The Business of Open Source

Today I chat with Kiersten Gaffney, CMO of Codefresh, a software delivery platform. Kiersten begins by defining her role as CMO. We then discuss the unique challenges of product strategy with open source projects. Kiersten talks about the importance of maintaining both a top-down and bottom-up approach when taking a project from open source to enterprise, and then explains some of the most common...

In this short summation episode, I talked a little more about why I think Deepfence's open source strategy is so genius. 

Today I sat down with Sandeep Lahane, founder and CEO of Deepfence, a security preventive and detective solution for cloud and container native environments. Sandeep began by explaining both the open source and enterprise components of Deepfence. Threatmapper is a multi-cloud platform for scanning, mapping, and ranking vulnerabilities in running containers, images, hosts, and repositories, and Thr...

Some short thoughts on marketing in the open source ecosystem, drawn from my conversation with Eric on Wednesday. 

Today I sit down with Eric Hendricks, the technical marketing director at Red Hat. Red Hat delivers open source solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments. Eric begins the conversation by discussing his start as a technologist and how he decided to make the move to marketing. Eric then discusses the challenges of bringing marketing savvy into the devops...

I'm trying something new this week — adding an extra episode with some key takeaways from the interview earlier in the week. In this one, I talked about the education battle many cloud native companies face, the problem of open source projects that are too good and understanding pain points for different personas. 

Today I’m joined by Omri Gazitt, founder of Aserto, an authorization company that offers cloud native authorization as a service. We discuss the differences between ID authorization and authentication and the problems associated with educating developers on the distinctions. Omri also talks about the evolution of authorization from server software all the way to cloud native authorization. He then...

I’m joined by Mark Grover, one of the founders of Stemma, a data catalogue for building decentralized data informed cultures. In essence it is a “Google Search” built for data scientists, data analyst, business leaders, and more. Stemma is striving to solve data documentation and relevance issues by keeping data cataloguing up to date and current. In this episode Mark covers his transition from th...

I’m joined by Matt Leray, co-founder and CTO Speedscale, an API testing product that applies “real world” stresses to “collect and replay traffic without scripting, simulate load and chaos, and measure performance.” With a history steeped in various aspects of tech, and with time spent in the startup space and cloud native space, Matt brings to the table some encompassing perspectives. Matt’s care...

Kit Merker, co-founder and COO at Nobl9, a software reliability platform. Through software-defined SLO’s Nobl9 helps developers, DevOps and reliability engineers deliver more reliable features faster. Kit has had a storied career in tech, and as a result is a great source of wisdom and know how. Especially in regard to navigating the various sides of any given business.  In this episode, Kit offer...

Michael Guarino, founder of Plural, a unified platform for open-source management platform entirely hosted on Kubernetes which creates a fully functional ecosystem around deploying Airflow. Though working in Kubernetes and more, Plural can be used across a wide spectrum of open source projects. Many of which Plural is specifically targeting to make their product appealing to users. In this episode...

Today’s guest is Michael Tanenbaum, CEO and co-founder of Mycelial, an edge data platform for distributed local first applications that is built with developers in mind. Myceclial takes the accomplishments of the cloud native movement to bring data that exists outside the data center into the hands of the developers themselves. With a focus on data from the “edge”, which Michael defines as anythin...

Lyon Wong, CEO and co-founder of Blameless, a complete reliability engineering platform that brings together AI-driven incident resolution, blameless retrospectives, SLOs/Error Budgets, and reliability insights reports and dashboards that enable businesses to optimize reliability and innovation. Lyon has a history steeped in founding and investing in start ups and company building, which has lead...

Haseeb Budhani, co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, a Kubernetes operations company joins the conversation. What a Kubernetes operation company is as companies use Kubernetes across their organizations they need the right automation, security, visibility and more. These are needs that come from multiple teams working across multiple applications, and it creates a lot of work. This is where Rafay...

Andrew Rynhard, Founder and CTO of Sidero Labs, joins the show today to discuss his work and Sidero Labs. Sidero is a Kubernetes lifecycle management reimagined from the operating system to entire stack. Andrew has origins steeped deeply in open source, and it has become a central focus to his entire ethos and drive. Andrew breaks down his own trajectory that lead to Sidero and the passion he leve...

Today’s episode is a round table with Morgan McClean, Ben Sigelman, and Alolita Sharma, the maintainers of Open Telemetry. Open Telemetry is a high-quality, ubiquitous, and portable telemetry to enable effective observability with a mission to make telemetry as approachable and applicable as possible. Open Telemetry’s values center on compatibility, reliability, resilience, and performance. With t...

Tyler Jewell, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, joins me for a deep conversation about the intersection of capital and technology. As a managing director, Tyler harnesses a focus on developer lead companies and the push he makes for those companies when it comes to funding. For Dell Technologies Capital, the focus is on providing the financial support and backing for the market that...

Rob Hirschfeld, CEO of and co-founder of RakN, joins the show to discuss their work in the world of automation. Notably so, automation of data centers using infrastructure code principles to create “infrastructure pipelines.” Rob’s honest and open story provides a great example of how to identify areas that need a product, to developing the product itself. In this episode, Rob gives us the history...

Sam Bhagwat, Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Gatsby, joins me for a conversation about his work. Gatsby is an open source project using React with a focus on building web sites, and not just web apps. As CSO Sam tracks the trends in the modern web development space and helps Gatsby to stay on the innovative edge. From the origin of the open source project in 2015, to the establishment o...

Avi Press, CEO and Co-Founder of Scarf, joins me for an in depth conversation about Scarf and the work they are doing in transparecny in open source maintainers. Avi’s career and the tools he built lead to a decision to capitalize on his tools. Now Scarf is an extension of his work into a commercial opportunity to change the open source ecosystem.  Avi addresses the general maintaner issues that S...

Alex Chircop, CEO of Ondat.io , joins me to talk about his company and their recent rebrand to reflect their shift to focus on some fundamental changes in the industry. With a changing persepective that mirrors the changes happening in cloud data and its uses, Alex and the teams at Ondat.io are staying ahead of the curve and implementing some institutional changes. In this episode Alex goes into t...

Matt Yonkovit, Head of Open Source Strategy at Percona, joins me for a conversation about Percona’s work and their robust history in open source. Percona has been at it for 15 years now and Matt’s work there is both prolific and sets him up to be very well informed about open source strategy at large. In this episode, Matt discusses what exactly his job means within the context of Percona, and how...

Dawn Foster, Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware, joins me to chat about open sourcing and the potential risks to consider. With 20+ years of experience in business technology, Dawn lends great insight not only as a leader in the realm of open source, but as a champion for measuring project health. In this episode, Dawn discusses key risks to consider when open sourcing a project...

Joe Bignell, the Kubernetes recruiter at InterQuest Group, joins me for an interesting conversation about the current job market in the Kubernetes space and his role and vision as a talent seeker. In this episode, Joe and I go into the rabbit hole as we explore the global talent shortage and its impact on the Kubernetes ecosystem. Joe shares invaluable insight and perspective on recruiting for sta...

Jonathan Ellis, CTO and co-founder of DataStax, has always had a startup mindset. In this episode, Jonathan joins me to discuss his journey and entrepreneurial roadmap thus far. In our conversation, Jonathan shares how he became involved with the Apache Cassandra project and his transition to founding DataStax. He also shares insight on the importance of hiring a go to market team, why hiring exec...