Open Source Startup Podcast

Paul Dix is Cofounder & CTO of open source time series data company InfluxData . The company's open source datastore, InfluxDB , has 26K stars on GitHub. InfluxData has raised over $200M from investors including Norwest, Battery, and Sapphire Ventures. In this episode, we dig into building the category of time series data, how an open source company's monetization plan should tie to fu...

Shivansh Vij is Founder & CEO of Loophole Labs , the modern application delivery platform. They have a number of open source projects that provide primitives for modern development. In this episode, we dig into Loophole's projects around WASM and networking, their unique hiring process, learnings for ambitious open source founders & much more!

Eliot Horowitz is Founder & CEO of robot developer platform Viam and the previous Founder & CTO of developer data platform MongoDB . In this episode, we discuss Eliot's many learnings from being a multi-time founder including the importance of extremely fast response time to user questions, the benefits (and challenges) of building general purpose platforms, democratizing access to rob...

Ben Rometsch is Co-Founder & CEO of Flagsmith , the commercial open source real-time feature flagging platform. The Flagsmith project has almost 3K stars on GitHub and provides feature flagging and remote configuration services that can be hosted on prem or using their hosted software. In this episode, we discuss building a startup in a profitable way, why open source matters for feature flagg...

Quentin de Quelen is Co-Founder & CEO of Meilisearch , the open source search engine platform. The Meilisearch project has 38K stars on GitHub and allows companies to quickly create amazing search experiences with features that work out-of-the-box. Meilisearch has raised $22M from investors including Felicis and CRV. In this episode, we dig into the massive TAM for search, working with the Rus...

Robert Brooks IV & Mitesh Agrawal are part of Lambda 's founding team which is making GPUs for deep learning more accessible. Lambda has an initiative to make GPUs available for training an open source foundation model in support of the broader ML community. In this episode, we dig into the GPUs for open source initiative, why open source matters for foundation models, the Lambda journey f...

Hong Wang is Founder & CEO of Akuity , the application delivery platform for companies building with kubernetes. Akuity works alongside the Argo Project which provides a suite of open source tools for deploying and running applications and workloads on Kubernetes. Akuity has raised $25M from investors including Decibel Partners and Lead Edge Capital. In this episode, we discuss the creation of...

Or Weis is Co-founder & CEO of Permit.io , the open source fullstack permissions as a service platform. The company's project, opal , is an admin layer for policy engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) and AWS' Cedar Agent and brings open-policy up to the speed needed by live applications. Permit.io has raised $6M from investors including NFX. In this episode, we discuss positioning i...

Abby Kearns has a long history in the open source ecosystem as the previous CTO of infrastructure automation platform Puppet , previous CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation , and an active investor and advisor to many open source startups. In this episode, we dig into the Puppet journey, the role organizations like Cloud Foundry play in the open source ecosystem, her views on open source projects versu...

Clément Salaün is Founder of Formance , the open source ledger for money-moving platforms. Their ledger is highly programmable and has over 600 stars on GitHub. Formance is a YC company and has raised over $3M from investors including Hoxton Ventures and Frst. In this episode, we discuss using open source to build user trust, creating a new category of open source software, the importance of build...

Dan Jeffries is the previous Chief Intelligence Officer at open source foundation model company Stability AI and Managing Director at the AI Infrastructure Alliance . Stability AI has raised almost $100M from investors including Lightspeed and Coatue. In this episode, we dig into the role of open source in generative AI, the benefits and drawbacks to open source foundation models, copyright issues...

Ry Walker is Founder of open source data companies Astronomer and CoreDB . Astronomer is the commercial company tied to the popular open source data workflow management system Apache Airflow , and CoreDB is a database company based on the popular open source database Postgres . CoreDB has raised $7M from investors including Venrock and CincyTech, and Astronomer has raised $283M from investors incl...

Kyle Quest is Founder & CTO of Slim AI , the platform to help application developers build secure containers faster. The company's open source project, Slim (previously known as Docker Slim), shrinks container images by up to 30x and makes them secure. It currently has 17K stars on GitHub. Slim AI has raised almost $60M from investors including Insight & Boldstart. In this episode, we...

