0:00Hello, it's me again. I hope uh you're enjoying these little episode intros that we're doing. Hopefully, it gives me a little chance to talk to you guys about why we're doing some of these episodes and what you should look out for in the interviews so you get more audio interviews. We're also adding overlays that you can see pop up to keep it visually interesting to explain things that maybe if you're newer to the industry, you don't know because I don't have time to go over every single thing while we're having interviews. Um, so I was at Superbase Selects recently, which
0:29is the Superbase company Conference. Um, and there's a lot of stuff to cover. Uh, in particular, I think I should share that I have a very close relationship with this company. Um, I was an angel investor in a seed round six years ago and they were my very very first angel investment. They've done super well.
0:48They went from 0 to 10 billion in in valuation in the last six years. is a fully remote open- source company which is enormous and they're pretty much becoming the standard for hosting Postgress. So I want to break down why what makes them tick. Um I also want to see why they did so well in my AEO ranking uh because it's not it's not a given for sure. Uh and there's a lot of companies that are fighting for uh what it means to build databases for agents.
1:15They were also I think our very very first sponsor for AI engineer the very first AI engineer in 2023 and they're now going to be our first sponsor for latent space uh which because we're open for sponsorships and uh you know who else to to do this with with companies that and people that I'm familiar with and trust and can explain very well to uh to our audience. And so the main things I wanted to cover they have they have a whole recap here on their YouTube which is very well executed and all
1:44that. Uh but they have this these three themes of build, operate and scale. I think the announcements are very much what I kind of look for in a company conference keynote. Um so build is basically how they want to improve post the Postgress experience for coding agents to set up and the two that I that really shot out to me is uh what one is is very simple one is which is that starting superb basease without docker that that is like the the less weight I
2:13can I need in order to start up basic processes to interact with the uh the database the better. Um and obviously I can scale it up to to full VM in the future. But um the second thing is through based compute where uh you run compute next to the database. I think collocating that is super easy. I think this is honestly super underrated. Um I think is uh maybe underelling what it potentially could be. Um your app having an MCP server from super library is really good and but declarative schemas
2:43is so important, right? But like you want declarative schemas rather than the standard SQL paradigm of uh set up a schema and then migrate migrate migrate.
2:51uh which is something we cover in the the the podcast like um if you you want everything to be in git as source of truth so that your agent can crawl it um and figure and set up and fork and whatever from there um it seems so simple but really when Postgress was not designed to do this uh it you have to kind of retrofit uh the events on top of uh onto a you know 40-y old database um and really I I kind of see Superbase's momentum now as doing the last mile or
3:21like the the really like frontier of Postgress development for agents to really use them super well. The beauty of it though is that it's not actually about agents. It's like we just needed this the whole time. Um so but humans also benefit and I I really like that. I don't like doing things only for agents to be happy. Um so then the second part is operate operating. Um so that is mostly just about giving more context
3:49really whether it's more logs more checks more connections uh markdown files for your SQL that's super cool uh knowledge and skills they every year they ship uh some interesting pipeline uh work from like you know stripe to to to to other sort of integrations um and I think the sort of general ETL problem as you get further and further in your AI engineering career becomes uh you know more and more part of the data engineering stack but now Suabase has
4:17their own first party solution you can use a mix of both like whatever but sometimes it's nice to have everything in one uh the last part is is perhaps the most uh complex and you know at scale thing uh this is why superbase changing their branding to prototype to pabyte um and really they're going after more and more scale obviously because they're grow the customers are growing um and so announcing a full v1 of multigress which is their uh their sort of port I guess of vitess for uh for
4:46posgress with the vitest guy which is enormous in the database world. If you don't know what vitest is you're losing out um you you need to know you're you're watching this on YouTube uh on a vitest website. Um Oreo DB and DB like there's a lot to go in there and honestly uh you can see my connection with the the founders. I think this is the first interview ever that the two of them have done and I make reference to that and try to uh you their chemistry
5:14and show show you what it's like to discuss and run a $10 billion database company. Enjoy.
5:28Okay, this podcast has been six years in the making. We're excited to have uh Coppel and Ant in the studio. Welcome, guys. Thanks. Thanks for having us.
5:37Uh we're recording this ahead of Super Select which you know it's your it's your big customer conference and we'll release this after the the conference.
5:47But I just want to sort of celebrate the journey that you guys have been on. I've seen you guys since you guys finished YC and you were like in that place in Singapore where you were sort of celebrating things and I you know I met you guys for the first time and I was like what is this like hot database company that like got like soft launched on hacker news by like you know some random user sometime um anyway congrats on all the the the success. What are you announcing the headlines at select?
6:15Let's just get right into that.
6:16Yeah. Yeah, sure. Um so there's quite a few headlines. We've got a lot to cover.
6:21The main ones would be starting off with um compute. So we offer a product called Edge Functions and Edge Functions are powered by Dino and they have basically a 2C limit. What we're finding is that well what we've heard from our community for a long time is that they want to run much longer workloads. They want to do things like chunking and embedding. So tomorrow we're announcing and by the time this comes out superbased compute
6:50which is you can run anything. It's longunning. It's serverless. It is running the same private network as your database. So it's colllocated has very good latency. So you can run postgress connections directly from compute and you can run anything inside it. So it's no longer constrained to just dino. You can use it with rust or python. You can run agents inside it. It's basically just a full compute instance. let's call it uh the comparable offerings in other clouds that other us might be familiar with. Uh would this be
7:19yeah something like a lambda function but um the container type lambda function um you can run a full container basically and then there's the other stuff.
7:30Yeah. And then we have well three uh innovations on the database space. So the first one which we talked about last year which was Ore DB or DB we've basically put it through the ringer in the past year to make sure that it is rock solid and ready for the Postgress ecosystem. The three innovations are basically uh performance scaling up and scaling out. Uh Postgress touches on uh sorry Oriental DB touches on performance. It is a drop-in replacement
7:58for the the current Postgress storage engine which is heap and it runs about 1.5 to two times faster and you don't have to change anything else. It's just completely compatible. It completely removes the need for some of these background tasks like vacuum upload. So it's actually very efficient for your database as well. And basically the innovation that all the work that we had to do this year was put it through PG regress full compatibility with Postgress antithesis. We put it through
8:26TPCC nightly benchmarks and JSON to make sure that it basically can never lose data. So we're releasing it tomorrow in full beta and we also made it Apache 2 licensed. It comes with a patent and the Apache 2 license covers the patent. So we actually acquired the technology, continue to develop it and then we paid for the patent and are now giving it away for free.
8:48One thing that you mentioned in passing which I still don't I can't get over is that you tested every operator and you said um every operator drops data in some situation.
8:59Well so this is for the second the second one so scaling.
9:02So that's that's that's multigress.
9:04Yes. So multigrass is the second big announcement. Basically we looked at the Postgress ecosystem and we looked at all the operators an operator for those who aren't familiar when you run Postgress you start with a single node but then with almost any database you want to run multiple nodes and you want things like failover you want it to manage backups so usually you have this thing called an operator which can run the entire cluster for you so there's quite a few operators in the Postgress ecosystem and what we had found was that under um certain conditions every single one of
9:34them could lose data and so We decided with Multigress to do a groundup rewrite of the entire structure of a of a operator. And so Multigress is essentially while our initial goal is to become or give sharding to the Postgress community, what it's turned out to be is this entire operating system. And we actually ran it uh again through very rigorous testing and we've done a uh 1,000 sequential failovers and it didn't lose any data and we've tested it in
10:03basically every way we can clobbering it to see whether it will ever lose data. So we're very confident now in its stability and so we're releasing that one as well tomorrow. It's completely open source. It will be on our platform for customers in uh invite only. So people who are running serious workloads can come to us and we'll start helping them to scale up.
