Open Source Startup Podcast

Manik Surtani is Head of Open Source and Bradley Axen is Principal Engineer at Block. Manik was key to launching Block's Open Source Programs Office and Bradley is a major open source contributor - including the project Goose which is Block's extensible AI agent project. It currently has over 11K stars on GitHub and has been used for a number of internal use cases at Block as well as by the general AI builder ecosystem. In this episode, we dig into:Block's history releasing and supporting open source projects, and how that led to the creation of the programs office How big companies like Block approach open source and come up with ideas for projects like GooseThe Goose project and how it's different from other agent frameworks

Nikhil Rao is Co-Founder of Reflex, the open source framework to build and deploy web apps in python. Their project, also called reflex, has over 22K stars on GitHub and is a library to build full-stack web apps.Reflex has raised $5M from investors including Lux Capital. In this episode, we dig into:The power of deploying apps using only Python Balancing abstraction and code level access for users The challenges low code frameworks have had becoming production-gradeThe apps users are building with ReflexHow he thought about Reflex Cloud Their vision to be as big as React

Ben Sigelman is the Co-Founder & CEO of observability platform Lightstep as well as Co-Creator of open source observability frameworks OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry. Lightstep was acquired by ServiceNow in 2021 and OpenTelemetry was released in 2019 and has since become the standard observability framework. In this episode, we dig into:The founding story for Lightstep - including the initial pivot into the ideaThe benefits Lightstep got from open sourcing OpenTracing The OpenTracing and OpenCensus merger into OpenTelemetryWhy OpenTelemetry has been so widely adopted Ben's perspective on the many companies building with OpenTelemetry todayHow their team made the decision to take the ServiceNow acquisition Company building learnings around team building (& more!)

Tobie Morgan Hitchcock is the Co-Founder & CEO of SurrealDB, the next generation serverless cloud database for modern applications. Their open source database, also called surrealdb, has 30K stars on GitHub. SurrealDB has raised $26M from investors including FirstMark and Georgian. In this episode, we dig into:Taking a broad vs. niche approach to building a new databaseHow coming from a non-traditional DB background helped Tobie take a new, first principles approachHow graph databases best reflect how humans think The importance of design for infra products How enterprises vs. SMBs / individual users view their value How open source helped them develop trust with large companiesPlanning out their cloud offering

Misha Bragin is the Founder & CEO of NetBird, the open source zero trust networking platform that allows companies and individuals to create secure private networks without the hassle of corporate networks. Their open source, also called netbird, has over 12K stars on GitHub and connects devices into a secure WireGuard-based overlay network. NetBird has raised $4M from investors including InReach Ventures. In this episode, we discuss: Pivoting away from their initial hardware-based approach How the growth in remote employees has driven demand Why VPNs needed to be reinvented Why they use the WireGuard protocol What's different about their approach vs. Tailscale Managing big and small users at the same time Why most technical founders should hire a technical marketer early

Kevin Wang is Founder & CEO of Fossa, the product security platform that automates compliance & security across open source third party code, suppliers, and tools. In this episode, we discuss: Where Kevin's interest in open source started Learning to work with big enterprises The shift from scanning to fixing Repositioning from an engineering to security platform Resisting the market pressure to push hard into AI

Max Stoiber is Co-Founder & CEO of Stellate, the GraphQL edge platformrecently acquired by Shopify.In this episode, we discuss:The Stellate journey from idea to initial traction to acquisitionThe market size (and limitations) for GraphQL, APIs, and DevToolsHow he ran a top-notch acquisition process for StellateWhy startups fail

Florian Forster is Co-Founder & CEO of Zitadel, the cloud security platform aiming to build the future of identity and access management. Their open source project, also called zitadel, provides identity infrastructure and has 10K stars on GitHub. In this episode, we dig into: The benefits of having an open source auth vendor Authentication vs. authorization Building the "GitLab for identity" Why customization matters for an auth product Demand for self-hosting options for auth Appealing to developers and security teams

Viraj Mehta is the Co-Founder & CTO of TensorZero which is an open-source infrastructure platform that creates a feedback loop for optimizing LLM applications. Their open source project helps users turn production data into smarter, faster, and cheaper models. In this episode, we dig into: The benefits of feedback loops for LLMs Helping their users choose the best underlying models for their applications "Recipes" as a potential monetization path The most common optimizations for LLM-based apps Educating users on what's possible with LLMs

Nathan Sobo is the Founder of Zed, the next-gen code editor that enables high-performance collaboration - powered by AI. Open source zed has 53K Stars on GitHub and is used by engineers at Vercel, Apple, Anthropic, and GitLab. Prior to founding Zed, Nathan created the editor Atom at GitHub which reached 1M+ active users. Zed has raised from investors including Redpoint and Root Ventures. In this episode, we dive into Nathan's deep history with code editors including the widely adopted GitHub editor Atom, the decision to make Zed open source (and the massive 10x growth that came from it), how AI changed their trajectory, why collaboration is core to becoming the defacto editor, anchoring on performance and responsiveness, how they're thinking about the commercial side of Zed & more!

