you get from bootstrapping your company - especially if it's open source, the importance of GTM and user persona clarity when building in a competitive space, investing in product marketing early, the challenges of visibility when open source is a core part of your GTM funnel, and much more!

Ovais Tariq is Cofounder & CEO of Tigris Data, the open source developer data platform.

Tigris has raised from investors including Basis Set and General Catalyst.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of focusing on user problems rather than your solution, hiring for your specific company needs (ie Tigris needed engineers who had operated at scale), learnings for other open source data-focused founders, and more!

Dan Lorenc is Founder & CEO of Chainguard, the platform to secure your software supply chain. Chainguard supports many popular open source projects such as Sigstore, SLSA, and Tekton.

Chainguard has raised $55M from investors including Sequoia and Amplify Partners.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of market education when creating a new category of software, assessing market timing when launching your company, some of Chainguard's unique content strategies, and more!

Rajoshi Ghosh & Tanmai Gopal are the Co-founders of Hasura, the platform to create GraphQL APIs with your data. Hasura's open source graph-QL engine has over 28K stars.

Hasura has raised $140M from investors including Lightspeed, Vertex, and Greenoaks Capital.

In this episode, we discuss how open source builds trust, the difference between project-market fit and product-market fit, hiring for values, and much more!

Glauber Costa is Founder & CEO of ChiselStrike, the backend-as-a-service platform. Their core technology is open source - and also called ChiselStrike.

In this episode, we discuss knowing the right entry point for your user persona, figuring out the best open source business model for your community, having a customer-centric approach to building product, learning fundraising as a technical founder, and more!

Sourabh Bajaj is Cofounder & CTO of CoRise, the technical up-skilling platform with courses taught by industry experts. They have courses focused on open source projects such as DBT that use real-world projects to teach industry skills.

In this episode, we discuss how technical learners are different, the opportunity for education to be a third-party tool, why industry professionals can make the best teachers, assessing your own founder-market fit, and more!

Doris Xin is Cofounder & CEO of Linea, the platform to bring data science projects to production. The company's open source project, LineaPy, helps remove engineering bottlenecks for data science teams.

In this episode, we discuss positioning in a competitive and technical market, using an open source strategy to help with integrations, Doris' journey from PhD to founder, and much more!

Adam Jacob is the Cofounder & CTO of Chef, the infrastructure automation platform, and CEO of System Initiative.

In this episode, we discuss the Chef journey, where open source shines (and where it can be problematic), and predictions on the future of open source.

Brad Van Vugt is Cofounder & CEO of Battlesnake, a competitive multiplayer game for web developers. The rules and game docs for Battlesnake are all open source.

This episode's discussion is heavily focused on community. We discuss the community's influence on the initial product scope, roadmap, and much more!

Armon Dadgar is Cofounder & CTO of HashiCorp, the software infrastructure & security automation company that works with open source projects such as Terraform, Vault, Consul, Vagrant, Packer, and Nomad.

HashiCorp went public in late 2021 and currently has a market capitalization of $6B.

In this episode, we discuss the timeline from project release to mass adoption, the importance of focusing on user problems rather than a specific technical solution, incorporating the right user feedback, the hard decisions he had to make as a leader, and learnings from 9+ years at HashiCorp.

Daniela Miao is Cofounder of Momento, the serverless cache that automatically optimizes, scales, and manages your cache for you. Momento works with open source caching engine Pelikan which was created at Twitter.

Daniela is joined in this episode by Yao Yue, a Principal Software Engineer at Twitter who is a core part of Twitter's Pelikan Caching team. Today, Momento provides a SaaS service on top of Pelikan in an Open Core model.

In this episode, we discuss launching a company on top of an open source project started by a team outside of the founders, messaging and positioning for technical companies, team building, and much more!

Saurav Pathak is Cofounder & Chief Product Officer of Bagisto, the open source e-commerce platform based in India that has bootstrapped to 60k+ downloads and 200K users.

In this episode, we discuss community contributions to product (Bagisto's extensions are 30% community-built!), building the foundation for an open source community before focusing on monetization, what "great support" really looks like for an open source company, lessons from building without VC money, and more!

Mike McNeil is Cofounder & CEO of Fleet, a device management platform based on the  open source endpoint visibility project osquery.