10:24Is this the full completion of multigrass being fully sort of parallel to Vites or is there still something left to go?
10:31No actually yeah it was quite interesting. So, Sugu um originally created uh VES in for the MySQL ecosystem but specifically for sharding and actually when he came along he said well the number one goal that we want to do for this time because we're always catching up on compatibility when we used for test you always had to change things as you move to shard it so change some queries so he said I want to focus
10:59only on compatibility first and so the way we've designed it is in such a way this groundup rewrite is specifically so that we know when we release sharding you actually won't have to change anything for your database you'll continue to run the same queries and multira will just be able to handle it zero changes to your code I mean that's incredible vision and the fact that you've been able to do it in two years that's one year um so we haven't released sharding yet I've seen the
11:27early prototypes and the designs for how we're doing it and it should should some of it should and by probably early next year depending on some of the things that are happening on our platform. We got a lot going on but um but we're very confident we're and we're we're happy with the progress. It's it's been pretty good.
11:46Yeah. I mean I think this is the last piece for the total domination of Postgress.
11:50Right. That's and for those who don't know you know look up the test uh powers YouTube powers what else? GitHub everything.
11:58Yeah. if workloads were ever to shift away from my SQL, you need this to to Postgress and that's then for Superbase to win.
12:05And hopefully it's not just for Superbase customers, right? Like it's fully open source community thing. Anyone who's who's running Postgress at scale um should be able to use Multigrass.
12:15Yeah. I'm sure like every coalition, every company that's involved in Postgress in some way is contributing to this thing, right? Cuz we all want this.
12:21Yeah. Yeah. We've got a whole design partner program. So um we're working with the likes of Boo Allen, we're working with Postman, we're working with Perplexity. So yeah, lots of customers coming on board. They a lot of people need it. They're running Postgress at scale and they need something to sc help them scale up.
12:37Yeah. Third third one is uh Yeah. So this one's a big one. Um scale out. At the moment we launch about 5 million databases on our platform every single month. and kind of the future where we know we're going, we think that we're going to have to launch billions per month. And so scaling out is a whole different beast. So we decided that we would have to look at some new architectures and people within the space, the agentic database space. And
13:07there's no other leading database provider who does agentic well than Terso. And so actually tomorrow and when this is announced it would have come out where we have announced that we've acquired terso to help us power agentic databases. Yeah, that's an incredible.
13:24It's also like they're they're primarily SQLite based, but it doesn't really matter, right? Like it's it's more about the architecture of like I guess I don't have the word to describe how basically like broadcasts is that the word for for scale out right like um there's the idea for them scaling SQLite was that they would have like a single writer and like multiple readers.
13:48Yeah. So so SQLite itself it's only a single writer. It's a file format. Um, so generally it's not they call it MVCC for Exactly. Exactly. So then they built this Terso architecture which basically builds MVCC for SQLite so that you can have multiple writers and SQLite is has a weird license. They had to fork it.
14:09They had to fork it. They originally started with lib SQL and then they they came along and they did this other really cool architecture and actually now the architecture actually it was very commonly discussed a few weeks ago while on S3. So some of the innovations in the database space are actually coming out of what's happening in object storage. So object storage has added a bunch of new features which basically mean that you can start using it a little bit like a a database and because object storage itself is I think it's 11
14:379 of data durability which is not reliability but whatever.
14:42Yeah, nonreliability but it it gives you what you need for for um basically what you would typically have for a cluster of databases. It's kind of like your cluster underneath. So you can start doing some cool things like yeah there's quite a few popular databases now or data use cases that are building directly on top of object storage. It's got some limitations um in our world view. It's probably good for these smaller use cases. In terms of transactions because when you got a
15:11transactional database you got to do a lot of reads and writes and so in this case you probably don't want to be doing something at massive scale on this. And that's why we have multigress. But for these what we're seeing where we need to get to these billions of databases, what we need them to be is a file format. And so that's where SQLite was super interesting. It's dominating. And actually the thing that really piqued our interest and I reached out to Globber. I said he released a blog post
15:39on how they done their rewrite basically makes the we have a pathway to get Postgress compatibility with their file format. So we're acquiring them and we're actually going to keep the Terso brand. So Terso is going to focus on SQLite and then we're going to introduce this new smaller instance type on Superbase called Superbase Spark and it'll be compatible with all our libraries and you can have one database for any idea any prototype that you want
16:08and when it takes off then you just upgrade to full Postgress databases all the way up to multigrass.
16:14I know you've been working on this for a while. This is the dream, right?
16:16Yeah. Yeah. has been both scaling up and scaling down has been one of the things that we've been trying to figure out how to do and is really when some of these innovations came along that we realize oh okay we can do this you know you're going to 5 million a month let's say you see on the trajectory of billions per month one of the secrets is they're actually kind of small databases right like these these things are tiny they're vioded apps like I I don't know if you have any insights on the on like what I mean until they get traction right and
16:46that's the thing is like once you hit the front page of hacking news, you need to know that you can go far beyond that.
16:51Um, and so the whole idea with with all of this was we need to make sure we've got a really smooth pathway to migrate between the backends like zero downtime migrations is like we it's just like a a need to have because like we see now that there's a lot of nontechnical builders who are building like whole companies, right? We have a a customer magic school and the guy was like a teacher, right? And he saw all these like inefficiencies in teaching like
17:20teachers spending time that on on tasks that could be automated. And so now you have these startups that start without a technical co-founder without a CTO and that's not like isolated incidents anymore. That's like becoming more everyone everyone's like a builder now.
17:38Um and that's why we see like the growth we've seen over the last 18 months is crazy. Yeah. But but it still feels like early and I think um there's a much larger market of almost like consumer-l like builders right people inside companies people who want to launch their own startups which is going to mean a lot more databases which like we said like if we give everyone a dedicated Postgress cluster it's
18:06probably you know we'll probably run out of physical computers in the in the world pretty fast which is basically what's happening. Yeah, I mean like we've faced it throughout this year. We're just our growth has uh has been uh one of the things that we've had to deal with in terms of capacity of computing.
18:24Yeah. So, congrats. Also, I will observe that I feel like Glowber is also a meme lord.
18:30Yeah. Well, that's one of the things I mean like come on.
18:33Yeah, he's amazing. So for those who don't know the the person behind this rubber based memes is this guy that you know um low key lowkey a killer I I would say and Will Glober also.
18:44Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big time.
18:45Any I don't know if you guys exchange notes on like what's funny?
18:50We're going to give him access to the superbase Twitter account for sure. I I could do with some help.
18:56Yeah. Yeah. Wait, is it still you?
18:58We've got a small team of uh teenagers now who help me out.
19:04Yeah. But it's we do a weekly workshop, a meme basically weekly meme workshop, but it's hard to hire for because you need to understand the tech and understand like what developers find funny basically in order to do that type of marketing, right?
19:20Yeah. Um, actually, you're you are also lowkey like meme lord.
19:24I'm not as funny as you. You're really really funny. Where's there was one with like a seagull and you were like um standing on top of super turtle standing on top of post I think it was a seagull standing seagull riding a flying seagull and it's like oh my god super I can't I can't find it right now but and this is all like deep superb history but like you know there there was a time when like those things were just like it was so good people wanted to be like you and they couldn't
19:51and it was your moat like memes.
19:55Yeah. And there was some big companies trying to run memes off their Twitter accounts. I won't name any names, but like very large organizations. Um, but yeah, it's it's hard. Like I said, it's hard to hire.
