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 - especiall...
Oct 17, 2022•36 min
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!...
Oct 13, 2022•34 min
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!...
Oct 12, 2022•38 min
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!...
Oct 06, 2022•42 min
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!...
Oct 03, 2022•37 min
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!...
Sep 29, 2022•39 min
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!...
Sep 27, 2022•38 min
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.
Sep 21, 2022•47 min
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!
Sep 16, 2022•37 min
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 f...
Sep 14, 2022•43 min
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 ope...
Sep 06, 2022•40 min
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!...
Aug 26, 2022•35 min
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....
Aug 18, 2022•41 min
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, a...
Aug 15, 2022•35 min
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, Ind...
Aug 05, 2022•41 min
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, t...
Jul 21, 2022•43 min
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 Y...
Jul 18, 2022•41 min
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 bui...
Jul 11, 2022•41 min
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 op...
Jul 06, 2022•45 min
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....
Jun 23, 2022•38 min
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 ...
Jun 21, 2022•33 min
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...
Jun 13, 2022•44 min
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 N...
Jun 08, 2022•36 min
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....
Jun 02, 2022•46 min
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....
May 19, 2022•42 min
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.
May 12, 2022•44 min
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....
May 05, 2022•38 min
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....
May 04, 2022•37 min
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.
Apr 27, 2022•38 min
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....
Apr 22, 2022•34 min
