Best Emily Omier Podcasts (2025)

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Go-To-Market for Open Source Companies with Quentin Sinig 34:54

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3h ago34:54

34:54

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Quentin Sinig, who has been the first “business” hire at three open source companies; Strapi, Kestra and now Pruna.ai. We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, which was especially interesting because it spanned three open source companies so we were able to talk about patterns Quentin …

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Open Foundations with Or Weis 37:02

7d ago37:02

37:02

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke to Or Weis, the CEO and co-founder of Permit.io. Or is a serial entrepreneur who has had a long career in developer tools. We talked about Permit’s relationship with open source, including of course the open source projects that they create and maintain. One thing to note is that none of Permit’s op…

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Straddling open source software and the hardware industry with Rob Taylor 34:27

14d ago34:27

34:27

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Rob Taylor, CTO/CSO and founder of ChipFlow. Although ChipFlow is unambiguously a software company, it creates software that facilitate the creation of semiconductors, so it straddles the software and hardware worlds. Some of the things we talked about include: The state of open source in the s…

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The double-edged sword of big initial customers with Taco Potze 39:12

21d ago39:12

39:12

This week I’m back from vacation and I have a new episode of The Business of Open Source, with Taco Potze! Taco is the co-founder and CEO of Open Social. A couple interesting takeaways from our conversation: When you’re transitioning from a services company to a product company, it’s much easier if the product you work on is connected to the servic…

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Build for Dual Audiences with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz 39:31

3M ago39:31

39:31

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz, CEO and co-founder of Penpot. We started out by talking about the transition from services company to product company, how they decided to pivot to building a product company and when they made the decision to go all-in on the product. Perhaps the most interesting part of th…

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Managing community contributors with Alya Abbott 36:23

3M ago36:23

36:23

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked with Alya Abbott, COO of Zulip, about managing community contributors. This is a hot topic for open source companies — and for that matter, open source projects in general, including those that aren’t being monetized in any way. It’s a bit of a third rail in the open source ecosystem to suggest that…

1
Building a Dual Growth Flywheel at GitLab with Nick Veenhof 36:17

3M ago36:17

36:17

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nick Veenhof, Director of Contributor Success at GitLab. GitLab has probably the most well-articulated open source strategy out there, and we talked about the two main prongs of that strategy, the co-create strategy and the dual flywheel strategy. We also talked about incentivizing individuals …

1
Solving Universal, Persistant Problems with David Aronchick 45:47

4M ago45:47

45:47

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with David Aronchick, CEO and founder of Expanso, about luck and timing, building into universal truths and the reasons for Kubernetes’ success. Before David founded Expanso (which is behind the project Bacalhau), he was the first non-founding PM on the Kubernetes project, and we kicked off by talki…

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David and Goliath in the CMS Market with Thomas Schedler 35:31

4M ago35:31

35:31

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Thomas Schedler, co-founder and CEO of Sulu. Sulu is a small, bootstrapped company that spun out of an agency; Thomas was recommended by someone to me as a guest, but when I first reached out to him he was skeptical about coming on the show because he wasn’t sure he was a good fit. But there’s …

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Open Source Firmware for EV Charging Stations with Marco Möller 33:57

4M ago33:57

33:57

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Marco Möller, CEO and co-founder of Pionix. This was a fabulous conversation about a company that’s in a very different market from the usual open source company: They make firmware for EV charging stations, and are behind the EVerest project, which is part of LF Energy. So who is part of the co…

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AI-generated Code Copied from Open Source with Julian Coccia 35:50

5M ago35:50

35:50

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Julian Coccia, CTO of ScanOSS, about selling access to data while making open source software. Of course, we also talked about being an open source company that is also deep in the open source world, helping companies understand their reliance on open source code and how open source is used in …

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How to be Successful when Donating a Project to the CNCF with Liz Rice 40:25

5M ago40:25

40:25

Today on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, which is now part of Cisco. We addressed two subjects: How to be successful as a company that donates their project to the CNCF, and the story of Isovalent’s acquisition by Cisco and the role open source played in that acquisition. We talked about: T…

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Open Source Manifestos with Vincent Untz 39:44

6M ago39:44

39:44

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked about Open Source Manifestos with Vincent Untz, CTO of Centreon. The entire conversation focused on this idea of open source manifestos, which Vincent is going to talk about at Open Source Founders Summit — and I had never heard of before. The idea to create an open source manifesto came about becau…