Fleet has raised $25M from investors including CRV.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of understanding your user profile(s), the nuances of company positioning, the difference between building a product vs. building tools, community management (particularly when your users are part of multiple communities) and much more.

Michael Malyuk is Cofounder & CEO of Heartex, the open source data labeling platform for building models at scale with flexibility.

The company's open source project, Label Studio, has 10K stars and a community of almost 6K users.

Heartex has raised $25M from investors including Redpoint and Unusual Ventures.

In this episode, we discuss flexibility as a differentiator, being customer obsessed in the short-term and vision obsessed in the long-term, the importance of strong documentation, and top challenges that open source founders face.

Maxim Fateev is Co-Founder & CEO and Dominik Tornow is Principal Engineer at Temporal, the workflow platform for building resilient applications.

Temporal is the company centered on the open source orchestration engine Temporal which is a fork of the project Cadence first created at Uber. The Temporal project and company have seen tremendous interest and the cloud service for Temporal will be GA later this year.

The company is valued at $1.5B and raised from investors including Sequoia, Index, and Amplify.

In this episode, we discuss the origins of Temporal at Uber, use cases for their resilient workflow engine, how the company's messaging and positioning have evolved over the past year, and the company's upcoming developer experience conference Replay which will be in-person in Seattle from August 25 - 26.

This is the second time we've had Temporal on the podcast. Check out our first episode on the Open Source Startup Podcast with Maxim here, which we released exactly 1 year ago, as well as the awesome blog post that Shawn Wang from their team put together on that first episode here.

Omri Gazitt is Co-Founder & CEO of Aserto, the open source enterprise-grade authorization-as-a-service platform. Their open source toolchain includes projects such as Open Policy Agent and their platform was built to be enterprise-ready incredibly fast.

Aserto has raised over $5M from investors including Heavybit and Costanoa Ventures.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of market education on a new capability (ie when would a user look for you in their journey), category creation, tracking success, and learnings for other open source founders!

Paul Copplestone is Co-Founder & CEO of Supabase the open source Backend-as-a-Service company that provides storage, authentication, edge functions, and a postgres database to users. 

Supabase's project, also called supabase, has 36K stars on GitHub and is positioned as the "open source Firebase alternative".

Supabase has raised $116M from investors including Coatue, Felicis, and YC.

In this episode, we discuss positioning as an open source alternative to "x", the benefits of going through YC as an open source company, how to judge open source momentum, learnings for other early open source founders, and more!

Vlad Ionescu is Founder & CEO of Earthly, the CI/CD framework that can run anywhere. Earthly's open source project, also called earthly, has over 7K GitHub stars and a slack channel with over 500 community members. Earthly has raised $3M from investors including 468 Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, Hack VC, and Bessemer.

In this episode, we discuss the distinction between source available and open source (and why source available works better for databases), company inspiration from the build process at Google, scoring an open source launch, positioning and messaging in a new category, and much more!

Kishore Gopalakrishna is Co-Founder & CEO of Startree, the real-time analytics platform that provides a managed service on top of the open-source distributed data store Apache Pinot.

Kishore is also the co-creator of Apache Pinot, which was started while he was at LinkedIn. Since leaving to build Startree, Kishore and his team have raised $28M from investors including GGV, Bain Capital Ventures, and CRV.

In this episode, we discuss the right time to launch a managed service on top of an open source project, the importance of relentless focus on customer needs and use cases early-on, community building, and much more.

Abhishek Nayak is Co-Founder & CEO of Appsmith, the open source platform for building internal tools. The company's open source project, also called appsmith, has 19K stars and is a low code project to build admin panels, internal tools, and dashboards.

Appsmith has raised over $50M from investors including Insight, Canaan, OSS Capital, and Accel.

Matthew Rocklin is Founder & CEO of Coiled, a company that sits on top of open-source Dask which makes Python highly scalable for data scientists. Coiled makes Dask enterprise-ready and gives users access to faster cluster startup times, savings on cloud costs, and allows them to run their Python workloads faster.

Coiled has raised $26M from investors including Bessemer and Costanoa.

In this episode, we discuss the creation of Dask, the decision to start a company around it, the challenges that come with company building, and much more!

David Cramer is the Co-Founder & CTO of Sentry, the open source error tracking and performance monitoring unicorn company used by over 3.5M developers and 85K organizations.

