Open Source Startup Podcast

Jeff Huber, Co-Founder of Chroma, discusses the importance of vector databases for AI applications, partnership with LangChain, and how data is crucial in changing AI behavior. They cover the journey from an AI tooling company to a successful vector database, focusing on user-friendly installation and community engagement.

John Britton & Mike McQuaid, Co-Founders of Workbrew and involved in Homebrew, discuss how Homebrew has kept projects simple, value from contributors, ICP shift to dev teams. They explore challenges in maintaining Homebrew, community contributions, project governance, and managing enterprise challenges with Work Brew. They also touch on navigating project and company growth hurdles, sales conversations, and adapting to the startup landscape.

Brian Raymond, Founder & CEO of Unstructured, discusses the importance of data preparation in NLP, creating a single API endpoint for handling diverse data formats, transitioning from open source to commercial success, engaging with government design partners, and the value of world-class design & marketing for open source companies.

Jake Moshenko, Co-Founder & CEO of AuthZed, discusses the Zanzibar approach to auth, building for big companies, Hacker News launch boosting growth, and early monetization strategies.

Joran Dirk Greef, Founder & CEO of TigerBeetle, discusses specialized databases for high volume transactional workloads, open source vs. source available, unique monetization strategies, and the enterprise commercial stack.

Niko West is Co-Founder & CEO of Rerun, the open source visualization engine for streams of multimodal data. Rerun has raised over $3M from investors including Costanoa. In this episode, we discuss how Rerun found early success in gaming, why building in Rust was important, how open source expanded the segments Rerun could serve, why they thought about monetization early, the importance of visual and video content & more!

Ketan Umare is Co-Founder & CEO of Union AI, the scalable MLOps platform focused on AI orchestration based on the flyte open source project. Union AI has raised $29M from investors including NEA & Nava Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the differences between Union AI and Airflow, what's unique about orchestrating AI workloads, bringing software engineering practices to AI & more!

Founder Sahil Chaudhary discusses the importance of education for GenAI infra companies, the benefits of synthetic data in moving from prototype to production, targeting AI native startups, and the challenges of fundraising for an AI startup.

André Eriksson, Founder & CEO of Encore, discusses their GTM strategy, adding Typescript support, and the use of Kubernetes. The podcast explores Encore's advantages over tools like Firebase, collaborative content creation, marketing strategies, and building a sustainable business with open-source.

Avery Pennarun is Co-Founder & CEO of Tailscale, the Wireguard-based VPN that reimagines secure, private networks. Tailscale has raised $115M from investors including Heavybit, Accel, CRV, and Insight. In this episode, we dig into what caused the team to reimagine zero trust security at the networking level, why they focus both on individual developers and large enterprises with a bottoms-up and top-down business model, why they leaned into the VPN comparison, how they create a personal tone for their blog & more!