Why Agents Love Supabase

AI agents are creating more software—and that changes what a backend needs to do. Supabase co-founders Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson join swyx to discuss running long-lived workloads alongside the database, making schemas easier for agents to underst...

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello, it's me again. I hope 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. So I was at Supabase Select recently, which is the Supabase company conference. And there's a lot of stuff to cover. In particular, I think I should share that I have a very close relationship with this company. I was an angel investor in a seed round six years ago,

• 0:44Speaker 00

  and they were my very, very first angel investment. They've done super well. They went from zero to 10 billion in valuation in the last six years. It's a fully remote, open source company, which is enormous. And they're pretty much becoming the standard for hosting Postgres. So I want to break down what makes them tick. I also want to see why they did so well in my AEO ranking, because it's not a given for sure. And there's a lot of companies that are fighting for what it means to build databases for agents. They 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 sponsors for Litenspace,

• 1:25Speaker 00

  because we're open for sponsorships and, you know, who else to do this with, with companies and people that I'm familiar with and trust and can explain very well to our audience. And so the main things I wanted to cover, they have a whole recap here on their YouTube, which is very well executed and all that. But they have 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. So build is basically how they want to improve the Postgres experience for coding agents to set up. And the two that really shout out to me is,

• 2:06Speaker 00

  one is a very simple one, which is starting Supabase without Docker. The less weight I can, I need in order to start up basic processes to interact with the database, the better. And obviously, I can scale it up to a full VM in the future. But the second thing is Supabase Compute, where you can run compute next to the database. I think collocating that is super easy. I think this is honestly super underrated. I think it's maybe underselling what it potentially could be.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Your app having an MCP server from Supabase is really good. But declarative schemas is so important, right? But like, you want declarative schemas rather than the standard SQL paradigm of set up a schema and then migrate, migrate, migrate, which is something we cover in the podcast. Like, if you want everything to be in Git, a source of truth, so that your agent can crawl it and figure it, set up and fork it, whatever, from there.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  It seems so simple, but really, when Postgres was not designed to do this, you have to kind of retrofit the events on top of, you know, a 40-year-old database. And really, I kind of see Supabase's momentum now as doing the last mile, like the really frontier of Postgres 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. But humans also benefit, and I really like that. I don't like doing things only for agents to be happy.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  So then the second part is operating. So that is mostly just about giving more context, really, whether it's more logs, more checks, more connections, markdown files for your SQL. That's super cool, knowledge and skills. Every year, they ship some interesting pipeline work from Stripe to other sort of integrations. And I think the sort of general ETL problem as you get further and further in your AI engineering career becomes, you know, more and more part of the data engineering stack. But now, Supabase has their own first-party solution. You can use a mix of both, like whatever, but sometimes it's nice to have everything in one.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  The last part is perhaps the most complex, you know, at-scale thing. This is why Supabase engineered their branding to prototype to Petabyte. And really, they're going after more and more scale, obviously, because the customers are growing. And so announcing a full V1 of multi-grids, which is their sort of port, I guess, of Vitesse for Postgres with the Vitesse guy, which is enormous in the database world. If you don't know what Vitesse is, you're losing out. You need to know. You're watching this on YouTube on a Vitesse website. Aureon DB and DB, like, there's a lot to go in there. And honestly, you can see my connection with the founders.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  I think this is the first interview ever that the two of them have done, and I make reference to that and try to view their chemistry and show you what it's like to discuss and run a $10 billion database company. Enjoy.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Okay, this podcast has been six years in the making. We're excited to have Koppel and Ant in the studio. Welcome, guys.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Thanks. Thanks for having us.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  We're recording this ahead of Supabase Select, which, you know, it's your big customer conference, and we'll release this after the conference. But I just wanted 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, you know, I met you guys for the first time, and I was like, what is this like hot database company that like got soft launched on Hacker News by like, you know, some random user or something? Anyway, congrats on all the success. What are you announcing the headlines at Select? Let's just get right into that.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, sure. So there's quite a few headlines. We've got a lot to cover. The main ones would be starting off with Compute. So we offer a product called Edge Functions, and Edge Functions are powered by Dino, and they have basically a two-second 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, Supabase Compute, which is, you can run anything. It's long-running, it's serverless, it is running in the same private network as your database, so it's collocated, has very good latency,

• 6:58Speaker 01

  so you can run Postgres 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.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Let's call it the comparable offerings in other clouds that others might be familiar with. Would this be?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like a Lambda function, but the container-type Lambda function.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  You can run a full container, basically.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  And then there's the other stuff.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then we have, well, three innovations on the database space. So the first one, which we talked about last year, which was Aureon DB. Aureon DB, we've basically put it through the wringer in the past year to make sure that it is rock solid and ready for the Postgres ecosystem. The three innovations are basically performance, scaling up, and scaling out. Postgres touches on, sorry, Aureon DB touches on performance. It is a drop-in replacement for the current Postgres 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,