20:07The guy who did like a 40,000word essay on breaking down our meme strategy.
20:12Someone studied our Twitter strategy actually really early on and posted it on on Hacken News.
20:17Yeah. On Hacking News. Uh and and that was funny because they' recorded the strategy in a way that we hadn't committed to paper yet. So then when we on boarded new marketing people, we were like here's the strategy that was written by someone else.
20:31Yeah. And of course hacking news hated it and then they were commenting on it and took the the first guy. This guy Yeah. Yeah.
20:40Learnings from four months of superb feed. He just looked at your work.
20:43How long was this? 2022. Okay.
20:44Yeah. Yeah. Wait, I I I mentioned it. Oh, okay. There you are.
20:48So he just broke it down.
20:49He broke it down and then hacken hated it on it and so Ant took a photo of them on it and posted it on our Twitter account.
20:58Your hate just fuels me.
21:00What is this? Uh interesting article.
21:02Yeah. Okay. So I commented.
21:06That was like a lot of our growth is thanks to Hacken News. I mean in the early days I just had to live on their end.
21:12So we should talk about that. What deal with the devil do you have to do with Dang uh to we we've been scolded by Dani like many times like for for launching too many things in a week basically and he's like rightfully paranoid about the association of hacken news and YC.
21:32So he kind of like if something happens, he kind of wants to throw us under the bus so that he people know, oh, we're not doing this for YC customers. We're an independent site. So he's been helpful to uh make sure that we we don't smear the name of of YC News.
21:50I mean, at this point, you don't need them, but like for sure, I think Dang does a Dang has super high credibility. But I do think you guys strategy of launch weeks and I think there was one of the launch weeks I think four or five where every single launch was like number one or page one on hacker news.
22:12I got told off so badly for that because I tweeted that proudly. I was like oh here we are. Then I got told off cuz we were like it basically looks bad because because like suddenly this YC company is like dominating the front page of Hack News. It looks like it's a bias.
22:29I'm like parading the fact that you're on the front which is true. Like so like tip to anyone, never screenshot the fact that you're on the front page of hack news and put it on Twitter because it's it does look like and and to be honest it it was gloating. So so it's a fair fair call out. Yeah.
22:45Yeah. There's all that which like I would say I was cons considered that somewhat ancient history now. You know, it's been a few years since since this is a relevant thing. But for those who don't know Superbase history, these are the things that you must check off as like the tour of things. What else? I mean, I I think the the top post there is interesting because this is the launch post.
23:04Yeah. But but it was someone else who launched us like we weren't ready. We weren't ready to be launched on hacking.
23:10And you didn't consider yourself a Firebase alternative.
23:13Oh yeah. So that was the day that we changed the tagline. We had the tagline original tagline.
23:17It was real time Postgress because what had happened was I wanted like we we were like oh let's build a Postgress company but in my previous company I had to migrate from Firebase to Postgress but I needed a real time feature and so I ended up building this realtime engine on top of Postgress and so we thought oh that's the killer thing like it's getting some open source traction this real time engine is kind of cool. So we were like oh real time Postgress no one cared. No one cared when we had a website and so like we were like let's change it to open source firebased alternative
23:47knowing that that was the reason why I switched and it was I think only 12 hours later or something like that that this article went up.
23:55Yeah. Still the top of all time and at the time we was running on top of digital ocean and every new database was two droplets. So two $5 a month droplets. way too.
24:08Um, one for the uh database and one for the APIs, right? Because we cuz we wanted to upgrade the APIs and and we only had a handful of like test users at that point and then all of a sudden I think we only had eight users. We went from 8 to 800 on that that launch alone.
24:26Yeah. And then we burned through I think we had like 10k of digital uh ocean credits which we just burned through in basically 48 hours. Um, and then we just got into YC, so AWS was like, "Oh, we'll give you, you know, whatever it was, 150k in credits if you migrate to us."
24:44And so we spent the first week of being in YC migrating 800 databases to a different cloud, which, you know, if you've ever migrated one database, you know how painful it is. It's like migrating 800 is not how you want to spend your first week in war. Do you remember that we could have been on digital like bas basically we should still be building on digital ocean cuz when you get into YC they have this credits program like huge number of credits on digital ocean at the time and we're like hey can we have these credits
25:13because we're like we're blowing up here and they said oh no you've already used the $10,000 credit program we can't give you this other one for 300,000 so we're like well we have to migrate to AWS and so the biggest lost opportunity of Digital I know our bills with AWS. Now, this is like probably one of their biggest customers ever that they lost from being too strict about because it was co it was a time when everyone was worried about like what's going to happen. So, I think they were like we don't want to overextend
25:44Um, yeah, it's fair.
25:45Yeah. So, it was like totally fair at the time just given the um the way the world was looking.
25:50People made many irrational uh decisions during co but you never know. I was still going to say you might be worth more than Digital Ocean now, but then somehow Digital Ocean has also like gone on a super tear.
26:03Because computers tripled in the last year.
26:05Wow, that's cool. So, what are they? 16 16 billion now.
26:10And like like uh Okay. Well, I guess there's a shortage of CPUs.
26:13Yeah, there's a shortage.
26:14How are you guys experiencing it? We literally I mean we're up against runways all the time where like we meet AWS like multiple times.
26:24Is there a way to spike when you have a spike or what do you do like you you just have agreements with people?
26:29Yeah, we've got to like plan very closely. We we pay more. We partner with them and in fact tomorrow as well we're announcing that we're bringing on a new investment partner which is Capital G. Capital G basically has access to the Alphabet ecosystem. Good for us on both sides. It's like we now have to consider a multi cloud strategy.
26:47We need GCP. Well, we need more compute basically. So GCP is a very obvious choice and of course we want to partner with all the AI labs as much as possible and so they have a suite of products. We work with them already on Gemini and we want to make sure that we're embedded deeply into all of their products. And that's another thing where you're mentioning how so much of the database ecosystem is being shaped by block storage and all these innovations and all these things. Clearly AWS is is is the leader there.
27:15It's hard to be multiloud if you're going to use GCS as like a swap for S3.
27:19Yes, as long as they've got the features. Actually, I don't know if their object storage has the all the features, but I'm sure that like whatever S3 do others follow. So I I still remember I think like 3 years ago they introduced like strong consistency.
27:34Yeah, that's the innovation basically that that helps. Yeah.
27:37And they just like they did it for free and they just rolled it out to everybody and it's like it's live now. What?
27:42Yeah. Yeah. And then S3 Express as well.
27:45That was a big game changer because why?
27:48Well, basically now what you want to do is like you typically write to a local drive and then you need to batch it to something more durable. And that batching process um and so the right times to this are 1 to 2 milliseconds. And so before you can guarantee a right back to your client, you basically need to batch it to something that's durable.
28:09So this one's durable. Not as durable as S3, not 11 9s, but durable enough that you can it's ephemeral durable.
28:17Yes, exactly. And then then in the background you take you take you use this kind of as your cache and then you move into S3 in the background.
28:26Do you need radius anymore?
28:28Uh yes. Yeah, you still need radius.
28:30Like this is no nowhere near fast enough. You need like basically your cache layers are either memory, MVME drive, um, local attached, S3, they're equivalent, and then S3.
28:42Amazing. Amazing. That was a little bit of data like we we jumped around quite a lot. Uh, based new way. Uh, a few more things that we're going to talk about. You your slogan was build in the weekend, scale to millions. Now we're prototype to pabyte, which is excellent.
28:56And really, it is reflective of the evolution in scale that you guys are doing, right?
29:01Yeah. Do you have anecdotes on like let's say early Superbase versus now?
29:06How fast are people scaling when they when they start a thing?
