The “Egoless” Company Culture that Powers Supabase with CEO Paul Copplestone

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0:31Paul Copplestone:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. We really have to weed out people. You either love our culture or you don't. And so the easiest thing to do is not to teach people, oh, this is the way to operate.

1:05It's just to hire people that love to operate that way. Hello, hello. Welcome to the Term Sheet Podcast. I'm Allie Garfinkel, senior writer here at Fortune. And every week on the Term Sheet Podcast, we go over the latest news insights in venture capital, private equity and startups. Every week, this is where you can listen to what makes some of the most exciting figures in the private markets tick. We did actually have some really big tech news this week. OpenAI and NVIDIA struck a$100 billion deal that essentially amounts to building data centers together. Every time I think the OpenAI numbers can't get bigger, lo and behold, they do.

1:42And it's important to say that as much as Microsoft has been a key supporter of OpenAI, if sometimes a complicated one, This, as much as anything, is a very, very key endorsement of OpenAI's trajectory, in my view. $100 billion coming out of NVIDIA that's on the top of the world, that is pretty, pretty affirming. It also makes a lot of sense, right? OpenAI needs this infrastructure if they're trying to sort of meet the demand for chat GPT, and NVIDIA needs this infrastructure too. Now, in a turn of events that I'm sure will not surprise you at all, we are going to continue talking about AI. And I'm very excited about this week's guest.

2:20He is the CEO of one of the most red term sheets of this past year, Paul Copplestone, CEO and co-founder of Supabase. Now, for those not in the know, Supabase is an open source database infrastructure built on Postgres. Now, what all that means in short is that it allows users to more easily build a back end for apps. Now, the company is actually, in certain ways at least, named after the Nicki Minaj song Super Bass. But don't let that fool you. The last time I talked to Paul, he had just raised$200 million in a Series D led by Excel. And currently, he is rumored to perhaps be raising another round that values the company at$5 billion.

3:01Now, I know what you're thinking. You're like, Ali, you're bringing on more and more of these AI people. But I promise you, Paul is not what you expect. Paul is from New Zealand, among other things, but he is also a person with a genuinely global perspective that I found really compelling and learned a lot from, and I think he will too. Here's Paul. Paul, welcome to the Term Sheet Podcast. I'm so excited you're here because I get to ask you a question that is going to facilitate, I know, one of my favorite answers because I've asked it to you before. Paul, why is your company called Superbase?

3:36You're starting with the important ones. Well, yeah, that one was a mistake that stuck. Basically, we were trying to find a name, a domain name, which is hard. And of course, AirDabBass, we're a database company. And I was looking for some sort of superlative bass, ultra bass or one of these. And Super Bass was taken. So I saw Super Bass and it kind of sounded like the Nicki Minaj song, which I thought was funny at the time because we could make a bunch of memes about it my co-founder and I so I bought it and then it just we put the website on it and unfortunately there was no opportunity to change it after it kind of went to the front page of hack news so we stuck with it so basically what you're telling me is you came up with the name and thought oh this is kind of fun and then it was the name.

4:34Have you ever considered changing it or is it Superbase? It's Nicki Minaj related in perpetuity. I consider changing it very often, unfortunately. It's going to be very hard to do that at this stage. But I don't know if Superbase inspires a lot of kind of enterprise-ready confidence. I can't imagine in board meetings of Fortune 100 how Superbase gets pitched. But we'll worry about that, I guess, when we get to IPO. Well, it seems to be working out pretty well so far. Tell us, you know, before we started recording, you and I were talking about how there's actually never been a better time for database nerds.

5:16What exactly does Superbase do and why is it sort of ripping in this environment? Yeah, so Superbase is a Postgres developer platform. Basically, we host databases. So we host data for people. You can imagine if you're going to build an application, maybe like Instagram, you need somewhere to store all your users, store their friends and all these sort of things. So you can put it in a database. And the world's most popular database is called Postgres. And that's what we host. We host this open source database for people. And so, yeah, that's pretty much what we offer. Superbase is, much like other technology we've covered on this podcast, underpinning so many different things that people don't even know about.

6:00And Postgres is actually something that has underpinned so many of our lives. And we just, if you're not a technical person. So, like, to the most non-technical person you can imagine, Paul. Yeah. Why does Postgres matter? Why do databases matter? Yeah, okay. So, easiest to start with databases. is if you imagine a business, right, what you see is kind of like the tip of the iceberg. That's the website. Imagine Twitter, right? There's this website and there's an app that you interact with. But underneath that is this like whole infrastructure. And as you go down, it gets kind of deeper and more technical.

