Nikita Shamgunov is the founder of Neon, an open-source serverless Postgres company. Before Neon, Nikita co-founded MemSQL, now SingleStore, which is valued at over a billion dollars. He has also worked as a VC at Khosla Ventures and held engineering roles at Meta and Microsoft. Nikita is known for his strategic thinking and transparency about his decision-making process. We discuss: The importance of storytelling and providing a clear narrative for your company When to introduce a sales team an...
Mar 06, 2025•47 min•Ep 126•Transcript available on Metacast David Placek from Lexicon - the man who named Vercel and Azure - explains the importance of selecting a name that goes beyond simply describing what a product does. He shares what you can do to come up with a great name. We cover: Common Naming Pitfalls: Discusses why names that merely describe a product or service fail to capture imagination and differentiation. The Strategic Impact of a Name: Explains how a well-chosen name can deliver significant returns on investment by reinforcing brand beh...
Feb 27, 2025•47 min•Ep 125•Transcript available on Metacast Mitchell Hashimoto - famously the founder of HashiCorp (creators of Terraform, Vault etc.) joins the show to discuss his latest open-source project, Ghostty, a modern terminal emulator. We discuss: Designing dev tools with a focus on human experience. Taking on large technical projects and breaking them down into achievable steps. Open source sustainability and the role of financial support. The impossible goal of building a perfect human experience with software. Passion and hiring—why obsessio...
Feb 20, 2025•57 min•Ep 124•Transcript available on Metacast Guillermo Rauch is the founder of Vercel. Vercel is a cloud infra platform so easy to use that it’s almost become a category: “I’m building the Vercel of X”. Vercel also recently launched v0 which is potentially the next evolution of web development - type what you want and it builds it and deploys it for you. He’s also the creator Next.js, socket.io and a ton of other open source tools and startups. Plus he’s a prolific investor in DevTools. I’ve missed a ton of his achievements here but essent...
Feb 14, 2025•56 min•Ep 123•Transcript available on Metacast Jacob Eiting, CEO of RevenueCat, joins us to discuss mobile developers and how they're different, RevenueCat's recent acquisition of Dipsea - and how it helps them dogfood. We also go hard on content - something RevenueCat is great at. We also talk about charisma in founders (but don't worry neither of us said rizz) This was especially fun because I actually used RevenueCat way before I started this show. We discuss: How RevenueCat simplifies in-app subscriptions and why mobile monetization is m...
Feb 07, 2025•53 min•Ep 122•Transcript available on Metacast Taylor Otwell is the creator of the Laravel framework. Taylor has created numerous paid products that have generated millions, such as: Laravel Forge (server provisioning/management) Laravel Vapor (serverless Laravel hosting with AWS) Laravel Envoyer (zero downtime PHP deployments) Laravel Nova (Laravel admin panel) In this interview, Taylor shares why he is now building Laravel Cloud - an infrastructure platform for Laravel apps and why Laravel Cloud needed VC funding. We also cover: The differ...
Jan 30, 2025•39 min•Ep 121•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, I pull out some of the key DevTools lessons I've learned in the last 120 interviews. Including: The importance of deeply understanding the problem you're solving by talking to developers directly, as emphasized by Adam Frankl. Ant Wilson's advice on experimenting with different go-to-market strategies and channels rather than relying on conventional wisdom. Zeno Rocha's emphasis on the importance of the last mile—packaging and presentation. He shares how spending more time on do...
Jan 23, 2025•20 min•Ep 120•Transcript available on Metacast Søren Bramer Schmidt, co-founder and CEO of Prisma, joins us to discuss the journey of building one of the largest developer communities in DevTools. Søren shares how Prisma's deliberate strategies have shaped its growth, feature prioritization, and the launch of new products like Prisma Postgres. We also explore the challenges of managing a vast user base and how Prisma is adapting to shifts in application development. We discuss: How intentional partnerships with educators and influencers fuel...
Jan 16, 2025•46 min•Ep 119•Transcript available on Metacast Keith Casey aka Danger Casey is a Senior Product Manager at Pangea - a Security Platform as a Service. Before Pangea, Keith was Director of Product Marketing at ngrok and worked at Okta and Twilio in a variety of roles - including DevRel. Keith also curates API Developer Weekly. In this episode we discuss Keith's writings on the future of DevRel. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like S...
