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Who we sat down with
Michel Tricot is the co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, the open-source data movement platform he launched in 2020. Before Airbyte, Michel led integrations and served as Director of Engineering at LiveRamp, where he scaled the teams and pipelines that synced massive data volumes. He also helped build rideOS as a founding engineer and Director of Engineering. Michel has spent 15+ years in data infrastructure, with a focus on commoditizing data pipelines and giving teams control and sovereignty over their data.
Discussed in this episode
Why Airbyte launched open source first (catching engineers “at the search”)
Project-market fit vs. product-market fit, and why they’re different
The content engine: founder-led writing, shipping slides, and radical transparency
Turning interest into community: 25k+ Slack, champions, and hiring from within
The near-misses: hiring ahead of PMF, support-heavy community, cloud complexity
Going upmarket: enterprise motion, longer cycles, and team ramp realities
AI wave → agents as “data consumers” and what it means for pipelines
Replatforming for control & sovereignty, not just “more connectors”
Episode highlights
00:15 — Airbyte’s rise: open source, community-first, and a billion‑plus valuation.
01:57 — Michel explains Airbyte in two lines: open data movement into warehouses (and now agents).
02:53 — Why launch open source on GitHub: capture engineers at the “write a painful script” moment.
06:53 — COVID reset: from a marketing‑focused product to an OSS platform that hit a hockey‑stick curve.
11:01 — Project-market fit vs product-market fit: adoption is not monetization.
14:41 — How Airbyte turned Slack into a rapid product feedback loop (ship next‑day fixes).
19:22 — The community trap: when your Slack becomes support, and how they course‑corrected.
23:53 — Cloud the hard way: why customers wanted control/sovereignty more than a hosted version.
29:22 — Building an enterprise motion: hire earlier, expect 6–9 month ramps, many more stakeholders.
33:26 — Fast path to Series A: publishing the deck, OSS adoption surge, and choosing investor fit.
Key Takeaways
1. Shrink scope to find signal.
Airbyte didn’t try to boil the ocean; it launched open source to solve one gnarly, universal pain: moving data from silos to value. By catching engineers “at the search,” they earned usage before monetization.
2. Separate project-market fit from product-market fit.
Community love ≠ revenue motion. Airbyte treated the GitHub traction as project-market fit, then built the monetization engine separately to reach true PMF.
3. Ship transparency as a growth channel.
Publishing fundraising slides, writing deeply technical posts, and narrating the build created trust at scale. Transparency reduced perceived risk and generated consistent inbound.
4. Community needs design, not just support.
Letting Slack become a help desk capped upside. Designing for champions, peer-to-peer help, and recognition programs turned users into advocates and contributors.
5. Control beats convenience in data infra.
Enterprises adopted Airbyte not just for connectors but because it runs where they need it. Control, sovereignty, and security often trump a pure cloud pitch in data movement.
6. Don’t hire ahead of platform complexity.
Moving from OSS to hosted cloud is a different business with operational drag. Hiring too fast created noise; starting small and iterating would have preserved product velocity.
7. Content compounds when founder-led.
For the first 18 months, Michel and co-founder wrote the playbook in public. Founder voice clarified positioning, attracted contributors, and set a high bar for later content ops.
8. Use community for real-time product discovery.
Posting lightweight polls/questions yielded 100+ responses in minutes, compressing research cycles. Community became an always-on signal router for roadmap decisions.
9. Enterprise motion is human-time, not server-time.
Longer cycles, more stakeholders, and ramp time are physics, not flaws. Hire earlier than feels comfortable, but in small, validated steps to avoid overextension.
10. Build for agents, not just analysts.
Agents are new “consumers” of data, demanding low-latency access and different interfaces. Replatforming around this shift is a multi-year moat, not a feature.
Follow Michel Tricot
X (Twitter):https://x.com/MichelTricot
Website:https://airbyte.com/Airbyte
Recommended books
High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove — A systems-first lens for building teams and measuring managerial output that informed Airbyte’s “window into the build” culture.
Referenced
Airbyte: https://airbyte.com/Airbyte
Airbyte GitHub org: https://github.com/airbytehqGitHub
Airbyte OSS repo: https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyteGitHub
Airbyte community hub (Slack/forum/events): https://airbyte.com/community/developersAirbyte
Airbyte “Getting support” (Slack + forum): https://docs.airbyte.com/platform/community/getting-supportdocs.airbyte.com
Accel: https://www.accel.com
Benchmark: https://www.benchmark.com
Host links
X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
Website: https://gtmnow.com
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