Postgres at PlanetScale (Interview)

31:32Jerod Santo:We're going to coin that sleeping lazy giants. So at the same time, you say forefathers of capitalism, they were cutthroat. Oh, you should be cutthroat. There was probably murder even. Like this is back original OG business days, right? I can only speculate. I'm not speaking from a biography by any means, but I imagine there was a lot of cutthroat. and if there was a version of open source they would certainly glean from it like they're not benign right just because it was early right yeah but but also open source came from a cap like i mean they tried right it was like microsoft let's not let them let's not remember the october letters forget the october letters not forget that they tried to kill and suppress open source and you know they bought github um to undo this and they have done a good job and they have done some great open source but capitalism big organizations like microsoft did try to stamp out open source and it did not work um and there is still a very rebellious almost political movement of open source again they take it too far some in some areas but it did it throw it did thrive in capitalism too there was a there was a when there was a net good but i agree with you but i i don't the early forefathers did you know the crony capitalism is not what they wanted they they some of the early decisions around contract law are why america has such an incredible economy now because they because you could get a fair shake in court you can still sue and get your day in court um and win and that is extremely important so i don't think it's worth viewing capitalism is always having to end up into in a very cynical everyone's going to screw you but i do think you have to be cutthroat i do absolutely i don't mean to say that i just mean that i think it's human nature and I'm with you.

33:14Jerod Santo:So I'm, I'm in a way narratively lamenting the scenario we're in right now from a position that the changelog is by and large been supporting open source since the year after GitHub was incepted, like at the same year, like I think GitHub was born in 2008. We were born in 2009 and we've been riding the wave of open source moves fast, keep up since the beginning. Well, friends, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Coder.com, secure environments where developers and agents work in parallel. And I'm joined by Nicky Pike, field CTO for Coder. Nicky, what is a field CTO? So I get that question a lot and it's, you know, half the people understand it, half the people don't.

33:57So a field CTO, I describe it very simply as we're DevRel for the C-suite. So we provide a bridge between the customer voice, between the C-suite and the managers and the leadership teams of our customers back into our product. And then we go through and we help enable our teams to have the same message to make sure that the message is correct and that we're building on something that people actually want, not just something that we think they want.

34:19Jerod Santo:Okay, so we're taking the laptop away from the developer. Not really, though. We're putting them in a cloud development environment, a secure environment where they can work with their agents in parallel. These are blessed environments. What's wrong with the laptop? The laptop is the trap here. And not only because the fact that it could be stolen, you could lose it, it breaks and you're out of work while you're waiting for a new one. But there's also just the consistency that you got there. We all know developers. Developers are going to be looking for some of the latest and greatest. And if you're not really controlling how they get out there, that's where you get this.

34:49It works on my machine. It doesn't work in production. It doesn't work anywhere else because you don't have that consistency. You don't have that ability to really standardize what that environment looks like. And this is a problem not only for new people coming in, you know, the onboarding statement is average, I think, is like four to five weeks for a new employee to really get their their local laptops set up and ready to start doing their first type of code. And, you know, the time to first commit is a metric that almost everybody knows. And the reason they can't do that is because there's a lot of tribal knowledge out there.

35:16They got to go talk to other developers. What are we using? Where do we get our dependencies? Are we getting them from public? Are we getting them from private repositories? But there's also the security and the supply chain aspect of this. When you have local machines out there, look at like the Shai Halud, you know, that virus that went out not long ago. This was a compromise of the NPM public repositories. They went and downloaded things. NPM did what it did. Next thing you know, you're compromised. But when you use something like what we're doing with cloud development environments, then you can mandate and you can put restrictions on there to say, hey, you can only go get your packages from our private repo.

35:50Those packages are expected to have been thoroughly vetted. We know that they're clean. Now, does this stop everything like Shai Halud? No. If that compromised package gets into your private repo, you can still have that, but it really reduces the surface area of the attack. And it also reduces the blast area of the compromise should it happen? Because if your laptop gets compromised and you have to kill the laptop for whatever reason, that's weeks out of work while you're either fixing that or you're getting a new laptop in. The cloud development environments allows you to kill that, start back up fresh, and you're back and running in five minutes.

36:22You don't have to wait all that time.

36:24Jerod Santo:Well, friends, the first step is to go to coder.com, install Coder, self-hosted environments for your teams to enjoy, to standardize around, and it's open source. So you can try it out today. Once again, Coder.com.

36:44Jerod Santo:And so as that same person, I'm sitting here today saying, okay, Nikki, is it going to be open source? I don't mean that like, Hey, Sam, give away your crown jewels. I just mean like, How do you battle this struggle? How do you deal with this struggle of like, gosh, we're in this scenario where my most fiercest competitors that have more than me, they can kibosh me, maybe not technically, but maybe with a purse potentially or a war chest. How can I give them my 15 years of a test, my five years of running PlanetScale and just hand that over in open source? It's a very challenging position to be in.

37:19Jerod Santo:But yet we come from this past thread of lovers and supporters of open source. Yeah, it's hard. I don't love thinking about it this way. And like I said, I used to say we would never do Postgres. Here we are. I just don't know. You did say that when we talked the first time. You're like, might as well go for life. Right. The test for life. Right. And I changed my mind on that. And I'm still, I do not mind being insistent. Like I'm here, you know, my public stance is I think about things very openly. and I express my feelings and I have absolutely, like people, when I tweet about stuff, people love to dig up old tweets.

37:56It's like some sort of gotcha. As if like, I'm like, People change their minds, man. Yeah, correct. I will change my mind faster than you. The world changes. Correct. I get no embarrassment and no shame from not being logically insistent. In fact, my bylaw, one of my things I say in my like kind of description on Twitter is I'm making more mistakes than you and I'm actually very proud of that. Like people, again, they read that and they get it wrong and they're like, oh it's a guy's proud of making mistakes stupid um i genuinely deliberately make mistakes i move extremely quickly i believe life is a is like a spread bet you have to make mistakes if i said to you there's a target down range i'll give you a million dollars if you hit it choose a sniper rifle or a shotgun what are you choosing you choose a shotgun because you're going to get i don't know how many shot they go and put in a shotgun but you're going to get more chances than the one sniper shot if you bundle everything into one big decision you better you better not miss well yeah with a shotgun blast and i learned this in the early days of github that culture was incredibly iterative we would put something small out learn iterate build i just will not i don't i refuse to to ever stick to anything in the past i have i have almost to a fault zero um respect for the past or time for the past i just want to see what's tomorrow and and if the most offensive, horrible thing I can do to my competitors, open source, sneaky, you bet you it'll be done in days until then.

39:19I think the best thing I can do is I'm watching some being built in the open. They are years behind us. Um, uh, I'm watching us take Amazon's best swing and moving customers off constantly. So right now I'm keeping that for ourselves, but who knows? We'll see.

