Open Source Startup Podcast

Adrien Treuille is Co-founder & CEO of Streamlit , the open-source app framework for Machine Learning and Data Science teams to build data apps. The company's underlying open-source project, also named Streamlit , has over 18K stars and a community of 1.4K+ on Discord.  Streamlit raised $60M+ from Sequoia, GGV, and Gradient Ventures and since the recording of this podcast was acquired by...

Steven Fabre is Co-founder & CEO of Liveblocks which provides open-source APIs and tools to create collaborative experiences. The company has a repo (also called Liveblocks ) that contains open-source packages for building performant and reliable multiplayer experiences.

Michel Tricot is Co-founder & CEO of Airbyte , the open-source data integration platform. Airbyte was launched in 2020 and since then the company's open-source project (also called Airbyte ) has picked up 6K stars and their Slack community has 6K+ data engineers actively participating in it.  Airbyte is a unicorn company, having raised $180M+ from investors such as Benchmark, Altimeter, a...

Ellen Chisa is Cofounder & CEO of Dark , a programming language, editor, and infrastructure that makes it easy to build backends. Dark is source-available (open-source "adjacent") and raised $4M from investors such as Cervin Ventures, Boldstart (where Ellen now works as a Founder-in-Residence), Data Collective, Harrison Metal, and Xfactor.

Julien Chaumond is Cofounder & CTO of Hugging Face , the AI community with deep roots in open source. Hugging Face has many open source projects including transformers (59K stars), datasets (13K stars), tokenizers (5K stars), among others. The company has raised $60M+ from investors such as Addition, Lux Capital, and Betaworks. 

Sven Al Hamad is Founder & CEO of Webiny , the open-source serverless CMS. Founded in London, England, the company's open-source project has 5K+ stars and their Slack community has 1K+ members.  In this episode, we talk about open-source and serverless as differentiators, understanding your open-source users (telemetry, being plugged into the community, etc.), the importance of strong doc...

James Hawkins , Co-founder & CEO, PostHog James is the Co-founder & CEO of PostHog, the product analytics company that started as an open-source alternative to SaaS products such as Amplitude. They've raised up to a Series B from investors including YC Continuity and GV.     In this episode, we discuss the early days of PostHog, GTM benefits of open-source business models (p...

Martin Mao , Co-founder & CEO, Chronosphere Martin is the Co-founder & CEO of Chronosphere, the open source-based observability platform that started with the open source metrics engine M3 . M3 has almost a 1K person Slack community and was started at Uber where the Chronosphere team initially worked on it. Chronosphere is a unicorn company and has raised $255M from Greylock, General Atlan...

Guillermo Rauch , Founder & CEO, Vercel Guillermo is the Founder & CEO of Vercel, the company behind the open-source project Next.js . Next.js is a React framework used by frontend developers to build websites in a Jamstack format. Next.js has 79K stars on GitHub and a Discord community with over 33K members. Vercel has raised over $300M from GGV, Accel, Google Ventures, and Bedrock Capita...

Abe Gong , Co-founder & CEO, Superconductive & Kyle Eaton , Growth Lead, Superconductive  Abe and Kyle are from Superconductive, the company behind the open-source project Great Expectations which has almost 6K stars on GitHub and a 5K+ person Slack community . Great Expectations is an open-source library for data quality, allowing users to always know what to expect from their d...

Alex Gallego , Founder & CEO, Vectorized Alex is Founder & CEO of Vectorized, the data streaming platform that released the open-source real-time streaming project Redpanda . Redpanda has 3.1K GitHub stars and a 1.2K person Slack community . Objectives for Vectorized are providing a faster version of Kafka and an amazing developer experience.  In this episode, we discuss Alex’s journe...

Egil Østhus & Ivar Østhus , Co-founders, Unleash Egil & Ivar are Co-founders of Unleash , the open-source feature management platform. The underlying project, unleash , has 4.5K GitHub stars and the company's enterprise product is run in an open-core model. In this episode, we discuss the origin story for Unleash (solving a problem the founders had themselves), how the open-source project...

