Sam Lambert Returns: Building Great Things by Playing the Long Game

Just kinda like come hang out. It's like the space for you whenever you wanna be here. It's gonna

And we were

There's no, you know, there's no risk. It's just do you like, we would need to focus only on, you know, kind of helping you all, like, migrate and figure it out because you just don't wanna take any risk and do it properly. So we're we, you know, we'd need to do something differently. So if all of you are willing to be part of our launch, we'll delay this by a whole quarter. We'll get you up into prod and then you become the launch.

And everyone was like, sure, fine. I mean, some these are public companies, right? They had to get approvals everywhere to go and do this and it was the first time they'd ever done this stuff. And it was just an awesome way. Mean, was like very much in the style of what we wanna do, is push our companies forward like like we're we're just a database at the end of the day, you know.

It's only magical when they're up, right? And Mhmm. Doing and building their companies. And so, yeah. So it was a kind of tough three months to kind of just try and stay chill, know that we're gonna launch this thing and then watch our customers be successful.

But since launching, we've just had so many inbound like emails and people immediately just bringing us incredible expensive Aurora workloads and saying how much would this custom plans go? And it's so far every single one is gonna save money and get faster. So it's very exciting.

You've got to hold on to that tension of of getting it out for people quickly. But at the end of the day, especially with what we do, no feature is worth production issues or reliability issues. Right. And so so we we just we have to be very cautious and and careful, you know.

I mean, is the theme. Who doesn't want that? I mean, we love as software engineers, we love that, right? We just love to either graphs going up or graphs going down dramatically normally means something good or terrible. But you know, in this sense, we're very happy. And the p 99 is the important one too.

There's nothing to debate. Is this good? Is this bad? Like, know, none of the whole there's like no discussion around it because it's just like, you know, very straightforward. I think the things that are actually good tend to be kind of straightforward in that way.

Like like these Aurora has just Mhmm.

That's huge. Now we just have to get out of our own way and make it even easier to go and do that and it's it's gonna be very good.

The benefit is that storage can be made redundant, your server workload can move around, it's okay if they need to move it to another server or whatever. It's not attached to the physical disk on a server, can access remotely. So if you're building anything in the cloud that needs persistence because you need redundancy, you're pretty much forced into using EBS. And if you look at a lot of these like newer clouds that are like simpler, they tend not to have the EBS offering because building EBS is quite challenging. It's a lot harder to build that than to build like compute offering.

It's extremely hard to run stateful workloads because they'll just, you know, do the thing where they put your database and your storage on the same physical server. Sorry, your your your compute and storage on the same physical server. And then when that server like runs out of space, you know, do they do? Like they gotta like figure that out. If they need to move stuff around, now data is in one place and you compete somewhere else.

So it's very difficult to run persistent workloads in simplified clouds. But then if you do want to run persistent workload, historically, the problem has been well, you need redundancy so you have to deal with the EBS penalty. Mhmm. But what plan scale metal does is it keeps you in AWS, you can still, you know, use all the other stuff that that's there and if your compute's there, there's no latency penalty. But it does not use EBS.

It actually does use instant storage but retains the redundancy capabilities, retains ability to move compute around. And that's kind of the big innovation which as many database offerings as there are, there's not really one that retains all of this. So it's kind like the sweet spot for any serious workload.

You don't get that in the cloud, like once you terminate an instance, an EC2 node with instance storage, it's gone forever, you'll never see it again. But with our redundancy model that's not a problem and the reason it's exciting for us is we're just buying the same machines Amazon does. Like they just take those exact same machines, they build all their software services on top of it. So if you're on Amazon buying convenience from Amazon, it's hard to beat them when it's at scale. It's about cost and efficiency.

But, you know, our software engineers have run bigger database workloads than Amazon themselves and some of the largest running on Amazon run on our software. Mhmm. And so it gives us the opportunity to just fully bet on ourselves. It's the same way that we increased our SLA. I don't know if you saw that because Yeah, did.

We don't rely on EBS. And and and and, you know, it's really flexible to use EBS. Like to, you know, we roll off our pods every twenty nine days. So every machine at Patsco is is less than a month old at any point. And EBS makes that really easy because you just detach the volume, spin up a new pod with the new version of MySQL, it attaches and runs and it's just easy.

That's the only trade off of moving to Metal is we do the traditional dance of like backup, restore. It's fine. We've done these, we've done this for millions and millions and millions of times. It's very, very robust, but it means that we yeah, we get that. And yeah, you're starting a database company today, you have to choose your pain and it's hard enough to do it one way, so you, you know, you usually end up people are doing it on s three as well.

Like there's companies like Turbo Puffer, shout out to Simon and crew, phenomenal. Like it's it's not an OLTP database, but it uses S3 to its advantage to provide like an incredibly cheap cost efficient way to do vector storage. Mhmm. It's not you only get a certain amount of your working set can be like hot basically and they then run that on fast local machines and then they back it all to s three. But running OLTP workloads on on slow storage is just lunacy.

It's that it's that band of consistent performance which is actually more important than than just an overall speed metric or average like milliset latency.

And when you fix things, that's where you see stuff react like like immediately. So yeah, I mean, stuff gets goes viral online where people just like, you know, do a couple calls and they're like, oh, here's the thing and it's it's funny. But when you're actually doing performance work, you know, it's it's all about the tail ones. And when you talk about like quality of a product, it's about feeling reliable and if p 99 sounds like, oh, that's like, you know, an edge case. Not really because like the it multiplies across number of queries and like as a user you like might hit that pretty frequently.

