Open Source Startup Podcast

Steven Fabre is Co-founder & CEO of Liveblocks which provides open-source APIs and tools to create collaborative experiences. The company has a repo (also called Liveblocks) that contains open-source packages for building performant and reliable multiplayer experiences.

Michel Tricot is Co-founder & CEO of Airbyte, the open-source data integration platform. Airbyte was launched in 2020 and since then the company's open-source project (also called Airbyte) has picked up 6K stars and their Slack community has 6K+ data engineers actively participating in it.  Airbyte is a unicorn company, having raised $180M+ from investors such as Benchmark, Altimeter, and Accel. 

Ellen Chisa is Cofounder & CEO of Dark, a programming language, editor, and infrastructure that makes it easy to build backends. Dark is source-available (open-source "adjacent") and raised $4M from investors such as Cervin Ventures, Boldstart (where Ellen now works as a Founder-in-Residence), Data Collective, Harrison Metal, and Xfactor.

Julien Chaumond is Cofounder & CTO of Hugging Face, the AI community with deep roots in open source. Hugging Face has many open source projects including transformers (59K stars), datasets (13K stars), tokenizers (5K stars), among others. The company has raised $60M+ from investors such as Addition, Lux Capital, and Betaworks. 

Sven Al Hamad is Founder & CEO of Webiny, the open-source serverless CMS. Founded in London, England, the company's open-source project has 5K+ stars and their Slack community has 1K+ members.  In this episode, we talk about open-source and serverless as differentiators, understanding your open-source users (telemetry, being plugged into the community, etc.), the importance of strong documentation, content strategies, and advice for other open-source project owners looking to turn their project into a company.

James Hawkins, Co-founder & CEO, PostHog James is the Co-founder & CEO of PostHog, the product analytics company that started as an open-source alternative to SaaS products such as Amplitude. They've raised up to a Series B from investors including YC Continuity and GV.     In this episode, we discuss the early days of PostHog, GTM benefits of open-source business models (particularly at larger enterprises that have infosec requirements), open-source alternatives to SaaS products, and advice to other open-source founders at the earliest part of their journey. 

Martin Mao, Co-founder & CEO, Chronosphere Martin is the Co-founder & CEO of Chronosphere, the open source-based observability platform that started with the open source metrics engine M3. M3 has almost a 1K person Slack community and was started at Uber where the Chronosphere team initially worked on it. Chronosphere is a unicorn company and has raised $255M from Greylock, General Atlantic, Lux Capital, Addition, Founders Fund, Spark Capital, and Glynn Capital.  In this episode, we discuss open source as an industry shift for observability, the early days of M3 at Uber, the opportunity for Chronosphere as an independent company, the right business model for Chronosphere, and product / team-building advice for other open source founders. 

Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO, Vercel Guillermo is the Founder & CEO of Vercel, the company behind the open-source project Next.js. Next.js is a React framework used by frontend developers to build websites in a Jamstack format. Next.js has 79K stars on GitHub and a Discord community with over 33K members. Vercel has raised over $300M from GGV, Accel, Google Ventures, and Bedrock Capital. In this episode, we discuss Guillermo’s extensive experience in open-source, early architectural decisions to set up for scale, what a great “developer experience” really means, creating a complex distributed system that appears simple from the user's perspective, Vercel’s culture of excellence, and advice for open-source founders early in their journey.

Abe Gong, Co-founder & CEO, Superconductive & Kyle Eaton, Growth Lead, Superconductive  Abe and Kyle are from Superconductive, the company behind the open-source project Great Expectations which has almost 6K stars on GitHub and a 5K+ person Slack community. Great Expectations is an open-source library for data quality, allowing users to always know what to expect from their data. It helps data teams eliminate pipeline debt, through data testing, documentation, and profiling bringing the best processes from software development to data teams.  In this episode, we learn how they were able to shift from building a healthcare data consultancy to Superconductive, turning a tool they built for themselves into a business. Abe and Kyle also share insights on their growth strategy, business model (and taking learnings from the GitHub business model), what goes on in their Slack channel, and their fundraising experience. 

Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO, Vectorized Alex is Founder & CEO of Vectorized, the data streaming platform that released the open-source real-time streaming project Redpanda. Redpanda has 3.1K GitHub stars and a 1.2K person Slack community. Objectives for Vectorized are providing a faster version of Kafka and an amazing developer experience.  In this episode, we discuss Alex’s journey from technical architect to CEO, why experimentation is important for open-source companies, what a great developer experience means, the tradeoffs between monetization and happy open-source users, coming up with a pricing model (Vectorized had Confluent as a benchmark), and building a high-quality team in today's environment.