In our latest Dev Propulsion Labs episode, we spoke with Monica Sarbu, Xata’s founder and CEO. Xata is a modern serverless PostgreSQL database platform designed to help developers build, test, and scale applications more easily.
Monica explains why database branching became their defining feature and how they shifted from targeting individual builders to serving enterprise teams modernizing their Postgres workflows. She reveals how they maintain culture through yearly family offsites across their remote team and why hiring a diverse team helps them build a better product.
Watch the full video on YouTube.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Victoria Melnilova: Hi everyone. It’s Dev Propulsion Labs, our podcast about the business of developer tools. My name is Victoria Melnikova. I’m the head of new business at Evil Martians, and today I’m very excited to introduce our guest, Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata. Hi Monica.
[00:00:22] Monica Sarbu: Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be here today with you.
[00:00:26] Victoria Melnilova: I almost feel like you’ve traveled all the way to come to the podcast
[00:00:30] Monica Sarbu: in a way I did.
[00:00:32] Victoria Melnilova: So I’m very lucky to have you here because you’re not typically in San Francisco and right now you are. So what led you here?
[00:00:42] Monica Sarbu: I think it’s a mixture of different things. First is that we want to extend our team here in the Bay Area.
One of the things that I, because usually I’m based in Berlin, for the audience that are in Berlin, in Germany. You know, you always want to think of like how [00:01:00] everything will go in the company. If you will be here. It’ll be easier for you to be in the same time zone with your customers and how things will change into, if you will be here.
And I think not only B, but many companies in Europe, they have this idea. And dream, right? If I go, for example, event to event in San Francisco, more than half of the people that are joining events are from Europe with a goal to, you know, to meet potential customers, to make new connections and so on. So there is always this question, right?
And for us it was, let’s try to see if we come here for six months and see how things are going. And also we can, you know. Be there for our customers in the same time zone and yeah, so we are approaching an, an end of the six months.
[00:01:55] Victoria Melnilova: It’s very exciting. Do you have a, a specific goal in mind for this [00:02:00] trip or it’s kind of just
[00:02:01] Monica Sarbu: No, we don’t have like a specific goal in mind.
[00:02:05] Victoria Melnilova: So right now there, there is a whole trend to be. Remote, but not, not even necessarily remote. Like I’m thinking about lovable for example, and lovable sets the precedent for a lot of young startups that want to create an AI product for them to remain in Europe. Yes. Higher in San Francisco to a certain extent, but, well, not, not only in San Francisco, but in the us, but have the roots kind of like deep in Europe.
Do you have. Kind of like a point on your agenda to keep the business European or It doesn’t necessarily.
[00:02:43] Monica Sarbu: I mean, the main NGG that we have is an in. So we are a US entity. We are a US company. First, and I think there is a trend in Europe. The way I see is many founders, the way they do is that they spend six months here in the US in six months in Europe.
For [00:03:00] most of the founders, that’s, that’s okay, but for me, because I have a daughter, for me, it’ll be really difficult to move back and forth. Because of the school system. Right. So the way I was doing it so far, I was go, I was flying back and forth often, sometimes once a month. And that’s why I wanted to try, let’s see how it is for six months not to travel at all and, and be here.
I think nowadays it’s, it’s more and more not so much important to be here physically here because anyway, even the companies that are based here. The way they do marketing and the way they do, they reach their customers is through online, right? So no one really, you know, most of the companies that you speak with you anyway.
Even nowadays, we speak with them over Zoom. We don’t necessarily go and speak with them in person. So I think it becomes less [00:04:00] important to be here physically. It’s important to have. Support from the company to be in this time zone, you know, to be in the time zone of your customers in order to support them, to onboard them and so on.
I think we’ll be able to see more and more companies grow in Europe. Of course, lovable is a great example and I, I am really happy for them. And you know, there are now quite many initiatives. There is the EU Inc. This initiative, a friend of mine. Was supporting it and they really is quite advanced. And I dunno if, if you know about this, but I think there are many initiatives in Europe in order to, to support more startups because the way it’s happening, what’s happening in the last years is that many startups in Europe, they created as their main entity, a US entity [00:05:00] because you can easily register in Delaware.
And you can hire people basically everywhere.
[00:05:07] Victoria Melnilova: Another startup that comes to mind is recraft. They’re based in London. I mean, I do think they have an office in the us but in general, I feel like it’s not a limitation for a company to be in Europe. Right. But there comes a point where you need a part of your team to be present here, as you said, to support customers, larger customers maybe, or even to do kind of like.
On the ground marketing with events and things like that.
[00:05:35] Monica Sarbu: Yes,
[00:05:36] Victoria Melnilova: yes. Are you planning to do more events, Fox here in San Francisco?
[00:05:42] Monica Sarbu: That’s something we didn’t decide yet, but even from the beginning of the company, we, we are looking to hire people in Europe and also east coast of us. So was, it is not something that we, we change now.
So we are a fully distributed company from the beginning. It just happened and most [00:06:00] of our engineers are in Europe just because, you know, there we found better talent than here. But as we grow, I think it’ll be over multiple continents as well. Now we hired our first, uh, engineering Canada, so we are extending to more countries as well.