Yep. And like feeling like when you hit something and it's like four out of five times it reacts correctly, but then the fifth time it's a little worse. The users ends up feeling like the whole thing is unreliable because sometimes it just feels off. So yeah, that's where all the all the value is and that's where, you know, you have to focus.

You know, we've done this forever, SANs or whatever. I get it. I understand, but doing every IO, which databases are incredibly chatty, it's not just your queries. The databases are doing other things like checkpointing and checksums and replication and managing a buffer pool. Like they're doing so much reading and writing to disk on your behalf to maintain all of the other things that databases have to maintain.

They're incredibly chatty and to do all of that over the network is just unbelievably costly and you see this in the graphs. And you're not just like just going over a network, you're going to three machines for redundancy, you're going through a type of load balancer. If you hit one node that's doing some kind of rebalancing or traffic shaping, that's gonna slow you down. Mhmm. We we've seen outages and we're gonna do a blog post about the kind of true reliability b b b s.

We we've seen outages where Amazon were like, yeah, maybe that was just like a blip. And we were it was more than a blip across multiple accounts. Mhmm. We we've we deploy so many EBS volumes, like, such a massive amount that we saw we noticed they had like a top of rack switch issue for one of the the EBS racks. Wow.

We saw it across multiple accounts. They first talked to one customer, they denied it was a problem and were like, well, three other customers of ours saw the exact same thing. So you clearly had a like a service issue and they're like, oh, yeah, you're right. Like we did actually. And and all of those things can just happen.

And now now you think about it, to put that in between just getting a page of data off of your disk, it's mad. It's actually great. Like Yeah. The cloud the cloud is is if that's the only cloud approach, luckily, it's not, then it's fundamentally wrong for databases. Like, fun fundamentally, they're they're not gonna work.

Mhmm. And it was really hard to track down because we're like, what is going on? Like, we can't replicate this. And it turned out they had like rolled something out to just one like a physical building before the other the physical partition before the rest of the region. And like, found the bug before like they Yeah. They realized it.

It's really really not easy. But luckily we're now in this amazing era of lots of startups inside that ecosystem having a fairly constrained place to be. Mhmm. There's like a debate on Twitter about this last night. People were talking about, you know, the difference being that we're inside Amazon with this tech because you could go and get like you could like you said, you can just go and get these machines from like Equinix or whoever and build on them, but that's not the point.

You have to be next to Lambda, you have to be next to s three, yet where everyone's traffic is. We just don't see You can't run serious services outside of Amazon. It just doesn't work. And then Google second and, you know, there's just everyone is there and they're using everything else. If you're not inside, if you're like not a v you know, a paired VPC away and you're it's just way way too slow. Way way way way way too slow.

And you can like build something very performant outside of Amazon. But to do it in Amazon is the trick and it's funny because it's not like real technical some of them are technical limitations, but a lot of them are just working within what's possible with what AWS offers. Just like, you know, you can't just say, I want a server with this size disk. There's like limits on how much the disk size can be, like how does that correlate to CPU size, memory size, so that probably impacts prod decisions on your end. So it's funny because to me, this is like I it's obviously the case.

Like you have to do that because your customers workloads are in AWS, so you have to be in AWS. That's just non negotiable. Mhmm. Very easy to build a great product outside of that. So I think a lot people show off great products that are not in AWS.

I don't find that super impressive because like that's not the hard part. Like, you can't actually build a big business that way. At the same time, I'm just like, man, this is a crazy it's like way too sticky for AWS. I'm like, how do you ever compete in certain categories with them when like you just have to be in there, you know, like, it's just like a ridiculous monopoly, feel like.

You've like that, once you're in that hell, you know you're like trying to build things of significance. And yeah, like, you're just completely right. It has to be inside where those workloads are. And the constraints are crazy. Yeah.

Mean, it's all of these little things, all of the little networking bits. The fact that one physical availability zone is not the same for everyone's account. People don't realize that, you know. So you end up getting strung up and stuck in all of these different places. It's it's it's complicated. It's extremely extremely complicated.

Like Mhmm. Their engineers are curious. They will get on and they love that you find these problems. You know, we're having fun with the EC two team because now they're like, yes, more giant databases to run on our stuff directly. That's cool.

You know, it's really fun. But yeah, like you like you actually said, like, you know, the long tail of shipping metal was, okay, do the really hard bit, which is how do you run petabytes of data reliably without losing data on machines that can just explode and disappear? The long tail is making that really reliable and all of the rough edges is gone. So for example, you know, EBS the great thing about EBS is you can take like a pico node, like a quarter of a vCPU and attach an 80 terabyte volume to it. You couldn't do anything obviously with it, it's that flexible.

That's one amazing thing about it. We don't need that for LTP, but, you know, we need people to upsize. Right? Where people actually have to like say they want to make their machines bigger. So we have to we've we have stuff that nags you.

You're 80% of your storage and Yeah. You can just like we'll we'll make it so you can just turn this on and it will scale out automatically, but not everyone wants that, right? It's like people don't auto scaling is that's another giant myth that, you know, that we could we could go hours into the auto scale. Like it works for certain things, for other things it's an absolute disaster and most people when you actually ask them what they're asking for, it's not it's not really how auto scaling works or is implemented. But anyway, so we have to and there's things like, okay, you're going do a schema change.