29:09Yeah. Well, the big thing is um I think how fast people are monetizing.
29:15At the start it was like you choose your database, you build your product at some point you um add in billing. now because you can add in stripe like at the agentic layer. It's like we see customers starting a project and within the same week like generating serious cash and and in the early days of vibe coding it wasn't obvious to us that this is something that's going to stick around.
29:40This is going to change the way software is built. But as soon as we saw someone earning like I think it was $10,000 within the first few days of launching their product, we were like, "Wow, this is this is real.
29:52People are making real things that generate real money." Um, so we knew we had to lean in in a way where there was waves we'd ridden successfully in the past, like when NFTts were huge, we leaned in a bit and we added like sign in with Ethereum and sign in with Salana. Um, but we didn't dedicate like tons of dev time because everyone kind of knew it was going to go away at some point. And making that decision for for vibe coding was like, you know, we we
30:20discussed it a lot as a team of how much do we lean in? And it was a time when we knew we needed to go slightly more up marker. It's like our biggest customers were like stretching the limits of of what we had at the time. And so we knew we had to then just do both. It was like, you know, um, innovate on the on the small like prototype stuff and innovate on the on the much larger side as well. And then you just need more people for that. So that one's funny because like on the number side
30:49basically for superbase there's been three chapters of AI. So the first chapter was um embeddings. I think we're on superbase vector which I have now transcribed and it will always uh we we should probably update this cuz uh Yeah. Yeah. The only talk you've ever done at Yeah, we did this talk. Basically, all these embedding databases were coming out, vector databases, great the vector.
31:12And so we were pushing the fact and you can use Postgress as a vector database.
31:17And Andrew Kane, a a completely independent guy, has developed this awesome extension and we're like, okay, trying to educate the market. Postgress can kind of do anything. You don't need another database if you're going to store your embeddings. So this was chapter one and it was it was a really a good growth driver for us and also good for the postgres ecosystem just letting people know now there's a lot of innovations in in embeddings what turbuffer for example are doing they use a lot of the innovations that terso are doing and I think it's a phenomenal use
31:46case for that type of stuff so that was chapter one chapter two was like the vibe coding wave whereas lovable bold all of these ones coming along that was end of 2024 and that's where we debated a lot hey do we really want to be there do we want to be servicing these. Do we even want to have our own VIP coding type platform on top of Superbase? But in the end, like our mission is store the world's data. And to do that, we based on our tagline. It's like be there when you're getting started. Make sure that they never want to leave. And so we
32:16saw people were getting started. They were doing toy things, but still it fit our mission. We just had to believe that over time these tools would become better. And then the third one which is the like crazy numbers started this year the models just got better basically and then we started seeing our top of funnel our signup rate start rapidly increasing but usually when this happens you're pouring a lot of dollars into marketing.
32:41We actually barely spend any dollars on marketing and uh most of it's just memes and things like that. So um here I got one of your charts. There we go. Yeah, I mean all your tries look the same, but because they're just like exponentially scaling, you just keep you just keep changing.
32:57The other crazy thing about this is is often when you get like more consumer-l like traffic and the top of funnel, your activation and conversion to pay goes down, but both of those things went up, started going up quite rapidly as well.
33:09Yeah. Because of the How do you know activation and conversion to pay? Oh, your super our metrics. Yeah, our full metrics. Um and and the reason is because the sign up to activation, the agent does it for you. Yeah.
33:22Like in one step. So it's basically it's almost 100%.
33:27Um and so those users then were converting to paid at a higher rate than our traditional developer user.
33:34Okay. I mean, excellent.
33:38But but I'm sure but I'm sure I'm sure like like all developer tools are seeing the same thing, right?
33:43Well, at different rates. I think you guys are clearly one of the the leaders there. You know, I was going to bring out this one of these these things. I have this AEO tracker uh where you know, if you if you type in Superbase and there's a there's a few categories where you're the leader. Uh but basically, it has led to every single frontier model recommending you as your primary choice for an integrated backend. What does integrated back end mean? It it is your original offerings like your your off your uh functions, your you know um and your database and and all the other stuff uh APIs. And I think it is
34:13interesting like you had to be in the market for three to four years exactly your time zone before LLM took off and then present yourself as the leading competitor to the leading thing at the time.
34:26And then to you can take over.
34:27Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're very lucky with our timing. I mean we couldn't have timed it better. Like it's complete accident. Well, I mean I think like on first princip principles basis. So we have interviewed other founders who maybe started post LLMs and resend was kind of their we've also talked to them like why does my LLM keep recommending resend and it's because they have a lot of good a practices.
34:51Sure. Yeah. And of course we invest very heavily in that but you know when we've been at that point since the start and that was an accident right? Now we just need to maintain that lead and community as well, right? Like our one of our growth strategies early was just was spending so much time with the community and it resulted in they were writing blog posts. They were making YouTube videos, they were putting out podcasts all about how to use Superbase in what situations like here's how I built this thing. I'm sure that all just got
35:20slurped up by the the models.
35:22Yeah. And open source helps as well. Of course being being open source. Uh you actually had a fun announcement on the community side because you're raising so much and you're trying to involve your community in some in in more deeply.
35:33Yeah. So so last year at Superbase Select we announced that we were going to do a crowdfunding round. It's something we've always wanted to do and we should have done it much earlier on but we just you know had so many other things going on and basically then we spent the last year fighting with the lawyers who are saying you know for the number of people we want to be involved there is no mechanism to do it without people being accredited investors until we asked them the question well what if they don't invest what if we just give
36:02them the stock and they were like yeah we'll look into it and then they came back and like actually there is a mechanism where if you really just want to give the stock away you can. And so now we've earmarked like a million dollars in Superbase stock that we're basically going to give to a bunch of the community members. The first community member we're we're going to stand up on stage and sort of announce is is this guy. His name's Gary Austin in the Superbase Discord.
36:30And this guy's like a legend of the Superbase community. He we looked into his stats and Gary has answered uh 20,000 in the last six years, 20,000 questions in the Superbase Discord. And the crazy thing is 13,000 of them he answered within the first hour of them being asked and he's not a Grockbot. Like he's a real human.
36:56Have you met him? What what is he?
36:58He's real. We we've met he he was basically like retired. Yeah.
37:01And just interested in Superbass.
37:03Gary Austin. Gary Abbott.
37:05Yeah. Gary Abbott is his real name.
37:07Okay. This guy and and he loved Superbass because he basically built his own sim similar um app cuz he loves red wine.
37:16Um and then was just getting a kick out of, you know, he's got Superbase logo on his Christmas tree. And he's also like, by the way, these are my favorite Superbase memes. So, it's just like you reminding me that like I'm about to run out of my Superbase.
37:30That's the announcement is we're basically like um anyone who's a legend in the Superbase ecosystem, we can now Is Discord still a strong I mean I I got mixed feelings about Discord. It it is it is the best chat, you know, Slack sucks, but also it is not public, right?
37:47So, all the work in there is not scalable.
37:50Have you found anything to solve that?
37:52There was some tools that we looked at uh in the early days. We we decided not to do it because you still needed to police like what things you wanted to be public and and what things you didn't.
38:03But the original debate that I remember we debated a lot was okay, we want to host the community. Do we do a Discord?
38:10Do we do a Slack community? Do we do a Reddit? And we tried a few different options, but we landed on this thing of like Discord users are going to use Discord. Reddit users are going to use Reddit. And we basically had to do all of the be where they are. Yeah. That's the answer. It was a lot of work.
38:28Yeah. And it worked out, right? I mean, that was the right answer.
