E13: Open-Source Data Streaming with Vectorized & Redpanda

Open Source Startup Podcast

Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO, Vectorized

Alex is Founder & CEO of Vectorized, the data streaming platform that released the open-source real-time streaming project Redpanda. Redpanda has 3.1K GitHub stars and a 1.2K person Slack community. Objectives for Vectorized are providing a faster version of Kafka and an amazing developer experience.

In this episode, we discuss Alex’s journey from technical architect to CEO, why experimentation is important for open-source companies, what a great developer experience means, the tradeoffs between monetization and happy open-source users, coming up with a pricing model (Vectorized had Confluent as a benchmark), and building a high-quality team in today's environment.