Michel Tricot, co-founder of Airbyte, discusses how early-stage open-source startups should sequence community contributions relative to core architecture development.
“You don't want to invite contribution too soon in a project because that's going to disrupt like building the foundation of the project.”
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More from Michel Tricot
Insight
Open source's real enterprise value is data control, not cost savings
“The value of open source isn't just in the fact that it is free and that you have a community, et cetera. It's just that it gives you full control over your, one of your most precious assets.”
Michel TricotMar 2, 2026▶ 35:33He raised $150M with $0 revenue. Then hit $1M ARR in 4 months. | Michel Tricot, Co-Founder of Air... · PMF Show
Opinion
Solving marketing attribution or recruiting creates the most valuable tech companies
“Anyone who can solve attribution, like two problems in the world is attribution and recruiting. If you can solve one of these two problems, you're the king of the world.”
Michel TricotMar 2, 2026▶ 19:34He raised $150M with $0 revenue. Then hit $1M ARR in 4 months. | Michel Tricot, Co-Founder of Air... · PMF Show
Insight
Open source wins because it eliminates both building and buying software
“Open source is very good when it comes to, like, the build versus buy, because In a way, it removes the build, but it also removes the buy. So as an engineer, you just take open source, you don't have to build, you don't have to buy, but you get the value out …”
Michel TricotMar 2, 2026▶ 24:11He raised $150M with $0 revenue. Then hit $1M ARR in 4 months. | Michel Tricot, Co-Founder of Air... · PMF Show
Insight
GitHub vanity metrics are essential for establishing trust with open-source developers
“Initially we're very focused on Vanity metrics on GitHub. Those, especially for open source, are very important because these vanity metrics, I don't care about how many stars I have, but I know that whenever I look at a project, whenever I look at the library…”
Michel TricotMar 2, 2026▶ 24:42He raised $150M with $0 revenue. Then hit $1M ARR in 4 months. | Michel Tricot, Co-Founder of Air... · PMF Show
Insight
No single company can build data connectors for every operational silo
“And also, the number of data silos and operational system that exists is just infinite. It just grows every day. And very hard for a single company to connect to all of those.”
Michel TricotMar 2, 2026▶ 3:44He raised $150M with $0 revenue. Then hit $1M ARR in 4 months. | Michel Tricot, Co-Founder of Air... · PMF Show
Opinion
Airbyte's primary competitor is homegrown internal systems built by engineering teams
“The biggest competitor is internal. So it's basically teams building homegrown systems and having to maintain them and just allocating a lot of their teams on that.”
Michel TricotMar 2, 2026▶ 4:08He raised $150M with $0 revenue. Then hit $1M ARR in 4 months. | Michel Tricot, Co-Founder of Air... · PMF Show
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