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How a Rebrand Increased Sales with Lukas Gentele 42:02

6M ago42:02

42:02

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Lukas Gentele, the CEO and co-founder of LoftLabs. Here’s some of the things we covered: There are many open source projects at LoftLabs. We talked about what the team did differently the second time round, when they’d had the experience of creating the first project under their belt, and why t…

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Fundraising and M&A for Open Source Companies with Daniel Jarjoura 43:02

6M ago43:02

43:02

This week on the Business of Open Source I spoke with Daniel Jarjoura, an investor at Avolta who specializes in developer-facing companies, and who writes a newsletter on developer-facing startups and also collects data on investments in open source companies. We spoke about the overall state of investment for open source companies and specifically…

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Products, consulting, and open source with Andrew Martin 36:40

7M ago36:40

36:40

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Andrew Martin, CEO and founder of Control Plane. Control Plane is ultimately a consulting company, as Andrew introduced it. But the company also created and maintains KubeSec, and also has an enterprise version of Flux CD that it licenses. That gives this conversation a slightly different flavor…

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How Technology Decisions Impact Growth with Misha Bragin 35:42

7M ago35:42

35:42

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Misha Bragin, co-founder and CEO of NetBird. This was also the first episode I recorded in 2025, which gives you an idea of how far in advance I’m recording episodes. NetBird has an interesting origin story — it came out of an original idea to make a hardware product, but as Misha and his co-fo…

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Open Source and AI Coding Assistants with Ty Dunn 40:56

7M ago40:56

40:56

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Ty Dunn, founder of Continue.dev, which is an open source AI code assistant. We had a fabulous conversation that touched on both the AI hype wave and why open source. The first thing I’d like to touch on is why Continue.dev is open source, in other words, what business rationale Ty has for taki…

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The CFO's View of Open Source Companies with Eileen Doody and Karen Walker 37:16

7M ago37:16

37:16

This week on The Business of Open Source I had a slightly different conversation: I spoke with the CFOs of two open source companies, Sysdig and Percona, to better understand what is different (and what is not) about financial management in open source companies. Karen Walker is the CFO at Sysdig, and Eileen Doody is the CFO at Percona. They both j…

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Thinking Hard about your License Choice with Ivan Burazin 39:22

8M ago39:22

39:22

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Ivan Burazin, the CEO and co-founder of Daytona. First of all, Daytona was one of the sponsors of the first edition of Open Source Founders Summit, and I had a chance to meet Ivan in person at the event. So a big thank you to him for taking a risk on the first year of the event! But let’s get d…

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Bootstrapping an Open Source Company with Ludovic Dubost 46:21

8M ago46:21

46:21

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Ludovic Dubost, founder and CEO of XWiki about the long history of XWiki, which he started in 2003. This was a wide-ranging conversation… here’s some of the things we covered: Why XWiki is an open source company. Ludovic started out with the explicit goal of creating a company, so why start it…

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Building an Open Source Company for Long-Term Sustainability with John O'Nolan 43:46

8M ago43:46

43:46

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with John O’Nolan, the co-founder of ghost.org. Before further ado, John is going to be one of speakers at Open Source Founders Summit 2025, so if you’d like a chance to dive deeper into any of the subjects we talked about on the podcast with him, in person, you should join us in May. There’s a lot …

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The Complicated Calculus around Donating a Project to a Foundation with Omri Gazette 24:08

8M ago24:08

24:08

In the last episode of The Business of Open Source recorded at KubeCon Salt Lake City, I spoke with Omri Gazitt, co-founder and CEO of Aserto. Aserto has two open source project that it maintains, one of which it donated to the CNCF. In this episode, we talked about the decision to donate a project to the CNCF — both what the process entailed and w…

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A Massive Head Start on Product Development with Open Source with Martin Mao 20:51

9M ago20:51

20:51

This special episode recorded live at KubeCon Salt Lake City last November is with Martin Mao, CEO and co-founder at Chronosphere. We talked about how M3 was foundational to the early history of Chronosphere, and how the ability to leverage M3, which Martin and his co-founder had written while they were still working at Uber. One of the most import…

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Finding Product-Market Fit with Wei Lien Dang 26:45

9M ago26:45

26:45

Happy new year everyone! There was a short break for Christmas + New Years the past two weeks, but this week I’m back with a fabulous episode with Wei Lien Dang, General Partner at Unusual Ventures and formerly co-founder of StackRox. I recorded this episode on-site at KubeCon Salt Lake City back in November 2024. This episode is particularly fabul…