Well, if you actually apply this schema change, it's going to fill up that box. So we have to kind of warn you that you would need to upgrade before you go and do it's all those kind of just little UX pieces that make it approachable and usable that takes the time in terms of building these kind of products out. And it you're yeah, you're dealing with weird there's there's this kind of when you look at these nodes, the SKUs are really all over the place. You wonder like, which custom customer did you add this custom machine type for? Because like, for $10 more, we can have double the memory.

You know, things like this.

And we'd get the same machine back sometimes. It's like, that's still not still broken. So now, we've got this logic where and we've seen it chain like two or three in a row. If you give us one that doesn't work, we hold it until we get given another one.

Like, the the thing I love about this job is you have to build with the paranoia assuming the server will arrive with no disks available to you. Like, you just you just have to, like, do all this loopy stuff and it's really fun. It's actually just like really interesting to kind of how to engineer at the like the extreme edge with those kind of needs for paranoia. It's it's cool. It's really cool.

So hearing this stuff is interesting and to me, I'm just like how do you even go about this? Like you build something and you think it works, but how do you know that like some random undiscovered thing isn't gonna happen

Most companies don't have the two. That's the one thing that's very different about PlanetScale is we have both. We have people that run mega websites and the deep kind of database core fundamentals of, you know, parses and query planners and all of storage engines and all that stuff. One philosophy that we have, which I think is kind of really amazing, and it's because of a shared nothing architecture. We talk about shared nothing a lot more in the future because it's an architecture that people don't really understand.

It doesn't come up much, and it's really truly the ideal end state for building these kind of systems at scale. But essentially, you know, you can't build a reliable service unless it doesn't rely humans to wake up. Because if you pay someone at 2AM in the morning, it's minimum of fifteen minutes. Well, that's your SLA just exploded anyway. Right?

You know? Mhmm. It's gone. And even if they do have to intervene, what options can you really give them when they have to come up to speed and figure out? So essentially at PanScale, all of our architecture is designed to kind of just have one solution to everything, just kill nodes. Kill the primary node

And that's literally it. Like, and and Vitesse just has handled failure this way hundreds of millions of times. It just knows, okay, that node is gone. How do I get the cluster back online and quick quickly into a kind of healthy state? It just runs that same, like, well worn code path to go and do that.

Yeah. And it makes building things reliably a lot easier. It's hard to do that but it's but the mental model is one thing. Get like kill the kill the failing node. And every time we've never touch wood, we've never caused global outage for any customer.

The worst you can have is like a minute of a shard being unavailable, which is partial failure, it's fine. No no one the other reason people build unreliable services is because they strive for like perfect records, no bugs. Like that's crazy. Like you have to embrace failure because it will definitely happen. Yeah.

But yeah, the resolve is always just kind of you you murder the node and bring it back and it becomes partial and and it makes the mental model so much easier. And it goes back to again separating storage and compute. Because of the shared nothing architecture, our nodes have their own truly like I guess full stack if you think about it. They have their own disk, they have their own memory, CPU, own copy of the data replicated from elsewhere. They they they share nothing with the others.

These kind of shared storage layer compute stuff like Aurora and whatever, they share way more. So like a single out like a single outage at any one of those layers of the stack is a is a full and total outage. Yeah. Exactly.

I like didn't dispose of these things in like a hundred different places and I gotta go go chase it down. And yeah, on one hand, I probably should have just had better discipline about it. I mean, any discipline I had around has deteriorated ever since I moved to doing stuff on Lambda. But like, you know, it works. Like it works really effectively.

The kind of versions of the app were just living for like weeks longer and we're just there was memory leaks everywhere. Like just frequent deploys kind of covers up some of these things. It's fine. Like, that that who gives a shit? Like, it's gonna fail.

It's, like, definitely gonna fail. Like like, embrace that. Just know it will and do the right thing. I I was gonna talk about this, you know, blog post about magic, cause I think we all we all wanna build things that are kind of fun and delightful and everyone likes the shiny web pages and whatever. But at the end of the day, you know, the magical experiences of the, you know, getting home to your family safely at Christmas, right, on an airplane.

And and it's it's more like building an airline than it is anything else, you know. All day long while we're talking just up and down up and down seven thirty sevens or whatever going up into the air coming down, they can be repaired at any airport on earth by a a crew of people on a shift that are just managed like through engineering firms or or whatever. They fail in the most predictable ways. The most regular failing parts are cached at every airport in the country. Like, how many times do you just get that kind of half an hour twenty minute delay while they fix something up and just get you going?

And you're you're not unsettling, you're safe, you're gonna be okay. Like those planes don't even turn off. Like the like a seven thirty seven will land and will just like sit there on, go back in the air. They'll do 10 flights a day. It's just so reliable.

People need to think of themselves as building that and how that works. Like how the food gets on, how the food comes up. Like that that is the real process of building this stuff. Not let's just hope it doesn't fail and make it really pretty. You know, it's just not gonna it's not gonna cut it.

And and the thing about like kind of the tech discourse of Hacker News and Twitter is you've quickly realized, I know you know this, which is most people don't have real problems. Like that's just truthfully, like, sure, fucking put SQLite on a server, like who cares? Like your two users won't notice. Like it just doesn't Like you can argue with people about Postgres or whatever and you just realize they just don't if they they just don't see the world the way you see the world. Right?

