Open Source Startup Podcast

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 next generation of AI agents, arguing that agents should run in virtual machines rather than containers. The conversation focuses on the unique requirements of agentic workloads: fast startup times, the ability to pause and resume state, strong isolation, and efficient resource utilization at massive scale. Unikraft’s technology enables lightweight virtual machines that can start in under 10 milliseconds, helping companies reduce latency, lower infrastructure costs, and run large numbers of ephemeral agents on minimal hardware. The discussion also covers emerging AI infrastructure needs such as checkpointing, branching, headless browser automation, and GPU access.The podcast also traces Unikraft’s origins from an academic research project to an open-source Linux Foundation initiative and, eventually, a startup founded in 2022. The conversation examines customer adoption, the role of Unikraft as foundational infrastructure for AI platforms, competition and collaboration within the agent ecosystem, the future of GPUs and virtualization, and lessons learned from building a company in the rapidly evolving cloud and AI infrastructure market.

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 widely adopted open-source projects like Terraform into sustainable businesses. His core takeaway is that support-only open source is difficult to scale; successful companies usually monetize the “multiplayer” capabilities that teams and enterprises need while keeping individual usage free.Now at Flox, James sees a similar opportunity built on top of Nix, a powerful but historically complex technology. He joined because Flox makes Nix dramatically easier to use, helping developers and AI agents manage software environments and dependencies. He also discussed the balance between open-source principles and commercial viability, and why he remains optimistic about the future of software development in the age of AI.

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 portal into what its founders describe as a “system of record for agents.” The company believes the future belongs not to vertical point solutions, but to flexible platforms that organizations control themselves, enabling anyone, from developers to non-technical employees, to become builders. Rooted in the founders’ experience of overwhelming developer workflows and ticket volumes, Port aims to centralize engineering context while making both humans and AI agents more self-sufficient. Their hybrid approach combines openness and commercial software, with public roadmaps, community contributions, and open-source integrations helping customers extend the platform while maintaining governance and control.The conversation also explored how AI is reshaping engineering organizations. Port is focused on creating the infrastructure around agents rather than building the agents themselves, providing visibility, permissions, governance, and a unified “context lake” for agent activity. As companies deploy increasing numbers of coding, security, SRE, and product agents, leaders need a control plane to understand what agents are doing and ensure they operate safely. The team is already seeing customers use Port to automate large portions of engineering support workflows, and they believe enterprises are adopting AI-driven workflows as quickly as, or faster than, mid-market companies. Internally, this pace of change requires constant adaptation, particularly across go-to-market teams, where education and flexibility have become more important than rigid playbooks.

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 episode, Neal and Oleks explain why AI agents are reshaping cybersecurity - shifting the focus from guardrails to runtime security. As tools like Claude Code and Codex spread rapidly, companies often have little visibility into the agents, plugins, skills, and external assets employees are using, creating major supply chain and runtime risks. Drawing on their experience building LLMGuard and leading security teams at Protect AI and Palo Alto Networks, they argue that runtime detection and response is still a wide-open market opportunity.They also discuss what it takes to build in the crowded AI security space, where buyers now expect real products instead of roadmap promises. The conversation highlights lessons from open projects like LLMGuard and Manifest, why reducing noise and false positives matters, and how open ecosystems can help establish trust and industry standards for securing AI agents and assets.

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 unique position in the AI boom by focusing on generative media - images, video, and audio - while most of the industry rushed toward language models. Early on, they recognized that image and video models operate very differently from LLMs. With no strong API-first players in image generation, they started there and doubled down on building reliable, high-performance infrastructure for running these models in the cloud, leveraging deep expertise in systems and performance engineering. Their strategy of embracing open-source models, then fine-tuning and optimizing them for real-world use cases, helped them quickly gain traction - growing from zero to $400M of revenue by 2026 and scaling rapidly as demand for generative media surged. The conversation also dives into how the company evolved into a full-stack generative media platform, expanding from images into video and audio as those markets matured, especially with video seeing explosive growth in 2024–2025. A key differentiator has been their relentless focus on inference performance, custom kernel optimization, and cost efficiency, which has driven strong customer retention. Rather than betting on a single model, they embrace rapid model turnover and ecosystem fragmentation, ensuring flexibility for developers and enterprises alike. Looking ahead, the biggest challenges lie in scaling video models and securing enough compute capacity in a supply-constrained GPU market. Throughout, the story highlights the power of small, focused teams with clear strategy and the ability to pivot quickly in a fast-moving AI landscape.

