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 ....
Apr 19, 2022•35 min
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....
Apr 13, 2022•37 min
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....
Apr 11, 2022•44 min
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....
Apr 07, 2022•38 min
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....
Apr 05, 2022•44 min
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....
Mar 30, 2022•38 min
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 ....
Mar 28, 2022•36 min
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.
Mar 24, 2022•35 min
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....
Mar 21, 2022•42 min
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.
Mar 16, 2022•29 min
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....
Mar 14, 2022•30 min
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 proj...
Mar 03, 2022•44 min
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 advic...
Feb 01, 2022•43 min
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 dis...
Jan 24, 2022•46 min
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 ...
Jan 07, 2022•49 min
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 t...
Dec 16, 2021•40 min
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 grea...
Dec 07, 2021•48 min
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 toolin...
Nov 19, 2021•57 min
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....
Nov 09, 2021•34 min
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 ...
Nov 05, 2021•51 min
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, Al...
Oct 07, 2021•42 min
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 a...
Sep 07, 2021•50 min
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 ...
Aug 05, 2021•42 min
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...
Jul 16, 2021•42 min
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
Jun 24, 2021•39 min
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 ...
Apr 14, 2021•37 min
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 b...
Mar 18, 2021•43 min
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...
Feb 03, 2021•31 min
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.
Jan 12, 2021•43 min
