Supabase duplicate

1. 0:00 – 0:04

   Intro

   1. SWswyx0:00

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:04 – 2:05

   Supabase Select headlines: introducing long-running Supabase Compute

   1. SWswyx0:04

      Okay. This podcast has been six years in the making. [laughs] We're excited to have, uh, Coppol and Ant in the studio. Welcome, guys.

   2. PCPaul Copplestone0:12

      Thanks. Thanks for having us.

   3. SPSpeaker0:13

      Thank you.

   4. SWswyx0:13

      Uh, we're recording this ahead of Supabase Select, which, you know, it's your, it's your big customer conference, and we'll release this after the, the conference. But I just wanted to sort of celebrate the journey that you guys have been on. I've seen you guys since you guys finished YC, and you were, like, in that place in Singapore where you were sort of celebrating things, and I, you know... I, I met you guys for the first time, and I was like, "What is this, like, hot database company that, like, got se- like, soft launch on Hacker News by, like, you know, some random user or something?" Um, anyway, congrats on all the, the, the success. What are you announcing the headlines at Select? Let's just get right into that.

   5. PCPaul Copplestone0:52

      Yeah. Yeah, sure. Um, so there's quite a few headlines. We've got a lot to cover. The main ones would be starting off with, um, Compute. So we offer a product called Edge Functions, and Edge Functions are powered by Deno, and they have basically a two-second limit. What we're finding is that, well, what we've heard from our community and for a long time, is that they wanna run much longer workloads. They wanna do things like chunking embe- embedding. So tomorrow we're announcing, and by the time this comes out, Supabase Compute, which is you can run anything. It's long running, it's serverless, it is running in the same private network as your database, so it's colocated, has very good latency, so you can run Postgres connections directly from Compute. And you can run anything inside it, so it's no longer constrained to just Deno. You can use it with Rust or Python. You can run agents inside it. It's basically just a, a full compute instance.

   6. SWswyx1:49

      Let's call it, uh, the comparable offerings in other clouds that others might be familiar with, uh, would this be-

   7. PCPaul Copplestone1:55

      Yeah. So something like a, a Lambda function, but, um, the container type Lambda function.

   8. SWswyx2:01

      Okay.

   9. PCPaul Copplestone2:02

      Yeah.

   10. SWswyx2:02

       Okay.

   11. PCPaul Copplestone2:02

       You can run a full container, basically.

   12. SWswyx2:04

       And then there's the other stuff.

3. 2:05 – 3:24

   AurionDB beta: faster Postgres storage engine and open-source licensing

   1. PCPaul Copplestone2:05

      Yeah. And then we have, well, three dem- uh, innovations on the database space. So the first one, which we talked about last year, which was AurionDB. AurionDB, we've basically put it through the ringer [chuckles] in the past year to make sure that it is rock solid and ready for the Postgres ecosystem. The three innovations are basically, uh, performance, scaling up, and scaling out. Uh, Postgres touches on, uh, sorry, AurionDB touches on performance. It is a drop-in replacement for the c- the current Postgres storage engine, which is Heap, and it runs about hun- 1.5 to two times faster, and you don't have to change anything else. It's just completely compatible. It completely removes the need for some of these background tasks, like vacuum and bloat, so it's actually very efficient for your database as well. And basically, the innovation that, or the work that we had to do this year was put it through pgregress, full compatibility with Postgres, antithesis. We put it through TPCC nightly benchmarks and Jepson to make sure that it basically can never lose data. So we're releasing it tomorrow in full beta, and we also made it Apache 2 licensed. It comes with a patent, and the Apache 2 license covers the patent. So we actually acquired the technology, continued to develop it, and then we paid for the patent and are now giving it away for free.

4. 3:24 – 5:00

   Multigress: a new Postgres operator to prevent data loss and enable sharding

   1. SWswyx3:24

      One thing that you mentioned in passing, which I still don't-- I can't get over, is that you tested every operator, and you said, um, every operator drops data in some situation.

   2. PCPaul Copplestone3:35

      Well, so this is for the second-

   3. SWswyx3:36

      Okay

   4. PCPaul Copplestone3:36

      ... the second one, so scaling up.

   5. SWswyx3:38

      I see. So that's, that's Multigress.

   6. PCPaul Copplestone3:40

      Yes. So Multigress is the second big announcement. Basically, we looked at the Postgres ecosystem, and we looked at all the operators. An operator, for those who aren't familiar, when you run Postgres, you start with a single node, but then with almost any database, you wanna run multiple nodes, and you want things like failover, you want it to manage backups. So usually you have this thing called an operator, which can run the entire cluster for you. So there's quite a few operators in the Postgres ecosystem, and what we had found was that under, um, certain conditions, every single one of them could lose data. And so we decided with Multigress to do a ground up rewrite of the entire structure of a, of a operator. And so Multigress is essentially, while our initial goal is to become, or give sharding to the Postgres community, what has turned out to be is this entire operating system. And we actually ran it, uh, again through very rigorous testing, and we've done a thou- uh, 1,000 sequential failovers, and it didn't lose any data, and we've tested it in basically every way we can, clobbering it to see whether it will ever lose data. So we're very confident now in its stability, and so we're releasing that one as well tomorrow. It's completely open source. It will be on our platform for customers and, uh, invite only, so people who are running serious workloads can come to us, and we'll start helping them to scale up.

5. 5:00 – 7:15

   Roadmap and ecosystem framing: sharding timeline and design partners

   1. SWswyx5:00

      Is this the full completion of Multigress being fully sort of parallel to Vitess? Or is there still le- something left to go?

   2. PCPaul Copplestone5:07

      No, actually, yeah, it was quite interesting. So Sugu, um, originally created, uh, Vitess in, for the MySQL e- ecosystem, but specifically for sharding. And actually, when he came along, he said, "Well, the number one goal that we wanna do for this time," because we're always catching up on compatibility when we use Vitess, you always had to change things as you move to sharded, so change some queries. So he said, "I wanna focus only on compatibility first." And so the way we've designed it is in such a way, this ground up rewrite, is specifically so that we know when we release sharding, you actually won't have to change anything for your database. You'll continue to run the same queries, and Multigress will just be able to handle it, zero changes to your code.

   3. SWswyx5:54

      That, I mean, that's, uh, incredible vision and the, the fact that you've been able to do it in two years.

   4. PCPaul Copplestone5:59

      That's one year.

   5. SWswyx6:00

      One year.

   6. PCPaul Copplestone6:00

      Um, so we haven't released sharding yet. I've seen the early prototypes and the designs for how we're doing it, and it should, should, some of it should land by probably early next year, depending on some of the things that are happening on our platform. We've got a lot going on, but, um, but we're very confident. We're, and we're, we're happy with the progress. It's, it's been pretty good.

   7. SWswyx6:21

      Yeah. I mean, I think this is the last piece for the total domination of Postgres.

   8. PCPaul Copplestone6:25

      Yeah.

   9. SWswyx6:26

      Right?

   10. PCPaul Copplestone6:26

       Yeah. That's, uh-

   11. SWswyx6:28

       And for those who don't know, you know, look up Vitess, uh, it powers YouTube, powers, what else, GitHub, uh, everything.