Like they just they they whatever they choose, it's gonna work and it has and it's their lived experience and they feel great about it and they don't pick technologies for the traits that we pick technologies and that's fine. It's completely there's no hate there. But when you're trying to kind of be in that area of the market and you're spending so much money on having like a free tier that will just not convert, you have to have marketing people that do that kind of media that works for that and it's just expensive and it's not optimized. And, you know, we saw a path to being a profitable company, which one is just incredibly powerful. Like we threw this huge party at the office and, you know, we have a lovely office now and we, you know, pay the mortgages of all of our staff and it's like our money.

It's in it just goes into the bank. We're not just, you know, hope hype round, VC hype rounds, hopes and dreams just spraying money up the wall while we just every customer costs like if a customer costs you more money, you're just reducing your burn constantly and we're now the opposite. If you write, if you're a $39 a month customer with us, you get like, you have a problem, you get a thoughtful reply from our amazing support team because you are a customer. We make money from you, it's amazing. We had an opportunity to do that, so we did it.

It was really painful, you know, I definitely would have done things slightly differently. But in the long run, it was an incredibly powerful change for the company because it focused us and gave us the autonomy to do things. Like this launch, the way we did it, we we just Mhmm. If you were, you know, a VC backed company with eighteen months of runway, you would just go to reinvent with your beta product just so you had that you had to build pipe. Just just more pipeline.

More pipeline. Like, you have to just go and ape it out there and shout about it out of desperation because you don't have long enough left. We were like, oh wow. Yeah. Actually, just launching it with some of the major biggest like tech brands around already running on it on their blogs, that's an obviously better launch.

Well, we're not going out of business so we can just do that. Yeah. Do you realize like when your daily decisions are made from a place of strength and not fear, how that compounds? Like it just we make decisions every single day that you can only make when you're profitable. Like and so, although, again, I miss the people that aren't here, like there's some amazing people that don't work at Pantscale anymore.

It was like the best thing we could do and it gave us this year to go and build metal. Mhmm. And it's we've done it and it's it's, you know, it's already just changing the company, like immediately. It it was the right thing to do. And it was it was just a very different thing than we are used to in tech.

And when you're building a deep infrastructure startup, you just need time, like, it's just time. Just like, you know, we've got a customer, I think, pays a couple of million a year, I think, now. I first showed them the product in beta, like, was barely real. And they're like, cool, this is great. Four years later, they eventually became a customer.

Yeah. Because they they they're just they're just not gonna Yeah. No one there's no offering just like, yeah, we just yeeted our data over to a startup. Now the business is finished but like, you know, like it's like they had cool features, you know, the website was shiny, just doesn't work. It just like our sales stance is so funny, know, we're we're working with at the moment this really very large public company, very famous.

And I was talking to the CTO and it was, you know, me and one of our sales engineers and he was like Google sent 18 people to try and to try and sell a spanner and you're here on your own. And I said, well, I mean, let's be honest, like, you and I never said the name of the company. Is anything other than like a technical proof of concept where we prove to you we can do this gonna convince you? Like, do you need slides and an interpretive dance done in front of you? Like, you just need to know we can do it and you have your own requirements unless you see it for yourself, you're not gonna buy it.

That's us now. We fully embrace that which is look at the website, it's just we just tell you what we do. We don't wanna hype it up. It's like if you have problems that fit our solution and you're serious about those, you just will read it and try it and it'll work. We kind of opted out of all that other crazy stuff.

And all these orgs look exactly the same. They're all producing the exact same stuff. But then also on the enterprise side, the way you build organizations that sell to enterprises, also like a standard playbook there. Did you Like, do you have people telling you to like, or pushing to like follow those standard things and like, what does that look like and, you know, like, it annoying?

Like our core audience are, like, back end engineers with hard problems. It just it just doesn't work. And, you know, we'll we'll we will build out the sales team. We will build these things out, and we have to build like, Mongo has one of the best sales team ever built in tech, like legendary. They wrote the book. Mhmm. They still needed to do that to build a big database business. You you have to. Mhmm. But the the the marketing paradigms shift over time.

Mhmm. And what worked ten year like, it's always that classic of like, yeah, like this person's there, you know, and they were at Twilio and they did this thing. Twilio nailed developer marketing for that generation. The Ask Your Developer billboard is legendary. They crushed it. We've moved on. We've gone past it. Like, we're elsewhere now. Yeah. And I think now it's gonna go back to simplicity and value, like and and we're we're seeing that.

Right now, I love AI. I'm not cynical about AI at all. I love it. But, you know, there's a lot of AI slop content being made Mhmm. And it's just like rubbish.

So we're we're now doing spending a month per blog post to make and we got one going out while we're talking right now, like, quality, really good stuff. You just it's what it takes now to cut above. Like, you've seen you've been to reinvent. You've seen the hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing spend just being screeched to each other. You just have to do something to cut through.

And and and that's why we do it our way. And if you have taste, it is such a moat. Like like our website started in a Google Doc. We just designed it in a in a in a g a Google Doc with words. Holly did a thread about this last week talking all about it.

And people well, some people were like, my god, this is genius when we shipped it. Other people were just so confused. They were like, this this company's gone nuts. They're gonna go crazy. I don't know why when I said we we were gonna do this, everyone at the company was like, yeah, let's do that. That seems like a good idea. I don't know why. That's just taste. You know know what I'm saying? Like when you saw it, you were like, oh, love this.

I don't know why you love this. I don't know. It's like the first thing I thought of. I I I I don't understand why I like it and other people do and some people hate it. I just don't get it.

