Open Source Startup Podcast
The leading podcast on how to build a successful open source company. Learn from the founders of HashiCorp, Chronosphere, Vercel, MongoDB, DBT, mobile.dev and more!
Episodes
E201: Building Your Agent Army with Paperclip
In this episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Paperclip Co-Founder Dotta (Nate) whose viral agent orchestration platform has taken off over the past several months as more teams adopt agents at work. Their open source, also called paperclip, has >75K stars on GitHub and is becoming the de facto way to manage a team of agents. This episode explores what it really means to build an “agent
E200: Open Sourcing Warp’s Terminal
This episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Warp founder Zach Lloyd as he shares the company story and decision to open source their core product: the terminal. They now provide an open source agentic development environment (born out of the terminal) which is also called warp and has almost 65K stars on GitHub. Zach discusses his frustration with the traditional terminal and
E199: Rethinking Infra-as-Code for the AI Era
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Pavlo Baron from Platform Engineering Labs - creators of open source infra-as-code platform formae. This podcast explores why traditional infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and Pulumi can struggle with state, drift, and the disconnect between code and real-world infrastructure. Pavlo shares lesson
E198: How Unikraft Launches AI Agents in
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Dr. Felipe Huici, CEO of Unikraft - the compute layer for sandboxes, AI agents, or any workload with VM-grade isolation. Their open source, also called unikraft, has 4K stars on GitHub and provides a next-generation cloud native kernel. This episode explores how Unikraft is building infrastructure for the
E197: The Evolution of Building Open Source Businesses from HashiCorp to Flox
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with James Bayer, Chief Product Officer at software development platform Flox.Flox's open source, also called flox, provides a software environment platform powered by package manager Nix.In this episode, James shares lessons from his career across Cloud Foundry, Pivotal, and HashiCorp, where he helped turn
E196: Shifting Developer Portals to Agent Portals with Port
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Zohar Einy the Co-Founder of agentic SDLC platform Port.They have a few open source projects including ocean which allows third-party systems to integrate with their developer portal.Port is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for the agentic era, evolving the traditional internal developer port
E195: Taking on the New AI Attack Surface With Manifold: Runtime, Skills & Supply Chains
The latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Neal Swaelens and Oleks Yaremchuk, 2 of the Co-Founders of runtime agent security company Manifold Security. Manifold recently released Manifest, their open-access, graph-based supply chain intelligence tool for users to scan skills and plugins to uncover any potential supply chain risks. In this epi
E194: Fal's Bet on Generative Media
The latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Batuhan Taskaya, the founding engineer and current Head of Engineering at generative media cloud Fal. Fal is a developer platform that allows builders to develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.This episode explores how a small, highly technical team carved out a uniq
E193: Managing 100s of Agents with Maestro
In our latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Pedram Amini, the creator of open source platform Maestro which allows users to run fleets of AI coding agents autonomously for long periods of time. Their project has 3K stars on GitHub. The episode explores how Maestro's multi-agent system overcame a key limitation in generative AI: context overload. After ju
E192: Creating Browser Use, Navigating Hyper Growth & Building in the Competitive Browser Automation Space
In our latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Magnus Müller, the Co-Founder & CEO of Browser Use - the platform that makes web agents come to life. Their open source, browser-use, has almost 80K stars on GitHub and is widely adopted. This episode dives into the unexpected rise of an open-source browser automation project that took off during Y Combinator -
E191: Super Fast Infra for Agents to Use the Internet
In our latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Catherine Jue, Co-Founder and CEO of browser infrastructure company Kernel. Their open source images acts as a browsers-as-a-service for automations and web agents.In this episode, we break down what Kernel is building today and why browser infrastructure has quietly become one of the most important layers for AI a
E190: Open Sourcing AI Coding Platform Devin to Create OpenHands
In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Robert Brennan, Co-Founder & CEO of OpenHands - the open platform for cloud coding agents. Their open source project, also called OpenHands, has 67K starts on GitHub and provides a software agent SDK, CLI, and local GUI. They also have OpenHands cloud - their paid, hosted version of the OpenHands GUI. This episode traces the rise of OpenD
E189: Why Your Backup Platform Should Be Open Source with Plakar
In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Julien Mangeard, Co-Founder of open source backup platform Plakar. Plakar's open source, also called plakar, has 1.5K stars on GitHub and provides a backup solution powered by open source, immutable data store Kloset.The podcast discusses why data backup remains a critical but unsolved problem, especially as the number of data sources has exp
E188: Building (And Spinning Out) Open Source Projects With Informal Systems
In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Zarko Milosevic (CTO) & Arianne Flemming (COO) of Informal Systems. They've built a protocol design & cross-chain infrastructure platform to foster trust in software and money. This episode explores how open source infrastructure and security drive company-building in high-stakes financial software. Using Malachite - a consensus e
Exclusive: BYOC Vendor Nuon Goes Open Source!
