Open Source Startup Podcast

Rajoshi Ghosh & Tanmai Gopal are the Co-founders of Hasura, the platform to create GraphQL APIs with your data. Hasura's open source graph-QL engine has over 28K stars. Hasura has raised $140M from investors including Lightspeed, Vertex, and Greenoaks Capital. In this episode, we discuss how open source builds trust, the difference between project-market fit and product-market fit, hiring for values, and much more!

Glauber Costa is Founder & CEO of ChiselStrike, the backend-as-a-service platform. Their core technology is open source - and also called ChiselStrike. In this episode, we discuss knowing the right entry point for your user persona, figuring out the best open source business model for your community, having a customer-centric approach to building product, learning fundraising as a technical founder, and more!

Sourabh Bajaj is Cofounder & CTO of CoRise, the technical up-skilling platform with courses taught by industry experts. They have courses focused on open source projects such as DBT that use real-world projects to teach industry skills. In this episode, we discuss how technical learners are different, the opportunity for education to be a third-party tool, why industry professionals can make the best teachers, assessing your own founder-market fit, and more!

Doris Xin is Cofounder & CEO of Linea, the platform to bring data science projects to production. The company's open source project, LineaPy, helps remove engineering bottlenecks for data science teams. In this episode, we discuss positioning in a competitive and technical market, using an open source strategy to help with integrations, Doris' journey from PhD to founder, and much more!

Adam Jacob is the Cofounder & CTO of Chef, the infrastructure automation platform, and CEO of System Initiative. In this episode, we discuss the Chef journey, where open source shines (and where it can be problematic), and predictions on the future of open source.

Brad Van Vugt is Cofounder & CEO of Battlesnake, a competitive multiplayer game for web developers. The rules and game docs for Battlesnake are all open source. This episode's discussion is heavily focused on community. We discuss the community's influence on the initial product scope, roadmap, and much more!

Armon Dadgar is Cofounder & CTO of HashiCorp, the software infrastructure & security automation company that works with open source projects such as Terraform, Vault, Consul, Vagrant, Packer, and Nomad. HashiCorp went public in late 2021 and currently has a market capitalization of $6B. In this episode, we discuss the timeline from project release to mass adoption, the importance of focusing on user problems rather than a specific technical solution, incorporating the right user feedback, the hard decisions he had to make as a leader, and learnings from 9+ years at HashiCorp.

Daniela Miao is Cofounder of Momento, the serverless cache that automatically optimizes, scales, and manages your cache for you. Momento works with open source caching engine Pelikan which was created at Twitter. Daniela is joined in this episode by Yao Yue, a Principal Software Engineer at Twitter who is a core part of Twitter's Pelikan Caching team. Today, Momento provides a SaaS service on top of Pelikan in an Open Core model. In this episode, we discuss launching a company on top of an open source project started by a team outside of the founders, messaging and positioning for technical companies, team building, and much more!

Saurav Pathak is Cofounder & Chief Product Officer of Bagisto, the open source e-commerce platform based in India that has bootstrapped to 60k+ downloads and 200K users. In this episode, we discuss community contributions to product (Bagisto's extensions are 30% community-built!), building the foundation for an open source community before focusing on monetization, what "great support" really looks like for an open source company, lessons from building without VC money, and more!

Mike McNeil is Cofounder & CEO of Fleet, a device management platform based on the  open source endpoint visibility project osquery. Fleet has raised $25M from investors including CRV. In this episode, we discuss the importance of understanding your user profile(s), the nuances of company positioning, the difference between building a product vs. building tools, community management (particularly when your users are part of multiple communities) and much more.