PlanetScale's Postgres Launch with Sam Lambert
We're we're probably gonna do a million dollars of ARR for the Postgres product by the end of next week, and we haven't even opened it to anybody.
Speaker 2:How's it going?
Speaker 1:Oh, I I've never been so busy in my entire life.
Speaker 2:You were just traveling. Right? You took a little break?
Speaker 1:That was just stupidity just going and do it. Like, you know my wife's from India. Her parents
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Are doing their fortieth anniversary. So, like, we don't love going to Delhi every time, just like smog and, you know, you're just stuck inside or whatever. And so we met in Italy, but her dad, like, booked, like, three different locations in Italy, and we have an eight we have an eight. Do you have a baby now?
Speaker 2:No. One more month.
Speaker 1:Oh, congratulations. It's gonna ruin your life, but eventually eventually, it's like whatever that weird illness cats give you. Like, you eventually kinda like them in the end.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you need any, like, help or advice with that stuff, ping me, by the way.
Speaker 2:I've, like Yeah. Will do.
Speaker 1:Been fully through this journey. Anyway, so, like, with a ten month old heat wave in Italy, and then British we had eight flights for the whole trip. British Airways canceled three, three, delayed three. Baby ended up hospitalized. We pulled the launch of postgrads forward a a week.
Speaker 1:Everything just went fucking crazy and basically, like, got back super late on Monday. And I just have slept, like, five hours since Monday, and it's all been good. I mean, it's just all been everything I'm happier than I've ever been. It's been, like, un just unreal. We're we're probably gonna do a million dollars of ARR for the post quiz product by the end of next week and we haven't even opened it to anybody.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's really crazy. Yeah. I mean, eight eight flights is crazy. I mean, with that without flying is these days, had a bunch of travel we did and then we hit like six months into the pregnancy and I'm like, this is awesome because now we can just say no to everything and no one expects us to travel.
Speaker 2:Probably for like at least a couple years. Yeah. I'm just like terrified of flying now.
Speaker 1:Has she mastered the poking the belly out to get through lines and just get because that's like a really good one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, she's she's like doing one month, so it's pretty obvious at this point. But yeah, people will treat her real nice,
Speaker 1:which is which is, you
Speaker 2:know, me by proxy too. So you launched the Postgres I think the Postgres launch was I I remember you were literally talking about traveling. I think you were literally flying that day or something. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We yeah. I was like I landed Heathrow, got into the lounge, like, three minutes before the call internally to launch happened.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:And so then, like, we launched it. I was just dying from it. Like, I just it was I was out of it completely. And then, like, I just got drunk in the lounge because, like, the immediate reaction was just incredible. My phone was just, like, lighting up.
Speaker 1:Twitter was going crazy and just knew immediately that people were really stoked, and so I was just neck in pimps cups. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Lanches are crazy because you just get so overstimulated. You're getting hit from like, every single angle, from Twitter, DMs Yeah. Texting you. So it's always a lot of fun. But like, by the end of the day, I'm like I'm like so overstimulated that I just need to like cool it and like force myself to go to sleep.
Speaker 1:Yes. Your dopamine your dopamine receptors get like all jacked up. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess yeah. Tell me a little bit about the history for this because I think a lot of people were pretty surprised because they know PlantScale as the MySQL company, and this dropped out of nowhere and surprised everyone.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. I mean, never say never, I guess. Right? I mean, it's it's the it's the thing. Ever since the metal launch, we've had, like, just some crazy really crazy things happen.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It's a mix of just tons of demand. So, like, on the day of the launch, we just you know, loads of people came in. I mean, it's accelerated
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:The kind of the test business even more doing doing metal, which is great. And we've moved some, like, giant like, the largest Aurora limitless workload in the world now runs on for tests on on planet scale, and they migrated to us. That was really cool. But alongside some of that demand, in fact, like, by about 10 x, we got loads of Postgres people coming in. Like, the CEO of a very well known company with, like, way over a 100,000,000 ARR, like, came to the office the next day and just sat down and was like, you know, you have to do like, here's how much we spend on Postgres.
Speaker 1:We're the only you're the only people we would migrate self hosted Postgres to. And I was just like, okay. This is nuts. Like but, basically, on the day, we had the metal party. The office was, like, full of hundreds of people.
Speaker 1:People were really excited. And after all that demand and just seeing the whole day of, like, smaller AI companies just, like, aping onto the platform as fast as possible, I kind of remembered what it was like to be in, like, an early startup where things are just everything's going. Like, we did this at GitHub, where we moved to Fastly, like, in no time. We just moved migrate. We we would just do, like, insane shit because it just didn't matter.
Speaker 1:And I just watched that happen, and so at the party, I went over to Nick, our CTO, and I just said, you know, we have to do Postgres. He went and he'd seen it all day too, and he just was like, yeah. I mean, it can't be harder than anything else we've done. And so we knew that night that it was happening, and then pretty much the day after, we told the whole company that you have two weeks to wrap up any of the, like, overhanging stuff we needed for the metal launch, to do a couple of, like, just some extra import stuff that we had been finishing off anyway, and then, like, we're gonna have a hack week where we're just gonna kind of try and see how far we get. And because, like, when you just, like, look at these problems, they look really insurmountable and difficult to do things.
Speaker 1:You're just like, oh, this could it's it's just complete unknown how long it would take to actually go and get this done. Mhmm. And so we had this very short all hands at the beginning of the week, which was just suspend belief. We may never do this. Like, who knows?
Speaker 1:But let's see if we can get Postgres into production on in our production and be able to connect to it. That was done by Tuesday afternoon, and we were like, oh, okay. Well, that was good. And by Friday, we had high availability and and failovers done, and the demos lasted three hours. Like, we did like, we asked everyone, like, to demo what they've been up to.
Speaker 1:The marketing team made fun videos, like and, like, all of these things, like, even like, Holly just showed people how many inbound we've had over the years asking for post just, like, little things, everything, like, Postgres related, basically. Yeah. And everyone just did like, we got insights working really nicely by the end of the week. And and the main feedback was everyone from everyone was that I can't believe how fast we got all of this done. We can do this.
Speaker 1:And we just said, right. We're shipping. We're gonna be in production with real customers live on this by July 1, and we were ahead of schedule even then and got it done. And so now there's real actual revenue generating companies with high workloads running on the platform and are just really happy. So it was very fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So okay. I don't realize it was that quick. So because Metal launched was that, like, within the past six months? Like, when was when was that launched?
Speaker 1:May. I think it was May, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:Okay. Wow. That was pretty quick.
Speaker 1:I'm so, like, dyslexic for dates. I just look at everything. It's like in the past, like, it could have been any time in the yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, especially when you're working at startups, like, time is just like a weird concept. You both can't believe how long it's been and how recent certain things were.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Mhmm. We actually have a good amount of Postgres experience in house. Actually, we have like ex Century people, ex GoCardless people who all have run really big Postgres workloads. So it's felt like pretty natural to go and do this, and it's been really fun, you know, to work with Postgres more.