38:31But then there's a lot of like great tools that started popping up, right? Um or I don't think anyone has has uh stood the test of time, let's call it, but yeah, there there are there are tools there are discord mirror to public Q&A site. That is a thing that people do.
38:47I don't know if it's been successful for anyone.
38:49And and like common room um the only thing that we did was for ourselves. So basically anyone who had asked a legitimate question on any one of these, we then would basically scrape the question and the response into our own website. No, actually we scraped it kind of into GitHub discussions and mirrored that onto our website and so the content that was getting used GitHub as a CMS.
39:15Yeah, we used it as a CMS. Exactly. Yeah. It was a great strategy because everyone ultimately everyone was asking the same questions over and over again. So we're just like okay well we'll surface it each time. Yeah, it can be confusing because there's gith there's superbase the open source and then there's super superbase the cloud platform and some and most people are probably going to come into support for superb cloud platform.
39:37So yeah it it is do you have any idea of your uh this is very hard to tell your open- source market capture. So uh this is a thing that like if you're in the developer tools circles you you know you do we like quite deliberately do not don't know. So we don't put any tracking in our open source offering. You can use it and we've had enterprises, large pharmaceutical companies for example, come to us and say, "Hey, we're running
40:05100 instances of your open- source project. Can you offer us a product?" So we've got this product called Control Tower, which allows enterprises to have monitor a fleet of databases. You won't find it on on our website, but Oh, come on. Yeah. Yeah.
40:21Cuz it launches because tomorrow I don't know if we're announcing it tomorrow but yeah basically it's control D it all it does is it's this fleet view we've got this very popular product superbase for platforms so that's what all these AI companies are building on top of we launch millions of databases for them and so all we needed to do was repackage this for enterprises and enterprises as well want to do the same thing which is they want to spin up many internal superbase for all of their
40:50users they want to see and administer them. And so control tower is essentially a repackaging of what we've already been developing for these platform providers except specifically for for individual enterprises.
41:03Yeah, I do want to cover because I think a lot of people think of you as bottoms up GTM uh you know what the work you've been doing on on the enterprise side. Uh so first of all, shout out to I think this is your most successful recent launch which is uh Superbase for platforms. This one launched in Yeah.
41:19Yeah. Yeah. I mean December 2025. Oh yeah, I saw some stats or like you guys called it successful. I don't know.
41:25Um what is the enterprise side right like what what are what is that story apart from like give me a dashboard.
41:31Well first of all we should talk about sales strategies.
41:34Okay so superbase is a very famously Pong company like we give a about we have 60% of every YC batch use superbase. We focus almost all of our attention on this like becoming an index company. Basically, our role model here is Stripe. We want to follow in their footsteps. They're one of the only developer tools that we've ever seen that has withtood more than a decade of moving our market and still keeping that developer love. So that's the first
42:03thing. So to do that, all we started doing when we did sales was layer on what we call product sales. So we look instead for like product triggers. It could be like a a logo, someone who we think is really important, but more importantly, they could be scaling up.
42:18They could be hitting some limits, having some errors, paying a certain amount. We've got a bunch of these triggers. And then AI came along and we're like, "Oh, we can do some interesting stuff from this." So, let's say we have a thousand product triggers every single week. We send off a,000 emails to people who are having problems and say 500 of them respond. We take the cohort who don't respond and we use them as a control group, okay?
42:44And we measure how much they grow. Turns out they grow 25% month over month. Then we take all those who do respond and we say to our sales team, the only thing you need to do is get on a call with these people and help them. And because we've got all their traffic patterns, we can give them a script. We know what their problem is. AI has been great on this. And uh we give them a script just to help out. And it turns out just getting on a call and helping people out, their account then grows 125%. So
43:11that 100% uplift, the incremental uplift is what we compensate our salespeople. Traditionally, you'd say get on a call with these people and just sell them and then you get the full quotota.
43:22But because we know our database grows, our platform grows at 25% month over month on this cohort of users, then we know that our sales force are adding this 100% incremental uplift. So that's how we do our sales function. It's always focused on these logos or very specific uh product needs. So yeah, the likes of the enterprise is usually coming in because they're wanting to launch lots and lots of databases or
43:51almost never it'll be a transfer of their production database. So migrating databases from say my SQL to Postgress or from say one scalable database to another scalable database almost never happens. And that was the core thesis of Superbase at the start. We knew that every single Postgress company we had looked at or database company we had looked at in the past that had tried to do migrations had failed over time. You just can't convince people to migrate.
44:20Even if you build a bigger, better, more scalable Postgress, what you have to do is land with them on day one and then make sure that they stick around to day 1,000, day 10,000. So all of our focus is winning these enterprise logos on on day one.
44:34Green field. Yeah, they're still not migrating.
44:38I guarantee they'll almost never migrate. There's a cohort that will need multigress. We talked to some logos who are looking at using it open source.
44:47they're very interested on making sure that um they can basically help us direct because they're running into problems of Postgress at scale. But for the next say 5 years almost all of our focus on the enterprise side is making sure that we can handle green field use cases which now in the enterprise it turns out to be a very prolific use case because they want all of their product people to be developing innovating as much as they can. So again, it's kind of
45:16perfect timing for us because that's what we've been focused on for so long.
45:20This control tower is like one of our biggest things. Multigress of course gives us the the opportunity to win these large workloads if and when they want to ever migrate, but it won't ever be one of our core focuses or at least not for the next say 5 years. We're going to have to focus really heavily on just landing inside these enterprises and then expanding up. The other thing that's changed is we obviously put in the past all of our focus into developers. So it was like selling to the developers enable them as a
45:49champion. They help you sell internally. H interestingly now we have like CPOS who are like wow I didn't code for the last 10 years but now because of lovable and superbase I'm building all these things internally that we now have like champions at the at the sea level without needing to put like a huge motion around there.
46:08Oh that's great. Yeah. mentioning Lovable, mentioning Bolt, Lovable is going to have their own database stuff, you know, and and like everyone is going to basically try to intrude on on each other's turf, uh, which is normal in in the in the grand scheme of things. Which is more sticky?
46:23Which is more sticky?
46:24More more sticky. Like, is the CPO more likely to be married to lovable or married to Superbase, you know, like is that a question that comes up?
46:32That's a great That's a great question.
46:34I think ultimately running databases is very hard.
46:36Fair enough. Well, and and as we just discussed, it's harder to migrate your database than it is your front end tool.
46:44Not that I don't think Lovable is sticky. I think it's amazing. And actually, they were the first people to do a really good job of making sure their agent didn't do stupid with um the database because we had very early on the agents were like trying to shove image data into Postgress. you know, they were turning off RLS in order to get their projects to work um by papercliping basically is that Lovable wrote really good skills to stop their
47:13agents doing stupid stuff. They were they were the first.
47:15That's the secret sauce.
47:16Yeah. Yeah. To solve all this and and and now like the models themselves don't do that stupid stuff anymore.
47:23So, it's it's the situation has improved a lot. It's gone from like um Will Smith eating spaghetti circa you know 2022 to Will Smith eating spaghetti in 2026.
47:35Yeah. Yeah. Um and that's a that's a famous meme.
47:37Uh talking about I'll leave the migration point alone after I mentioned this. You know, one of the things that I got like a big aha moment was when I met Karen from CO2 was one of your board members and she said like her thesis is whole like you know you are not just replacing Firebase you're also like you know coming off as like new new RDS right for for Amazon. Um if there was a you know stage four of fourth era post AI of superbase that is like the other you know the one trillionx in your in
48:06your growth. Rip out Oracle. I I don't know like yeah what is is is that that's the one that the famous migrations are after I heard some crazy stat like that it might be different now cuz they're trying to Oracle are trying to move everything to the cloud but I think it was like one year ago someone said that only 5% of Oracle workloads by revenue ran in the cloud and so like almost everyone was saying oh let's rip
48:33out Oracle let's do migrations people that's what I mean though when I look through the history of database providers who have tried to run this strategy, it sounds amazing and it's something that we will of course try to do ourselves. Why would we not try to do this? But it is incredibly difficult and I think you will just want to focus first of all on landing inside the enterprise.
