Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
Happy weekend, everyone. I hope that your week wasn’t too hectic and that you are getting a good recharge in. That said, we have a lot to talk about.
Something that has been cropping up more and more in my inbox, SMS folder and Twitter DMs are venture rounds from startups with an open-source backbone. Essentially, startups have roots in an open-source project, often with the progenitors of that open tech inside the company itself.
A good example of this at the very end stage of the startup world was Confluent. The company went public this week to pretty good effect, pricing above its IPO range and later appreciating further. Confluent is predicated on the open-source tech Kafka, which you’ve probably heard of.
The Exchange caught up with Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, an early…
