E161: Reimagining Python Notebooks with Marimo

E161: Reimagining Python Notebooks with Marimo

Author: Robby (MTF); Tim (Essence VC) December 16, 2024 Duration: 34:14

Akshay Agrawal is the Founder & CEO of Marimo, the next generation Python notebook. Their open source reactive notebook for Python, also called marimo, has almost 9K stars on GitHub.

Marimo has raised $5M from investors including AIX Ventures.

In this episode, we dig into Akshay's love of building developer tools for data teams, his journey from PhD to founder, what a great developer experience means for data teams, why reproducibility was a key problem for them to solve, how he thinks about monetization when other notebooks like Jupyter don't focus on making money & 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: 50

Open Source Startup Podcast
Podcast Episodes
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Duration: 37:19
In this episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Modem Co-Founder Ben Vinegar who's building the AI product manager for software teams. He was previously a longtime engineering leader at open source application moni…
E202: How the Largest MLOps Community Was Built [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:08
In our latest episode, co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Demetrios Brinkmann, founder of the MLOps Community, the leading community for MLOps with over 90K developers in it today. He's also a Member of the Non-Technical S…
E201: Building Your Agent Army with Paperclip [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:19
In this episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Paperclip Co-Founder Dotta (Nate) whose viral agent orchestration platform has taken off over the past several months as more teams adopt agents at work. Their open s…
E200: Open Sourcing Warp’s Terminal [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:28
This episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Warp founder Zach Lloyd as he shares the company story and decision to open source their core product: the terminal. They now provide an open source agenti…
E199: Rethinking Infra-as-Code for the AI Era [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:27
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Pavlo Baron from Platform Engineering Labs - creators of open source infra-as-code platform formae. This podcast explores why t…
E198: How Unikraft Launches AI Agents in [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:20
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Dr. Felipe Huici, CEO of Unikraft - the compute layer for sandboxes, AI agents, or any workload with VM-grade isolation. Their…
E196: Shifting Developer Portals to Agent Portals with Port [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 38:41
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Zohar Einy the Co-Founder of agentic SDLC platform Port.They have a few open source projects including ocean which allows third…
E194: Fal's Bet on Generative Media [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:26
The latest Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Batuhan Taskaya, the founding engineer and current Head of Engineering at generative media cloud Fal. Fal is a developer…