But if you do have that, knows. And and we've had it with other things like the other like database branching, we invented that, all of these different things. If you have that, use it. Don't you just see so many companies go wrong by having all of this taste, this initial thing that made them then them, and they're like, okay, so we've got this unique thing that's growing, we've got this advantage, this view completely unique viewpoint on the world. So let's go and do what, like, every other company does now.

Like, let's just like throw all that away. And VCs are some some of the worst for this. They're like, are we back contrarians and we want the and then the and then and then I you know, my friends, the companies, they'll phone me and be like, yes, my board is telling us like, it's now enterprise sales, go to market demand gen and and way too early and it's just like pattern matching and running the playbook. It just Yeah. No great company was built that way.

So if you're doing that today, innately you're not doing what they did. And the marketing thing is funny because the only thing that matters in marketing is that people want to hear what you're saying and it's so much like fashion and that some approach to that will be novel for a while. But it so quickly becomes like a counter signal almost like like the whole mean, talking about landing pages like, you know, linear did their crazy landing page. And for a while that was like really great. But now when I see one of those, I get like a negative reaction.

Because somewhere in the back of my head, I'm just like, I know they hired like some standard design agency. They like threw them 200 k and they didn't like think at all. We're just like, I want a clone of this. And without me constantly thinking that stuff, I just equate it with low quality. So yeah, it's like fashion and it's not irrational, like the whole point is novelty and like, you know, standing out.

And especially and even at your guys' stage, like, you got to figure out how to make your dollars go further than than they should. Yes. If you are buying attention for a hundred k, a company with 10 x the money as you will just do that at 10 x.

If you set that constraint, it's really hard because like, you know, 99% ideas don't pass that bar. But it's so fun because that's like such a pure creative exercise that I feel like most people should love. And so exciting when you like stumble on something and and you're hyped to get it out.

Don't care. We're the only people not building a separated storage and compute architecture. Like we're the only people not building it for years and the VCs would just go, oh, mean, Snowflake? It worked for

It is would never do this. I would never and they look at you like, wow, that just you just sound better. And they're like, I'm sure I did to them, but like, where are we now? You know, like like you just you just like you just have to you just have to feel insane for years and years and years on end and just prove it out. I also think, by the way, when it comes to this marketing stuff, generationally, we're in a different world, thanks to kind of the Rails community, thanks to the Node community.

You know, I'm old now. I'm 38 years old. When I was a git, I was 32. Had a hundred million dollar budget for data centers and software and whatever. I grew up in the Ruby world. Like, the tools I used were beautiful and good, right? Like, you know, the 2013 kind of tech era when I was an engineer, you were using Heroku, you were using Rails, you were using all of these really well crafted GitHub. I mean Mhmm. The one, right? Like, these well crafted beautiful tools.

Like, did GitHub do different to SourceFlash? I mean, nothing. It's like, except be usable and resonate to a generation. All those people who grew up on that software are now VPs at big companies and don't want to buy crappy shitty software and and don't care about the hype.

I I I people laugh, joke at me all the time. I saw The Matrix the first time ever last year. Thought it I thought it was terrible. I don't know what anyone was like. But anyway but like, the I can't because the hype kills it for me.

Like, it just you just it's everywhere, and then it just cannot possibly be as good as everyone is saying, and it ruins it. And the times where I kind of just nakedly use AI for the things it's good at, it's just unbelievably magical. The day I wake up wishing that my Siri would like rearrange my life and do everything for me, I'm very disappointed. And Yeah. And I think we're at the begin and I hope PlanetScale kind of shows that we're putting skin in the game is that I think we're in the post hype era.

I think everyone's dopamine receptors have been worn down to just a nub and I just think someone wants something that's good. And and there's a pull request of 64 versions of my launch post for metal because I I wanted it to have as few words as was like, you know, like you it was like coding golf or whatever, you're just trying to get right. It was just like well, I sent it to one of my dearest friends in the world, Ted Nyman. Shout out to Ted, he's got an amazing company called Case that he's building. An incredible writer, just kept sending it to him, and like, I just couldn't get it where I wanted it to be, because I just wanted it to be I wanted it to convey what's special, because you only get this tiny amount of airtime, but I didn't want to indulge in anything other than here's a customer.

Don't like, what's the news flash for most companies? Companies says, own product is amazing. Okay. Good. Good job, you guys. You know, confidence is important. But I just wanted to be like, don't ask us. Who gives a shit? Like, it's a database. Like, go to Cash App, the you know, go and look at their public filings of that company.

Like, the things we know about how incredible that company is, you know. It's in, like, Kendrick Lamar songs and Super Bowl ads and, you know, that's the cool bit. That's the actual cool bit, right? And not not the the kind of, you know, semi sync replication. And so that's why and I and I think now, I think so I hope we're at the beginning of this post hype era of what you what's your what are you actually doing?

And then I think it becomes the, you know, the billboard ads shot on iPhone? They're the most self aware amazing ads. You look at Google ad for a Pixel and it's like eight mega like, how many megapixels are we at? I don't know how many megapixels the iPhone camera is. I buy the new iPhone every single year, but it doesn't matter.

They they are so self aware. Like like Google just give you a lot of tech specs. Of course, do. It's Google. Apple just say, here's a picture of a yurt that someone took.

Like, that person is exploring the world and is cool and we're getting out of the way so they can do it, shot on iPhone. It's that awareness, I think, and I think that's hopefully where we're getting in tech, which is we've gone through this massive amount of hype and physics have not changed. The rules of software have barely changed. Present them simply, spend your time building something good and people will like it or they won't like it. That's all it matters.

