The Business of Open Source

Guy Podjarny, co-founder and President of Snyk, has seen the world of startups through the lens of an employee and as a founder. With two companies under his belt, Guy has excelled as an entrepreneur as Snyk proves to be a leader in developer security.   In this episode of Cloud Native Startup, Guy shares insight on his first startup, Blaze (acquired by Akamai), and his current company, Snyk. He l...

For Vidya Raman, technology has always been close to her heart. As an investor at Sorenson Ventures, Vidya is guided by this passion and plays an impactful role in helping technical founders build and grow successful businesses. Vidya serves as a leader in early-stage startup investing and thrives on optimizing companies. In this episode of Cloud Native Startup, Vidya talks about her transition fr...

Glasnostic is a cutting-edge observability solution that enables DevOps, SRE and security teams to effectively control emerging disruptive behaviors. In this episode of Cloud Native Startup, I chat with Glasnotic’s co-founder and CEO, Tobias Kunze. As a trailblazer in the world of cloud-native technologies and a two-time startup founder, Tobias brings a wealth of insight. Prior to Glasnostic, Tobi...

Laurent Gil is by no means a novice when it comes to founding companies. As the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at CAST.AI, Laurent marks this as his fourth company. As a repeated entrepreneur, Laurent comes with valuable insight, which he brings to this conversation on Cloud Native Startup. In this episode, we discuss Laurent’s entrepreneurial journey, which has taken him across the globe an...

As the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Kong Inc., Marco Palladino takes great pride in the company he has built from the ground up. Marco’s story begins with his move from Italy to San Francisco with no money and a 3-month visa. Today, he and his fellow Co-Founder, Augusto Marietti, have undoubtedly earned that pride. In this episode of Cloud Native Startup, we explore Marco’s life jour...

In this episode of Cloud Native Startup, Ihor Dvoretskyi, Developer Advocate at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), joins me for a conversation about contributing a project to CNCF. We discuss the benefits of contributing an open source project and Ihor shares insight on the key metrics for success. Ihor also defines each of the three project stages; sandbox, incubating, and graduated, and t...

In this episode of Cloud Native Startup, Justin Borgman, Chairman and CEO of Starburst Data, takes us through Starburst’s evolution as it speedily makes its mark in the enterprise software space. As a two-time startup founder, Justin illustrates his journey towards founding Starburst, alongside his fellow co-founders, and we explore how they built this unique company. He also shares his advice and...

This week on Cloud Native Startup, I’m joined by Tobi Knaup, CEO & Co-Founder of D2iQ. In this episode, Tobi provides insight on how D2iQ helps its customers change the world through open source and how it is reflected in their core mission. We also explore what led to the creation of this pioneering technology company and how the cloud native space has changed since.  Highlights: Tobi provide...

HashiCorp’s Co-Founder and CTO, Armon Dadgar, joins me for a conversation on Cloud Native Startup. In this episode, we focus on open source and how it serves as the core to HashiCorp’s identity. We also explore Armon’s journey towards founding HashiCorp with Mitchell Hashimoto and what the future holds as they both lean into their respective passions. Learn a few keys to cultivating a successful o...

Neil Cresswell, co-founder of Portainer, joins me this week on Cloud Native Startup. In this episode, we talk about the evolution of Neil’s fascinating career, which began at age 17, and how it led to Portainer. We also discuss Portainer’s core ethos of simplicity, open source product, Neil’s predictions on Kubernetes, and more. Highlights: Neil recounts how he went from self-employed to co-foundi...

Michael Hyatt joins me on this episode of Cloud Native Startup.  Not only is Michael a leading tech investor and philanthropist, but he also ranks as one of Canada’s top entrepreneurs. In this episode, Michael provides a wealth of knowledge as he shares invaluable tips for aspiring, new, and current founders. We also discuss the early stages of founding companies with his brother Richard, the ment...

J.J. Guy, Co-founder and CEO of Sevco Security, joins me this week on Cloud Native Startup . In this episode, J.J. breaks down Sevco Security and the IT security ecosystem. We also discuss challenges, lessons learned, building a solid team culture and more. Highlights: Introduction to Sevco and how it fits into the security product ecosystem. (:0016) What creates friction across the entire IT orga...

