Paul Copplestone of Supabase on low ego teams, meme workshops, and building for the next generation
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone reveals why hiring ex-founders with beaten-down egos builds better products, how internal meme workshops became part of their culture, and why vibe coding isn't a bubble that will burst. He shares the accidental origin of Launch Weeks, explains why Supabase is building for a 30-year timeline, and breaks down how they scaled to 5 million developers across 40 countries with barely any meetings.Episode notes: https://evilmartians.com/events/podcast-paul-copplestone-supabaseFollow us on X: https://x.com/dpl_podRecorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtoolsLinks:Supabase: https://supabase.comPaul Copplestone on X: https://x.com/kiwicoppleEvil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartiansVictoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_enEvil Martians for devtools: https://evilmartians.com/devtools
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Sam Lambert of PlanetScale on surviving AWS outages and the real cost of extreme fault tolerance
Sam Lambert of PlanetScale reveals how they stayed up during the AWS outage that took down millions of sites, helped grow Vitess usage 61,000% in four years, and why "tier zero" infrastructure demands extreme fault tolerance. He shares the journey from 750-user consultancy to "growing like crazy", why operational excellence beats feature velocity, and what it actually costs to build databases that never go down.Episode notes: https://evilmartians.com/events/podcast-sam-lambert-planetscaleFollow us on X: https://x.com/dpl_podRecorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.comEvil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtoolsLinks:PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com/Sam Lambert on X: https://x.com/isamlambertEvil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartiansVictoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
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Zeno Rocha of Resend on cutting scope ruthlessly and shipping perfect products fast
Resend founder Zeno Rocha reveals how he built an $18M Series A email API company by obsessing over brand, giving away React Email for free, and rejecting the "ship crap fast" mentality. He shares why seeking rejection accelerates sales, how zero-ego hiring beats talent, and why most dev tools fail by hiding behind GitHub stars instead of charging money.Episode notes: https://evilmartians.com/events/podcast-zeno-rocha-resendFollow us on X: https://x.com/dpl_podRecorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.comEvil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtoolsLinks:Resend: https://resend.com/Zeno Rocha on X: https://x.com/zenorochaEvil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartiansVictoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
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Jeff Huber of Chroma on how small opinionated teams with low egos build the best developer tools
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Chroma co-founder Jeff Huber explains why "consensus is a death blow" for great products and reveals his framework for commercializing open source: keep the engine open, monetize the car. He breaks down context engineering, why RAG became industry brain rot, and how small opinionated teams with low egos build the best developer tools.Follow us on X: https://x.com/dpl_podEpisode notes: https://evilmartians.com/events/podcast-jeff-huber-chromaEvil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtoolsRecorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.comLinks:Chroma: https://x.com/trychromaJeff Huber on X: https://x.com/jeffreyhuberEvil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartiansVictoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
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Sarah Wooders on why LLMs are like Memento and building the infrastructure for stateful AI agents
Join us for a conversation with Sarah Wooders, CTO & co-founder of Letta AI, as she reveals why LLMs are not there yet and how stateful agents will unlock the next generation of AI applications. From Berkeley PhD to YC alum to building the infrastructure for truly intelligent agents.Key insights from this episode.On the core problem with LLMs:"It's kind of like if you've seen the movie Memento... if you have a person that just forgets every single day or forgets every five minutes... That's basically what LLMs are."Why 2025 feels like the early Internet:"I feel like with AI, this is our version of that. There's just so much opportunity. Everything is so undefined. There's a ton of white space... so much low hanging fruit."The difference between real agents and marketing fluff:"A lot of people just added LLMs into [existing workflows] and then called them an agent... that's inherently still very different from something that's like an agent that has identity, that works autonomously, that learns."On building in the AI boom vs 2020:"Right now is a much better time to be building a startup... the amount of value that's just being created and that you can capture is so much more."What's still missing in AI infrastructure:"MCP is super early... there's a ton of differences in how people implement the protocol. Auth hasn't really been figured out. There's a big lack of standardization."Why open source matters for AI tools:"We want to do that agentic orchestration in an open way... allowing developers to have as much control as possible over their context window, being able to see what tokens are going in and out."Links:Letta AI: https://letta.comSarah Wooders on X: https://x.com/sarahwoodersEvil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartiansVictoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_enEvil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools#AI #Agents #LLM #Startups #OpenSource #AItooling #StatefulAgents
Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools. Hosts from the Evil Martians team interview prominent dev tools founders with the goal of sharing knowledge in the maturing developer tool and commercial open source industry.
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