• 8:14Speaker 01

  so it's actually very efficient for your database as well. And basically, the innovation that, or the work that we had to do this year was put it through PG Regress, full compatibility with Postgres, Antithesis, we put it through TPCC nightly benchmarks and Jepson 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 pay for the patent and are now giving it away for free.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  One 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 every operator drops data in some situation.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Well, so this is for the second, the second one, so scaling.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  So that's multi-grids.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yes, so multi-grids is the second big announcement. Basically, we looked at the Postgres ecosystem and we looked at all the operators. An operator, for those who aren't familiar, when you run Postgres, 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 Postgres ecosystem. And what we had found was that under certain conditions, every single one of them could lose data. And so we decided with multi-grids to do a ground-up rewrite of the entire structure of an operator. And so multi-grids is essentially, while our initial goal is to become, or give sharding to the Postgres community,

• 9:50Speaker 01

  what has turned out to be is this entire operating system. And we actually ran it again through very rigorous testing, and we've done 1,000 sequential failovers, and it didn't lose any data, and we've tested it in basically 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 and invite-only, so people who are running serious workloads can come to us, and we'll start helping them to scale up.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Is this the full completion of multi-grids being fully sort of parallel to Vitesse? Or is there still something left to go?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  No, actually, yeah, it was quite interesting. So Sugu originally created Vitesse 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 use Vitesse, you always had to change things as you move to shart it, so change some queries. So he said, I want to focus only on compatibility first. And so the way we've designed it is in such a way, this ground-up 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,

• 11:14Speaker 01

  and multi-grids will just be able to handle it, zero changes to your code.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  I mean, that's incredible vision, and the fact that you've been able to do it in two years?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  That's one year. So we haven't released sharding yet. I've seen the early prototypes and the designs for how we're doing it. And it should, some of it should land by probably early next year, depending on some of the things that are happening on our platform. We've got a lot going on, but we're very confident. And we're happy with the progress. It's been pretty good.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is the last piece for the total domination of Postgres.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Right?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  And for those who don't know, look up BitS, powers YouTube, powers, what else? GitHub, everything.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  If workloads were ever to shift away from MySQL, you need this to Postgres. And that's then for Supabase to win.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  And hopefully it's not just for Supabase customers, right? Like it's fully open source.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Community thing.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Anyone who's running Postgres at scale should be able to use MultiGrass.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sure like every coalition, every company that's involved in Postgres in some way is contributing to this thing, right? Because we all want this.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we've got a whole design partner program. So we're working with the likes of Booz Allen, we're working with Postman, we're working with Perplexity. So yeah, lots of customers coming on board that a lot of people need it. They're running Postgres at scale and they need something to help them scale up.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, third.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Third one is, yeah, so this one's a big one, 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 there's no other leading database provider who does agentic well than Tursa. And so actually tomorrow, and when this is announced, it would have come out where we have announced that we've acquired Tursa to help us power agentic databases.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's an incredible, it's also like, they're primarily SQLite based, but it doesn't really matter, right? Like it's more about the architecture of like, I guess, I don't have the word to describe how basically like broadcast, is that the word?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  For?

• 13:39Speaker 00

  For scale out, right? Like there's, the idea for them scaling SQLite was that they would have like a single writer and like multiple readers.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so SQLite itself, it's only a single writer. It's a file format, so generally it's not.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Like solving MVCC for SQLite.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So then they built this Tursa architecture, which basically builds MVCC for SQLite, so that you can have multiple writers.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  Yes. And because SQLite has a weird license, they had to fork it.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  They had to fork it. They originally started with LiveSQL 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 database. And because object storage itself is, I think it's 11 nines of data durability.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Yes, which is not reliability, but whatever.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, not reliability, but it gives you what you need for, for, 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 in our worldview. It's probably good for these smaller use cases in terms of transactions, because when you've got a transactional database, you've 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 MultiGrass. But for these, what we're seeing, where we need to get to, these billions of databases,

• 15:25Speaker 01

  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 Glaber, I said, he released a blog post on how they've done their rewrite, basically makes the, we have a pathway to get Postgres compatibility with their file format. So we're acquiring them and we're actually going to keep the Tursa brand. So Tursa is going to focus on SQLite. And then we're going to introduce this new smaller instance type on Supabase called Supabase Spark, and it'll be compatible with all our libraries. And you can have one database for any idea, any prototype that you want.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  And when it takes off, then you just upgrade to full Postgres databases, all the way up to MultiGrass.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  I know you've been working on this for a while. This is the dream, right?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's been, both scaling up and scaling down has been one of the things that we've been trying to figure out how to do.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  And it's really when some of these innovations came along that we realized, oh, okay, we can do this.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Right? Like these, these things are tiny, they're vibe coded apps.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Like, I don't know if you have any insights on the, on like what.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, until they get traction, right? And that's the thing is like, once you hit the front page of Hackin News, you need to know that you can go far beyond that. 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, it's just like a need to have. Because like, we see now that there's a lot of non-technical builders who are building like whole companies, right? We have the customer magic school and the guy was like a teacher, right? And he saw all these like inefficiencies in teaching, like teachers spending time that on tasks that could be automated.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Everyone.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Everyone's a builder now. 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 there's a much larger market of almost like consumer-like builders, right? That people inside companies, people who want to launch their own startups, which is gonna mean a lot more databases, which, like we said, like, if we give everyone a dedicated Postgres cluster, it's probably, you know, we'll probably run out of physical computers in the, in the world pretty fast.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Which is basically what's happening. Yeah. Like we've faced it throughout this year and we're just, our growth has, has been one of the things that we've had to deal with in terms of capacity of computing.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So congrats. Also, I will observe that I feel like Glaber is also a meme lord.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's one of the things.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Right?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  I mean, like, come on.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's amazing.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  So for those who don't know, the, the person behind the Supabase memes is this guy.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  You know, low key, low key a killer, I would say. And we're Glaber also.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, big time.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  And I don't know if you guys exchanged notes on like what's funny.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Not yet.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Really? That never came up?