39:37Jerod Santo:Yeah. You know, I would I would struggle just as much as you are right now with that choice and if I were you just speaking out loud here I'd probably keep it on the inside for now just because what do you gain? Yeah Like who do you help by open sourcing Niki? That's the question Yeah And then even with open source there's so much change maybe you could speak to this too potentially as you weigh these pros and cons, is you see a lot of change in open source. You mentioned it pulling tests back, all sorts of things, not accepting pull requests, not accepting contributions. So we're open source.

40:22Jerod Santo:Sure, you can use it. It's still the free gift. It's still the USB stick on the front curb. Thank you very much. But we don't accept any contributions. It's just in-house only. So there's no – and then you've got the Mitchell Hashimoto direction, which is like, let my current contributors, you know, I think I'm sort of, you know, TLDRing in a way what they're doing, but it's sort of like a merit-based, if you've done some good things or somebody suggests you, you can kind of come in kind of thing. And I could be wrong on that. Again, I'm sort of out of the loop to some degree on certain things, but I feel like the scoreboard and the way we participate in certain open source, not all open source, but certainly high stakes open source, like something like Niki being open source, for example, there's a different game being played.

41:12Jerod Santo:And it's, it's just a little unfair to release your crown jewel that helps you do so much. And then what do you really gain from giving it away? I don't know. Yeah. I think about this and I don't want to criticize anyone who's done like there are people that you have to find your own path in this world. And people do amazing, like open source maintainers are saints. Like the, the things they put up with, it's harder than ever. Now we, i just want to say that like you are all incredible people and that i i hope that we all find a better path forward for this maybe it's licensing i don't know but like i really hope so so i would never want to seem like i'm critical we're losing from this too right like we we're still not the size of amazon so still when we're working with these gigantic businesses they're like well i know we know plant scale is profitable and has lots of money in the bank and is going to be around forever But, you know, it'd be easier if like we knew because, you know, we've never had an enterprise customer churn, right?

42:10We've never had a sharded customer lever. So we've retained every dollar of enterprise business. And they know that, right? And they know that it's like not incredibly easy to go from if Planetsco is the best, most scalable database, if we hit the limits of that, like they know that they're not going to turn around and do it tomorrow. But if a lot of the code was open source, it does give them more of a sense and a feeling that they have a plan if something was ever to happen or we got acquired or whatever, right? So we're losing from this too. And maybe that's why Amazon behave this way. It's because it's easier for them to stymie us if we know that we can't do that.

42:42I don't know. But it is sad and it's not an easy situation. And I will always come back and update you as my thoughts change. But right now I speak to a lot of the people you've mentioned as being Shining Stars of Open Source. I've had this conversation with people and we're all trying to find our way toward figuring this out.

43:03Jerod Santo:Well, I mean, if you can give a demo with Cursor, have it do some cool stuff with Insights, and you can do the same thing with the code base. You can look at somebody's code base, whether it's even from a license perspective. You can graph intent. Oh, yeah. You don't have to copy code these days to copy the idea or even to – I don't want to say copy is a bad thing. We've all been copying. We've been standing on the shoulders of giants for a long time. but it's really just an interesting space where you have a super intelligence available for most anybody with 20 bucks on most of the planet that has access to these tooling and to learn to examine to replicate you can do it nefariously you can do it altruistically you know you can do it and from so many different angles but the point is the primitive the ability is uh is there take me back to this unfair advantage of Niki I don't want to blaze past that with how deep you went in the feelings you have on today's open source but what is this unfair advantage?

44:13Jerod Santo:How long is this list and why do people feel? Take me further into that remark. Well, there's two sides to this and you've just touched on AI. One unfair advantage is that we have like some of us have spent the last 15 years in our careers working on very large websites or very large database deployments and that is knowledge that has not made it into any single model right like the code that we wrote to solve these problems may do but the brains that that code was formulated are still in our heads and precisely none of that has gone in and the reason we have very very large ai companies building on top of us is because they're buying for our expertise they're buying for what my engineers will do at two in the morning paged with a behavior that has never happened before that active human brain instructing the agents to fix things and building the pipelines that the agents use um is what people pay for so that gives us one advantage which is yeah maybe i'm not 22 anymore doing all nighters all the time but agents can do all-nighters um yeah so we've got so not only has nikki been the distillation of so many years of experience of incredibly talented people it's been built at a breakneck pace because those people turned out exceptional engineers can do exceptional engineering with ai and we're taking our experience and using it and so there is potential for a lot of tech companies that...

45:51Can you hear that?

45:53Jerod Santo:Yeah. What in the world? They're doing construction outside. That is likely a drill. It's okay. Let's see if it passes. I hope so. Give me a second. That was a great question you asked me. I want to make sure I don't forget that. Man, you're so good at this, by the way. I literally... I've never... I asked you to come on this. I've never asked a podcast to have me back. Nope. Wow. You stood out. I still have the t-shirt. I also don't keep merch either. Like I really thought you did an amazing job. So like, I would love to make sure we cry, dude. No, seriously, seriously. I've been through some stuff, man.

46:32Jerod Santo:It's been, it's been a journey. I hope you're okay. It's while we're waiting for this to go, I'll give you a little snapshot. So behind the scenes, this last 2025 was a challenging year for me and my business partner. Jared. He's a great dude. I love him to death, but we just had differing opinions on how the business should run. And, um, I just got tired of the partnership and I really did. And I'm sure he got tired of the partnership as well. It's not like it's a one-sided scenario here, but we were together as partners for a decade basically. And that's, that's a challenging change really. And so right now in December of last year, I asked him if I could buy him out.

47:13Jerod Santo:He agreed. And so in February of 26 this year, we inked that deal and it's done. So he's no longer part of the business. So that's the change. But at the same time, we have this AI revolution happening. I've been building a lot of cool stuff, all the while also podcasting and maintaining this business. But it's been challenging because the world has just changed drastically. And I've had some imposter syndrome, to be honest with you. like well you should not show and you should well but to hear you say that is what makes me tell you that seemingly tmi behind the scenes that i would not normally share so uh deeply with someone um but so i appreciate that because i want you to wholeheartedly take my encouragement that you should keep doing going forward for multiple reasons plant scale we did layoffs like we were nearly dead at one point things are better than ever we are now like just more alive like ripping business like we got features like like brex did a report that were in the top 25 of like things that start as startups are spending on now like we are going but it was so dark and if you don't push through that you will never get to that and it's really hard your founder too and i literally the story you just told me another creator told me the exact same thing business partner breakup buying them out pain it's very common and like yeah but i'm serious like deadly serious you are p99 amazing at what you do you should not feel and but all the best people feel imposter syndrome i do too like but you shouldn't it's also a long journey to having done this like my whole career has been a podcaster for the most part and i can honestly say i haven't built anything technologically that's worth really anything so being in the tech industry and not really having any tech to show for it is kind of embarrassing in a way no but like media now is me i i you know media is is is hotter than ever now right people want to tell a because there's now like i remember back in the day there was like two companies doing one the same thing right like you basically just like in 2013 you had to be the first person with the idea and you can make a big company now there's 10 people 10 startups in san francisco going after every bad idea and people are differentiating now through storytelling, craft, design, experiences.

