Kishore Gopalakrishna is Co-Founder & CEO of Startree, the real-time analytics platform that provides a managed service on top of the open-source distributed data store Apache Pinot.

Kishore is also the co-creator of Apache Pinot, which was started while he was at LinkedIn. Since leaving to build Startree, Kishore and his team have raised $28M from investors including GGV, Bain Capital Ventures, and CRV.

In this episode, we discuss the right time to launch a managed service on top of an open source project, the importance of relentless focus on customer needs and use cases early-on, community building, and much more.