Michel Tricot is the co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, the open-source data movement platform he launched in 2020. Before Airbyte, Michel led integrations and served as Director of Engineering at LiveRamp, where he scaled the teams and pipelines that synced massive data volumes. He also helped build rideOS as a founding engineer and Director of Engineering. Michel has spent 15+ years in data infrastructure, with a focus on commoditizing data pipelines and giving teams control and sovereignty over their data.
Discussed in this episode
- Why Airbyte launched open source first (catching engineers “at the search”)
- Project-market fit vs. product-market fit, and why they’re different
- The content engine: founder-led writing, shipping slides, and radical transparency
- Turning interest into community: 25k+ Slack, champions, and hiring from within
- The near-misses: hiring ahead of PMF, support-heavy community, cloud complexity
- Going upmarket: enterprise motion, longer cycles, and team ramp realities
- AI wave → agents as “data consumers” and what it means for pipelines
- Replatforming for control & sovereignty, not just “more connectors”
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