Speaker 1:This has been great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess talk to me a little bit about so there's obviously stuff that was probably unique about Postgres, but I'm curious about what was shared because I'm assuming you guys have some kind of operator that's just good at managing database nodes generally. So how much of that was able to be reused? Like, what could be reused? What was what couldn't?
Speaker 1:A lot. And then all of the infrastructure that surrounds that operator. Right? So Mhmm. The post we released, about extreme resilience, did you see that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I did. I I I didn't read it yet, but, I did come across it.
Speaker 1:Basically just a list of rules that we follow for how we do that. All of that stuff underpins the Postgres product too.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So the operator is incredibly mature. The way we run many, many different Kubernetes clusters that don't share any backplane. Like, all of these kind of layers of of very resilient infrastructure are kind of done and and work really well. Our edge like, you do remember those there's those benchmarks out there that are essentially just, like, a latency test for getting to the database that compares us to, like, Neon, Subbase, and everyone. And we were just, like, so much faster than everyone else because our edge infrastructure is exceptionally good because we have people that have managed the edge networks of top 100 websites.
Speaker 1:Right? So, like, it's all of these, like, things that affect the database Mhmm. That we've done really, really well, all of those things get pulled in. Our backup system that can back up databases at line rate, restore backups at line rate. Like, all of these things that we've done for the hosted Vertex product were there.
Speaker 1:And then, of course, like, the operator being incredibly mature, having done hundreds and hundreds of millions of failovers. And Mhmm. You know, it's all that. And and so we we the other big design decision we made was to not do what we did previously, which was do, like, MySQL hosting using Vertess. And then you could, like, scale up massively on Vertess like our very large customers have done.
Speaker 1:We've done two products this time. We've done what we internally called Horizon. It was called Horizon so that we could ship JavaScript in the UI without people knowing. It was Postgres so we could walk around San Francisco without talking about things without people knowing plans going to something about Postgres.
Speaker 2:That's funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right. Like, it was a very secretive product. We we NDA ed. So it was about 50 people, including you, under NDA before this announced just so that we could talk to people about it.
Speaker 1:And we did genuinely talk to so many customers of other platforms to kind of figure out their pain points and their problems. And, yes, so there's that. There's the uncharted, extremely fast, vanilla Postgres that runs on metal. And that means that pretty much if you use Postgres anywhere else, you can just drop it in and and it works. We're still finishing up kind of getting some extensions installed in a way that won't get people hacked, you know, like the kind of approved list that Amazon has and whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And yeah, and then we've got rapid development on the sharded solution, which you will be able to pull in when you need to shard, and you will have the trade offs that sharding brings. We made people live with Vitesse's trade offs when they didn't need sharding, and that was a mistake. And then we're undoing that mistake for this product. So it's actually two products that we've been building.
Speaker 2:Oh, I see. Interesting. And then if you do need to go from one to the other, it's like it's the same as coming in from, like, external database, I'm assuming.
Speaker 1:We'll make it a very Yeah. Seamless online process. The same way, like, in our UI right now with the test, you can reshard, you can
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You can migrate to different separate key spaces, you can do all sorts of those things. We will make it extremely easy. So, like, right now, there's a bunch of folks migrating over that have self sharded Postgres inside their app player.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:And they're just swapping they're swapping us in as those shards, right, to replace Aurora. And then we will then work with them to make sure that Nova meets their requirements, and we'll work with them to ramp that up in production. So really, like, if anyone's interested in sharded Postgres, the fastest way to get to that is to migrate to the current platform. That means our insights product can see your queries, do all that stuff, and then we can manage migrating you to a sharded solution very, very quickly after that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. So in terms of the sharding stuff, this is like a from scratch new project?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It had to be. It's like all of we are the Vitesse maintainers. We run Vitesse at significantly higher scale than anybody else among with the most amount of customers.
Speaker 1:And so Vitesse's improvements and learnings are what will feed this the Postgres version, but it doesn't need to be Vitesse. That would be like a bad architectural decision to go and do And it would violate like our fundamental kind of architectural principles that we have.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I guess conceptually is the approach that Vitess takes, like, architecturally. It's effectively gonna be the same same set of the Postgres, or are there any core Postgres quirks that make it different?
Speaker 1:No. There's there's there's some ways that it will be better, some ways it will be less optimal. Postgres has some really nice elements to it that make, you know, using its parser, using various features really nice. Its replication story is nowhere near as good as MySQL's low, so we'll have to do some work there to kind of paper over that. It's just gonna be different, but architecturally, yes, pretty much the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And to achieve all those same goals, and then it's really gonna be that paired with the operator that gives you the overall result. And that's and all we really care about, PlanetScale, is the result, which is extreme scalability at high at true high availability.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense. So I guess the other piece of this is the Postgres connection pooling, which has always been a massive pain in the ass. Yes. I'm assuming the guys you guys already have a connection pulling layer and you just adapted that to Postgres?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We actually have now we have a new proxy called PS Bouncer
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Which does the we call it that because everyone's familiar with PG bouncer, and we just want people to know that's what it's like there to do. Mhmm. It is faster than PG bouncer. It's, easier to make high more highly available, and it will do, like, buffering, so that you can do actually, like, online, migrations. Online, like, switchovers and failovers in the way that we do with Vitesse.
Speaker 1:So, like, I don't know if people know that we we we kill nodes underneath our data our customers' traffic constantly. Like, it's just happening while we chat. Like, we have to roll through millions of them throughout a month. Every single node of plant scale dies after twenty nine days. No node ever gets to twenty nine days of life.
Speaker 1:It either gets hit by a maintenance window. It either gets replaced due to an underlying failure, or we need to do an aversion upgrade or something. The answer to every single one of those things is a a PRS or an ERS, which is just killing the nodes in that cluster and having them reconverge thanks to the operator. To do that, we need to be able to store queries in flight and redirect them to the right place. We have achieved all of that for Postgres already, and so that proxy is very good.
Speaker 1:It's very low latency. It's lower latency than anyone we saw at Amazon, Google, or any other provider. We can get you talk we can get you from your front end to the database server with the least least latency of anybody, and then it can also do all those special things for you. It can route you to the right replicas in the right AZ and do all all those magic things. And that itself is now undergoing a partial rewrite to make it even faster and have a iterative path towards sharding.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Cool. That makes sense. Yeah. I think the connection pulling stuff, I mean, in AWS, like if you which is, you know, one of the most used Postgres services, you can't just spin up Postgres and be done with it.
Speaker 2:You gotta also spin up their their data proxy thing. And I'm just like, it's been so many years of this, like, is this not just integrated and solved on their end? Yeah. It's like you it's like not it's not optional, but you need it for sure.
Speaker 1:Postgres is gonna have a long journey. The Neon team actually started this and doing the good work to go and grind this out, which is moving to a thread model for Postgres. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I have seen those threads.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And I like, shout out to them for doing that. Right? Like, it's a it seems like the third rail.
Speaker 1:I think a lot people are very unhappy with that idea. Yeah. But it it does seem to be it is something that needs to change. And, you know, we've we've seen you know, we've had to tune, like, memory management for Postgres as well. It hands a lot off to the operating system in a way that MySQL doesn't, so then Yeah.
