Open Source Startup Podcast

Hong Wang is Founder & CEO of Akuity, the application delivery platform for companies building with kubernetes. Akuity works alongside the Argo Project which provides a suite of open source tools for deploying and running applications and workloads on Kubernetes. Akuity has raised $25M from investors including Decibel Partners and Lead Edge Capital. In this episode, we discuss the creation of the Argo open source project while the team was at Applatix, the decision to create a commercial company - Akuity - around Argo after Applatix was acquired by Intuit, what it means to have a great developer experience (UI, real-time data, etc.), creating harmony between the open source and paid product, and much more!

Or Weis is Co-founder & CEO of Permit.io, the open source fullstack permissions as a service platform. The company's project, opal, is an admin layer for policy engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) and AWS' Cedar Agent and brings open-policy up to the speed needed by live applications. Permit.io has raised $6M from investors including NFX. In this episode, we discuss positioning in a competitive market, product market fit vs. GTM fit & much more!

Abby Kearns has a long history in the open source ecosystem as the previous CTO of infrastructure automation platform Puppet, previous CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, and an active investor and advisor to many open source startups. In this episode, we dig into the Puppet journey, the role organizations like Cloud Foundry play in the open source ecosystem, her views on open source projects versus products, her advice to open source startups & much more! Video episode here

Clément Salaün is Founder of Formance, the open source ledger for money-moving platforms. Their ledger is highly programmable and has over 600 stars on GitHub. Formance is a YC company and has raised over $3M from investors including Hoxton Ventures and Frst. In this episode, we discuss using open source to build user trust, creating a new category of open source software, the importance of building in a modular way, Clément's framework for monetization & much more!

Dan Jeffries is the previous Chief Intelligence Officer at open source foundation model company Stability AI and Managing Director at the AI Infrastructure Alliance. Stability AI has raised almost $100M from investors including Lightspeed and Coatue. In this episode, we dig into the role of open source in generative AI, the benefits and drawbacks to open source foundation models, copyright issues that can come up when training data is visible, the capital it takes to start a foundation model, and opportunities to build that founders should be looking at today. Full video episode here

Ry Walker is Founder of open source data companies Astronomer and CoreDB. Astronomer is the commercial company tied to the popular open source data workflow management system Apache Airflow, and CoreDB is a database company based on the popular open source database Postgres. CoreDB has raised $7M from investors including Venrock and CincyTech, and Astronomer has raised $283M from investors including Venrock, Insight, and Sierra Ventures. In this episode, we dig into the Astronomer journey and when things really started to work, what a great UI means in the data space, where the idea for CoreDB came from, his learnings around open source monetization, the benefits and drawbacks of building a commercial open source data company, and learnings Ry is taking from Astronomer to his new company CoreDB.

Kyle Quest is Founder & CTO of Slim AI, the platform to help application developers build secure containers faster. The company's open source project, Slim (previously known as Docker Slim), shrinks container images by up to 30x and makes them secure. It currently has 17K stars on GitHub. Slim AI has raised almost $60M from investors including Insight & Boldstart. In this episode, we dig into where the idea for Slim came from (Kyle was trying to solve his own pain), building for multiple personas (in this case, security and developer teams), the shift left movement in security & much more!

Harjot Gill is Co-founder & CEO of FluxNinja, the intelligent load management platform for reliability engineers. The company's open source project, Aperture, provides capabilities such as concurrency limiting, rate limiting, and auto-scaling. This episode also features Matt Ranney, a principal engineer from Doordash, who is an early adopter of Aperture. In this episode, we discuss the importance of having strong evangelists of new technology (in this case, Matt at Doordash), the right north star metrics to track as an open source company (production usage is key), lighting many GTM fires & more!

Amjad Masad is Founder & CEO of Replit, the browser-based development environment giving developers the power to build collaboratively with the power of AI on any device. Replit has raised over $200M from investors including a16z, Coatue, and YC. In this episode, we dig into Replit's evolution from an education-focused company to a broadly used coding platform, the role of AI in coding (and Replit's AI engine Ghostwriter), why it's much harder to build a horizontal platform & much more! This episode is a must-listen.

Guy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk, the developer-first security platform that helps companies find and fix vulnerabilities in their code, open source dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code. Snyk has raised $1.2B from investors including Boldstart, Accel, Tiger Global, and Addition. In this episode, we dig into selling security products to developers, the pros and cons of being open source (Snyk is not!), Snyk's fundraising journey and challenges early on, how Snyk has evolved over the years, the decision to bring in an outside CEO & more!