Open Source Startup Podcast

Ivan Burazin is Co-Founder & CEO of Daytona, the open source developer environment management platform. Their open source manager, also called daytona, has 9K stars on GitHub.

Daytona has raised $5M from investors including Upfront Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into Daytona's plan to be the fastest growing cloud development environment, how consistent and frequent content has become a huge driver of their growth, how bringing successful DevTool founders as angels helped with initial credibility and growth, thinking about the user and buyer's motivations, open source license decisions and the future of open source licenses (MIT + Apache are the only true open source licenses in their perspective) & more!

Steven Tey is Founder & CEO of Dub.co, the open source link management infrastructure platform for modern marketing teams. Their open source project, also called dub, has almost 18K stars on GitHub and is used by teams at companies like Vercel, Raycast, and Perplexity.

In this episode, we dig into starting Dub.co as a side project and how it ultimately turned into a company, their initial positioning as a Bitly alternative, their focus on great design and how that shows up in all parts of their product and marketing, how analytics unlocked much higher ACVs and value for customers, how getting a top Hackernews post helped drive early momentum, their vision to become an end-to-end attribution platform & more!

Lukas Schulte is Co-Founder and CEO of SDF Labs (Semantic Data Fabric), the data transformation layer and query engine platform. They're an open core company powered by the Apache Data Fusion query engine.

SDF Labs has raised $9M from investors including RTP Global and Two Sigma Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the complications and pain points with the Modern Data Stack, shifting left with data (ie. moving more over to the client), competing with DBT by adding a query engine, why building in Rust was important, why their CLI is closed source, the importance of a strong partner strategy as a data company & more!

Sameer Al-Sakran is CEO of Metabase, the open-source analytics and business intelligence platform. Their open source project, also called metabase, has over 38K stars on GitHub.

Metabase has raised $51M from investors including NEA, Insight and Expa.

In this episode, we dig into the company's 10 year journey, what it means to have a "developer friendly analytics platform", eliminating the friction with BI by making Metabase super fast to get started with, keeping the product simple, juggling short-term execution with their long-term vision & more!

Stanislas Polu is Co-Founder of Dust, the platform for companies to create and operate custom AI assistants for a range of use cases.

Dust has raised $20M from investors including Sequoia.

In this episode, we dig into the diverse set of users and use cases for Dust, how Dust spreads within an organization, their unique approach to open source, competing with vertical AI agents, augmenting humans instead of replacing them, predictions on the future of the agent space & more!

Jonathan Schneider is Co-Founder & CEO of Moderne, the platform for code migrations.

Moderne has raised up to a Series A from investors including Intel Capital and True Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the importance of software refactoring and the security and engineering challenges that come up when code isn't maintained, why they started with Java refactoring, their rewrite open source project, how the amount of code created with GenAI has made refactoring an even bigger challenge & more!

James Perkins is Co-Founder & CEO of Unkey, the open source API management platform that helps developers secure, manage, and scale their APIs. Their project, also called unkey, has almost 3K stars on GitHub.

Unkey has raised from investors including Essence VC, Sunflower, and The New Normal Fund.

In this episode, we dig into the complicated API tooling landscape, getting their early start with crypto and AI companies, what great DevEx means to them (simplicity is key), their scalable pricing model, splitting work between Co-Founders, their expansion plan and how they plan on grow capabilities without over-complicating the product & more!

Lukas Gentele is Co-Founder & CEO of Loft, the platform engineering company behind "kubernetes virtualization" to reduce costs and create efficiencies for teams with high (and growing) kubernetes usage. They allow any organization to scale self-service access to Kubernetes from 10 to 10,000 engineers.

Loft recently raised $24M led by Khosla Ventures and previously raised from investors including Fusion Fund.

In this episode, we dig into the company's journey through a shift from being a PaaS (devpod) to virtualization of kubernetes (vcluster), the rapid feedback loop you get from having an open source-based company, why Lukas thinks open source founders should be more commercial from the start & more!

Aliaksandr Valialkin and Roman Khavronenko are Co-Founders of VictoriaMetrics, the open source time series database and monitoring platform built alongside their open source project, also called victoriametrics.

In this episode, we discuss the limitations to Prometheus and how ClickHouse inspired the founders to build VictoriaMetrics, how open source helped them attract their early users and gain momentum, the importance of simplicity and saying no to feature requests that would complicate the product, their approach to an Open Core model, their unique view on funding and why bootstrapping has been an advantage for them and more!

Lars Kamp is Co-Founder & CEO of Fix, the continuous cloud security platform to help detect, prioritize, and remediate critical cloud risks using open source software like their inventory scanner.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of getting CISOs involved early for solutions that touch developers and security teams, the importance of an amazing self-service experience for developer adoption, their focus on transparent pricing & more!