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Open Source Startup Podcast

Open Source Startup Podcast

Robby (MTF); Tim (Essence VC) 195 episodes Latest May 26, 2026

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

E197: The Evolution of Building Open Source Businesses from HashiCorp to Flox Jun 9, 2026 00:40:22 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 Jun 3, 2026 00:38:41 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 May 26, 2026 00:45:18 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 Apr 29, 2026 00:41:26 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 Apr 8, 2026 00:39:12 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 Feb 18, 2026 00:41:13 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 Feb 4, 2026 00:36:13 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 Jan 20, 2026 00:46:21 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 Jan 15, 2026 00:39:54 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 Jan 9, 2026 00:37:48 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! Dec 17, 2025 00:42:23 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 Nov 20, 2025 00:42:05 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

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