Jul 14, 2026 · 42 min · 12 segments
This Open Source Startup Podcast episode has our co-hosts Robby and Tim in conversation with Pavlo Baron from…
Pavlo BaronGuest
Tim ChenHostRobbyHost
Why we went into this is that, yeah, I don't know, maybe, maybe Zach and myself are [laughs] a very special kind of people.
We actually like solving hard problems, and the space we're looking at right now, uh, with our solution is full of hard problems.
It was not allowed to go down for a second, and, uh, we would be punished for losing data of any kind in the processing.
So maintaining this kind of technology required a lot of other technology to be in place, all kinds of data stores, uh, uh, streaming engines, and, uh, very sophisticated low-level work in the cloud, uh, or in the clouds, uh, at the end of the day.
And what we saw is that we are busy Doing stuff all day, just stitching together things and building Rube Goldberg machines rather than focusing on delivering value.
It is because trillions of tools and you kinda need to put them in picture, and then everything is breaking here and there, and you keep fixing.
You wake up to a problem that you didn't cause, you need to go and fix this again.
Tomorrow, it's a totally different pattern, but it looks like similar, but yeah, you can, you cannot really say it's the same.
So long story short, him and I, we said back then already, "Hey, let's fix it." But we actually never got to fixing it until now.
And, uh, the whole, um, inception of, uh, um, uh, Platform Engineering Labs actually happened through us learning that, uh, IBM is acquiring, uh, HashiCorp.
And at that point, I gave Zack and call-- a call and said, "Hey, I mean, I just spent two and a half years at IBM.
Why we went into this is that, yeah, I don't know, maybe, maybe Zach and myself are [laughs] a very special kind of people.
We actually like solving hard problems, and the space we're looking at right now, uh, with our solution is full of hard problems.
It was not allowed to go down for a second, and, uh, we would be punished for losing data of any kind in the processing.
So maintaining this kind of technology required a lot of other technology to be in place, all kinds of data stores, uh, uh, streaming engines, and, uh, very sophisticated low-level work in the cloud, uh, or in the clouds, uh, at the end of the day.
And what we saw is that we are busy Doing stuff all day, just stitching together things and building Rube Goldberg machines rather than focusing on delivering value.
It is because trillions of tools and you kinda need to put them in picture, and then everything is breaking here and there, and you keep fixing.
You wake up to a problem that you didn't cause, you need to go and fix this again.
Tomorrow, it's a totally different pattern, but it looks like similar, but yeah, you can, you cannot really say it's the same.
So long story short, him and I, we said back then already, "Hey, let's fix it." But we actually never got to fixing it until now.
And, uh, the whole, um, inception of, uh, um, uh, Platform Engineering Labs actually happened through us learning that, uh, IBM is acquiring, uh, HashiCorp.
And at that point, I gave Zack and call-- a call and said, "Hey, I mean, I just spent two and a half years at IBM.
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