• 18:50Speaker 02

  We're gonna give them access to the Supabase Twitter account for sure. I could do with some help.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Wait, is it still you?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  We've got a small team of teenagers now who help me out.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  You do workshops, right?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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?

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Actually, you're, you are also low key like meme lord.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  I'm not as funny as you. You're really, really funny. Where's, there was one with like a seagull and you were like, standing on top of a turtle.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Standing on top of Postgres, I think it was.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  It's like a standing seagull riding a flying seagull and it's like, my God.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't, I can't find it right now. But, and this is all like deep Supabase 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. And there was your moat, like memes.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  And there were some big companies trying to run memes off their Twitter accounts. I won't name any names, but like very large organizations. But yeah, it's, it's, like I said, it's hard to hire for.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  The guy who did like a 40,000 word essay on breaking down our meme strategy.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Someone studied our Twitter strategy, actually really early on, and posted it on, on Hackin News.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, on Hackin News.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  And, and that was funny because they'd recorded the strategy in a way that we hadn't committed to paper yet. So then when we onboarded new marketing people, we were like, here's the strategy. It was written by someone else.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And of course Hackin News hated it. And then they were commenting on it and.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  I found it.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  And took the first comment.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  This guy, this guy.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Learnings from four months of Supabase feed. He just looked at your word for four months.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  2022, okay.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Wait, I, I mentioned it? Ooh.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  There you are.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  So he just broke it down.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  He broke it down. And then Hackin News hated it on it. And so, and took a photo of them shitting on it and posted it on our Twitter account.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Your hate just fuels me.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  What is this interesting article? Yeah, okay, so I commented.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was like, a lot of our growth was thanks to Hackenews. I mean, in the early days, I just had to live on there and.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  So we should talk about that. What deal with the devil do you have to do with Dang?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  We've been scolded by Danji like many times, like for launching too many things in a week, basically.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And he's like rightfully paranoid about the association of Hackenews and YC. So he kind of like, if something happens, he kind of wants to throw us under the bus so that people know, oh, we're not doing this for YC customers. We're an independent site. So he's been helpful to make sure that we, we don't smear the name of YC or Hackenews.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  I mean, at this point, you don't need them. But like, for sure, I think Dang does a, Dang has super high credibility. No one really like, you know, questions him. But I do think like, you know, you guys innovated the strategy of launch weeks. And for a while, 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 Hackenews.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  I got told off so badly for that because I tweeted that proudly. I was like, oh, here we are. And then I got told off because we were like, it basically looks bad because, because like suddenly this YC company is like dominating the front page of Hackenews. It looks like it's a bias.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  I'm like parading the fact that you're on the front.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is true. Like, so like tip to anyone. Never screenshot the fact that you're on the front page of Hackenews and put it on Twitter because it's, it does look like, and to be honest, it was gloating. So, so it's a fair, fair call out. Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's all that, which like, I would say, I would consider 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, Supabase history, these are the things that you must check off as like the tour of things. What else? I mean.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  I think the top post is interesting because.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  This is the launch post?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it was someone else who launched us. We weren't ready. We weren't ready to be launched on Hackenews.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  And you didn't consider yourself a Firebase alternative?

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So that was the day that we changed the tagline. We had the tagline.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Original tagline?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  It was real time Postgres. Because what had happened was, I wanted, like, we were like, oh, let's build a Postgres company. But in my previous company, I had to migrate from Firebase to Postgres, but I needed a real time feature. And so I ended up building this real time engine on top of Postgres. 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 Postgres. No one cared. No one cared when we had a website. And so like, we were like, let's change it to open source Firebase alternative, knowing that that was the reason why I switched. And it was, I think, only 12 hours later or something like that, this article went up.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, still the top of all time.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Way too.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  And one for the database and one for the APIs. Right, because.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Because we wanted to upgrade the APIs and decouple.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  And we only had a handful of like test users at that point. And then all of a sudden.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  I think we only had eight users. We went from eight to 800 on that, that launch alone.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  And then we burned through, I think we had like 10K of Digital Ocean credits, which we just burned through in basically 48 hours. 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. And 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 YC.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Do you remember that we could have been on Digital, like basically, we should still be building on Digital Ocean because 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? Because 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 Ocean.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Being too strict, yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  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 that.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Because it was COVID, it was a time when everyone was worried about like what's going to happen.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  True.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  So I think they were like, we don't want to overextend ourselves.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  It's fair. Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it was like totally fair at the time, just given the, the way the world was looking.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  People made many irrational decisions during COVID.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  But you never know. I was still going to say, you might be worth more in a digital ocean now. But then somehow Digital Ocean has also like gone on a super tear. Look at this.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Because computers.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  They tripled in the last year.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Wow, that's cool. So what are they, 16?

