Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:07:39 · Garry Tan, S3
[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. [00:08:39] S3: Do you have some examples, Paul, of, like, apps that people have built on Supabase, maybe just for themselves, are the kinds of things that would have never been built before?
00:08:39 · S3, Paul Copplestone
[00:08:39] S3: Do you have some examples, Paul, of, like, apps that people have built on Supabase, maybe just for themselves, are the kinds of things that would have never been built before? [00:08:49] S0: Oh, well, one kind of cool example was at our conference. We had the conference here, and afterwards, this guy from Brazil came up to me, and he's built an entire taxi app from his phone. And it's, kind of like a a little mini Uber for his local market. And I just thought... He's a taxi driver himself. I don't actually know why he built it, but the fact that he could build it. And he came up extremely grateful and that he could do this. And also, like, with the type of energy... He's... He was, like, 50 years old or something like that, but he had the energy of a, like, teenager building suddenly, which I think is kinda cool because now it's kind of getting to that stage where I I think it's a little bit... There's so much uncertainty around, like, what is the future of work going to look like? But in this category of builders, there's that excitement of the future, and that's really what I love about Supabase. It's like something that people can come in and those who are uncertain now are discovering this skill set and these opportunities where previously they were just blue collar workers, these type of profile. [00:09:59] S3: Harj, you've been building some of your own personal software recently. Yeah. Can you talk about what you've been cooking up?
00:10:03 · Harj Taggar
[00:10:03] S2: It's just grown... Yeah. It's sort of like the end of one stuff, but it's just grown out of getting really addicted to OpenClaw. Actually, like maybe six months ago now, I'm embarrassed I said it, I said like there was gonna be no UIs and it was all just gonna be like chat through my OpenClaw. But it turns out actually, and I also was really determined not to use a database for a long time. I just wanted everything to be in markdown. But yeah, it turns out actually you hit a point where like a database is useful and you do need UI. And so I've just been building that over the last couple of weeks in particular. So it's like, I mean, I call it control tower, it's just like sort of every section of my life. I know like I have like a UI to like triage all my emails so I don't need to read my inbox. Finances, tracking like spending, health, like both like tracks my weight and my workouts and everything is all in like one place. But like the magic of it is sometimes it's a mind boggling thought actually is like I think about like the finance section of like my one app for myself is better. I think is at least feature parity to Mint or Monarch or all of these things. But in some ways actually better because you can start doing really personalized context. Like it can figure out what a transaction is by looking up in my, like the name in my g brain to figure out who that person is. Oh, like that, I know that's like, and categorize it correctly. And that was like a whole company, like several startups just doing personal finance and now you can just build it for yourself. And I don't need it to work for anyone else or have anyone else's opinion on it. It's just like kinda like my thing. It's kinda awesome.
00:11:31 · Paul Copplestone, Harj Taggar
[00:11:31] S0: We see a lot of that one where it's finance and health, basically, the two, like, ones where you want your own Yeah. Data. Yeah. So we see a lot of people doing that and syncing all the devices Yep. To to a single database is kind of a Yeah. Magic skill, and you can, like, prompt it to, like, build these correlations across [00:11:49] S2: So correlations are really bad. Again, if you just take the health example, it's like, yeah, all of that data is in my two phase database, but then it also has access to my calendar, so it knows things. It's like, your weight went up recently, but, like, you were traveling, so that's okay. Like, you can just, like, get back on track Yeah. Next week, and it just has, like, this context that's really valuable. [00:12:10] S0: I also found that as I started to use the personal agents, like, I'm getting a little bit paranoid that I'm putting all of, like, all of the, like, routines and everything, and the CRM is becoming, like, boxed into one agent. And so now I'm slowly extracting it out into one so that if I wanna attach different agents on top, then I know that, like, I can use any any agent. So the CRM is another really critical one. [00:12:36] S2: Yeah. That's why you guys are so valuable. It's like, actually, like, it's like the... It's sort of like the store record or to the the the database is actually the thing that's valuable. Like you don't you want to own your own database and then build all the applications or agents on top of it versus having that all in like someone else's database. Mhmm.
00:12:36 · Harj Taggar, S3
[00:12:36] S2: Yeah. That's why you guys are so valuable. It's like, actually, like, it's like the... It's sort of like the store record or to the the the database is actually the thing that's valuable. Like you don't you want to own your own database and then build all the applications or agents on top of it versus having that all in like someone else's database. Mhmm. [00:12:54] S3: Which is a totally wild idea. Like if you just think about the history of databases, it used to be the case that, like, the world had only a relatively small number of very large databases run by, like, large companies. And I remember, like, when Supabase got started, you kinda had this idea that they should be, like, really easy for everyone to, like, make a database. And it almost, like, didn't make sense at the time why so many people would wanna do that. Because unless you can write code, what can you do with a database? And there's not... Just not that many people who can actually, like, write code and build a personal CRM like that. Like, it's just, like, too much work for most people pre AI.
00:12:54 · S3, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, Paul Copplestone
[00:12:54] S3: Which is a totally wild idea. Like if you just think about the history of databases, it used to be the case that, like, the world had only a relatively small number of very large databases run by, like, large companies. And I remember, like, when Supabase got started, you kinda had this idea that they should be, like, really easy for everyone to, like, make a database. And it almost, like, didn't make sense at the time why so many people would wanna do that. Because unless you can write code, what can you do with a database? And there's not... Just not that many people who can actually, like, write code and build a personal CRM like that. Like, it's just, like, too much work for most people pre AI. [00:13:28] S2: Another example actually where Supabase is really valuable for me is the other section I have is just a file upload. It sounds very simple, but any file I can forward via email, just dump it in this UI, and then my agent like figures out what that is and how it's relevant to my life and like what to do with it. But that's all being stored on Supabase. And so yeah, in general it's just like Supabase is actually gonna end up having like all of the data about my life in a single place. I would never have thought about wanting a personal database a year ago, because it wouldn't have made any sense. But now, that's actually the most valuable thing. [00:14:05] S1: Yeah, you have an S3 compatible Supabase files thing, [00:14:07] S0: and Yeah. [00:14:08] S1: All my stuff is in that. [00:14:09] S0: Oh, really? Nice. Yeah. [00:14:10] S2: Yeah. Yeah.