When Andres Morey went through Y Combinator with Octopart, an electronic components search engine startup in 2007, people looked at him like he was crazy: "You're working on an Internet startup? How are you gonna make money? There's no money in the Internet."
This was the post-dot-com bubble burst reality, when Internet companies were viewed with deep skepticism. Yet for Andres and his YC cohort, building an Internet company was obvious. It was simply the easiest and most sensible way to start a business. Many of the young internet companies of this time would prove skeptics wrong, including Octopart, which was acquired after nearly a decade of growth.
Now, seventeen years later, Andres is experiencing déjà vu. After his successful exit from Octopart and taking time to start a family, he's back in the entrepreneurial game—this time in open source. And the parallels to those early Internet days are striking.
"I think that the energy around open core companies is similar to the energy around Internet startups when we did Y Combinator," Andres reflects. "Many have their doubts on whether or not open source can succeed commercially, but for the people doing it, it’s just the best way to build a product."
His latest project, Kubetail, is a compelling case study for this thesis. What started as a personal solution to a Kubernetes logging problem has evolved into a growing open source community—one that recently completed OCV's Catalyst program with impressive results.
Kubetail: Cutting through Kubernetes logging hell
The Kubetail story began with a familiar developer frustration. After selling Octopart, Andres wanted to dive back into coding. But when he started working with Kubernetes, he hit a wall: there was no built-in way to view logs from multiple containers in one unified stream. Instead, developers had to manually switch between pods in the Kubernetes Dashboard or write custom scripts just to follow what their services were doing in real time.
The solutions that existed came from enterprise giants like Datadog, Grafana, and New Relic—companies with multibillion-dollar valuations and feature-rich platforms designed for large enterprises. For a solo developer or small team, these tools can be overkill and inaccessible.
"As a single developer, I wanted these tools to just exist as part of Kubernetes," Andres explains. "After setting up Kubernetes, you should get these observability tools."
Six months later, he built Kubetail, a lightweight, browser-based logging dashboard for Kubernetes optimized for tailing logs across multi-container workloads in real-time through a clean and modern interface. The dashboard is designed to be user-friendly and can be installed inside a cluster easily using Helm. The technical architecture reflects modern development practices—TypeScript and React on the frontend, Go for the backend, and Rust for performance-critical components—creating a full-stack app that attracts developers interested in contributing across the entire development stack.
Andres launched Kubetail on Hacker News, landing on the front page. It picked up some interest and a few hundred GitHub stars, but a few days later, momentum stalled and things went quiet.
Kubetail in Catalyst
Despite his entrepreneurial experience, Andres faced a learning curve when it came to open source community building. His initial approach, like many open source authors, was purely technical: build something excellent and let word-of-mouth handle the rest. "I was just basically working quietly, thinking, you know, if you build it, they will come," he shared. "It’s going to be so good and so useful that people are just naturally going to find it." For over a year, this meant working on his own while growth on the project remained stagnant. It was an unexpected email from OCV that changed everything for Kubetail, leading to his acceptance into the Catalyst sponsorship program.
The transformation was dramatic. In Catalyst, Kubetail's metrics soared: GitHub stars jumped from around 300 to over 1,300, while the contributor base expanded from 3 to 34 people. Most importantly, that empty Discord server now hosts over 50 active community members, with about 10 contributors working on the project weekly.
Andres reflected on the shift:
"Before I started, there was zero community. I had a Discord server, and I was the only one in it—just sitting there working alone every day. Then I started working with you and following your week-by-week guidance on where to focus. It really helped me with everything from Reddit outreach to reviewing the GitHub readme, which we grew from around 300 stars to over 1,300. But more significantly, the community took off. Before Catalyst, there were no users in Discord. Now there are over 50."
The hands-on mentorship from the OCV team offered in the Catalyst program proved invaluable for someone with deep technical skills but limited experience in community building. It helped shift his routine from pure coding to balancing development with community engagement and contributor support.
In crowded spaces, community scales
What makes Kubetail's growth particularly interesting is its strategic positioning. Rather than trying to compete directly with the enterprise giants, the project occupies a specific niche: plug-and-play observability for Kubernetes-focused developers and small teams.
Users typically deploy Kubetail alongside comprehensive solutions like Loki and Kibana, preferring Kubetail's interface for real-time log visualization while relying on established tools for archiving and advanced features. It's a complementary approach that avoids direct competition while serving an underserved market segment.
"Observability is a crowded space," Andres acknowledges. "The existing players are huge companies with many engineers, and users expect a lot of features. So we're gonna need an army of contributors, building because they like the project and use it themselves, to compete with those guys." The growing community of passionate open source contributors, many of whom use Kubetail for their own projects, may provide the development capacity needed to compete with well-funded enterprises.
The economics of staying open
Andres's perspective on monetization reflects both his startup experience and his pragmatic approach to open source sustainability. While some contributors maintain idealistic views about purely nonprofit open source, he recognizes the reality of resource requirements.
"If you want to tackle big problems, you need resources," he explains. "And right now, the options are donations, corporate sponsorships, or commercialization."
His observation about corporate sponsorship is particularly astute: much of what appears to be altruistic open source funding actually comes from commercial sources that prefer to keep their involvement subtle. Companies like Google invest heavily in open source projects while maintaining the appearance of community-driven development.
"I take a very practical view," Andres says. "Some projects can work purely on sponsorships, many can't. There's definitely a place for Open Core, and there's also a place for totally nonprofit open source."
For Kubetail, he's taking a patient approach—bootstrapping the project and planning to reassess commercialization options in the months to come. The goal isn't quick monetization but sustainable long-term development. He wants to work on Kubetail for the next fifteen to twenty years.
Building for platform shift
Beyond the immediate growth metrics, Kubetail is positioning itself for several upcoming shifts in the tech world that could accelerate its trajectory. Andres believes Kubernetes will eventually become "the only cloud platform that matters," making Kubernetes-specific tools increasingly valuable.
Emerging AI technologies like MCP servers present integration opportunities that didn't exist when the project started. "For us, changing directions is just a shift in the roadmap because these things haven't even been built yet," he notes.
This adaptability advantage—being nimble enough to pivot toward new technologies—exemplifies the competitive edge that community-driven projects can have over established enterprises.
From case study to signal
As Kubetail's Catalyst program concludes, the project serves as more than just a successful case study in open source community building. It represents what Andres sees as a broader inflection point for Open Core companies—a moment that parallels the early days of Internet startups when skeptics questioned their viability.
The difference now is that the infrastructure for open source success is becoming more mature. Programs like Catalyst provide the mentorship and resources that can accelerate project and community growth, while platforms like GitHub offer built-in community features that didn't exist during the early Internet era. "I think we need to get over this idealistic view of open source and commercialization. More open source is better than less, and some projects need commercialization to succeed," Andres argues.
For entrepreneurs considering the open source path, his advice is straightforward: focus on building something valuable, embrace community development, and maintain a practical perspective on sustainability. The infrastructure exists to support successful Open Core companies; it just needs to be leveraged.
Just as Internet companies eventually proved their skeptics wrong, Andres believes Open Core companies are positioned to do the same. For those who recognize the moment, the timing couldn't be better.
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OCV's Catalyst program provides funding and mentorship to open source authors and maintainers to catalyze project growth over three months. The program aims to support open source projects with commercial viability by helping maintainers increase project usage, revitalize project activity, grow community contributions, and develop relationships with experienced open source experts.
If you have an open source project with commercial potential, Catalyst could help you achieve similar growth. If you are an open source maintainer or author interested in the Catalyst program, you can apply for sponsorship here.