Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:23:32 · Harj Taggar, Paul Copplestone
[00:23:32] S2: And Yeah. I mean, is what I was asking about sort of like how you think about the enterprise early because I think, I mean, if go even further back, this is sort of like Heroku was sort of the first where it's like, hey, like just start with like the best developer experience and then scale up. It is actually can be quite hard to like scale up with people. And I think like, you know, Heroku sort of, I don't think could quite bridge that gap to how do you keep people on you like as the apps get bigger and and need to be more performant etcetera etcetera. But like historically every company's had to figure that out. Mhmm. And I know you guys are looking that way but you might not have to. Like honestly, the the the market for just owning like, I know, call it zero to 10 whatever, like keeps expanding at this rate, it's gonna be huge. [00:24:14] S0: Yeah. We want it all. Yeah. Yeah. So we might not have to, but we'll definitely do it. And, like, kudos to Heroku. I think they popularized Postgres. But at the time, Postgres was pretty... It was still pretty nascent and it still got some scaling limitations. And so, yeah, we've had to wrap Postgres and some tooling that will allow it to scale indefinitely. But... [00:24:41] S2: I mean, I guess a better analogy for you guys is more like AWS was able to actually like get people early and like [00:24:46] S0: And scale. [00:24:46] S2: Yeah. And so do do you... Like what are the lessons maybe? Like how how do you think about making sure you can scale infinitely? The
00:24:46 · Harj Taggar, Paul Copplestone
[00:24:46] S2: Yeah. And so do do you... Like what are the lessons maybe? Like how how do you think about making sure you can scale infinitely? The [00:24:53] S0: lesson, I think that they... I heard a stat and was telling me. I might get it wrong, so fact check me. But something like 40% of AWS's revenue comes from, like, startups that started on them and then scaled up. And, like, that's the category that we want. You know? Like, we know that to convince people to migrate to... From one database provider to another is near impossible. And so we just wanna be there on day one, make sure that they have a great time, and then make sure that they actually don't wanna leave. [00:25:24] S2: The same business model to Stripe. I mean, it's, like, basically the best business model on Earth if you can get it. But you get them on day one and then just scale with, like, the fastest growing companies in the world. [00:25:32] S0: Yeah. Definitely. And you just do that for a generation. Yeah. And you become a generational business. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Yeah. It's hard for us because what does day one look like? That's rapidly shaped Yeah. Changing. So in the past, day one for me was always like YC customers. And now day one is becoming like, okay. Everyone's a builder. What are they gonna use? What are the modalities? What... How are they gonna choose their databases? These are tricky questions.
00:25:32 · Paul Copplestone, Garry Tan, S3
[00:25:32] S0: Yeah. Definitely. And you just do that for a generation. Yeah. And you become a generational business. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Yeah. It's hard for us because what does day one look like? That's rapidly shaped Yeah. Changing. So in the past, day one for me was always like YC customers. And now day one is becoming like, okay. Everyone's a builder. What are they gonna use? What are the modalities? What... How are they gonna choose their databases? These are tricky questions. [00:25:59] S1: YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early, and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay. Back to the video. [00:26:13] S3: It's kind of a different customer segment. Like like, initially, when you started, like, there was not an individual market for databases. Like, the idea of a database company being a direct to consumer [00:26:23] S0: Mhmm. [00:26:23] S3: Yeah. Business would have just, like, sounded like a Syntax error. Yes. But now you actually have two segments. You have the, like, early stage companies that that that has this powerful Stripe business model, but you're also, like, selling directly to consumers or to their agents perhaps. [00:26:38] S0: Yes. Yes. Yes. [00:26:39] S3: And those use cases presumably will not scale the way startups will, but they might just, like, continue to use you for, like, for the rest of their lives because you're powering the app that, like, runs their personal finance software or your taxi cab company or something like that.
00:26:39 · S3, Paul Copplestone, Harj Taggar
[00:26:39] S3: And those use cases presumably will not scale the way startups will, but they might just, like, continue to use you for, like, for the rest of their lives because you're powering the app that, like, runs their personal finance software or your taxi cab company or something like that. [00:26:53] S0: Yeah. And as their lives grow and they accumulate information, that is basically an index of our our own growth, you know. So they just store more. People are collecting more data. This kind of prosumer market is essentially a a good growth factor for us. [00:27:09] S2: I guess, do you think about the personal agent world in that... Through that perspective then if sort of coding agents want Supabase, that's very clear, do you think about the next phase as being assuming we all have personal databases, like do you need to do anything to make sure that it's easy for personal agents to talk to you? Is that any different, or is it based the same thing?
00:27:09 · Harj Taggar, Paul Copplestone
[00:27:09] S2: I guess, do you think about the personal agent world in that... Through that perspective then if sort of coding agents want Supabase, that's very clear, do you think about the next phase as being assuming we all have personal databases, like do you need to do anything to make sure that it's easy for personal agents to talk to you? Is that any different, or is it based the same thing? [00:27:29] S0: Yeah. I'm very bullish now on personal agents after a week of my EA being away and me learning exactly what they can do. And now I'm just kind of obsessed with the idea of building for personal agents. And it's true that I I said to our company, like, we're code first. Like, we're building for humans that are doing code first, but, actually, we're doing it for agents. Those humans pretty soon won't actually be interacting. So, like, the way I've been building is I'm using dots. I just sit on a phone call with it all the time and I'm chatting to it and saying, oh, can you make these changes? And my my kind of heuristic to make sure I'm building or dogfooding correctly is that I just don't look at the code. And I don't allow myself ever to check the architecture except when I wanna check that it's actually building things correctly. But when I'm making these changes, I just wanna talk to it and see what it can change. [00:28:25] S2: What of us?
00:28:25 · Harj Taggar, Paul Copplestone, S3, Garry Tan
[00:28:25] S2: What of us? [00:28:26] S0: What of It's crazy as well. Like, it's doing some phenomenal stuff that I just... It it feels like something out of a sci fi movie from, like, two years ago. But now, like, I'm having so many of these moments that I'm just mind blowing. If you had shown someone this six months ago, they would've just thought it was impossible. [00:28:48] S3: Yeah. You... I was at your Supabase Select conference a couple weeks ago, which is an awesome conference, by the way. And I had this, like, kinda crazy thought. I was sitting there, and you're talking about all these awesome new features that Supabase was putting out. And I was like, you know, if I was building an app on Supabase, maybe? I wouldn't even care to understand all these awesome features myself. I wanna, like, send my agent to Supabase Select to, like, listen to all the awesome new features and figure out how to integrate them into my code base. [00:29:17] S0: Oh, that's wild. A truly virtual conference. We should do that. A conference just for agents. [00:29:22] S3: For agents. Yeah. A conference for agents. [00:29:24] S0: They all turn up live. [00:29:26] S3: Live. They can like talk to each other, exchange tips on like, you [00:29:29] S0: know, this book live. [00:29:30] S2: Wow. We can bridge it. You can sort of airdrop in like the markdown files for everyone. But you have to be there in, like, the the audience to get it. [00:29:38] S1: We'll call it the artifactory. Yeah. [00:29:42] S0: Oh, man. I quite like that.