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Open Source Startup Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by 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!
Latest Episodes
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- Yesterday40 min
E204: Open Source in the Age of Agents With Isaac From Semgrep
In this episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Semgrep Co-Founder & CEO Isaac Evans about the evolution of application security, the Semgrep journey, and building developer tooling in the agentic age. Semgrep's open source static scanner has almost 18K stars on GitHub and finds bug variants with patterns that look like source code.In this episode, we get into the evolution of application security, from the early days of developer security tooling to a world increasingly shaped by AI agents. Isaac shares how his interest in security began at MIT, where he recognized that securing software would become a critical bottleneck to unlocking new technologies. We trace Semgrep’s origins from an internal tool at Facebook to an open-source project and eventually a security platform, including the early customer use cases that shaped the company’s approach to finding vulnerabilities. We also discuss the changing dynamics of open source, why Semgrep is becoming more conservative about what it releases publicly, and how AI is fundamentally reshaping the economics of vulnerability discovery.Looking ahead, we dive into what it means to build security tools for AI agents rather than humans, why the next generation of security products will need to expose deeper capabilities through APIs and agent-native interfaces, and how the rise of AI-generated code is changing who builds software and who is responsible for securing it. He explains why a world with zero vulnerabilities is unlikely, how the roles of security engineers and vulnerability researchers may diverge as AI improves, and why complexity remains the enemy of security. Finally, we discuss how Semgrep is thinking about speed as a growing company, not simply shipping more, but tightening customer feedback loops and increasing how often it delivers meaningful value.
- Sep 9, 202637 min
E203: From Sentry to Modem - Rethinking How Product Teams Listen
In this episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Modem Co-Founder Ben Vinegar who's building the AI product manager for software teams. He was previously a longtime engineering leader at open source application monitoring software platform Sentry. Ben reflects on his journey from Disqus to nearly a decade at Sentry, where he became the company’s first VP of Engineering and worked across product development, SDKs, acquisitions, and incubation. He shares how the rapidly falling cost of software development with AI led him to build Modem, an AI product teammate that helps teams understand what customers are saying and connect that feedback to what they’re shipping.The conversation explores why data and context, not just the agent, are the hard parts of building useful AI products, how conversational data creates a new kind of observability, and why these systems are harder to build internally than they appear. He also discusses open source, dogfooding, and how being deeply fluent with AI is changing the way he hires and builds teams.
- Sep 3, 202636 min
E202: How the Largest MLOps Community Was Built
In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Demetrios Brinkmann, founder of the MLOps Community, the leading community for MLOps with over 90K developers in it today. He's also a Member of the Non-Technical Staff at the Agentic AI Foundation which is an open foundation advancing adoption of leading open source AI projects.This episode explores what it really takes to build a thriving community in a world where social media no longer provides the fast, meaningful feedback it once did. Drawing on lessons from growing the MLOps Community to tens of thousands of members, the conversation breaks down the difference between an audience and a true community, why consistency matters more than explosive growth, and why community-building is a marathon (not a sprint).The episode also covers the role of content, events, personal connections, and storytelling; why community shouldn’t be treated as another marketing channel; and why fostering community needs to be a company-wide effort rather than the responsibility of one community hire. Plus, it touches on the rapid growth of AI and agent communities, including MCP, and what founders can learn from them.
- Aug 3, 202639 min
E201: Building Your Agent Army with Paperclip
In this episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Paperclip Co-Founder Dotta (Nate) whose viral agent orchestration platform has taken off over the past several months as more teams adopt agents at work. Their open source, also called paperclip, has >75K stars on GitHub and is becoming the de facto way to manage a team of agents. This episode explores what it really means to build an “agent-led company.” Rather than thinking of AI agents as isolated tools, Paperclip treats them like employees working toward shared goals, with the platform acting as the company that coordinates them. We discuss why existing AI workflows (whether it’s dozens of Claude Code tabs or standalone coding agents) break down at scale, and how Paperclip provides a unified interface for managing projects, agents, tasks, context, and budgets across any model or AI harness. From marketing and documentation to customer support triage and software development, the conversation dives into how teams can assign the right agents to the right work while keeping humans in control through evaluation, reflection, and orchestration.We also unpack the challenges and opportunities of building an open source agent platform in one of AI’s fastest-moving markets. The discussion covers Paperclip’s explosive early growth, the realities of maintaining a ton of community pull requests, security risks in agentic systems, and why the future isn’t about replacing people with AI - it’s about enabling individuals and organizations to scale their impact through coordinated agents. Looking ahead, we explore Paperclip Cloud, enterprise workflows, governance, and why the next frontier for AI isn’t just better models, but better memory, context, and systems for managing an entire workforce of agents.