Jan 09, 2025•54 min•Ep 118•Transcript available on Metacast Louis Knight-Webb is the CEO and co-founder of Bloop. Bloop helps with modernizing legacy software, particularly focusing on COBOL and mainframes. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Takeaways: - Mainframes and COBOL are still foundational in many industries. - Bloop started with a focus on code search but evolved to address legacy code modernization. -...
Jan 02, 2025•46 min•Ep 117•Transcript available on Metacast Guy Podjarny is the founder of Tessl - a startup that is rethinking how we build software. Guy previously founded Snyk - a dependency scanning tool worth billions of dollars. Before Snyk, Guy founded Blaze, which he sold to Akamai. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. In this conversation, we talk about the future of programming and the future of DevTool...
Dec 23, 2024•45 min•Ep 116•Transcript available on Metacast Tessa Kriesel is the founder of builtfor.dev, where she helps DevTools founders with GTM. In this episode we talk about how she helps founders improve their go to market strategy in a short sprint. Links: Built for Devs Tessa Kriesel This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com/...
Dec 19, 2024•38 min•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast We dig into the the build vs. buy dilemma for APIs, and the role of OpenAPI in effective documentation. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. We explore how AI is transforming the landscape of APIs and developer tools, and discuss the future of coding. The choice between building and buying SDKs depends on company maturity. OpenAPI is crucial for generati...
Dec 16, 2024•48 min•Ep 114•Transcript available on Metacast Jake Cooper is the founder of Railway - an infrastructure platform that let's you build powerful infrastructure in a simple way. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. In this episode we discuss: - Building a remote team with a flat structure - Railway's sales team doing their best Minority Report impression - Why leverage matters - Building their own data...
Dec 12, 2024•51 min•Ep 113•Transcript available on Metacast In this conversation, Daksh Gupta, the CEO of Greptile - an AI code understanding API - shares: Why it’s important to do unique types of marketing, like making an energy drink Why most people misunderstand sales How companies are buying AI tools and why it will probably change soon This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Links: Greptile greptile.com Mintlif...
Dec 05, 2024•38 min•Ep 112•Transcript available on Metacast Ankur Goyal is the founder of Braintrust, a year old LLM eval platform that is already used by Figma, Vercel and Stripe and just raised $36m from a16z. It's a rocketship. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Key Success Factors - Started with a targeted list of ~50 companies already working with AI - Focused on early adopters and innovators in the spac...
Nov 29, 2024•40 min•Ep 111•Transcript available on Metacast Samuel Colvin - the creator of Pydantic - the most popular data validation library for Python. Used by literally everyone (Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, NVIDIA, even the NSA). He shares the story behind his startup Logfire which just raised $12.5m from Sequoia. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. Key takeaways: - You can just build a different product ...
Nov 28, 2024•35 min•Ep 110•Transcript available on Metacast There are more and more open source DevTools startups. I’ve interviewed dozens. But I am still confused about open source licenses. So I decided to ask questions to two people who actually understand them: my friends Eric and Matt - founders of open source background jobs tool Trigger.dev. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. What we discuss: Two Key Ques...
Nov 21, 2024•50 min•Ep 109•Transcript available on Metacast John O'Nolan is the Founder and CEO of Ghost.org. Ghost is an open source blog & newsletter platform. We use them for the Scaling DevTools' blog . Note: this episode was recorded on 17th October 2024. We talk about: How to communicate the benefits of Open Source to non-developers How Ghost manages to align open source and money making John's thoughts on the Automattic/Wordpress drama Advantages and disadvantages of VC funding and open source What would John do with VC dollars Resources: Ghos...
Nov 14, 2024•42 min•Ep 108•Transcript available on Metacast Gonto (Martin Gontovnikas) was the 6th employee at Auth0 and helped them grow fast and sell for $6.5billion to Okta. Now he is the founder of Hypergrowth Partners and helps DevTools grow fast. We discuss: What Auth0 did to become so valuable so fast What the best founders do (Guillermo Rauch) Different is better than better People follow people not brands Why bleeding edge matters Resources Why Technical SDRs are the Future of DevTools https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/product-advocate...
Nov 07, 2024•38 min•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast Mike McQuaid and John Britton are cofounders of Workbrew - a tool that gives you the missing features for enterprises running homebrew. John has previously worked at GitHub and Twilio and is a contributor to Homebrew. Mike has also worked at GitHub as well as being the project lead and longest running maintainer at Homebrew. We dig into: How Homebrew can trace its origins to a pub in London How Apple actually work with Homebrew How Homebrew managed to grow and scale up How Workbrew are avoiding ...
