Open Source Startup Podcast

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.

Graham Neray is Co-founder & CEO of Oso, the authorization-as-a-service platform that created open source oso - a batteries-included framework for building authorization into applications. Oso has raised $26M from investors including Felicis and Sequoia. In this episode, we dig into the first thing Oso founders built (a programming language created for authorization called Polar), how they decided on the right open source license, how Oso is positioned in the highly competitive auth space, how user requests have driven their monetization strategy, and much more!

Nick Schrock is Founder of Dagster Labs & Creator of Dagster - the open source orchestration platform for the development, production, and observation of data assets. Dagster Labs has raised just under $50M from investors including Sequoia, Index, and Georgian Partners. In this episode, we discuss how Dagster is bringing software engineering principles to the data space, what a great developer experience means for data engineers, how to think about launching the cloud version of your open source project & much more!

Paul Butler, Founder of Drifting in Space, discusses browser-based tech, industrial company adoption, components of Drifting in Space platform, building applications on Plane, benefits/challenges of browser-based apps, marketing challenges, balancing product building and user feedback, and the future of browser-based apps.

Varun Mohan, Co-founder & CEO of Codeium, discusses competing with GitHub Copilot, their own infrastructure for incredible scale, building a 30K person community, and leveraging open source in generating AI. They also explore the future of AI models and building a product that matters to users.