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 juggling many Claude sessions for different tasks, Pedram realized each problem needed its own isolated workflow. Maestro turns this into a system letting users run many agents and tabs in parallel, keeping tasks separate and avoiding context degradation during long or complex work.Maestro is designed for scale, enabling dozens or even hundreds of agents to handle complex projects simultaneously. It’s flexible, model-agnostic, and especially useful for breaking big problems into independent units. The project has quickly grown into a community-driven effort, reflecting a broader shift: instead of buying a bunch of tools, developers can build highly customized AI systems themselves, pointing toward a future of large-scale agent orchestration.

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 - while many similar projects before and after it never gained traction. The founder reflects on why: delivering a “magical moment” fast. Early demos showing AI controlling a browser, inspired by trends like OpenAI’s Operator, and immediately clicked with people. What began as a developer-only Python library evolved into a hosted product as non-technical users - from sales teams to startups - wanted access. Along the way, the team leaned into controversial but compelling use cases, like AI applying for jobs on your behalf, which sparked conversation and accelerated growth. The core challenge they focused on solving was reliability: unlike deterministic automation scripts, AI agents can behave unpredictably, making trust and repeatability central problems to overcome.The long-term vision goes beyond UI automation toward agents that can skip the browser entirely and interact directly with website servers through structured actions. But the conversation isn’t just about infrastructure. The founder admits that early growth came mostly from building and talking to users, while recent months have been dedicated to storytelling and marketing rather than coding. A personal through-line emerges as well: learning to replace defensiveness with curiosity - questioning assumptions, staying open to feedback, and continuously refining both the technology and the narrative around it.

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 agents. We talk about Kernel’s focus on fast, low-latency cloud browsers, why performance matters more than people expect, and how developers can connect agents via APIs or MCP servers without spinning up heavy infrastructure themselves.We also explore the real-world use cases driving adoption - from a new wave of RPA for industries without APIs, to real-time web analysis, sales intelligence, and voice agents that need to respond instantly. Finally, we dig into Kernel’s open-source, developer-first DNA, the technical bets behind its control plane and unikernel-based browsers, and why the team believes agentic workflows are still early, but inevitable.

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 OpenDevin - now OpenHands - as an open-source alternative to closed AI coding agents like Devin. Open to anyone from day one, it attracted highly technical developers, academics, and eventually large enterprises that valued flexibility, privacy, and lack of model lock-in. Launched amid the 2024 surge of excitement around autonomous coding agents, OpenHands quickly built a massive community and differentiated itself by rejecting the idea of replacing engineers, instead focusing on empowering them through transparent, human-in-the-loop tooling.The discussion also covers the fragmented AI dev-tool landscape and why open source may define future standards. While many tools compete in the individual “inner loop” of coding, OpenHands emphasizes the collaborative “outer loop,” safety, and running agents at scale. Its organic growth, community-driven roadmap, and focus on real developer pain points highlight a future where AI accelerates software creation without removing human accountability.

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 exploded across SaaS applications, cloud databases, and on-prem systems. For CISOs and CTOs, this complexity makes it increasingly difficult to ensure everything is done “the right way.” The core argument is that the only truly safe approach is maintaining an independent, secure copy of your data - without vendor lock-in and with guaranteed long-term access, sometimes for decades. End-to-end encryption, immutable storage, and compatibility with different storage backends are emphasized as essential foundations rather than optional features.The conversation contrasts hype-driven cloud-only backup companies like Eon with Plakar’s back-to-basics approach: an open source, resilience-focused system designed to handle large and diverse datasets securely. Built around an immutable storage engine (Kloset), Plakar aims to let individuals or small teams manage their own backups while also supporting collaboration at scale. The founder’s motivation is rooted in personal experience- having previously lost critical data as a CTO - which reinforced the need for security, openness, and community involvement to continuously add and validate new data sources in a rapidly evolving data landscape.

