Open Source Underdogs

Intro Mike: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, founder of Gluu, and this is episode 70 with Patrick Backman, General Partner, CEO and Co-Founder at OpenOcean, and Co-Founder of MariaDB. This episode uncharacteristically diverges from the normal format. It’s more of a general interview than a discussion on the... The post Episode 70: Early-Stage Venture Capital, OpenOcean, with Patrik Backman first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike: Hello, and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, Founder of Gluu, and this is episode 69, with Kevin Mueller, Founder and CEO of Passbolt. Passbolt helps teams securely share secrets, which could be passwords, API credentials or cryptographic keys. It’s one of the few open-source projects in the privileged... The post Episode 68: Kevin Mueller, Co-Founder / CEO Passbolt first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, Founder of Gluu, and this is episode 68 with Solomon Hykes, Co-Founder and CEO of Dagger, but also formerly the co-founder and CTO of Docker. Back in February, I recorded this episode at the Civo Navigate conference in my hometown of Austin,... The post Episode 68: Solomon Hykes, Co-Founder / CEO Dagger first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host Mike Schwartz, founder of Gluu, and this is episode 67 with Peter Farkas, Co-founder and CEO of FerretDB. Why FerretDB and not PigeonDB? That’s a very good question. Whereas pigeons are underappreciated for their speed and resiliency, ferrets are fierce and furry and... The post Episode 67: Document Database FerretDB with Peter Farkas, Co-Founder/CEO first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

OSFS Website: https://05f5.com/ Intro Michael: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is a special episode to promote the inaugural Open Source Founder Summit, which is happening in Paris, May 27th and 28th. Talking about this event is Emily Omier, host of The Business of Open Source Podcast,... The post Episode 66: Open Source Founders Summit 05f524, with Emily Omier, Founder first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 65 with Nick Schrock, Founder and CTO of Dagster, a platform that helps companies create data pipelines, which is critical to transform and update data in order to make it useful, for example, to generate reports, content,... The post Episode 65: Scaling Data Pipelines with Nick Schrock, Founder/CTO of Dagster Labs first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 64 with Idit Levine, Founder and CEO of Solo.io, an API Gateway and Service Mesh company with a product called Gloo – not to be confused with Gluu – the company that I lead, who sponsors this podcast.I’ve been... The post Episode 64: API Service Mesh with Idit Levine, CEO and Founder of Solo.io first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 63, with Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, the software startup behind Cilium, an eBPF-based Networking, Security and Observability project.  This episode was recorded in early February at the inaugural State of Open Source Conference or SoCon,... The post Episode 63: EBPF Networking Isovalent with Liz Rice – Chief Open Source Officer first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Almandine Le Pape is the Co-Founder and CEO of Element, the the company behind the Matrix protocol, which deines a "chat" and collaboration protocol that enables federation across Slack, Rocket.Chat, Element, and many other implementations. The post Episode 62: Amandine Le Pape, Element CO-Founder / COO, Messaging and Collaboration first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 61, with guest Nauren Batjargal, Co-Founder and COO of Erxes, a firm based in Mongolia that produces an open-source CRM and Customer Experience Platform. It is the first crowdfunded startup I’ve interviewed in the series. So,... The post Episode 61: Interview with Nauren Batjargal, Co-Founder & COO of Erxes, a Leading Open -Source Customer Experience Platform first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Michael: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 60 with guest, Antti Karjalainen, a co-founder and CEO of RoboCorp. RoboCorp is a vendor in the RPA or Robotic Process Automation software market. It’s a type of software that allows businesses to automate repetitive and routine tasks... The post Episode 60 – Robotic Process Automation with Antti Karjalainen, Founder / CEO of RoboCorp first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs episode 59, with guest Igor Farinic, Co-founder and CEO of Evolveum. For those of you who don’t know Evolveum, it’s a European company based in Slovakia that specializes in Identity Management and Governance. This kind of software is used by Enterprises to provision and manage... The post Episode 59 – Igor Farinic, Evolveum: Open -Source Software Vendor in the Identity Management and Governance Space first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Michael: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 58, an interview with Armon Dadgar, Co-Founder and CTO of HashiCorp, the company behind the Uber successful open-source projects Terraform and Vault. In addition to writing one of the pillars of cloud infrastructure with over 100 million... The post Episode 58: Cloud Infrastructure Automation Platform with Armon Dadgar, Co-Founder & CTO of HashiCorp first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Tokenizing the FOSS package ecosystem. The post Episode 57 – Tokenizing the FOSS Package Ecosystem, with Max Howell, Founder of tea.xyz first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike Schwartz: Federico, welcome to the podcast! Federico Kunze Küllmer: Hey, Mike, thanks for having me today! Background Mike Schwartz: Before we dive into Evmos, tell us a little bit about your journey how’d you get here? Federico Kunze Küllmer: So, I started in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering in Chile. I did a semester... The post Episode 56 – Connecting Blockchains in Web3 EVMOS, with Federico Kunze Küllmer, Co-Founder of EVMOS first appeared on Open Source Underdogs.

