Open Source Startup Podcast Robby (Cowboy VC) & Tim (Essence VC)

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!

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!