The company's most popular open source project, also called sentry, has over 31K stars and lets users monitor and fix crashes in real-time. The server is in Python, but it contains a full API for sending events from any language, in any app.

Sentry has raised $217M from investors including Accel, NEA, and Bond.

In this episode, we talk with David about starting Sentry before open source business models were mainstream, how he's adapted as a leader holding the CEO and CTO seats at different points in time, and his candid advice to open source founders (particularly first-time founders) starting out today.

Bob van Luijt is the Co-Founder & CEO of SeMI Technologies, the company behind the open-source project Weaviate which is a vector search engine for ML models.

Weaviate uses machine learning to vectorize (ie represent) and store data in order to more easily find answers to natural language queries.

The project has 2.5K stars on GitHub and an almost 1K person Slack community of data scientists, data engineers, and software engineers.

The company has raised over $17M from investors including NEA, Zetta, and Cortical Ventures.

Erica Brescia is the previous COO of GitHub and is currently an MD at Redpoint Ventures. Jono Bacon is a renowned Community Consultant who also has roots at GitHub.

In this lively episode, Erica and Jono discuss their unique backgrounds in open source, how the ecosystem has evolved, open source business models & licenses, and advice for open source founders.

André Eriksson is the Founder of Stockholm-based Encore, the open-source backend development engine. 

Encore's core open source project, also called encore, has almost 3K stars and helps developers escape the complexity that historically comes with setting up and managing distributed backend infrastructure.

The company has raised $3M from the Open Source Startup Podcast's very own Tim Chen of Essence VC as well as Crane Venture Partners and Third Kind VC. 

Matt Butcher is Co-Founder & CEO of Fermyon, the company building open source, WebAssembly-powered cloud tools. 

The company's most popular open source project, spin, has over 1K stars and is a framework for building and running fast, secure, and composable cloud microservices with WebAssembly. 

Elena Samuylova is Co-Founder & CEO of Evidently AI, the open source ML monitoring platform. The company's open source project, also called evidently, has over 2K stars on GitHub and is used to evaluate and monitor ML models - from validation to production. The project's Discord channel has over 500 participants.

Evidently AI is a YC company from the S21 batch and is HQ'd in San Francisco.

Nicolas Hourcard is Co-Founder & CEO of QuestDB, creators of the fastest open source time-series database questdb. Their database project has over 8K stars on GitHub and their Slack community has over 1.2K individuals. 

QuestDB has raised over $14M from investors including 468 Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Episode 1. 

Avi Press is Founder & CEO of Scarf, the platform that helps open-source companies understand how their code is being used. 

Scarf has raised over $7M from investors including Race Capital and Freestyle Capital. 

Ajay Kulkarni is Co-Founder & CEO of TimescaleDB, the simplest SQL time-series database. The company's open-source project, timescaledb, has 13K stars and their slack community has over 8K participants. 

TimescaleDB has raised over $180M from investors including Tiger, Redpoint, Icon, NEA and Benchmark. 

Arjun Narayan is Co-Founder & CEO of Materialize, the platform for building data-intensive applications with materialized views. The company's source-available project, also called materialize, has 3.9K stars and their slack channel has over 1.4K participants. 

Materialize has raised over $100M from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint, and Lightspeed. 

YouTube version of the episode here.

Soumyadeb Mitra is Founder & CEO of Rudderstack, the open-source bidirectional data pipeline platform. Their primary open source project rudder-server provides an open source alternative to SaaS platform Segment and has over 3K stars with a community of over 1.7K on Slack.   

Rudderstack has raised $82M from investors including Insight Partners and Kleiner Perkins. 

Jack Naglieri is Founder & CEO of Panther, the platform to run security operations at scale. It includes detection-as-code, a robust security data lake, and huge scalability with zero-ops. The company started as open-source but closed sourced in 2021. 

Panther is a unicorn company having raised $140M+ from Coatue, ICONIQ, Lightspeed, and 645 Ventures. 

Artyom Keydunov is Co-founder & CEO of Cube.dev, the headless BI platform for building data apps. Cube.dev's open-source project, cube-js, has almost 13K stars on GitHub and helps data engineers and application developers access data from modern data stores, organize it into consistent definitions, and deliver it to every application.