   12. PCPaul Copplestone6:34

       Yeah.

   13. SWswyx6:34

       If workloads were ever to shift away from MySQL, you need this-

   14. PCPaul Copplestone6:38

       Yeah

   15. SWswyx6:38

       ... to, to Postgres.

   16. PCPaul Copplestone6:39

       Yeah.

   17. SWswyx6:39

       And that's then for Supabase to win.

   18. PCPaul Copplestone6:41

       And hopefully it, it's not just for Supabase customers, right? Like it's fully open source.

   19. SWswyx6:45

       It's community things.

   20. PCPaul Copplestone6:46

       It's anyone who's, who's running Postgres-

   21. SWswyx6:48

       Yeah

   22. PCPaul Copplestone6:48

       ... at scale, um, should be able to use Multigress.

   23. SWswyx6:51

       Yeah, I'm sure like every coalition, every company that's involved in Postgres in some way is contributing to this thing, right? 'Cause we all want this.

   24. PCPaul Copplestone6:56

       Yeah, yeah. We've got a whole design partner program, so, um, we're working with the likes of Booz Allen, we're working with Postman, we're working with Perplexity. So yeah, lots of customers coming on board. They, a lot of people need it. They're running Postgres at scale, and they need something to sc- help them scale up.

   25. SWswyx7:13

       Yeah. Third.

6. 7:15 – 10:08

   Scaling out: acquiring Turso and building “agentic databases” for billions of instances

   1. PCPaul Copplestone7:15

      Third one is, uh, yeah, so this one's a big one, um, scale out. At the moment, we launch about 5 million databases on our platform every single month, and kind of the future where we know we're going, we think that we're going to have to launch billions per month. And so scaling out is a whole different beast. So we decided that we would have to look at some new architectures and people within the space, the agentic database space, and there's no other leading database provider who does agentic well than Turso. And so actually tomorrow, and when this is announced, it would have come out, where we have announced that we've acquired Turso to help us power agentic databases.

   2. SWswyx7:58

      Yeah. That's an incredible... It, it's also, like, they're, they're primarily SQLite based, but it doesn't really matter, right? Like it's, th- it's, it's more about the architecture of, like, I guess, I don't have the word to describe how basically, like, broadcasts, is that the word? For, for scale out, right? Like, um, there's the idea for them scaling SQLite was that they would have, like, a single writer and, like, multiple readers.

   3. PCPaul Copplestone8:24

      Yeah. So, so SQLite itself, it's only a single writer. It's a file format. Um, so generally it's not thought of as a-

   4. SWswyx8:30

      Like sort of an MVCC for SQLite.

   5. PCPaul Copplestone8:32

      Yeah, ex- exactly. Exactly. So then they built this Turso architecture, which basically builds MVCC for SQLite so that you can have multiple writers.

   6. SWswyx8:42

      Yes.

   7. PCPaul Copplestone8:42

      And then it's also-

   8. SWswyx8:43

      And because SQLite is, has a weird license, they had to fork it.

   9. PCPaul Copplestone8:45

      They had to fork it.

   10. SWswyx8:46

       [laughs]

   11. PCPaul Copplestone8:46

       They originally started with LibSQL, and then they-

   12. SWswyx8:48

       [laughs]

   13. PCPaul Copplestone8:49

       ... they came along, and they did this other really cool architecture. And actually now the architecture, actually, it was very commonly discussed a few weeks ago, well, on S3. So some of the innovations in the database space are actually coming out of what's happening in object storage. So object storage has added a bunch of new features, which basically mean that you can start using it a little bit like a, a database. And because object storage itself is, I think it's 11 nines of, of data-

   14. SWswyx9:15

       Durability

   15. PCPaul Copplestone9:15

       ... durability.

   16. SWswyx9:16

       Yes.

   17. PCPaul Copplestone9:16

       Then-

   18. SWswyx9:16

       Which is not reliability, but whatever

   19. PCPaul Copplestone9:17

       ... yeah, not reliability, but it, it gives you what you need for, for, um, basically what you would typically have for a cluster of databases. It's kind of like your cluster underneath. So you can start doing some cool things like, yeah, there's quite a few popular databases now, or data use cases that are building directly to, on top of object storage. It's got some limitations, um, in our worldview. It's probably good for these smaller use cases in terms of transactions, because when you've got a transactional database, you've got to do a lot of reads and writes, and so in this case, you probably don't want to be doing something at massive scale on this, and that's why we have Multigress. But for these, what we're seeing, where we need to get to, these billions of databases, what we need them to be is a file format. And so that's where SQLite was super interesting.

   20. SWswyx10:07

       King.

7. 10:08 – 13:01

   Product packaging: keeping the Turso brand and launching Supabase Spark for prototypes

   1. PCPaul Copplestone10:08

      It's dominating. And actually, the thing that really piqued our interest, and I reached out to Glover, uh, I said, uh, he released a blog post on how they've done their rewrite, basically makes the, we have a pathway to get Postgres compatibility with their file format. So we're ac- acquiring them, and we're actually gonna keep the Turso brand. So Turso is gonna focus on SQLite, and then we're going to introduce this new smaller instance type on Supabase called Supabase Spark, and it'll be compatible with all our libraries, and you can have one database for any idea, any prototype that, that you want, and when it takes off, then you just upgrade to full Postgres databases all the way up to Multigress.

   2. SWswyx10:50

      I know you've been working on this for a while. This is the dream, right?

   3. PCPaul Copplestone10:52

      Yeah, yeah. There's been, both scaling up and scaling down has been one of the things that we've been trying to figure out how to do.

   4. SWswyx10:59

      Yeah.

   5. PCPaul Copplestone10:59

      And it's really when some of these innovations came along that we realized, oh, okay, we can do this.

   6. SWswyx11:04

      You know, you, you're going to 5 million a month. Let's say you see on the, the trajectory of b- billions per month. One of the secrets is they're actually kind of small databases.

   7. PCPaul Copplestone11:13

      Yeah.

   8. SWswyx11:13

      Right? Like these, these things are tiny. They're vibe coded apps. Like-

   9. PCPaul Copplestone11:16

      Yeah

   10. SWswyx11:16

       ... n- like I, I, I don't know if you have any insights on, on the, on like what features went there.

   11. PCPaul Copplestone11:20

       Yeah. I mean, until they get traction, right? And that's the thing is like once you hit the front page of Hacker News, you need to know that you can go far beyond that. Um, and so the whole idea with, with all of this was we need to make sure we've got a really smooth pathway to migrate between the backends, like zero downtime migrations. It's like we, it's just like a, a need to have. Because, like, we see now that there's a lot of non-technical builders who are building, like, whole companies, right? We have the, a customer, Magic School, and the guy was, like, a teacher, right? And he saw all these, like, uh, inefficiencies in teaching, like teachers spending time that, on, on tasks that could be automated. And so now you have these startups that start without a technical co-founder, without a CTO, and that's not, like-

   12. AWAnt Wilson12:07

       ... isolators incidents anymore. That's, like, becoming more-

   13. SWswyx12:11

       Everyone

   14. AWAnt Wilson12:11

       ... everyone's-

   15. SWswyx12:12

       Yeah

   16. AWAnt Wilson12:12

       ... like, a bu- a builder now. Um, and that's why we see, like, the growth we've seen over the last 18 months is crazy.

