Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:06:23 · Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Paul Copplestone
[00:06:23] S1: I mean, that was basically true, like, two years ago or one year ago, but definitely not true this year. [00:06:28] S2: Yeah. I was just talking to someone actually this last weekend if it's the builder category. It's like a fintech founder just exited his company for like over $1,000,000,000. And he's always been sort of product adjacent, like studying math at like as an undergrad and sort of like kind of could pull together some Ruby scripts but like always needed an engineer to like build the software. And now side projects, he's just building his own stuff and he has all the knowledge from how to build a fintech company. So he can actually build pretty sophisticated just like for his own personal finances like balance sheets and tracking software and knows how to like integrate in with banks. He's writing all the integrations from scratch. It's just like the kind of software that would never have been built even two years ago. [00:07:08] S0: These are the perfect type of builder as well because like developers like me, I have very, like, developer focused ideas and things that I wanna build. But then you've got all these domain experts, and they know exactly the niches of, oh, this is an unsolved problem in my niche, and so they're actually able now to, like, dig right into those niches without having to convince someone else to join them. I think you guys were talking about this, weren't you, in NYC, like, the profile shifting even from from who you're bringing into the cohort?
00:07:08 · Paul Copplestone, Garry Tan
[00:07:08] S0: These are the perfect type of builder as well because like developers like me, I have very, like, developer focused ideas and things that I wanna build. But then you've got all these domain experts, and they know exactly the niches of, oh, this is an unsolved problem in my niche, and so they're actually able now to, like, dig right into those niches without having to convince someone else to join them. I think you guys were talking about this, weren't you, in NYC, like, the profile shifting even from from who you're bringing into the cohort? [00:07:39] S1: I think that if you look at the sort of era of, what, 2022, 2025, there's sort of this real shift thinking like, well, AI is coming, and suddenly having software engineering as a, you know, core... You know, you'd need a technical cofounder no matter what. That was, like, a a mega idea that, you know, really came to the fore at YC during that time period. It was always sort of true, but, like, sort of doubled down on that. And then really in the last year, we sort of said, actually, yeah, builders. Like, we're starting to see people who are able to, like... I mean, the much harder thing to do is to know what to build. You know, being able to build is something that anyone can sort of have on tap now, and that's actually a really cool thing. Like, can you imagine all the things that never would have built exactly for what you said? It's like, oh, we know that people would buy this, we know that there's a problem here, But at the margins, those people couldn't convince an engineer to work on it.