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 engine built for a customer and later acquired by Circle - as an example, the conversation highlights how verifiability and reliability are core to the team’s approach.Informal operates in a unique way. They have core products and ones that are spun out. Projects emerge organically from real user needs and are either kept in the core or spun out as independent companies, often as open source software with services. With a worker-owned structure and roots in crypto, the organization focuses on building trustworthy financial and software infrastructure while staying flexible through spin-outs and acquisitions.

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 a customer’s cloud account rather than the vendor’s. This model is especially attractive to enterprises because it improves security, data sovereignty, and trust, while enabling earlier pilots and shorter sales cycles. Infrastructure products like Nuon focus on making this practical by packaging applications so they work in customer environments without requiring vendor access, positioning BYOC as an enterprise-first approach that is likely to become the default way software is delivered.A key theme is open source as a trust and distribution strategy. In the infrastructure space, open sourcing lowers perceived risk, deepens customer collaboration, and builds community, which in turn acts as sales enablement for large enterprise deals. The conversation also connects BYOC to AI, highlighting patterns like bring-your-own-model, keys, and GPUs, and frames BYOC as a spectrum rather than a binary choice. The broader vision is to define and lead a BYOC movement by uniting vendors around shared standards, trust, and community-driven adoption.

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 explain how traditional systems like Spark weren’t designed for today’s AI workloads, especially unstructured data and LLM inference. Fenic was their answer: an open-source engine and DataFrame library built specifically for LLM workflows, multi-step reasoning, and agentic systems - without the operational complexity.Their biggest lessons: start GTM early, talk to as many data leaders as possible, and keep validating - insights that led directly to open-sourcing Fenic and building its MCP-powered developer experience.

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 perfection, and tried to build infrastructure before a killer product. He also burned himself out and wishes he had simplified and hired earlier.McGugan believes the terminal is a neglected but essential interface, prized for speed and flow. Rich and Textual modernized terminal output, but monetizing open-core dev tools proved difficult. His new project, Toad, aims to be a universal AI front-end for the terminal - open-source, protocol-driven, and able to plug into different agent back ends like Claude and others. The goal: seamless workflows and modern UX in the environment developers already live in.Big takeaways: monetize early, ship a killer app sooner, don’t overcomplicate structure, and avoid grinding yourself into the ground.

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 belief that browser automation is a critical but underinvested primitive that future AI applications will depend on for years. He traces the journey from the limitations of traditional headless browsers and brittle RPA tools to the emergence of a cleaner, more adaptable framework built for the AI era.We dive into:Stagehand’s design philosophy: minimal feature bloat and strong abstractions.Developer-first community: TypeScript and Python support driven by user demand and open-source contributions prioritized through community PRs.Director, Browserbase’s new layer for non-technical users: “if v0 was for building websites, Director is for building automations.”How open source investment fuels both innovation and integration, and why Browserbase believes the next billion-dollar company will be built on top of its framework.The evolving relationship between AI agents and the web, touching on Cloudflare, automation ethics, and where the line lies between automation and scraping.Paul also reflects on inspiration from figures like Jeff Lawson, the importance of great abstractions for new developers, and the “moment of magic” when AI begins to work on your behalf.

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 fast, but the code was ugly.Most AI generated code was unnecessarily long and messy. For builders who viewed code as artistic expression, that was painful. Once they tried BAML, everything changed. It was clean, elegant - completely the opposite of AI slop.It wasn’t an overnight success. It took nine months to reach ten users — but the early ones stayed because of thoughtful design:Easy model swappingFull visibility into every prompt and test caseA workflow so simple that non-technical users (even lawyers!) could test codeBAML was built with a philosophy that code is the source of truth, not the docs.The conversation touches on how LLM observability and thoughtfully designed code make BAML unique. It’s inspired by the same thinking that made React sticky - beauty and composability.Pretty code, the founder believes, isn’t vanity - it’s a functional advantage:Fewer bugsEasier to reason aboutFriendlier for AI-generated systems