6:34That's the bottom of the iceberg. And right at the bottom of this is a database where everything is stored and all the connections are made and a lot of the heavy logic that's going on and the engineering goes into that. So that's the database. Basically, every business in the world needs a database to operate. There's very few that can operate without data. The reason why Postgres is kind of the leader now is because of this thing in technology called open source. It's a bit unique. I remember I described it to my wife, who's not a technical person, and she was fascinated by it because it's kind of a weird thing within technology.

7:16where a bunch of geeks like to contribute their free time to things for free. Like they'll build things for free. And there's a whole ecosystem of technology that people are spending time building, putting it out on the world. Anyone can see the code. They can take the code. And it's kind of like the sharing economy within the technical space. So the world's most popular database is an open source one now. And it's been around for about 40 years. in various variations. And now it's kind of having a moment. And that's where we were super lucky. Around 2020, we could see that it was kind of becoming very popular.

7:59And we thought, well, we want to build a database company. How can we give back? And so we wanted to build our company around Postgres. So a lot of our success has been really trying to contribute back to the Postgres ecosystem and then the success of Postgres giving us a really good tailwind. Paul, I want to go back to the beginning. When were you first aware of open source software and did it coincide with the desire to be an entrepreneur or did they happen separately? Ah, well, that's a good question. I can't remember. Well, I've been a techie for kind of my whole life. Well, since I left school, I learned like kind of self-taught and did it throughout my college while I was studying so I guess I learned about open source then I can't actually remember it's just kind of quite prolific the one thing the one story I can give back from those days is I actually started with databases it was a different one it's one that's created by Microsoft and I loved the idea of these kind of real-time databases and I thought, oh, my father's an entrepreneur and I thought I'm going to build a business about databases.

9:16This is when I probably was about 20 years old. And we don't have, I'm from New Zealand, we don't really have the concept of startups or at least we didn't when I was growing up. And so I just kind of pitched this idea, wrote an email and sent it off to a millionaire that I knew saying, hey, can I, he was a tech millionaire and I didn't really know him that well, but I pitched him the idea and he promptly said it was a terrible idea because it's kind of already been done. So that's kind of funny because now 15 years later or 20 years later, I'm basically doing that. I went back and read it and it's essentially what I was pitching is kind of this real-time database system with a good dashboard and everything.

10:01So it's completely full circle. And also I love you sending it off to a random tech millionaire that, you know, just saying, you seem to know something about this. I didn't know what else to do, you know. How do you go about starting a company? There was no sort of Y Combinator or anything in New Zealand. So, yeah, definitely no. It took me a long time to even realize what the term startup was. The Superbase story I wrote last year was among our most read term sheets of the last 12 months. Oh, cool. Yeah. Cool. Right. But since our story in April, I know Superbase has grown quite a bit. Many attribute that growth to vibe coding.

10:42Walk us through the kind of growth you've seen since raising$200 million. dollars yeah so that kicked off in december um uh believe it or not we only talked i think what not even six months ago so it's it's pretty wild um since december like everything's just been a bit of a rocket ship internally um the kind of vibe coding we classify them as ai builder platforms and they have they started with both lovable v0 these ones and then they've proliferated and throughout many of them, they've chosen Superbase to be the backend of the tool. And largely because we provide this ease of use, but we also provide a bunch of tools that you need, logins and everything.

11:28So it's very easy to put a, generate an app on top of Superbase, the entire backend for you. And this has meant that even as more pop up, they've started to use Superbase. And because of this, there's this halo effect where people just sign up, they hear about it, We've kind of become more popular even for non-developers. Today, I think the ratio of signups, direct signups to AI builders, maybe there's about 30 % directly attributable to AI builders. So it's kind of had a growth effect. But our signup rate has just skyrocketed. I think we're nearly at 4 million developers now, up from in September, 1 million developers.

12:12So it's just, yeah, it feels like a bit of a rocket ship. I was going to say, how do you handle that level of good chaos? Because that kind of growth has to be a vortex. Yeah. Well, that's not easy. That's been the thing. Everything's going great. The numbers all look good. The main thing that breaks is like, you know, for us, a really good customer experience. We, for example, we never used to, we have never said that we will support the free tier. We have a very generous free plan. And we said we won't do support for the free plan. Well, we actually did. We always supported the customers. If anyone was blocked, we'd jump in.