[00:06:19] Victoria Melnilova: So Monica was actually on my podcast, I wanna say three years ago. When I was just starting this whole topic and a lot has changed for SEDA since then. Then I remember you explained it as Airtable for databases.
[00:06:35] Monica Sarbu: Yes. That was the pitch. So the way the initial pitch that I had was. That we want you to build something between as easy to use as an Airtable, but as powerful as a database somewhere in the middle.
So I had this like slide where you are positioning, you know, here is the database, here’s Airtable, and we are in the middle. And our audience back then was builders. And [00:07:00] now basically we shifted completely. I think this is something that maybe you, you would like to discuss about.
[00:07:06] Victoria Melnilova: Let me put it like this.
The database market is very intense, so we, some of the names that we know, like super base and planet scale and neon, there is a lot going on on the internet. There are feuds, like it’s, it’s very, you know, it’s very intense and say a was never part of this like feud, you know, it was always kind of like standalone, kind of like completely different solution.
And now with this whole surge of the ai, I dunno, wave. Let’s put it like that. We know that both planet scale and and Super Bay are serving to those AI customers growing, right? Like for example, super Bays is the backbone for the Vibe, code and projects. A lot of them, planet scale is targeted more like bigger clients that are scaling and like [00:08:00] enterprise clients.
What happened to Sada? Where does Sada stand? From what I understand, you’ve pivoted. What is the new product? Just walk us through kind of the new Xata.
[00:08:11] Monica Sarbu: Yeah, so basically when we started, we, we target the builders and small companies and we build a platform in such a way to offer a free, generous tier plan.
And we still have the most generous year plan. And then we realized that, you know, as PA Postgres grew in popularity and our customers have different requirements, they wanted direct access to Postgres. Initially, we didn’t give this direct access to Postgres. We realized that we cannot really build the functionality that we wanted.
For SMBs on the, on the old platform. So we decided, we did this, we took this decision to basically start over with the platform. So we had a few open source project that we build around, but we said [00:09:00] that we, we want to build, you know, if we have started from scratch, what type of platform we build and we build a very flexible platform that allows us to build features, specifics for SMBs for larger companies.
And also that is very flexible. That was very important for us. That allows us to build easy features on top of it. And now we have launched for this, uh, new platform in May this year. Mm-hmm. And you know, the feedback is, is very great. Like we have already customers that are running with us in production and in terms of customers that we are targeting, we are not targeting builders with the new platform anymore because we have different types of functionality.
And I can go into more details on that. And we are targeting, basically the sweet spot I think is SMBs for us, but it can be anyone from company that has free [00:10:00] developers to enterprises.
[00:10:02] Victoria Melnilova: So let’s talk about functionality. What is the new setup? What does it do?
[00:10:06] Monica Sarbu: Yeah, so the main, so we are a po, a modern Postgres platform that lets developers create a database branch with anonymized data from production.
For each feature or pull request, and this basically removes the bottleneck of staging environments that gives developers increased velocity of development, and also gives this confident that developer need. To push features in production. And I think this workflow becomes even more important when we are discussing now about coding agents because the scale is really much larger and I think it’s important to give the coding agent a safe environment where they can test end to end with real data from production without, you know, human interaction.[00:11:00]
And I think it’s important to do this without mass in production and doing it in a, like in a database branch. And yeah, this is one of the use case that we, we are pushing and we want to be part of the development workflow of companies and to use us for development environments, not only for production environments as all the other companies are, are serving customers for.
[00:11:29] Victoria Melnilova: I’m really interested in how you defined what the new feature set would be for ada. Was it something like user feedback sessions that you did? How did you get that information? Or is it just purely your hypothesis and kind of like understanding of the market shares? The, the kind of like behind the scenes?
[00:11:47] Monica Sarbu: I think that’s a very good question and I think we learned, we learned this by, in speaking with a lot of. Lead technical leaders, VP of engineering, CTOs [00:12:00] from small companies, technical leads and VPs from larger companies, enterprises and so on. And it was interesting at the beginning we were asking them a set of questions like, what are the problems that you are facing?
We Postgres and so on. And most of the, most of the people ask like, we don’t really have any problem, like Postgres is really performing and so on. And then we change the question and we ask, what is your main problem in the company? And all the develop, all the leaders are like, the main problem that we have is developer velocity and.
This kind of trigger us that there is something missing why there isn’t any other solution on the market. We have companies nowadays that come to us and like they’re looking at our website and like, why no one did this in the last 10 years. And yeah, we want to be that company and to solve this workflow for developers.
[00:12:59] Victoria Melnilova: [00:13:00] So another point that I remember from our previous conversation, you said something like. We focus on the product, we don’t necessarily do much marketing around it. And the product is gonna speak for itself.
[00:13:12] Monica Sarbu: Yes.
[00:13:12] Victoria Melnilova: Do you still stand by that? Yes. How do you make sure that the product is good?
