Essays by Ry Walker

A framework for evaluating open source projects beyond star counts — looking at velocity, community health, and commercial viability.

Why we're building Tembo: AI coding agents should be orchestrated, not operated. The vision for enterprise-grade agent infrastructure.

AI outbound scales noise, not trust. Why cold outreach is saturated in 2025 and how warm, relevant paths still win.

A step-by-step framework for testing startup ideas: talk to users, fake the demo, iterate until you know what to build. Don't write code yet.

Open source your core, build a SaaS around it ASAP, and keep both flywheels spinning. How to balance community and commercial traction.

A battle-tested framework for seed-stage pitches: the four pillars that matter (product, team, traction, market) and five steps to nail them.

A self-assessment and prescriptions for becoming data-driven: hire a data scientist, establish a warehouse, and track your Daily ETL Tasks.

How fundraising really works: you'll get a pile of 'no' and a smaller pile of 'maybe.' Without a potential lead in that maybe pile, you're not ready.

How Astronomer evolved from USERcycle analytics to a data engineering platform. The organic growth from clickstream to Apache Airflow to Kafka.

Could Daily ETL Tasks be an effective indicator for how data-driven your organization is? A thought experiment inspired by Airbnb's data infrastructure.

The story of leaving safe jobs and comfortable positions to build companies—Differential, then Astronomer—because I had no other choice.

Our journey through AngelPad as the first Midwest team ever accepted. From application to Demo Day, here's what the top-ranked accelerator is really like.

Data silos are a growing problem as SaaS proliferates. How cloud computing, mobile, and machine learning are creating a data revolution.

Should early-stage SaaS companies do professional services? Advice from Brad Feld, Hiten Shah, and other investors on the product vs. services dilemma.

Most startup advice focuses on product and marketing. Retention gets far less airtime—and that's a shame, because it's where most products die.

Build something astonishing for your early adopters. Measure their amazement across education, setup, and ongoing value—then track your improvement.