Aug 23, 2021 · 53m · neon-show
Hasura Founder on Building For Developers ft. Tanmai Gopal
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this in-depth interview, Hasura co-founder and CEO Tanmai Gopal details his journey from tech consulting to building an open-source data access engine, providing strategic insights on open-source monetization, critical-path infrastructure, and developer-led growth.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Siddhartha holds 10.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Siddhartha as informed peer 2.4 Guest teaching 3.4 Guest disagreement 1.4 Siddhartha pushing back 1.0
speaking balance: gold is Siddhartha, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 28:38 Tanmai forcefully reframes the Postman comparison
Tanmai rejects Siddhartha's premise that Postman and Hasura share the same trajectory, distinguishing between design-time tools and mission-critical cloud infrastructure.
Hardest push from Siddhartha ▶ 46:14 Siddhartha counters product focus with distribution doctrineSiddhartha directly challenges Tanmai's 'build the best product' thesis by citing the startup maxim that building in a desert without distribution is a founder's biggest mistake.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 29:12 Tanmai educates Siddhartha on infrastructure vs design-time toolsTanmai systematically breaks down why critical path uptime dependencies create completely different monetization and adoption dynamics compared to workflow tools like Postman or GitHub.
Siddhartha holds their own ▶ 49:11 Siddhartha contrasts Indian SaaS success with open-source absenceSiddhartha brings domain knowledge by citing community platforms like SaaSBOOMi to challenge why India has failed to cultivate a comparable developer-led open-source movement.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Siddhartha as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Siddhartha pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome and Overview of Hasura's Data Access Infrastructure | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Siddhartha introduces Tanmai and invites him to explain Hasura in layman's terms. Tanmai provides a foundational walkthrough of data access infrastructure and Hasura's managed offerings in an agreeable, introductory manner. | |
| Tanmai Gopal's Childhood, Academic Journey, and IIT Madras | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Siddhartha prompts Tanmai to share his early life and background. Tanmai delivers an extensive autobiographical monologue covering his upbringing across Gujarat, IIT Madras, and early research projects. | |
| Transition from Tech Consulting Agency to Launching Hasura | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Tanmai details the founding of the consulting agency and how internal tooling evolved into Hasura. Siddhartha provides a concise summary confirming the consulting firm's initial scope. | |
| Navigating the VC Shift and Raising the Seed Round | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Siddhartha asks how difficult it was to shift from a bootstrapped mindset to raising venture capital. Tanmai clarifies that he is not dogmatic about funding models, explaining his pragmatic approach to capitalization and meeting Nexus and Stripe angel investors. | |
| The Third Wave of Open Source and Hasura's Business Model | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Asked about Hasura's monetization, Tanmai educates Siddhartha on the 'third wave' of open-source business models, separating developer-level open-source value from operational enterprise commercial features. | |
| Milestones: From Project-Community Fit to Commercial Scale | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Siddhartha presses Tanmai for ARR metrics and asserts that Hasura is approaching unicorn status. Tanmai gives a firm 'no comment' on valuation and numbers, redirecting to discuss project-community fit versus product-market fit. | |
| Categorizing Dev Tools: Critical Path Infrastructure vs. Design Tools | 2 | 7 | 4 | 2 | Siddhartha attempts to equate Hasura's journey and user metrics directly to Postman. Tanmai pushes back sharply, explaining the fundamental distinction between design-time tools (Figma, GitHub, Postman) and critical path runtime infrastructure (Hasura, Mongo, AWS), while rejecting raw user counts as a relevant metric. | |
| Organizational Structure and Bottom-Up Community Go-To-Market | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Siddhartha assumes Hasura's outbound sales team proactively approaches enterprises running the software. Tanmai gently corrects him, explaining that their motion is inbound and bottoms-up, where enterprise engineering teams reach out directly. | |
| Open-Source Startup Philosophy: Product Excellence Over Playbooks | 2 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Siddhartha asks whether there is a raw template or playbook for open-source founders. Tanmai delivers a comprehensive monologue arguing that prescriptive SaaS playbooks fail in open source, emphasizing product excellence and authentic community engagement instead. | |
| Distribution Dynamics and the Future of Indian Open-Source Tech | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Siddhartha offers sharp pushback, presenting the contrarian startup doctrine that distribution matters more than building in isolation and highlighting India's lack of an open-source ecosystem. Tanmai counters by showing how community serves as built-in distribution in open source and provides a nuanced structural analysis of the Indian tech landscape. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Indian education forces career choices before students gain real-world experience
“You kind of figure out your path, not after doing anything in the real world. But you kind of almost choose your path before you know anything about anything, which is one of those things that sucks about the Indian education system.”