48:56Yeah, that makes sense. It's it's one of those things where like you know when I see and talk to coding agent people all day long the great promise is that you can finally migrate off of all this legacy software that you have right and like hopefully that means that you cut over everything.
49:11That's true because one of the things that actually makes Oracle so sticky is like you end up writing these million line stored procedures like you stuff everything into your database and so actually probably rewriting that is these days a lot easier.
49:25Right. Right. So like hopefully coding agents are the boom. Maybe they're not there yet. Maybe you guys have to become more on prem. Most of the problem around migrations is actually not not rewriting it and you can do migrations for example on the data analytics side quite easily from one from one warehouse to another.
49:42The problem is that usually your OLTP database is powering your most revenue generating application. So a minute of downtime means that you end up with basically dollars lost. And so then what you end up doing is having to run these two things in parallel. And then the risk of this is that you get this split brain where you've got some data running on one side, some on another. And if you try to reconcile split brain anyone who's tried to do it, it's a very hard problem. So the risks are just so much
50:11higher when it comes to OLTP that a lot of time people just start doing splitting the workloads off and they'll start new workloads. They'll do a lot of operations here and hopefully they'll migrate things over.
50:22Yeah. Usually then you got two problems though. Well, speaking of LTP, I mean, uh, this is just like down database indulgence. We also had two of the co-founders of data bricks here, mate and Reynolds, where they are making a claim that they have solved HTAP.
50:41Which is the sort of the white will of database people, right? If you if you know like uh well, traditionally you need an OOLTP, you need OLAP database. Um, never the two shall meet except that uh sometimes you you would like to never have to replicate anything.
50:54Yeah. Are you are you paying attention at all to that stuff? Like is is there is there a story there for super basis on some one someday?
51:00Yes, we are particularly interested in duck lake. I think ducklake is a very and ductb is a very interesting technique.
51:05Mother duck but a but a data lake like what what is what is duck lake?
51:08Uh duck lake. Okay. So um duct DB which was recently there's duck DB which is basically like a SQLite for analytics column the storage.
51:18Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It can read directly from object storage. That's typically how it's touted and it can actually read from your Postgress database as well. So open source great technology and actually there's also uh duct DB labs which was recently acquired by AWS. Yeah. So they're a foundation that are developing so they're building a committee um around the open source. I actually think of duct DB a little bit like the Postgress of the analytics
51:46ecosystem in that they're trying to make it so that it's owned by no one. It does a lot of things. It's very versatile.
51:54It's like a professor in Netherlands.
51:56Yeah, exactly. They live they live and work out of the Netherlands which is pretty cool. So our interest mostly on the warehouse side is not trying to make Postgress an analytical database but mostly then focusing on using the right technology for the right job. I don't know if HTAB many people have tried to slay the HTAB dragon object storage could be the solution to that but generally we think once you get to a certain size on the OLTP side you need to have sharding there's a limit to the
52:25amount of MVME disk space that you can have so if you need to split transaction across two servers you're basically then going to be fetching it from object storage eventually that will slow down your database so we think that sharding is by far the best way to do scale up into the pabytes and then you should treat your analytics differently. Now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't store your data directly on object storage for example and then read from it from a different route but trying to
52:55smash these two together doesn't necessarily make that much sense in my opinion.
53:00Yeah, I I I'm happy to leave it there because we do have more uh to uh work on. I do think, you know, they have some innovations where they're they're basically using their their spare compute on their uh database uh machines to power all this uh replication is is my read of what they're doing.
53:18And actually to be honest, I haven't looked so much into how they're doing HDAP. So I could be misquing.
53:24Yeah, exactly. It's it's like you're you're in your lane, you know, it's not exactly like your customers are like banging the table asking you for this. It is just like if you want to become the preeminent database company someday you have to have an answer.
53:36Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
53:40Which like Yeah. It's it's interesting.
53:41Uh the other mention I will check in on is durable workflows and and you know that world which as you know temporal uh I've been I've been uh banging the drone for a while. You have made uh like every year you made you do a little thing.
53:54Yeah. Yeah. We're incrementing our way towards So like don't you like how come it's not like more P 0 for you because like you know temporal is doing super well right?
54:03Okay. So what was missing for us to do durable workflows compute right? So you're you're doing this now.
54:09Yeah. Super interesting space to be in I think like yeah now we have had people in the community try to build workflow engines on top of superbase functions and it just didn't work because of the 2C timeout.
54:21Yeah. Now we've got the primitive that would unlock the ability to do longunning durable workflows.
54:28I think my original pitch for Superbase is like you want the sort of the all-in-one the the sort of aentic cloud that like is the back end integrated back end that that people can can use, right? Like you've got signing with Chad BT now which is uh a great part like you you just kind of have to sort of give the AI everything it wants and then it will be your best friend.
54:48Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. Pretty much.
54:50And be prolific. I mean, our B1 strategy is to partner with as many of these frontier labs and models as we can. So, we've got to be prolific there. And then we basically we see our attach rates just going up as well.
55:02Yeah. I mean, obviously there's the US labs and you're you're you're here in the US. Do the other labs have significant partnerships? What What are they like? Mistrol, Coher, the Chinese labs. I don't know if Not so much where Well, they might they might do.
55:18Okay. You primarily care about the US.
55:20Yeah. Okay. That's right.
55:21Yeah. Mainly just cuz like that's who's delivering the most traffic at the moment, right? That could change.
55:28But what does partnership look like?
55:29Like basically it's one thing to be on the their app store. It's the other thing to be their default thing when they when you launch in Artifact.
55:36Yeah. So that one's super interesting for us to be able to hopefully be one of those providers. One of the reasons why we couldn't in the past was because we just couldn't handle their scale. I mean take chat GPT for example. What do they got now? A billion monthly 1.2 billion monthly active users. One of their users launching a database every single month.
55:58Now we've got to launch 1.2 billion Postgress servers. It's just as I said we've got to get to the billions of databases per month. We just haven't been able to do it until today where we acquire a company. That means we've got the technology which can drive it up.
56:13Scale up. Scale up. Okay. Um other than that what are other I guess P 0 objectives for the company like you know over the over the next year how are you sort of guiding the direction P 0 are basically win the strategic labs win the models and uh continue our PLG push where we are focused on the enterprise is is winning these new work and it's more that like the ceiling of PLG when we started the
56:42company we were like we can get to 100 million on PLG. We can probably get to 200 million, but then we're going to need to do something different in terms of motion. But because of AI, like that ceiling just lifted and we don't know where it got lifted to like is it a billion, is it two billion, is it, you know, you could just we could just keep going. But we still want to do the other stuff as well. So we basically like last year we were like, well, we have to do both.
57:09to both the small stuff and the big stuff and you know maybe we're a bit greedy.
57:15No, I I think it's it's what people want right the same sort of mental model that uh and you know they they'll pay you to handle the fine grain details of moving up in terms of orders of magnitude and I don't know how many orders of magnitude that is but quite a quite a lot.
57:29It's just crazy because if you would have asked us 18 months ago we were growing fast. If you would have said, "What can you do to 10x your top of funnel?" I would have said, "There's nothing like it's crazy, right?" And then just this whole market just exploded. So, let's see what happens.
