Open Source Startup Podcast

Jake Moshenko is Co-Founder & CEO of AuthZed, the scalable authorization platform based on Google's Zanzibar white paper. Their open source permissions database spiceDB has 5K stars on GitHub and enables fine-grained access control for customer applications.

AuthZed has raised $4M from investors including Work-Bench and Amplify.

In this episode, we dig into the Zanzibar approach to auth, branding themselves as a database, building for big companies from the get-go, their Hacker News launch and how getting on the front page kickstarted their project's growth, monetizing early & more!

Joran Dirk Greef is Founder & CEO of TigerBeetle, the open source financial transactions database. Their project, also called tigerbeetle, has over 7K stars and is a database designed for mission-critical workloads and performance.

TigerBeetle has raised $6M from investors including Amplify.

In this episode, we discuss why general purpose databases don't scale for high volume transactional workloads - and the need for specialized databases generally, open source vs. source available, the enterprise commercial stack of management, monitoring, security, and identity, their unique take on monetization & more!

Niko West is Co-Founder & CEO of Rerun, the open source visualization engine for streams of multimodal data.

Rerun has raised over $3M from investors including Costanoa.

In this episode, we discuss how Rerun found early success in gaming, why building in Rust was important, how open source expanded the segments Rerun could serve, why they thought about monetization early, the importance of visual and video content & more!

Ketan Umare is Co-Founder & CEO of Union AI, the scalable MLOps platform focused on AI orchestration based on the flyte open source project.

Union AI has raised $29M from investors including NEA & Nava Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the differences between Union AI and Airflow, what's unique about orchestrating AI workloads, bringing software engineering practices to AI & more!

Sahil Chaudhary is Founder of Glaive AI, the platform to build models that are faster, cheaper and outperform general purpose models with the help of synthetic data.

In this episode, we discuss why education is so important for GenAI infra companies at this stage, how synthetic data helps companies move from prototype to production, why synthetic data may be a better approach vs. cleaning data, why they're targeting AI native startups as an initial market & more!

André Eriksson is Founder & CEO of Encore, the backend development platform for startups building event-driven and distributed systems. This is Andre's second time on the Open Source Startup Podcast (first episode here) and, in this episode, we dig into their GTM strategy, why it was important for them to add Typescript support (in addition to Go), whether companies should still build with kubernetes & more!

Avery Pennarun is Co-Founder & CEO of Tailscale, the Wireguard-based VPN that reimagines secure, private networks.

Tailscale has raised $115M from investors including Heavybit, Accel, CRV, and Insight.

In this episode, we dig into what caused the team to reimagine zero trust security at the networking level, why they focus both on individual developers and large enterprises with a bottoms-up and top-down business model, why they leaned into the VPN comparison, how they create a personal tone for their blog & more!

Yingjun Wu is Founder of RisingWave, a new open source stream processing database.

RisingWave has raised $40M from investors including Yunqi Partners.

In this episode, we discuss RisingWave's approach versus Apache Flink and other stream processing frameworks, why stream processing is important for real-time monitoring use cases, why they initially focused on startups and how free support helped develop trust with these early users, key decisions around their product and why Postgres compatibility was crucial & more!

Andrew Hoh is Co-Founder of LastMile AI, the AI developer platform for engineering teams to productionize LLM applications. They take an "open periphery" stance on open source with projects like AIConfig to help developers build AI applications.

LastMile AI has raised $10M from investors including Gradient, AME, Exceptional Capital, and Firsthand Alliance.

In this episode, we discuss LastMile's approach to simplifying AI for developers and why they decided to build an end-to-end solution, LastMile's open periphery approach to open source, where we are on the experimentation-to-commercialization curve with GenAI, why Azure is the top cloud provider when it comes to AI support & more!

Loris Degioanni is Founder & CTO of Sysdig, the observability and container security company behind the Falco and Sysdig open source projects. Both projects are widely adopted, with 7K GitHub Stars each.

Sysdig is a $2.5B company that has raised over $700M from investors including Insight, Accel, Bain, DFJ, Goldman Sachs, Third Point & Permira.

In this episode, we dig into Sysdig's roots in infrastructure and the pivotal decision to focus on security 2 years into the company journey, Sysdig's culture of experimentation (and some paranoia) that has helped make them successful, why they thought about their paid product early & much more!