E87: Commercializing Open Source Data Systems with Astronomer & CoreDB

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.