57:43Yeah. I remember at our company offsite at the start of the year, we we put this crazy ambitious revenue number out and someone came up to me and said, "Oh, you shouldn't have set that number. Like, the team are going to be we're going to miss it. The team are going to be so disappointed." And it took us like 4 months to hit the number. It's just like a ridiculous growth curve from the start of this year.
58:03Amazing. Um, what are the open questions that you have? Like, you know, if you had a crystal ball that it would change the way that you bet on things, how development will be done and what people will develop. These are the two things that I think a lot about.
58:20Okay. You know, what are the possible answers? Is just more more agents like Yeah. So like this year we're focusing a lot like and I'll talk about it in my keynote basically that we're moving from like we started as a dashboard company that was the best DX then like you know a lot of people are like oh headless mode headless was what we kind of started headless 360 salesforce all these sort of things I mean we had that at the start like you could use superbase directly API driven that's one of the reasons why we succeeded this
58:48year our big focus is moving from from to code first get native So basically when you launch a superbase instance inside um your local machine you get this superbase folder and it represents your database. It has all your functions everything.
59:04Does this exist today?
59:05This exists today if you use the our CLI. So it's a virtual file system.
59:09Uh like it's a representation of it's like infrastructure as code.
59:14Yeah. And in fact what we're announcing tomorrow is like we've done our kind of final change for declarative schemas.
59:20This was a a really challenging one actually covering all of Postgress and so now you can have a full file representation of Postgress uh the shape of your database declaratively in your folder that's really important for agents cuz generally how you operate with Postgress is you have a migration file every time you make a change you add a file to this migrations folder and it's like a historical log okay so that's great it's industry standard but imagine putting an agent across a
59:48thousand files and telling asking it, oh, what is the shape of this table? It has to guess through a thousand files.
59:55So, it has to recompile its or you have to launch the database um locally, run the migrations up, and then you inspect introspect the database, but that's too slow. So, basically what we want to do is turn the schemas folder inside our our superbase folder into a completely declarative state of your database. And so we've captured everything from tables, policies, uh database comments all inside these files. So we're releasing a new library PG Delta. You
1:00:24can use it with any Postgress database. Um but we've got mechanisms for for superbase. And so this is an important step for agents. We know that agents are going to operate mostly on code. They don't want to reach out to anything.
1:00:37They've got to iterate very fast on the file system. So that's fine. And today people are using CLIs. they're happy with these harnesses. What I suspect we're moving more towards is like at the moment I'm trying to do some development just on my mobile phone for example and I'm quite comfortably able to do it. Of course I know what's going on behind the scenes. So I'm telling it things that I know it has to do from an infrastructure point of view. But we're getting to a state where I can imagine you don't need
1:01:06to be an engineer. You you have an idea, you say to your phone, your dot or whatever personal agent you have. I want to build X and 1 second later you kind of have this application live you can iterate on it yourself so these are the things that I'm thinking okay what are the use cases that people are going to want if this is the case is it personalized what do we care about are these things going to scale up what are the mechanisms how are we going to
1:01:34develop and what tooling do we need to provide to make sure that we are the default provider in this new world any questions that you're you're interested in is for crystal ball into the future.
1:01:45As someone who's been a software engineer now for like a few decades, you have strong opinions on like how the software should be built, right? Like in terms of like uh continuous integration or like continuous delivery or whatever and I find myself like pushing my opinions on the on the agents of like oh you want to do it in this way and but now more and more like you don't need to. But my worry there is are they all
1:02:12just going to like converge on one way of building software or yeah mode collapse you know which is great you're all going to use super bases but but like the the thing that's great about like the software development industry is like industry is like these are like famous flame wars right of like what's the correct approach like are we going to lose that or yeah so you want diversity in ideas so that the best idea can win and but then the models are just going to make you so lazy that nobody even bothers to look at
1:02:43Yeah. And and they just all converge on one way of building software and then that's you know is it going to be like a local maxima in terms of Yeah. I I don't know. I I I do think uh yeah so first of all I think that's a valid fear. I do think it's out of your control. Um I and and yes uh the low taste let's call it casual app builders will will converge on whatever the the mean is the model is which is you guys.
1:03:06But then the the discerning high skill people will always really care about the details as as they should.
1:03:12Right. And which which will which will then filter down eventually is my idea.
1:03:17But are these high skill people going to continue to be trained by uh I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think I think people are passionate enough. I I it's one of those things where like you know I do think like uh you know the average um college is probably screwed, right? right? Like you probably don't need to go to university anymore because you can probably self teach and just like you know uh get get your own uh job. It's always been like this top tier of people that that are moving a lot of the the needle and you need to uh and and they will always find
1:03:46a way to have their own self-interest uh be satisfied curiosity in terms of like what what is possibly better. You know the type of people that take a year off and go to the recur center and just work on cool programming problems even though they could be making money in in the industry and like Yeah.
1:04:04What do you disagree on between the two of you? It's rare to have the two of you have Oh, yeah. That's a great on on the pod. So, you know, I want to capture this.
1:04:12I think one of the reasons we've been so effective like working together is because there are definitely situations when we'll disagree, but as soon as the other person like pushes a little bit, the other person's like, "Yeah, maybe you're right. Let's let's try it." Yeah.
1:04:29So, we never end up in like big busts. And it turns out like most of that stuff actually doesn't matter anyway. Like as long as the general direction is is correct, then then it's going okay. But uh yeah, I can't think of Oh, you guys are really struggling here.
1:04:46Yeah. Yeah. Which is why like because it's it's never an important enough thing like we've never had a bus stop because it's never been important enough to actually fight hard enough on it. Like and also we're busy. So like usually like handling Yeah. We're trying to handle different parts of the business.
1:05:06Maybe it's just like things are growing and obviously you got your domain and and you just need to work together, right?
1:05:10Yeah. It's interesting, you know, uh so Laura here uh all three of us were in entrepreneur first in Singapore. You were all different working on different companies and then you guys stayed back after the cohort at your housemates after the cohort.
1:05:25Yeah. Yeah. So we were all we lived in a house with seven people and we were all doing different startups.
1:05:32And so was doing his startup, I was doing another one. This is before superbase.
1:05:36And so like I think somehow your energies uh you know you you you found that you were suitable working together and and working on this uh this Yeah. Because like traditionally especially in in an accelerator model, you're pushed as a technical person to work with some domain domain expert, right? Um, but in the house we lived in, it was basically seven people who were all builders, all technical people. And we found that pairing to just be like so much more effective, especially on when
1:06:05you're building dev tools cuz you are the subject matter expert as a developer is that we could could just get so much more done. And so then we ended up hiring most of the other people who lived in the the flat as well as our employees. Rory, who was the first employee? Um not the first but the first to on go to market like now he runs all of go to market.
1:06:26The post guy was first.
1:06:28Angelico. Yeah. We had an intern.
1:06:31An intern from my previous startup.
1:06:33We just dragged him along.
1:06:35Yeah. And and then the other like first like full-time hire was this guy Steve Chavez who um who was the Postgress maintainer. And the funny thing is we were in the YC batch and the advice they give you in YC is like okay we're going to give you a bunch of money. don't hire anyone at this the big temptation is to hire a big team and we went to our partner and we said oh but we've got this guy Steve he's the lead maintainer of Postgress and he was like hire him immediately he was like forget the advice go and get him
1:07:05of his reputation or because it made sense for superbase well yeah both it just made sense that you know this was a technology we were very reliant on and we going to lean in and it was like and the the funny thing is we hired Steve and we said don't worry about Superbase just keep building Postgress and just making it awesome.
