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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”

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor: ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is the GTM Intelligence Platform built for sales, marketing, and RevOps.

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It’s trusted by the fastest-growing companies and has become the category leader in GTM Intelligence.

Learn more at zoominfo.com.

Follow Michel Tricot

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Chapters

1. Setting The Stage: PMF vs. Deals (00:00:00)

2. Airbyte’s Origin And Billion-Dollar Trajectory (00:00:15)

3. What Airbyte Does In Plain Terms (00:01:54)

4. Why Open Source First (00:02:48)

5. Community Velocity And Sovereignty (00:05:40)

6. Launching During COVID And Early Signals (00:07:35)

7. Defining Project Market Fit (00:10:22)

8. Content As The Primary Growth Engine (00:12:00)

9. Building And Nurturing A Slack Community (00:14:08)

10. Events As A Third Growth Pillar (00:17:03)

11. Avoiding A Support-Only Community Trap (00:18:50)

12. Structure: DevRel, Community, Customer Engineering (00:21:02)

13. Discovering Control As A Core Value (00:22:12)

14. Cloud Missteps And Course Correction (00:24:16)

15. AI Agents And The Next Data Wave (00:26:04)

16. Replatforming For Agents (00:28:03)

17. Operationalizing AI Inside The Company (00:29:12)

18. Technical Founder Building GTM (00:31:02)

19. Moving Upmarket To Enterprise (00:33:00)

20. Fundraising: Seed To Series A In Two Months (00:35:15)

21. Investor Fit And Expectations For OSS (00:38:03)

22. Hard Lessons: Cloud Complexity And Hiring (00:40:10)

23. Books, Resources, And Where To Follow (00:42:18)

735 episodes