Speaker 1:The operating system isn't aware of it. It's always managing a a database server. Right? So, like, it you just well, it's just different in terms of, like, things we have to do. Luckily, have people that have worked on the kernel, so you can just you can figure those things out too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nice. Yeah. That that Postgres thing, it's such a long standing issue. I remember there was, like, a thread finally talking about it.
Speaker 2:But obviously, you have a code base that's like as old as it is, that was effectively single threaded. You just have globals and stuff everywhere. So that just seems like a complete nightmare to work through. It has to happen and it will get done. But, yeah, painful task.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's manageable. The replication story is is Mhmm. Worse and harder to deal with. But again, I'm sure that will get better over time.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll try and help there and we'll, you know, we'll compensate in other ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess let's talk a little bit about like the kind of the business of Postgres. So for me, you know, whenever I've used Postgres, it's always been Aurora and kinda nothing else. You guys seem positioned and you've been positioned for a while as like the better alternative to Aurora. Is that kinda how you're thinking about the Postgres side as well?
Speaker 1:You know, I looked at everyone other than Aurora and what you know, it just doesn't matter. You know what I mean? It's like very it's like hitting a child, but Aurora is is like a real product, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you have any numbers on how big they are, like, business wise?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I Well, I don't know
Speaker 2:how much you can share, but
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's, it's a major part of Amazon's business is is that and and Amazon as a as a whole company, Aurora stands out as a as a major contribution to their entire business, and it's a very good product. Like, it truly is very good. We are provably better, and that's been proven through our customers' stories. Like, if you go and read the case studies, very large Aurora customers have migrated to us, seen cost savings, seen significant performance improvements, and most importantly, reliability improvements, which Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is always, like, stunning to me. Like, I spoke to someone very senior from a w formerly from AWS last night, actually. And they and he was like, yeah. They they know that, and it's, like, kind of very stunning, actually, that that's, the case that have you know, have achieved that. And to me, I kinda pinch myself, and then I you're reminded that, like, this is the the technology arc through and through.
Speaker 1:Right? This is small companies with advantages can eventually win against very large ones. And so it's been really interesting. And and, actually, the amount of email like, you know, we we've been doing this kind of ramp up from, like, moving people from the smaller providers over to us, and that's been, like, really easy, and they see an immediate benefit. And we're just going through building our confidence, building everyone else's confidence.
Speaker 1:I've been surprised at how many Aurora people have reached out, like, really wanting to dig in and try it. So it's very cool. Really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's weird given how much attention Postgres has gotten. You know, Aurora has still been the default for so long. It's interesting to see that kind of finally start to change. The other thing I was gonna ask was, obviously in this initial phase, I'm assuming it's smaller companies.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you have bigger companies, like, looking to looking to move to or maybe have already moved. What do you think about this whole there's like all this talk about how there's some link between Postgres and AI companies. There's like a lot of like framing in that way. Like, do you have any thoughts on on that?
Speaker 1:The majority of AI companies are getting founded using Postgres.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But, like, is that is that unique to AI companies, is is that just startups in general?
Speaker 1:It's also also I think it's just startups in general. And and part of the thing that was very revealing to me was talking to, like, Aurora users or whoever and just saying, why did you choose Postgres? And it's just like
Speaker 2:Default? Yeah. Exactly. It's a yeah.
Speaker 1:Everyone else uses it. It's like, yeah. I mean, that's it, really. Like, no one most people's initial choice for a database is just ask a friend, use whatever the tutorial framework or thing you're using is. Right?
Speaker 1:When I realized that was the criteria, I was like, okay. Then if we have something unique to offer this market, we should because there's just so many people building there. We had to obviously convince ourselves we have something unique, but yeah. Think it's just the default for startups. The thing is we've seen from AI companies and, you know, I think we'll probably talk more publicly alongside them soon that one of the largest AI companies has migrated to Vitesse now on planet scale Nice.
Speaker 1:With a with a massive workload because the the the AI companies that are taking off, it, doesn't matter to them. There's a religion just goes out the window. They're in a you know, they're death wrestling with ogres, to use the succession quote. But they're all fighting each other on models and GPUs and, like, trying to get GPU capacity and trying to do all of these things. Why solve database problems alongside that when it's an undifferentiated problem that another company has fixed?
Speaker 1:So at the bottom end, yes, lots of AI companies are migrating and wanting to move to our Postgres product because they just use it anyway. And then at the upper end, because we are this database that's been powering very large consumer products
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:For a long time, they now are consumer products. Right? They have to just be online And, and you know, one of the AI companies that's migrated to us has is powering just a ton of like real just consumer usage. There's nothing really to do with the model or whatever, but it's just like we have a ton of users now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we create a lot of rights. The thing that's very different about the AI companies is their write volume is significantly higher and of different proportions than traditional OLTP workloads because they're doing Yeah. A They're storing like they're storing what the user asks for, what the model talks about, what comes back, like all of just wanna keep everything and then a relational database that can take a lot of rights is a really good place to store to do that. So
Speaker 2:yeah. Yeah. That's right. I never thought about it. I guess it's it's inverted.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming people don't read. It's like they're each user is generating a ton of data and they're probably not reading it all the time. The inverted of the normal workload. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which if you like compare that to big consumer OLTP workloads like Twitter, for example, one tweet Yeah. Is like a single insert that fans out to millions of reads potentially. GitHub's the same. You don't you you read or generate a read on GitHub way more than you do actually write something.
Speaker 1:And so most OLTP workloads are a 100 to one, maybe even a thousand to one. That's complete opposite for certain AI companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, this this reminds me another thing I think about a lot, which is if I kind of just step back and look at how easy this stuff has gotten as a good end developer. I I remember back in the day, you know, we had to like we like ran up our own Cassandra clusters and maintain that ourselves. And it's hilarious how like that's not something I would even ever probably in the rest of my life even come close to thinking. Like forget even there's a side of maintaining my own, you know, hosting this stuff.
Speaker 2:There's also like even going to those technologies, like even that has has gone away where, you know, stuff like PlanetScale can kind just handle a pretty wide range of workloads Yeah. Without needing like specialized tools. So, yeah, it's crazy how the database part of applications has has gotten really, really boring and visible.
Speaker 1:Which is good. Yeah. Like you said, it's exactly you're right. Like, database problems can just interrupt anything your company's doing. Like, you can have outages.
Speaker 1:But even then, if you wake up in the morning and last night's backup didn't complete, you you are not. You can't do anything else that day. Like, no matter what you had planned, if you have an issue now, you could ruin your business. And so, like, those things not happening is you know, I wish more people that had to actually do it, and they would understand. That was actually a lot of the debates I would have with people on Postgres arguing with me.
Speaker 1:I realized they've never hosted a Postgres cluster. And I I I used to ask people, like, talk me through an online version upgrade for Postgres, and they just they couldn't. They've never thought about how to do it, and you kind of realize that these are just problems. Like, one of our issues now, and it's a nice issue to have, is so many people asking to migrate and then are not quite sure how they would do it online. They have to, like, plan a multistep process.
