Open Source Startup Podcast

Robby (MTF); Tim (Essence VC)
  • 5.0 (17)
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

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. E178: Building Safer AI Agents with Portia AI

    JUL 31

    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
  2. E177: RunReveal's Anti SIEM SIEM Platform (With AI That Actually Works!)

    JUL 8

    E177: RunReveal's Anti SIEM SIEM Platform (With AI That Actually Works!)

    Alan Braithwaite is Co-Founder & CTO of RunReveal, the security data platform with real-time monitoring, built-in detections, and AI-powered investigations. Today, they manage and analyze security logs for teams at Harvey, ClickHouse, Cloudflare, and Temporal. RunReveal has multiple open source projects including event stream processing library kawa and query language pql. RunReveal has raised from investors including Costanoa, Modern Technical Fund, and Runtime Ventures. In this episode, we dig into: Why today's modern security teams are rethinking data management The benefits of building RunReveal on ClickHouse How they worked with early believers / customers like Temporal Their open source strategy and building trust with the community through open sourcing components like their event processing library Their MCP server and enabling security teams to use AI to automate investigations (including the launch of their new remote MCP server)

    44 min
  3. E176: Why All AI Agents Will Need Cloud Sandboxes

    JUN 23

    E176: Why All AI Agents Will Need Cloud Sandboxes

    Vasek Mlejnsky is Co-Founder & CEO of E2B, the open-source runtime for executing AI-generated code in secure cloud sandboxes. Essentially, they give AI agents cloud computers. Their open source repos, particularly e2b which has 9K GitHub stars, have been widely adopted to help securely run AI-generated code. E2B has raised $12M from investors including Decibel and Sunflower. In this episode, we dig into: Why agents need a sandbox Building a new category of infra tooling, much like LaunchDarkly Some of their viral content moments - including Greg Brockman sharing their videos Figuring out the right commercial offering Why they don't agree with pricing per token Why moving from Prague to the Bay Area felt essential for them as founders

    37 min
  4. E175: How Dragonfly Is Taking on Redis With a New Data Store

    MAY 19

    E175: How Dragonfly Is Taking on Redis With a New Data Store

    Roman Gershman is Co-Founder & CTO of Dragonfly, the drop-in Redis replacement for heavy data workloads that has significant performance, cost, and scale benefits. Their open source dragonflydb has 28K stars on GitHub. Dragonfly has raised $21M from investors including Quiet Capital and Redpoint. In this episode, we dig into: The challenges with Redis The users that have really benefitted from Dragonfly (high scale + real-time needs - gaming, B2C) The benefits of being multi-threaded How they got some of their bigger users / customers like Twilio, SoFi, and Spotify

    40 min
  5. E174: The SDF / DBT Acquisition (1 + 1 = 3)

    MAY 2

    E174: The SDF / DBT Acquisition (1 + 1 = 3)

    Lukas Schulte is Co-Founder & CEO of SDF Labs, the developer platform that scales SQL understanding across organizations, which was recently acquired by data transformation unicorn dbt Labs. In this episode, he's joined by Anders Swanson, Senior Developer Experience Advocate at dbt, to discuss the acquisition and future of data engineering. In this episode, we dig into: How the acquisition happened, as well as the M&A process How dbt thinks about building capabilities internally vs. making acquisitions How the SDF platform will improve the lives of dbt users The most challenging parts about the integration What the future developer experience for data teams will be like A glimpse into the future of data engineering

    40 min
  6. E173: Feature Flagging with OpenFeature

    APR 14

    E173: Feature Flagging with OpenFeature

    Andrew Norris is Co-Founder & CEO of DevCycle, the leading feature flagging platform based on the OpenFeature project. OpenFeature provides a standard for feature flagging unifying tools behind a common interface and avoiding vendor lock-in at the code level. DevCycle is a product created by Taplytics, the platform for marketing and product teams to A/B test. In 2023, they raised $5M to scale DevCycle. In this episode, we dig into: The creation of DevCycle through insights at Taplytics Learning to sell to engineers (DevCycle) vs. marketing teams (Taplytics) The decision to keep Talytics going vs. focus solely on DevCycle Why engineers prefer open standards like OpenFeature How their GTM works alongside OpenFeature

    35 min
  7. E172: How MetalBear Makes Cloud Development 100x Faster

    APR 7

    E172: How MetalBear Makes Cloud Development 100x Faster

    Aviram Hassan is Co-Founder & CEO of MetalBear, the cloud development platform that lets developers run local code as if it were part of their remote environment. Their project, mirrord, has 4K stars on GitHub and is loved by users at companies like SentinelOne, Flexport, and Run.ai. In this episode, we dig into: How traditional staging environments create friction for cloud developers Their unique approach that allows for concurrency - and educating the market on it How open source helped build trust with big, enterprise customers early The story behind their first big customer win Focusing on a killer, fast time to value implementation Introducing monetization early, and how their products align with open source mirrord

    35 min
  8. E171: How Companies Like Block Build Viral Open Source Projects

    APR 3

    E171: How Companies Like Block Build Viral Open Source Projects

    Manik Surtani is Head of Open Source and Bradley Axen is Principal Engineer at Block. Manik was key to launching Block's Open Source Programs Office and Bradley is a major open source contributor - including the project Goose which is Block's extensible AI agent project. It currently has over 11K stars on GitHub and has been used for a number of internal use cases at Block as well as by the general AI builder ecosystem. In this episode, we dig into: Block's history releasing and supporting open source projects, and how that led to the creation of the programs office How big companies like Block approach open source and come up with ideas for projects like Goose The Goose project and how it's different from other agent frameworks

    40 min
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5
out of 5
17 Ratings

About

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!

Information

  • Creator
    Robby (MTF); Tim (Essence VC)
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2025
  • Episodes
    178
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 410155
  • Show Website
    Open Source Startup Podcast

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