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 moving at breakneck speed.ClickHouse's Series C valued the company at $6.35B earlier this year, and just yesterday they announced an extension to that round, just months after it was raised. In this episode, we dig into:Origins & Founding StoryClickHouse began as an internal project at Yandex to power a Google Analytics–style platform, focused on performance and scale.Open-sourced in 2016 - rapid global adoption laid the foundation for ClickHouse the company. Yury first discovered ClickHouse while at Google; impressed by its speed, he later co-founded the company in 2021 alongside Aaron Katz (ex-Elastic) and the original creator Alexey Milovidov.Why ClickHouse Stands OutColumn-oriented, open source OLAP database designed for massive-scale analytical processing.Excels in performance, efficiency, and cost - ideal for large data volumes and real-time analytics (and now AI workloads). Architectural choices:Columnar storage = better compression and faster execution.Separation of compute and storage enables elasticity, scalability, and resilience in the cloud.Open Source vs. CloudOpen-source version offers freedom and flexibility.Cloud product delivers much lower total cost of ownership and fully managed experience.Architectural parity between the two ensuring no vendor lock-in for customers. Customers can run the same queries on both; most stay with cloud due to simplicity and cost efficiency.Use Cases & Ecosystem4 main use cases:Real-time analyticsData WarehousingObservability AI / ML WorkloadsCompany Building & CultureFully remote from day one.Prioritized experienced, self-sufficient engineers over early-career hires.Built and launched GA version in less than a year - insane pace of innovation.Innovation & CommunityMonthly release cadence.Hundreds of integrations and connectors.Strong open-source and commercial communityAdvice for FoundersFocus on what matters most Hire mature, independent thinkers.Move fast but maintain quality; ClickHouse Cloud achieved production-grade quality in record time.

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 with Lance format → 9,000% performance gain.Multi-modal AI taking off (vision, audio, text); Midjourney & Runway as pioneers; audio now a major category.How they built trust through open source.Integrated workflows (data prep + search + embedding) going beyond vector DBs; education needed to show full value.Cloud/serverless launch in 2023–24 enabled seamless local-to-production use.Future bets: audio infra, robotics, spatial reasoning; vector DBs risk irrelevance if they don’t evolve.

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 tasks.Core value of Nadrama – developers just want to deploy apps; Nadrama abstracts away infrastructure pain.His view on what being truly open source means (including using the Apache 2.0 license) Ryan's user discovery process - talking directly with as many users as possible, mining his network / folks he's worked with in the past, community events & meetups.Navigating the earliest days of Nadrama Security philosophy – believes in baseline security for all accounts (not just enterprise), informed by a Cloudflare background.

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 motivation for Grit to open sourceHow AI generated code has put pressure on software maintenanceWhere new problems have been created by AI-generated code The acquisition by Honeycomb - motivation, integration, and how the deal happened

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 planning to deployment The focus on accuracy as their true north star metric Their paid contribution program How their found their initial ICP in regulated industries Why 2026 will be the year of agents Her best fundraising advice (hint: never really stop fundraising)

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 from investors including Costanoa, Modern Technical Fund, and Runtime Ventures. In this episode, we dig into:Why today's modern security teams are rethinking data management The benefits of building RunReveal on ClickHouse How they worked with early believers / customers like TemporalTheir open source strategy and building trust with the community through open sourcing components like their event processing libraryTheir MCP server and enabling security teams to use AI to automate investigations (including the launch of their new remote MCP server)

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, we dig into:Why agents need a sandboxBuilding a new category of infra tooling, much like LaunchDarkly Some of their viral content moments - including Greg Brockman sharing their videosFiguring out the right commercial offering Why they don't agree with pricing per token Why moving from Prague to the Bay Area felt essential for them as founders

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 Dragonfly (high scale + real-time needs - gaming, B2C) The benefits of being multi-threaded How they got some of their bigger users / customers like Twilio, SoFi, and Spotify

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 happened, as well as the M&A process How dbt thinks about building capabilities internally vs. making acquisitions How the SDF platform will improve the lives of dbt users The most challenging parts about the integration What the future developer experience for data teams will be like A glimpse into the future of data engineering

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 DevCycle. In this episode, we dig into:The creation of DevCycle through insights at Taplytics Learning to sell to engineers (DevCycle) vs. marketing teams (Taplytics)The decision to keep Talytics going vs. focus solely on DevCycle Why engineers prefer open standards like OpenFeatureHow their GTM works alongside OpenFeature