Oct 31, 2024•47 min•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Klein is the founder and CEO of Browserbase - one of the fastest growing DevTools in 2024. Browserbase is a headless browser API focused on helping AI Agent startups. We dig into: Why browser automation? How Browserbase hit "VC-market-fit" Visionary is revisionist-history Tips for hiring your friends Why buying a jacket is like buying a devtool Building an in-person DevTool in San Francisco Making priorities (what Paul doesn’t care about). Where to find Paul and Browserbase: Twitter/X https...
Oct 24, 2024•42 min•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast In 2017, Rasmus Makwarth sold his previous APM (Application Performance Managment) startup Opbeat to Elastic for an undisclosed amount. Opbeat became Elastic APM, which became a big part of the Elastic Observability solution and Rasmus became Senior Director of Product Management - with a focus on Developer Experience. Today, Rasmus is the founder and CEO of Bucket.co - a feature flagging tool built for B2B teams. Bucket has raised $5.7m from investors such as Project A and Creandum. We dig into...
Oct 17, 2024•30 min•Ep 104•Transcript available on Metacast Shawn Wang (aka swyx) is the founder of smol.ai (AI news curation), and the cohost of Latent Space (popular AI Engineer podcast). Plus, Shawn started the AI Engineer movement with his essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organized two incredible AI engineer conferences in the past twelve months - AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Engineer Summit And Shawn has angel invested in DevTools like Airbyte , Railway , Supabase , Replay.io , Stackblitz , Flutterflow , Fireworks.ai while running the DevTools a...
Oct 10, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast Sagar is the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy - an API tooling platform. We talk about the journey of Speakeasy. The challenges of startup life. How they developed the product and how they work with influencers in a surprising way. Building relationships with influencers can significantly enhance product development. Importance of listening to customers Fine line between product and consulting The role of documentation in user experience Being responsive to customer needs builds long-term relatio...
Oct 04, 2024•56 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast In this conversation, Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render, discusses the evolution of Render as a cloud infrastructure platform is actually simple to use. He shares insights from his time at Stripe, emphasizing the importance of customer focus, crafting a seamless user experience, and the philosophy of progressive disclosure of complexity. Anurag also highlights the significance of customer support as an integral part of the product and offers advice for aspiring founders on finding their pas...
Sep 26, 2024•41 min•Ep 101•Transcript available on Metacast This is our 100th episode! And we're thrilled to welcome back fan favourite Ant Wilson - the cofounder and CTO of Supabase. They discuss the evolution of Supabase, the importance of open source, and effective marketing strategies. Ant shares insights on community engagement, the significance of developer-centric branding, and the challenges of navigating the enterprise landscape. We also touch on the rise of AI and vector databases, emphasizing the power of open source in development. The conver...
Sep 24, 2024•43 min•Ep 100•Transcript available on Metacast Nick Gomez is the co-founder and CEO of InKeep. InKeep is an AI customer support tool focused on Developer Tools. They discuss the importance of understanding developer needs, the role of AI in technical support, and how community engagement can enhance support efforts. What we discuss AI support for developer tools is different from traditional B2B SaaS support. Developers often seek help through documentation and community forums. Scaling technical support requires understanding the developer'...
Sep 22, 2024•39 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast Adam Frankl has been VP at four Developer Tools unicorns, including JFrog, Neo4J and Sourcegraph. Adam is the author of the Developer Facing Startup and recently launched the Developer Facing Startup Founders Academy: a program that helps founders launch and grow their developer tools. In this conversation, Adam Frankl discusses the critical role of a Technical Advisory Board (TAB) in the success of developer-facing startups. He emphasizes the importance of understanding developer needs, effecti...
Sep 20, 2024•2 hr 30 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast In this conversation, with Michael Grinich - founder and CEO of WorkOS. WorkOS helps you start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. We discuss the challenges and strategies of navigating tough conversations in a startup environment, the importance of understanding engineering leadership, and the role of empathy in user experience. The conversation covers the significance of conferences for startups, the necessity of articulating the 'why' behind a business, and the chal...
Sep 16, 2024•56 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast 