This week on Cloud Native Startup, I am joined by William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant, Inc. In this episode, William talks about his beginnings as a software engineer at Twitter and his transition towards starting and running his own company. We also discuss how rewriting Linkerd enhanced its core value of simplicity, the blessing and curse of open source, his advice to his younger self, and more. In t...

David Friend, co-founder and CEO of Wasabi Technologies, Inc. writes the rules of his own success. With 7 companies under his belt, David continues to be an impactful maverick entrepreneur. In this episode, David and I talk about the evolution of his journey, which started off in the music industry, and how it led him to found a cloud data storage company. Join us for more on this week’s episode o...

This week, Swaroop Jagadish, co-founder of Acryl Data , takes us through his journey from quitting his day job as an engineer to founding his first startup company alongside Shirshanka Das. Swaroop also shares his insights on Acryl Data’s business model and the advantages and challenges of building an open source project-based company. Tune in for more on Swaroop and Acryl Data in this episode of...

Dhiraj Sharan, CEO and founder of Query. AI , joins me this week on Cloud Native Startup.  With a career that spans over 20 years in cybersecurity, Dhiraj has seen the swift adoption of multi-cloud environments and SaaS apps. In this episode, Dhiraj discusses the importance of evolving your product as the world changes and why you should ask yourself, “How can I be innovative for the next layer?”...

Anurag Goel, Founder and CEO of Render , joins me on this episode of Cloud Native Startup. Learn about his beginnings at Stripe as employee #8, the birth of Render and how it solved a gap in the market, and his lessons learned while transitioning roles. We also discuss how open source fits into business strategy and much more. In this episode, we cover: Anurag and how he founded Render (00:27)  Le...

This week on Cloud Native Startup, I talked with Wei Dang, founder of cloud native security company StackRox which was acquired by RedHat in 2020.  Highlights:  How Wei met his co-founder and how the two of them saw the need for new types of security tools.  Why talking to people throughout the Kubernetes ecosystem led to a series of a realizations that security in a cloud native world was going t...

The Business of Cloud Native is now Cloud Native Startup. Going forward, I'm moving away from talking to end users and focusing instead on what it takes to build a startup in the cloud native ecosystem. I'll be talking with startup founders, startup advisors and others in the ecosystem about making the transition from software engineer to startup founder, the stories behind companies we read about...

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I spoke with Abby Kearns, CTO at Puppet, about the changing role of technology in the enterprise and how that changes things for software companies like Puppet.  Highlights Whatever the exact definition of cloud native, ultimately it is a way to improve scaling and resilience.  The increasing importance of software for enterprises, because customers simpl...

This week on the Business of Cloud Native, I talked with Kelsey Hightower, principle engineer at Google and Kubernetes expert. We talked about how technology like Kubernetes helps engineers focus more on solving business problems instead of constantly solving the same low-level problems.  Highlights:  How the evolution of technology — and the evolution of customers’ expectation — have made cloud n...

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I spoke with Mark Thiele of Edgevana about the definition of cloud and cloud native, where the line is between cloud and edge and situations where edge is the best option.  Highlights:  A discussion of situations where edge is the most appropriate option and how edge can help solve problems related to latency, data transfer costs, data sovereignty and net...

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I spoke with Jana Boruta, Director of Global Events at HashiCorp, about building community — for startups, for big companies and for open source projects with no budget. We also touched on digital-first events and how they differ from in person events.  Highlights: What is community and why does it matter for companies building commercial tools for develo...

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I spoke with James Campbell, CEO of Cado Security, about his background in the security world and why he felt like there needed to be a better way to manage security forensics in a cloud native environment.  Highlights:  Why it’s important to get better information about security incidents — or potential security incidents — to make better decisions.  Why...

What is edge? What is cloud? What is the difference and what are the different requirements for each use case? I talked to Samy Fodil, CEO and founder of Taubyte, about edge computing, industrial IoT and how the edge requires a dramatically different approach from the cloud.  Highlights: Why edge is a truly distributed system, unlike the cloud.  What inspired Fodil to start Taubyte and why he thin...