Open Source Startup Podcast

In our latest episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Jon Morehouse, founder and CEO of infrastructure company Nuon which enables Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) for everyone. This is an exclusive podcast episode with Jon digging into their decision to open source Nuon! The episode discusses the industry’s growing shift toward Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), where SaaS products run directly inside a customer’s cloud account rather than the vendor’s. This model is especially attractive to enterprises because it improves security, data sovereignty, and trust, while enabling earlier pilots and shorter sales cycles. Infrastructure products like Nuon focus on making this practical by packaging applications so they work in customer environments without requiring vendor access, positioning BYOC as an enterprise-first approach that is likely to become the default way software is delivered.A key theme is open source as a trust and distribution strategy. In the infrastructure space, open sourcing lowers perceived risk, deepens customer collaboration, and builds community, which in turn acts as sales enablement for large enterprise deals. The conversation also connects BYOC to AI, highlighting patterns like bring-your-own-model, keys, and GPUs, and frames BYOC as a spectrum rather than a binary choice. The broader vision is to define and lead a BYOC movement by uniting vendors around shared standards, trust, and community-driven adoption.

In our latest episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Yoni Michael and Kostas Pardalis, Co-Founders of Typedef. Both have deep backgrounds in data infrastructure (Starburst, Tecton, etc.) and, after meeting through a "blind date" at Blue Bottle Coffee, decided to team up to address the growing brittleness of large-scale data pipelines - issues made worse by the rise of AI.They explain how traditional systems like Spark weren’t designed for today’s AI workloads, especially unstructured data and LLM inference. Fenic was their answer: an open-source engine and DataFrame library built specifically for LLM workflows, multi-step reasoning, and agentic systems - without the operational complexity.Their biggest lessons: start GTM early, talk to as many data leaders as possible, and keep validating - insights that led directly to open-sourcing Fenic and building its MCP-powered developer experience.

In our latest episode, Robby and Tim talk with Will McGugan, creator of the Rich and Textual open source projects and founder of Textualize and Toad (not yet released), about the challenges of turning beloved open-source projects into real businesses. Despite Rich and Textual's huge adoption in the Python community, he says he waited too long to monetize, focused too much on technical perfection, and tried to build infrastructure before a killer product. He also burned himself out and wishes he had simplified and hired earlier.McGugan believes the terminal is a neglected but essential interface, prized for speed and flow. Rich and Textual modernized terminal output, but monetizing open-core dev tools proved difficult. His new project, Toad, aims to be a universal AI front-end for the terminal - open-source, protocol-driven, and able to plug into different agent back ends like Claude and others. The goal: seamless workflows and modern UX in the environment developers already live in.Big takeaways: monetize early, ship a killer app sooner, don’t overcomplicate structure, and avoid grinding yourself into the ground.

In this episode, we sit down with Paul Klein IV, Founder & CEO of Browserbase, to explore how his team is redefining the foundation of AI-driven browser automation. Browserbase provides the web browser infrastructure for AI agents and apps, and its open-source SDK, Stagehand, lets developers write automations using natural language - adapting seamlessly as websites evolve.Paul shares his belief that browser automation is a critical but underinvested primitive that future AI applications will depend on for years. He traces the journey from the limitations of traditional headless browsers and brittle RPA tools to the emergence of a cleaner, more adaptable framework built for the AI era.We dive into:Stagehand’s design philosophy: minimal feature bloat and strong abstractions.Developer-first community: TypeScript and Python support driven by user demand and open-source contributions prioritized through community PRs.Director, Browserbase’s new layer for non-technical users: “if v0 was for building websites, Director is for building automations.”How open source investment fuels both innovation and integration, and why Browserbase believes the next billion-dollar company will be built on top of its framework.The evolving relationship between AI agents and the web, touching on Cloudflare, automation ethics, and where the line lies between automation and scraping.Paul also reflects on inspiration from figures like Jeff Lawson, the importance of great abstractions for new developers, and the “moment of magic” when AI begins to work on your behalf.

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 swappingFull visibility into every prompt and test caseA workflow so simple that non-technical users (even lawyers!) could test codeBAML 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 bugsEasier to reason aboutFriendlier for AI-generated systems