49:40I think you're about to enter an age where your skills are more important than ever. I genuinely, I look at how we build our marketing team and our buying behaviors are all going in that direction. Yeah.

49:49Jerod Santo:Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I think the business is definitely changing. I'm still excited about podcasting. I'm just a little bummed to be alone, even though it was my choice. Yeah. And so I'm just navigating some personal motivation, I would say. And then also I'd think a little bit of burnout and then also some imposter syndrome. So you mix all that together. You get a really weird soup that just tastes kind of nasty sometimes. Well, you should come out to San Francisco and feel the energy out here. Like it will really pick you up. I think it will really make you feel like go to events, see people.

50:23Like I think you'll really enjoy it. You'll meet some new generation of founders to interview and chat to. I think it'd be really good. Man, I got a ton of friends out there too.

50:30Jerod Santo:I mean, I would consider you as a friend as well, but I would come through, come to the office, hang out. You're more than welcome. I should just do like a tour. Yep. Go see Adam Jacob. Come see you. There's a few others that I would so reach out to. My buddy at render on a rug. Great guy. Small handful of folks. I just like going to hang out with if, if they would let me, of course, but come through. Well, I think we're going to drill this window. So I'll carry on. So I'll start editing. I didn't pick up the editor's name. So we're like in this very interesting time right now. There's a bunch of companies being built by people who've got deep expertise from working in other places.

51:08They know their domain really well and they can build for the next generation and using AI to do that really rapidly. Like AI scales expertise phenomenally. And I do speak to startups where like they're kind of you. There's an arc of time. And this is how I view us via Amazon, right? Which is like five years ago, VCs used to tell me you're never going to be Amazon. Well, five years later, we've got the largest databases for multiple of their products running on them. And people advocate for us over them constantly. It's the kind of arc of time when it comes to startups. There's an incumbent and there's the rising ones.

51:40And the things that mean they are struggling right now to respond to demand, they're doing great as a business right now. They're the ones with GPUs. But it's difficult for a 50 ,000-person organization. And we have a 50-person engineering team. They have 5 ,000 people running our engineering on the competing products to us and we still beat them. This is because we can move faster. We are nimble. We are involved. We get there. Like large organizations, thanks to AI, although they are trying to keep everyone out, like they are at risk because they can't move fast enough. You just like you don't need masses of people to do stuff anymore.

52:15And so it's interesting. Like I'm seeing some young companies that come with a different angle of seeing things and they're going to be truly disruptive. but I'm seeing some wash against the waves of just the facts of life and the facts of how some software dynamics are. Again, that may all wash out in 10 years time. It might be completely irrelevant to have anything we've built. We might have a God computer that can just do everything. We're not there yet. We've got one more cycle maybe before that, maybe a few, who knows, where some great companies will be built by very experienced people scaling their expertise through ai so it's actually an amazing i've never had more fun like we we have a customer at wop they are just phenomenal at what they do and they're young and they're building for their audience and they are just absolutely outstanding and they're scaling incredibly rapidly when it comes to consumer when all these places experience actually kills you like you don't like you can be too old for these things right um but when it comes to infrastructure there are just ways of doing infrastructure that will persist for quite a while um and there's rules to how that gets done and that's how it's going to be for a while, I think.

53:20Jerod Santo:Help me understand your hardware story because this is something that I'm personally challenged with is like, how do you compete and innovate against Amazon or even Google whenever you deliver Vitesse or Nikkei or PlanetScale to GCP or AWS? How do you compete and innovate in their playground, so to speak, their hardware, their world? Do you build your own machines? What is your story? We do not build our own machines. I think when we named metal, I think it was a good name at the time. I think it was kind of obvious what it meant. But people have conflated it with us running our own data centers.

53:57That is not true. I thought you did.

53:59Jerod Santo:I thought you bought some NVMEs and racked them and stacked them. I'm glad you then thought that so I can correct that, which is we use the bare metal machines that Google and Amazon give us, and we build on top of that. So that's how we compete. We take the same machine they do and build our entire software stack on top of it. which means the machine the profile the cost profile of the machine is low because they don't really put much margin on top because they don't really do anything but the most impressive thing is those machines are ephemeral if we lose one of those machines or we give one back by accident and we miss schedule something in kubernetes or whatever we would lose the customer's data and so we differentiate and no other startups are doing this um there's a few that think they are it's hilarious we can see the code and like they're going to lose data um that and so we differentiate by running databases and state and we run more state on kubernetes than anyone on earth uh we just actually released a really amazing fatty on our team released a great blog post about kubernetes that is just a wonderful masterful piece of writing i recommend anyone read it um and yeah so we build from the base up so it means we can perform as fast or better than the their solutions with all of our DX, agentic AX on top of it, the higher uptime we are, we compete with them by having higher uptime and just generally a better product while inside the cloud.

55:19This is the thing. There's a few Neo clouds that have built really well outside of the major clouds. But if you want to sell to large companies and companies that are far beyond startups, you have to be in AWS and Google because of latency issues and all of these things. We have to be there. And so the fact we found the perfect hybrid between on-prem performance and scalability, well, no, we add the scalability. On-prem performance inside the Hyperscalers cloud is why we get to do what we do. We also run in the customer's account too. It is not on-prem. You still go to plantscale.com. It's like bring your own cloud, which I think you and I will have talked about in 2022.

56:03And we were early to that. It was one of the greatest things we did. We have gigantic customers running it because they are customers of Google and Amazon. So we run inside their accounts. And so it means that they secure it. They pay the bill. They get great discounts. When you're committing a billion dollars to Amazon, you get a decent discount. And so they can use that as a mission. So we can get the total cost, like our cost, plus the discount on those hardware costs. We can often be Amazon on price. and so that's why that's how we compete

56:37Jerod Santo:Yeah, it's interesting because you have to, you know, it's almost hypocritical, but you can't help it, right? Because you just said in one second, they're terrible partners, alluding to Amazon, but yet, you know, you have to play in their world. So it's like this, like a masked party, you know, like maybe a masquerading kind of thing. I'm thinking like a party where you have to go with a mask on, you know, but you're still kind to people. It's this really weird scenario where you have to play nice, but not quite so nice. Oh, believe me. Like I massively respect them for the position of leverage they've put themselves in.

57:16AWS is a phenomenal business built by phenomenal people and we should have nothing but respect for them. At the same time, they have to strike a fine balance of competing with the people that run on them. Right. And like how long people will tolerate that. Now, luckily, there's that undoing as well because they've built like, what, 350 services. And now there's 10 competitors for every one of those services. And it hurts for them because they have to keep up and people want the best in class tools. Unfortunately, the database is some of the services that make the absolute most money for Amazon.