Akshay Agrawal is the Founder & CEO of Marimo, the next generation Python notebook. Their open source reactive notebook for Python, also called marimo, has almost 9K stars on GitHub. Marimo has raised $5M from investors including AIX Ventures. In this episode, we dig into Akshay's love of building developer tools for data teams, his journey from PhD to founder, what a great developer experience means for data teams, why reproducibility was a key problem for them to solve, how he thinks about monetization when other notebooks like Jupyter don't focus on making money & more!

Vlad Matsiiako is CEO & Co-Founder of Infisical, the open source secrets management platform. Their open source project, also called infisical, has 16K stars on GitHub and helps users sync secrets across their teams and infrastructure. Infisical has raised $3M from investors including Gradient and YC. In this episode, we dig into their path from closed to open source, their big user wins (including government users), the importance of reliability for products in and around this category, the organic growth that came from their community, their AI strategy & more!

Karthik Ranganathan is Founder & CTO of Yugabyte, the PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database for cloud native applications. Their open source database, also called yugabyte, has almost 10K stars on GitHub. Yugabyte has raised almost $300M and sits at a $1.3B valuation. They've raised from investors including Sapphire Ventures, Lightspeed, and 8VC. In this episode, we dig into the enormous interest Yugabyte had at the onset as transactional databases were due for innovation, the key architecture choices they made, the initial launch, key early customer wins, the importance of positioning as a distributed SQL company, their evolving open source strategy, building alongside the Postgres community, the decision to bring on an outside CEO & much more!

Andrew Firestone is CEO and Knut Sveidqvist is CTO of Mermaid Chart, the open source text-based diagraming software platform. The mermaid project has over 70K stars on GitHub and is an open source diagramming and charting tool. Mermaid Chart has raised $7.5M from investors including Open Core Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the mermaid project's 8 year journey, going from side project to company, working with GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij to bring Andrew in as CEO & more!

Atai Barkai is Co-Founder & CEO of Copilotkit, the platform to build production-grade AI Copilots 10x faster. Their open source project, also called copilotkit, has almost 13K stars on GitHub and provides React UI + elegant infrastructure for AI Copilots, in-app AI agents, AI chatbots, and AI-powered Textareas. In this episode, we dig into Copilotkit's incredible open source growth trajectory, the importance of tutorials and templates to grow community in a new product area, understanding all of the user types and use cases people were using their open source for, competing with vertical copilots, the future of copilots and when AI becomes more autonomous & more!

Lauren Long is Co-Founder & CTO of Ampersand, the developer platform for native product integrations. Ampersand has raised $5M from investors including Matrix, Base Case Capital, Flex Capital, and 2.12 Angels. In this episode, we dig into their differentiation as a "code-first" product, why they focused on the GTM vertical to start (Salesforce was the first integration), why their CLI is open source but their orchestration layer is closed source, how being transparent on pricing has been a differentiator for them & much more!

Philippe Noël is Co-Founder & CEO of ParadeDB, the modern Elasticsearch alternative built on Postgres. They're purpose-built for heavy, real-time workloads and their open source project, also called paradedb, has over 6K stars on GitHub. ParadeDB has raised $2M from investors including General Catalyst & YC. In this episode, we dig into the benefits of connecting search directly to the database (ie. no ETL), the types of users / use cases that really benefit from ParadeDB (e-commerce, FinTech, etc.), the decision to focus on Postgres, making adoption super easy, Philippe's learnings as a second-time founder & more!

Eric Futoran is Co-Founder & CEO of Embrace, the mobile observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. Embrace has raised almost $80M from investors including NEA, Greycroft & Eniac. In this episode, we dig into the creation of mobile observability as a category and how Embrace helped evangelize it, what makes mobile observability unique, why they open sourced their SDKs, how aligning with OpenTelemetry changed their trajectory, the difference between having product-market-fit and GTM-market-fit, shifting from just focusing on mobile teams to mobile + DevOps teams & more!

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!