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Stories from the trenches about tech startups and businesses.
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Founders Talk Founders Talk #87

Building an investment platform for everyone

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2022-02-12T00:00:00Z #startups 🎧 10,639

This week Adam is joined by Joe Percoco — the Co-CEO of Titan, a premier investment manager for everyone. Titan is an investment company, a media, and a tech company, all rolled into one. Mid last year, they closed a $58 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $450 million valuation. They currently have $750 million in assets managed and more than 35,000 clients.

Why should Titan exist? In Joe’s words, “Wall Street ignores everyday investors, and caters only to the ultra wealthy. This divide doesn’t sit well with us. So, we built Titan.” On today’s show Joe shares the journey, the why’s, the how’s, and the sequencing it might take to get to a $1 trillion of assets managed.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #86

Bringing observability superpowers to all

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2022-01-28T12:00:00Z #startups +1 🎧 9,110

This week Adam is joined by Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Christine and Adam recorded this show late last year, just after their Series C funding round. They talk about the superpower of observability for developers, how she and Charity Majors got to the place to found Honeycomb, the state of their platform today, what exactly observability is, and their goals for the future of Honeycomb.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #476

Supabase is all in on Postgres

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2022-01-25T03:30:00Z #oss +2 🎧 46,670

This week Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase joined us to catch us up on the next big thing happening in the world of Postgres. Supabase might be best known as “the open source Firebase alternative,” a tagline they might be reluctant to maintain. But from Adam’s perspective, he’s never been more excited about what they’re bringing to market for Postgres fans. In the last year, Supabase has gone from 0 to more than 80,000 databases on their platform — and they’re still in beta…and it’s open source. Hopefully today’s show sheds some light on why everyone is talking about Supabase.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #85

Making the last database you’ll ever need

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2022-01-14T20:00:00Z #startups +3 🎧 9,760

This week Adam is joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. Now that PlanetScale is in general availability, Adam had to get Sam on the show to talk about the behind the scenes of building this database platform, how this is the last database you’ll ever need and what that means for developers, why serverless, its open source underpinnings with Vitess, and a preview of what’s to come.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #84

Building on global bare metal

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2021-11-24T19:30:00Z #startups +1 🎧 9,419

This week Adam is joined by Zac Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and now running Equinix Metal. They talk about the early days of the internet infrastructure space, the beginnings of Packet, the “why” of bare metal, transitioning Packet from startup to global company overnight when they were acquired by Equinix, and how all this for Zac is 20 years in the making.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #83

Making the Web. Faster.

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2021-11-05T19:30:00Z #startups 🎧 8,454

Today Adam is joined by Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. They talk about building the platform that’s making the web faster and lets front-enders do their best work, his framework for leading as a CEO, what’s next for Next.js and Next.js Live, and how everything for Vercel is built on “Develop. Preview. Ship.”

Founders Talk Founders Talk #82

Journey to CEO, again

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2021-10-28T17:30:00Z #startups +2 🎧 12,087

Today Adam is joined by Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. Evan’s journey to become the CEO was not by way of founder, in this company. Evan has founded several companies in the past, and he’s been in a CEO position for more than 22 years. But InfluxData was founded by Paul Dix, and Paul knew years ago that his role (best role?) was to lead the technical and product direction of the company, which lead him to Evan. Today we share that story as well as a glimpse into operating the business that built the defacto platform for building time series applications with deep roots in open source.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #81

The future of code search

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2021-10-20T19:00:00Z #startups +1 🎧 7,272

Today Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph. He’s been tracking Sourcegraph for years now and knew one day they would hit Unicorn status, and that happened this year. They’re just off a massive $125M Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.625B valuation to bring code search to every developer. The future of code search has never been more clear and we’re excited to share today’s show with you.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #460

The business model of open source

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2021-09-17T20:30:00Z #oss +1 🎧 46,271

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #80

Iterating to globally distributed apps and databases

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2021-09-03T20:00:00Z #startups 🎧 8,701

Today Adam is joined by Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly.io — a platform for running full stack apps and databases close to users. This conversation with Kurt talks through his journey as a developer and entrepreneur, fundraising, getting into Y Combinator (twice), and how they’ve iterated on the Fly platform since 2017 to get to where they are right now.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #79

The acquisition of a lifetime

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2021-08-26T11:00:00Z #startups +1 🎧 7,011

On today’s show Adam is joined by John Nunemaker (an old friend). For some of you listening you might remember John’s appearance on The Changelog #11, which was basically forever ago. Or his company Ordered List — they made Gauges, Harmony, and Speaker Deck which was quite popular in its time — so much so that they attracted the attention of Chris Wanstrath, one of the co-founders of GitHub to acquire Ordered List. The rest as they say is history. Today, John and I go back through that history to see what it was like to be acquired by GitHub and how that single choice has forever changed his life.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #78

Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition

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2021-08-13T11:00:00Z #startups 🎧 7,575