Cube.dev has raised over $20M from investors including Bain Capital, Decibel Partners, Eniac VC, 645 Ventures, Slack Fund, and Betaworks. 

DeVaris Brown & Ali Hamidi are Co-founders of Meroxa, the platform for building real-time data pipelines. The company's open-source project Conduit lets users build and run their data pipelines. 

Meroxa has raised almost $20M from investors including Drive Capital, Root VC, and Amplify Partners. 

Ian Tien is Co-founder & CEO of Mattermost, the open-source messaging and collaboration platform with customers including Fastly, Samsung, Bosch, NASA, AIG, Wealthfront, and the US Air Force. The company has multiple open-source projects focused on collaboration and 34K+ stars across them all. 

Mattermost has raised $70M from investors such as YC and Redpoint. 

Adrien Treuille is Co-founder & CEO of Streamlit, the open-source app framework for Machine Learning and Data Science teams to build data apps. The company's underlying open-source project, also named Streamlit, has over 18K stars and a community of 1.4K+ on Discord. 

Streamlit raised $60M+ from Sequoia, GGV, and Gradient Ventures and since the recording of this podcast was acquired by Snowflake for a reported $800M.  

Steven Fabre is Co-founder & CEO of Liveblocks which provides open-source APIs and tools to create collaborative experiences. The company has a repo (also called Liveblocks) that contains open-source packages for building performant and reliable multiplayer experiences.

Michel Tricot is Co-founder & CEO of Airbyte, the open-source data integration platform. Airbyte was launched in 2020 and since then the company's open-source project (also called Airbyte) has picked up 6K stars and their Slack community has 6K+ data engineers actively participating in it. 

Airbyte is a unicorn company, having raised $180M+ from investors such as Benchmark, Altimeter, and Accel. 

Ellen Chisa is Cofounder & CEO of Dark, a programming language, editor, and infrastructure that makes it easy to build backends. Dark is source-available (open-source "adjacent") and raised $4M from investors such as Cervin Ventures, Boldstart (where Ellen now works as a Founder-in-Residence), Data Collective, Harrison Metal, and Xfactor.

Julien Chaumond is Cofounder & CTO of Hugging Face, the AI community with deep roots in open source. Hugging Face has many open source projects including transformers (59K stars), datasets (13K stars), tokenizers (5K stars), among others. The company has raised $60M+ from investors such as Addition, Lux Capital, and Betaworks. 

Sven Al Hamad is Founder & CEO of Webiny, the open-source serverless CMS. Founded in London, England, the company's open-source project has 5K+ stars and their Slack community has 1K+ members. 

In this episode, we talk about open-source and serverless as differentiators, understanding your open-source users (telemetry, being plugged into the community, etc.), the importance of strong documentation, content strategies, and advice for other open-source project owners looking to turn their project into a company.

James Hawkins, Co-founder & CEO, PostHog

James is the Co-founder & CEO of PostHog, the product analytics company that started as an open-source alternative to SaaS products such as Amplitude. They've raised up to a Series B from investors including YC Continuity and GV.    

In this episode, we discuss the early days of PostHog, GTM benefits of open-source business models (particularly at larger enterprises that have infosec requirements), open-source alternatives to SaaS products, and advice to other open-source founders at the earliest part of their journey. 

Martin Mao, Co-founder & CEO, Chronosphere

Martin is the Co-founder & CEO of Chronosphere, the open source-based observability platform that started with the open source metrics engine M3. M3 has almost a 1K person Slack community and was started at Uber where the Chronosphere team initially worked on it. Chronosphere is a unicorn company and has raised $255M from Greylock, General Atlantic, Lux Capital, Addition, Founders Fund, Spark Capital, and Glynn Capital. 

In this episode, we discuss open source as an industry shift for observability, the early days of M3 at Uber, the opportunity for Chronosphere as an independent company, the right business model for Chronosphere, and product / team-building advice for other open source founders. 

Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO, Vercel

Guillermo is the Founder & CEO of Vercel, the company behind the open-source project Next.js. Next.js is a React framework used by frontend developers to build websites in a Jamstack format. Next.js has 79K stars on GitHub and a Discord community with over 33K members. Vercel has raised over $300M from GGV, Accel, Google Ventures, and Bedrock Capital.

