Open Source Underdogs

James Watters, SVP, Products at Pivotal Software, is a veteran of the unix and open source software business. With a broad breadth of products, including Java Spring and many other essential tools for developers, Pivotal has built a business of enormous scale in record time. Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello, and welcome to Open Source Underdogs....

Shannon Williams, Co-Founder and VP Sales of Rancher lays out how a great team with deep domain knowledge can actively identify a product market fit in a crowded space, and emerge a winner. It’s an inspiring story of a plan perfectly executed. This is a MUST LISTEN episode of Underdogs! Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello, and welcome...

Isaac Schlueter emerged as one of the most important leaders from the Javascript community. As Chief Open Technology Officer of npm Inc, the company behind the essential software registry, he has a bird’s eye view of what makes Javascript such a unique ecosystem. And his mission was also unique: to transform a free public utility...

Ben Golub has lead several open source software ventures, including Gluster and Docker. Storj monetizes open source by creating a distributed file storage network. Using the network, people can securely store files. And owners of Internet connected computers can put their unused disk capacity to work. To lower transactions costs, Storj launched a true utility...

Bart Copeland, is the CEO of ActiveState. Since the 90s, millions of developers have used the famous ActiveState distributions of Python, Perl and Tcl. In this episode, Bart narrates ActiveState’s journey, including several pivots and ownership changes. Stay tuned to the end to find out how they were able to pivot to the open source...

Loris Degioanni is the Founder and CTO of Sysdig, a platform for cloud-native visibility and security for workload production. In this episode, Loris discusses how his past entrepreneurial experiences have helped shape a successful business at Sysdig. Transcript Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this...

In this special rebroadcast episode, we revisit the conversation held by Adam Stacoviak, host of The Changelog, the renowned podcast for developers, and Donald Fischer, Co-founder and CEO of Tidelift. Tidelift offers subscription-based support and maintenance for open source dependency applications, powered by the project’s maintainers themselves. In this episode, Adam and Donald discuss Tidelift’s...

Peter Mattis is the Co-founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind the popular cloud-native, distributed SQL database, CockroachDB. In this episode, Peter discusses their experiences transitioning to a new, less permissive open source license, and how open source startups are evolving business models to maintain competitiveness. Transcript Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello, and welcome...

Boris Renski is the Co-founder and CMO of Mirantis, an open source platform for Kubernetes on-prem container orchestration. In this episode, Boris discusses how Mirantis has been able to effectively pivot multiple times as technology has evolved. Transcript Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs, the podcast about successful open source business...

Peter Zaitsev is the Co-founder and CEO of Percona, an open source database software and solutions provider. In this episode, Peter discusses how Percona has successfully built a multi-million dollar business around services and support without VC funding. Here’s a link to Peter’s 2016 article How Percona Has Built a Successful Open Source Business Based...