I try to use it as much as possible. I'm not one of these people that are like, you know, against it. But there's so much talk about I just built like the craziest thing without, you know, any effort whatever. And there's like so there's so much discussion around this. And I keep thinking about the products I use and I'm like, I use like five products and I haven't used a new one in like a long time.

If there's all this stuff being built, how come one of you has not built something that I like love, right? It's it's like not showing up in the place that matters. And I I felt this way about tech for a while where I feel like we're just obsessed with these demos, like here's a little demo of something. Whereas, I think kind like what you guys do with this launch, it's like, oh, we this thing has been in production. Look at this thing we've actually built, now we're gonna talk about it.

That's so much better, I think, outside of it being just better for people like, you know, it it has more value. It's just a much better filter for yourself. Like if you're trying to like show something to the world, like just wait till you actually build something cool with it because that'll just kind of filter out a bunch of things that you're just gonna waste your waste your time on. So we definitely try to make sure, like I said, you being even though I said that I get really excited to to show stuff off, I make sure that I like put it into production, use it for something real and know that's actually useful before before I talk about it. But again, like it's just it's just not it.

Like every single company in DevTools whatever, they just put together like a stupid demo of a product that no one's gonna use to show off some feature they kind of made up.

Like, why don't we just like what's the kind of minimum thing that proves it out? And there's a great you can whoever's listening, you can Google this. Spotify had a slide in a talk years ago that was like iteration and it was like, you know, job is like get to the shops or whatever. Sad person waiting for a car to get built versus skateboard, scooter Yeah. Bike.

Like, it just gets Yeah. Better daily and you can still go back and forth. Like, yeah, for a while, you're trying to skateboard with shopping bags, can't imagine how that's like, but, you know, but it'd be at least you're you're doing something. There's there's this minimum functionality. You can ship stuff daily that is consequential towards something big.

If you're very clever and selective about how you iterate and and build and kind of your tooling backs the ability to do it. And and I think people think, well, it's either like waterfall ship every six months this perfect thing or ship garbage and hype it up every day. And it's it's it's neither actually. It's this kind of middle ground of like pace and learning and sensibly defining incremental progress on you know, like the eye, the evolution of the eye, right? Like an eye did not appear, but some light sensing kind of, you know Yeah.

You know, mid market people want it. We know we don't have it. Right? So like could it delay metal or just ship metal and now work on that next and you just go through it and you just kind of grind it out and you make it happen. I will say one more thing about hype though, like I am in your audience.

Like I think in the world of AI, trust and credibility is gonna be essential. That I sent I guess like why we blog the way we do, is like we wanna like educate people and really speak from a place of authority. Like when you say you like something, trust it, right? Because you are selective and and because you say you don't like things and you don't just kind of hype it up and that means I'm an actual member of like your audience. I wanna hear what you are thinking about and and because of that credibility and and trust and that and and people ruin it so quickly by hyping up.

There's other YouTubers that I know are very good engineers. I know they are. But for for money, they lie about the technologies they use. Like bad. That is bad.

We are in that era of tech now where the grift is on and that they know better. They literally know better in an exchange for money. And I mean, it's the same with what we watch for crypto, like all of the VCs that quietly shuffled off their kind of Right. NFT profile pictures and they're now hyping up AI. It's like, you can't trust these people.

They just believe in everything. That selectivity and taste and building your audience on truth, don't I don't really have much of a following on Twitter or whatever. Because I like I just tweet what is actually true about databases. Tiny Tam of people that give a shit about that, but like, I mean, who cares? Like why why change?

Why risk it? So I think it's like holding on to being genuine. And I there's very few tech media. Like I told you, I listen to this podcast every week because it's like a real thing and it it just feels like we're in this desert of of genuine good content about tech and hopefully that will change as as time goes on and we all grow.

I % believe you really care about that. But having clarity the moment you have that, it's it's so so so so difficult. And to me, like, clarity is more important than anything. And Ivan goes like, me and you have a personal relationship, like we like each other. Even that affects my clarity, right?

Like I wanna see PlanetScale do a I like wanna like what you guys are doing. So I'm just like hyper aware of how easily you can kind of get caught up in this stuff. So then when I see people like hyping stuff up, my first thought is it's not really about like, oh, they're like confusing people. It's like they're confusing themselves. Like you're not gonna reach the right destination if you're confusing yourself to that degree.

They they they're interning at great companies here, and they asked like, can I go to dinner with them? So I went to dinner, they show up like eager with advice, and I said, have zero advice for you.

Like you are doing way better than I was. I don't know why like I said, the only advice I have for you is in your twenties, never say no to going out once. You're never going to get those Friday nights where you're like, oh, these are infinite, they're not. Like I am old and I get hangovers now. Right?

That's the only advice I had for them. I was like, what would I know? I don't know your generation. You you look at me like, until recently I was wearing low cut cut socks. That's apparently how they all know we're old. I got some new one. I got the bombers long ones now. Oh, Much nicer. But the point is is why would you care? Why would you give a shit?

Like, do you know what I mean? Like Yeah. I see a doctor more more I'm not sick or anything, I have to I'm like, yeah, I have to go and sit to your doctor. You don't see a doctor. You don't even know what feeling sick looks like. I was like, don't listen to me. There's nothing I have for you. And I also haven't achieved anything. Why should you look up to me in any way? Like, just just you don't, you know?

