Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:00:00 · Paul Copplestone, Garry Tan
[00:00:00] S0: I'm genuinely excited about what the future could be for a lot of people. The thing that I really love about Supabase is that, like, I see a lot of entrepreneurship because of the platform. I certainly think that it'll be the case that everyone in the world with access to AI will become a builder of some sort. Like, you can build anything. You can customize it. You wanna make tweaks to some app, some UI, then you don't have to be beholden to to someone. I'm pretty pumped about 2027, actually. [00:00:36] S1: Welcome back to another episode of the Lightcone. Today, we're joined by Paul Copplestone, cofounder and CEO of Supabase, the open source Postgres backend that's become the default database inside tools like Claude Code and Codex. Supabase now has 13,000,000 users, and it's spinning up over a million databases a week. Paul, welcome to the Light Cone. Thanks for having me. So to start off, know, famously YC gives you a t shirt on the first day of YC that says make something people want, but increasingly, all of us are realizing it's make something agents want, and your company really exemplifies that. You know, something like 70% of the new activity is from agents. Isn't that crazy? [00:01:18] S0: Yeah. It's wild. It's wild. I think, like, this year, especially what we've seen in terms of the numbers, the inflection, is just a huge shift towards agents.
00:01:18 · Paul Copplestone, Harj Taggar, S3
[00:01:18] S0: Yeah. It's wild. It's wild. I think, like, this year, especially what we've seen in terms of the numbers, the inflection, is just a huge shift towards agents. [00:01:29] S2: Just so we can understand just how much you guys have grown, because it's kind of mind boggling. Yeah. Like, what are the numbers you care about, and where were you lot... Like, this time last year, and where are you now? [00:01:38] S0: I think this time last year, so yeah, we're 13,000,000 sign ups now, probably twelve months back we would have been around three, perhaps, this year. Revenue will grow Forex, we've got, trying to think what [00:01:55] S2: what's million databases being created per week at the moment, kind of over [00:01:58] S0: a million. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:01:59] S2: What was it this time last year? [00:02:01] S0: I think, actually, if databases under management now are approaching 50,000,000, and this time last year, it was 8,000,000. So it's just a huge, huge inflection. [00:02:12] S3: What's been driving that? [00:02:13] S0: First, people building with abandon software engineers. Second, I think that there are a lot more builders coming online. So what was traditionally someone with a software engineering background is now... It's now becoming possible for non engineers to actually build things on top of Supabase.
00:02:13 · Paul Copplestone, Garry Tan, S3
[00:02:13] S0: First, people building with abandon software engineers. Second, I think that there are a lot more builders coming online. So what was traditionally someone with a software engineering background is now... It's now becoming possible for non engineers to actually build things on top of Supabase. [00:02:34] S1: So this is a really big shift. What have you guys actually done to facilitate or encourage this shift from... You know, obviously, software engineers are gonna keep choosing Supabase, but, you know, how do you get the agents to come over in the first place? [00:02:50] S0: Yeah. We largely have seen, like, three chapters in Supabase. We started as a dashboard company, then we went to an API company, and now we're very much a code first company. So we try to have the modalities that the agents really want to build with, which is code first. They really want to use CLIs most of the time. The other thing is just being chosen as a default in the LLMs, which I think we were a huge beneficiary of our of our... The timing of which we started to become a default choice for databases. How [00:03:24] S3: much do think being open source played a role in it too? Because the agents love open source things.
00:03:24 · S3, Paul Copplestone, Garry Tan
[00:03:24] S3: much do think being open source played a role in it too? Because the agents love open source things. [00:03:29] S0: You know, it's hard to know the counterfactual, but I think it was critical. I mean, everything that we do is open source and it seems to have been a a huge benefit to us. And we do it in a very open source y way. Like, we tried to support existing tools. It's not just Supabase tools. We we support, like, Postgres is a very famous tool for the Postgres ecosystem, and we help to maintain that. So we kinda got sprawl across many communities. [00:03:57] S1: I would guess that the agents actually really like open source because when something goes wrong, it can just look at the source. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I noticed the agents really like feeling powerful and they love data. And there's nothing more frustrating than hitting a brick wall, and then you don't know what's going on and you can't fix it. [00:04:14] S0: I think it's going to be increasingly important as well because now with, you know, security being so important, I think a lot of the, say, enterprises are going to want to inspect the source code to know that it's secure. And if you've got closed source code, then you probably won't want to adopt them as a vendor. [00:04:34] S1: Is developer even still sort of the the core user that you're going after? Or how, you know, how do you think about it now in 2026?
00:04:34 · Garry Tan, Paul Copplestone
[00:04:34] S1: Is developer even still sort of the the core user that you're going after? Or how, you know, how do you think about it now in 2026? [00:04:43] S0: Yeah. I think that the world where we're moving and at least what we're seeing this year is, like, kind of builders. Builders are coming online and it's, like, a crazy amount of people coming online. The crazy thing about this year is usually when you're, like, our top of funnel, our sign ups are accelerating. And usually when this happens, you see a lot of the other numbers start to decline, activation, conversion. But actually, this year, all of them are kinda going up into the right, which is a bit insane just because the models are getting so good at building. And we're starting to see people who traditionally wouldn't have a software engineering background able to come in and build things. [00:05:25] S1: That's the distinction is, like, builder as in they might not be actually software engineers. Mhmm. They might just be someone who needs to build a thing, and they're just, you know, popping open Claude Code, and then it turns out files only get you so far. Mhmm.
00:05:25 · Garry Tan, Paul Copplestone
[00:05:25] S1: That's the distinction is, like, builder as in they might not be actually software engineers. Mhmm. They might just be someone who needs to build a thing, and they're just, you know, popping open Claude Code, and then it turns out files only get you so far. Mhmm. [00:05:40] S0: Yeah. And in some ways, like, this category of people have all these pent up ideas that they could never convince a software engineer to, like, help them build, and now they don't have to convince anyone. They've got all these ideas that they're churning out. Software engineers still make up a huge portion, but the rate of the growth of the builder segment is is pretty pretty big. Also, like, I don't know where the ceiling is on this one. Like, I I remember our early investors were saying, ah, PLG, product like growth, is gonna tap out at this revenue, and you'll have to start moving into this segment of the market. And there just appears to be no ceiling so far, and I I can't see where it stops. [00:06:23] S1: I mean, that was basically true, like, two years ago or one year ago, but definitely not true this year.