- Jul 27, 202644 min
E200: Open Sourcing Warp’s Terminal
This episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Warp founder Zach Lloyd as he shares the company story and decision to open source their core product: the terminal. They now provide an open source agentic development environment (born out of the terminal) which is also called warp and has almost 65K stars on GitHub. Zach discusses his frustration with the traditional terminal and how it inspired him to rebuild it from first principles. Originally conceived before ChatGPT as a more intuitive, collaborative command-line experience, Warp quickly resonated with developers and has since grown to 1 million users. Lloyd discusses the company’s decision to build Warp in Rust, its early reluctance to open source the product, and how the rise of coding agents transformed Warp from a modern terminal into a broader agentic development environment.The conversation also explores Warp’s evolving product vision: a terminal, agent harness, and cloud platform that can orchestrate different models and coding tools without locking companies into a single provider. Lloyd explains how Warp uses agents to triage issues, write and review code, test interfaces, and accelerate open source contributions while keeping humans involved in key decisions. Ultimately, the episode is about how AI is reshaping software development and Warp’s ambition to become the platform that turns ideas, community feedback, and company workflows into shipped software as efficiently as possible.
- Jul 14, 202642 min
E199: Rethinking Infra-as-Code for the AI Era
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Pavlo Baron from Platform Engineering Labs - creators of open source infra-as-code platform formae. This podcast explores why traditional infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and Pulumi can struggle with state, drift, and the disconnect between code and real-world infrastructure. Pavlo shares lessons from building Instana and explains how those experiences led to Formae, an open-source approach that treats infrastructure state as accessible, executable code using Apple’s Pkl language.The conversation also looks at what infrastructure management needs in the AI era. By reducing low-level complexity and giving both humans and AI agents safer abstractions for discovering, modifying, and reconciling infrastructure, Formae aims to make infrastructure automation more reliable and less labor-intensive.
- Jun 18, 202642 min
E198: How Unikraft Launches AI Agents in
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Dr. Felipe Huici, CEO of Unikraft - the compute layer for sandboxes, AI agents, or any workload with VM-grade isolation. Their open source, also called unikraft, has 4K stars on GitHub and provides a next-generation cloud native kernel. This episode explores how Unikraft is building infrastructure for the next generation of AI agents, arguing that agents should run in virtual machines rather than containers. The conversation focuses on the unique requirements of agentic workloads: fast startup times, the ability to pause and resume state, strong isolation, and efficient resource utilization at massive scale. Unikraft’s technology enables lightweight virtual machines that can start in under 10 milliseconds, helping companies reduce latency, lower infrastructure costs, and run large numbers of ephemeral agents on minimal hardware. The discussion also covers emerging AI infrastructure needs such as checkpointing, branching, headless browser automation, and GPU access.The podcast also traces Unikraft’s origins from an academic research project to an open-source Linux Foundation initiative and, eventually, a startup founded in 2022. The conversation examines customer adoption, the role of Unikraft as foundational infrastructure for AI platforms, competition and collaboration within the agent ecosystem, the future of GPUs and virtualization, and lessons learned from building a company in the rapidly evolving cloud and AI infrastructure market.
- Jun 9, 202640 min
E197: The Evolution of Building Open Source Businesses from HashiCorp to Flox
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with James Bayer, Chief Product Officer at software development platform Flox.Flox's open source, also called flox, provides a software environment platform powered by package manager Nix.In this episode, James shares lessons from his career across Cloud Foundry, Pivotal, and HashiCorp, where he helped turn widely adopted open-source projects like Terraform into sustainable businesses. His core takeaway is that support-only open source is difficult to scale; successful companies usually monetize the “multiplayer” capabilities that teams and enterprises need while keeping individual usage free.Now at Flox, James sees a similar opportunity built on top of Nix, a powerful but historically complex technology. He joined because Flox makes Nix dramatically easier to use, helping developers and AI agents manage software environments and dependencies. He also discussed the balance between open-source principles and commercial viability, and why he remains optimistic about the future of software development in the age of AI.
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About Open Source Startup Podcast
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!
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