Speaker 1:So we're doing a lot of kind of education to help people understand how to do that. That's going well, but it's still it's not an easy it's not just any of this database stuff. It's, like, not easy, and people find it very scary, so they should. You know, you can do some real damage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what's your guys' goal? Like, you you're trying to become, like, you know, IPO? Like, that's the that's the path that you're headed down?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I really don't you know, I don't think that far ahead. I always feel like you just have to earn thinking about these things. Right? You know?
Speaker 1:I just don't success and my and what my definition of success is is far off, and it's a daily grind of working really hard to get there. There's a lot of people that fantasize about that that end and that exit, and I can tell you that
Speaker 2:Because side it's more of a side effect of everything else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It truly is. Like, it's the people that don't focus on that, that just focus with what they love end up accidentally building the best companies. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I just don't think about the end. The end is gonna be always bittersweet Yeah. No matter what happens, whether you get bought, whether you IPO. And we're far off the goals I have for the company, so I don't think about it. I do but I just you know, being a profitable company that is now exceeding all of our financial targets, is a very powerful position.
Speaker 1:I mean, I we have competition all around now in the postcodes world. I just we just have to wait. I mean, every customer they get shortens their runway.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:If we never sold another dollar of software, we would still not run out of money. And so that's extremely strategic. Like, it's just very people have to now just you see companies, like, throwing away tons of brand equity to just chase vibe coding. Now there's nothing wrong with vibe there's there's there's truly nothing wrong, but there's catching these tailwinds, and it feels extremely exciting. But at the end of the day, like, you've gotta truly capitalize on that.
Speaker 1:And inverting a heavily negative gross margin business in that world is an almost impossible feat. If we are positive gross some positive gross margin business that builds for really large customers that stick around and are happy, strategically, that's something that's really powerful, and we'll build a great company. So we just keep doing that over and over again and see what options come up, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess to phrase my question another way, like, is when you think about your goals or your dreams for the company, is it that, like, every single database workload is running on plan scale? Like, that's the that's the hope you have?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. My I find all of the things I that make me the happiest when it comes to, you know, things that happen at the company is when products I like or that lots of people like run on the platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's really fun.
Speaker 1:It's extremely fun. I mean, every day I pay for coffee, I know that it's hitting a Palantzco database. You know, every Yeah. Message I send. You know, it's just it's really fun.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's just really cool. And there's like companies like WAP. Right? The have you seen WAP? This is a New York company.
Speaker 1:They're they're they're doing a kind of I guess it's like a Shopify for the the the world of creators, and they're just absolutely crushing it, and they've paid out billions of dollars.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I think I saw you talking about them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're just a phenomenal company, and I feel so inspired when I, like, work with them and go and see them and work at their office. And it's just, like, so cool to be seeing their journey and seeing them grow. And, like, little moments, like, you know, kick.com runs on PlanetScale. And I remember them signing up at the beginning of them developing their app and had a small, like, small, tiny database and now, like, a good size.
Speaker 1:And then they have a Formula one car, you're looking at that, and you're like you know? You just you just like these are really satisfying. It's a really good feeling. You know? I wanna keep going and going and going.
Speaker 1:And that is to me, it's also the trust. Right? Someone looks at you and says, yeah, this is a real we have a real company. We're a public company that's running on your platform and they trust you to do it. To me, that's like the best.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It fast exceeds any kind of money, monetary goals.
Speaker 2:Sometimes when I look through our, like, customer list and I kind of like visit their websites and see what what they're about, the other feeling I get is you get a sense of how big the world is. Like you just see all these companies doing all these things that you'd never even heard of or would think of and there's you imagine, oh, there's like a team of like, the people in an office and I think about this stuff every day and yeah, you just feel really connected with how large the world really is. Really good feeling.
Speaker 1:Yes. We have a few companies that yeah, like you I just can't believe how much generate like how much database workloads they generate for the things they do and they might be in other countries and in markets and and products that I've never thought about for myself and it's just really fun to kinda see that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Because otherwise, you're kinda like in a bubble, but like when you see that, you realize how big the world actually is.
Speaker 1:I know the service at Blizzard that uses Vitesse. So when you load Call of Duty, I see that service load, and I know it's loading. Yeah. That's fun. It's it's just very like, that's just very cool.
Speaker 1:It'll never not be cool to me. And, like, going and visiting their headquarters and seeing, yeah, I was a Wow player for forever. And you're just like, okay. Well, now I'm visiting Blizzard, a actual customer of the company that I'm running. It's just you get these pinch me moments that are amazing.
Speaker 2:So I was gonna go back a little bit. You were talking about the the vibe coding thing. So obviously there is a trend I'll call it right now where there is a bunch of companies building platforms, help people build apps from zero to one and you know, deploy them and that obviously includes a database. And it's kind of a rush to like try to be the company that powers these things. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'd to hear a little bit more about how you think about that. So I'll say I'll tell you my perspective first which is I don't know whether this trend is valuable or not, so I'm gonna ignore that part of it. Let's take for granted that, you know, this problem needs to be solved and it's worth solving. The approach right now has been at least it seems like has been a spin up like real instances of infrastructure for each one of these services. To me that feels like fundamentally the wrong approach because this is more like millions of apps that get like very little traffic each.
Speaker 2:And that model just doesn't seem that to make sense. But yeah, am curious to hear hear your thoughts.
Speaker 1:So before I answer, I'll also do the same caveat which is I love AI. We have very large users of AI and very serious users of AI tools and we have very serious AI customers. And I I code using AI
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's fun.
Speaker 1:Constantly. It's amazing. I mean, I I love there's I love being in the eras. I saw someone use the term of, like, plastic software. I think it's really cool, like, an app that you only need for a month.
Speaker 1:Right? So you just like make it really quickly. And like, you know, I've got a few of them on the go right now like a dashboard that I wanted to build, right, that just connects into our metrics cluster, pulls a lot of things, you get like something interactive and fun. Right? You're just like vibe coding that stuff up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's really good. The stuff with Cursor is incredible in Slack where you can just go fix this, please, and it does it. It's just like Yeah. Mind blowing to me.
Speaker 1:It's like real actual like magical bicycle of the mind level kind of like these Mhmm. Moments that you'll remember for the rest of your life. So I think that's sort of cool. Convex has a vibe coding product with Chef and that is doing like, incredible things, and the primitive they built into our product make that stuff really easy and making those situated plastic apps really easy to use. I do that but I do, however, in answering your question about, like, whether these the infrastructure is right, I do think there's, a lot of usage that's just gonna go away eventually.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, there's there's a max like, we've had things like Squarespace, Retul, all of these kind of tools that have allowed you to simplify automation or just simplify website building and all those things. And then you just realize that people don't have that many problems or ideas. Like, automation has in no way been deployed at the level it could have been. Most people don't want to.
Speaker 1:Most people aren't creative. Like, you put people in front of ChatGPT and they don't know what to ask. It's the same with Google. You ask someone to Google, like, who's been an Internet user for years, they're just very naive kind of we've had our fingertips on this stuff. So I just you know, these companies that are growing very quickly, they're also churning through customers very quickly.