13:00Unfortunately, we can barely keep up with the paid customers now. You just can't, you know, the number of customers this year will go up maybe 6x paying customers or 7x. And you can't ramp your own team that fast. And so our headcount, the number of people inside Superbase will go from 95 to about 200. That's already going to break a lot of things, you know. So largely it's just trying to figure out the cultural shifts, how the team shifts. And we're trying to do that very well. We have very low attrition. We kind of hire people who are very high skilled. We don't do interns or anything because we're an async culture.

13:41It's too hard. So we keep our bar really high, but just growing that fast internally causes a lot of breakages. And how do you manage those breakages? um well you kind of have to let them break to be honest you you expect them to break in certain ways and you you know it's going to be the case you can't really resist it you have to preempt it um a lot of it's actually not so much i think we've got so many experienced people they they understand things break things are a problem the hardest thing is the culture um because people come in, you can't really teach culture, you know, you, you have a way of operating, like we're very flat, we're almost like an open source community ourselves internally, we don't have much management structure.

14:30And so the way we operate is very trust based, and you figure things out, we'll throw you a bunch of problems, we'll give you as much rope as you can take. And people come in, and they're being at other companies that they bring their own culture, and no fault of their own, but they know a way of operating that is not the super base way. And so a lot of my time this year is just making sure that they understand this is how we do it. We're low ego. We'll give you a bunch of work, work hard. We're not going to check in. You're on your own. Tell us if you're getting swamped. These type of problems.

15:03A lot of people kind of getting close to burnout, but managing, and we just jump in where we can. Walk us through how you're thinking about hiring, how you tend to think about hiring generally and how that might be evolving right now in this environment? Yeah. Well, the first thing is because I said we're remote, we're actually completely async. We like each team might have one meeting per week. So for an engineer in a team, they might have 30 minutes FaceTime with someone and all the rest of their time throughout the week is just working on their own. Now that's amazing for some people and it's horrific for others.

15:43We learned that pretty early on. And we had people who thought, oh, I've done remote work. And what they meant was throughout COVID, I worked in a company where we're all in the same time zone. And we learned that, no, we really have to weed out people. You either love our culture or you don't. And so the easiest thing to do is not to teach people, oh, this is the way to operate. It's just to hire people that love to operate that way. So you either fit our culture to start off with or you don't. The other really important thing in the culture is this kind of egoless and meritocratic environment or way of operating.

16:23The way that manifests usually is because we're async. Like, for example, you might suggest something and it could be a day or two before someone comes and reads your message and then they'll push back. They'll have another idea. And in that moment, of course, like you have had a day to brew on your idea, which seems amazing because you've probably not thought too much about other ways of doing it. So you need to basically be quite egoless that, oh, we're looking for the truth, the best solutions. We're not looking for my solution. And there's always so many ways to solve technical problems. So a lot of it's finding people who really fit that type of egoless, truth-seeking mentality.

17:07One of the things I found really interesting the first time we met was this sort of very clear hiring philosophy you had. That, for instance, you were interested in hiring other founders. Where does that come from and why has it stuck? Founders are great because they kind of, you can leave them to their own devices. so we'll just give them whole problems and then we just don't need to check in with them the other thing is they're really low ego so yeah I talked about being low ego one of the things that we really commonly see is that we have to interview for it it's very hard to figure out but the place where you see it the most is right at the end when you're making the offer so when they start negotiating for their contract and you think mostly it's because of the numbers but actually the thing that happens is they go from talking to a founder right at the end and being very nice to talking to someone from the people team but uh little do they know that the person that they're talking to is on the people team is my sister so so i'm gonna learn about you know how they're negotiating and what type of person they are at that final stage and the tendency has always been ah you know we've gone all the way through this um journey you know they seemed good up until now should we take them now it's just a hard no we're so good at saying no at that stage that's awesome I just love the idea too of um because so many people act poorly in thinking they're gonna get away with it but I love the idea of being like actually that was my sister and she and I were having dinner the other night and no actually it does matter how you treat other people um especially when nobody's looking yeah yeah it's like that saying what's the one like um you want to know what a person's like, see how they treat the waiter.

18:49That's pretty much the same analogy. Is a no assholes policy especially important when you're dealing with developer communities? I don't know. I don't know. For hiring, maybe, but there's a lot of companies. This filters out into our social media. There's a lot of competitors in our space. You'll see often, And actually, in the early days, we counterpositioned it against another company called Firebase, which was acquired by Google. They're kind of a full back end as a service as well. We counterpositioned against them because it was very good for our growth. We became part of the narrative when you're getting started.

