Skip to content

Why Agents Love Supabase

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

1h 16m
Transcript

Original podcast

Summary

Written by a model from the transcript; not yet reviewed.

This episode covers Supabase Select, the company's annual customer conference, with co-founders discussing their growth from zero to a $10 billion valuation over six years. The founders break down three core themes of build, operate, and scale, detailing major technical announcements like Supabase Compute, the open-source Aureon DB engine, MultiGrass for Postgres sharding, and the acquisition of Tursa. They explain how the surge of AI-driven 'vibe coding' and agentic workflows has massively accelerated user acquisition and monetization, while transforming how developers interact with databases.

  • Run long-running workloads, background tasks, and agentic code right next to your database using Supabase Compute. 6:44
  • Upgrade storage performance without changing your setup by adopting Aureon DB as a drop-in Heap replacement. 7:56
  • Scale out efficiently to support high-volume applications by leveraging the technology from the Tursa acquisition. 13:17
  • Drive predictable growth by analyzing product usage triggers and offering personalized engineering support rather than cold sales pitches. 42:22

Chapters

  1. 0:00
    Podcast Intro and Supabase Background

    Hosts introduce the episode and discuss their close relationship with Supabase, highlighting its rapid growth and role as a Postgres hosting standard.

  2. 1:15
    Supabase Themes: Build, Operate, Scale

    The host outlines Supabase’s three core themes—build, operate, and scale—explaining how each contributes to their success with agents and developers.

  3. 5:20
    Multi‑Grids and Sharding Innovation

    The team discusses Multi‑Grids, a ground‑up rewrite of Postgres operators that guarantees no data loss and supports sharding, positioning Supabase for massive scale.

  4. 6:16
    Compute and Edge Functions Announcement

    Supabase announces its new Compute product, enabling long‑running, serverless workloads collocated with the database, expanding beyond the previous Edge Functions limit.

  5. 7:30
    Tursa Acquisition and SQLite Scaling

    Supabase acquires Tursa to bring SQLite-based multi‑writer capabilities, enabling scalable agentic databases and expanding their product portfolio.

  6. 12:00
    Enterprise Strategy and Control Tower

    The hosts discuss Supabase’s enterprise focus, introducing Control Tower for managing fleets of databases and detailing their product‑led sales approach.

  7. 14:20
    Future Growth and Scaling Outlook

    Supabase outlines its plans for billions of databases per month, multi‑cloud partnerships, and the evolving role of AI in accelerating adoption.

  8. 35:38
    Community Engagement and Crowdfunding

    Supabase shares its community‑driven crowdfunding initiative, awarding stock to active members and highlighting the importance of open‑source contributions.

  9. 47:54
    Supabase’s Migration Strategy and Oracle Legacy

    Discussion of the challenges and strategies for migrating legacy Oracle workloads to Supabase, highlighting the complexity of OLTP migrations.

  10. 52:00
    Scaling to Billions of Databases

    Conversation about the need to support billions of Postgres instances per month to meet the demands of large AI models like ChatGPT.

  11. 53:41
    Durable Workflows and Temporal Integration

    Overview of how Supabase is integrating durable workflow capabilities, building on Temporal, and enabling long‑running processes.

  12. 56:25
    P‑Zero Objectives and PLG Growth

    Explanation of Supabase’s P‑Zero strategy, focusing on winning strategic labs, models, and expanding product‑led growth.

Highlights

Quotes

  • “They went from zero to 10 billion in valuation in the last six years.”
    Unnamed speaker · 0:47
  • “where you can run compute next to the database.”
    Unnamed speaker · 2:25
  • “But like, you want declarative schemas rather than the standard SQL paradigm”
    Unnamed speaker · 2:44
  • “This is why Supabase engineered their branding to prototype to Petabyte.”
    Unnamed speaker · 4:29
  • “You can run agents inside it. It's basically just a full Compute instance.”
    Unnamed speaker · 7:08
  • “The problem is that usually your OLTP database is powering your most revenue generating application.”
    Unnamed speaker · 49:42
  • “We know that agents are going to operate mostly on code. They don't want to reach out to anything.”
    Unnamed speaker · 1:00:33
  • “If you want to become the preeminent database company, someday you have to have an answer.”
    Unnamed speaker · 53:31

About this episode

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...

Transcript

0:00
1:16:38

14,518 words · 3 speakers

Topics

  • Supabase
  • Postgres
  • Go
  • Rust
  • SQLite
  • AWS
  • Oracle
  • DuckDB
  • Duck Lake
  • GitHub

Page updated · transcript and summary are machine-generated