Speaker 1:Right? As they go through, people trying it out for a month and the next cohort comes in and, you know, people just like fuck around and and and whatever. They are using databases to do this, which obviously you would do. The thing I don't understand, and I was in this position when I saw a lot of, like, dedicated vector databases or, you know, other technologies, it doesn't quite gel for me why it wouldn't just be SQLite that you would use, right? And people don't understand the difference between a database server and a database engine and what they do.
Speaker 1:Database services servers contain an engine, but they do a significant more things with the assumption of a like a multi tenancy case, so more than one client. Right? And and the work for those that don't understand how these things work, I will tell you that it's probably often two to three times more code problems, bugs are associated with the server part than the engine part. Right? In fact, the engine part can be much, much simpler.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's because of things like MVCC, multi version concurrency control, like making sure that when you're writing to the database, doesn't clash with me writing to the database, making sure that both our both our connections are terminated to that database, that authentication happens, and all of those things. It's all just to assume more than one user. These AI apps don't need that. So all of the things that come with a server, even if that server can scale to zero, it is still a useless overhead that and I don't understand why you couldn't just embed SQLite databases everywhere for doing this like we already have, and I think a lot of people are probably coming to that conclusion too.
Speaker 1:It seems to be the common take. But who knows? I've been wrong about loads of things. I you know? I also have biases, so, I mean, it can't just be completely wrong.
Speaker 2:It it's it's also funny because people have been bringing up SQLite forever. And this is like the one time where, hey, like, actually is a good thing to bring up, but nobody seems to be seems to be really exploring that that path.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's two things that ob obfuscate anything in tech, which is if you're giving things away for free, that is just impossible to even judge then. You know, I still get and it's picked up even more in Postgres, but I still get 10 plus emails a day. Why don't you have a free tail? All these sorts of things.
Speaker 1:And it really shows you. And, But it's like if you could imagine every single one of them would be on your product and would still would never pay you money, it would change a lot of of the metrics that you could share. Right? Like, it
Speaker 2:would Right.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. When you're offering free computers or basically giving $3 away for $1 on the Internet, you're gonna just attract a ton of, usage, which is fine. So that's one thing I think maybe that because there's people giving away those hosted databases for free, essentially, they're using that instead of SQLite or whatever, and because it's already built into the product. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then just the hype cycle of their marketing budgets paired with that, you just can't really tell.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, SQLite on the server, think, is a bad idea. But embedded, it's a phenomenal database. I've used it. I use it.
Speaker 1:I've got so many SQLite databases because of for that usage at all. I'm not trying to build a server for it and then everything else is really simple. I think it all went out in that way, but it will not change that SQLite winning in that world will not change the balance sheet of any particular company. SQLite is incredible open source project that is good as it is and is perfect for this use case now, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the giving away money is is a funny thing because the way I see it is there are cases where it works really well, right, like subsidizing something. In all of those cases, there's some kind of network effect effect involved. So if you like take the classic example of Uber, yeah, they subsidize the hell out of that stuff, But the end result that they get to walk away with is a gigantic network of drivers and all that stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So like there's it's it is a once that's bootstrapped, it's impossible to really compete with them. I think people take see that and they kind of apply it to everything where subsidizing a large user base for a DevTool product, once you stop doing that, they can just leave because there's no like there's not there's nothing tangible. There's no network thing that you've built up. And to me, there's like so there's a really obvious and basic, but it just keeps happening. And it's happening now with the AI stuff as well because you're starting to see I mean, it's a very old lesson which is if you're a business and you have a cost and you pay a certain way and you're charging your customers in a way that doesn't match that, that's just not gonna work.
Speaker 2:Like eventually, it's gonna be something that's not sustainable. And you're seeing that with AI companies now where they give some kind of like fixed price monthly thing, but then their costs are user based and they're gonna they're starting to to deal with that. And again, these these are like productivity products. They're not like network, social networks or like marketplace type businesses. But yeah, like it's now we've seen so many iterate or I've seen so many iterations of this now.
Speaker 2:It keeps happening.
Speaker 1:That was the thing that was very surprising when we were looking at other database companies that I was learning from their customers that their their bill wasn't based on usage. It was built based on how many projects they'd set up or whatever. Mhmm. And I was like, that's a very that's the a very unusual profile for database companies to have in terms of revenue. Ours is purely purely usage based.
Speaker 1:Like, they there's there's people paying us north of a million dollars a year, and they have three three accounts. Like, they just have three administrators for that database that just access it. So it's completely inverse to other database companies that are kind of caught up in this AI hype, is like extreme user growth and then no monetization of of any particular growth. And that that that I mean, the whole world could shift, but there's a really good I think a sub stat post called I think it's like enterprise businesses are fat tailed.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:People don't understand that, like, there's this extreme power law to everything in tech, especially revenue. And if you're trying to get to $500,000,000 of revenue, you need some huge building blocks to do that. You can't just sell $29 projects Yeah. That have a database as part of it. That doesn't work.
Speaker 1:You need you need certain people paying you a lot of money for a lot of consumption that they cannot move from. They're like they like it would you know, the reason people migrate when people change free tiers and stuff is because they don't have problems. They don't. If they're not like if it's not gonna interrupt a paying customer of theirs, it doesn't matter, you know? This is really interesting.
Speaker 1:That's kind of another interesting thing we've seen from this Postgres launch is I've got so many people, and I've been giving them access that they're on other providers that haven't launched their product yet. So they're like, please let us in before we launch next week so we can move. Mhmm. And I'm doing that because it's it's the second someone like, someone depends on your service, that move is orders of magnitude harder. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I'm just letting those people have access so they cannot have that problem in the future. This has been very interesting to understand a bit more closely how certain companies are being built. It's very interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the the rules are actually really simple. It's just build a product where no one has to eject from. Your customer shouldn't have to eject from it. And then charge them in a way that matches your cost.
Speaker 2:And if you do both of those things, you're fine. But Yes. Weirdly, it's rare.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the retention numbers of databases that don't let you down are very high it turns out, you know, like very very high. You people just don't take the risk after that's that's happening which is really nice.
Speaker 2:I mean, was another thing that I was reflecting on when you guys launched the Postgres stuff. Just the response is so funny, it's just like, oh, yeah, like, of course, I'm gonna use this or like, finally or like, everyone's really excited and you don't really have to it's not like you have to go out there and be like, use us, we're very reliable. Like, you know, we you don't have to release any of that. It's already understood that, you know, if you guys do something, there's gonna be certain characteristics that are gonna come with that and that's kind of assumed and and everyone trusts that's gonna happen. And it's it's such a good position to be in brand wise.
Speaker 2:You guys have an actual brand, so having a brand means like people see your name on it and they they know certain things about your product.
Speaker 1:That was the craziest thing to me and I, you know, I said a huge thank you to our marketing team for achieving this, is people really got it. Like, heard the two words next to each other and they knew what it meant and I was really surprised. I truly was like, wow, like, really we are synonymous with these qualities and they're the only qualities I care about for a database. And I was, like, really proud of that. Like
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It was it was just awesome, actually. Yeah. That was real weird, actually, to see to see that. And I also thought we I would have spent the week with people going, you said you don't like Postgres. Like, now you're like, you're a hater.