57:50Like people, I have other CEOs who have great partnerships with Amazon because they compete with less important Amazon services. say you must i mean i just i just met one of your customers and they told me how much they spend on amazon how much they spend on you like amazon must love you and i was like we have a terrible time because we're competing with the the software that they're trying to the services they're trying to protect the most and so um yeah they behave really badly in that world um and so they just have to be careful and i hope we don't make the same with um some of the large model companies that constantly talk about how they're going to replace everyone it's like i i would caution anyone from allowing that to happen again it was because with ai it could be dangerous like it is really bad that you can be an amazon customer and that they can see you working with someone else and their sales and then they reach use that to reach out to that and they do do that and it is extremely bad and there's

58:42Jerod Santo:nothing that should not be a thing it happens it happens all the time our customers tell us constantly and so they have to be careful because like you don't get to rain forever there's other And Microsoft actually is not like that. On Azure, their sales team, the way they operate, is much more friendly to the ecosystem of people that work on them. Amazon particularly really do not do that. They pretend to. They suck you in. Like they have released – it's of a company that I think most people think as compared to us isn't really. But Amazon just released a competing product to them today after having that company on stage at reInvent last year.

59:20So they will pull you in. it's so funny actually a founder i can't remember what company it was tweeted a screenshot of an email they got from amazon corp dev being like oh hey you know it looks like you're doing really well i would love to reach out and see how we can help that was sent like six months before amazon released a competitive product and i reached out to that founder and showed him an identical email from me i just didn't pick up pick up the phone because i've been tired of their so long there's no way i'm talking to any any of them yeah it's like are you a fan of silicon

59:50Jerod Santo:Valley Bonnie Chance, the TV show? It's too close to it. I've enjoyed watching it, and I've met the producers. They came to GitHub when they were doing research. I know a friend of mine is one of their advisors. They did a great job of parodying it to the degree where I find it a struggle to watch when I live in it in Silicon Valley. It's hard to watch. Some of the actual props were from GitHub. I don't even remember the scene where they get delivered merch on the doorstep. GitHub provided that as a prop. It's hard to watch for me. is a long-winded answer of saying no. I've seen some of it and it is good.

1:00:22Mike Judge is a genius, but when you kind of know people that are just exactly the same as the characters, it's a bit much for you. Plus, I don't really watch TV. So there you go, extremely long-winded way of explaining that to you. The answer is no.

1:00:37Jerod Santo:Well, friends, I'm back with a good friend of mine, Michael Greenwich. Michael, I know that I love WorkOS. Our audience may not know about WorkOS, but what are the challenges developers face starting a new project? Choosing the right tools, choosing the right database, choosing the right auth. Take me there. When a developer starts a new project, the decisions that they make at the very beginning end up having long lasting consequences. What language you build in, what platform you build on top of, what database you choose. These are things that are very hard to change later on. So they have like major consequences.

1:01:07Jerod Santo:And especially if they limit your ability to grow and scale, at some point as the product starts to take off, you're going to have to stop developing new product features and go re-architect or rebuild your system. And that might be a killing blow right at the moment you need to accelerate. So these decisions early on are really, really important. And I think that's why developers gravitate towards solutions that are mature, things that they know that will scale, even things that are open source. You're going to pick something like PlanetScale for your database provider, not because it's the cheapest or because it's the most fun to use, but because you know it's going to be a durable provider that you can scale on for years.

1:01:45Jerod Santo:And Workforce is like that for auth. You know, at the earliest, earliest days, if you look across all these different services, they kind of look very similar. But at day 1000 or day 2000 or day 10 ,000, you're going to want to have made sure that you picked a platform that could scale with you. And today WorkOS is powering auth and identity and security and permissions for all these AI companies, literally the fastest growing companies in the world, like OpenAI and Anthropic and Cursor and Perplexity. WorkOS is under the hood there. So I think when people pick WorkOS early on, really what they're doing is trying to pick the defaults to allow them to grow and rapidly scale.

1:02:19Jerod Santo:And there's no platform other than us that's done that at that same level. Well, friends, the next step is to go to WorkOS.com. Sign up today. Check it out. Free for a million active users. Try it today. There's no excuse not to. It is your default. You should choose it. So do so. WorkOS.com. Once again, WorkOS.com.

1:02:47Jerod Santo:That's okay, because I won't ruin the plot by any means, but I'll just give a glimpse. I think it was in season two. It may have been in season one. They were brought in by a venture capitalist firm, they being Pied Piper. And they were innovating on this compression algorithm. and they were hunting for money obviously because like any startup you need money to grow and they were brain raped I would guess is probably the proper term I don't know if that's the proper term or not so similar it's like you know let's email you let's get you into the room and ask you how your thing works with no intention to invest because they were not intending to invest and you know because they're naive and they're early in their careers they gave away information they were happy to like gosh in these venture capitalist meetings no one ever asks us how the platform works let's just whiteboard the thing for you so they literally whiteboard uh you know their crown jewels and uh now they have a competitor let's just say before they did not now middle out that was pretty much the you know the crux of pied piper was now given to a funded team who is capable with engineers and they go and build the same thing now they have competitor so this happens all of the time this is a real thing like you see the reason why i was in the show is like it's real yeah you see a story once a week of someone on twitter being like oh yeah actually this company offered like to try and buy us and do due diligence and they use that really poorly and like it's very bad this is it is it you know i chat to young founders and founders that are new in this and it's amazing how naive people can be to thinking that these giants are here to help um and that it's not immensely cut right through and it's getting worse there is so much on the line like people are terrified by ai they are terrified by what it's doing to them even though they should not be um yeah it's causing this to happen much much more frequently and yeah you have to be very careful and very secretive about what you do we just don't we try like we have learned the lessons and we we try not to fall for these things yes it must be challenging to even come on a podcast to have me ask you questions that might go into an area i'm sure you're protective of it but nonetheless there's some anxiety to some degree like i i've got to be in the public because i want to promote what we're doing i'm the ceo and you have to be, you have to do your job.

1:05:20Jerod Santo:And there's a job, one of the jobs of the CEO is to be some version of a figurehead to the company and the spokesperson and obviously speak eloquently and have clear thoughts and share your ideas as well. But then there's a part that's like, well, now I'm at risk. Cause like, if I share too much, you know, how much do I share? How, how do I navigate this, this new world we're in? And I think that's a, how do you, personally handle that yourself with being in the public? Because you're pretty well-spoken in two ways, well-spoken, but then also I hear you and I see you on X and I'm like, dang, there's Sam going toe-to-toe with benchmarking and calling them out.

