From Open Source to $200M Startup: Temporal's Journey with CTO & Co-Founder Samar Abbas

Samar Abbas, co-founder and CTO of Temporal, shares his journey from working on developer tools at tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Uber to co-founding a startup that raised $220 million. Abbas discusses how Temporal, born from the open-source project Cadence at Uber, solves critical reliability challenges for developers building distributed applications.

This episode explores the evolution from an internal tool to a thriving open-source project, and finally to a successful commercial product. Abbas offers valuable insights on finding the right co-founder, the benefits of open-source for infrastructure projects, and how to navigate the transition from engineering to entrepreneurship.

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Inside the episode:
• The origins of Temporal and its predecessor, Cadence, at Uber
• How Temporal enables durable execution of code and solves reliability challenges
• The journey from open source project to founding a company
• Insights on finding a complementary co-founder
• Evolving roles between co-founders as the company scales
• The benefits and considerations of open source for infrastructure projects
• Temporal's product roadmap and vision for the future
• The importance of iteration and solving real problems in product development

Mentioned in the episode:

Temporal: The company co-founded by Samar Abbas, offering a platform for building durable applications
Replay conference: Temporal's annual user conference
Cadence: The open-source predecessor to Temporal, developed at Uber
Simple Workflow Service: An AWS product that was an early attempt at solving durable execution challenges
Durable Task Framework: An open-source library developed by Abbas at Microsoft Azure
Event Hubs: An Azure service for large-scale data ingestion, similar to Apache Kafka
Kafka: A distributed event streaming platform mentioned in comparison to Event Hubs
Gong: A conversation intelligence platform that impressed Abbas with its AI integration

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