E7: From Open-Source Project at Uber to Temporal.io

Open Source Startup Podcast

Maxim Fateev, Co-Founder & CEO, Temporal.io

1:17: Maxim digs into his extensive experience with distributed systems and how it led him to build Cadence, the open-source project behind his company Temporal

5:10: We discuss why open-source is important and how it helps projects last vs. keeping them within a company where they will most likely die

9:30: Maxim talks about finding product-market fit through open-source before raising venture capital; one signal was the quality of engineers from top companies in their 1K person slack channel

14:35: We discuss the importance of building trust with users, especially with developer tools running in critical production systems, and the importance of founder credibility (Maxim and his cofounder had been working on distributed systems for 20 years); building trust took years as the project matured and Maxim marketed it through speaking at conferences, etc.

19:15: We dig into Temporal's product positioning

24:50: Maxim discusses Uber’s response to the team forking Cadence to create Temporal; the most contentious part was not making it backward compatible; migrating the community was also a challenge

28:50: We talk about the commercial side of the product; Temporal is delivered via API and sold as a hosted service and has a usage-based pricing model

37:07: We discuss evangelism and the importance of marketing for a new category (also - Temporal is hiring dev advocates!)

39:30: We end on advice for other open-source company founders - the key being to just start