Open Source Startup Podcast

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

Emily Omier, Positioning Consultant for Commercial Open-Source Companies 2:53: Emily discusses the positioning of the 2 products OSS companies have: the OSS product & the paid product  5:30: Emily talks about her process & how she interacts with ‘super users’ to understand what they use the project for (hint: it’s often not what the project owner had in mind) 8:02: Emily digs into competition and how most OSS startups are competing with a manual process vs. other companies 10:09: The hard parts about positioning an OSS startup are discussed: resource challenges, focus, and engineers as challenging buyers 14:36: Emily talks about common mistakes OSS companies make 18:54: We dig into the right team set-up for OSS companies 21:10: Emily talks about the key areas OSS companies should think about when coming up with their positioning: expectations on what the product does and does not contain, expectations on related tools, competitors, and target users (type of app, workload, product, use case, etc.) 35:45: We talk about monetization and how to think about targeting the right customers 37:50: Emily ends on advice for early-stage OSS founders: don’t try to create a completely new category, bring well-understood concepts together, and position as the best option for a small market early-on

Joe Beda, Founder & CTO, Heptio 2:00: Developing the Kubernetes project at Google & deciding to open-source it 4:48: The origins of Heptio & building a company around Kubernetes 13:29: Open-source business models & 'open extensibility' as the new model 24:36: Scaling open-source businesses: metrics to track & interacting with the community 31:55: Good areas for successful open-source products & advice for founders

Joe Duffy, Founder & CEO, Pulumi 1:17 - Background on Joe & Pulumi - the company was started to give infra engineers tools to help them innovate faster. 3:05 - Why OS as a core part of Pulumi’s strategy - getting community buy-in was important as it created trust and authenticity. Joe also saw the power of open source when he was at Microsoft and they started exploring an OS strategy. 5:29 - Pulumi launched as a company and OS project at the same time. The benefit of this was they could be thoughtful about the business model from the get-go instead of it being an afterthought. 9:53 - The SaaS attach rate was insanely high - 2/3 adopted the SaaS. It was the default experience that developers opted out of if they wanted to. The business model was close to what AWS offers - a full managed service. 12:13 - Finding product-market fit with the OS project and business at the same time was tricky. It took over a year to release the OS project, however they had their first paying customer before they open-sourced anything. 14:28 - They decided to charge for enterprise features only (identity, policy enforcement, webhooks, team management, etc.). 20:25 - When measuring the health of the open-source, they focused on engagement over growth metrics. They wanted end users to be really successful. Joe continues to be baffled about investor conversations that center on stars - it’s one light measure of momentum but there are much stronger signals around health from Stack Overflow, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.  25:20 - Joe took on the role of the developer advocate himself early on. In fact, he did parts of every function before hiring for them to make sure he understood all parts of the business.  26:53 - In raising money for an OS company, focusing on typical SaaS metrics as well as OS metrics is important. Both need to be worked on in tandem. 28:55 - Early on, the focus was on building the OS community over the SaaS product. The ratio was 10:1 for people working on the OS vs. SaaS. 31:10 - Advice Joe has for OS founders - don’t sweat monetization too soon as once it’s introduced it averts focus away from top of funnel OS growth. 33:05 - Joe wishes investors understood developers more. They’re a tough group to make happy and the tech changes rapidly. It’s not just about momentum metrics but solving big problems for the community (TensorFlow is a good example). 35:08 - Joe’s final piece of advice is focus on making developers happy and starting in a niche vs. making a solution too broad at the start. 

Max Schireson, prev. CEO, MongoDB 1:20: Max started his career at Oracle where he became frustrated with the limitations of relational databases. He then moved to MarkLogic where he discovered XML databases and the flexibility of that format got him excited about the potential for new databases. From there, he moved to MongoDB as CEO just as NoSQL started to take off. There, he was exposed to the distribution potential of open-source. With an open-source business, people used your product well before you sold it to them. The company was very early when he joined. There were 20 employees and $10Ks - $100Ks of revenue. However, they already had a fair amount of open-source adoption. 7:40: Technical support became incredibly challenging at MongoDB since users were so sophisticated. 11:50: The transition away from support as a business model was necessary as users were finding fewer issues with the product. Max walks through the shift towards an open core model bifurcating free and paid functionality.  13:40: Deciding between paid and unpaid features was challenging. They discovered that paid features were good for operating at scale, and while they could have made more money by charging for additional support, they felt that having the best free open-source product on the market should take priority.  17:50: They didn't focus on stars as a core metric as it is only a rough measure of momentum. Instead, they focused on things like Google Trends (how often people searched for MongoDB), how often someone would put MongoDB on their LinkedIn as a skill, and if MongoDB was posted on Indeed in job recs. 22:20: Marketing and community came in the form of grassroots efforts and informal presentations. These included 'Mongo Days' where they organized engineering events across the country. Developers liked the honest and genuine nature of how MongoDB was sold to them with the sales team using phrases like “people use Mongo because the alternatives suck”. 25:30: MongoDB used an incremental approach to monetization (support then additional product functionality). They could have prioritized monetizing more sooner but instead focused efforts on the open-source. 27:15: A piece of advice from Max to open-source founders: focus on production workflows for monetization where you'll see real volume. 29:50: Open-source works best in a cloud delivery model. If someone downloads your open-source and uses it on-prem, it’s hard to track and fix issues since you don’t know who all is using the software (in a cloud model, you can fix issues for everyone at the same time). 32:05: Open-source can be seen as just a distribution method, but cloud products can have other great distribution methods. 36:15: A common mistake when building an open-source company is focusing on open-source adoption OR monetization instead of both.  38:20: Open-source licenses are important to protect your IP. MongoDB had a specific license that restricted how developers could use the product, which was risky since it added friction, but it didn’t end up hurting adoption for them.  43:10: At MongoDB, the greatest ‘growth hack’ was having a great product experience from the get-go; implementation was quick and users saw value very early.