• 26:07Speaker 00

  They're 16 billion now.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Billion, yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  And like, okay, well, I guess there's a shortage of CPUs?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a shortage.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  How are you guys experiencing it?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  We literally, I mean, we're up against runways all the time where like we meet AWS like multiple times.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Is there a way to spike when you have a spike? Or what do you do? Like, you just have agreements with people?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've got to like plan very closely. 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. Like, we now have to consider a multi-cloud strategy.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Mini GCP.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  We need GCP, or 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.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  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 the leader there. It's hard to be multi-cloud if you're going to use GCS as like a swap for S3.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yes, 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.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  I still remember, I think like three years ago, they introduced like strong consistency.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the innovation, basically, that helps. Yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  And 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?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And then S3 Express as well. That was a big game changer because.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Why?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Well, 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. And so the right times to this are one to two milliseconds. And so before you can guarantee a write back to your client, you basically need to batch it to something that's durable. So this one's durable, not as durable as S3, not 11 nines, but durable enough that you can.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  It's ephemeral durable.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Yes, 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, which is cheaper.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Do we need Redis anymore?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, yeah, you still need Redis. Like, this is nowhere near fast enough. You need like, basically, your cache layers are either memory, NVMe drive, local attached to S3, their equivalent, and then S3.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, amazing, amazing. That was a little bit of data, like we jumped around quite a lot. Clearbase memory. A few more things that we're going to talk about. You, your slogan was building the weekend, scale to millions. Now we're prototype to petabyte, which is excellent. And really, it is reflective of the evolution in scale that you guys are doing, right?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Do you have anecdotes on like, let's say, early Supabase versus now? How fast are people scaling when they, when they start a thing?

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the big thing is, I think, how fast people are monetizing.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  At the start, it was like you choose your database, you build your product. At some point, you 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 in the early days of Vibe Coding, it wasn't obvious to us that this is something that's going to stick around. This 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 that product, we were like, wow, this is, this is real. People are making real things that generate real money. And so we knew we had to lean in. In a way where

• 29:57Speaker 02

  there was waves we'd ridden successfully in the past, like when NFTs were huge, we leaned in a bit and we added like sign in with Ethereum and sign in with Solana. 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 Vibe Coding was like, you know, we, we discussed 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 market. It's like, our biggest customers were like stretching the limits of what we had at the time. And so we knew we had to then just do both.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  It was like, you know, 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.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  That one's funny because like, on the number side, basically for Supabase, there's been three chapters of AI. So the first chapter was embeddings. I think we were on.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Supabase vector.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Which I have now transcribed and it will always, we should probably update this because.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  This is the only talk you've ever done at AI.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. We did this talk, basically all these embedding databases were coming out, vector databases, create the vector. And so we were pushing the fact and you can use Postgres as a vector database. And Andrew Kane, a completely independent guy, has developed this awesome extension. And we're like, okay, trying to educate the market. Postgres can kind of do anything. You don't need another database if you're going to store your own embeddings. So this was chapter one and it was, it was 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 embeddings, what TurboBuffer, for example, are doing. They use a lot of the innovations that Terso are doing. And I think it's a phenomenal use case for that type of stuff.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  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 vibe coding type platform on top of Supabase? 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 saw 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.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  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. We actually barely spend any dollars on marketing. And most of it's just memes and things like that. So.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Here, I got one of your charts. There we go.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  I mean, all your charts look the same, but because they're just like exponentially. You just keep, you just keep changing the Y axis.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  This is, is often when you get like more consumer life traffic on the top of funnel, your activation and conversion to pay goes down.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  But both of those things went up.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Started going up quite rapidly as well.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Because of the models.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  How do you know activation and conversion to pay? Oh, your, it's super basis.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Our metrics, yeah, our follow metrics.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  And, and the reason is because the signup to activation, the agent does it for you.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Like in one step, so it's basically, it's almost a hundred percent.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  The friction's gone.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and so those users then were converting to pay at a higher rate than our traditional developer user.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  Okay. I mean, excellent.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, good. But I'm sure, I'm sure like, like all developer tools are seeing the same thing, right?

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Well, at different rates, I think you guys are clearly one of the leaders there. You know, I was going to bring out this, one of these, these things. I have this AEO tracker where, you know, if you, if you type in Supabase and there's a, there's a few categories where you're the leader. But basically it has led to every single frontier model recommending you as your primary choice for an integrated backend. What does integrated backend mean? It is your original offerings, like your, your auth, your functions, your, you know, and your database and all the other stuff, APIs. And I think it is interesting, like you had to be in the market for three to four years, exactly your.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  timezone before LLMs took off. And then present yourself as the leading competitor to the leading thing at the time.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  And then you can take over.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We're very lucky with our timing. I mean, we couldn't have timed it better, like it's a complete accident.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think like on first principles basis, so we have interviewed other founders who maybe started post LLMs. And resend was kind of there. We've also talked to them, like, why does my LLM keep recommending resend? And it's because they have a lot of good AEO practices.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Sure, 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? So now we just need to maintain that lead.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  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 Supabase and what situations, like here's how I built this thing. I'm sure that all just got slurped up by the, the model.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  And open source helps as well, of course.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Being, being open source. 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.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so last year at Supabase 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 them the stock? And they were like, yeah, we'll look into it. And then they came back and they were like, actually there is a mechanism where if you really just want to give the stock away, you can.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  And so now we've earmarked like a million dollars in Supabase stock that we're basically going to give to a bunch of the community members. The first community member we're going to stand up on stage and sort of announces is this guy. His name's Gary Austin in the Supabase Discord. And this guy is like a legend of the Supabase community. He, we looked into his stats and Gary has answered 20,000, in the last six years, 20,000 questions in the Supabase 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 Grokbot, like he's a real human.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Have you met him? What, what is his, what is his deal?