In our latest episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Jon Morehouse, founder and CEO of infrastructure company Nuon which enables Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) for everyone. This is an exclusive podcast episode with Jon digging into their decision to open source Nuon! The episode discusses the industry’s growing shift toward Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), where SaaS products run directly inside
E186: Unlocking Your Unstructured Data with Typedef
In our latest episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Yoni Michael and Kostas Pardalis, Co-Founders of Typedef. Both have deep backgrounds in data infrastructure (Starburst, Tecton, etc.) and, after meeting through a "blind date" at Blue Bottle Coffee, decided to team up to address the growing brittleness of large-scale data pipelines - issues made worse by the rise of AI.They expl
E185: The Challenges with Monetizing Open Source with the Creator of Rich + Textual
In our latest episode, Robby and Tim talk with Will McGugan, creator of the Rich and Textual open source projects and founder of Textualize and Toad (not yet released), about the challenges of turning beloved open-source projects into real businesses. Despite Rich and Textual's huge adoption in the Python community, he says he waited too long to monetize, focused too much on technical perfecti
E184: Building the Browser for AI - the Browserbase Story
In this episode, we sit down with Paul Klein IV, Founder & CEO of Browserbase, to explore how his team is redefining the foundation of AI-driven browser automation. Browserbase provides the web browser infrastructure for AI agents and apps, and its open-source SDK, Stagehand, lets developers write automations using natural language - adapting seamlessly as websites evolve.Paul shares his belie
E183: Why English Isn't a Programming Language - the BAML Story
This episode dives into why code quality still matters in the age of AI, and why English - no matter how good models get - won’t replace programming.Our guest is Co-Founder of Boundary, Vaibhav Gupta, and he shares the journey behind BAML, a new programming language to write and manage AI logic. After 12 pivots and 3.5 years, the team realized something simple but powerful:AI tools were evolving f
E182: The Rise of ClickHouse
In the episode, we sat down with ClickHouse Co-Founder Yury Izrailevsky to unpack how one of the fastest open-source databases in the world became the analytics engine of choice for 2,000 customers including Harvey, Canva, HP, and Supabase. From its Yandex origins to powering AI observability, Yury shares how ClickHouse balances open-source roots, cloud innovation, and a remote-first culture movin
E181: Why Multimodal Is the Future of AI Data Workloads
Chang She is Co-Founder & CEO of LanceDB, the multimodal lakehouse platform. Their open source data format lance has over 5K stars on GitHub and is a modern columnar data format for ML and LLMs implemented in Rust.LanceDB has raised $41M from investors including Theory Ventures, CRV, and Essence VC. In this episode, we dig into:Early focus: autonomous vehicles; solved real-time analysis limits
E180: Why Kubernetes Still Needs Simplifying: The Nadrama Story
Ryan Djurovich is the Founder & CEO of Nadrama, the open source infrastructure automation platform that deploys containers instantly. In this episode, we dig into:Kubernetes challenges that still exist today – setup and operations are notoriously hard and complex.What great developer experience means to him – focused on making deployments super simple by streamlining infrastructure and common
E179: LLMs for Software Maintenance (the Grit Story)
Morgante Pell is the Founder of Grit, the developer tool that puts software maintenance on autopilot and was acquired by Honeycomb in April 2025. In this episode, we dig into:The Grit product and how LLMs have made software maintenance much more efficient Launching GritQL - Grit's embedded query language for searching and transforming codeTheir early focus on the JavaScript community The motivatio
E178: Building Safer AI Agents with Portia AI
Emma Burrows is Co-Founder & CTO of Portia AI, the platform to build AI agents in regulated environments. Their open source Python SDK provides a developer framework for predictable and stateful agentic workflows. Portia AI has raised around $5M from investors including General Catalyst and First Minute Capital.In this episode, we dig into:Why they built an end-to-end platform from agent plann
E177: RunReveal's Anti SIEM SIEM Platform (With AI That Actually Works!)