Intro Mike Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is Episode 55, with Miguel Valdés Faura, CEO and Co-Founder of Bonitasoft. Not every tech company follows the same trajectory to success. Hypergrowth is great if your market supports it, but the world of infrastructure software is diverse, and...

Intro Mike: Hello, and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is the episode 54, with Justin Borgman, Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Starburst, the company behind the Presto Data Access Project. Before we get started, I have a quick request – we all want to help open-source founders and startups....

Intro Mike: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 53, with Rajoshi Ghosh, co-founder of Hasura, a relatively young startup, using GraphQL to connect Enterprise data. I’m happy to report that Rajoshi is the first Indian national we’ve had as a guest on the podcast, a...

Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I am your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 52 with Melissa Di Donato, CEO of SUSE. SUSE really needs no introduction except to say that as one of the oldest open-source companies in the industry, it maybe has more traction than most people...

Interview with Cornelia Davis, CTO of Weaveworks, a leader in the cloud native infrastructure open source software ecosystem.

Intro Mike Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 50 with Kathryn Erickson who helps lead open-source strategy at DataStax. Founded in 2010 and currently employing about 500 people, DataStax was one of the first and most successful companies in the Apache Cassandra big data Ecosystem....

Intro Mike Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 49 with Martin Buhr, CEO of Tyk. API Management is a hyper-competitive market–there are commercial, open-source and SaaS products from which to choose. This makes Tyk’s success even more impressive. I think they’ve done a lot of...

Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 48 with Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Gravitational.This episode, it’s a little longer than most, clocking in closer to 45 minutes. That’s definitely because Ev has such a broad breadth of technical and business experience, we probably...

Intro Michael Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host Michael Schwartz, and this is episode 47 with Tracy Miranda, Director of Open-Source Community at CloudBees. CloudBees is a company behind Jenkins, the famed project, which is used to automate building, testing and deploying software. Many commercial and open-source projects use Jenkins...

Intro Mike Schwartz: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 46 with Joe Duffy, Founder and CEO of Pulumi. Pulumi is a platform that lets organizations manage infrastructure in the cloud of their choice, using the coding platform of their choice. It’s delivered as either a cloud...

Episode 45 of the Open Source Underdogs Podcast: An interview with Tracy Ragan, CEO and Co-Founder of Deployhub.

Intro Mike: Hello, and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 44 with Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO of Puppet. Yvonne is the third CEO of Puppet. Luke Kanies was the founder, we interviewed him in the episode 22. Sanjay Mirchandani succeeded him, and Yvonne took over from Sanjay in...

Intro Mike: Hello, and welcome to Open Source Underdogs, the first podcast recorded in 2020. I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 43 with Kris Nova, a Chief Open-Source Advocate at Sysdig. Kris, who also goes by Nova, has contributed to Kubernetes and several other open-source successful software projects and startups. She’s currently...