Founders truly know nothing until they ship a product to market
“Until you build a product and take it to market, you actually don't know anything. Nothing matters how you do stuff, what you know, et cetera. Nothing matters till you have the sense of what it takes to build a product and just take that product to market, rig…”
Hasura reached 100 million open-source downloads in its second year
“We went, we did two million downloads in the first year, a hundred million downloads in the second year, on track for adding up three hundred million this year. I mean, the fastest open source GraphQL project over the last two years since we launched”
The Indian VC ecosystem was immature for early open-source devtools startups
“Fundraising in the initial stages was hard in India because that kind of a mindset is not easy to get in kind of the Indian ecosystem, right? It's not mature enough in, for these kinds of companies.”
Hasura operated purely open source for two years before monetizing in mid-2020
“So we were open source for 2018 to 2019 to 2019 to 20 20 and 2020, mid 20 20 is when we started monetizing. Just before our CDZB is when we started monetizing.”
Successful commercial open-source companies globally can be counted on two hands
“The number of successful open source commercial companies are not too many in the world. That's not a SaaS playbook. It's not as well known as a SaaS playbook. It's very different. There are the number of open source commercial companies you can probably count…”
Third-wave open-source monetization charges operators rather than core developers
“This third wave of open source kind of monetization that we see where the idea is that the APIs, That developers use on the product is the same. The core of the product, right, which provides developer value to the practitioner is the same throughout our open …”
Open-source startups must reach project-community fit before product-market fit
“For an open source company, right, and Samir has a really nice way of putting this, and he calls it, you go from kind of, you first have to get project community fit, and then after that, you move towards product market fit. So it's like building two companies…”
Hasura delayed commercial development until seeing mission-critical enterprise adoption
“We needed that mission critical adoption to then actually start to work on the commercial version of the product. Till then we decided to not do any work on the commercial side of the product. We're going to wait Till we started seeing mission critical adoptio…”
Gopal: Hasura has continuously maintained multiple years of cash runway
“Our runway from the beginning till now has always been Many years away.”
Design-time devtools impact productivity rather than production application uptime
“I would say Postman is in the category of developer tools, which are similar to things like GitHub and Figma. So GitHub, Figma, Postman, those are kind of a category of tools. Now, these are tools that are basically design time tools. Right? These are tools th…”
Hasura tracks deployed mission-critical projects rather than total user counts
“We don't look at number of users as a metric. We look at number of projects as a metric, right? Like how many projects are being deployed. That is a metric for us. And that metric is a meaningful metric if that project is mission critical, right? The project b…”
Hasura relies entirely on inbound requests rather than outbound enterprise sales
“Usually our users reach out to us directly. We don't reach out to them. They usually reach out to us directly. They're already using Hasra and they reach, they are aware of the commercial products. They reach out to us.”
Open source lacks enough commercial precedents to establish a standard playbook
“There's not enough open source companies in the world to really call it a playbook or a template quite yet. Maybe there will be one that emerges.”
Hasura has no direct global competitors but expects them within two years
“There is no competition to what Hasura does today. It doesn't exist. It'll exist a year, two years later. But there isn't an equivalent of what Haskell does today. There is no other company like this in the world, right? Solving the problem that we do”
Early-stage open-source startups have distribution inherently baked into developer communities
“Eventually, in any stage of the company, distribution matters more than anything else because you figured the product out. But in those early stages distribution will come because of community. So distribution is already baked into the fact that you're a commu…”
Traditional VCs should not back open-source startups without understanding their distinct dynamics
“You can't have an e-commerce investor invest in an open source project if they don't have an understanding of the motion, right? Because they'll have unfair expectations, right? Which is again, no fault of their own, right? You have an e-commerce or SaaS growt…”