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Maintaining Control of your Brand with Ramiro Berrelleza 24:17

9M ago24:17

24:17

This week on The Business of Open Source, I have a special episode recorded on-site at KubeCon NA this fall, with Ramiro Berrelleza, the CEO of Okteto. We kicked off the conversation with a discussion about branding. Okteto is the name of the company, the name of the project and the name of the product. We started this conversation because it had b…

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KubeCon Special Episode: Changing Culture with Software with Cole Kennedy 17:52

10M ago17:52

17:52

This week on the Business of Open Source, I have an episode recorded on-site at KubeCon SLC last month with Cole Kennedy, co-founder of TestifySec. We kicked off the conversation with a discussion about software development practices in the US Department of Defense and the US government at large — and the challenges involved with deploying quickly …

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KubeCon Special Episode: Managing the Tension between Product and Project with Bobby DeSimone 18:30

10M ago18:30

18:30

Who pays for the future of infrastructure? In this special episode, I spoke to Bobby DeSimone, founder and CEO of Pomerium, about how he feels like infrastructure and security both have to be open source — but then, what does that mean about the future of the financial support for infrastructure and security? We talked about: The importance for cus…

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KubeCon NA Special Episode: The Connection Between Community Engagement and Revenue with Mark Fussell 23:18

10M ago23:18

23:18

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Mark Fussell, CEO and co-founder of Diagrid and co-creator of Dapr, in a special episode recorded on-site at KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City. We kicked off with a discussion of what’s different about running an open source company versus a proprietary software company, and Mark said that a big par…

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ATO Special Episode on Product Strategy with Elias Voelker 17:57

10M ago17:57

17:57

In this last special episode of The Business of Open Source recorded at All Things Open, I spoke with Elias Voelker, VP North America for CheckMK. We talked a lot about product strategy; when CheckMK decided that they needed a clear strategy for deciding which feature goes in the open source project and which goes in the commercial version. Elias f…

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Applying the lessons from Docker with Solomon Hykes 39:06

10M ago39:06

39:06

This week on The Business of Open Source, I have the first episode I recorded on-site at KubeCon Salt Lake City (and the only full-length episode), with Solomon Hykes, CEO and co-founder of Dagger, and co-founder of Docker. One thing Solomon mentions briefly but that is very important is that there are limits to what can be learned from Docker’s st…

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ATO Special Episode with Nithya Ruff 15:31

11M ago15:31

15:31

In this special episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nithya Ruff, director of Amazon’s Open Source Program Office (often referred to as an OSPO). We started out talking a little about what exactly an OSPO is and what they do in companies — something I’m guess not everyone understands. It boils down to managing the company’s open sou…

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ATO special episode with Peter Farkas 16:29

11M ago16:29

16:29

In this special episode recorded at All Things Open, I talk with Peter Farkas, CEO and co-founder of FerretDB. We talked about about MongoDB and the license change fiasco and why Peter wanted to build an open source company and never considered building a non-open source company. The biggest 🤯 in this episode was about enforcing what it means to be…

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Selling Peace of Mind with Bhaskar from YottaDB 29:06

11M ago29:06

29:06

This week’s full-length episode is with Bhaskar, founder of YottaDB. This episode was recorded on-site at All Things Open last week, and we covered a wide range of topics. Including: How the open source ecosystem, and the open source business ecosystem, has changed over the past 30+ years. Who can responsibly self-support an open source database, a…

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ATO Special Episode with Tatiana Krupenya of DBeaver 13:11

11M ago13:11

13:11

This special episode of The Business of Open Source with Tatiana Krupenya, CEO of DBeaver, was recorded on site at All Things Open 2024. It’s a short conversation, so we addressed one main question: What is the difference between running an open source company versus as proprietary software company? Tatiana says the difference is big — and it’s com…

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Behind the Scenes of the Open Source AI Definition with Stefano Maffulli 32:14

11M ago32:14

32:14

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative, about the definition of open source and… the definition of open source AI. We recorded this episode on-site at All Things Open, so there’s a little bit of background noise. We talked about why OSI felt like it needed to develop…

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Price Anchors of Zero Dollars with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick 42:09

11M ago42:09

42:09

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick , the co-CEO of Grist Labs and CTO of Grist Labs. We talked about managing growth of users versus growth of revenue, moving to an open source approach for technical, not technical, reasons, and open-source related product management questions for open sourc…

