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Technology

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!

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  • 22 episodes
  • Avg 40 min
  • English

Episodes 22

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  • Oct 20, 2025 · 37 min

    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

  • Oct 8, 2025 · 47 min

    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.

Showing 21–22 of 22 episodes