Open Source Startup Podcast

Michael Malyuk is Cofounder & CEO of Heartex, the open source data labeling platform for building models at scale with flexibility. The company's open source project, Label Studio, has 10K stars and a community of almost 6K users. Heartex has raised $25M from investors including Redpoint and Unusual Ventures. In this episode, we discuss flexibility as a differentiator, being customer obsessed in the short-term and vision obsessed in the long-term, the importance of strong documentation, and top challenges that open source founders face.

Maxim Fateev is Co-Founder & CEO and Dominik Tornow is Principal Engineer at Temporal, the workflow platform for building resilient applications. Temporal is the company centered on the open source orchestration engine Temporal which is a fork of the project Cadence first created at Uber. The Temporal project and company have seen tremendous interest and the cloud service for Temporal will be GA later this year. The company is valued at $1.5B and raised from investors including Sequoia, Index, and Amplify. In this episode, we discuss the origins of Temporal at Uber, use cases for their resilient workflow engine, how the company's messaging and positioning have evolved over the past year, and the company's upcoming developer experience conference Replay which will be in-person in Seattle from August 25 - 26. This is the second time we've had Temporal on the podcast. Check out our first episode on the Open Source Startup Podcast with Maxim here, which we released exactly 1 year ago, as well as the awesome blog post that Shawn Wang from their team put together on that first episode here.

Omri Gazitt is Co-Founder & CEO of Aserto, the open source enterprise-grade authorization-as-a-service platform. Their open source toolchain includes projects such as Open Policy Agent and their platform was built to be enterprise-ready incredibly fast. Aserto has raised over $5M from investors including Heavybit and Costanoa Ventures. In this episode, we discuss the importance of market education on a new capability (ie when would a user look for you in their journey), category creation, tracking success, and learnings for other open source founders!

Paul Copplestone is Co-Founder & CEO of Supabase the open source Backend-as-a-Service company that provides storage, authentication, edge functions, and a postgres database to users.  Supabase's project, also called supabase, has 36K stars on GitHub and is positioned as the "open source Firebase alternative". Supabase has raised $116M from investors including Coatue, Felicis, and YC. In this episode, we discuss positioning as an open source alternative to "x", the benefits of going through YC as an open source company, how to judge open source momentum, learnings for other early open source founders, and more!

Vlad Ionescu is Founder & CEO of Earthly, the CI/CD framework that can run anywhere. Earthly's open source project, also called earthly, has over 7K GitHub stars and a slack channel with over 500 community members. Earthly has raised $3M from investors including 468 Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, Hack VC, and Bessemer. In this episode, we discuss the distinction between source available and open source (and why source available works better for databases), company inspiration from the build process at Google, scoring an open source launch, positioning and messaging in a new category, and much more!

Kishore Gopalakrishna is Co-Founder & CEO of Startree, the real-time analytics platform that provides a managed service on top of the open-source distributed data store Apache Pinot. Kishore is also the co-creator of Apache Pinot, which was started while he was at LinkedIn. Since leaving to build Startree, Kishore and his team have raised $28M from investors including GGV, Bain Capital Ventures, and CRV. In this episode, we discuss the right time to launch a managed service on top of an open source project, the importance of relentless focus on customer needs and use cases early-on, community building, and much more.

Abhishek Nayak is Co-Founder & CEO of Appsmith, the open source platform for building internal tools. The company's open source project, also called appsmith, has 19K stars and is a low code project to build admin panels, internal tools, and dashboards. Appsmith has raised over $50M from investors including Insight, Canaan, OSS Capital, and Accel.

Matthew Rocklin is Founder & CEO of Coiled, a company that sits on top of open-source Dask which makes Python highly scalable for data scientists. Coiled makes Dask enterprise-ready and gives users access to faster cluster startup times, savings on cloud costs, and allows them to run their Python workloads faster. Coiled has raised $26M from investors including Bessemer and Costanoa. In this episode, we discuss the creation of Dask, the decision to start a company around it, the challenges that come with company building, and much more!

David Cramer is the Co-Founder & CTO of Sentry, the open source error tracking and performance monitoring unicorn company used by over 3.5M developers and 85K organizations. The company's most popular open source project, also called sentry, has over 31K stars and lets users monitor and fix crashes in real-time. The server is in Python, but it contains a full API for sending events from any language, in any app. Sentry has raised $217M from investors including Accel, NEA, and Bond. In this episode, we talk with David about starting Sentry before open source business models were mainstream, how he's adapted as a leader holding the CEO and CTO seats at different points in time, and his candid advice to open source founders (particularly first-time founders) starting out today.

Bob van Luijt is the Co-Founder & CEO of SeMI Technologies, the company behind the open-source project Weaviate which is a vector search engine for ML models. Weaviate uses machine learning to vectorize (ie represent) and store data in order to more easily find answers to natural language queries. The project has 2.5K stars on GitHub and an almost 1K person Slack community of data scientists, data engineers, and software engineers. The company has raised over $17M from investors including NEA, Zetta, and Cortical Ventures.