• 36:58Speaker 02

  We, we've met, he, he was basically like retired.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  And just interested in Supabase.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Gary Austin, or Gary Abbott?

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, Gary Abbott is his real name.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Okay, this guy.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  And, and he loved Supabase because he basically built his own similar, similar app because he loves red wine. And, and then was just getting a kick out of, you know, he's got Supabase logo on his Christmas tree. And he's also like.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  This is my favorite Supabase memes. It's just like you reminding me that like, I'm about to run out of my Supabase.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  That's the announcement is we're basically like, anyone who's a legend in the Supabase ecosystem, we can now.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Is Discord still a strong? I mean, I, I got mixed feelings about Discord. It is, it is the best chat, you know, Slack sucks, but also it is not public, right? So all the work in there is not scalable.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Have you found anything to solve that?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  There was some tools that we looked at 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. But the original debate that I remember we debated a lot was, okay, we want to host the community. Do we do a Discord? Do 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 this.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Just be where they are.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  And be where they are, yeah.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  That's the answer.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Was a lot of work.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it worked out, right? I mean, there was the right answer.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  But then there's a lot of like great tools that started popping up, right? And, or.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  I don't think anyone has, has stood the test of time, let's call it. But yeah, there, there are, there are tools, there are Discord mirror to public Q and A site. That is a thing that people do. I don't know if it's been successful for anyone.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and like Common Room helped a lot.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  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 slurped out.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  Use GitHub as a CMS.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we use 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.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. It can be confusing because there's GitHub, there's Supabase, the open source. And then there's Supabase, the cloud platform. And some, and most people are probably going to come into support for Supabase, the cloud platform.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  So, yeah, it is.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  Do you have any idea of your, this is very hard to tell, your open source market capture? So this is a thing that like, if you're in the developer tools circles, you, you know, you do?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  We like quite deliberately do not.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Don't know.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  So.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  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 a hundred 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.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Oh, come on.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Cause it launches.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Tomorrow.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Tomorrow.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  I don't know if we're announcing it tomorrow, but yeah, basically it's Control Tower. All it does is, is this fleet view. We've got this very popular product, Supabase for Platforms. So that's what all these AI companies are building on top of. We launched 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.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  Internal Supabase.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Internal Supabase for all of their users. 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.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do want to cover because I think a lot of people think of you as bottoms up GTM, you know, what the work you've been doing on the, on the enterprise side. So first of all, shout out to Wembo.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  I, I think this is your most successful recent launch.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Supabase for Platforms, this one launched in, yeah?

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, December 2025, so.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, but.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  I saw some stats or like, you guys called it successful, I don't know.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  What is the enterprise side, right? Like what, what are, what is that story apart from like, give me a dashboard?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, we should talk about sales strategies.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  So Supabase is a very famously Pongji company. Like we give a shit about, we have 60% of every YC batch use Supabase. 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 withstood more than a decade of moving our market and still keeping that developer love. So that's the first thing. So to do that, all we started doing when we did sales was layer on what we call product led 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.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  They 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 thousand 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.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  And 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 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 that 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 shit and then you get the full quota. But because we know our database grows, our platform grows at 25% month over month on this cohort of users.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  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 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 almost never, it'll be a transfer of their production database. So migrating databases from say MySQL to Postgres or from say one scalable database to another scalable database, almost never happens. And that was the core thesis of Supabase at the start.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  We knew that every single Postgres 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, even if you build a bigger, better, more scalable Postgres. 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.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Greenfield.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Greenfield, yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  They're still not migrating?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  I 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. They're very interested on making sure that they can basically help us direct. Because they're running into problems of Postgres at scale. But for the next, say, five years, almost all of our focus on the enterprise side is making sure that we can handle greenfield 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 perfect timing for us because that's what we've been focused on for so long.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  This 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, five years. We're gonna have to focus really heavily on just landing inside these enterprises and then expanding up.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  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 champion, they help you sell internally. 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 C level and without needing to put like a huge motion around that.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  Oh, that's great. Mentioning lovable, mentioning Bolt. Lovable is gonna have their own database stuff, you know? And, and like everyone is gonna 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.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Which is more sticky?