1:07:24Um and then obviously if we have support requests or whatever we can we can ask them but um and the model just worked really well and then we ended up when Steve wanted to grow the Postgress team just hiring more people dedicated to work on that project. Well you guys are doing so much for community and open source. One thing I do have in my mind is like what is the future of large commercial open source? Um, one obviously there's a lot of slop and and I'm sure you guys are dealing with that
1:07:51but two also your dependencies are now becoming uh optional like you can just vibe code whatever you want anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:08:01So I I whatever you is in your heads about the future of open source I'd just love to hear it.
1:08:07I think the rewrite in Rust is a valid mechanism. I mean someone came to me on our team and they're like oh yeah yeah I'm rewriting everything in Rust that we're doing like uh and I was like to what level are you going to rewrite the database are you going to rewrite Postgress? Postgress is not rewritten is not in ROS but I doubt down to that level you care. So there's like layers upon which you want to get to where things will be rewritten and then you don't want to be spending your actual
1:08:35innovation tokens or your actual tokens rewriting everything. So there's going to be like a a collapse of almost every tool probably into let's say it's Rust if that ends up being the the ultimate way of writing things cuz it's faster and more correct. And that will happen probably for most open source tools. But then after you've done this iteration and everything's running on this highly effective language, then you're not going to be rewriting it all of the
1:09:02things every single time. There'll be a few winners. A really classic one could be say Postgress. It's written in Haskell which is a very unusual language and it's very hard to maintain. Could it be written in Rust now? Yeah, probably it could. And the mechanism the the function is still valuable and probably there'll be if that happens there'll be one rust fork of Postgress and that will be the winner for that particular category.
1:09:30But you haven't done it yet and you're and a lot of your stuff is elixir as well.
1:09:34Yeah. So that's the other thing. Then you have to think on the infrastructure side. Elixir is like a really interesting language because of the beam. So, so and then you start thinking when you're operating things, what is the right mechanism for operating? So, but now you can change paradigms pretty much easily as long as you fit all your tests and you know.
1:09:53Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a good one. I haven't thought a lot about would we switch Elixir to Rust.
1:10:00It's just an option now. Uh Malta from Verscell is uh you know one of his tweets that sticks in my mind. He he's got lots of uh interesting thoughts. He set aside some amount of money and rewrite all of our dependencies uh at at the C level or C++ level into Rust. Um because we just know it is better. It's safer, more correct, whatever.
1:10:18And it is it is a one-time upgrade of open source.
1:10:22All the drivers, what whatever you you use. Um so I thought it was like a pretty interesting I quite like that as an idea. Yeah. I don't think it will happen because people love to do it themselves.
1:10:32But but as an idea I I would like we as a company would 100% get behind that.
1:10:37Awesome. And then uh I think closing question which I I should have stuck in somewhere earlier. AI coding within Subbase, right? Uh obviously you guys are big beneficiaries of coding agents outside. Uh what is the policy internally? How much are you spending?
1:10:51Is there is there concern about spend anything of that sort? Superbase has always felt like a bunch of different startups like glued together. So we have like the orth product and we've always been very insistent that they should make their own decisions like on what tools they use like how they behave as a team like the reporting structure and the AI policy was kind of no different is like a lot of people asking what is the AI coding policy and we were like well just it's up to you as as your
1:11:20team. I think we have started to consolidate a few bits especially around cost but as much as we can we'd like to keep that model of like let the teams decide how they want to run things that's it very decentralized I I would say um I am trying to figure out a number for company leaders to take home with them as like what is the market standard and so uh what what are data points you can hang your head on here people say uh you know the average
1:11:48person is spending like $20 a month and and uh average employee is maybe $200 a month. OpenAI uh you know at the the sort of 50th percentile is spending maybe three to 5,000 a month and the top percentile is in the maybe hundreds of thousands right and so that is the rough idea I think a good metric is basically what is your ratio of token spent to human spend and it's r like for a lot of people is may be 0.1 tokens to to one human salary and uh you know you can
1:12:18probably go up to one pretty safely and if you're over 1.5 you're probably in trouble something like Yeah. So our I just say luckily as a remote company basically everything that's ever happened is documented.
1:12:30So I can ask our AI how much we're spending. So currently we spend about 300k per month.
1:12:37Yeah. For 600 people.
1:12:41450 people. Yeah. Okay. It gives people an idea. But but what you've said about like scaling the cost in terms of related to the number of employees makes sense also for us because we are hiring very quickly. So if we end up getting a lot of leverage out of just like extra you should be right then fine. You need a whole bunch of serverless employees that can spin up and down as as you need. Right.
1:13:02Yeah. Exactly. which is like yeah like you know I I just had a CTO of uh you know another top startup say like he was worried about his company's spend and I'm like well actually your that's your investment in everyone else and probably it's very skewed right like there's there's like two or three people that are super insane at your company and everyone else is like probably not using AI yeah that's exactly what we see as well we got a leaderboard and people we put the leaderboard up and usually people are a little bit ashamed so they kind of like Yeah cuz you're wasting money probably
1:13:30and that's also the wrong focus like The focus shouldn't be on how much you're spending, but like how much end to end like in terms of systems thinking, you should be thinking like in terms of how many end toend processes are you actually solving that where you no longer need a human in the loop or collapsing down longunning human problems that suddenly become very short problems. So that's where we're spending most of our investment on like how we're using AI. Luckily, you know, as you saw, like every single thing that's ever happened in Superbase is documented
1:14:00because we're an async company. So, building a company harness like an agenda harness around Superbase is basically just formalizing. You can point AI at it and say, what are our principles and it'll do document down all our decision making principles for the whole history of Superbase. So, that's where we're spending a lot of our time. Before we move on from people, we do have I think now like 50 open roles and we are fully globally remote. So we don't care where you are. If you're very good same salary everywhere, right?
1:14:30Yeah. Same salary regardless of where you live. If you're very good at what you do, please take a look at our job board.
1:14:35Yeah. Can you uh can you like one profile just pick one whatever is top of mind as uh as your highlight for what you're looking for and why?
1:14:45Because we're just growing at a ridiculous rate. We need all the S surres we can get.
1:14:50What is the quality that is like you know you probably get a lot of S applications and you don't look at them like what what stands out.
1:14:56The thing that we really care about is that you you actually want to work remotely. Um so it's this is a strange one but yeah it's true we get a lot of quality people but to fit in at Superbase you kind of need to thrive in a remote first environment like a fully async environment. It's actually not for everyone. We learned that pretty early on. People would come in and they'd be like, "Oh, this is like I need to see humans."
1:15:21My typical model of an SR is like this gray beard that's like sitting in a dungeon somewhere and doesn't want to talk to humans anyway.
1:15:27That's the perfect person. All of those people, please apply it.
1:15:31Hopefully they listen to the podcast.
1:15:33Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, we we we probably do have a lot of great beards um in SR. I I think one of I have been on the record as saying AI sur is one of the hardest categories for for agent startups. I think I might be wrong soon, but so far it's been correct. Like the AI has not cracked it. Sorry. For for whatever reason.
1:15:52No, no, no, no, not yet. I agree.
1:15:55Like building software is, you know, debatable. Solve problem. Maintaining like keeping things running.
1:16:03Is a whole different beast.
1:16:05Well, okay. Well, thank you for keeping things running for everyone else. You guys, congrats on your journey, man.
1:16:09Like, I'm so proud to be your friend and an investor and and just like just see the progress. I cannot wait for the IPO whenever that is. Uh it looks like it's going to take some more time, but it it'll be it'll be fun. I I really want to see you guys like, you know, do the whole ring the ring the bell and, you know, building the next great open-source company, right? Excellent.
1:16:27Definitely, man. Thanks for having us.