Alan Braithwaite is Co-Founder & CTO of RunReveal, the security data platform with real-time monitoring, built-in detections, and AI-powered investigations. Today, they manage and analyze security logs for teams at Harvey, ClickHouse, Cloudflare, and Temporal. RunReveal has multiple open source projects including event stream processing library kawa and query language pql. RunReveal has raised
E176: Why All AI Agents Will Need Cloud Sandboxes
Vasek Mlejnsky is Co-Founder & CEO of E2B, the open-source runtime for executing AI-generated code in secure cloud sandboxes. Essentially, they give AI agents cloud computers. Their open source repos, particularly e2b which has 9K GitHub stars, have been widely adopted to help securely run AI-generated code. E2B has raised $12M from investors including Decibel and Sunflower. In this episode, w
E175: How Dragonfly Is Taking on Redis With a New Data Store
Roman Gershman is Co-Founder & CTO of Dragonfly, the drop-in Redis replacement for heavy data workloads that has significant performance, cost, and scale benefits. Their open source dragonflydb has 28K stars on GitHub. Dragonfly has raised $21M from investors including Quiet Capital and Redpoint. In this episode, we dig into:The challenges with Redis The users that have really benefitted from
E174: The SDF / DBT Acquisition (1 + 1 = 3)
Lukas Schulte is Co-Founder & CEO of SDF Labs, the developer platform that scales SQL understanding across organizations, which was recently acquired by data transformation unicorn dbt Labs. In this episode, he's joined by Anders Swanson, Senior Developer Experience Advocate at dbt, to discuss the acquisition and future of data engineering. In this episode, we dig into:How the acquisition happ
E173: Feature Flagging with OpenFeature
Andrew Norris is Co-Founder & CEO of DevCycle, the leading feature flagging platform based on the OpenFeature project. OpenFeature provides a standard for feature flagging unifying tools behind a common interface and avoiding vendor lock-in at the code level.DevCycle is a product created by Taplytics, the platform for marketing and product teams to A/B test. In 2023, they raised $5M to scale D
E172: How MetalBear Makes Cloud Development 100x Faster
Aviram Hassan is Co-Founder & CEO of MetalBear, the cloud development platform that lets developers run local code as if it were part of their remote environment. Their project, mirrord, has 4K stars on GitHub and is loved by users at companies like SentinelOne, Flexport, and Run.ai. In this episode, we dig into:How traditional staging environments create friction for cloud developersTheir uni
E171: How Companies Like Block Build Viral Open Source Projects
Manik Surtani is Head of Open Source and Bradley Axen is Principal Engineer at Block. Manik was key to launching Block's Open Source Programs Office and Bradley is a major open source contributor - including the project Goose which is Block's extensible AI agent project. It currently has over 11K stars on GitHub and has been used for a number of internal use cases at Block as well as by th
E170: From Idea to Working Web App Using Only Python with Reflex
Nikhil Rao is Co-Founder of Reflex, the open source framework to build and deploy web apps in python. Their project, also called reflex, has over 22K stars on GitHub and is a library to build full-stack web apps.Reflex has raised $5M from investors including Lux Capital. In this episode, we dig into:The power of deploying apps using only Python Balancing abstraction and code level access for users
E169: Building New Standards for Observability - Lightstep & OpenTelemetry
Ben Sigelman is the Co-Founder & CEO of observability platform Lightstep as well as Co-Creator of open source observability frameworks OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry. Lightstep was acquired by ServiceNow in 2021 and OpenTelemetry was released in 2019 and has since become the standard observability framework. In this episode, we dig into:The founding story for Lightstep - including the initial p
E168: One (Multi-Model) Database to Rule Them All - SurrealDB