1:06:01Jerod Santo:You're in the most positive way, ruthless. I love that about you. I love the way you come at folks in a way. But how do you manage the ability to sort of show up somewhere like this, but then also not give it all away i think about this very often it is a constant evolving debate so we're very open we're known for our technical content is a great example right so how do you share really deep insightful things that have a meaning you can tell when tech content is just like fluff right like how do you talk about um really deep things without giving away proprietary things i talk about this all the time at the beginning of every one of our all hands there is a giant slide um that says um confidential on it and we're very clear and i remind the employees that we are incredibly open at plant scale like if you're an employee of plant scale you know you can look at how our finances are if when we do board meetings we present the board deck for the entire company i believe in hiring exceptionally good people um i believe i mean I cannot self-assign this but it's something I'm aware of that people would view plant scales having quite a high talent bar um and being a small engineering team that's clearly boxing above our weight um I do not believe in hiring incredible people and then hiding anything from them like every business problem can be engineered we are only engineers to engineer ourselves towards building a phenomenal business so I share very very liberally internally but we have to remind people that you you might not like it's very unless you're essentially myself or like the c level at the company it is very hard to know whether the thing you are doing or working on or you might just say it plays an important role in a very big picture that we don't want to get out there so we guard very um you know we're very protective over what we do our roadmap what we're like when we built Postgres, we had to work in secret.

1:08:07Like you had to have a code name so that when we could ship front-iron end code, because we were iterative, it wouldn't be referred to. So that when we were in South Park, we can talk about what we're like working on without them knowing. Like we are very secretive in that way, but we have to do a fine line of like being open and like allowing our marketing team and myself and folks to go and speak on behalf of the company and not leak and mess things up. And so it just takes refinement and it takes culture and it takes thinking that through like our kubernetes post we did but fatty is amazing like it goes very far into showing you how well we think about systems without exactly kind of giving you the keys to the kingdom and so it's this constant balance that will again it will change over time but i try when it comes to twitter twitter is a bit of fun for me like

1:08:52Jerod Santo:half the time i don't take things seriously having fun i just don't mind saying things that i know is going to make people lose their minds and it's like it's just funny to me um how easy it is uh uh especially also when it just doesn't impact me like i don't get anxiety about this i can have a fight with someone online and then just close my phone and never think about it i can sleep like a baby um so it doesn't really bother me but it's funny when it really lights up some of your competitors and they lose it and whatever and do some linkedin posting uh but also like partly the way i am on social media is because i do not believe in letting in false truths or things come be said about your company and not jump on them immediately i've worked at places or i've watched other companies that just get drowned on social media with things that are not true about that company and they and they are too reserved and polite about it they don't squash these mistruths i go at that stuff incredibly quickly to correct it in the public record um not this i make it sound like there's tons of drama around this company there really is not but you know people come up and say things and they try they do silly things and you know you just call it out and just say it for it is and it's just a it's a way of handling pr and public relations and sometimes companies misstep and you can get out there and correct them really quickly and i watch companies just getting absolutely destroyed in the public narrative and their ceo should just be out there correcting these things saying it confronting them whatever like i've had people say hateful mean things i've had the odd death threat too um i often meet the people uh you know like you just go and say hi and uh talk to them and make friends and i have a few people that i now talk to very it's a bit of a meme internally that i've had people that have been real haters like just absolutely hated us and me and now our customers and you just i just reach out to them and have a conversation with them like i'm if someone if someone is mad and hateful at me and makes a good point i like you can really flip that by going yeah actually you're right i was completely wrong with what i said like i genuinely do try and put controversial things out there see how people react and then change my mind if i do believe and i very often change my mind i have zero fear changing my mind like it's my job to do that yeah a lot can change well a lot can happen in relationships whenever you can be transparent but then also be willing to have a conversations like so many people just don't have the conversation correct it would much rather subtweet you or they would much rather you know talk about you behind your back or right you know round about so to speak and i don't mean like negative or positive just sort of like just about you right but uh you know something changes whenever you actually have a conversation with somebody and there's clarity and then there's also just transparency in terms of you know what i was not actually totally right here i've changed my mind here and i don't feel that way anymore or you were right and I was wrong.

1:11:41Jerod Santo:You know, that is the way that happens there. Absolutely. I completely agree. That is the way to deal with subtweeting, by the way. If people subtweet you, just immediately go at them, just say, I know that's about me and then just like react to it. They stop because they subtweet because they're cowards. And if you call it out, but people are too polite, they won't call it out. And so it lets all this stuff happen. It's silly. For those that are listening that maybe be aware of my, I have zero expectation that a single person knows who I am that is listening to you. And maybe they do now. Obviously, that's why I'm here.

1:12:08But, you know, maybe you've, interacted or seen my Twitter or whatever. And there might be people that really think this guy, like this guy, he's a piece of online or whatever. Um, I just would love to let you know that it is one of our largest sources of leads. There is a dropdown in our Salesforce to designate their source being my Twitter. One of the, one of the hottest AI companies in Europe came inbound two weeks ago. Whenever I see I love meeting customers. If you read blog posts from our customers. Yeah, very many out there very many times that they that I will be the first person they've spoken to.

1:12:45And I will also babysit their migrations. I'll be in the slacker. I love it is talking to customers one of my favorite I don't know people like why are you talking to me? I'm like, what else should CEO be doing and talk to customers work on the prime? Right. But like, they're very surprised. Anyway, I joined I like I saw them come one of their engineers filled out a contact us form. And I was like, that's a great company. i want to talk to them i added myself to the meeting because i added them to me myself to the meeting the founder showed up and i said wow and this is a great company they're going to pay us a few million dollars um i said uh how did you hear of plan scale and he said i love your twitter and i was like that's great and i said you can't you can't tell i said unfortunately like that's going to just make me worse but like it is it works and i get told all the time that people just want they don't hear genuine takes anymore tech has become so mealy mouth and there's fakers there it's never been full of more full of fakers that don't know how computers work i think people feel refreshed tech got a little bit too friendly to the non-technical ones that can yap all day long we should drive them out and get back to talking about like actual engineering um and i think there's a void of that and i think people miss it and i'm kind of i'm just saying my stuff it's not deliberate i might quit tomorrow i don't care i don't think so much about it i'm not obsessed with my father account like i just say the things i care about and believe and maybe don't believe or want to test the belief in and i just use it and it's that it does come up a lot though it's like yeah people mention my i get people mention my twitter to me constantly maybe

1:14:09Jerod Santo:i should change i don't know but well i follow you so i pay attention so i see uh i'm not involved in the conversations but like anybody else i lurk yeah you know and i'm here for the stuff i'm here for the good stuff sometimes there's drama sometimes it's not yeah and i can't really recall the ones that the posts that I'm talking about but I recall other database companies touting their superiority in terms of their speed and their migrations like I don't even remember what but it was something like that and you were like not not true like here's the real benchmarks that's how they're they're being not true with their their details because you can fudge that just like calling them out I'm like dang you know why not I love that.