In this episode, we discuss Guillermo’s extensive experience in open-source, early architectural decisions to set up for scale, what a great “developer experience” really means, creating a complex distributed system that appears simple from the user's perspective, Vercel’s culture of excellence, and advice for open-source founders early in their journey.

Abe Gong, Co-founder & CEO, Superconductive & Kyle Eaton, Growth Lead, Superconductive 

Abe and Kyle are from Superconductive, the company behind the open-source project Great Expectations which has almost 6K stars on GitHub and a 5K+ person Slack community. Great Expectations is an open-source library for data quality, allowing users to always know what to expect from their data. It helps data teams eliminate pipeline debt, through data testing, documentation, and profiling bringing the best processes from software development to data teams. 

In this episode, we learn how they were able to shift from building a healthcare data consultancy to Superconductive, turning a tool they built for themselves into a business. Abe and Kyle also share insights on their growth strategy, business model (and taking learnings from the GitHub business model), what goes on in their Slack channel, and their fundraising experience. 

Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO, Vectorized

Alex is Founder & CEO of Vectorized, the data streaming platform that released the open-source real-time streaming project Redpanda. Redpanda has 3.1K GitHub stars and a 1.2K person Slack community. Objectives for Vectorized are providing a faster version of Kafka and an amazing developer experience. 

In this episode, we discuss Alex’s journey from technical architect to CEO, why experimentation is important for open-source companies, what a great developer experience means, the tradeoffs between monetization and happy open-source users, coming up with a pricing model (Vectorized had Confluent as a benchmark), and building a high-quality team in today's environment. 

Egil Østhus & Ivar Østhus, Co-founders, Unleash

Egil & Ivar are Co-founders of Unleash, the open-source feature management platform. The underlying project, unleash, has 4.5K GitHub stars and the company's enterprise product is run in an open-core model.

In this episode, we discuss the origin story for Unleash (solving a problem the founders had themselves), how the open-source project spread, the Unleash paid product journey, why open-source works for regulated industries, new tooling areas for the open-source model, and advice for early-stage founders.

Leland Takamine, CEO & Co-founder, mobile.dev

Leland Co-founder & CEO of mobile.dev, the first "shift left" mobile development platform for high-quality mobile experiences. Their software finds bugs and performance issues before a new mobile release goes out.

The origins of mobile.dev are in the project nanoscope, which Leland open-sourced while at Uber. The number and quality of companies using nanoscope signaled the need for better mobile development tooling.

Since launching, mobile.dev has signed enterprise customers such as Reddit and raised funding from Cowboy Ventures along with strategic funds and angels such as Essence VC, President of Coinbase Emilie Choi, VP Engineering from Robinhood Surabhi Gupta, "Building Mobile Apps at Scale" author Gergely Orosz, Founder of Kong Marco Palladino, and mobile influencer PY Ricau among others.

In this episode, we discuss the decision to create and open-source nanoscope, how nanoscope led to mobile.dev, the "Shift Left Mobile" movement, and Leland's journey as a leader - particularly on going from technologist to CEO.

mobile.dev is also hiring. Check out open reqs for Android Lead, Frontend Lead, and Device Cloud Engineering Lead (all remote)!

Jeremiah Lowin, CEO & Founder, Prefect

Jeremiah is the founder of Prefect, the data flow company that sits on top of the open-source workflow project Prefect Core as well as the recently released orchestration engine project Prefect Orion. Unlike many open-source companies, Prefect didn't start out as open-source. Two years into the company-building journey, Prefect Core launched and the traction from there has been very strong. 

Today, Prefect has a Slack community of over 10K members and has raised from VCs including Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Tiger Global, and Positive Sum. 

In this episode, we discuss the early Prefect story, open-source as a social network, different ways to approach fundraising as an open-source company, product positioning, and more! 

Tristan Handy, CEO & Founder, dbt Labs

Tristan is co-founder & CEO of dbt Labs (previously Fishtown Analytics), the company that sits on top of the open-source data transformation tool dbt. 

dbt has quickly become the industry standard with more than 5K companies using it in production supported by a Slack community of over 15K members. The company recently reached unicorn status raising their $150M Series C round at a $1.5B post-money valuation with investors including Sequoia, a16z, Altimeter, and Amplify. 

In this episode, we discuss the origin story behind dbt, why timing for open-source projects matters, building community, Tristan's perspective on fundraising, the 'Modern Data Stack', and his personal growth journey as a leader. 