Tobie Morgan Hitchcock is the Co-Founder & CEO of SurrealDB, the next generation serverless cloud database for modern applications. Their open source database, also called surrealdb, has 30K stars on GitHub. SurrealDB has raised $26M from investors including FirstMark and Georgian. In this episode, we dig into:Taking a broad vs. niche approach to building a new databaseHow coming from a non-tr
E167: Taking on Network Security with a Zero Trust Approach with NetBird
Misha Bragin is the Founder & CEO of NetBird, the open source zero trust networking platform that allows companies and individuals to create secure private networks without the hassle of corporate networks. Their open source, also called netbird, has over 12K stars on GitHub and connects devices into a secure WireGuard-based overlay network. NetBird has raised $4M from investors including InRe
E166: Making Open Source Reliable & Secure with Fossa
Kevin Wang is Founder & CEO of Fossa, the product security platform that automates compliance & security across open source third party code, suppliers, and tools. In this episode, we discuss: Where Kevin's interest in open source started Learning to work with big enterprises The shift from scanning to fixing Repositioning from an engineering to security platform Resisting the m
E165: Can DevTools Get to $1B ARR?
Max Stoiber is Co-Founder & CEO of Stellate, the GraphQL edge platformrecently acquired by Shopify.In this episode, we discuss:The Stellate journey from idea to initial traction to acquisitionThe market size (and limitations) for GraphQL, APIs, and DevToolsHow he ran a top-notch acquisition process for StellateWhy startups fail
E164: Taking on Auth0 with Open Source Zitadel
Florian Forster is Co-Founder & CEO of Zitadel, the cloud security platform aiming to build the future of identity and access management. Their open source project, also called zitadel, provides identity infrastructure and has 10K stars on GitHub.
In this episode, we dig into:
The benefits of having an open source auth vendor
Authentication vs. authorization
Building the "GitLab
E163: Using Feedback Loops to Optimize LLM-Based Applications
Viraj Mehta is the Co-Founder & CTO of TensorZero which is an open-source infrastructure platform that creates a feedback loop for optimizing LLM applications. Their open source project helps users turn production data into smarter, faster, and cheaper models.
In this episode, we dig into:
The benefits of feedback loops for LLMs
Helping their users choose the best underlying models for t
E162: The AI Code Editor War with Zed
Nathan Sobo is the Founder of Zed, the next-gen code editor that enables high-performance collaboration - powered by AI. Open source zed has 53K Stars on GitHub and is used by engineers at Vercel, Apple, Anthropic, and GitLab. Prior to founding Zed, Nathan created the editor Atom at GitHub which reached 1M+ active users.
Zed has raised from investors including Redpoint and Root Ventures.
In this
E161: Reimagining Python Notebooks with Marimo
Akshay Agrawal is the Founder & CEO of Marimo, the next generation Python notebook. Their open source reactive notebook for Python, also called marimo, has almost 9K stars on GitHub.
Marimo has raised $5M from investors including AIX Ventures.
In this episode, we dig into Akshay's love of building developer tools for data teams, his journey from PhD to founder, what a great developer experien
E160: Open Source Secrets Management with Infisical
Vlad Matsiiako is CEO & Co-Founder of Infisical, the open source secrets management platform. Their open source project, also called infisical, has 16K stars on GitHub and helps users sync secrets across their teams and infrastructure.
Infisical has raised $3M from investors including Gradient and YC.
In this episode, we dig into their path from closed to open source, their big user wins (in
E159: Innovating on Distributed SQL Databases with Yugabyte
Karthik Ranganathan is Founder & CTO of Yugabyte, the PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database for cloud native applications. Their open source database, also called yugabyte, has almost 10K stars on GitHub.
Yugabyte has raised almost $300M and sits at a $1.3B valuation. They've raised from investors including Sapphire Ventures, Lightspeed, and 8VC.