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Getting people to use the features you already have with Eric Holscher 45:37

11M ago45:37

45:37

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs. We had a really far-ranging conversation that included talking about why documentation is often so bad, why documentation should be a priority, but also Eric’s experience building Read the Docs and Write the Docs. This episode was interesting because …

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Open source companies' reputation problem with Chris Holmes 44:25

12M ago44:25

44:25

Today on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Chris Holmes, co-founder and CEO of Greymatter. Greymatter is deeply involved in the open source ecosystem and maintains the Go Envoy Control Plane, but Chris is adamant that it is not an open source company. We had a great discussion about why that is, what it means for the company and the convers…

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Building your product with your customers with David Höck 40:31

12M ago40:31

40:31

This week on the Business of Open Source, I spoke with David Höck, co-founder of Vendure. We talked about switching licenses from MIT to GPL, the ways that Vendure is different from it’s competitors and how architectural decisions can be a powerful differentiator for an open source company. Favorite quote: “You need to build your product together w…

1
Finding and losing product-market fit with Allard Buijze 44:59

1y ago44:59

44:59

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Allard Buijze, the CTO and founder at AxonIQ. We talked a lot about the importance of open source for getting feedback on your product and validating your idea — or not. One of the things we talked about was how the beginning of AxonIQ was tied to the same consultancy that developed Spring Sou…

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Friendly Competition within the ClickHouse Ecosystem with Robert Hodges 42:51

1y ago42:51

42:51

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity. This is a great example of an open source company that is built on top of an open source project, ClickHouse, that they did not create and still do not have direct control over. Altinity has created and maintains other open source projects in the ClickHouse ecosy…

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Feature prioritization and customers' perceived value with Brad Micklea and Jesse Williams 45:15

1y ago45:15

45:15

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Jesse Williams and Brad Micklea, co-founders of Jozu and each with a long history of experience in various open source companies behind them. Even though Jozu is young, there was a lot to learn from these two and their experience in both open source and non-open source businesses. We talked abo…

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The Importance of Clear Frameworks for Product vs Project with Jimmy Zelinskie 44:47

1y ago44:47

44:47

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Jimmy Zelinskie, co-founder and CPO of Authzed, which is behind SpiceDB. We kicked off the discussion with a really interesting discussion about whether or not SpiceDB is a database and whether or not Authzed is a database company. At first they didn’t see it that way, but as soon as they start…

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Product market fit for project and product with Galeal Zino 37:34

1y ago37:34

37:34

This week on the Business of Open Source I had Galeal Zino, CEO and founder of NetFoundry, which creates OpenZiti. One of the most interesting things about the this conversation was the conversation about how to balance whether you’re promoting the product or the project. I talk to a lot of founders who assume that because you have both, you have t…

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Complicated pricing and competition against the big players with Raphael Michel 40:08

1y ago40:08

40:08

Pretix founder and CEO Raphael Michel has a completely different philosophy about what he is building compared to the big players in the event / ticketing platform space. We had a great conversation this week about Pretix, how Pretix is positioned compared to big players, and who care about the fact that Pretix is an open source company. Some takea…

1
Creating an ecosystem with Ashraf Samhouri 35:16

1y ago35:16

35:16

This week on the The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Ashraf Samhouri, the CEO and co-founder of Activepieces. Activepieces didn’t start as an open source company — and we started out the conversation by talking about why it was important to take an open source route because Activepieces is building an ecosystem. Some other highlights from the…

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Testing 17 different income streams with Per Ploug Krogslund 42:43

1y ago42:43

42:43

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Per Ploug Krogslund, who is currently senior director of developer programs at Docker, and who previously had a number of experiences at the intersection of open source and business. He founded and ran an open source company, Umbraco, for many years, and also led the Open Source Program Office …

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Open source as a privilege of successful businesses with Tom Wilkie 44:55

1y ago44:55

44:55

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs. We talked about how he had a 10-month run building a startup before ultimately joining Grafana in an acquisition — why he thought that was the right move at the time and how it’s developed since then. But Tom has also had a long career in open source businesses…

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Realistic pros and cons of working with foundations with Mike Milinkovich 40:01

1y ago40:01

40:01

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Mike Milinkovich, executive director at the Eclipse Foundation. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the role of open source foundations in the open source ecosystem, especially as related to open source businesses. The existence of open source foundations, and how companies decide to engage…