Open Source Startup Podcast

Robby (MTF); Tim (Essence VC)

The leading podcast on how to build a successful open source company. Learn from the founders of HashiCorp, Chronosphere, Vercel, MongoDB, DBT, mobile.dev and more!

  1. E185: The Challenges with Monetizing Open Source with the Creator of Rich + Textual

    HACE 2 DÍAS

    E185: The Challenges with Monetizing Open Source with the Creator of Rich + Textual

    In our latest episode, Robby and Tim talk with Will McGugan, creator of the Rich and Textual open source projects and founder of Textualize and Toad (not yet released), about the challenges of turning beloved open-source projects into real businesses. Despite Rich and Textual's huge adoption in the Python community, he says he waited too long to monetize, focused too much on technical perfection, and tried to build infrastructure before a killer product. He also burned himself out and wishes he had simplified and hired earlier. McGugan believes the terminal is a neglected but essential interface, prized for speed and flow. Rich and Textual modernized terminal output, but monetizing open-core dev tools proved difficult. His new project, Toad, aims to be a universal AI front-end for the terminal - open-source, protocol-driven, and able to plug into different agent back ends like Claude and others. The goal: seamless workflows and modern UX in the environment developers already live in. Big takeaways: monetize early, ship a killer app sooner, don’t overcomplicate structure, and avoid grinding yourself into the ground.

    34 min
  2. E184: Building the Browser for AI - the Browserbase Story

    29 OCT

    E184: Building the Browser for AI - the Browserbase Story

    In this episode, we sit down with Paul Klein IV, Founder & CEO of Browserbase, to explore how his team is redefining the foundation of AI-driven browser automation. Browserbase provides the web browser infrastructure for AI agents and apps, and its open-source SDK, Stagehand, lets developers write automations using natural language - adapting seamlessly as websites evolve. Paul shares his belief that browser automation is a critical but underinvested primitive that future AI applications will depend on for years. He traces the journey from the limitations of traditional headless browsers and brittle RPA tools to the emergence of a cleaner, more adaptable framework built for the AI era. We dive into: Stagehand’s design philosophy: minimal feature bloat and strong abstractions. Developer-first community: TypeScript and Python support driven by user demand and open-source contributions prioritized through community PRs. Director, Browserbase’s new layer for non-technical users: “if v0 was for building websites, Director is for building automations.” How open source investment fuels both innovation and integration, and why Browserbase believes the next billion-dollar company will be built on top of its framework. The evolving relationship between AI agents and the web, touching on Cloudflare, automation ethics, and where the line lies between automation and scraping. Paul also reflects on inspiration from figures like Jeff Lawson, the importance of great abstractions for new developers, and the “moment of magic” when AI begins to work on your behalf.

    43 min
  3. E183: Why English Isn't a Programming Language - the BAML Story

    20 OCT

    E183: Why English Isn't a Programming Language - the BAML Story

    This episode dives into why code quality still matters in the age of AI, and why English - no matter how good models get - won’t replace programming. Our guest is Co-Founder of Boundary, Vaibhav Gupta, and he shares the journey behind BAML, a new programming language to write and manage AI logic. After 12 pivots and 3.5 years, the team realized something simple but powerful:AI tools were evolving fast, but the code was ugly. Most AI generated code was unnecessarily long and messy. For builders who viewed code as artistic expression, that was painful. Once they tried BAML, everything changed. It was clean, elegant - completely the opposite of AI slop. It wasn’t an overnight success. It took nine months to reach ten users — but the early ones stayed because of thoughtful design: Easy model swapping Full visibility into every prompt and test case A workflow so simple that non-technical users (even lawyers!) could test code BAML was built with a philosophy that code is the source of truth, not the docs. The conversation touches on how LLM observability and thoughtfully designed code make BAML unique. It’s inspired by the same thinking that made React sticky - beauty and composability. Pretty code, the founder believes, isn’t vanity - it’s a functional advantage: Fewer bugs Easier to reason about Friendlier for AI-generated systems

