BUILDERS How Collate turned 12,000 open source users into an inbound sales engine | Suresh Srinivas
Collate is building a semantic intelligence platform that unifies fragmented metadata tooling across the modern data stack. With 12,000+ community members, 3,000+ open source deployments, and 400+ code contributors, the company has proven that open source can be a systematic GTM engine, not just a distribution tactic. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Suresh Srinivas, Co-Founder & CEO of Collate, to explore his journey from the Hadoop core team at Yahoo, through founding Hortonworks, to architecting data systems processing 4 trillion events daily at Uber—and why that experience led him to rebuild metadata infrastructure from scratch.
Topics Discussed:- Why platform builders at Yahoo and Hortonworks struggled to drive business value despite powerful technology
- The metadata fragmentation problem: how siloed tools lack unified vocabularies and end-to-end context
- Collate's contrarian decision to build Open Metadata from zero rather than spinning out Uber's internal tooling
- Engineering an open core GTM model that generates nearly 100% inbound sales from technical practitioners
- Scaling community contribution: moving from feedback loops to 400+ code contributors
- Hiring a CMO to translate technical value into business-leader messaging without losing practitioner trust
- The convergence thesis: structured data, knowledge graphs, and semantic layers as the foundation for reliable AI
Architect your open source for GTM leverage, not just distribution: Suresh built Open Metadata as a unified platform consolidating data discovery, observability, and governance—previously fragmented across multiple tools. This architectural decision created natural upgrade paths to Collate's managed offering. The lesson: open source architecture should solve a complete job-to-be-done that reveals commercial value through usage, not just demonstrate technical capability.
100+ daily practitioner conversations beats any user research: Collate maintains ongoing dialogue with their community across Snowflake, Databricks, and other integrations. Suresh called this "a product manager's dream"—immediate feedback on what breaks, what's missing, and what workflow improvements matter. For infrastructure startups, this beat rate of validated learning is nearly impossible to replicate through traditional customer development.
High-velocity releases build credibility faster than pedigree: Starting from scratch without Yahoo or Uber's brand meant proving commitment through shipping cadence. Collate's strategy: demonstrate you'll be around and responsive before asking for production deployments. This matters more in open source than closed-source where sales cycles force commitment conversations earlier.
Separate technical-buyer and business-buyer GTM motions explicitly: Collate's founding team spoke fluently to data engineers and architects who lived the metadata problem daily. Their CMO hire (after establishing product-market fit) brought expertise in articulating business impact—ROI on data initiatives, compliance risk reduction, AI readiness—without the founders faking business-speak. The timing matters: hire for the motion you're entering, not the one you're in.
Play the long game with builder-culture companies: At Uber, internal tools were 2-3 years ahead of vendor solutions but became technical debt as teams moved to new problems. Suresh's advice: "Keep in touch with these larger companies. Your technology will improve and you will have better conversation with larger technical companies." The wedge is timing—catch them when maintenance burden outweighs building pride, typically 24-36 months post-launch.
Design for all company scales from day one: Unlike Uber's internal metadata platform built for massive scale with corresponding complexity, Open Metadata works for small teams through enterprises. This wasn't just good design—it was GTM expansion strategy. Building only for scale locks you into enterprise-only sales. Building only for simplicity caps your ACV. The middle path requires architectural discipline upfront.
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM