Open Source Startup Podcast

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. 

Egil Østhus & Ivar Østhus, Co-founders, Unleash Egil & Ivar are Co-founders of Unleash, the open-source feature management platform. The underlying project, unleash, has 4.5K GitHub stars and the company's enterprise product is run in an open-core model. In this episode, we discuss the origin story for Unleash (solving a problem the founders had themselves), how the open-source project spread, the Unleash paid product journey, why open-source works for regulated industries, new tooling areas for the open-source model, and advice for early-stage founders.

Leland Takamine, CEO & Co-founder, mobile.dev Leland Co-founder & CEO of mobile.dev, the first "shift left" mobile development platform for high-quality mobile experiences. Their software finds bugs and performance issues before a new mobile release goes out. The origins of mobile.dev are in the project nanoscope, which Leland open-sourced while at Uber. The number and quality of companies using nanoscope signaled the need for better mobile development tooling. Since launching, mobile.dev has signed enterprise customers such as Reddit and raised funding from Cowboy Ventures along with strategic funds and angels such as Essence VC, President of Coinbase Emilie Choi, VP Engineering from Robinhood Surabhi Gupta, "Building Mobile Apps at Scale" author Gergely Orosz, Founder of Kong Marco Palladino, and mobile influencer PY Ricau among others. In this episode, we discuss the decision to create and open-source nanoscope, how nanoscope led to mobile.dev, the "Shift Left Mobile" movement, and Leland's journey as a leader - particularly on going from technologist to CEO. mobile.dev is also hiring. Check out open reqs for Android Lead, Frontend Lead, and Device Cloud Engineering Lead (all remote)!

Jeremiah Lowin, CEO & Founder, Prefect Jeremiah is the founder of Prefect, the data flow company that sits on top of the open-source workflow project Prefect Core as well as the recently released orchestration engine project Prefect Orion. Unlike many open-source companies, Prefect didn't start out as open-source. Two years into the company-building journey, Prefect Core launched and the traction from there has been very strong.  Today, Prefect has a Slack community of over 10K members and has raised from VCs including Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Tiger Global, and Positive Sum.  In this episode, we discuss the early Prefect story, open-source as a social network, different ways to approach fundraising as an open-source company, product positioning, and more! 

Tristan Handy, CEO & Founder, dbt Labs Tristan is co-founder & CEO of dbt Labs (previously Fishtown Analytics), the company that sits on top of the open-source data transformation tool dbt.  dbt has quickly become the industry standard with more than 5K companies using it in production supported by a Slack community of over 15K members. The company recently reached unicorn status raising their $150M Series C round at a $1.5B post-money valuation with investors including Sequoia, a16z, Altimeter, and Amplify.  In this episode, we discuss the origin story behind dbt, why timing for open-source projects matters, building community, Tristan's perspective on fundraising, the 'Modern Data Stack', and his personal growth journey as a leader.  Transcript here

Peer Richelsen, Co-Founder, Calendso Peer is co-founder of Calendso, a company launched earlier this year. Calendso is an open-source calendar application ('open-source Calendly alternative’) that has 6K+ GitHub stars, 500+ forks, and a 700+ person Slack group. After an incredible launch, they rocketed to #1 Product of the Month in April 2021 on Product Hunt. In this episode, we discuss Peer’s unique founder journey and how he found Calendso’s CEO, the company's launch, prioritizing objectives at an open-source company, building community, and open-source eating business applications.

Maxim Fateev, Co-Founder & CEO, Temporal.io 1:17: Maxim digs into his extensive experience with distributed systems and how it led him to build Cadence, the open-source project behind his company Temporal 5:10: We discuss why open-source is important and how it helps projects last vs. keeping them within a company where they will most likely die 9:30: Maxim talks about finding product-market fit through open-source before raising venture capital; one signal was the quality of engineers from top companies in their 1K person slack channel   14:35: We discuss the importance of building trust with users, especially with developer tools running in critical production systems, and the importance of founder credibility (Maxim and his cofounder had been working on distributed systems for 20 years); building trust took years as the project matured and Maxim marketed it through speaking at conferences, etc.  19:15: We dig into Temporal's product positioning  24:50: Maxim discusses Uber’s response to the team forking Cadence to create Temporal; the most contentious part was not making it backward compatible; migrating the community was also a challenge 28:50: We talk about the commercial side of the product; Temporal is delivered via API and sold as a hosted service and has a usage-based pricing model  37:07: We discuss evangelism and the importance of marketing for a new category (also - Temporal is hiring dev advocates!)  39:30: We end on advice for other open-source company founders - the key being to just start