Open Source Startup Podcast

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...

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 w...

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 invest...

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...

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...

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 approa...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 cr...

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 ear...

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 t...

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 a...

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,...

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 transaction...

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 vi...

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 &...

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, w...

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 wi...

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...

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 hel...

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 La...

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 ro...