From Open Source to $200M Startup: Temporal's Journey with CTO & Co-Founder Samar Abbas

Samar Abbas, co-founder and CTO of Temporal, shares his journey from working on developer tools at tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Uber to co-founding a startup that raised $220 million. Abbas discusses how Temporal, born from the open-source project Cadence at Uber, solves critical reliability challenges for developers building distributed applications. This episode explores the evolution from an internal tool to a thriving open-source project, and finally to a successful commercial product. Abbas offers valuable insights on finding the right co-founder, the benefits of open-source for infrastructure projects, and how to navigate the transition from engineering to entrepreneurship. Unlock the full potential of your product team with Integral's player coaches, experts in lean, human-centered design. Visit integral.io/convergence for a free Product Success Lab workshop to gain clarity and confidence in tackling any product design or engineering challenge. Inside the episode: • The origins of Temporal and its predecessor, Cadence, at Uber • How Temporal enables durable execution of code and solves reliability challenges • The journey from open source project to founding a company • Insights on finding a complementary co-founder • Evolving roles between co-founders as the company scales • The benefits and considerations of open source for infrastructure projects • Temporal's product roadmap and vision for the future • The importance of iteration and solving real problems in product development Mentioned in the episode: Temporal: The company co-founded by Samar Abbas, offering a platform for building durable applications Replay conference: Temporal's annual user conference Cadence: The open-source predecessor to Temporal, developed at Uber Simple Workflow Service: An AWS product that was an early attempt at solving durable execution challenges Durable Task Framework: An open-source library developed by Abbas at Microsoft Azure Event Hubs: An Azure service for large-scale data ingestion, similar to Apache Kafka Kafka: A distributed event streaming platform mentioned in comparison to Event Hubs Gong: A conversation intelligence platform that impressed Abbas with its AI integration Learn something? Give us a 5 star review and like the podcast on YouTube. It's how we grow.   Follow the Pod Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/convergence-podcast/ X: https://twitter.com/podconvergence Instagram: @podconvergence