• 46:24Speaker 00

  More, more sticky. Like is the CPO more likely to be married to lovable or married to Superbase, you know, like?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Is that a question that comes up?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  That's a great, that's a great question. I think ultimately running databases is very hard.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Well, as we just discussed, it's harder to migrate your database than it is your front end tool. And not 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 shit with, um, the database. Because we had, very early on, the agents were like trying to shove image data into Postgres. You know, they were turning off RLS in order to get their projects to work. And like paperclip maxing basically is that lovable wrote really good skills to stop their agents doing stupid stuff. They were, they were the first.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  That's the secret sauce.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  It's the solve all this.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  And, and now like the models themselves don't do that stupid stuff anymore.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  So 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.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And that's a, that's a famous meme. Talking about, I'll, I'll leave the migration point alone after I mention this. You know, one of the things that I got like a big aha moment was when I met Karen from Co2, who's 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 up as that new, new RDS, right? For, for Amazon. Um, if there was a, you know, a stage four of, a fourth era post AI of Supabase that is like the other, you know? The one trillion X in your, in your growth, rip out Oracle. I don't know. Like, yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  What is, is that the? That's the one that the famous migrations are after. I heard some crazy stat like that. It might be different now because 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 out Oracle, let's do migrations. People, that's what I mean though. Like 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?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  But it is incredibly difficult. And I think you will just wanna focus first and all on landing inside the enterprise.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes sense. It's just one of those things where like, you know, when I see, I 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.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Right? And like hopefully that means that you cut over everything.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  That'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.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Right, right. So like hopefully coding agents are the boom. Uh, maybe they're not there yet. Maybe you guys have to become more on prem.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  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. The 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.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  So the risks are just so much higher when it comes to OLTP that a lot of the 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.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Usually then you've got two problems though.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Well, speaking of OLTP, I mean, uh, this is just like down database indulgence. We also had two of the co-founders of Databricks here, Mate and Reynolds, where they are making a claim that they have solve H-TAP.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Which is the sort of the white wheel of database people, right? If you know like, uh, well, traditionally you need an OLTP, you need all that database.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Never the two shall meet, except that, uh, sometimes you, you would like to never have to replicate anything.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Are you, are you paying attention at all to that stuff? Like is there, is there a story there for Supabase this Sunday?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Yes, we are. Particularly interested in Duck Lake. I think Duck Lake is a very, and DuckDB is a very interesting technology.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Mother duck, but a, but a data lake? Like what is, what is Duck Lake?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Uh, Duck Lake. Okay. So, um, DuckDB, which was recently, there's DuckDB, which is basically like a SQLite for analytics.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Column storage.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly. Can read directly from object storage. That's typically how it's touted. And it can actually read from your Postgres database as well. So open source, great technology. And actually there's also, uh, DuckDB Labs, which was recently acquired by AWS. Now, so they're a foundation that are developing. So they're building a committee, um, around the open source. I actually think of DuckDB a little bit like the Postgres of the analytics ecosystem. 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.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  It's like a professor in Netherlands.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 Postgres an analytical database, but mostly then focusing on using the right technology for the right job. I don't know if H-TAP, many people have tried to slay the H-TAP 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 amount of NVMe 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.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  That will slow down your database. So we think that sharding is by far the best way to do scale up into the petabytes. 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 smash these two together doesn't necessarily make that much sense in my opinion.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. 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.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  And actually, to be honest, I haven't looked so much into how they're doing H-TAP. So I could be misquoting.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  It is just like, if you want to become the preeminent database company, someday you have to have an answer.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  Which like, yeah, it's interesting. The other mission I will check in on is durable workflows and that world, which as you know, Temporal, I've been banging the drum for a while. You have made, like every year you made, you do a little thing.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we're incrementing.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  So like, don't you like, how come it's not like more P zero for you? Because like, you know, Temporal is doing super well, right?

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so what was missing for us to do durable workflows? Compute?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Right, so you're doing this now?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 Supabase functions, and it just didn't work because of the two-second timeout.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Now we've got the primitive that would unlock the ability to do long-running durable workflows.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  I think my original pitch for Supabase is like, you want the sort of the all-in-one, the sort of agentic cloud that like is the backend, integrated backend that the people can use, right? Like, you've got signing with ChatGPT now, which is a great part. Like, you just kind of have to sort of give the AI everything it wants, and then it will be your best friend.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much, pretty much. And be prolific. I mean, our P1 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.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, there's the US labs, and you're here in the US. Do the other labs have significant partnerships? What are they like? Mistral, Cohere, the Chinese labs? I don't know if.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Not so much. Well, they might, they might do.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  Okay, you probably only care about the US.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, that's fair enough.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, mainly just because like, that's who's delivering the most traffic at the moment, right? That could change.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  But what does partnership look like? Like, basically, it's one thing to be on their app store. It's the other thing to be their default thing when they, when you launch an artifact.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 ChatGPT, for example. What have they got now? A billion monthly?