1:14:55Jerod Santo:I mean, like, I guess because some people would be maybe too busy, not that you're not too busy, but like somebody might use the excuse of being too busy to come at them. But that's what I think stood out to me was like that I liked about your personality was that you're not you're not unwilling to push back when you know, you know, maybe of an untruth or a fudging of a number, so to speak, or some sort of benchmark detail. that just didn't really fit. Now, you have a reputation to maintain with PlanetScale, obviously, but I would say that you are definitely edgy, and I like that. It's not a bad thing.

1:15:35Jerod Santo:It's not how I would respond because I'm just not quite that way, but I respect it. I like that. Yeah, maybe it's just that I'm oddly broken and have brain damage. I don't know. I also don't believe that people are too busy. If someone is comparing your product technically and lying about it, you should stamp on that immediately. Stamp on that, yeah. Like if you care about your craft, and I care massively about the craft of engineering, I love the database space because it is just engineering. There are so many companies that have out-talked us, out-yapped us, and now their largest customers are migrating to us because they use Postgres.

1:16:11We are winning, but it's fundamentally a game of engineering, and I take it very, very seriously. I love, like we are not a very serious culture internally in the sense that we have a sense of humor. I like to make jokes. I like to be funny. I like to be silly. But when it comes to engineering, and we take our job of engineering very seriously, everyone accidentally lets down customers and things, and now and then that happens with us, and we take that very seriously as well. We are here to be a database product, and I feel like one of the best things I can do to attack my competitors is out-engineer them and then have a lot of fun doing it publicly and build a narrative around doing that.

1:16:48and they can come for it. Like when we announced our Postgres product, it was a very simple blog post. It just benchmarked us against all the ones that were on the market. We smashed some of them into the floor. We had to give two of them. We had to give them double the resources just so they could show up on the graph next to us. That was the way. We showed up humble because we said we weren't going to go into Postgres because we didn't go into Postgres. I didn't know if we could do anything better. I didn't want to be arrogant enough and believe that we can just grandiosely show up and do a different database better once we'd shown that we could though we we made that the point of what we're doing all of the companies that we benchmarked tweaked got very triggered one one actually the cto came up to our people that we released it while we had a booth at a conference that day they walked up to them and got so angry that spit was flying like someone else from another company a friend of mine whose company's booth was next door was like you need to check on your team they've just been screamed at by the cto of one of the people you benchmarked I'll save their name.

1:17:48It would be so big for them to get mentioned on a podcast like for this. So I won't. I won't. But they, yeah, it really made people extremely mad. They all promised follow-ups. We watched them all benchmarks. It's been a year, not a single follow-up because they couldn't do it. So they can sit back down and try and write code and do all their yapping. They can hire their big brand designers to spend 90 grand on a website. And we all just do engineering and we'll take that bit very seriously. And then we'll have fun messing with them publicly.

1:18:14Jerod Santo:Yeah, that's wild. let's go to maybe an angle I wasn't really going to mention, but you mentioned$90 ,000 websites. And I'm not saying that your website is not$90 ,000. And I'm not going to try and offend you by telling you how much you did or didn't spend on your website, but I did it in a Google doc. You're not going to offend me. I did it in a Google doc. So it's not, it was very cheap. How do you mean you did it? The first version of that website and Holly, our incredible CMO, She has a Twitter thread about this. I was on a trip to see the Redwoods and I was up late at night and I was like, we need to go way simpler.

1:18:54I just want to, we've got great tech. Let's just communicate this like a read me. And so I opened a Google Doc and just started drawing ASCII out into it and writing words. And then Jason, our phenomenal designer, took it, made it look like less like the let, like sort of scribblings of a mental patient and put it up on the internet. and it went viral immediately i got invited onto podcasts that have like hundreds of thousands of listeners like marketing podcasts we don't i didn't go on those but like people were fascinated by things that get spoken about all the time it will change we are going to work on a new version of the website like it it's too simple now it's that format and that medium is too simple to like communicate the complexities of three separate products and all this sort of stuff so it will evolve but it was very fun to run in the other direction now by the way there is some beautiful$90 ,000 websites out there.

1:19:45Some companies produce, have insane taste and produce absolutely incredible websites. We just went very simple for now and we're never going to go to these. I also just don't like it. It's bad engineering to me when you open a website and it's all flashy and you can hear your MacBook spin up and Chrome is stuttering. That's bad engineering. That does not communicate what I want to communicate. But it was just a little silly thing. you know this again i just like to do try dumb stuff it works or it doesn't you can undo it whatever it was it you know it worked pretty well i think back in the day when we had you first in

1:20:23Jerod Santo:the pod and for several years after that you had closer to what would seemingly look like a 90 000 website you know and i think it's about a year or two ago you've gone the direction you've gone so you haven't always had this you know you've had this minimalistic opinion but it didn't seem like you were this um plain that's probably the way it's said you know it's very close to plain text it's not it's not a pejorative our previous website was also extremely good done by an extremely talented set of people um and it got copied there was actually people that open sourced libraries to cop out copy our like gradient hero and i someone said to me recently like they remember that year when we had that website they saw copies of it everywhere and we did like people ripped that old website off so now i'm saying it's like what we're doing right now is figuring out the new one and i'm like when we tried really hard people loved it and like it was good when we didn't try at all people also loved it and copied both both versions now i kind of feel like the pressure is on to do something else that's a bit crazy i'm not trying to pretend i'm some design genius and we're going to come up with anything amazing but you do feel that kind of like huh like we also didn't try to do those things we just did things that made sense to us but it gives you that pressure to like think what can we do this time that's special maybe we've found it i don't know we'll see we'll see what people think i'm sure they won't be afraid to tell me online since you're a uh spicy natured fella that's probably the sweetest thing i could probably say that's cool i like that say something meaner i'm just i'm enjoying my own words i'm Sorry, Sam.

1:22:04Say something meaner. I'd like to do it. Keep this in as well. Don't cut it. Say something mean. What do you think the worst? No, no, no.

1:22:09Jerod Santo:I really meant that in that way. I liked how it sounded. I had to laugh. It's like a comedian on the stage laughing at their own joke. That's like, you shouldn't do that. So I did that. No, it's good. I liked that. You should enjoy it. Maybe I'm spicy. I don't know. You are spicy. That's fine. Maybe everyone's bland. I'm not going to be born. I'm not going to be born with that, man. Listen, I live in Texas, and it's just fine to be spicy. Okay? just fine that's true um i want to go to this level because i i this is something that i've had we've had podcasts on this we've talked about multi-grass we've talked to sugu we've talked to i'm even an investor in super base i'm a small angel investor in super base well that was a very good chance to give you money so i couldn't be an angel investor for you well that was an exceptional investment because they've built a very valuable business so you yeah the it's my I've only had two angel investments.