   17. SWswyx12:19

       It's good.

   18. AWAnt Wilson12:19

       Yeah, but, but it still feels, like, early. And I think, um, there's a much larger market of almost, like, consumer, like, builders, right? So people-

   19. SWswyx12:30

       Mm

   20. AWAnt Wilson12:31

       ... inside companies, people who wanna launch their own startups, which is gonna mean a lot more databases, which- [laughs]

   21. SWswyx12:38

       [laughs]

   22. AWAnt Wilson12:38

       ... like we said, like, if we give everyone a dedicated Postgres cluster, it's probably n- you know, we'll probably run out of physical computers in the, in the world pretty fast.

   23. SWswyx12:48

       Which is basically what's happening. [laughs]

   24. AWAnt Wilson12:49

       Yeah. [laughs]

   25. SWswyx12:50

       I mean, like, we've faced it throughout this year.

   26. AWAnt Wilson12:52

       [laughs]

   27. SWswyx12:52

       We just, our growth has, uh, has been, uh, one of the things that we've had to deal with in terms of capacity of computing.

   28. AWAnt Wilson13:00

       Yeah.

8. 13:01 – 17:34

   Community, memes, and early growth loops: Twitter strategy and Hacker News dynamics

   1. SWswyx13:01

      So congrats. Also, I will observe that I feel like Glauber is also a meme lord. Yeah. Well, that's one of the things-

   2. AWAnt Wilson13:07

      Right?

   3. SWswyx13:07

      ... why we like him.

   4. AWAnt Wilson13:08

      Like, I mean, like, come on.

   5. SWswyx13:09

      [laughs] Yeah, he's amazing.

   6. AWAnt Wilson13:10

      So for those who don't know, the, the person behind the Supabase memes is this guy.

   7. SWswyx13:13

      Yeah. [laughs]

   8. AWAnt Wilson13:14

      Uh, the, you know, um, low key, low key a killer-

   9. SWswyx13:17

      [laughs]

   10. AWAnt Wilson13:17

       ... I w- would say. And well, Glauber also.

   11. SWswyx13:19

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big time.

   12. AWAnt Wilson13:20

       Uh, any- I don't know if you guys ex- exchange notes on, like, what's funny and-

   13. SWswyx13:23

       Not yet

   14. AWAnt Wilson13:24

       ... things like that. No.

   15. SWswyx13:24

       No.

   16. AWAnt Wilson13:25

       Oh, really? That never came up?

   17. SWswyx13:26

       We're gonna give him, we're gonna give him access to the Supabase Twitter account-

   18. AWAnt Wilson13:28

       [laughs]

   19. SWswyx13:28

       ... for sure.

   20. AWAnt Wilson13:29

       Oh my God.

   21. SWswyx13:30

       Um, I c- I could do with some help. [laughs]

   22. AWAnt Wilson13:31

       Uh, yeah, yeah. Wait, is it still you?

   23. SWswyx13:33

       Uh, w- I... We've got a small-

   24. AWAnt Wilson13:34

       Okay. [laughs]

   25. SWswyx13:34

       ... team of, uh, teenagers now who help me out. [laughs]

   26. AWAnt Wilson13:38

       [laughs]

   27. SWswyx13:39

       But-

   28. AWAnt Wilson13:39

       You do workshops, right, every week?

   29. SWswyx13:40

       Yeah, but it, it's ha- We do a weekly workshop, a meme, basically weekly meme workshop, but it's hard to hire for because you need to understand the tech and understand, like, what developers find funny, basically, in order to do that type of marketing, right?

   30. AWAnt Wilson13:55

       Yeah. Um, I-
9. 17:34 – 20:45

   Origin story pivot: from “real-time Postgres” to “open source Firebase alternative” (and scaling pains)

   1. SWswyx17:34

      What else? I mean-

   2. AWAnt Wilson17:36

      I, I think that the, the top post there is interesting because-

   3. SWswyx17:39

      This is the launch post

   4. AWAnt Wilson17:40

      ... yeah, but, but it was someone else who launched us.

   5. SWswyx17:42

      Yeah, Vicky.

   6. AWAnt Wilson17:43

      Like, we weren't ready.

   7. SWswyx17:43

      Yeah, yeah.

   8. AWAnt Wilson17:44

      We weren't ready to be launched on Hacker News.

   9. SWswyx17:46

      And you didn't consider yourself a Firebase alternative.

   10. AWAnt Wilson17:48

       Oh, yeah. So that was the day that we changed the tagline. We had the tagline-

   11. SWswyx17:52

       What was the original tagline?

   12. AWAnt Wilson17:53

       It was real-time Postgres.

   13. SWswyx17:54

       Ah.

   14. AWAnt Wilson17:54

       Because what had happened was I wanted, like, we, we were like, "Oh, let's build a Postgres company," but in my previous company, I had to migrate from Firebase to Postgres, but I needed a real-time f- feature, and so I ended up building this real-time engine on top of Postgres. And so we thought, "Oh, that's the killer thing. Like, it's getting some open source traction. This real-time engine, it's kinda cool." So we were like, "Oh, real-time Postgres." No one cared.

   15. PCPaul Copplestone18:18

       No one cared when we had a website, and so, like, we were like, "Let's change it to open source Firebase alternative," knowing that that was the reason why I switched. And it was, I think, only 12 hours later or something like that that-

   16. SWswyx18:29

       Yeah. Yeah

   17. PCPaul Copplestone18:30

       ... this article went up.

   18. SWswyx18:31

       Yeah.

   19. AWAnt Wilson18:31

       Yeah.

   20. SWswyx18:31

       Still the top of all time.

   21. AWAnt Wilson18:33

       And at the time, we was running on top of DigitalOcean, and every new database was two droplets.

   22. PCPaul Copplestone18:40

       [laughs]

   23. AWAnt Wilson18:40

       So two $5 a month droplets.

   24. SWswyx18:42

       Why two?

   25. AWAnt Wilson18:43

       Um, one for the, uh, database and one for the APIs.

   26. PCPaul Copplestone18:47

       [laughs]

   27. AWAnt Wilson18:48

       Right. Because w-

   28. PCPaul Copplestone18:49

       Because we wanted to upgrade the APIs and decouple.

   29. SWswyx18:52

       Independently, yeah.

   30. AWAnt Wilson18:52

       And we only had a handful of, like, test users at that point.
10. 20:45 – 23:22

    Compute shortages, multi-cloud pressure, and bringing on CapitalG

    1. SWswyx20:45

       Uh, and like, and like, uh, okay, well, I guess there's a shortage of CPUs.

    2. PCPaul Copplestone20:48

       Yeah, there's a shortage. [laughs]

    3. SWswyx20:50

       How are you guys experiencing it? [laughs]

    4. PCPaul Copplestone20:52

       We literally... I mean, we're up against runways all the time where, like, we meet AWS, like multiple times.