Leland Takamine , CEO & Co-founder, mobile.dev Leland Co-founder & CEO of mobile.dev, the first "shift left" mobile development platform for high-quality mobile experiences. Their software finds bugs and performance issues before a new mobile release goes out. The origins of mobile.dev are in the project nanoscope , which Leland open-sourced while at Uber. The number and quality of compani...

Jeremiah Lowin , CEO & Founder, Prefect Jeremiah is the founder of Prefect, the data flow company that sits on top of the open-source workflow project Prefect Core as well as the recently released orchestration engine project Prefect Orion . Unlike many open-source companies, Prefect didn't start out as open-source. Two years into the company-building journey, Prefect Core launched and the tra...

Tristan Handy , CEO & Founder, dbt Labs Tristan is co-founder & CEO of dbt Labs (previously Fishtown Analytics), the company that sits on top of the open-source data transformation tool dbt.  dbt has quickly become the industry standard with more than 5K companies using it in production supported by a Slack community of over 15K members. The company recently reached unicorn status rai...

Peer Richelsen, Co-Founder, Calendso Peer is co-founder of Calendso, a company launched earlier this year. Calendso is an open-source calendar application ('open-source Calendly alternative’) that has 6K+ GitHub stars, 500+ forks, and a 700+ person Slack group. After an incredible launch, they rocketed to #1 Product of the Month in April 2021 on Product Hunt. In this episode, we discuss Peer’s uni...

Maxim Fateev, Co-Founder & CEO, Temporal.io 1:17: Maxim digs into his extensive experience with distributed systems and how it led him to build Cadence, the open-source project behind his company Temporal 5:10: We discuss why open-source is important and how it helps projects last vs. keeping them within a company where they will most likely die 9:30: Maxim talks about finding product-market f...

Emily Omier, Positioning Consultant for Commercial Open-Source Companies 2:53: Emily discusses the positioning of the 2 products OSS companies have: the OSS product & the paid product  5:30: Emily talks about her process & how she interacts with ‘super users’ to understand what they use the project for (hint: it’s often not what the project owner had in mind) 8:02: Emily digs into com...

Joe Beda, Founder & CTO, Heptio 2:00: Developing the Kubernetes project at Google & deciding to open-source it 4:48: The origins of Heptio & building a company around Kubernetes 13:29: Open-source business models & 'open extensibility' as the new model 24:36: Scaling open-source businesses: metrics to track & interacting with the community 31:55: Good areas for successful open-...

Joe Duffy, Founder & CEO, Pulumi 1:17 - Background on Joe & Pulumi - the company was started to give infra engineers tools to help them innovate faster. 3:05 - Why OS as a core part of Pulumi’s strategy - getting community buy-in was important as it created trust and authenticity. Joe also saw the power of open source when he was at Microsoft and they started exploring an OS strategy. 5:29...

Max Schireson, prev. CEO, MongoDB 1:20: Max started his career at Oracle where he became frustrated with the limitations of relational databases. He then moved to MarkLogic where he discovered XML databases and the flexibility of that format got him excited about the potential for new databases. From there, he moved to MongoDB as CEO just as NoSQL started to take off. There, he...

Marco Palladino, Co-founder & CTO, Kong 0:50: Kong's origin story 5:48: How Kong’s underlying open source project generated early adoption 9:37: Shifting from open source adoption to commercialization 16:09: What enterprise features Kong prioritized building first 21:37: Hiring the early team balancing open-source and commercialization expertise 24:48: How to think about protecting your open-s...

Todd Persen, Co-founder & CEO, Era Software (prev. Co-founder & CTO, InfluxData)  In this episode, we'll dig into the InfluxData founding story as well as Todd's decision to make his new company, EraDB, closed source. We'll also discuss the metrics to determine if an open-source project is a success, what features users will pay for, and the benefits (and drawbacks) of having an open-...