Michel Tricot

Michel Tricot is co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, the open-source data integration company he started in 2020 with Jean (John) Lafleur. Their stated mission is to commoditize data integration pipelines so moving data between tools stops being a custom engineering tax.

LiveRamp, rideOS, and the same connector problem

Tricot studied computer science at EPITA in France and moved to the U.S. in 2011. At LiveRamp he was Head of Integrations and Director of Engineering, building connectors that synced hundreds of terabytes a day. He later joined rideOS as a founding member and Director of Engineering. In a Frontlines interview he said that after years in financial data, internet-scale identity data, and mobility data, he kept seeing companies reinvent the same access problem: "how they access data."

YC pivot into open-source ELT

He and Lafleur entered Y Combinator in 2020. Early product work leaned marketing-facing; COVID collapsed that market. In July 2020 they recentered on data-engineering integration and released the first Airbyte version that fall. Tricot has said they spent long stretches interviewing data engineers before locking the open-source, extensible connector model that became Airbyte's public identity.

On commoditizing pipelines

In conversations such as Datacast with James Le, he returns to the same idea: integration should be a commodity layer, not a bespoke project for every source. Airbyte's growth as an open-source ELT platform is the company-shaped version of that belief.