• 55:52Speaker 00

  1.2.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  1.2 billion monthly active users. One of their users launching a database every single month. Now we've got to launch 1.2 billion Postgres 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.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Scale up, scale out. Okay, other than that, what are other, I guess, P zero objectives for the company? Like, you know, over the, over the next year, how are you sort of guiding the direction?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Our P zeros are basically win the strategic labs, win the models, and continue our PLG push, where we are focused on the enterprise is, is winning these new workflows.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  And it's more that like, the ceiling of PLG, when we started the company, we were like, we can get to 100 million on PLG. We can probably get to 200 million, but then we're gonna 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've basically, like last year, we were like, well, we have to do both.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  The both the small stuff and the big stuff, and, you know, maybe we're a bit greedy.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  No, I, I think it's what people want, right? The same sort of mental model that, and, you know, they'll pay you to handle the fine-grained 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.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  It'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.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember at our company offsite, at the start of the year, where we put this crazy ambitious revenue number out, and someone came up to me and said, oh, you shouldn't have said that number. Like, the team are gonna be so.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  We're gonna miss it.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  We're gonna miss it. The team are gonna be so disappointed, and it took us like four months to hit the number. It's just like a ridiculous growth curve from the start of this year.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Amazing. What are the open questions that you have? Like, you know, if you had a crystal ball, it would change the way that you bet on things.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  How development will be done and what people won't develop. These are the two things that I think a lot about.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Okay, well, you know, what are the possible answers? Is there just more, more agents?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  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 Supabase directly, API-driven. That's one of the reasons why we succeeded. This year, our big focus is moving from, from, to code-first, get native. So basically, when you launch a Supabase instance inside your local machine, you get this Supabase folder, and it represents your database, it has all your functions, everything.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Does this exist today?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  This exists today, if you use the R CLI.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  So it's a virtual file system?

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Like, it's a representation of, it's like infrastructure as code.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in fact, what we're announcing tomorrow is like, we've done our kind of final change for declarative schemas. This was a really challenging one, actually, covering all of Postgres. And so now you can have a full file representation of Postgres, the shape of your database declaratively in your folder. That's really important for agents, because generally, how you operate with Postgres 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 thousand files and telling, asking it, oh, what is the shape of this table? It has to guess through a thousand files, so.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  It has to recompile, basically, in its weights, yeah.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Or you have to launch the database locally, run the migrations up, and then you introspect the database. But that's too slow. So basically, what we want to do is turn the schemas folder inside our, our Supabase folder into a completely declarative state of your database. And so we've captured everything from tables, policies, database comments, all inside these files. So we're releasing a new library, PG Delta. You can use it with any Postgres database, but we've got mechanisms for, for Supabase. 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. They've got to iterate very fast on the file system.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  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 to 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 one second later, you kind of have this application live, you can iterate on it yourself.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  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 develop? And what tooling do we need to provide to make sure that we are the default provider in this new world?

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Any questions that you're, you're interested in for a crystal ball into the future?

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  As 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 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 just gonna like converge on one way of building software?

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, mode collapse, which is great, they're all gonna use Supabase, it's fantastic.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  But like, 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 gonna lose that?

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you want diversity in ideas.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Best idea can win, and, but then the models are just gonna make you so lazy that nobody even bothers to look at the details.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and they just all converge on one way of building software, and then that's, you know, is it gonna be like a local maxima in terms of?

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I don't know. I, I do think, yeah, so first of all, I think that's a valid fear. I do think it's out of your control.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  And, and yes, the low taste, let's call it the casual app builders, will, will converge on whatever the mean is, the model is, which is you guys. But then the discerning high-skill people will always really care about the details, as, as they should.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Right, and which, which will, which will then filter down eventually. This is my idea.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  But are these high-skill people gonna continue to be trained by?

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, I think people are passionate enough. It's one of those things where like, you know, I do think like, you know, the average college is probably screwed, right? Like, you probably don't need to go to university anymore, because you can probably self-teach and just like, you know, get, get your own job. It's always been like this top-tier people that are moving a lot of the, the needle, and you need to, and, and they will always find a way to have their own self-interests 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 industry, and like, yeah.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  What do you disagree on between the two of you? It's rare to have the two of you have.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's a great.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  On, on the pod, so, you know, I want to capture this.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  I 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.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  The other person's like, yeah, maybe you're right, let's, let's try it. And so we never end up in like big bust-ups, and it turns out like most of that stuff actually doesn't matter, right? Like, as long as the general direction is, is correct, then, then it's going, okay, but.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't think of-

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  Oh, you guys are really struggling here. Oh, my god.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Which is why, like, because it's it's never an important enough thing. Like, we've never had a bust up because it's never been important enough to actually fight hard enough on it, like. And also, we're fucking busy. So like, usually, like, ants handling, yeah, we're trying to handle different parts of the business.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  Maybe it's just like, things are growing and obviously you got your domain and you just need to work together.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, you know. So Laura here, 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? You were housemates after the cohort?

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So we were all, we lived in a house with seven people and we were all doing different startups.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  And so Em was doing his startup, I was doing another one. This is before Supabase.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  And so like, I think somehow your energies, you know, you you found that you were suitable working together and working on this.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, because like traditionally, especially in an accelerator model, you're pushed as a technical person to work with some domain expert, right? And 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 you're building dev tools. Because you are the subject matter expert as a developer, is that we 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.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  Was the first employee?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Um, not the first, but the first on go to market, like now he runs all of go to market.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  The Postgres guy was first?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  No, uh, Angelico. Angelico, yeah, we had an intern. An intern from my previous startup. We just dragged him along. Yeah. And and then the other like first, like full time hire was this guy Steve Chavez, who who was the Postgres maintainer. And the funny thing is, we were in the Y C batch. And the advice to give you in Y C is like, okay, we're gonna give you a bunch of money. Don't hire anyone. It's 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 Postgres. And he was like, hire him immediately. You know, he was like, forget the advice, go and get him.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Of his reputation or because it made sense for Supabase?

