Open Source Startup Podcast

Leland Takamine is Co-Founder & CEO of mobile.dev, the team behind open source mobile UI testing framework Maestro. The framework, which is a compelling new alternative to Appium or Espresso, has quickly grown to 2.6K stars and a community of >700 users.

The company has raised $3M from investors including Cowboy Ventures, Essence VC, and a number of high-profile angel investors.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of ease of use for getting open source adoption, how community feedback creates a product advantage, the challenges with timing open source adoption, learnings from growing a community, how to time a paid product & more!

Shanea Leven is Founder & CEO of CodeSee, the cloud-based data visualization platform that helps users master the understanding of their code.

CodeSee has raised $10M from investors including Uncork, Boldstart, and Wellington.

In this episode, we discuss how to test messaging, the importance of having a strong GTM strategy early-on, what a great onboarding experience looks like, and more!

Max Howell is CEO of Tea, the platform that enables developers to get compensated for their work. Max is also the creator of Homebrew, the popular package management system.

Tea has raised $8M from investors including Binance Labs.

In this episode, we discuss the founding story for Tea, learnings on building extremely large open source projects and communities, Tea's ties to Web3, and helping open source developers get compensated for their work.

Sam Lambert is CEO of PlanetScale, the serverless MySQL database platform for developers.

PlanetScale is powered by the open source database clustering system Vitess which was originally built at Google to scale YouTube.

The company has raised over $100M from investors including KPCB, Insight, SignalFire, and a16z.

In this episode, we discuss PlanetScale's positioning as a database platform rather than a database, the importance of authenticity and showing off capabilities with every launch, transparency around pricing, proving the ability to scale, looking at the quality of companies and people in the community as a measure of success, thinking about GTM very early, and much more!

Alex Dean is Cofounder & CEO of Snowplow Analytics, the behavioral data platform that transforms data into actionable insights.

Snowplow's open source behavioral data engine, also called snowplow, has over 6K stars and is a developer-first engine for collecting behavioral data.

Snowplow has raised $55M from investors including NEA, MMC, and Atlantic Bridge after being bootstrapped for some time.

In this episode, we discuss the flexibility you get from bootstrapping your company - especially if it's open source, the importance of GTM and user persona clarity when building in a competitive space, investing in product marketing early, the challenges of visibility when open source is a core part of your GTM funnel, and much more!

Ovais Tariq is Cofounder & CEO of Tigris Data, the open source developer data platform.

Tigris has raised from investors including Basis Set and General Catalyst.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of focusing on user problems rather than your solution, hiring for your specific company needs (ie Tigris needed engineers who had operated at scale), learnings for other open source data-focused founders, and more!

Dan Lorenc is Founder & CEO of Chainguard, the platform to secure your software supply chain. Chainguard supports many popular open source projects such as Sigstore, SLSA, and Tekton.

Chainguard has raised $55M from investors including Sequoia and Amplify Partners.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of market education when creating a new category of software, assessing market timing when launching your company, some of Chainguard's unique content strategies, and more!

Rajoshi Ghosh & Tanmai Gopal are the Co-founders of Hasura, the platform to create GraphQL APIs with your data. Hasura's open source graph-QL engine has over 28K stars.

Hasura has raised $140M from investors including Lightspeed, Vertex, and Greenoaks Capital.

In this episode, we discuss how open source builds trust, the difference between project-market fit and product-market fit, hiring for values, and much more!

Glauber Costa is Founder & CEO of ChiselStrike, the backend-as-a-service platform. Their core technology is open source - and also called ChiselStrike.

In this episode, we discuss knowing the right entry point for your user persona, figuring out the best open source business model for your community, having a customer-centric approach to building product, learning fundraising as a technical founder, and more!

Sourabh Bajaj is Cofounder & CTO of CoRise, the technical up-skilling platform with courses taught by industry experts. They have courses focused on open source projects such as DBT that use real-world projects to teach industry skills.

In this episode, we discuss how technical learners are different, the opportunity for education to be a third-party tool, why industry professionals can make the best teachers, assessing your own founder-market fit, and more!