Open Source Startup Podcast

Viraj Mehta is the Co-Founder & CTO of TensorZero which is an open-source infrastructure platform that creates a feedback loop for optimizing LLM applications. Their open source project helps users turn production data into smarter, faster, and cheaper models.

In this episode, we dig into:

Nathan Sobo is the Founder of Zed, the next-gen code editor that enables high-performance collaboration - powered by AI. Open source zed has 53K Stars on GitHub and is used by engineers at Vercel, Apple, Anthropic, and GitLab. Prior to founding Zed, Nathan created the editor Atom at GitHub which reached 1M+ active users.

Zed has raised from investors including Redpoint and Root Ventures.

In this episode, we dive into Nathan's deep history with code editors including the widely adopted GitHub editor Atom, the decision to make Zed open source (and the massive 10x growth that came from it), how AI changed their trajectory, why collaboration is core to becoming the defacto editor, anchoring on performance and responsiveness, how they're thinking about the commercial side of Zed & more!

Akshay Agrawal is the Founder & CEO of Marimo, the next generation Python notebook. Their open source reactive notebook for Python, also called marimo, has almost 9K stars on GitHub.

Marimo has raised $5M from investors including AIX Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into Akshay's love of building developer tools for data teams, his journey from PhD to founder, what a great developer experience means for data teams, why reproducibility was a key problem for them to solve, how he thinks about monetization when other notebooks like Jupyter don't focus on making money & more!

Vlad Matsiiako is CEO & Co-Founder of Infisical, the open source secrets management platform. Their open source project, also called infisical, has 16K stars on GitHub and helps users sync secrets across their teams and infrastructure.

Infisical has raised $3M from investors including Gradient and YC.

In this episode, we dig into their path from closed to open source, their big user wins (including government users), the importance of reliability for products in and around this category, the organic growth that came from their community, their AI strategy & more!

Karthik Ranganathan is Founder & CTO of Yugabyte, the PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database for cloud native applications. Their open source database, also called yugabyte, has almost 10K stars on GitHub.

Yugabyte has raised almost $300M and sits at a $1.3B valuation. They've raised from investors including Sapphire Ventures, Lightspeed, and 8VC.

In this episode, we dig into the enormous interest Yugabyte had at the onset as transactional databases were due for innovation, the key architecture choices they made, the initial launch, key early customer wins, the importance of positioning as a distributed SQL company, their evolving open source strategy, building alongside the Postgres community, the decision to bring on an outside CEO & much more!

Andrew Firestone is CEO and Knut Sveidqvist is CTO of Mermaid Chart, the open source text-based diagraming software platform.

The mermaid project has over 70K stars on GitHub and is an open source diagramming and charting tool.

Mermaid Chart has raised $7.5M from investors including Open Core Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the mermaid project's 8 year journey, going from side project to company, working with GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij to bring Andrew in as CEO & more!

Atai Barkai is Co-Founder & CEO of Copilotkit, the platform to build production-grade AI Copilots 10x faster. Their open source project, also called copilotkit, has almost 13K stars on GitHub and provides React UI + elegant infrastructure for AI Copilots, in-app AI agents, AI chatbots, and AI-powered Textareas.

In this episode, we dig into Copilotkit's incredible open source growth trajectory, the importance of tutorials and templates to grow community in a new product area, understanding all of the user types and use cases people were using their open source for, competing with vertical copilots, the future of copilots and when AI becomes more autonomous & more!

Lauren Long is Co-Founder & CTO of Ampersand, the developer platform for native product integrations.

Ampersand has raised $5M from investors including Matrix, Base Case Capital, Flex Capital, and 2.12 Angels.

In this episode, we dig into their differentiation as a "code-first" product, why they focused on the GTM vertical to start (Salesforce was the first integration), why their CLI is open source but their orchestration layer is closed source, how being transparent on pricing has been a differentiator for them & much more!

Philippe Noël is Co-Founder & CEO of ParadeDB, the modern Elasticsearch alternative built on Postgres. They're purpose-built for heavy, real-time workloads and their open source project, also called paradedb, has over 6K stars on GitHub.

ParadeDB has raised $2M from investors including General Catalyst & YC.

In this episode, we dig into the benefits of connecting search directly to the database (ie. no ETL), the types of users / use cases that really benefit from ParadeDB (e-commerce, FinTech, etc.), the decision to focus on Postgres, making adoption super easy, Philippe's learnings as a second-time founder & more!

Eric Futoran is Co-Founder & CEO of Embrace, the mobile observability platform built on OpenTelemetry.

Embrace has raised almost $80M from investors including NEA, Greycroft & Eniac.

In this episode, we dig into the creation of mobile observability as a category and how Embrace helped evangelize it, what makes mobile observability unique, why they open sourced their SDKs, how aligning with OpenTelemetry changed their trajectory, the difference between having product-market-fit and GTM-market-fit, shifting from just focusing on mobile teams to mobile + DevOps teams & more!