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 unique approach that allows for concurrency - and educating the market on itHow open source helped build trust with big, enterprise customers early The story behind their first big customer winFocusing on a killer, fast time to value implementation Introducing monetization early, and how their products align with open source mirrord

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 the general AI builder ecosystem. In this episode, we dig into:Block's history releasing and supporting open source projects, and how that led to the creation of the programs office How big companies like Block approach open source and come up with ideas for projects like GooseThe Goose project and how it's different from other agent frameworks

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 The challenges low code frameworks have had becoming production-gradeThe apps users are building with ReflexHow he thought about Reflex Cloud Their vision to be as big as React

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 pivot into the ideaThe benefits Lightstep got from open sourcing OpenTracing The OpenTracing and OpenCensus merger into OpenTelemetryWhy OpenTelemetry has been so widely adopted Ben's perspective on the many companies building with OpenTelemetry todayHow their team made the decision to take the ServiceNow acquisition Company building learnings around team building (& more!)

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-traditional DB background helped Tobie take a new, first principles approachHow graph databases best reflect how humans think The importance of design for infra products How enterprises vs. SMBs / individual users view their value How open source helped them develop trust with large companiesPlanning out their cloud offering

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 InReach Ventures. In this episode, we discuss: Pivoting away from their initial hardware-based approach How the growth in remote employees has driven demand Why VPNs needed to be reinvented Why they use the WireGuard protocol What's different about their approach vs. Tailscale Managing big and small users at the same time Why most technical founders should hire a technical marketer early

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 market pressure to push hard into AI

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

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 for identity" Why customization matters for an auth product Demand for self-hosting options for auth Appealing to developers and security teams

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 their applications "Recipes" as a potential monetization path The most common optimizations for LLM-based apps Educating users on what's possible with LLMs

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 episode, we dive into Nathan's deep history with code editors including the widely adopted GitHub editor Atom, the decision to make Zed open source (and the massive 10x growth that came from it), how AI changed their trajectory, why collaboration is core to becoming the defacto editor, anchoring on performance and responsiveness, how they're thinking about the commercial side of Zed & more!

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 experience means for data teams, why reproducibility was a key problem for them to solve, how he thinks about monetization when other notebooks like Jupyter don't focus on making money & more!

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 (including government users), the importance of reliability for products in and around this category, the organic growth that came from their community, their AI strategy & more!

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 enormous interest Yugabyte had at the onset as transactional databases were due for innovation, the key architecture choices they made, the initial launch, key early customer wins, the importance of positioning as a distributed SQL company, their evolving open source strategy, building alongside the Postgres community, the decision to bring on an outside CEO & much more!

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 company, working with GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij to bring Andrew in as CEO & more!

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, the importance of tutorials and templates to grow community in a new product area, understanding all of the user types and use cases people were using their open source for, competing with vertical copilots, the future of copilots and when AI becomes more autonomous & more!

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 open source but their orchestration layer is closed source, how being transparent on pricing has been a differentiator for them & much more!

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 database (ie. no ETL), the types of users / use cases that really benefit from ParadeDB (e-commerce, FinTech, etc.), the decision to focus on Postgres, making adoption super easy, Philippe's learnings as a second-time founder & more!

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 with OpenTelemetry changed their trajectory, the difference between having product-market-fit and GTM-market-fit, shifting from just focusing on mobile teams to mobile + DevOps teams & more!

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 huge driver of their growth, how bringing successful DevTool founders as angels helped with initial credibility and growth, thinking about the user and buyer's motivations, open source license decisions and the future of open source licenses (MIT + Apache are the only true open source licenses in their perspective) & more!

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 positioning as a Bitly alternative, their focus on great design and how that shows up in all parts of their product and marketing, how analytics unlocked much higher ACVs and value for customers, how getting a top Hackernews post helped drive early momentum, their vision to become an end-to-end attribution platform & more!

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 data (ie. moving more over to the client), competing with DBT by adding a query engine, why building in Rust was important, why their CLI is closed source, the importance of a strong partner strategy as a data company & more!

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", eliminating the friction with BI by making Metabase super fast to get started with, keeping the product simple, juggling short-term execution with their long-term vision & more!

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 instead of replacing them, predictions on the future of the agent space & more!