This week on the TechCrunch Live podcast, we hear from Mark Rostick from Intel Capital to Garima Kapoor from MinIO. 

It might not be the buzziest areas to grow a company, yet MinIO found a niche selling object storage, while competing directly with Amazon S3. Perhaps the open source component helps drive interest from its target developer market looking for an alternative from the cloud giant. It’s never easy competing with the likes of Amazon, yet MinIO has been able to find success. Garima Kapoor co-founded MinIO in 2014 and has since grown the company to a billion-dollar valuation. Along the way, Kapoor raised $126.30 million from venture capital, including from Mark Rostick of Intel Capital.

We have a lot of questions about MinIO:

• Why did it get into a business competing directly with Amazon?
• What role did open source have in building a developer audience?
• How did cloud-native technologies contribute to your success?
• What did Mark and Intel Capital see in this company that made them think they could succeed in a crowded and mature market?

And you can ask questions too! Each week on TechCrunch Live, registered Hopin attendees can submit questions, and I’ll do my best to ask as many as possible.

TechCrunch Live is our weekly event series featuring top founders and investors. The show records live, most Wednesdays at 12:00 p.m. PDT. It’s free to register and attend. Watch past episodes on our YouTube channel and subscribe to the podcast here.