 Hi, this is your Sopna Bhartya and welcome to here for Let's Talk. Today we have with us Nikita Shangunov, CUN founder of Neon. Tell us a bit about the company itself. What do you folks do? The company and the product is Serverless Postgres. So we are a Postgres company. Our mission is to become the default Postgres offering in the cloud. And what we bring to the table is the ability to run Postgres, which everybody knows and loves, as a serverless offering. So what we tend to say internally and externally is the database is just a URL. And if you are a developer, that's really the only thing that you need to know about the database. And all of this sizing, scaling, up and down, and all the way down to zero, and all the way up to very large and demanding sizes and workloads will be done for you. So that's what Neon really is. Neon launched almost like a year and two days ago. So two days ago, we had an anniversary. And in about a year since December 6, 22, we onboarded 400,000 databases on the platform. So the growth has been absolutely phenomenal for us. And we are very excited what the next year is going to bring to us. Then look at Postgres, of course, you said is loved by the ecosystem. Yes, it does. Talk about its role in the modern cloud net ecosystem. If you look at the competitive offerings that most of the hyperscalers provide, the most interesting services are AWS RDS and AWS Aurora. So RDS think about it as Postgres and IBM. And Aurora think about it as a more modern offering that's more cloud native with separation of storage and compute. So Neon is more like Aurora than it is like RDS. Having said that, we built our separation of storage and compute in the open. So if you use a service like AWS Aurora, obviously the service is proprietary. And every database cloud or not cloud has kind of two parts to it. One is storage and one is compute. It does pay off in the cloud to separate those two. And what Aurora did, they implemented the storage part as a cloud native service inside AWS. And obviously it is proprietary. Neon did a similar thing. It implemented that the storage service from scratch in Rust. But what's different for us versus Aurora, we built it as an open source project. And that project has 10 plus thousand stars. It's publicly available on YouTube and has a very friendly license. So we're developing in the open. At the same time, all our aspirations are about cloud native and SaaS. So the bits are open source. But we are measuring ourselves by the adoption of our cloud service, which is in the cloud. Unlike RDS and unlike Aurora, we're serverless only. So that's your only way of consuming Neon is to go into our console, push a button or make an API call. And two seconds later, you get that URL. And that's your database. So that's how Neon stacks against the competition. It really focuses on developer productivity and not necessarily just the running the app in production, but being with the developer every step on the way when you build your application. What are the pain points that you see where developers face when it comes to not only the scale of the application that we're talking about, but the, I mean, there is a sprawl of tools. They also have to do with multi cloud. What are some of the pain points that you see there? And then how you kind of add some of those to make life easier for developers? The first pain point that we clearly see is that modern developer infrastructure and developer truly is following GitHub. And GitHub is setting the standard in a kind of the quality of developer experience, the UI and the convenience of things. If I were to mention another kind of great company that is focused on something else, it's focused on hosting front-end applications and positions themselves at front-end cloud, but even taking what GitHub brought to the developer world to the next level, that would be Versailles. So Versailles is a big partner of us, and they're redefining what it's like to build a front-end application. Where when you build a front-end app and you want to deploy this app around the world, and as you develop the app, you want to see previews, you want to have next-level collaboration capabilities, and obviously the platform is fully serverless. That's what we mean by the next-gen developer experience. Now, Neon is following kind of the grades of GitHub and Versailles in providing a similar developer experience, but for data. So I think that the first pain point, as you asked, is if you look at modern database offerings from hyperscalers, they look more like IT cloud and not like a developer cloud. And what I mean by that is it's hard to spin them up. You tend to pay subscription, not consumption. They don't follow your application developer lifecycle. They don't support previews. They don't integrate with GitHub very well. So they're kind of sitting on the island and being like truly a piece of IT infrastructure. But when you want to empower the developer, so you need to make instant response to every API calls in terms of provisioning. That allows you to start having a fleet. Potentially, you're for every application, it is at least dev stage production environment. But maybe you're going to have an environment for every PR. So multiplied by the number of developers, multiplied by the number of pull requests that you're ascending. And suddenly, you transition from having just one database to having a fleet. Just like in Versailles, for every PR, you can have a preview environment. With Neon, for every PR, you can have a separate endpoint that give you the state of that database for that pull request. And creating those branches is also very, very straightforward. And that's how we integrate with GitHub and with GitHub Actions as a software development lifecycle. That's how we integrate with Versailles. Moreover, Versailles Postgres is a Postgres offering and Versailles is powered by Neon. So that's our journey and that's our biggest differentiator. Neon is built for developers rather than for the IT team that builds something on top of the database to empower developers. That, by the way, doesn't mean that IT people hate Neon. IT people love Neon