Transcript here

Peer Richelsen, Co-Founder, Calendso

Peer is co-founder of Calendso, a company launched earlier this year. Calendso is an open-source calendar application ('open-source Calendly alternative’) that has 6K+ GitHub stars, 500+ forks, and a 700+ person Slack group. After an incredible launch, they rocketed to #1 Product of the Month in April 2021 on Product Hunt.

In this episode, we discuss Peer’s unique founder journey and how he found Calendso’s CEO, the company's launch, prioritizing objectives at an open-source company, building community, and open-source eating business applications.

Maxim Fateev, Co-Founder & CEO, Temporal.io

1:17: Maxim digs into his extensive experience with distributed systems and how it led him to build Cadence, the open-source project behind his company Temporal

5:10: We discuss why open-source is important and how it helps projects last vs. keeping them within a company where they will most likely die

9:30: Maxim talks about finding product-market fit through open-source before raising venture capital; one signal was the quality of engineers from top companies in their 1K person slack channel  

14:35: We discuss the importance of building trust with users, especially with developer tools running in critical production systems, and the importance of founder credibility (Maxim and his cofounder had been working on distributed systems for 20 years); building trust took years as the project matured and Maxim marketed it through speaking at conferences, etc. 

19:15: We dig into Temporal's product positioning 

24:50: Maxim discusses Uber’s response to the team forking Cadence to create Temporal; the most contentious part was not making it backward compatible; migrating the community was also a challenge

28:50: We talk about the commercial side of the product; Temporal is delivered via API and sold as a hosted service and has a usage-based pricing model 

37:07: We discuss evangelism and the importance of marketing for a new category (also - Temporal is hiring dev advocates!) 

39:30: We end on advice for other open-source company founders - the key being to just start

Emily Omier, Positioning Consultant for Commercial Open-Source Companies

2:53: Emily discusses the positioning of the 2 products OSS companies have: the OSS product & the paid product 

5:30: Emily talks about her process & how she interacts with ‘super users’ to understand what they use the project for (hint: it’s often not what the project owner had in mind)

8:02: Emily digs into competition and how most OSS startups are competing with a manual process vs. other companies

10:09: The hard parts about positioning an OSS startup are discussed: resource challenges, focus, and engineers as challenging buyers

14:36: Emily talks about common mistakes OSS companies make

18:54: We dig into the right team set-up for OSS companies

21:10: Emily talks about the key areas OSS companies should think about when coming up with their positioning: expectations on what the product does and does not contain, expectations on related tools, competitors, and target users (type of app, workload, product, use case, etc.)

35:45: We talk about monetization and how to think about targeting the right customers

37:50: Emily ends on advice for early-stage OSS founders: don’t try to create a completely new category, bring well-understood concepts together, and position as the best option for a small market early-on

Joe Beda, Founder & CTO, Heptio

2:00: Developing the Kubernetes project at Google & deciding to open-source it

4:48: The origins of Heptio & building a company around Kubernetes

13:29: Open-source business models & 'open extensibility' as the new model

24:36: Scaling open-source businesses: metrics to track & interacting with the community

31:55: Good areas for successful open-source products & advice for founders

Joe Duffy, Founder & CEO, Pulumi

1:17 - Background on Joe & Pulumi - the company was started to give infra engineers tools to help them innovate faster.

3:05 - Why OS as a core part of Pulumi’s strategy - getting community buy-in was important as it created trust and authenticity. Joe also saw the power of open source when he was at Microsoft and they started exploring an OS strategy.

5:29 - Pulumi launched as a company and OS project at the same time. The benefit of this was they could be thoughtful about the business model from the get-go instead of it being an afterthought.

9:53 - The SaaS attach rate was insanely high - 2/3 adopted the SaaS. It was the default experience that developers opted out of if they wanted to. The business model was close to what AWS offers - a full managed service.

12:13 - Finding product-market fit with the OS project and business at the same time was tricky. It took over a year to release the OS project, however they had their first paying customer before they open-sourced anything.

14:28 - They decided to charge for enterprise features only (identity, policy enforcement, webhooks, team management, etc.).