    5. SWswyx20:59

       Is there a way to spike when you have a spike, or what do you do? Like, you, you just have agreements with people to-

    6. PCPaul Copplestone21:05

       Yeah, we've gotta, like, plan-

    7. SWswyx21:06

       You just pay more

    8. PCPaul Copplestone21:07

       ... very closely.

    9. SWswyx21:07

       Yeah.

    10. PCPaul Copplestone21:08

        We, we pay more. We partner with them. And in fact, tomorrow as well, we're announcing that we're bringing on a new investment partner, which is CapitalG. CapitalG basically has access to the Alphabet ecosystem. Good for us on both sides, like we now have to consider a multi-cloud strategy.

    11. SWswyx21:23

        Meaning GCP.

    12. PCPaul Copplestone21:24

        We need GCP, or we need more compute, basically, so GCP is a very obvious choice, and of course we wanna partner with all the AI labs as much as possible. And so they have a suite of products. We work with them already on Gemini, and we wanna make sure that we're embedded deeply into all of their products.

    13. SWswyx21:40

        And that's another thing where you're mentioning how so much of the database ecosystem is being shaped by block storage and all these innovations and all these things. Clearly, AWS is, is, is the leader there.

    14. PCPaul Copplestone21:50

        Mm-hmm.

    15. SWswyx21:50

        It's hard to be multi-cloud if you're gonna use GCS as like a swap for S3.

    16. PCPaul Copplestone21:55

        Yes, as long as they've got the features. Actually, I don't know if their object storage has the, all the features, but I'm sure that, like, whatever S3 do, others follow, so [laughs]

    17. SWswyx22:06

        I re- I still remember, I think like three years ago, they introduced, like, strong consistency.

    18. PCPaul Copplestone22:09

        Yeah, that's the innovation basically that-

    19. SWswyx22:11

        Right

    20. PCPaul Copplestone22:12

        ... that helps. Yeah.

    21. SWswyx22:13

        And they just like, they did it for free-

    22. PCPaul Copplestone22:14

        Yeah

    23. SWswyx22:14

        ... and they just rolled it out to everybody-

    24. PCPaul Copplestone22:15

        Yeah. Yeah

    25. SWswyx22:15

        ... and it's like, "It's live now."

    26. PCPaul Copplestone22:17

        Yeah.

    27. SWswyx22:17

        What? [laughs]

    28. PCPaul Copplestone22:18

        Yeah, yeah. And then S3 Express as well, that was a big game changer, um, because-

    29. SWswyx22:23

        Why?

    30. PCPaul Copplestone22:23

        Well, basically now what you wanna do is, like, you typically write to a local drive, and then you need to batch it to something more durable, and that batching process, um... And so the write times to this are one to two milliseconds, and so before you can guarantee a write back to your client, you basically need to batch it to something that's durable. So this one's durable, not as durable as S3, not 11 nines, but durable enough-
11. 23:22 – 30:00

    AI-driven growth and funnel changes: embeddings, vibe coding, and agent-assisted activation

    1. SWswyx23:22

       Uh, clear business memory. Uh, a few more things that we're gonna talk about. You, you, your slogan was build in a weekend, scale to millions, now we're prototype to petabyte. Just-- Which is excellent. And really, it is reflective of the evolution in scale that you guys are doing, right?

    2. PCPaul Copplestone23:37

       Yeah.

    3. SWswyx23:37

       Do you have anecdotes on, like, let's say early Supabase versus now, how fast are people scaling when they, when they start a thing?

    4. AWAnt Wilson23:44

       Yeah. Well, the big thing is, um, I think how fast people are monetizing.

    5. SWswyx23:50

       Oh, yeah.

    6. AWAnt Wilson23:51

       At, at the start, it was like you choose your database, you build your product. At some point, you, um, add in billing. Now, because you can add in Stripe, like, at the agentic layer, it's like we see customers starting a project and within the same week, like, generating serious cash.

    7. SWswyx24:08

       Yeah.

    8. AWAnt Wilson24:08

       And, and in the early days of vibe coding, it wasn't obvious to us that this is something that's gonna stick around, this is gonna change the way software is built. But as soon as we saw- Someone earnin', like, I think it was $10,000 within the first few days of launching their product. We were like, "Wow, this is, this is real."

    9. PCPaul Copplestone24:27

       Yeah.

    10. AWAnt Wilson24:27

        People are makin' real things that generate real money. Um, so we knew we had to lean in, in, in a way where there was waves we'd ridden successfully in the past. Like, when NFTs were huge, we leaned in a bit, and we added, like, sign in with Ethereum and s- sign in with Solana. Um, but we didn't dedicate, like, tons of dev time because everyone kinda knew it was gonna go away at some point. And making that decision for, for vibe coding was like, uh, you know, we, we discussed it a lot as a team of how much do we lean in. And it was a time when we knew we needed to go slightly more upmarket. Like, our biggest customers were, like, stretching the limits of, of what we had at the time. And so we knew we had to then just do both. It was like, you know, um, innovate on the, on the small, like, prototype stuff, and innovate on the, on the l- much larger side as well. And then you just need more people for that. [laughs] So...

    11. PCPaul Copplestone25:23

        That one's funny because, like, on the numbers side, b- basically for Supabase, there's been three chapters of AI. So the first chapter was, um, embeddings. I think we were on-

    12. AWAnt Wilson25:32

        Supabase Vector

    13. PCPaul Copplestone25:33

        ... yeah.

    14. AWAnt Wilson25:34

        Which I have now transcribed, and it will always, uh... We, we, we should probably update this 'cause, uh-

    15. PCPaul Copplestone25:38

        Yeah, yeah. It's probably super-

    16. AWAnt Wilson25:39

        ... this is the only talk you've ever done at AI. [laughs]

    17. PCPaul Copplestone25:41

        Yeah. [laughs] We did this talk. Uh, basically, all these embedding databases were coming out, vector databases, create the vector. And so we were pushing the fact, and you can use Postgres as a vector database, and Andrew Kane, a, a completely independent guy, has developed this awesome extension. And we're like, okay, trying to educate the market. Postgres can kinda do anything. You don't need another database if you're gonna store your own embedding. So this was chapter one, and it was, it was really a, a good growth driver for us. A- and also good for the Postgres ecosystem, just letting people know. Now there's a lot of innovations in, in embeddings. What Turbopuffer, for example, are doing, they use a lot of the innovations that Turso are doing, and I think it's a phenomenal use case for that type of stuff. So that was chapter one. Chapter two was, like, the vibe coding wave, whereas Lovable, Bold, all of these ones coming along. That was end of 2024, and that's where we debated a lot. Hey, do we really wanna be there? Do we wanna be servicing these? Do we even wanna have our own vibe coding type platform on top of Supabase? But in the end, like, our mission is store the world's data. And to do that, we, based on our tagline, it's like, be there when you're getting started, make sure that they never wanna leave. And so we saw people were getting started. They were doing toy things, but still, it fit our mission. We just had to believe that over time these tools would become better. And then the third one, which is the, like, crazy numbers, start of this year, the models just got better, basically. And then we started seeing our top of funnel, our, our sign-up rate start rapidly increasing. But usually when this happens, you're pouring a lot of dollars into marketing.

