Open Source Startup Podcast

Hassy Veldstra is Founder of Artillery, the cloud-scale serverless load testing platform. The company's project, also called artillery, has almost 7K stars on GitHub. Artillery has raised over $2M from investors including YC. In this episode, we discuss building a company around your own pain point, early signals that there was strong company potential with the project, finding growing communities to align with (in this case, Node.js) & much more!

Kanjun Qiu is Cofounder & CEO of Generally Intelligent, the platform to develop general-purpose AI agents that can be safely deployed in the real world. Generally Intelligent has raised $20M from investors including the Astera Institute & YC. In this episode, we dig into the future for AI agents and where they fall short today, why they open sourced their research environment, the importance of market timing when launching a company, Kanjun's views on whether the Agentive AI space is over-hyped & much more!

Paul Dix is Cofounder & CTO of open source time series data company InfluxData. The company's open source datastore, InfluxDB, has 26K stars on GitHub. InfluxData has raised over $200M from investors including Norwest, Battery, and Sapphire Ventures. In this episode, we dig into building the category of time series data, how an open source company's monetization plan should tie to fundraising, some of the hardest decisions the team had to make during InfluxData's journey so far & more!

Shivansh Vij is Founder & CEO of Loophole Labs, the modern application delivery platform. They have a number of open source projects that provide primitives for modern development. In this episode, we dig into Loophole's projects around WASM and networking, their unique hiring process, learnings for ambitious open source founders & much more!

Eliot Horowitz is Founder & CEO of robot developer platform Viam and the previous Founder & CTO of developer data platform MongoDB. In this episode, we discuss Eliot's many learnings from being a multi-time founder including the importance of extremely fast response time to user questions, the benefits (and challenges) of building general purpose platforms, democratizing access to robots & hardware engineering through better developer tools, and much more!

Ben Rometsch is Co-Founder & CEO of Flagsmith, the commercial open source real-time feature flagging platform. The Flagsmith project has almost 3K stars on GitHub and provides feature flagging and remote configuration services that can be hosted on prem or using their hosted software. In this episode, we discuss building a startup in a profitable way, why open source matters for feature flagging, finding direction with little signal early-on & much more!

Quentin de Quelen is Co-Founder & CEO of Meilisearch, the open source search engine platform. The Meilisearch project has 38K stars on GitHub and allows companies to quickly create amazing search experiences with features that work out-of-the-box. Meilisearch has raised $22M from investors including Felicis and CRV. In this episode, we dig into the massive TAM for search, working with the Rust community, what an amazing developer experience means for a search product, Meilisearch's roadmap (hint: it involves LLMs and AI-enabled search), Quentin's journey from developer to company leader, the company's focus on diversity & much more!

Robert Brooks IV & Mitesh Agrawal are part of Lambda's founding team which is making GPUs for deep learning more accessible. Lambda has an initiative to make GPUs available for training an open source foundation model in support of the broader ML community. In this episode, we dig into the GPUs for open source initiative, why open source matters for foundation models, the Lambda journey from the early days (well before generative AI!) & much more!

Hong Wang is Founder & CEO of Akuity, the application delivery platform for companies building with kubernetes. Akuity works alongside the Argo Project which provides a suite of open source tools for deploying and running applications and workloads on Kubernetes. Akuity has raised $25M from investors including Decibel Partners and Lead Edge Capital. In this episode, we discuss the creation of the Argo open source project while the team was at Applatix, the decision to create a commercial company - Akuity - around Argo after Applatix was acquired by Intuit, what it means to have a great developer experience (UI, real-time data, etc.), creating harmony between the open source and paid product, and much more!

Or Weis is Co-founder & CEO of Permit.io, the open source fullstack permissions as a service platform. The company's project, opal, is an admin layer for policy engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) and AWS' Cedar Agent and brings open-policy up to the speed needed by live applications. Permit.io has raised $6M from investors including NFX. In this episode, we discuss positioning in a competitive market, product market fit vs. GTM fit & much more!