Harjot Gill is Co-founder & CEO of FluxNinja , the intelligent load management platform for reliability engineers. The company's open source project, Aperture , provides capabilities such as concurrency limiting, rate limiting, and auto-scaling. This episode also features Matt Ranney , a principal engineer from Doordash, who is an early adopter of Aperture. In this episode, we discuss the...

Amjad Masad is Founder & CEO of Replit , the browser-based development environment giving developers the power to build collaboratively with the power of AI on any device. Replit has raised over $200M from investors including a16z, Coatue, and YC. In this episode, we dig into Replit's evolution from an education-focused company to a broadly used coding platform, the role of AI in coding (a...

Guy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk , the developer-first security platform that helps companies find and fix vulnerabilities in their code, open source dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code. Snyk has raised $1.2B from investors including Boldstart, Accel, Tiger Global, and Addition. In this episode, we dig into selling security products to developers, the pros and cons of being ope...

Ryan Blue is Co-Founder of data automation platform Tabular and Co-Creator of Apache Iceberg , the open source high-performance format for huge analytic tables. Tabular most recently raised a Series A from a16z. In this episode, we discuss the concept of a "headless data warehouse", being a problem-centric rather than solution-centric founder & more!

Douwe Maan is Founder & CEO of DataOps platform Meltano , the extract and load company behind the open source CLI & version control project meltano . Meltano has raised $12M from investors including Venrock & Google Ventures. In this episode, we dig into spinning a company out of GitLab, Meltano's cloud launch, making technical data engineers first-class citizens & more!

Shauli Rozen is Founder & CEO of ARMO , the company behind Kubernetes open source security platform kubescape . The project has over 8K stars on GitHub and includes tools for risk analysis, security, compliance, and misconfiguration scanning. ARMO has raised $35M from investors including Tiger Global and Pitango VC. In this episode, we dig into the differences in building product for DevOps vs...

Ramiro Berrelleza is Founder & CEO of Okteto , the Kubernetes development platform that allows developers to spin up production-like dev environments in the cloud. Okteto's open source project, also called Okteto , allows users to spin up a development container, which is configured like the user's production Kubernetes deployment. Today, it has 2.8K start on GitHub. Okteto has raised...

Justin Borgman is CEO of Starburst , the “Analytics Everywhere” company based on the sequel query engine Trino (previously called Presto). Trino is a distributed SQL query engine for big data and is used by companies such as Salesforce, Robinhood, Lyft, LinkedIn, Goldman Sachs, and Netflix. Trino currently has 7.5K GitHub Stars . Starburst has raised over $400M from investors including Index, Coat...

Vikram Sreekanti & Joey Gonzalez are Co-Founders of Aqueduct , the open-source orchestration layer for machine learning infrastructure. Aqueduct's open source project, also called aqueduct , has over 400 stars on GitHub. In this episode, we discuss what Vikram & Joey learned from interviewing 100s of data teams, building in the competitive MLOps space, how and why they invest in content &a...

Curtis Northcutt is Co-Founder & CEO of Cleanlab , the company that helps AI & ML teams automatically find and fix errors in their datasets. They have over 5K stars on GitHub and are already working with companies such as Wells Fargo and Google on ML data quality. In this episode, we discuss the difference between data noise and model noise, the growing importance of ML data quality with t...

James Mikrut is Founder of Payload CMS, the React & TypeScript headless CMS. Their open source project, payload , has over 9K stars on Github and provides a Headless CMS and Application Framework built with TypeScript, Node.js, React, and MongoDB. Payload has raised over $5M from investors including Gradient Ventures and YC. In this episode, we discuss Payload's early guerilla marketing tactic...

Sergei Egorov is Co-Founder & CEO of AtomicJar , the developer-first testing platform built on top of open source testing framework Testcontainers . AtomicJar provides Testcontainers Cloud which allows users to run tests in the cloud with anything that can be containerized. AtomicJar has raised almost $30M from investors including Insight Partners and Boldstart. In this episode, we discuss use...