Speaker 1:One, that's just not true. And two, no one's really saying it. They're they're like, oh, cool. Like, you're gonna come and do this thing in the postgres world. There's a space for that, so we're really happy to see it.
Speaker 1:So that was nice. And, yeah, we've we've done a lot of hiring since that launch. There's people from postgres companies that are like, notable people in the posters world are joining the company, which is nice to see too. Nice. It's really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good lesson that people just take away because it's not like you guys built that brand overnight. It's not like you did a few things or spent money in a few places that achieved that. Like, that's a goal of every company.
Speaker 2:Like, not every company has a brand. But if you do have a brand, it's like a ridiculous advantage. And it's built slowly every single day over years and doesn't really look like anything until all of a sudden it does in moments like these. And I think companies feel like seem to think it's like, if I spend the right amount of money with the right design agency and I like have the right name and it it's it's really there's short term things that you can do that look like you're building a brand, but it's all just sugar. It's just this Yeah.
Speaker 2:Slow long term thing. And like everything else with startups, but this one especially so.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it takes a very long time in databases. You just have to grind through winning trust with people over and over again. Like, they're already on Amazon, and even if they're unhappy, like, don't get fired for trust in Amazon. I mean, you know, that's that's done.
Speaker 1:And yeah. So yeah. It just takes forever, and I think people really try and get quick hits and ruin really good brands. Like, a lot of the companies are getting trolled right now for their lack of reliability. Like, they could have avoided that by just not saying they were hyperscalable or infinite or bottom.
Speaker 1:You know, all these words that, like, don't really like, if you say them and someone finds out very quickly they're not true and then shares that that's not true, it's really negative for your brand, like, really negative. And so you have to not do that. And the reason we share so much about our customers is because it's like it gives you that shine of, you know, their brands trust your brand so that it's additive to everyone, which is really nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of this stuff always ends up feeling to me like it's this slow process of continuously not doing the wrong thing every single day versus like explicitly doing stuff right. It's more just like there's all these wrong things that are easy easy to do And if you don't do them long enough, then it then it works out. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just feel that there's traps everywhere and you kind of over time understand how to avoid them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, you're right. And and I was thinking actually, could we have done Postgres sooner? And I I'm certain the answer is still no. Like, I'm truly certain the answer is still no because it would have been a distraction.
Speaker 1:We hadn't earned the right to go and do that yet. Mhmm. All of those things. Like, it just infrastructure tech companies take way longer than people realize. Like, way, way, way longer than than people realize.
Speaker 1:In fact, the ones that grow rapidly at the beginning aren't aren't really, like, often selling infrastructure, you know?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, you you built like a snowflake. I mean, you look at it took forever to build that and then it goes off like a rocket. Right? But it until that day, it's really I mean, even look at Figma. Right?
Speaker 1:Their fur they had lots of small flat rounds at the beginning of their company because they were just figuring out how to do, like, efficient CRDTs in the browser. Right? Like, that's just until that was that technical hurdle was cleared, downstream product was not gonna be anywhere, and then it goes off. And until you've done that really hard deliberate work, then it's just not gonna it's a technical operation. That's why why venture capital can be extremely positive for deeply technical businesses like ours.
Speaker 1:Like, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Couldn't be profitable out the gate when you're trying to build something that's deeply technical. But then when you get to that point, it's very very beneficial.
Speaker 2:I think I try to tell people is like when I see people starting new companies and stuff, I always ask them like are you really is this something you want do for like at least ten years? Because it's not gonna be fast. Like there's stories of things happening fast but for you it's probably gonna be ten years minimum and is this really is this are you excited to give up that amount of your life focused on this thing? Because that that is what it takes.
Speaker 1:I have reoccurring nightmare that, like, I do investing, you know, now and then, just like cut people a check now and then. And, you know, some of them have paid off. I have this nightmare that one pays off extremely well, and then I, like, don't wanna do stuff in the future. Like, it makes me somehow lazy. I'll I'll tell you this, which is I worked at GitHub.
Speaker 1:We sold to Microsoft. That was financially lucrative for a lot of people, and it came with, like, extreme sadness for me. I think it was one of the greatest companies Yeah. Of all time. And, you know, a lot of my friends I made there and like, you know, some of the people I'm closest to in the world that I see every single week and go for drinks and we hang out, you know.
Speaker 1:And you look back and it's like every thing we whinged about, every problem we complained about was just ridiculous. We were 27 years old at one of the greatest companies of all time, the world of software development, and I regret every second I didn't just breathe all of that in and just enjoy it because that's your life. Like, it's it's what you get to do. I I fear it ending. When people, like, joke about an exit or whatever, I get really snappy about it.
Speaker 1:I get really snappy because I'm like, yeah, okay, you'll be, like, rich or whatever. And first, everyone is already rich. And so you're just like, but then it's over. And then it's like, what do what do you do next? Do you just, you know, buy watches or whatever?
Speaker 1:You know? No, seriously,
Speaker 2:like You gotta start over. Yeah. It's a
Speaker 1:Everyone who knows me truly knows I will be at work when I die. Like, that is just I will be you know, do you know what I mean? Like, I want I love working. I work every day of my life and I just it's the best. I just I like I like doing that stuff.
Speaker 1:It happens to be symbiotic with making money, but, you know, I know so many rich people that have done nothing in their lives. I don't respect them. I don't want their opinions. I don't care about them, and they'll they have tons of money. I realized long ago that there's no correlation between wealth, skill, or intelligence.
Speaker 1:And so now I get to work with people whose skill and intelligence I respect. I wanna do that for as like long as possible, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I really resonate with how you describe it as like bittersweet or sad because I remember early in my career, obviously like, you know, an acquisition that's like the dream. Like, oh my god, I hope one day I get acquired. And then as you start to get more successful and those options start to show up, you realize that the day you say yes to that is a day where every dream you had of the future of what this thing could be is over. Yep.
Speaker 2:And that's such a sad feeling. It's like so negative that it overwhelms whatever, you know, financial portion of it is. Mhmm. And I never like this this seems this seems crazy to me. This was some crazy to me but like when I was first starting, I I remember I would see like companies that blew up and got crazy acquisition offers and they said no to like several billion dollars.
Speaker 2:I'd be like, that guy's so stupid, like what is he thinking? But now I get it, it's like, yeah, and then what? Like everything you wanted that you're hoping for, things that you wanted to do, you don't get to anymore. Yeah. And that's kind of what overrides everything.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah. No. I mean it. And like if you're gonna take it to the logical extreme, like why aren't you working on things that make even more money?
Speaker 1:Like go Right. Evil. You know what I mean? Just like work on. No.
Speaker 1:But seriously, like, why you what what dumb midpoint? If you're like, you're okay, so you're you you see you know what I mean? Like, the middle of the like, if you're not making if you just just care about money, go and make extreme amounts of money doing something insanely boring. If you wanna do something that's purely creative, then why even kind of intertwine money with those two things? I like both.
