Open Source Startup Podcast

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.

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!