Open Source Startup Podcast

Tommy Dang is Co-founder & CEO of Mage, the data plumbing platform that's the modern replacement for Airflow. Mage's open source project, mage-ai, has over 3K stars and lets companies run, monitor, and orchestrate thousands of data pipelines.

Mage has raised over $6M from investors including Gradient Ventures.

In this episode, we discuss pivots, testing product ideas with hundreds of potential users (and asking questions like, "what is the most boring part of your data work?"), why company content should be informative and entertaining, and how to approach selling in a customer-centric way.

Mark Fussell & Yaron Schneider are Co-founders of Diagrid, the platform that simplifies and provides access to the power of distributed systems. Diagrid's founders co-created open source Dapr which Diagrid provides a fully managed service on top of. Dapr has over 20K stars and works on any language or framework.

Diagrid has raised over $24M from investors including Norwest Venture Partners and Amplify.

In this episode, we discuss contributors rather than stars as a strong engagement metric, why Open Core wasn't the right business model for Diagrid, learnings for other open source founders & more!

Oskari Saarenmaa is Founder & CEO of Aiven, the fully managed, open source cloud data platform. Their platform combines all the tools needed to connect and manage open source data services such as Apache Kafka, Grafana, MySQL, Redis, InfluxDB along with many others. They have also open sourced a number of projects themselves (see here on GitHub).

Aiven has raised $420M from investors including IVP and Atomico.

In this episode, we discuss automation as a core value, finding a role in the open source ecosystem across multiple projects, the importance of 24/7 support when you have global customers, learning GTM as a technical team & more!

Mike Malone is Founder of Smallstep, the automated certificate management platform for DevOps teams. Their certificate management project, also called smallstep, has 5K stars on GitHub and provides a private certificate authority and ACME server for secure automated certificate management.

Smallstep has raised $26M from investors including Boldstart and StepStone Group.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of staying lean before achieving PMF, where to draw the line on free open source vs. paid product, his learnings as an engineer-turned-founder & more!

YouTube version of the episode here

Graham McNicoll & Jeremy Dorn are Co-founders of GrowthBook, the open source feature flagging and experimentation platform out of YC. Their feature flagging and A/B testing project, also called growthbook, has 4K stars on GitHub.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of having an iterative culture, having a dynamic view on positioning, and the importance of content and market education.