    18. AWAnt Wilson27:17

        Mm.

    19. PCPaul Copplestone27:17

        We actually barely spend any dollars on marketing, and, uh, most of it's just memes and things like that.

    20. AWAnt Wilson27:23

        [laughs]

    21. PCPaul Copplestone27:23

        So, um, so-

    22. AWAnt Wilson27:25

        Here, I got, I got one of your charts. There we go.

    23. PCPaul Copplestone27:27

        Yeah.

    24. AWAnt Wilson27:27

        I mean, all, your, all your charts look the same, but because they're just, like-

    25. PCPaul Copplestone27:29

        [laughs]

    26. AWAnt Wilson27:30

        ... exponentially keep scaling-

    27. PCPaul Copplestone27:31

        It's like a weird thing

    28. AWAnt Wilson27:31

        ... you just keep, you just keep-

    29. PCPaul Copplestone27:32

        But-

    30. AWAnt Wilson27:32

        ... changing the Y-axis ... the other crazy thing about this is, is often when you get, like, more consumer-like traffic in the top of funnel, your activation and conversion to pay goes down.
12. 30:00 – 35:39

    Community ownership: giving stock to community legends and scaling support knowledge

    1. PCPaul Copplestone30:00

       Being, being open source. Uh, you actually had a fun announcement on the community side because you're raising so much, and you're trying to involve your community in some, in, in, more deeply.

    2. AWAnt Wilson30:08

       Yeah. So, so last year at Supabase Select, we announced that we were gonna do a crowdfunding round. It's something we've always wanted to do, and we should have done it much earlier on, but we just, you know, had so many other things going on. And basically then we spent the last year fighting with the lawyers who are saying, you know, for the number of people we wanna be involved, there is no mechanism to do it without people being accredited investors. Until we asked them the question, "Well, what if they don't invest? What if we just give them the stock?" [laughs]

    3. SWswyx30:40

       [laughs]

    4. AWAnt Wilson30:41

       And they were like, "Yeah, we'll, we'll look into it." And then they came back and they were like, "Actually, there is a mechanism where if you really just wanna give the stock away, you can." And so now we've earmarked, like, um, $1 million in Supabase stock that we're basically gonna give to a bunch of the community members. The first community member we're, we're gonna stand up on stage and sort of announce is, is this guy, his name's Gary Austin in the Supabase Discord, and this guy is, like, a legend of the Supabase-

    5. SWswyx31:08

       Yeah

    6. AWAnt Wilson31:08

       ... community. He- we looked into his stats, and Gary has answered, uh, 20,000, in the last six years, 20,000, uh, questions in the Supabase Discord. And the crazy thing is 13,000 of them, he answered within the first hour of them being asked.

    7. SWswyx31:26

       Mm.

    8. AWAnt Wilson31:26

       And he's not a grok bot.

    9. SWswyx31:28

       [laughs]

    10. AWAnt Wilson31:28

        Like, he's a real human. [laughs] Yeah.

    11. SWswyx31:31

        Have you met him? What, what is his-

    12. AWAnt Wilson31:33

        Yeah, we-

    13. PCPaul Copplestone31:33

        Yeah, yeah

    14. AWAnt Wilson31:33

        ... he's real. We, we've met him. He, he was basically, like, retired-

    15. SWswyx31:37

        Yeah

    16. AWAnt Wilson31:37

        ... and just interested in Supabase.

    17. SWswyx31:39

        Gary Austin.

    18. AWAnt Wilson31:40

        Gary Austin.

    19. SWswyx31:40

        Or Gary Abbott?

    20. PCPaul Copplestone31:41

        Yes, Gary Abbott-

    21. AWAnt Wilson31:41

        Yeah, Gary Abbott is his real name

    22. SWswyx31:42

        ... is his real name. Okay, this guy.

    23. AWAnt Wilson31:43

        Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

    24. SWswyx31:45

        Okay.

    25. AWAnt Wilson31:45

        And, and he loved Supabase because he basically built his own som- sommelier, um, app 'cause he loves red wine.

    26. SWswyx31:52

        Mm-hmm.

    27. AWAnt Wilson31:52

        Um, and then was just getting a kick out of, you know, he's got the Supabase logo on his Christmas tree.

    28. SWswyx31:57

        [laughs]

    29. PCPaul Copplestone31:59

        [laughs]

    30. AWAnt Wilson31:59

        And he's also, like-
13. 35:39 – 40:44

    Enterprise and “product-led sales”: triggers, scripts, and greenfield strategy

    1. SWswyx35:39

       Yeah. I do wanna cover, because I think a lot of people think of you as bottom sub GTM, uh, you know, what the work you've been doing on, on the enterprise side.

    2. PCPaul Copplestone35:46

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SWswyx35:46

       Uh, so first of all, shout out to Wenbo.

    4. PCPaul Copplestone35:48

       Yeah. [laughs]

    5. AWAnt Wilson35:49

       [laughs]

    6. SWswyx35:49

       I, I think this is your most successful recent launch, which is-

    7. PCPaul Copplestone35:52

       Uh, Supabase for Platforms.

    8. SWswyx35:53

       Yeah.

    9. PCPaul Copplestone35:53

       This one launched in, yeah.

    10. SWswyx35:55

        Yeah, yeah. I mean, December 2025, so.

    11. PCPaul Copplestone35:56

        Uh, yeah, but-

    12. SWswyx35:57

        I saw some stats or, like-

    13. PCPaul Copplestone35:58

        Yeah, yeah

    14. SWswyx35:59

        ... you, you guys call this successful. I don't know.

    15. AWAnt Wilson36:00

        Yeah.

    16. SWswyx36:01

        Um, what is the enterprise side, right? Like, what, what are, what is that story apart from, like, give me a dashboard?

    17. PCPaul Copplestone36:07

        Well, first of all, we should talk about sales strategies.

    18. SWswyx36:10

        Okay.

    19. PCPaul Copplestone36:10

        So Supabase is a very famously PYMG company.

    20. SWswyx36:14

        [laughs]

    21. PCPaul Copplestone36:14

        Like, we give a shit about... We have 60% of every YC batch use Supabase. We focus in- Almost all of our attention on this, like becoming an index company. Basically, our role model here is Stripe. We wanna follow in their footsteps. They're one of the only developer tools that we've ever seen that has withstood more than a decade of moving up market and still keeping that developer love. So that's the first thing. So to do that, what we started doing when we did sales was layer on what we call product-led sales. So we look instead for like product triggers. It could be like a, a logo, someone who we think is really important, but more importantly, they could be scaling up, they could be hitting some limits, having some errors, paying a certain amount. We've got a bunch of these triggers, and then AI came along and we're like, "Oh, we can do some interesting stuff from this." So let's say we have 1,000 product triggers every single week. We send off 1,000 emails to people who are having problems, and say 500 of them respond. We take the cohort who don't respond, and we use them as a control group.