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, both. It just made sense that, you know, this was a technology we were very reliant on and we were gonna lean in. And it was like, and the funny thing is, we hired Steve and we said, don't worry about Superbase. Just keep building Postgres and just making it awesome. And and then obviously, if we have support requests or whatever, we can we can ask him. But and the model just worked really well. And then we ended up, when Steve wanted to grow the Postgres team, just hiring more people dedicated to work on that project.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  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? One, obviously, there's a lot of slop and I'm sure you guys are dealing with that. But two, also, your dependencies are now becoming optional. Like, you can just vibe code whatever you want.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Anything, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  So I, whatever is in your heads about the future of open source, I'd just love to hear it.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  I 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, and I was like, to what level are you gonna rewrite the database? Are you gonna rewrite Postgres? Postgres is not rewritten and is not in Rust, 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 innovation tokens or your actual tokens rewriting everything. So there's gonna be like 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 because it's faster and more correct.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  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 gonna be rewriting it all of the things every single time. There'll be a few winners. A really classic one could be, say, Postgres is 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 Postgres. And that will be the winner for that particular category.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  But you haven't done it yet. And you're, and a lot of your stuff is Elixir as well.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  But now you can change paradigms pretty much easily as long as you fit all your tests, you know?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a good one. I haven't thought a lot about would we switch Elixir to Rust?

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  It's just an option now. Yeah, Malta from Versal is, you know, one of his tweets that sticks in my mind. He's got lots of interesting thoughts. He says, I some amount of money and rewrite all of our dependencies at the C level or C++ level into Rust, because we just know it is better, it's safer, more direct, whatever. And it is, it is a one time upgrade of open source.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  All the drivers, whatever you you use. So I thought that's like a pretty interesting.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  I like that as an idea. Yeah. I don't think it'll happen because people love to do it themselves.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  But but as an idea, I would, like, we as a company would 100% get behind that.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Awesome. And then I think closing question, which I should have stuck in somewhere earlier. AI coding within Supabase, right? Obviously, you guys are big beneficiaries of coding agents outside. What is the policy internally? How much are you spending? Is there is there concern about spends, anything of that sort?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Supabase has always felt like a bunch of different startups like glued together. So we have like the auth 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 are asking, what is the AI coding policy? And we were like, well, just it's up to you as as your team. 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 wanna run things.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  That's it, very decentralized.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  I I would say 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 what are data points you can hang a hat on here? People say, you know, the average person is spending like $20 a month. And then average employee is maybe $200 a month. OpenAI, you know, the sort of 50th percentile is spending maybe 3,000 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 spend to human spend? And it's like, for a lot of people, it's maybe 0.1 tokens to to one human salary.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  And, you know, you can probably go up to one pretty safely. And if you're over 1.5, you're probably in trouble, something like that.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  So I'll just say, luckily, as a remote company, basically, everything that's ever happened is documented. So I can ask our AI how much we're spending. So currently, we spend about 300K per month.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, for 600 people.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  No. Like 450 people.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  450 people. Okay. It gives people an idea.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  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 actually.

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  You should be, right?

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Then, then fine.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  You need a whole bunch of serverless employees that can spin up and down as you need.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  Which is like, yeah, like, you know, I just had a CTO of, you know, another top startup say like, he was worried about his company spend. And I'm like, well, actually, 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.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what we see as well. We've got a leaderboard and people, we put the leaderboard up and usually people are a little bit ashamed. So they're kind of like.

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, because you're wasting money, probably, yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  And 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 to end processes are you actually solving that where you no longer need a human in the loop? Or collapsing down long running 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 Supabase is documented because we're an async company. So building a company harness, like an agentic harness around Supabase is basically just formalizing. You can point AI at it and say, what are our principles?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  And it'll document down all our decision making principles for the whole history of Supabase. 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.

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  Same salary everywhere, right?

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, same salary regardless where you live. If you're very good at what you do, please take a look at our job board.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, can you, can you like one profile, just pick one, whatever is top of mind as as your highlight for what you're looking for and why?

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Isories.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Because we're just growing at a ridiculous rate. We need all the isories we can get.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  What is a quality that is like, you know, you probably get a lot of ISRE applications and you don't look at them, like what what stands out?

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  The thing that we really care about is that you you actually want to work remotely. 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 Supabase, 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.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  My typical model of an ISRE is like this gray beard that's like sitting in a dungeon somewhere and doesn't want to talk to humans anyway.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  All of those people, please apply it. Hopefully, they listen to the podcast.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, yeah, we we probably do have a lot of gray beards in ISREs. I I think one of, I have been on the record as saying, AI ISRE 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, AI has not cracked ISRE for whatever reason.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  No, no, no, not yet. I agree.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Like, building software is, you know, debatable, solve problem, maintaining, like, keeping things running.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Is a whole different beast.

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  Well, okay. Well, thank you for keeping things running for everyone else. You guys, congrats on your journey, man. Like, I'm so proud to be your friend.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  And and investor and it's just like, just see the progress. I cannot wait for the IPO, whatever that is. It looks like it's gonna take some more time. But it'll be, it'll be fun. 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.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Definitely, man. Thanks for having us.