1:22:59Jerod Santo:That's my best one. Okay. Good. Congratulations. Not very many angel investments on my side, but that one I think is paying off very well, and I'm happy about that. I've got friends who use Superbase, and I'm like, why do you use it? And these are obviously, well, I shouldn't say that. They're newer to software development, a.k.a. Vibe Coding, which is just fine. You know, everybody's got to start somewhere in the all-air. That is their audience, and they've done a phenomenal job of building that audience. They have millions of people that are vibe coding on top of that platform. I'm like, why are you using Superbase?

1:23:29Jerod Santo:That's where my database is. I'm like, is that it? Is that all you're using them for is just a Postgres database? Okay, fine. They're doing incredible health from this. I digress. They've ridden this wave and they had great experience. I think they should feel very proud of themselves. And they've created an amazing business. Most people have not done that. It's amazing. What are your thoughts on, you know, what you're doing with Nikkie and Multigress? How do those two rub, I suppose, in the marketplace? It's their attempt. There is, like you've just referred to, there is one of the people that created for Tess at YouTube and was a co-founder of PlantScale that is a super base doing this and a couple of ex-employees.

1:24:14You know, the competition is good. they're welcome to go and do this it's it's great it's it's different i'll tell you how it's different well first of all i'll address that sugu left the company before we had a single sharded customer in production and so the the thing that i don't like about this situation is the perception that someone who made plant scale what it is today has gone to super base that is completely untrue if you look at the version of the company pre um 2020 and 2021 one that is the counterfactual to what plant scale could have been and it was not and now plant scale is what it is now he played no role in what it is now and so when people online make takes about oh you know they're gonna super base is a shot of becoming anything like plant scale that is just not true none of the plant scale dna has gone to super base so i can correct that like leaving that early in in in a company that's achieved so much since that period of that person leaving is hardly the boon people think it is but that's fine yeah and i wish him well um i don't like talking about individuals and their histories but they have had no problem talking trying to claim the vitess name and claim an association with plant scale and i don't like that um so we what they're building i'm have no doubt will be of quality and the people that are building it are not unserious and they are not bad engineers.

1:25:40However, they're in a business that does different things. It is not the union of the 15 years experience of the test, the five years of building plant scale and all the other things that we do. And so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. I wish everyone well. I think it's great building software. however when nearly like there's customers that are still on their home page that have migrated to us already when now we do postgres the logos that are on our page and you consider the long term sustainability of what it takes to build a sharded product and the companies that run on sharding a company that's really only serviced by coders is not going to compete with a company that has done the opposite of that and is running some of the world's largest databases.

1:26:29And that will prove out. But at the end of the day, I would not try and go after their audience because I don't believe I could, right? I do not believe, and until I maybe will believe that one day, but I try and stay humble and say, I would not try and compete with Superbase right now on Vibe Coding, on backends as a service. They've done a really good job at this. they are welcome to try and um compete on what we do which is what they think they're doing with multigres but as someone has been through this um there is many more things that are not just you just don't just have a an open source like sharding tool is not it is their record with security is very publicly quite bad like we do not have that right these are all things that enterprises care about um at the end of the day when i've seen the largest database that they ever had that moved to us and it was like i mean minuscule in comparison to it was far below our average customer size it's going to be a long battle when they have to like do you envision a world of opposite a giant sharded postgres customer and versus us and what's your largest customer and ours is four orders of magnitude larger i mean i don't know we'll see i like the competition but i don't really think about like there's other ones that are trying other sharding ones it's like why have i do it i just don't think about it i we are on schedule we're on our schedule when it comes to database scaling we set that standard industry-wide um you have to start being like you have to focus in other places if you want to win that way But I do wish them well, and I wouldn't hate to communicate any disrespect for the incredible business that they have built.

1:28:19Jerod Santo:Yeah. So you mentioned having extraordinary engineers, and you mentioned having the ability to give those extraordinary engineers artificial intelligence, AI, right? Models, LLMs, Anthropic, Cloud, Codex. Pick your flavors. I know what my flavors are. I say use them all, of course, right? Use the ones that work for you. you've got Niki out there. You're not sure about open sourcing it for all the reasons we've already talked about, but what was it like to take that exceptional engineering team, 50, how many ever was necessary, or how many ever you sliced off from that larger swath of folks to build out Niki?

1:28:58Jerod Santo:What was it like to kind of have a redo, I would call it? Like, I've been enjoying the redos in this AI world because there's so much more possible. I'm almost happy to fail at trying to implement something because I learned and that my next version would just be that much better and more closer to what I actually want to deliver. So what was it like having had that many years of experience with Vitesse, this brand new superpower, some of the most amazing engineers out there anyways, and then here you go and you're building Niki. What was that like? Phenomenal. It's just been amazing. like to watch people that are so good at what they do and their craft to have superpowers to build now we are not just vibe coding this thing right i sure am not to be generous the multigress team as well they did a really good post about how they used ai to build and people also interpreted that as vibe coding which i don't think that's what they were doing either right like some exceptional engineers are building really really quickly um but we're what i'm watching phenomenal people build in phenomenal ways with AI.

1:30:01And it is like, I thought Niki would take two to three years, right? We're a year in and we're already moving customers now. That is like, and I thought three years with like earlier AI, right? Like how it was a year ago when we started this. And then I also thought, you know, just doing 15 years of work that quickly, right? Like now, is it got feature parity with the test no um will it get there soon enough yes it is amazing it's actually a great kind of meditation on the fact that code was just a thing you had to get through and that taste and now that's a terribly overused word so whatever but like but your taste your biases your experience fed into things that will write the code is truly where it was like and it gives me like there's a lot of people feeling despair about ai we are ingenious creatures we have engineered our way off of this planet to the depths of the ocean we've engineered our environment around us ai will be a tool to do that and i i when we start like when ai takes over more and our ingenuity gets flowed into those that machine we will gain more as a species so it's very exciting to me to see this and see how we engineer using these tools and the productivity is there and it does truly gel with the belief that I have and other people have that this stuff will scale the expertise that companies have we are proving that right now like the knowledge that things we know the proprietary knowledge we know about running databases at this scale can influence how we build and produce something very quickly and that shows that there is an incredible moat to experience and intelligence and your company's culture and the way you build and the targets you set for yourself.

1:31:51And code was always just a syntax that you had to build and you had to be smart at reading it and you had to be really good at coding and there's a massive power law to the distribution. Like his ability to code has been unfairly distributed across the industry. But if you're listening to this and you're skeptical to AI, I hate to tell you that it's here and that it's happening and the best engineers are engineering in phenomenal ways. I'm also happy to tell you it's nowhere near too late to adopt these tools. The hype slop lords on Twitter that are just saying random stupid things and making everyone get triggered and upset are wrong.

1:32:30They've always been here. They've existed throughout the industry. Dumb people have dumb takes on tech. The good people that are good at engineering look at this as a thing to engineer and they just engineer it. And so it has been amazing to have that do over. And it taught me so many lessons that I knew in an abstract way after building software for 20 years, but now I really know it.

