E141: Building Companies on Open Source Standards - from Hortonworks to Mydecisive.ai

Open Source Startup Podcast

Ari Zilka is CEO of mydecisive.ai, the general-purpose observability engine built on OpenTelemetry. Ari was previously the CTO of Hortonworks which built products on top of open source Apache Hadoop and merged with Cloudera in 2019.

In this episode, we dig into the similar patterns Ari sees between Hortonworks / Hadoop and mydecisive.ai / OpenTelemetry, why large enterprises don't want their data to be held hostage and are shifting towards OpenTelemetry, how open source switches costs from vendors to engineering, why he's focused on building the community before monetizing, his view on monetization ("the developer bakes you in, the operator pays for it"), why the "ops" side of "devops" carries the money, and the learnings from building Hortonworks that he's bringing into mydecisive.ai.