E142: Redefining Self-Serve Analytics with Dremio

E142: Redefining Self-Serve Analytics with Dremio

Author: Robby (MTF); Tim (Essence VC) July 17, 2024 Duration: 41:26

Tomer Shiran is Founder of Dremio, the data lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI based on open source frameworks Apache Arrow, which the Dremio team created, and Apache Iceberg.

Dremio has raised over $400M from investors including Norwest, Redpoint, Adams Street, Sapphire, Insight, and Lightspeed. They are currently valued at $2B.

In this episode, we dig into Tomer's journey from MapR to Dremio, his initial vision for making the data stack more accessible, their first breakthrough with Apache Arrow and a columnar-format approach, focusing first on project-market fit before monetization, adding support for Apache Iceberg, how they're using AI to improve user experiences & more!


Building a company around open source software is a unique and often misunderstood path, full of specific challenges and rare opportunities. The Open Source Startup Podcast digs into that journey directly with the people who have navigated it, moving beyond theory to the practical realities shared in conversation. Hosts Robby and Tim bring their distinct perspectives from MTF and Essence VC to these discussions, creating a space where founders speak candidly. You’ll hear from the architects behind names like HashiCorp, MongoDB, and Vercel, as well as leaders from Chronosphere, DBT, and mobile.dev, as they unpack their experiences. This podcast focuses on the pivotal decisions around community building, monetization strategies, and maintaining project ethos under the pressures of scaling a business. Each episode serves as a detailed case study, revealing how these companies turned publicly available code into sustainable, impactful enterprises. The dialogue naturally explores the tensions between open collaboration and commercial needs, offering a real-world blueprint that is both instructive and nuanced. For anyone curious about the intersection of community-driven development and venture-scale growth, this series provides an essential and unfiltered resource.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Open Source Startup Podcast
Podcast Episodes
E193: Managing 100s of Agents with Maestro [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:12
In our latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Pedram Amini, the creator of open source platform Maestro which allows users to run fleets of AI coding agents autonomously for long per…
E191: Super Fast Infra for Agents to Use the Internet [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:13
In our latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Catherine Jue, Co-Founder and CEO of browser infrastructure company Kernel. Their open source images acts as a browsers-as-a-service for…
E190: Open Sourcing AI Coding Platform Devin to Create OpenHands [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:21
In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Robert Brennan, Co-Founder & CEO of OpenHands - the open platform for cloud coding agents. Their open source project, also called OpenHands, has 67K starts on GitHu…
E189: Why Your Backup Platform Should Be Open Source with Plakar [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:54
In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Julien Mangeard, Co-Founder of open source backup platform Plakar. Plakar's open source, also called plakar, has 1.5K stars on GitHub and provides a backup solution…
Exclusive: BYOC Vendor Nuon Goes Open Source! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:23
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…
E186: Unlocking Your Unstructured Data with Typedef [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:05
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…
E184: Building the Browser for AI - the Browserbase Story [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:21
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…