E171: How Companies Like Block Build Viral Open Source Projects

Open Source Startup Podcast

Manik Surtani is Head of Open Source and Bradley Axen is Principal Engineer at Block. Manik was key to launching Block's Open Source Programs Office and Bradley is a major open source contributor - including the project Goose which is Block's extensible AI agent project. It currently has over 11K stars on GitHub and has been used for a number of internal use cases at Block as well as by the general AI builder ecosystem.

In this episode, we dig into:

• Block's history releasing and supporting open source projects, and how that led to the creation of the programs office

• How big companies like Block approach open source and come up with ideas for projects like Goose

• The Goose project and how it's different from other agent frameworks