Open Source Startup Podcast

Mars Lan is Co-Founder and CTO of Metaphor, the modern data catalog that is described as the "Social Platform for Data." Metaphor was created by the founders of ⁠DataHub⁠ which is known as the leading open source metadata platform. Metaphor has raised over $10M from investors including Amplify, a16z, and Point72 Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the story behind Metaphor's creation - and why the team didn't build a managed service on top of DataHub, why Metaphor isn't open source, why sales funnel is the biggest benefit of building a company using open source & much more! For more on Metaphor's story, check out the link here

Moses Guttmann, CEO of ClearML, discusses the importance of automation and building multiple components for a comprehensive solution. They also talk about the shift towards using LLMs and challenges in building and scaling enterprise information access solutions. Moses provides advice to founders in the LLM or ML Ops fields on building and monetizing open source projects.

Tianqi Chen, Co-Founder and Chief Technologist of OctoML, discusses the importance of supporting multiple models, advancements in Llama and Stable Diffusion, building TVM and OctoML communities, predictions on GenAI in enterprise, and challenges in starting a MLAI company.

Toni de la Fuente, founder of ProwlerPro, talks about the importance of good documentation, industry events that helped Prowler gain momentum, shifting focus to all major cloud platforms, the need for patience with open source, effective and affordable cloud security solutions, comparing cloud infrastructure providers, differentiation between paid and open source products, user experience, and the importance of feedback.

Fredrik Björk is Founder & CEO of Grafbase, the API platform for developers to deploy high performance, scaleable GraphQL APIs. Grafbase has raised $7M+ from investors including Next47 and Uncorrelated Ventures. In this episode, we dig into what a “unified data layer” is and why it’s needed, how they found their early adopters in industries like e-commerce and IoT, Grafbase "Launch Weeks" and more!

Adam Jacob is CEO of DevOps platform System Initiative and Co-Founder of infrastructure automation platform Chef. This is Adam's second time on the Open Source Startup Podcast, and this episode is packed with learnings. We discuss the distribution benefits of open source and why some products should be open source and others should not, challenges with the Open Core business model, HashiCorp's license change and the community's response to fork Terraform to create OpenTofu, and much more!

Soren Martius is Co-Founder & CEO of Terramate, the infrastructure-as-code management platform that sits on top of Terraform. Their open source project, also called Terramate, has 3K GitHub stars and adds capabilities such as code generation, stacks, orchestration, change detection, and data sharing to Terraform. In this episode, we discuss building the Terramate community alongside the Terraform community, focusing 70% of the team's effort on Terramate cloud, how HashiCorp's license change impacts the open source community and Terraform builders, and much more!

Linda Lian, Co-founder & CEO of Common Room, discusses the journey from a DevRel tool to a GTM tool, how Common Room solves top problems for users, targeting developers and open source community, building value and validation, positioning Common Room, understanding ideal customer profile and go-to-market strategies, and challenges and complexity of building a company.

Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, discusses the importance of ease of use, building for the average developer, and the GenAI wave. He shares his 3-pronged GTM strategy and lessons from Snowflake's success. They also explore challenges in the open source market and give advice for open source founders.

Yury Selivanov, Co-founder & CEO of EdgeDB, discusses how they built a developer-first database, the importance of a short learning curve, breaking through competition, monetizing open source databases with the cloud model, and the upcoming EdgeDB 4.0 and Cloud launch.