Open Source Startup Podcast

Andrew Norris is Co-Founder & CEO of DevCycle, the leading feature flagging platform based on the OpenFeature project. OpenFeature provides a standard for feature flagging unifying tools behind a common interface and avoiding vendor lock-in at the code level.

DevCycle is a product created by Taplytics, the platform for marketing and product teams to A/B test. In 2023, they raised $5M to scale DevCycle.

In this episode, we dig into:

• The creation of DevCycle through insights at Taplytics

• Learning to sell to engineers (DevCycle) vs. marketing teams (Taplytics)

• The decision to keep Talytics going vs. focus solely on DevCycle

• Why engineers prefer open standards like OpenFeature

• How their GTM works alongside OpenFeature

Aviram Hassan is Co-Founder & CEO of MetalBear, the cloud development platform that lets developers run local code as if it were part of their remote environment. Their project, mirrord, has 4K stars on GitHub and is loved by users at companies like SentinelOne, Flexport, and Run.ai.

In this episode, we dig into:

• How traditional staging environments create friction for cloud developers

• Their unique approach that allows for concurrency - and educating the market on it

• How open source helped build trust with big, enterprise customers early

• The story behind their first big customer win

• Focusing on a killer, fast time to value implementation

• Introducing monetization early, and how their products align with open source mirrord

Manik Surtani is Head of Open Source and Bradley Axen is Principal Engineer at Block. Manik was key to launching Block's Open Source Programs Office and Bradley is a major open source contributor - including the project Goose which is Block's extensible AI agent project. It currently has over 11K stars on GitHub and has been used for a number of internal use cases at Block as well as by the general AI builder ecosystem.

In this episode, we dig into:

• Block's history releasing and supporting open source projects, and how that led to the creation of the programs office

• How big companies like Block approach open source and come up with ideas for projects like Goose

• The Goose project and how it's different from other agent frameworks

Nikhil Rao is Co-Founder of Reflex, the open source framework to build and deploy web apps in python. Their project, also called reflex, has over 22K stars on GitHub and is a library to build full-stack web apps.

Reflex has raised $5M from investors including Lux Capital.

In this episode, we dig into:

• The power of deploying apps using only Python

• Balancing abstraction and code level access for users

• The challenges low code frameworks have had becoming production-grade

• The apps users are building with Reflex

• How he thought about Reflex Cloud

• Their vision to be as big as React

Ben Sigelman is the Co-Founder & CEO of observability platform Lightstep as well as Co-Creator of open source observability frameworks OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry.

Lightstep was acquired by ServiceNow in 2021 and OpenTelemetry was released in 2019 and has since become the standard observability framework.

In this episode, we dig into:

• The founding story for Lightstep - including the initial pivot into the idea

• The benefits Lightstep got from open sourcing OpenTracing

• The OpenTracing and OpenCensus merger into OpenTelemetry

• Why OpenTelemetry has been so widely adopted

• Ben's perspective on the many companies building with OpenTelemetry today

• How their team made the decision to take the ServiceNow acquisition

• Company building learnings around team building (& more!)

Tobie Morgan Hitchcock is the Co-Founder & CEO of SurrealDB, the next generation serverless cloud database for modern applications. Their open source database, also called surrealdb, has 30K stars on GitHub.

SurrealDB has raised $26M from investors including FirstMark and Georgian.

In this episode, we dig into:

• Taking a broad vs. niche approach to building a new database

• How coming from a non-traditional DB background helped Tobie take a new, first principles approach

• How graph databases best reflect how humans think

• The importance of design for infra products

• How enterprises vs. SMBs / individual users view their value

• How open source helped them develop trust with large companies

• Planning out their cloud offering

Misha Bragin is the Founder & CEO of NetBird, the open source zero trust networking platform that allows companies and individuals to create secure private networks without the hassle of corporate networks. Their open source, also called netbird, has over 12K stars on GitHub and connects devices into a secure WireGuard-based overlay network.

NetBird has raised $4M from investors including InReach Ventures.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Pivoting away from their initial hardware-based approach

• How the growth in remote employees has driven demand

• Why VPNs needed to be reinvented

• Why they use the WireGuard protocol

• What's different about their approach vs. Tailscale

• Managing big and small users at the same time

• Why most technical founders should hire a technical marketer early

Kevin Wang is Founder & CEO of Fossa, the product security platform that automates compliance & security across open source third party code, suppliers, and tools.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Where Kevin's interest in open source started

• Learning to work with big enterprises

• The shift from scanning to fixing

• Repositioning from an engineering to security platform

• Resisting the market pressure to push hard into AI

Max Stoiber is Co-Founder & CEO of Stellate, the GraphQL edge platformrecently acquired by Shopify.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The Stellate journey from idea to initial traction to acquisition

• The market size (and limitations) for GraphQL, APIs, and DevTools

• How he ran a top-notch acquisition process for Stellate

• Why startups fail

Florian Forster is Co-Founder & CEO of Zitadel, the cloud security platform aiming to build the future of identity and access management. Their open source project, also called zitadel, provides identity infrastructure and has 10K stars on GitHub.

In this episode, we dig into: