Open Source Startup Podcast

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.

Erica Brescia is the previous COO of GitHub and is currently an MD at Redpoint Ventures. Jono Bacon is a renowned Community Consultant who also has roots at GitHub. In this lively episode, Erica and Jono discuss their unique backgrounds in open source, how the ecosystem has evolved, open source business models & licenses, and advice for open source founders.

André Eriksson is the Founder of Stockholm-based Encore, the open-source backend development engine.  Encore's core open source project, also called encore, has almost 3K stars and helps developers escape the complexity that historically comes with setting up and managing distributed backend infrastructure. The company has raised $3M from the Open Source Startup Podcast's very own Tim Chen of Essence VC as well as Crane Venture Partners and Third Kind VC. 

Matt Butcher is Co-Founder & CEO of Fermyon, the company building open source, WebAssembly-powered cloud tools.  The company's most popular open source project, spin, has over 1K stars and is a framework for building and running fast, secure, and composable cloud microservices with WebAssembly. 

Elena Samuylova is Co-Founder & CEO of Evidently AI, the open source ML monitoring platform. The company's open source project, also called evidently, has over 2K stars on GitHub and is used to evaluate and monitor ML models - from validation to production. The project's Discord channel has over 500 participants. Evidently AI is a YC company from the S21 batch and is HQ'd in San Francisco.