    37 min
  4. E182: The Rise of ClickHouse

    8 OCT

    E182: The Rise of ClickHouse

    In the episode, we sat down with ClickHouse Co-Founder Yury Izrailevsky to unpack how one of the fastest open-source databases in the world became the analytics engine of choice for 2,000 customers including Harvey, Canva, HP, and Supabase. From its Yandex origins to powering AI observability, Yury shares how ClickHouse balances open-source roots, cloud innovation, and a remote-first culture moving at breakneck speed. ClickHouse's Series C valued the company at $6.35B earlier this year, and just yesterday they announced an extension to that round, just months after it was raised. In this episode, we dig into: Origins & Founding Story ClickHouse began as an internal project at Yandex to power a Google Analytics–style platform, focused on performance and scale. Open-sourced in 2016 - rapid global adoption laid the foundation for ClickHouse the company. Yury first discovered ClickHouse while at Google; impressed by its speed, he later co-founded the company in 2021 alongside Aaron Katz (ex-Elastic) and the original creator Alexey Milovidov. Why ClickHouse Stands Out Column-oriented, open source OLAP database designed for massive-scale analytical processing. Excels in performance, efficiency, and cost - ideal for large data volumes and real-time analytics (and now AI workloads). Architectural choices: Columnar storage = better compression and faster execution. Separation of compute and storage enables elasticity, scalability, and resilience in the cloud. Open Source vs. Cloud Open-source version offers freedom and flexibility. Cloud product delivers much lower total cost of ownership and fully managed experience. Architectural parity between the two ensuring no vendor lock-in for customers. Customers can run the same queries on both; most stay with cloud due to simplicity and cost efficiency. Use Cases & Ecosystem 4 main use cases: Real-time analytics Data Warehousing Observability AI / ML Workloads Company Building & Culture Fully remote from day one. Prioritized experienced, self-sufficient engineers over early-career hires. Built and launched GA version in less than a year - insane pace of innovation. Innovation & Community Monthly release cadence. Hundreds of integrations and connectors. Strong open-source and commercial community Advice for Founders Focus on what matters most Hire mature, independent thinkers. Move fast but maintain quality; ClickHouse Cloud achieved production-grade quality in record time.

    47 min
  5. E181: Why Multimodal Is the Future of AI Data Workloads

    9 SEP

    E181: Why Multimodal Is the Future of AI Data Workloads

    Chang She is Co-Founder & CEO of LanceDB, the multimodal lakehouse platform. Their open source data format lance has over 5K stars on GitHub and is a modern columnar data format for ML and LLMs implemented in Rust. LanceDB has raised $41M from investors including Theory Ventures, CRV, and Essence VC. In this episode, we dig into: Early focus: autonomous vehicles; solved real-time analysis limits with Lance format → 9,000% performance gain. Multi-modal AI taking off (vision, audio, text); Midjourney & Runway as pioneers; audio now a major category. How they built trust through open source. Integrated workflows (data prep + search + embedding) going beyond vector DBs; education needed to show full value. Cloud/serverless launch in 2023–24 enabled seamless local-to-production use. Future bets: audio infra, robotics, spatial reasoning; vector DBs risk irrelevance if they don’t evolve.

    37 min
  6. E180: Why Kubernetes Still Needs Simplifying: The Nadrama Story

    24 AGO

    E180: Why Kubernetes Still Needs Simplifying: The Nadrama Story

    Ryan Djurovich is the Founder & CEO of Nadrama, the open source infrastructure automation platform that deploys containers instantly. In this episode, we dig into: Kubernetes challenges that still exist today – setup and operations are notoriously hard and complex. What great developer experience means to him – focused on making deployments super simple by streamlining infrastructure and common tasks. Core value of Nadrama – developers just want to deploy apps; Nadrama abstracts away infrastructure pain. His view on what being truly open source means (including using the Apache 2.0 license) Ryan's user discovery process - talking directly with as many users as possible, mining his network / folks he's worked with in the past, community events & meetups. Navigating the earliest days of Nadrama Security philosophy – believes in baseline security for all accounts (not just enterprise), informed by a Cloudflare background.

    33 min
  7. E179: LLMs for Software Maintenance (the Grit Story)

    18 AGO

    E179: LLMs for Software Maintenance (the Grit Story)

    Morgante Pell is the Founder of Grit, the developer tool that puts software maintenance on autopilot and was acquired by Honeycomb in April 2025. In this episode, we dig into: The Grit product and how LLMs have made software maintenance much more efficient Launching GritQL - Grit's embedded query language for searching and transforming code Their early focus on the JavaScript community The motivation for Grit to open source How AI generated code has put pressure on software maintenance Where new problems have been created by AI-generated code The acquisition by Honeycomb - motivation, integration, and how the deal happened

    43 min
  8. E178: Building Safer AI Agents with Portia AI

    31 JUL

    E178: Building Safer AI Agents with Portia AI

    Emma Burrows is Co-Founder & CTO of Portia AI, the platform to build AI agents in regulated environments. Their open source Python SDK provides a developer framework for predictable and stateful agentic workflows. Portia AI has raised around $5M from investors including General Catalyst and First Minute Capital. In this episode, we dig into: Why they built an end-to-end platform from agent planning to deployment The focus on accuracy as their true north star metric Their paid contribution program How their found their initial ICP in regulated industries Why 2026 will be the year of agents Her best fundraising advice (hint: never really stop fundraising)

    33 min
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The leading podcast on how to build a successful open source company. Learn from the founders of HashiCorp, Chronosphere, Vercel, MongoDB, DBT, mobile.dev and more!

Información

  • Creador
    Robby (MTF); Tim (Essence VC)
  • Años de actividad
    2021 - 2025
  • Episodios
    185
  • Clasificación
    Apto
  • Copyright
    © 410155
  • Mostrar sitio web
    Open Source Startup Podcast

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