In this episode, we dig into the enormou
E158: Open Source Diagramming and Charting with Mermaid Chart
Andrew Firestone is CEO and Knut Sveidqvist is CTO of Mermaid Chart, the open source text-based diagraming software platform.
The mermaid project has over 70K stars on GitHub and is an open source diagramming and charting tool.
Mermaid Chart has raised $7.5M from investors including Open Core Ventures.
In this episode, we dig into the mermaid project's 8 year journey, going from side project to
E157: Build Your Own Production-Grade AI CoPilots With Copilotkit
Atai Barkai is Co-Founder & CEO of Copilotkit, the platform to build production-grade AI Copilots 10x faster. Their open source project, also called copilotkit, has almost 13K stars on GitHub and provides React UI + elegant infrastructure for AI Copilots, in-app AI agents, AI chatbots, and AI-powered Textareas.
In this episode, we dig into Copilotkit's incredible open source growth trajectory
E156: Code-First Product Integrations with Ampersand
Lauren Long is Co-Founder & CTO of Ampersand, the developer platform for native product integrations.
Ampersand has raised $5M from investors including Matrix, Base Case Capital, Flex Capital, and 2.12 Angels.
In this episode, we dig into their differentiation as a "code-first" product, why they focused on the GTM vertical to start (Salesforce was the first integration), why their CLI is ope
E155: Taking on Elasticsearch - the ParadeDB Story
Philippe Noël is Co-Founder & CEO of ParadeDB, the modern Elasticsearch alternative built on Postgres. They're purpose-built for heavy, real-time workloads and their open source project, also called paradedb, has over 6K stars on GitHub.
ParadeDB has raised $2M from investors including General Catalyst & YC.
In this episode, we dig into the benefits of connecting search directly to the d
E154: Bringing OpenTelemetry to Mobile Observability
Eric Futoran is Co-Founder & CEO of Embrace, the mobile observability platform built on OpenTelemetry.
Embrace has raised almost $80M from investors including NEA, Greycroft & Eniac.
In this episode, we dig into the creation of mobile observability as a category and how Embrace helped evangelize it, what makes mobile observability unique, why they open sourced their SDKs, how aligning wi
E153: Dead Simple Dev Environments with Daytona
Ivan Burazin is Co-Founder & CEO of Daytona, the open source developer environment management platform. Their open source manager, also called daytona, has 9K stars on GitHub.
Daytona has raised $5M from investors including Upfront Ventures.
In this episode, we dig into Daytona's plan to be the fastest growing cloud development environment, how consistent and frequent content has become a hu
E152: Taking on Bitly with Dub.co - an Open Source Alternative for Link Management
Steven Tey is Founder & CEO of Dub.co, the open source link management infrastructure platform for modern marketing teams. Their open source project, also called dub, has almost 18K stars on GitHub and is used by teams at companies like Vercel, Raycast, and Perplexity.
In this episode, we dig into starting Dub.co as a side project and how it ultimately turned into a company, their initial pos
E151: Taking on DBT by Combining Data Transformation with a Query Engine
Lukas Schulte is Co-Founder and CEO of SDF Labs (Semantic Data Fabric), the data transformation layer and query engine platform. They're an open core company powered by the Apache Data Fusion query engine.
SDF Labs has raised $9M from investors including RTP Global and Two Sigma Ventures.
In this episode, we dig into the complications and pain points with the Modern Data Stack, shifting left with
E150: Fast Analytics with Metabase
Sameer Al-Sakran is CEO of Metabase, the open-source analytics and business intelligence platform. Their open source project, also called metabase, has over 38K stars on GitHub.
Metabase has raised $51M from investors including NEA, Insight and Expa.
In this episode, we dig into the company's 10 year journey, what it means to have a "developer friendly analytics platform", eliminati
E149: One AI Agent to Rule Them All?
Stanislas Polu is Co-Founder of Dust, the platform for companies to create and operate custom AI assistants for a range of use cases.
Dust has raised $20M from investors including Sequoia.
