Open Source Startup Podcast

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!

Ryan Blue is Co-Founder of data automation platform Tabular and Co-Creator of Apache Iceberg, the open source high-performance format for huge analytic tables. Tabular most recently raised a Series A from a16z. In this episode, we discuss the concept of a "headless data warehouse", being a problem-centric rather than solution-centric founder & more!

Douwe Maan is Founder & CEO of DataOps platform Meltano, the extract and load company behind the open source CLI & version control project meltano. Meltano has raised $12M from investors including Venrock & Google Ventures. In this episode, we dig into spinning a company out of GitLab, Meltano's cloud launch, making technical data engineers first-class citizens & more!

Shauli Rozen is Founder & CEO of ARMO, the company behind Kubernetes open source security platform kubescape. The project has over 8K stars on GitHub and includes tools for risk analysis, security, compliance, and misconfiguration scanning. ARMO has raised $35M from investors including Tiger Global and Pitango VC. In this episode, we dig into the differences in building product for DevOps vs. security teams, how to use signals from discord / slack channels to drive product roadmap, bringing on a VP of Open Source & more!

Ramiro Berrelleza is Founder & CEO of Okteto, the Kubernetes development platform that allows developers to spin up production-like dev environments in the cloud. Okteto's open source project, also called Okteto, allows users to spin up a development container, which is configured like the user's production Kubernetes deployment. Today, it has 2.8K start on GitHub. Okteto has raised $18M from investors including Root VC and Two Sigma. In this episode, we discuss the challenges of building with kubernetes, figuring out market timing, how to position for your specific users & more!

Justin Borgman is CEO of Starburst, the “Analytics Everywhere” company based on the sequel query engine Trino (previously called Presto). Trino is a distributed SQL query engine for big data and is used by companies such as Salesforce, Robinhood, Lyft, LinkedIn, Goldman Sachs, and Netflix. Trino currently has 7.5K GitHub Stars. Starburst has raised over $400M from investors including Index, Coatue, A16z, and Alkeon. In this episode, we dig into the Presto to Trino transition, recruiting the Trino founders to Starburst, waiting to raise venture capital until there are strong signs of PMF, what PMF looks like (ie. multiple Fortune 500 users), getting competition to compete on your turf, and more!

Vikram Sreekanti & Joey Gonzalez are Co-Founders of Aqueduct, the open-source orchestration layer for machine learning infrastructure. Aqueduct's open source project, also called aqueduct, has over 400 stars on GitHub. In this episode, we discuss what Vikram & Joey learned from interviewing 100s of data teams, building in the competitive MLOps space, how and why they invest in content & much more!