This week Heikki Nousiainen, CTO and Co-founder of Aiven, joins me to chat about building the business, his passion for open source and entrepreneurship, and his hopes for the future of open source in the public sector. 

In this episode, Heikki and I explore the successes and challenges he and his three co-founders encountered in creating and maintaining their global open source data platform. We discuss how they choose technologies to support, the importance of customer demand, how founders can learn to work together, and when to “kill your darlings.” 

Highlights:

• Origins of Aiven (1:40)
• Pros and cons of being headquartered in Helsinki (4:41)
• Aiven’s relationship to the open source community (6:02)
• How Aiven has evolved since its inception (7:34)
• How Aiven chooses technologies to incorporate into their service offerings (9:21)
• One thing that has been very successful for Aiven (12:51)
• Why Aiven chose their business model (16:33)
• The biggest challenge Aiven is currently facing (17:37)
• The State of Open Con and giving back to the Community (20:17)
• Barriers to more open source adoption in the public sector (21:24)

Links:

Heikki

• LinkedIn
• Twitter: @hnousiainen
• Aiven