19:31Should I choose Firebase? Should I choose Superbase? This one's open source. This one's not. So it became a very good mechanism. And what we had is a lot of our community were saying, hey, you know, Superbase is amazing. Firebase sucks. And we were jumping in and saying, hey, no, actually, Firebase is actually pretty awesome. I love it, which is true. We don't need to be an asshole. We got a lot of inspiration from Firebase and we just want to make something better. and I think there's a lot of companies um especially in the tech tech twitter world that take the opposite approach they'll shit on any competitor um which I think is a bit low integrity most of our competitors are actually pretty good um we've got differences but um but you know like it's kind of obvious that that person's one-sided and I think you fall into a little bit of audience capture, if you know the term on social media, where if you're an asshole, then you get a lot of views and you continue being an asshole.

20:34We just haven't done that throughout our journey. I was going to say, it's popular. It's actually popular. Yeah, it's sort of in vogue right now. I think a lot of people would even argue. But the reason I ask about it in terms of developer communities specifically is because there's sort of no hiding. Developers are either devoted fans or your worst critics. And I think a lot of people outside of tech don't know. I mean, do you think people outside of tech are sort of aware of the power of developer communities? I don't know. I think I live in a bubble. I live in the tech bubble. Are you aware?

21:07I wasn't before I was covering this. Definitely not. No, no, not at all. I was sort of floored by not only the kind of fandom, but the level of commitment sort of to a specific tool or even a specific entrepreneur. I think it's really interesting from a sociocultural lens, but it also means that there's a lot of responsibility. In a weird way, kind of like a journalist, you're beholden to an audience. For sure. For sure. Yeah, you know, like this week I'm kind of backing off Twitter, but I know in the back of my mind, like that's to the detriment of the company. Like I need to be the voice of Superbase.

21:49I definitely think like, yes, it's prolific in tech. You have to have these personalities, the cult of personality, and you kind of have a vibe. Every company has a vibe. I do see it in some other companies. I went to the Figma conference and seeing all the design people turn up, that was like a cult-like following. I was impressed. They're actually now my North Star of how to be as a company. Getting that level of fandom as we continue to grow would be amazing. The goal is to be Figma-esque, it sounds like. Yes, for developers. Yeah. Which I think Stripe has done pretty well. But like the people that when I went to the Figma conference, it was like a festival.

22:31People were flying in from all over the world. And like, I don't know, it felt very, very fun. If you could sort of look to the future, what is one question you would really want the answer to? what is the ai trend in 2026 i think you know we're a company that rides every wave that's pretty much our our vibe so um you know i'm always trying to build for the next wave that's pretty much it so i don't want to look too far ahead in the future i know databases will be around in 50 years that's for sure and i'm pretty confident it'll be postgres so our intent is to to build a generational company the steps to get there are just year on year riding the next wave that's pretty much it and we've done it so far for five years we've had um cycles and i think vibe coding is here to stay um there's definitely a new mechanism for getting started um and it's this ai is kind of a super cycle this wave but there'll be so many more like this throughout the next five years.

23:35I just, I actually don't know what they are. And I have no clue how to pick them. I think there's stuff in memory, in voice that's still emerging. So something in there. And I think a lot of the stuff around glasses, lenses, geospatial mapping, which I spent a lot of time actually doing in another startup. I'm pretty excited for that work. So yeah, I think mostly I want to know where the technological trends are going. And you've mentioned vibe coding. What has most surprised you about the rise of Vibe Coding, particularly the way it sort of crushed it over the last six months? I'm pretty surprised at how successful people are able to be, and by the numbers as well.

24:20Actually, the retention rates for people who are in that classification of AI builder are the same as our non-AI builder, like our traditional developer community. and so so they're coming in and they're using it and they're becoming successful and like the nice thing you know we were discussing this before is um for a long time five years i've been hanging out with my friends and and i just talk about startups or whatever and now like i was just in zurich and i was catching up with a friend who i haven't seen in three years and i was telling him you know business is going good he said oh what's the name of your startup and i said oh super base and he said oh i'm a customer and he had built an app and he was showing me he's not a techie so it's quite cool the surprising thing is how successful people are becoming you know and i think you know the the common saying is you know only get better from here i think this is you know the case of course like this is just the first year of vibe coding where it's going to evolve and the kind of audience that's going to grow from this the tooling as it gets better and better around traditional developer workflows, I think is going to enable a lot of new builders in the world.