In this episode, we dig into the diverse set of users and use cases for Dust, how Dust spreads within an organization, their unique approach to open source, competing with vertical AI agents, augmenting humans
E148: Software Refactoring in the Age of AI
Jonathan Schneider is Co-Founder & CEO of Moderne, the platform for code migrations.
Moderne has raised up to a Series A from investors including Intel Capital and True Ventures.
In this episode, we dig into the importance of software refactoring and the security and engineering challenges that come up when code isn't maintained, why they started with Java refactoring, their rewrite open
E147: The Over-complication of API Management - What Went Wrong?
James Perkins is Co-Founder & CEO of Unkey, the open source API management platform that helps developers secure, manage, and scale their APIs. Their project, also called unkey, has almost 3K stars on GitHub.
Unkey has raised from investors including Essence VC, Sunflower, and The New Normal Fund.
In this episode, we dig into the complicated API tooling landscape, getting their early start wi
E146: Inventing Virtual Kubernetes Clusters
Lukas Gentele is Co-Founder & CEO of Loft, the platform engineering company behind "kubernetes virtualization" to reduce costs and create efficiencies for teams with high (and growing) kubernetes usage. They allow any organization to scale self-service access to Kubernetes from 10 to 10,000 engineers.
Loft recently raised $24M led by Khosla Ventures and previously raised from investo
E145: Bootstrapping an Open Source Monitoring Platform
Aliaksandr Valialkin and Roman Khavronenko are Co-Founders of VictoriaMetrics, the open source time series database and monitoring platform built alongside their open source project, also called victoriametrics.
In this episode, we discuss the limitations to Prometheus and how ClickHouse inspired the founders to build VictoriaMetrics, how open source helped them attract their early users and gai
E144: How to Straddle Developers and Security Engineers
Lars Kamp is Co-Founder & CEO of Fix, the continuous cloud security platform to help detect, prioritize, and remediate critical cloud risks using open source software like their inventory scanner.
In this episode, we discuss the importance of getting CISOs involved early for solutions that touch developers and security teams, the importance of an amazing self-service experience for developer a
E143: Bringing Software Engineering Best Practices to Data
Tim Delisle and Nico Joseph are Co-Founders of FiveOneFour, the company attempting to bring a software developer-like experience to data and analytics stacks. Together, they're second-time founders who previously founded data integration company Datalogue, which Nike acquired in 2021.
In this episode, we break down the software engineering practices that would benefit data teams, their approa
E142: Redefining Self-Serve Analytics with Dremio
Tomer Shiran is Founder of Dremio, the data lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI based on open source frameworks Apache Arrow, which the Dremio team created, and Apache Iceberg.
Dremio has raised over $400M from investors including Norwest, Redpoint, Adams Street, Sapphire, Insight, and Lightspeed. They are currently valued at $2B.
In this episode, we dig into Tomer's journey
E141: Building Companies on Open Source Standards - from Hortonworks to Mydecisive.ai
Ari Zilka is CEO of mydecisive.ai, the general-purpose observability engine built on OpenTelemetry. Ari was previously the CTO of Hortonworks which built products on top of open source Apache Hadoop and merged with Cloudera in 2019.
In this episode, we dig into the similar patterns Ari sees between Hortonworks / Hadoop and mydecisive.ai / OpenTelemetry, why large enterprises don't want their d
E140: Accelerating Enterprise AI Adoption with Better Agentic Workflows
Mark Huang is Co-Founder of Gradient, the platform for enterprise agentic automation. Gradient recently open sourced their 4M context window finetune of Llama-3, which is the longest context window available today.
Gradient has raised $10M from investors including Wing VC, Mango Capital, and Tokyo Black.
In this episode, we dig into enterprise readiness for LLM-backed applications today, Gradien
E139: Taking on AWS with an Open Source Alternative
Umur Cubukcu is Co-Founder of Ubicloud, the open source and portable cloud that can reduce cloud spend by 3–10x. Their project, also called ubicloud, has over 3K stars and provides elastic compute, block storage, virtual networking, managed Postgres, and IAM services.
Ubicloud has raised $16M from investors including 500 Global and YC.