Speaker 1:I like the sport of building a business
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In a market that's highly technical. I have like, mean, I've before I came to PlanetScale, before I've been doing this, I would get offers all the time to, like, be the VP engineering or CTO at a sure thing company. Like, like, it's just a a sure thing. Yeah. With, like, with an equity offer, it's like, yeah, I'll make a $100,000,000 or something from that company if they IPO at, like, the last valuation or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you just because the product just did nothing for me. It was it's just so boring. I just wouldn't go to sleep excited for the next day. You'd just be grinding through it, you know, and Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's not what being alive is about.
Speaker 2:I'm sure people are seeing this or like probably think we sound crazy, but it's just one of these things where when you get a taste of everything probably aligning in this way, it just there's no going back and you kind of get get addicted to it.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's yeah. I mean, and of course, like, you realize that when you do have money, right? So it's like, okay, well, you know, it does there's a there's a level of like earning that you do that kind of makes you feel very safe and that's a completely different feeling. Then you get those you get the option to go and wanna work on things that you love, and that's that's really nice.
Speaker 1:But there's this kind of person that gets a lot of money and was never that passionate, and now they just have time and money, and they just do all of the standard boring rich people things.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And it just looks so boring to me. You know, it just doesn't look fun. Yeah. I like to do the things I did when I was young. That was it, you know.
Speaker 1:I I had a good friend of mine who's very successful. He still just codes and does video games because that's like what he always liked. Know, why why does people suddenly like make a ton of money and start getting into just very generic rich people? I just don't understand it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is funny. I always I mean, I'm the same way as you, like I know I'm gonna like die at work as well. But you know, I actually think I think about this all the time because I've seen so many personal situations where people retire and their health just like deteriorates and their brain deteriorates. And then Yep.
Speaker 2:I've I've seen it in such crazy ways where I feel like they've I think they literally died because they retired, you know? Yeah. So, yeah, it's kind of like a it's kind like a sickness in a way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People's like brains go to mush. They've seen this. One of the blue zones I think the there's a blue zone in like is it Okinawa? Somewhere in Japan.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And I believe like one of the accepted reasons that people live so long is that it's traditional for the grandparents that they take care of their grandchildren.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I see.
Speaker 1:And it gives them such connection and purpose and a reason to live that they're just, like, happy and and have purpose, and that and that and it helps them stick around. It's it's kind of odd. Yeah. And I just like I also and the thing that I find really nice now is helping younger people that are building companies. I always tell them not to listen to me and don't really try and replicate anything that I've done because I don't feel like I've ever been successful yet.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, until you build something really incredible that meets what I want to build, then I don't feel that successful. But helping people kind of short circuit some of the the standard issues Yeah. That you run into and the mistakes that you make, and I've made tons of mistakes. Like, if you could you ask everyone five years if you if you listen to this, you know, anyone that's running a company five years in, what they would do differently, it'd be nearly everything.
Speaker 1:Everything. Yeah. Right? You just make mistakes. Like, there's no playbook for what you do.
Speaker 1:People like to think there are they really think there's templates, but when you study the great companies, they're all off of they don't run on a standard template. They it's all weird, widening paths to get to where they are. But like yeah. Just like helping people through the undifferentiated things is like very, very satisfying. And it's also why people should always back second time founders because it's truly, truly, you just learn so much the first time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I feel like I've had to make every mistake like three times before I really I've really
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Understood.
Speaker 1:One of the one of the hardest to avoid is just constant temptation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:So many different opportunities have come in in the last week. And it's just like, okay, we have to stick to the fundamentals of the things we do very well, not get you know, and just it's that it's like that trio marathon run of just like a constant pace. And I actually think that's the most unfair things we can do to our competitors is that you haven't really seen a lull in shipping from PlanetScale. Like, we
Speaker 2:have just Right.
Speaker 1:Just like a like a marching drumbeat of pace. Like, everyone can pull off a sprint to rush some shit out in a quarter, and then, like, everyone's, like, exhausted and dying. If you can just constantly march at a pace that just no one else can keep up with, it's really unfair to folks. And so it's that long game playing it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the temptation thing is funny because it kind goes back to what I was saying about there's just traps everywhere and it's just about like avoiding them. I you know, when I was younger, I imagined building a business was like, like you're desperate looking for some opportunity and like you just can't find it and you're hoping that opportunity shows up one day. As you get a little bit more successful, it's actually the inverse problem. There's just a million awesome looking opportunities all the time, But they're hiding the better opportunity that's like a little a little harder to see.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it just feels like every day it's just about saying no to pretty great options really and having to focus on that. And, yeah, it just takes so much experience to to even recognize what what those things look like.
Speaker 1:Yep. Absolutely. I can remember in the early days of GitHub, a very, very large company open had an open checkbook to do like, do a certain type of GitHub deployment. There would have been a one on one for them, and it would have been a nightmare. And it was just so much money.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:And and at the time, it's just like, wow. That seems but if you'd done that, it throws you off course. Same with us. Right? Like, we get asked continually to just do a purely on prem version of Planet Scout.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:We've been asked so many times with with people that would pay extra like, at certain time, like, it would never have happened now, but, like, at that time, we would have, like, potentially doubled our revenue at the time that we're being asked to do it, and it gets really tempting.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I
Speaker 1:remember all of the experience I had for other companies that showed me not to do that, but it's that quick temptation, especially if you're not profitable. This is the Mhmm. This is where those kind of like, that kind of knowing your cash out date. Right? And, you know, for those that don't know what that means, like, if you any of your vendors, anyone is not profitable, that means the CEO and executive team and the board know the exact date where the business is finished.
Speaker 1:Like, there is a date in the future that's calculable where it there there's no more money in the bank. Just the costs will overlap what's left. That is a feeling that is very difficult and very hard, and it makes you act weird. And so Yep. When we when we released the first version of metal, the the most the the test version, we were gonna try and get it out in beta before Reinvent because Reinvent is a big conference, a massive conference, actually.
Speaker 1:If you've not been to Reinvent, you should just to sort of confront how large the commercial side
Speaker 2:of things. Crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Software engineers don't understand, I don't think, how large the commercial part of the industry is. It's a conference that could only happen in Vegas, and it's across five hotels. And
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's insane.
Speaker 1:Probably a billion dollars in marketing spend across the whole thing. Must've been just ridiculous. Oh, so what so anyway, so we were trying to rush it out for that. But instead of, you know, I've told that story. Our customers were having problems with UBS, so we said to them, we'll migrate you first, actually.
Speaker 1:And that took an extra quarter to do that, but that meant the announcement was so much better because it was like real people use this. It's real. It's GA today. It works. You know, like, if you were unprofitable and had eighteen months of runway, you wouldn't do that.
Speaker 1:You couldn't. You'd have to, like, get whatever crap out there to try and spend a load of marketing money to build pipeline to desperately, like, try and get leads and have something to show the next set of investors to try and, like, get your next hit to keep alive and keep going. That's rough. I mean, like, lot of these AI valuations and raises that you're seeing are based on the fact that the growth they've seen is costing them so much money. They they have to raise to stay alive.