This week Adam is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0. Auth0 is a for developers, by developers identity, access, security, and authentication platform built for the cloud that secures billions of logins every year. Mid 2020 they raised $120 million at a $1.92 billion valuation after being told no several times. Then, earlier this year in March they announced they were being acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion, in a bold and future-thinking all stock deal. This episode is full of wisdom, inspiration, and tactical advice that Eugenio has used to build Auth0.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #77

From open source to commercially viable

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2021-08-09T21:00:00Z #startups +2 🎧 6,821

This week Adam is joined by Asim Aslam, the founder of Micro - a new cloud platform entirely focused on the developer experience of consuming and publishing public APIs. Asim’s journey spans many years of open source work on Micro. His sole focus right now, is evolving that work into a commercially viable business. This episode is jam-packed with stories of great timing, grit, resilence, success and failure, and, of course, lessons learned.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #76

From disrupting the cloud to IPO

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2021-07-12T20:30:00Z #startups +1 🎧 7,005

This week Adam is joined by Mitch Wainer, previously CMO at DigitalOcean and a member of the founding team. They talk about his journey as an entrepreneur and marketer, the early days at DigitalOcean, and everything that went into disrupting the cloud with blazing fast SSDs. Back in March (2021), DigitalOcean started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — this obviously earned Mitch and many others a very large payday. They also talk about the work Mitch is doing now with Welcome and Sponsored.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #445

Funds for open source

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2021-06-18T21:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 33,219

This week we’re talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year Open Collective announced “Funds for Open Source.” The idea is simple, make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective along with Gitcoin announced fundoss.org as part of Maintainer Week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 dollars funding open source that you can support.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #443

Exploring Deno Land 🦕

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2021-06-08T12:00:00Z #deno +3 🎧 32,187

This week we’re joined by Ryan Dahl, Node.js creator, and now the creator of Deno - a simple, modern and secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript that uses V8 and is built in Rust.

We talk with Ryan about the massive success of Node and how it impacted his life, and how he eventually created Deno and what he’s doing differently this time around. We also talk about The Deno Company and what’s in store for Deno Deploy.

Go Time Go Time #177

Building startups with Go

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2021-04-29T15:45:00Z #go +1 🎧 18,366

Startups are all about iterating quickly, building MVPs, and finding that elusive product market fit, so how does Go fit into that picture? Is Go a good choice for startups, or is it exclusively for the larger corporations? In this episode Jon is joined by four startup founders to learn about their experience building a startup with Go.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #75

The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience

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2021-03-26T18:00:00Z #startups +2 🎧 7,022

This week Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.

Go Time Go Time #169

Go at Clever

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2021-03-04T16:30:00Z #go +1 🎧 14,726

In this episode we explore how Clever started using Go. What technologies did Clever start with, how did they transition to Go, and what were the motivations behind those changes? We then explore some of the OS tech written by the team at Clever.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #74

Intensely focused on building a software company

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2021-02-23T20:30:00Z #startups 🎧 6,141

This week Adam talks with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder & CEO of Raygun. Raygun is an award-winning application monitoring company founded by John-Daniel Trask (better known as JD) and Jeremy Boyd in Wellington, New Zealand. They have revenues in the 8 digits annually, and have done it with very little funding (~1.7M USD). Today’s conversation with JD shares a ton of wisdom. Listen twice and take notes.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #73

Balancing business and open source

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2020-11-23T22:00:00Z #startups +2 🎧 6,413

Raj Dutt is the founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. Grafana has become the world’s most popular open source technology used to compose observability dashboards (we use Grafana here at Changelog). Raj and team are 100% focused on building a sustainable business around open source. They have this “big tent” open source ecosystem philosophy that’s driving every aspect of building their business around their open source, as well as other projects in the open source community. But, to understand the wisdom Raj is leading with today, we have to go back to where things got started. To do that we had to go back like Prince to 1999…

Founders Talk Founders Talk #72

Slow and steady wins

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2020-08-03T19:30:00Z #startups 🎧 6,828

Jeff Sheldon is the founder and creator of Ugmonk. Jeff is a designer by trade, and an entrepreneur by accident. I been following Jeff’s journey for the better part of Ugmonk’s existence. I’m also a customer. Jeff and I hold several similar values near and dear to our hearts. In addition to my appreciation for Jeff’s product design abilities, and how he leads his business, I also appreciate Jeff’s awareness and focus on the long hard path.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #402

What's next for José Valim and Elixir?

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2020-07-10T17:30:00Z #elixir +2 🎧 27,226

We’re joined again by José Valim talking about the recent acquihire of Plataformatec and what that means for the Elixir language, as well as José. We also talk about Dashbit a new 3 person company he helped form from work done while at Plataformatec to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production. Lastly we talk about a new idea José has called Bytepack that aims to help developers package and deliver software products to developers and enterprises.

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