Controlling your own narrative in a hot market with Vinoth Chandar, founder of Onehouse

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Vinoth Chandar, the founder and CEO of Onehouse and the creator of Apache Hudi. We took a pretty deep dive into the relationship between Onehouse and Hudi, a topic that for me is at the heart of building a company on top of an open source project. In fact, whether or not Onehouse is an ‘open source company’ could be debatable; Hudi is an Apache project — it’s not owned by Onehouse in anyway — and Onehouse is not a ‘managed Hudi’ or ‘enterprise Hudi.’ Onehouse solves a problem that is fundamentally not the same problem that Hudi solves.

Here’s some other take aways from my conversation with Vinoth:

• There were both technical and business reasons for the relationship between Onehouse and Hudi; Hudi is a library, and you can’t offer a library as a service. Also, Onehouse does way, way more than Hudi.
• Out of Hudi’s 16 project management committee members, 5 are from Onehouse. Which means both that Onehouse has a significant presence, but also that it can’t completely control the project.
• The disadvantage of being in a ‘hot’ market, which means there are lots of big players trying to define the narrative around data lakehouses.
• Starting Onehouse two and a half too late… or was it actually too early? We had a discussion about timing of starting the company, and Vinoth had arguments for why they started the company too late, but also why it might have been too early.
• Are you giving away too much? The Onehouse board sometimes thinks so; but what Vinoth thinks was a mistake was not spending enough time educating both Hudi users and the larger community about just how much Hudi can do, instead of letting external players define the narrative about what Hudi does.

Check out the full episode for more wisdom from Vinoth!