Open Source Startup Podcast

Tim Delisle and Nico Joseph are Co-Founders of FiveOneFour, the company attempting to bring a software developer-like experience to data and analytics stacks. Together, they're second-time founders who previously founded data integration company Datalogue, which Nike acquired in 2021.

In this episode, we break down the software engineering practices that would benefit data teams, their approach to market education (ie. things like templates to get users started), why open source is a requirement for a product like this, where we are on the journey to democratize access to data, their approach to monetization & more!

Tomer Shiran is Founder of Dremio, the data lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI based on open source frameworks Apache Arrow, which the Dremio team created, and Apache Iceberg.

Dremio has raised over $400M from investors including Norwest, Redpoint, Adams Street, Sapphire, Insight, and Lightspeed. They are currently valued at $2B.

In this episode, we dig into Tomer's journey from MapR to Dremio, his initial vision for making the data stack more accessible, their first breakthrough with Apache Arrow and a columnar-format approach, focusing first on project-market fit before monetization, adding support for Apache Iceberg, how they're using AI to improve user experiences & more!

Ari Zilka is CEO of mydecisive.ai, the general-purpose observability engine built on OpenTelemetry. Ari was previously the CTO of Hortonworks which built products on top of open source Apache Hadoop and merged with Cloudera in 2019.

In this episode, we dig into the similar patterns Ari sees between Hortonworks / Hadoop and mydecisive.ai / OpenTelemetry, why large enterprises don't want their data to be held hostage and are shifting towards OpenTelemetry, how open source switches costs from vendors to engineering, why he's focused on building the community before monetizing, his view on monetization ("the developer bakes you in, the operator pays for it"), why the "ops" side of "devops" carries the money, and the learnings from building Hortonworks that he's bringing into mydecisive.ai.

Mark Huang is Co-Founder of Gradient, the platform for enterprise agentic automation. Gradient recently open sourced their 4M context window finetune of Llama-3, which is the longest context window available today.

Gradient has raised $10M from investors including Wing VC, Mango Capital, and Tokyo Black.

In this episode, we dig into enterprise readiness for LLM-backed applications today, Gradient's approach to pushing context lengths for foundation models and the benefits to open sourcing their Llama-3 finetune model, their focus on healthcare and finance verticals, how they're finding their place in the noisy GenAI infra space & more!

Umur Cubukcu is Co-Founder of Ubicloud, the open source and portable cloud that can reduce cloud spend by 3–10x. Their project, also called ubicloud, has over 3K stars and provides elastic compute, block storage, virtual networking, managed Postgres, and IAM services.

Ubicloud has raised $16M from investors including 500 Global and YC.

In this episode, we dig into Ubicloud's grand vision of building a cloud service provider, where they're starting, why open source is a massive differentiator for them & more!

Michael Stonebraker is a legendary database system pioneer as the founder of Ingres, Postgres, and now DBOS. His work while at Berkeley and then MIT has been central to many relational database companies.

His new company, DBOS, has raised $9M from investors including Engine Ventures and Construct Capital.

This episode is a masterclass on the history of database systems and digs into the creation of Ingres and Postgres, why he's always focused on commercial applications and specifically industrial companies as users of his systems, why he started DBOS as an operating system to make it easier to build, scale, and secure TypeScript applications & more!

John Viega is Co-Founder & CEO of Crash Override, the open source monitoring platform based on the Chalk project which has 22K stars on GitHub.

Crash Override has raised $14M from investors including SYN Ventures, BVP & Firestreak Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into what being "dev friendly" means, what their best performing content has been, standing out in the incredibly crowded security landscape & more!

Jeff Huber is Co-Founder of Chroma, the open source vector database. Their open source project, also called chroma, has 13K stars on GitHub.

Chroma has raised $20M from investors including Quiet Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.

In this episode, we dig into why vector databases are important for AI applications & why AI workloads are different, how their partnership with LangChain helped with early growth, why data is really the only tool a user has to change modern AI's behavior & more!

John Britton & Mike McQuaid are Co-Founders of Workbrew, the company that provides additional features and support for companies using Homebrew. Homebrew's main project, brew, is a wildly popular open source project with 40K GitHub stars and provides the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux).

In this episode, we dig into John & Mike's history with Homebrew and their time together at GitHub, how Homebrew has kept projects simple over time and avoided feature creep, how Homebrew has managed to get a lot of value from contributors, how their ICP has shifted from mac admins to dev and security teams & more!

Brian Raymond is Founder & CEO of Unstructured, the platform to extract and transform complex data for use with every major vector database and LLM framework. Their open source project has 7K stars on GitHub and includes libraries and APIs that let users build custom preprocessing pipelines for labeling, training, and production machine learning pipelines. Today, they have over 6M downloads and 50K companies using their tools.

Unstructured has raised $65M from investors including Bain, Essence VC, and Menlo Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into Brian's process of talking to 100 data scientists before launching Unstructured, why the long tail of data matters for LLMs, competing with their own open source, why being a "boring company" is valuable for today's LLM stack, why they liked having government design partners, why world-class design & marketing are huge differentiators for open source companies & more!