Open Source Startup Podcast

Lukas Gentele, Co-Founder & CEO of Loft, discusses his platform engineering company, which focuses on Kubernetes virtualization to promote efficiency in high-usage environments. He shares insights on the evolution of VCluster and how it's shaping developer autonomy. Lukas highlights the importance of a strong feedback loop in an open-source ecosystem and stresses that open-source founders should embrace commercialization early on. He also unveils innovative approaches to cost reduction, like the Sleep Mode feature, enhancing the business case for virtual Kubernetes clusters.

Aliaksandr Valialkin and Roman Khavronenko, Co-Founders of VictoriaMetrics, share their journey from a software company to launching an innovative open source monitoring platform. They discuss the limitations of Prometheus and how ClickHouse inspired their scalable solution. The duo highlights the importance of simplicity, the advantages of bootstrapping, and their unique take on the Open Core model. Crucial advice is offered for aspiring open source founders, emphasizing team dynamics and user-focused problem solving over profit-driven goals.

Lars Kamp, co-founder and CEO of Fix, discusses the crucial intersection of development and security in cloud environments. He emphasizes involving CISOs early in the process to foster collaboration. The conversation highlights the necessity of a seamless, self-service experience for developers to encourage adoption of security tools. Lars also shares insights on transparent pricing strategies and the challenges of navigating the open-source landscape in a competitive market, offering valuable advice for founders.

Tim Delisle and Nico Joseph, founders of FiveOneFour, discuss bringing software engineering practices to data teams, market education, open source requirements, democratizing data access, and monetization strategies. Topics include evolving data schemas, separate APIs, fast iteration, user feedback, and the benefits of embracing open source practices.

Tomer Shiran is Founder of Dremio, the data lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI based on open source frameworks Apache Arrow, which the Dremio team created, and Apache Iceberg. Dremio has raised over $400M from investors including Norwest, Redpoint, Adams Street, Sapphire, Insight, and Lightspeed. They are currently valued at $2B. In this episode, we dig into Tomer's journey from MapR to Dremio, his initial vision for making the data stack more accessible, their first breakthrough with Apache Arrow and a columnar-format approach, focusing first on project-market fit before monetization, adding support for Apache Iceberg, how they're using AI to improve user experiences & more!

Ari Zilka, former CTO of Hortonworks and current CEO of mydecisive.ai, discusses the shift towards OpenTelemetry in large enterprises, the cost benefits of open source, and the importance of building a community before monetizing. He emphasizes the value of 'ops' in 'devops' for revenue and shares insights on strategy merging, hypothesis testing, and ecosystem building in company growth.

Mark Huang, Co-Founder of Gradient AI, discusses enterprise readiness for LLM-backed applications, open sourcing their Llama-3 finetune model, focus on healthcare and finance, and navigating GenAI infra space.

Umur Cubukcu, Co-Founder of Ubicloud, discusses building an open-source cloud alternative to AWS, emphasizing cost savings, simplicity, and freedom. They explore navigating the AWS ecosystem, delivering personalized services, and overcoming challenges in building a compound product.

Legendary database pioneer Michael Stonebraker discusses the history of database systems, creation of Ingres and Postgres, focus on industrial companies as users, and the innovative concept of DBOS as an operating system for TypeScript applications.

John Viega is Co-Founder & CEO of Crash Override, the open source monitoring platform based on the Chalk project which has 22K stars on GitHub. Crash Override has raised $14M from investors including SYN Ventures, BVP & Firestreak Ventures. In this episode, we dig into what being "dev friendly" means, what their best performing content has been, standing out in the incredibly crowded security landscape & more!