    22. SWswyx37:19

        Okay.

    23. PCPaul Copplestone37:20

        And we measure how much they grow. Turns out they grow 25% m-month over month. Then we take all those who do respond and we say to our sales team, "The only thing you need to do is get on a call with these people and help them." And because we've got all their traffic patterns, we can give them a script. We know what their problem is. AI has been great on this. And, uh, we give them a script just to help out, and it turns out just getting on a call and helping people out, their account then grows 125%. So that 100% uplift, the incremental uplift, is what we compensate our salespeople. Traditionally, you would say, "Get on a call with these, these people and just sell them shit, and s- then you get the full quota." But because we know our database grows, our platform grows at 25% month over month on this cohort of users, then we know that our sales force are adding this 100% incremental uplift. So that's how we do our sales function. It's always focused on these logos or very specific, uh, product needs. So yeah, the likes of the enterprise is usually coming in because they're wanting to launch lots and lots of databases, or almost never it'll be a transfer of their production database. So migrating databases from, say, MySQL to Postgres, or from, say, one scalable database to another scalable database almost never happens. And that was the core thesis of Supabase at the start. We knew that every single Postgres company we had looked at or database company we had looked at in the past that had tried to do migrations had failed over time. You just can't convince people to migrate. Even if you build a bigger, better, more scalable Postgres, what you have to do is land with them on day one and then make sure that they stick around to day one thousand, day ten thousand. So all of our focus is winning these enterprise logos on, on day one.

    24. SWswyx39:10

        Greenfield.

    25. PCPaul Copplestone39:11

        Greenfield, yeah.

    26. SWswyx39:12

        They're still not migrating?

    27. PCPaul Copplestone39:14

        I guarantee they'll almost never migrate.

    28. SWswyx39:16

        Wow.

    29. PCPaul Copplestone39:16

        There's a cohort that will need Multigress. We talked to some logos who are looking at using it open source. They're very interested on making sure that, um, they can basically help us direct because they're running into problems of Postgres at scale. But for the next, say, five years, almost all of our focus on the enterprise side is making sure that we can handle greenfield use cases, which now in the enterprise it turns out to be a very-

    30. SWswyx39:44

        Hmm
14. 40:44 – 45:02

    Database stickiness, migrations risk, and why OLTP cutovers are hard

    1. SWswyx40:44

       Oh, that's great. Yeah. Mentioning Lovable, mentioning Bolt. Lovable is gonna have their own database stuff, you know, and, and like everyone is gonna basically try to intrude on, on the- each other's turf, uh, which is normal in, in the, in the grand scheme of things. Which is more sticky?

    2. PCPaul Copplestone40:59

       Which is more sticky?

    3. SWswyx41:00

       More s- more sticky. Like is the CPO more likely to be married to Lovable or married to Supabase? You know, like-

    4. PCPaul Copplestone41:06

       Ah, okay

    5. SWswyx41:06

       ... is, is that a question that comes up or?

    6. PCPaul Copplestone41:08

       That's a great, that's a great question. I think ultimately running databases is very hard.

    7. SWswyx41:12

       Fair enough. [laughs]

    8. PCPaul Copplestone41:13

       Well, and, and, and as we just discussed, it's harder to migrate your database than it is your-

    9. SWswyx41:17

       Yeah, yeah

    10. PCPaul Copplestone41:17

        ... front end tool.

    11. SWswyx41:19

        Yeah. Yeah.

    12. PCPaul Copplestone41:20

        And not that I don't think Lovable is sticky. I think it's amazing. And actually, they were the first people to do a really good job of making sure their agent didn't do stupid shit with, um, the database. Because we had, uh, very early on the agents were like trying to shove image data into Postgres. You know, they were turning off RLS in order to get [chuckles] their projects to work.

    13. SWswyx41:42

        Hmm.

    14. PCPaul Copplestone41:43

        Um, by paperclip maxing basically, is that Lovable wrote really good skills to stop their agents doing stupid stuff. They were, they were the first.

    15. SWswyx41:51

        That's the secret sauce.

    16. PCPaul Copplestone41:52

        Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    17. SWswyx41:53

        It's the, it's to solve all these-

    18. PCPaul Copplestone41:54

        And, and, and now like the models themselves don't do that stupid stuff anymore.

    19. SWswyx41:58

        Yeah.

    20. PCPaul Copplestone41:59

        So it's, it's-- the situation has improved a lot. It's gone from like, um, Will Smith eating spaghetti circa, you know, 2022 to Will Smith eating spaghetti in 2026.

    21. SWswyx42:10

        Yeah.

    22. PCPaul Copplestone42:10

        Yeah.

    23. SWswyx42:11

        Yeah. Um, and that's a, that's a famous meme.

    24. PCPaul Copplestone42:13

        [laughs]

    25. SWswyx42:13

        Uh, talking about... Uh, I'll, I'll leave the migration point alone after I mention this. You know, one of the things that I got like a big aha moment was when I met Karen from Co2, who's one of-

    26. PCPaul Copplestone42:21

        Yep

    27. SWswyx42:21

        ... your board members, and she said like her thesis is whole, like, you know, you are not just, uh, replacing Firebase, you're also like, you know, coming off as like new, new RDS, right? For-

    28. PCPaul Copplestone42:30

        Hmm

    29. SWswyx42:30

        ... for Amazon. Um, if there was a, you know, a stage four of a fourth era post-AI of Supabase that is like the other, you know- The one trillion X in your, in your growth, rip out Oracle. I, I don't know.

    30. PCPaul Copplestone42:44

        Mm-hmm.
15. 45:02 – 48:15

    HTAP and analytics: interest in DuckDB/Duck Lake, but separate OLTP scaling via sharding

    1. SWswyx45:02

       Well, speaking of OLTP, I mean, I, I, this is just my down database indulgence. We also had two of the co-founders of Databricks here, Matei and Reynolds, where they are making a claim that they have solved HTAP.

    2. PCPaul Copplestone45:16

       Okay. Yeah.

    3. SWswyx45:17

       Which is the sort of the white whale of, of database people, right?

    4. PCPaul Copplestone45:19

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    5. SWswyx45:19

       If you, if you know, like, uh, well, traditionally you need an OLTP, you need all that database.

    6. PCPaul Copplestone45:24

       Yeah.

    7. SWswyx45:24

       Um, never the two shall meet, except that, uh, sometimes you, you would like to never have to replicate anything.

    8. PCPaul Copplestone45:30

       Yeah.

    9. SWswyx45:30

       How you... Are you paying attention at all to that stuff? Like, is, is there, is there a story there for Supabase some- someday?

    10. PCPaul Copplestone45:35

        Yes, we are particularly interested in Duck Lake. I think Duck Lake is a very... and DuckDB is a very interesting technology.

    11. SWswyx45:41

        Is, is it Mother Duck, but a, but a data lake? Like, what, what is, what is Duck Lake?

    12. PCPaul Copplestone45:44

        Uh, Duck Lake. Okay, so, um-

    13. SWswyx45:45

        [laughs]

    14. PCPaul Copplestone45:46

        ... DuckDB-

    15. SWswyx45:47

        Yeah

    16. PCPaul Copplestone45:47

        ... which was a recently... It's DuckDB, which is basically like a SQLite for analytics.