It's like, it doesn't you just have to kind of go and just build what's, you know, true to Yeah. And then you're lucky if it has economic impact. You're

People downplay because it's uncomfortable, it feels uncomfortable to just talk about luck, but it's just luck. My entire career changed because like one saw one guy at GitHub tweeted Yeah. Exactly. Frustration that they couldn't hire a database person. So I just DM'd them.

I don't know why I DM'd. My entire life changed, like everything. There's two people that exist in the world, my two children would not have existed if I said that to you. No, you're like seriously, like, you just can't plan it. But if you go out there every day and work really hard, because because that I I will say one thing, a true bit of advice is I'm not smart.

I'm not a smart person. I'm I'm by far the worst engineer that works at PlanetScale, right? But no one can will not let anyone outwork me. Mhmm. You know, you know, like because because smart doesn't get you anywhere without hard work.

And like, people always say like luck has to catch you working or whatever. I just I firmly believe that, you know. You just have to be Mhmm. Doing anything and something and like jump on it. Like, we a massive because of metal, a massive opportunity jumped in our lap this week.

We started already. But yesterday we made that decision instantly, we're doing the thing that we that, you know, I'll I'll come back when we ship that one. But like Mhmm. This is it's massive, it's as big as metal and it was yesterday the opportunity showed up and now we're started. We're just going.

We're just doing it. That's what it takes. It just takes like relentless drive and moving all your chips into one place over and over again and then luck Yeah. Will kind of find you. And other people that are also lucky that can create more luck will find you and you can just be there.

You just do stuff. Just do things. You you have the you can just do things is is just so incredible and and it's it's similar to like manifestation as well. I I seemingly simultaneously believe it's dumb and completely real at the same time.

The the single decision thing is so crazy to me because I I think I think about this all the time now. I think I get physically nauseous and uncomfortable when I think about this. My wife who I met because she came in for interview and we ended up hiring her at the company I was

You decided to shrink the team. You also got rid of your free tier to kind of focus more on mid and up market. There and it was really controversial. There's like a lot of commentary about it, specifically the free tier thing where people were like actually, don't know, like, what like do you like, what were some of the things that you were really frustrated about that you wish people like understood differently?

One of them was the messaging. Think it was very cold in in in reflection. I think the blog post was very cold. I did it, I sent it to my friends that happened to have either founded successful companies or just been CEOs or run a business or whatever. And they read the post and they were like, oh yeah, this is a they they they agreed with the decision. Mhmm.

And I believed in this so much that I just wanted to do it and I did it and I and I I think I hurt people and I I I just I don't feel good that I I did that. I think that's fair critique that it it was a kind of a cold way to message something that had a real human impact. But then you kind of just saw this wave of stupidity that followed. Like like, you know, we put that we had a limited runway and then someone very famous with a very large audience got on camera and said, how is that possible? How can you have an infinite runway?

And you just think to yourself, when more money goes into our bank every month that leaves, what date am I supposed to choose for when we're gonna go out of business? Like, every venture backed founder has a cash out date in their head. They know that at the current rate of burn, without giant revenue inflection, their bank account will go to zero. Like every like ask your venture backed like vendors when their cash out day is. They know.

They know. They report it every every three months to their board. We will run out of money. If nothing else changes, a raise or a revenue inflection, we'll run out of business. So like takes like that, you're just like, wow, people are just hateful or stupid.

Like that's moronic. Like, you know, just help me if you you know, help me find the day we're just gonna go bust when we keep making more money. Like we ended the we ended the year with like way more money in our bank than we modeled. Like millions of dollars more than we thought we would have at the end of the year, we had it. That's thanks to our info team cutting loads of Klaus Ben and costume, whatever.

We did a bunch of that. But like the point being is that takes like that were silly. ASTRO were releasing a database product a week after we did the layoff and they were like, you know, and this is where I thought it was really amusing because like, you know, you know we kinda know what we're doing in databases, like that was never in question. You knew people knew what we were doing. We got and just did something very drastic.

In my mind, that would have made me feel humble, but instead they were like, wow, like, you know, amping it up and doing all this sort of stuff. Turns out they were wrapping another database platform that has lost data and shipped a product without backups, lost customer data, and then gave data away by having a bug that's literally impossible to do on our our platform, where they just served other people random databases. Yeah. Never unlive that. You'll never undo that.

Not not that we'd ever see or see companies like that in a competitive sale, but when they have competitors, just takes reminding people of that, and that's that's that's over. Like, you know, they shipped that. And you just think to yourself, like, the arrogance is unbelievable. Like, they just the level of arrogance and how little they know about computers. Like, they just don't understand them.

They just think it's just this simple thing, and as long as you do some good marketing and some little drawing on the you know, it works, and it just doesn't. And so stuff like that was just like, okay, you'll see. It was like that long game thing of like, yeah. I got home that night, and my wife looked at me, and she just burst into tears. And she's like, I've just read what everyone's saying to you on the Internet.

And I thought it was hilarious, like, sound dick, but, like, some really funny quips, so some really good ones. I just thought it was really funny. But, yeah, like, people go at you and it's not comfortable and you don't feel good and people remember it and whatever. But then you watch. You watch the outages.

You watch, like, the data loss and you're just like, yeah, that's the that's the long game. We're just gonna keep building. We're building metal. We're building this stuff. You can all confidently yap, but then do it.

Like, when we wake up at two in the morning to, like, fix figure out issues, I know, like, they could have infinite money and they couldn't fix these problems. They they literally could not. And so you just eventually stopped caring. But, know, at at the at the time, you were just like, wow, everyone is so wrong and they're so wrong about you and you want your you want a fair trial and you just can't get that in in the court of public opinion and it gets to you. And people have said to me, why do you care?

