Building in the open: Sameer Al-Sakran x Metabase
Berlin, we're back! This time, we're bringing our Founder & CEO, Sameer Al-Sakran, for a live conversation on building one of the most successful open source companies in the world, product-led growth, and the future of BI.
Sameer started Metabase as a side project, waited years before charging, ignored a lot of conventional SaaS advice, and built a product now used by 90,000+ companies, with 8-figure ARR and a global open source community behind it.
Joining us on stage is Francesco Mucio, organizer of the Data Berlin community, who will be leading the conversation with Sameer.
Big shout to our friends at dltHub for helping make this happen!
Agenda
18:00 — Welcome and intro
18:30 — A conversation with Sameer Al-Sakran, CEO & Founder of Metabase 🎤
19:15 — Pizza, drinks and chats 🍕
20:00 — End 👋
What we'll cover
- Why open source?
- Why wait so long to monetize?
- How do you build a product-led company?
- When should you ignore customers?
- How do you sell to enterprises without losing the soul of the product?
- How did we accelerate shipping cadence?
- What does the future of BI look like when anyone can query data in plain English?
- How we are integrating AI into the product, from natural language querying to AI governance controls
This is a conversation about building enduring companies, not chasing startup trends.
We'll close the evening the right way: pizza, drinks, and good conversations. Great chance to connect with founders, builders, and data people in Berlin.
About Metabase
Metabase brings elegant, easy-to-use analytics to teams of all sizes. Anyone can explore and visualize data with questions in natural language, the visual query builder, or SQL.
Share insights and reporting in interactive dashboards or notebook-like documents to tell stories with data.
Data teams can build a curated semantic layer directly in their BI tool — giving both humans and agents reliable, consistent context for every query.