Open Source Startup Podcast

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!