    17. SWswyx45:53

        Column the storage.

    18. PCPaul Copplestone45:54

        Yes, exactly. Exactly. It can read directly from object storage. That's typically how it's touted, and it can actually read from your Postgres database as well. So open source, great technology, and actually there's also, uh, DuckDB Labs, which was recently acquired by AWS. Yeah. So they're a foundation-

    19. SWswyx46:12

        That's what they tell me, yeah

    20. PCPaul Copplestone46:12

        ... that are developing, so they're building a committee, um, around the open source. I actually think of DuckDB a little bit like the Postgres of the analytics ecosystem in that they're trying to make it so that it's owned by no one, it does a lot of things, it's very versatile.

    21. SWswyx46:30

        It's like a professor in Netherlands?

    22. PCPaul Copplestone46:32

        Yeah, exactly. They live, they live and work out of the Netherlands, which is pretty cool. So our interest mostly on the warehouse side is not trying to make Postgres an analytical database, but mostly then focusing on using the right technology for the right job. I don't know if HTAP... Many people have tried to slay the HTAP dragon. Object storage could be the solution to that. But generally, we think once you get to a certain size on the OLTP side, you need to have sharding. There's a limit to the amount of NVMe disk space that you can have. So if you need to split transaction across two servers, you're basically then going to be fetching it from object storage. Eventually, that will slow down your database. So we think that sharding is by far the best way to do scale up into the petabytes, and then you should treat your analytics differently. Now, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't store your data directly on object storage, for example, and then read from it from a different route. But trying to smash these two together-

    23. SWswyx47:32

        Hmm

    24. PCPaul Copplestone47:32

        ... doesn't necessarily make that much sense in my opinion.

    25. SWswyx47:36

        Yeah. I, I, I'm happy to leave it there because we do have more, uh, to, uh, work on. I do think, you know, they, they have some innovations where they're, they're basically using their s- their spare compute on their, uh, database, uh, machines to power all this, uh, replication is, is my read-

    26. PCPaul Copplestone47:53

        Uh, yeah

    27. SWswyx47:53

        ... of what they're, of what they're doing.

    28. PCPaul Copplestone47:54

        And actually, to be honest, I haven't looked so much into how they're doing HTAP, so I could be misquoting.

    29. SWswyx48:00

        Yeah, e- exactly.

    30. PCPaul Copplestone48:01

        Yeah.
16. 48:15 – 53:05

    Durable workflows, lab partnerships, and scaling to model-driven traffic

    1. SWswyx48:15

       Which, like, yeah, it's, it's interesting. Uh, the other mention I will check in on is durable workflows and, and, you know, that world-

    2. PCPaul Copplestone48:22

       Uh, yeah

    3. SWswyx48:22

       ... which, which as you know, Temporal, uh-

    4. PCPaul Copplestone48:24

       Yeah, yeah

    5. SWswyx48:24

       ... I, I've been, I've been, uh, banging the drum for a while. You have made, uh, like every year, you make, you do a little thing.

    6. PCPaul Copplestone48:30

       Yeah, yeah. We're incrementing our way towards [laughs] dur-

    7. SWswyx48:32

       Yeah. But, like, don't you... Like, how come it's not, like, more P zero for you? Because, like, you know Temporal is doing super well, right?

    8. PCPaul Copplestone48:38

       Okay, so what was missing for us to do durable workflows? Compute.

    9. AWAnt Wilson48:42

       Right. So you're, you're doing this now [chuckles]

    10. PCPaul Copplestone48:44

        Yeah. Super interesting space to be in, I think. Like, yeah, now we have had people in the community try to build workflow engines on top of Supabase functions, and it just didn't work because of the two-second timeout.

    11. AWAnt Wilson48:57

        Yeah.

    12. PCPaul Copplestone48:58

        Now we've got the primitive that would unlock the ability to do long-running durable workflows.

    13. AWAnt Wilson49:04

        I think my original pitch for Supabase is, like, you want the sort of the all-in-one, the, the, the sort of-

    14. PCPaul Copplestone49:09

        Yeah

    15. AWAnt Wilson49:09

        ... agentic cloud that, like, is the backend, integrated backend that, that people can, can use, right? Like, you've got sign-in with ChatGPT now, which is, uh, a great part. Like, you, you just kind of have to sort of give the AI everything at once, and then it will be your best friend.

    16. PCPaul Copplestone49:23

        [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.

    17. AWAnt Wilson49:25

        [laughs]

    18. PCPaul Copplestone49:25

        Pretty much. And be prolific. I mean, our P1 strategy is to partner with as many of these frontier labs and models as we can, so we've gotta be prolific there, [chuckles] and then we basically, uh, we see our attach rates just going up as well.

    19. AWAnt Wilson49:38

        Yeah. I mean, obviously there's the US labs, and you're, you're, you're here in the US. Do the other labs have significant partnerships? What, what are they like? Mistral-

    20. PCPaul Copplestone49:47

        Uh

    21. AWAnt Wilson49:48

        ... Cohere, the Chinese labs. I, I don't know if-

    22. PCPaul Copplestone49:51

        Not so much

    23. AWAnt Wilson49:51

        ... what's in your-

    24. PCPaul Copplestone49:52

        Oh, well, they might-

    25. AWAnt Wilson49:53

        Okay

    26. PCPaul Copplestone49:53

        ... they might do. I, I-

    27. AWAnt Wilson49:54

        Yeah, okay, you primarily care about the US labs.

    28. PCPaul Copplestone49:55

        Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs]

    29. AWAnt Wilson49:55

        Yeah, okay. Okay, that's fair enough. [laughs]

    30. PCPaul Copplestone49:57

        Yeah. Yeah, mainly just 'cause, like, that's who's delivering the most traffic-
17. 53:05 – 59:06

    Git-native, agent-friendly development: declarative schemas and pgDelta

    1. AWAnt Wilson53:05

       Amazing. Um, what are the open questions that you have? Like, you know, if you had a crystal ball in- that it would change the way that you bet on things.

    2. PCPaul Copplestone53:15

       How development will be done-

    3. AWAnt Wilson53:17

       Okay

    4. PCPaul Copplestone53:18

       ... and what people want developed. These are the two things that I think a lot about.

    5. AWAnt Wilson53:22

       Okay. You know, what are the possible answers? It's just more, more agents, like-

    6. PCPaul Copplestone53:25

       Yeah, so, like, this year we're focusing a lot, like, and I'll talk about it in my keynote, basically, that we're moving from... Like, we started as a dashboard company. That was the best DX. Then, like, you know, a lot of people are like, "Oh, headless mode." Headless was what we kind of started, Headless 360, Salesforce, all these sort of things. I mean, we had that at the start, like you could use Supabase directly, API-driven. That's one of the reasons why we succeeded. This year, our big focus is moving from, from, um, to code first, Git native. So basically, when you launch a Supabase instance inside, um, your local machine, you get this Supabase folder, and it represents your database. It has all your functions, everything.