because, well, developers ask IT personnel, DevOps, and SREs to give them the modern features. And so lots of organizations keep rebuilding them internally. Like, oh, I need to support staging very well. Oh, I need to support previews very well. With Neon, it comes out of the box. But at the same time, it's fully secure. It also saves you money. Because the moment you start providing lots and lots of environments for your developers, costs tend to run out of control. Because you're duplicating data and you're duplicating, you know, instances. You're standing up all those instances. At Neon, when you create developer and staging environments, even they support the full copy of data, that data is, you know, our storage understands copy and write, the concept of copy and write. So just like in Git, when you create more branches, it doesn't mean that you're spending, you know, the amount of storage that is whatever your one environment is multiplied by the number of environments. Because this is copy and write, you know, the bulk of the data is central for every environment that you're using. And then since we separated storage and compute, each compute environment is right size to your workload. So if your production environment, let's say, in the t-short size needs a t-short size XL, whatever that might be, then your developer environment that is created as a clone of your production environment might have a t-short size S or even less than that. Because we're scaling, we know how to automatically scale your compute environments all the way down to zero. And then we'll wake them up as you start putting the load into the system. So that becomes, you know, a very economical environment that writes sizes to your developer workflow. Do you see that for the modern cloud, native cloud-centric approach, organizations do need to focus more on culture, people, and of course, tools are important, but the focus should be more on culture as well. I think what we are observing in the modern environment is the pressure of doing more with less. And as a tools company, as a dev tools company, we are welcoming that change because when you give people more powerful tools, they can do more with less. The other thing that we're observing is the rise of developer, which is, you know, not new, right? It's more of an unstoppable force that has been with us. And every year or every shift, developers in every organizations are getting more power than in the previous iteration. So every tool that can become self-serve for a developer that works in the organization contributes to the overall productivity and contributes to how much people can get done. If you look at very large organizations like banks, you know, take, you know, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, you will find that the ratio of developers is increasing over time compared to the overall staff. And why is that? Well, you know, those people get more done for the business. So we're arriving to a place where the biggest bottleneck to the company is the productivity of their software engineering team. So just like getting more business is the productivity of the software engineering team. We're actually starting to see even further phenomenon now. Google famously burns more money on compute now than on software engineering salaries. So that's a transformation, you know, transformation number one is like we having more developers now and staff or it becoming the most important part of the organization. And the second thing is, well, we're starting to spend more money on compute than even on developers. And that's kind of crazy. But of course, that compute runs software that developers create. Now, let's just move away from technology a bit and talk about the company, talk a bit about the growth of the company you have seen the investment and what are the areas that you are going to invest further into as you look at further growing neon. Just like in other businesses, our own constraint to our business is the productivity of our software development team. So we're making lots of investments and lots of improvements in overall quality of service, first and foremost, right? So despite the fact that we have 400,000 databases under management, we don't call ourselves GA yet. And we're going to become GA in March. And when we become GA, we want to put kind of the neon stamp of quality approval on the service. And that's around uptime security, availability, and robustness of the overall system. So that's our gating factor to this. And lots of work is going towards achieving this goal. The other investment is happening in the overall developer experience. While we've made very big strides towards the developer experience, we're not stopping. There's more goodness is coming. And now, kind of every week, we're shipping something. Every week, we're shipping something that improves the developer experience and kind of like how delightful is to use the service. Finally, and that's starting really, really, you know, we're going to start rolling out features early next year. We have a product internally, we call it dba.ai. We haven't announced it yet. So I'm not going to say what the public name is. And we'll continue kind of iterating on the name. We have a code name internally, but it might not become kind of the name. So internally, we call it dba.ai. And think about all the work that dba's typically do. They actually can be done with AI. So what do dba's do? Well, they tune the database, they create indexes. They migrate from one database to another. They upgrade. So a lot of the things that humans do now with databases can be done with AI. And we think that this is kind of massive, right? Because you're not competing with other tool per se. You're competing with a human being. And you're substituting some of the very tedious minutiae work that people tend to do with technology. So we're excited to see this change coming into the platform. Nikita, thank you so much for taking time out today to talk about neon, the challenges that developers face when it comes to database. And thanks for all the work that you folks are doing. And I would love to chat with you folks again. Thank you.