Open Source Startup Podcast

Russ d'Sa is Founder of LiveKit, the real-time streaming audio, video, and data infrastructure platform for developers. Their open source project, also called livekit, provides the end-to-end stack for WebRTC and has over 6K stars on GitHub.

In this episode, we dig into LiveKit's unique founding story with the idea coming from the founders' experience building a Clubhouse competitor and using Agora, early interest from companies like Pinterest that gave indications that there was a need for an open source alternative to Agora and Twilio, why Conversational AI will be a big driver for LiveKit & more!

Jeu George is Co-Founder & CEO of Orkes, the orchestration engine based on the Conductor project. Conductor was originally created at Netflix but they have since discontinued support of the project. The team at Orkes has forked the project and is building a company around it.

In this episode, we talk through the Conductor journey - from creating the original project at Netflix to forking the project, why an orchestration engine is critical to companies building with microservices, signs that there was company potential behind the project (aspirational companies using it, production workloads, etc.) & more!

Kyle Carberry is Founder & CTO of Coder, the self-hosted remote development platform. Their project, also called coder, enables users to provision remote development environments via Terraform and has over 6K Github Stars.

In this episode, we dig into the evolution of the browser-based coding movement, how Coder massively improved developer experience & productivity, their early focus on enterprise customers & more!

Charlie Marsh is Founder & CEO of Astral, builders of next-gen python tooling. Their first project, ruff, is an extremely fast Python linter and code formatter written in Rust and has 22K GitHub Stars.

In this episode, we dig into why they started with a linter, getting to 8.5M monthly downloads, the impact of building with Rust, how they developed deep 1:1 relationships with their community, growth unlocks (when companies like Hugging Face started using them, for example), how Charlie put his authentic voice into their content, what parts of Python tooling they'll take on next (package manager, testing, documentation) & more!

Jeff Cross is Co-Founder & CEO of Nx, the build system for maintaining and scaling monorepos, both locally and on CI. Their project, also called nx, has over 20K stars on GitHub.

Nx has raised $25M from investors including a16z & Nexus.

In this episode, we discuss the benefits of using monorepos and the types of teams and codebases it works well for, crucible moments for the company (ie. when they went beyond the Angular framework), learning how to support large enterprise customers by starting a consulting business first, what great DevEx means to them (speed, automatic migrations, scale) & more!

Kyle Mathews is Co-Founder & CTO of Gatsby, the front-end web development platform. Their open source framework, GatsbyJS, is widely adopted with 55K GitHub Stars.

In Feb 2023, Gatsby was acquired by Netlify.

In this episode, we discuss how GatsbyJS was able to grow incredibly fast, what features matter most for front-end development frameworks (speed, approachability, etc.), learnings from going after a smaller portion of the market and over-hiring & more!

Pranay Prateek is Co-Founder of Signoz, the open source observability platform with OpenTelemetry-native traces, metrics, and logs. Their open source project, also called Signoz, has over 15K GitHub Stars and helps developers monitor their applications and troubleshoot problems.

Signoz has raised $7M from investors including SignalFire and Uncorrelated Ventures.

In this episode, we discuss why observability is a good category to use open source, why Signoz started with tracing and then added on other types of observability, the growth of OpenTelemetry and why Signoz decided to build with it, how the release of logs unlocked growth, the importance of simple pricing in this category & more!

Mars Lan is Co-Founder and CTO of Metaphor, the modern data catalog that is described as the "Social Platform for Data." Metaphor was created by the founders of ⁠DataHub⁠ which is known as the leading open source metadata platform.

Metaphor has raised over $10M from investors including Amplify, a16z, and Point72 Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into the story behind Metaphor's creation - and why the team didn't build a managed service on top of DataHub, why Metaphor isn't open source, why sales funnel is the biggest benefit of building a company using open source & much more!

For more on Metaphor's story, check out the link here

Moses Guttmann is Co-Founder and CEO of ClearML, the end-to-end AI lifecycle platform for deep learning, machine learning, and Gen AI models. The company's project, also called clearml, provides experiment management, MLOps and data management capabilities and has 5K stars on GitHub.

In this episode, we dig into the process of spinning out a project, the pros & cons of starting with a broad product offering, the closed vs. open source debate for GenAI, LLaMA 2 vs. GPT-4 & more!

Tianqi Chen is Co-Founder and Chief Technologist of OctoML, the compute infrastructure platform for tuning and running generative models in the cloud. OctoML was founded by the creators of Apache TVM, the machine learning compiler framework for CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators.

OctoML has raised $132M from investors including Amplify, Addition, Madrona, and Tiger.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of supporting multiple models, the advancements from LLaMA and Stable Diffusion this year, building the TVM and OctoML communities, predictions on GenAI in the enterprise (hybrid ML, for example), whether GenAI is over-invested in & more!