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 StoryClickHouse 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 OutColumn-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. CloudOpen-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 & Ecosystem4 main use cases:Real-time analyticsData WarehousingObservability AI / ML WorkloadsCompany Building & CultureFully 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 & CommunityMonthly release cadence.Hundreds of integrations and connectors.Strong open-source and commercial communityAdvice for FoundersFocus on what matters most Hire mature, independent thinkers.Move fast but maintain quality; ClickHouse Cloud achieved production-grade quality in record time.
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E181: Why Multimodal Is the Future of AI Data Workloads
Chang She is Co-Founder & CEO of LanceDB, the multimodal lakehouse platform. Their open source data format lance has over 5K stars on GitHub and is a modern columnar data format for ML and LLMs implemented in Rust.LanceDB has raised $41M from investors including Theory Ventures, CRV, and Essence VC. In this episode, we dig into:Early focus: autonomous vehicles; solved real-time analysis limits with Lance format → 9,000% performance gain.Multi-modal AI taking off (vision, audio, text); Midjourney & Runway as pioneers; audio now a major category.How they built trust through open source.Integrated workflows (data prep + search + embedding) going beyond vector DBs; education needed to show full value.Cloud/serverless launch in 2023–24 enabled seamless local-to-production use.Future bets: audio infra, robotics, spatial reasoning; vector DBs risk irrelevance if they don’t evolve.
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E180: Why Kubernetes Still Needs Simplifying: The Nadrama Story
Ryan Djurovich is the Founder & CEO of Nadrama, the open source infrastructure automation platform that deploys containers instantly. In this episode, we dig into:Kubernetes challenges that still exist today – setup and operations are notoriously hard and complex.What great developer experience means to him – focused on making deployments super simple by streamlining infrastructure and common tasks.Core value of Nadrama – developers just want to deploy apps; Nadrama abstracts away infrastructure pain.His view on what being truly open source means (including using the Apache 2.0 license) Ryan's user discovery process - talking directly with as many users as possible, mining his network / folks he's worked with in the past, community events & meetups.Navigating the earliest days of Nadrama Security philosophy – believes in baseline security for all accounts (not just enterprise), informed by a Cloudflare background.
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E179: LLMs for Software Maintenance (the Grit Story)
Morgante Pell is the Founder of Grit, the developer tool that puts software maintenance on autopilot and was acquired by Honeycomb in April 2025. In this episode, we dig into:The Grit product and how LLMs have made software maintenance much more efficient Launching GritQL - Grit's embedded query language for searching and transforming codeTheir early focus on the JavaScript community The motivation for Grit to open sourceHow AI generated code has put pressure on software maintenanceWhere new problems have been created by AI-generated code The acquisition by Honeycomb - motivation, integration, and how the deal happened
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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)
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