Ed Boyajian, CEO joined EnterpriseDB and helped it pivot from a small organization, to one of the leading Postgres database companies. The company has figured out how to run a profitable business, while embracing and respecting the community and open development process that has formed around Postres for more then two decades.

Geoff Schmidt, CEO and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL, says you don't get to pick your business model, you get to pick your problem. As part of the team who authored one of the most popular monolithic JavaScript rapid application development frameworks, MeteorJS, Geoff describes how they applied their experience to address an even bigger challenge--how to build more flexible backend data services.

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...

Joseph Jacks is the Founder and Organizer of the Open Core Summit (OCS), the world’s first commercial open source software (COSS) event. Joseph is also the Founder and GP of OSS Capital, a venture fund that invests exclusively in early-stage Commercial Open-Source Software (COSS) companies. In this episode, Joseph discusses the exciting origins of the...

Corey Scobie is the Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering at Chef, maintainers of the popular open source configuration management tool. In this episode, Corey discusses the “4 freedoms of open source software,” and various challenges associated with building a business around open source software. Interested in learning more about Chef? We encourage you...

Paul Dix is the Founder and CTO of InfluxData, creator of the popular open source time series database, InfluxDB. In this episode, Paul discusses finding balance between commercial and open source offerings. Transcript Intro Michael Schwartz: Welcome back! You’re listening to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this week, we’re honored to...

John Newton is the Founder and CTO of Alfresco Software, an open source digital business platform specializing in ECM and BPM software. In this episode, John discusses community building, the “open core” business model, and his perspective on the atmosphere surrounding pure play open source businesses in the market today. Transcript Intro Michael Schwartz: Welcome...

Syste “Sid” Sijbrandij is the Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, a DevOps lifecycle tool. In this episode, Syste discusses product pricing and their approach to hiring a globally-dispersed team. Transcript Introduction Michael Schwartz: Welcome back, and thanks for checking into Open Source Underdogs. We have an epic interview this week with Sid Sijbrandij, Co-Founder of...

Richard Wyles is the Co-founder and CEO of Totara Learning, an open source learning management system. In this episode, Richard discusses how Totara monetizes access to its open source software. For further reading on Richard’s perspective regarding open source business, we highly suggest checking out his article: We don’t make software for free, we make...

Emil Eifrem is the Co-founder and CEO of Neo4j, a category-defining graph database platform powering applications for artificial intelligence, fraud detection, real-time recommendations, and master data. In this episode, Emil identifies key questions entrepreneurs must ask in the emerging era of public cloud software. Transcript Intro Michael Schwartz: Welcome back, Underdogs. This week, we’re lucky...

Sam Tuke is the CEO of pHpList, an email marketing system powered by open source software. In this episode, Sam discusses the merits of a SaaS business model versus open core. Transcript Intro Michael Schwartz: Howdy, Underdogs. Welcome to episode 23. Finding all the successful open source software companies is hard work. You can’t Google...

Luke Kanies is the Founder of Puppet, an open source tool for software configuration management. In this episode, Luke discusses the fundamental challenges of starting, building and running an open source software business. Transcript Michael Schwartz: Welcome back to Open Source Underdogs, the podcast where we interview the founders of pure play open source software...

Ravi Mayuram is the CTO and SVP of Engineering at Couchbase, a NoSQL vendor responsible for the Couchbase Server, an open source, NoSQL, document-oriented database. In this episode, Ravi discusses how an entrepreneur may successfully orient themselves around the problem they’re solving. Couchbase Transcript Intro Michael Schwartz: Welcome back to Open Source Underdogs, the podcast...

Ofer Bengal is the Co-founder and CEO of Redis Labs, home of Redis, one the world’s fastest instant experience databases. In this episode, Ofer discusses the evolution of open source software in the cloud-hosted market. To note: This interview took place a few weeks prior to Redis Labs’ announcement of an updated license for modules...