Speaker 1:It eats their runway. That's not great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's yeah. It's another aspect of this that I didn't understand early on. You You know, there's like being smart and like making good decisions. And but so much of it is about protecting your own ability to even think clearly.
Speaker 2:Like so many things can just take a smart person and just have them start making horrible decisions just given the situation they're in. So yeah, like we we talk constantly about, you know, are we like thinking clearly like what's biasing us? Like, like avoid situations that have upsides but, you know, would like impact our ability to like assess the situation properly. Yeah. So I'm like really paranoid about that.
Speaker 2:I'm like, am I getting involved with something that that clouds my judgment? Because it doesn't matter how smart you are.
Speaker 1:Nope. Anyone can and there's times when you're very vulnerable too. Yeah. Right? Like, three bad things happening in a row to wake like, you know, just the temptation.
Speaker 1:You're, you know, you're sat there alone at two in the morning. You're thinking about the seriousness of what you've done and what you do. Yeah. And it can, you know, it can be hard. That's why you need people around you, though.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Speak the truth. Keep you keep the keep the emperor's clothes on.
Speaker 2:So this last thing before we hop off, I just remembered that, you tweeted reminiscing about React the other day. Yeah. Yeah. So I I I spent a bunch of time with Erlang and Elixir and like React was obviously like the god in that world. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But yeah, we had a deployment where we were able to embed React inside all of our application nodes and, like, it clustered and all the data querying was, like, effectively local. I was like, this is really awesome. But they they died out. Right? They kind of disappeared.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, that's the way of most database companies. Right? There's a lot of really niche things. But I have, like again, I have, like, a lot of nostalgia for some of the
Speaker 2:There was an era where there was so much database experimentation. That was fun. Every new startup, I would pick something different.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I agree. And there's, like, really cool, like, really cool stuff built by really, really talented people. It's like, if you like cars, right, you can appreciate the ones that are just incredible powerhouses that, you know, everyone loves and they work and then whatever. And then there's the weird niche ones that have tried something completely crazy, and you're like, that's fun and cool too.
Speaker 1:Like, you can I love that about tech? I treat like, this is why I love Convex because it's it's actually the most kind of modern and dynamic database I've seen
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That is actually extremely real and practical has really serious users, and they've kept everything else normal. And it's being built by a team of people that so it's the ex Dropbox MySQL team. They ran for, like, 15,000 MySQL nodes. So they know that like, these are people I truly, like, respect. Some of the folks that work with them actually work at PlanetScale.
Speaker 1:Like, we kind of everyone knows each other. And they've taken that underlying infrastructural knowledge and then built something incredibly dynamic and forward facing on top. That to me is just I love it. Like, I absolutely love that as a way of approaching the problem versus people who show up and go, like, we're the end of sequel or whatever, and then, like
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Don't really do anything revolutionary in exchange. Convex is actually doing really revolutionary things while kind of sticking to the rules that physics is leaving us with for databases. So, like, stuff like that's really cool. Yeah, like React we that came from were we all went for, like, a dinner at one of my favorite restaurants the other night to kind of celebrate a bit, and we all sat around a round table, and then, you know, it was an extra chair. So we moved the chair, we had to shuffle around the clock.
Speaker 1:And so I was like, And, yeah, I just I remembered it. But, yeah, there's, like, so many so many fun. There's still some that are going, you know. Like, the if, like, they were, the hot database of the day, but it still, like, gained a user base and are taking along really nicely.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I just remember I think me and Adam were talking about this where there were just a time where everything just felt a little bit more wild. And things have settled down now and there's like tried and true ways that make sense for most people. But yeah, I do remember when like I was using like a different graph database every month and graph databases like blew up for a while.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it was a good time and I'm glad I was able to kinda live through that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now that kind of frenetic wildness seems to just be marketing budgets which is kind of not.
Speaker 2:No. That's fine.
Speaker 1:I know. I treated this. I felt bad doing it, but I kind of I've more gained more conviction, which is there was this era of tech where, basically, if you were an engineer people engineers were very hostile to anyone that, like, wasn't an engineer, couldn't code, and it was too extreme back then. I actually think we've gone too far the other way now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not as far as I agree.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There's just people that are yapping twenty four seven on Twitter that just don't know how computers work and have massive audiences, and it's just like you know what I mean? Like, why? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm fat. Why would like, I wouldn't just sit there as someone who can't run, go in, here's running tips. Here's how you think about running.
Speaker 2:And then get offended when someone is like, do you actually run? You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right. Exactly. I can't say that. I mean, that's really it's not really nice to say, you know, it's like, well, we're here to do software engineer.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean? It's like Yeah. If you applied this to other industries, it would be absolutely nuts. You know?
Speaker 2:I mean, I do wonder though. Like, I wonder because I'm like, I'm so in our industry, but my people should be the same everywhere. Like, are there are the are these same dynamics that exist in all industries and we just don't don't see it? Like, are there medical people that are just, like, talking shit?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, I really hope not. No. I don't think they are. I I really don't think there's, like, doctors that are just, like, there for the vibes, you know, and just, like I hope so.
Speaker 1:I truly hope. We I don't know. We'll we'll we will we'll see. But yeah, like, I mean, maybe that will change. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's definitely been a weird one to watch. The industry is in a very strange place right now.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for joining me today. This is a good conversation.
Speaker 1:Thank thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Excited for you and your team in Landscape Postgres. I always see pictures of your office. It looks really nice. I'll I'll swing by at some point once I'm traveling.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Come through. Come and work from the office while you're here. Like, people do that. It's really, you know, it's nice to have people stop in.
Speaker 1:It's nice to have a physical location that people come to. We had this, like, really fun party the other night that we would just invite people to come and migrate. And just, like, being here at midnight watching people just migrating their databases to PlanetScale while we were, like, hanging out, drinking, and listening to music was just really fun, like, really enjoyable. SF's good for that. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that's the stuff I miss. I miss. I wish that I that's what I'm jealous of. Like, it's fun to to have those things just happening randomly on a weekly basis.
Speaker 1:You yes. And you can actually, you know, like, pretty much every day of the week in this town, there's three events you could've you could go to. And there's interesting people everywhere. There's then then there's the other balance of there's, certain people or certain companies that go to every single one and you just think you can't be doing any work. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1:Like, I try and limit myself to going and doing something like that maybe once a week or whatever. But there's people that's just like, how how have you why does your party fool say 600 events attended? It's just not
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like this is a case everywhere where there's like an industry and like some large percentage of it is just people acting out like they're doing stuff and like a small percentage of it is actually doing stuff. And SF is like no, like doesn't escape that either and maybe it's even more concentrated in some ways.
Speaker 1:Oh, for sure. For sure. And there's an inverse correlation with like people's pop you meet people that are popular on Twitter and then you like talk to them about tech and it's just like, wow, you don't actually know how computers work. That's really interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Why would one lead to another, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Alright. Well, I'll let you go. Thanks for joining again.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me as always.