1:32:50Jerod Santo:Yeah. Do you think, there's one part of my question that you didn't answer very well, and I'm just curious about this, and that's fine, is the redo part of it. Do you feel like, you know, I wouldn't want to say that necessarily because I'm not sure of the actual code. I haven't read it because it's not open source, and that's cool. But when we look at Niki and the opportunity to redo, You mentioned it's not quite where Vitesse is at. Will it be eventually? Of course. Yep. But was it a joy for you and for others that were involved in writing this code or, you know, operating the AI that wrote the code and all the wisdom that came from that?

1:33:31Jerod Santo:Was it cool? Was it fun to do a redo or a take two on what Vitesse was for MySQL to do what Niki is for Postgres? members of that team have told me that they're having the most fun of their career like yeah just to start with an empty repo heck yeah like we had this meeting we all got together and we just talked about like how are we going to build this like what are the main lessons we learned from taking vitess and like vitess was built by very smart people at google right and they they they did an incredible thing breaking out of google and did all these things and like i said vitess has grown and become a real mature product in the last five years in the last five years since 2021 its usage has gone up 65 000 it's pretty good um it's used by more people now than it ever has been um but like there's nothing like that getting it on all of your like washing all your sins away and trying again and protest is an amazing piece of software but of course if you can just start from like you do it some days you do it just anyway right you like take one crack at something and go okay i learned like i felt around i learned all the things um i'm going to just refresh and just like do the first shot again and it works um and it goes well and so doing that a decade scale with massive customers running on it you just make things differently like vitess is still a phenomenal piece of engineering and it is far superior to nikki is right now or anything else out there in terms of database scalability but over time Nicky may outdo it just from the sheer nature that it's like the architecture is different and we're very very excited about it and we are excited to keep pushing Vitesse, Vitesse is getting new things added continually because of some of the things that MySQL can do, like I wouldn't say one's going to be better actually than the other, it's going to be different but taking a database system that's similar to MySQL in architecture there's still a SQL database and then doing it again incredible fun like the real do-over was incredible fun everyone's enjoyed it and I feel very lucky to watch that teamwork yeah both sides of the major database coin my sequel and Postgres will forever be in some version of a war um we've always been around here Postgres for life so thank you for coming around Sam even though you feel that Postgres is in fact inferior to MySQL, and we'll leave that for a different day.

1:36:03Oh, can I hit that nuance there? Sure, sure. It is just different, right? MySQL lost the crown because they stopped listening to their users. They stopped building for developers. It is a very good database to operate, and I think it is still easier to operate than Postgres, right? Like high availability is easier, all of these things. We run into so many issues with customers, and you just have to explain to them, this is how Postgres does it. vacuuming is bad because it's a core thing like yeah like it's a core decision similar to the replication is not as how i would like it to be but it's different they have a different philosophy and they've achieved something phenomenal they it is the default database now because people have done a good job of helping you operate it heroku us the major clouds have taken that pain away and so now you're left with a dev interface and the extensions ecosystem so much better so much better so i love postgres now like getting to work with that audience and see these brilliant and amazing companies and using it and then to bring something truly differentiated from our biases in the mysql world it's phenomenal so i wouldn't say one's better or worse they're just different but like they will get better over time or like they all wear them i hope we can play a

1:37:18Jerod Santo:role in making both better continually yeah well you're a a minute or two away from a customer call And I appreciate you going literally to the one yard line with me on this podcast. Is there anything you want to say in closing, just as we tail out and the show anything whatsoever? I loved the episode we recorded all those years ago. It was one of my favorite that I've ever done. It's one of the ones that we've been, people have referred to over the years and people still, you know, that was maybe how they heard a plant scale. And they're very complimentary about how we both did on that show. And so I'm really glad to be back.

1:37:54And it's amazing to see these enduring things that go through this. The industry has changed a lot while you do what you do. And so it's amazing to have something enduring that we anchor on. And I enjoy listening and I've enjoyed being part of it. So I just want to say thank you, Adam, for everything you've done for all of us that are listeners. And for building something that you should be very proud of and that we like subscribing to. And that I really enjoyed being part of too. And I'm very happy to be back. with a company that's defaulted live with hopefully users listening now and potential users in the future.

1:38:30So thank you to yourself and your audience and everyone involved. You've got something enduring and really amazing.

1:38:36Jerod Santo:Well, thank you. Thank you very much. It's been a lot of work, as you know, over the years. I mentioned the pod. Our inception was, our birth date was November 2009. So we've been here for a very long time. We're coming up on our next birthday here later this year and i forget how many years it's been but as long as i care about this community which i think will be the day i die i'll be producing some version of a podcast hopefully is always the change law because i feel like the name we chose changelaw.com even is like you can't erase it it's an it's an institution it may change and have different variations over the years but i feel like we're we've always struck the right balance of who to talk to why to talk to them etc and obviously having you a part of that has been amazing so thank you sam and thank you for all the work you do at planet scale and the whole team there and no thanks go to our customers being you it's not me it's our customers we're only here because our customers thank you to all of them um we love our customers and they're you know they're very special people but like you have truly achieved the change log for the industry you've been doing this long you've tracked yeah man the change you know what you should do is you should go back and like reflect on old episodes i bet you've got some amazing people that aren't like there's like you could do a super car yeah i mean like it has really been the changelog for the industry and you should keep going because we're about to enter a new era that will be fun and different and really cool i think so too this next era is gonna be interesting and uh i i sure hope we all endure it as you've said i i sure hope we can and we do because things change seemingly every single day.

1:40:11Jerod Santo:But Sam, thank you so much for being a friend, coming back on the pod, sharing all your wisdom and really just sharing the struggle of what it takes to last in this industry and what it takes to be a great player in this industry. I appreciate your perspective, your wisdom, and your team, your product, and your customers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

1:40:31You better keep that glazing in. If I hear that edited out, I will be furious at you. You better sit there and have other people go, wow, yeah, actually now i think about it adam is amazing and we're grateful oh man you better keep it in i will be so mad you'll get my twitter if you don't well friends thanks for tuning in to this

1:40:49Jerod Santo:episode of the change law joined by sam lambert ceo of planet scale big fan of what they're doing over there love the way sam has led this company you know love the almost died but not default dead now they are default alive and thriving which is cool databases have been all the rage for a very long time for obvious reasons and now in this agentic era we're in with agent scale being slung around everywhere we need planet scale we need planet scales to focus on my sequel to focus on postgres to focus on nikki to focus on metal to focus on mvme based databases and And that's cool stuff. And so I hope you enjoyed the show.

1:41:31Jerod Santo:A massive thank you to our friends who have sponsored this pod. We got our good friends over at Buildkite. Our good friends, obviously, and partners over at Fly. And our good friends over at Coda.com. And of course, to the Beat Freak in residence, Break Master Cylinder. All right, friends, this show's done. We'll see you again very soon.

1:42:09Win it.

1:42:10Jerod Santo:Win it. It really whips the. King of. Yeah.