25:32Well, it's sort of to this end, it sounds like part of what's happening is it's sticky, both if you're someone who's very technically savvy and if you're not. Do you worry about how it affects programming jobs? No, not at all. I think what we see is most of the time, it's actually, like for example, our API engineers, come in and they might do a little prototype on like livable or v0 or something like that and then they'll kick it over to the design team and what we're seeing from like enterprise customers is they're running these huge hackathons but it's not for their engineers it's actually just for like their product managers so what they want to do is kind of help the engineers like they want to they've got a ton of ideas that they want to brainstorm on and then they still need all the engineers to build out all of these things.

26:25So I imagine it's just going to mean that there are more things for engineers to build later on. Thinking about your experiences in past startups and in this one, if there's one piece of advice for founders listening, what is it? I think the number one thing as a founder, which is one of our principles, is Kaizen, which is the Toyota production system principle it means continuous improvement from the CEO to the factory line worker and it just means like iterate iterate iterate that's pretty much it so we do that everything in super bass is an iteration I can't remember any time we've done like a big bang change everything is like some small process improvement some iteration that well we try things they don't really go well we stick with them we do a small improvement and a lot of our most successful things like launch weeks for example now everyone does launch weeks in the developer community well they were from some small idea that we had five years ago and they kind of proliferated out and they're being one of our most successful ways of marketing to the developer community but you know if we had just done one and seen the how it was kind of not that great, we could have dropped it at that point.

27:46But we always have this idea, well, how can we improve it? And that's the mentality that you have to bring to a startup. Because if you try to do too much too soon, you'll just have a failure to launch. Well, and it's one of the things that's very interesting about it is because a lot of the time the discourse around startups is the goal is to be a unicorn. The goal is to be a multi-billion dollar company. But the only way to get there is through small iterative choices every single day. 100%. Now, I have to ask you a New Zealand question. How has being from New Zealand informed your perspective as a founder?

28:22Because I think it has. I think if you say it, I don't know if I'm going to believe you. But I don't know, because that's kind of like, you know, asking someone or telling like an American, you know, you've got an accent and the American's like, no, I don't have an accent. You've got an accent. So I don't know, but I do hear all the time from the people that I'm fundraising from, they always say, you're a really unconventional founder. I don't know if that's a compliment or not, but I've heard it every single fundraising. So I must be doing something different. Well, also, I mean, to be fair, Can you tell the story of how Excel pursued you really quickly?

29:04Because it is a great story that is New Zealand-centric. That was a fun one. We had raised in, I think, September last year. And then I just wanted to put my head down and get to work. So I went to New Zealand and I was working. And then kind of Excel, one of the guys at Excel, Gonzo, was messaging me. And he said, you know, we're pretty keen on Superbase. And I said, well, sorry, but you would have to fly to New Zealand. I'm busy working. And he said, all right, I'm booking my next flight. And I was like, what do you mean? And so he literally sent the message. And I promptly tweeted that so that the world knew.

29:44And then he came and I was trying to work. And I just said, you know, here are kind of our terms. We're not planning to raise for a year. So you've got to like meet the terms. and so after a while he went away and he then kind of called in the big guns Arun the partner at on the growth team and then Arun said well I'm coming to New Zealand too so I went to Queenstown we spent the night had dinner together and then um yeah we met the next day and they they gave me a term sheet so it's pretty pretty cool actually getting a term sheet in New Zealand then flying all the way to New Zealand I thought that was pretty cool and I promised them that um probably the next board meeting next year we'll we'll do that in New Zealand so we'll repeat repeat the process well the thing I was floored by when I heard this story is getting to New Zealand is actually not easy from California or from anywhere and it's not just getting to New Zealand this is not Auckland I live in a place called Wanaka and it's this mountain town you're gonna fly to Queenstown and you're gonna drive over these mountains it's it's not easy so and Gonzo did it twice.

30:51So I knew they were committed. That's why I knew I could drive the price up. Well, and I know I also I'd forgotten that you tweeted it out. But that also does make sense. You live a lot of life online. So my final question for you, Paul, what meme describes your life right now? Yeah, it's probably that the guy's sitting in the fire. Everything's on fire. This is okay. You know, I think that's kind of how it feels within a startup. But the nice thing about being async is you can kind of turn your computer off and you would just pretend like all of that's not happening. So, so, yeah, it's all going good.