I don't know, I do. I just care.

Like, we started to now see more folks interacting and kind of talking about the stuff they do at scale and and and and the realities of running in tech, you kind of realize, like, yeah, there's this dormant group of folks that do really amazing, interesting things, and they kind of wanna talk about it, and we're hopefully hopefully igniting a revolution for these people to go and actually talk about what it means to kind of do this stuff in reality. And that's why, again, why I like your stuff because you, you know, you have this kind of, like, you're not cynical. You know you have to build for an audience that's young and modern and doing amazing stuff, but you also just balance that with, like, it's still computers.

Like you you think everyone else you think you must be crazy because everyone else is doing things differently. But forever, I was just like, why is everyone obsessively going after this indie hacker free tier type of persona? Why is there a whole company oriented around that? In my head, was like this I'm like trying to see it, I can't see it. We are we doing anything wrong?

And then to see you guys have captured that a good amount more than us and then be like, oh yeah, that's like not worth it at all. Like that's actually a negative thing and it's gonna like screw us if we're if we keep going around that and like go the other way. Mhmm. That was like an important data point for us because that was the first time we finally saw someone in the space like like show that that that's that might actually be right. Like everyone's kind of chasing the thing that doesn't really make sense.

And then now, oftentimes we see companies that are like blowing up, like they're getting a bunch of usage or whatever. And I just the first thing we think about is like, man, what does their support look Like what Oh, how do Are they just going through complete hell right now because they're getting like the dumbest people that will never pay you just eating up your time. And we orient so much around how do we make sure that we build as though those people can use us, but like we're never in a situation where we're stuck supporting them.

You don't need it. Like you you just you're completely right. Like, I mean, it's this is this is what people are gonna learn over time, which is, you know and so many people have founders have said to me, we're not doing a free tier because of you. Like, we just don't we're just we're just not bothering. And I'm like, yeah, I think that would be a good decision or it won't.

There's like tons of businesses I would start where I would have a free tier. Like, they would Yeah. Would be consumption based infrastructure businesses because how can you be serious about your company if you can't spend $39 to buy the same database that Cash App has? How can you not be serious? How can you be serious?

Like, seriously, just like, we're giving you a sign up flow that, probably, some of the greatest companies in the world in the world, tech companies in the world use money print businesses that just print money, and you can't you don't wanna spend $39 on that. You're gonna fail. You failed already. This is a test for you, and you have failed it. Like, no, I'm serious.

I'm serious. It's just like, yeah, you just have to not care. And then but again, it's gonna take ten years to prove that out. It really it really will take ten years. And people always go like, wow, what about net new?

I mean, people are the largest customer of one of these little Postgres startups is migrating to us now. They were they were told by that company, you are a largest customer. That's why you're causing a struggle. Yeah. It's like it's a order of magnitude below, you know, ACV even. So it's Yeah. One, if that's your large customer, that's very bad. Two, it's hilariously sized small database. It's like a hundred gig of data. Wow.

So it's just like, what's your free tier doing for you? If you're that's the peak of your conversion is that.

Because you're just like, you're finally making money, you're trying to make more money, oh, and they're gone. And now you're like fighting this infinite battle. Like, that's just not a fun place to be. Like, why build anything that people will outgrow?

He was like, oh yeah, a %. It was, you know. So we showed up with that. You know, if the job if all the job is is light $30,000,000 on fire to make $2,000,000, I mean, that's fucking easy. I mean, I can do that.

Just buy Lambos and give them away for a third of the I mean, if that's that's all they're doing. Like, you see this hype and this, you see these user graphs. It's like, yeah, like any if the job is to light money on fire, like, to make no money, that's super And that's and that's that's the vanity of that's the vanity of tech Twitter, which is like Yeah. You know, David Kramer who's run Century is hilarious as well, you know. He puts it like, you know, he's built a phenomenal business and he puts like 10,000,000 MLR Yeah.

Like it's just thinking about anything other than obsessively thinking about that like it's just air. Yeah. And at the end of the day like there's a graveyard of dead companies that looked incredible

Like, it's a long grind to go and do this and checkpointing today's Twitter optics as in any form form of indication of future or success or failure is dumb.

And I'm back to the thing you were saying about the free tier and $39. That's the thing that was so funny to me because everyone was like really upset that the free tier was gone and to me and I was like, the discussion like like when I was talking about I took it for granted, okay, the free tier is gone. But like hold up, $39 a month is free. Like to me that's like that's Like that is free. Like how is that?

Like, we would never even think about think about that. So it's just funny that there was so much debate over the free tier is gone, but like, man, it's like still just basically free, you know.

And then you just think to yourself, we could end thousands of businesses today by fucking up. Thousands of companies could just go. Right? Like when CTOs of public companies sit you down and go, if we go bust, you go bust, you're like, hey, you have a $300,000,000,000 market cap. That's a sobering realization and people can't and like, people don't want to pay $39 for like that. Yeah, I know.

But when you're on online, it's just like everyone just interjects into each other's stuff. Mhmm. So yeah, like the things that I'm doing look ridiculous from your point of view but like,

I feel so bad for him because he's being misinterpreted blah blah blah. Like, I was reading that. Then I swipe up to the next one and it's one of our stuff and I'm like, fuck. So now I'm just like, I wanna be out there, but at the same time, I'm too out there because I

This isn't gonna be your one of your channels, but whatever.