In this episode, we dig into Ubicloud's grand vision of b
E138: The Database Pioneer Behind Ingres, Postgres & DBOS
Michael Stonebraker is a legendary database system pioneer as the founder of Ingres, Postgres, and now DBOS. His work while at Berkeley and then MIT has been central to many relational database companies.
His new company, DBOS, has raised $9M from investors including Engine Ventures and Construct Capital.
This episode is a masterclass on the history of database systems and digs into the creation
E137: Monitoring Infrastructure with Chalk Marks
John Viega is Co-Founder & CEO of Crash Override, the open source monitoring platform based on the Chalk project which has 22K stars on GitHub.
Crash Override has raised $14M from investors including SYN Ventures, BVP & Firestreak Ventures.
In this episode, we dig into what being "dev friendly" means, what their best performing content has been, standing out in the incredibly c
E136: Creating the Vector Database for AI Application Developers
Jeff Huber is Co-Founder of Chroma, the open source vector database. Their open source project, also called chroma, has 13K stars on GitHub.
Chroma has raised $20M from investors including Quiet Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.
In this episode, we dig into why vector databases are important for AI applications & why AI workloads are different, how their partnership with LangChain helped with ear
E135: Riding the Homebrew Wave
John Britton & Mike McQuaid are Co-Founders of Workbrew, the company that provides additional features and support for companies using Homebrew. Homebrew's main project, brew, is a wildly popular open source project with 40K GitHub stars and provides the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux).
In this episode, we dig into John & Mike's history with Homebrew and their time to
E134: Making Complex Data RAG-Ready with Unstructured
Brian Raymond is Founder & CEO of Unstructured, the platform to extract and transform complex data for use with every major vector database and LLM framework. Their open source project has 7K stars on GitHub and includes libraries and APIs that let users build custom preprocessing pipelines for labeling, training, and production machine learning pipelines. Today, they have over 6M downloads an
E133: Reinventing Authorization with Google's Zanzibar Paper
Jake Moshenko is Co-Founder & CEO of AuthZed, the scalable authorization platform based on Google's Zanzibar white paper. Their open source permissions database spiceDB has 5K stars on GitHub and enables fine-grained access control for customer applications.
AuthZed has raised $4M from investors including Work-Bench and Amplify.
In this episode, we dig into the Zanzibar approach to auth,
E132: From General Purpose to Specialized Databases
Joran Dirk Greef is Founder & CEO of TigerBeetle, the open source financial transactions database. Their project, also called tigerbeetle, has over 7K stars and is a database designed for mission-critical workloads and performance.
TigerBeetle has raised $6M from investors including Amplify.
In this episode, we discuss why general purpose databases don't scale for high volume transaction
E131: Why the Next Generation of Time Series Databases Will Be Multimodal
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 vi
E130: Orchestrating AI Workloads with Union AI
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 &
E129: The Race to Help Build Custom AI Models
Sahil Chaudhary is Founder of Glaive AI, the platform to build models that are faster, cheaper and outperform general purpose models with the help of synthetic data.
In this episode, we discuss why education is so important for GenAI infra companies at this stage, how synthetic data helps companies move from prototype to production, why synthetic data may be a better approach vs. cleaning data, wh
E128: Simplifying Complex Infrastructure with Encore
André Eriksson is Founder & CEO of Encore, the backend development platform for startups building event-driven and distributed systems. This is Andre's second time on the Open Source Startup Podcast (first episode here) and, in this episode, we dig into their GTM strategy, why it was important for them to add Typescript support (in addition to Go), whether companies should still build with
E127: Reimagining VPNs with Tailscale
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
E126: RisingWave's Take on Launching a New Database
Yingjun Wu is Founder of RisingWave, a new open source stream processing database.
RisingWave has raised $40M from investors including Yunqi Partners.
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E122: How Orkes is Building a Great Company on Conductor
Jeu George is Co-Founder & CEO of Orkes, the orchestration engine based on the Conductor project. Conductor was originally created at Netflix but they have since discontinued support of the project. The team at Orkes has forked the project and is building a company around it.
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