20:25 - When measuring the health of the open-source, they focused on engagement over growth metrics. They wanted end users to be really successful. Joe continues to be baffled about investor conversations that center on stars - it’s one light measure of momentum but there are much stronger signals around health from Stack Overflow, Hacker News, Reddit, etc. 

25:20 - Joe took on the role of the developer advocate himself early on. In fact, he did parts of every function before hiring for them to make sure he understood all parts of the business. 

26:53 - In raising money for an OS company, focusing on typical SaaS metrics as well as OS metrics is important. Both need to be worked on in tandem.

28:55 - Early on, the focus was on building the OS community over the SaaS product. The ratio was 10:1 for people working on the OS vs. SaaS.

31:10 - Advice Joe has for OS founders - don’t sweat monetization too soon as once it’s introduced it averts focus away from top of funnel OS growth.

33:05 - Joe wishes investors understood developers more. They’re a tough group to make happy and the tech changes rapidly. It’s not just about momentum metrics but solving big problems for the community (TensorFlow is a good example).

35:08 - Joe’s final piece of advice is focus on making developers happy and starting in a niche vs. making a solution too broad at the start. 

Max Schireson, prev. CEO, MongoDB

1:20: Max started his career at Oracle where he became frustrated with the limitations of relational databases. He then moved to MarkLogic where he discovered XML databases and the flexibility of that format got him excited about the potential for new databases. From there, he moved to MongoDB as CEO just as NoSQL started to take off. There, he was exposed to the distribution potential of open-source. With an open-source business, people used your product well before you sold it to them. The company was very early when he joined. There were 20 employees and $10Ks - $100Ks of revenue. However, they already had a fair amount of open-source adoption.

7:40: Technical support became incredibly challenging at MongoDB since users were so sophisticated.

11:50: The transition away from support as a business model was necessary as users were finding fewer issues with the product. Max walks through the shift towards an open core model bifurcating free and paid functionality. 

13:40: Deciding between paid and unpaid features was challenging. They discovered that paid features were good for operating at scale, and while they could have made more money by charging for additional support, they felt that having the best free open-source product on the market should take priority. 

17:50: They didn't focus on stars as a core metric as it is only a rough measure of momentum. Instead, they focused on things like Google Trends (how often people searched for MongoDB), how often someone would put MongoDB on their LinkedIn as a skill, and if MongoDB was posted on Indeed in job recs.

22:20: Marketing and community came in the form of grassroots efforts and informal presentations. These included 'Mongo Days' where they organized engineering events across the country. Developers liked the honest and genuine nature of how MongoDB was sold to them with the sales team using phrases like “people use Mongo because the alternatives suck”.

25:30: MongoDB used an incremental approach to monetization (support then additional product functionality). They could have prioritized monetizing more sooner but instead focused efforts on the open-source.

27:15: A piece of advice from Max to open-source founders: focus on production workflows for monetization where you'll see real volume.

29:50: Open-source works best in a cloud delivery model. If someone downloads your open-source and uses it on-prem, it’s hard to track and fix issues since you don’t know who all is using the software (in a cloud model, you can fix issues for everyone at the same time).

32:05: Open-source can be seen as just a distribution method, but cloud products can have other great distribution methods.

36:15: A common mistake when building an open-source company is focusing on open-source adoption OR monetization instead of both. 

38:20: Open-source licenses are important to protect your IP. MongoDB had a specific license that restricted how developers could use the product, which was risky since it added friction, but it didn’t end up hurting adoption for them. 

43:10: At MongoDB, the greatest ‘growth hack’ was having a great product experience from the get-go; implementation was quick and users saw value very early.

Marco Palladino, Co-founder & CTO, Kong

0:50: Kong's origin story

5:48: How Kong’s underlying open source project generated early adoption

9:37: Shifting from open source adoption to commercialization

16:09: What enterprise features Kong prioritized building first

21:37: Hiring the early team balancing open-source and commercialization expertise

24:48: How to think about protecting your open-source IP

30:00: Marco's advice for open-source project owners who want to start a company

Todd Persen, Co-founder & CEO, Era Software (prev. Co-founder & CTO, InfluxData) 

In this episode, we'll dig into the InfluxData founding story as well as Todd's decision to make his new company, EraDB, closed source. We'll also discuss the metrics to determine if an open-source project is a success, what features users will pay for, and the benefits (and drawbacks) of having an open-source component at a startup.