    7. AWAnt Wilson54:06

       Does this exist today?

    8. PCPaul Copplestone54:07

       This exists today-

    9. AWAnt Wilson54:08

       Okay

    10. PCPaul Copplestone54:08

        ... if you use the RCLI.

    11. AWAnt Wilson54:10

        So it's a virtual file system.

    12. PCPaul Copplestone54:11

        Uh, like, it's a representation of... It's like infrastructure as code.

    13. AWAnt Wilson54:15

        Okay.

    14. PCPaul Copplestone54:16

        Yeah. And in fact, what we're announcing tomorrow is, like, we've done our kind of final change for declarative schemas. This was, uh, a really challenging one actually, covering all of Postgres. And so now you can have a full file representation of Postgres, uh, the shape of your database declaratively in your folder. That's really important for agents 'cause generally how you operate with Postgres is you have a migration file every time you make a change. You add a file to this migrations folder, and it's like a historical log. Okay, so that's great. It's industry standard. But it- Imagine putting an agent across a thousand files and telling, asking it, "Oh, what is the shape of this table?" It has to guess through a thousand files, so-

    15. SWswyx54:57

        It has to recompile basically-

    16. PCPaul Copplestone54:58

        It has to recompile

    17. SWswyx54:59

        ... edit its weights. Yeah

    18. PCPaul Copplestone54:59

        Or you have to launch the database, um, locally-

    19. SWswyx55:03

        Migrate, migrate, migrate, migrate

    20. PCPaul Copplestone55:03

        ... run the migrations up, and then you inspect, introspect the database, but that's too slow. So basically, what we want to do is turn the schemas folder inside our, our Supabase folder into a completely declarative state of your database. And so we've captured everything from tables, policies, uh, database comments, all inside these files. So we're releasing a new library, pgDelta. You can use it with any Postgres database. Um, but we've got mechanisms for them, for Supabase. And so this is an important step for agents. We know that agents are gonna operate mostly on code. They don't wanna reach out to anything. They've gotta iterate very fast on the file system. So that's fine, and today people are using CLIs. They're happy with these harnesses. What I suspect we're moving more towards is, like, at the moment I'm trying to do some development just on my mobile phone, for example, and I'm quite comfortably able to do it. Of course, I know what's going on behind the scenes, so I'm telling it things that I know it has to do from an infrastructure point of view. But we're getting to a state where I can imagine you don't need to be an engineer. You, you have an idea, you say to your phone, your daughter, or whatever personal agent you have-

    21. SWswyx56:15

        Yeah

    22. PCPaul Copplestone56:15

        ... "I want to build X," and one second later, you kind of have this application live. You can iterate on, on it yourself. So these are the things that I'm thinking, okay, what are the use cases that people are going to want if this is the case? Is it personalized? What do we care about? Are these things gonna scale up? What are the mechanisms? How are we going to develop, and what tooling do we need to provide to make sure that we are the default provider in this new world?

    23. SWswyx56:42

        Any questions that you're, you're interested in, uh, as for a crystal ball into the future?

    24. AWAnt Wilson56:47

        As someone who's been a software engineer now for, like, a few decades, you have strong opinions on, like, how the software should be built, right? Like, in terms of, like, uh, continuous integration or, like, continuous delivery or whatever, and I find myself, like, pushing my opinions on the, on the agents of, like, oh, you wanna do it in this way and... But now more and more, like, you don't need to. But my worry there is, are they all just gonna, like, converge on one way of building software or-

    25. SWswyx57:19

        Yeah, mode collapse

    26. AWAnt Wilson57:20

        You know-

    27. SWswyx57:21

        Which is great. They're all gonna use Supabase. It's fantastic. [laughs]

    28. AWAnt Wilson57:23

        Yeah. [laughs] No, but, but, but, like, the g- the thing that's great about, like, the software development injury is, like, uh, uh, industry is, like, these are, like, famous flame wars, right? Of, like-

    29. SWswyx57:33

        Yeah

    30. AWAnt Wilson57:33

        ... what's the correct approach? Like, are we gonna lose that or-
18. 59:06 – 1:11:40

    Founder dynamics, open-source futures, and internal AI coding spend

    1. SWswyx59:06

       What do you disagree on between the two of you? It's rare to have the two of you have, uh-

    2. AWAnt Wilson59:10

       Oh.

    3. PCPaul Copplestone59:11

       Oh yeah, this is great

    4. SWswyx59:12

       ... on, on the pod, so, you know, I wanna capture this.

    5. AWAnt Wilson59:15

       I think one of the reasons we've been so effective, like, working together is because there are definitely situations when we'll disagree, but as soon as the other person, like, pushes a little bit-

    6. PCPaul Copplestone59:27

       Yeah

    7. AWAnt Wilson59:27

       ... the other person's like, "Yeah, maybe you're right. Let's, let's try it."

    8. PCPaul Copplestone59:31

       Yeah.

    9. AWAnt Wilson59:31

       Um, so we never end up in, like, big bust-ups, um, and it turns out, like, most of that stuff actually doesn't matter, right?

    10. PCPaul Copplestone59:38

        Yeah, it doesn't matter. [laughs]

    11. AWAnt Wilson59:38

        Anyway. Like, as long as the general direction is, is correct, then, then it's gone okay. But, uh, yeah, I can't think of-

    12. SWswyx59:46

        Oh, you guys are really struggling here. Oh my God. [laughs]

    13. PCPaul Copplestone59:48

        Yeah, yeah. Which is why, like... Because it's, it's never an important enough thing. Like, we've never had a bust-up because it's never been important enough to actually fight hard enough on it, like... And also, we're fucking busy, so, like-

    14. SWswyx1:00:03

        [laughs]

    15. PCPaul Copplestone1:00:03

        ... usually, like-

    16. SWswyx1:00:04

        You got your thing, I got my thing

    17. PCPaul Copplestone1:00:04

        ... Ant's handling, yeah.

    18. SWswyx1:00:06

        Yeah, yeah.

    19. PCPaul Copplestone1:00:06

        We're trying to handle different parts of the business.

    20. SWswyx1:00:08

        Yeah. Maybe it's just, like, things are growing, and obviously you got your domain and, and you just need to work together, right?

    21. PCPaul Copplestone1:00:12

        Yeah.

    22. AWAnt Wilson1:00:12

        Yeah.

    23. PCPaul Copplestone1:00:12

        Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    24. SWswyx1:00:13

        Yeah. It's interesting, you know. Uh, so Laura here, uh, all three of us were in Entrepreneur First-

    25. AWAnt Wilson1:00:18

        Yeah. [laughs]

    26. PCPaul Copplestone1:00:19

        Yeah. [laughs]

    27. SWswyx1:00:19

        ... in Singapore. We were all different work- working on different companies, and then you guys stayed back after the cohort? Uh, you were housemates after the cohort?

    28. PCPaul Copplestone1:00:27

        Yeah, yeah.

    29. AWAnt Wilson1:00:27

        Yeah.

    30. PCPaul Copplestone1:00:27

        So we were all, we lived in a house with seven people, and we were all doing different startups.

Episode duration: 1:11:40