Very interesting. I'm interested in hearing about working with open source projects, selling data, and customer support; I'm especially interested in how start

Very interesting. I'm interested in hearing about working with open source projects, selling data, and customer support; I'm especially interested in how startups handle bugs in newer open source projects. Do you spend time identifying the cause and submitting a patch, switch technologies, or work on something else and punt the decision? This is a specific system design question, but I'd also like to hear about choosing between job queues (e.g., Beanstalk) and batch systems (e.g., Hadoop) for soft real-time data processing. Interesting startups to interview: - FlightCaster and BackType (lots of data, users get product for free, discuss process of finding and selling to customers interested in associated data; both also deal with real-time data) - Shopify (supporting users that use your product to sell their product) - banksimple (regulated industry) - DuckDuckGo (building a system to compete with a wealthy behemoth) - WakeMate and Square (designing and manufacturing hardware)