[00:13:18] Monica Sarbu: So yeah, we don’t have sales team, so everything is coming inbound.
Yeah. I think it’s is very important. You have a very good product. And, you know, we, you see customers using it and facing problems. So we immediately, you know, fix those bottlenecks for customers. I think for me, this was the number one, you know. Goal when building a product to make it easy to use. Because if you make a product that is very difficult to use, no one will make it.
It doesn’t matter how good and how performant the product is if no one is gonna use it. So for us, every time, like we have discussions with developers, you know, [00:14:00] user experience, this is very important for us. And we literally spend a lot of time and resources on making this, like, make it easy to use, thinking of ways, how to make.
Fewer steps in order for the customer to be successful.
[00:14:15] Victoria Melnilova: So that’s interesting. We talk about this internally a lot because for us, developer happiness and developer productivity are kind of like the main thing. That’s our kind of biggest chip on our shoulder. Let’s put it like that. But when it comes to technical founders, they don’t necessarily like to think about that.
To be honest. Like a lot of the times what I hear is that my technology is great if they can’t figure out, they’re not my customer. You know, it’s, it’s that kind of sentiment. What would be your advice to such founders, and maybe do you have any practical tips as to how to approach your product with a.
New set of eyes, you know, with a set of eyes of a potential customer.
[00:14:57] Monica Sarbu: I’m very critical of the product, so I always [00:15:00] see things that I need to improve. I think, I think it depends on the, on the people that you have around it. And I, I can tell you that all my career I struggle to hire tech leads that have.
This feeling of a product or building a product. I think many technical leaders, or technical people in general, they’re excited about, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna build this, I’m gonna use this architecture because it’s so cool and I’m so excited about this. But in the end, what it does matter is that you know, you, you have to think about building something that is useful, first of all, but also easy to use.
I think it’s just about the people and finding the right people. If you as a founder don’t have a critical eye for a product, I think it’s important for you to hire the right people that have this. And I was kind of in a lucky situation that, you know, I brought with me the leadership team from Elastic.
Ah yes. So I grew the team there and [00:16:00] I think it does help. Right? So our CTO is just amazing. He is just not. Not only a very good technical person, but also he has a eye for ai, for, for a product and what the developer will be interested to use. And I think you need to have not only a good eye for a product, but also vision what you think that this might be useful for developers in a few years, because it’ll take time to build.
In order to be there in a few years. So I think it’s just a matter of be surrounded by, by the right, uh, people.
[00:16:39] Victoria Melnilova: And when you think about like the goodness of a, of a product, is it specific metrics that you measure or it’s kind of like a feeling that a team should have
[00:16:49] Monica Sarbu: a feeling, but also we have, you know, we look at sessions, how customers are using our product and what are the features they’re using more.[00:17:00]
There is also a feeling, right? Because right now we see that customers like they continue to use our product more and more. So this is a good indication that they like the product. When you see that, uh, they are not churning, but they are using more the product and you know, they’re always indications. So of course for us, even in this situation.
Where I will say we only have positive signals that everything is going well. We still put a lot of effort in making it work, and I think this is not something that you do once we have internally a project. That we call onboarding that basically thinks about continuously how we can improve the user experience and what are the things that we have to implement on the backend side to make this move for, for, for people either in the UI or the common interface.
[00:17:58] Victoria Melnilova: So if we talk about the [00:18:00] pivot. We kind of briefly discussed that aggressive marketing is not something that Sayta is, is known for, right? You don’t necessarily do aggressive marketing, but let’s say you decided to pivot your product. How do you handle the pivot and make sure that people that have been using Sayta.
Are not taken aback by it and you know, how did you handle that transition?
[00:18:22] Monica Sarbu: Yeah, that’s a very difficult situation that we are in because we have lots of users on an old platform and now we are transitioning them on the new platform. Of course, the new platform won’t have a free tier plan and we don’t have the same functionality and the new platform versus the old platform, but we gave them a very generous package and yeah, we try to do as much as possible.
To make them happy. And of course it’s not a nice thing and an easy thing, especially there are companies that, you know, they run the application on all the platform. [00:19:00] But yeah, it’s a very tricky situation.
[00:19:03] Victoria Melnilova: So what would be your advice? I mean, and this advice applies not only to this, but in general, something that we also talk to our, to our clients about is how to raise prices gracefully, you know, and how to.
For example, get rid of a free tier gracefully. How to introduce a paywall gracefully, like how to monetize your product better. I think this could apply to, to all of those situations. I
[00:19:25] Monica Sarbu: think it depends on the audience. So I. If we’ll have, for example, build a new platform also for the same audience we’ll have continuously have like a free tier plan.
Well, we changed completely the audience, so it doesn’t really make sense for us to have a free tier plan. We have two weeks free trial, but we don’t have a free tier plan. Plan. And I can tell you a bit, I think for us it fits much better as a company and as leaders to. Not go after builders. I mean, [00:20:00] my entire experience is from my entire career I was, you know, building products for companies.
The goal initially was to start with builders and then go and and support companies. So we didn’t want you to go after builders. I think super base is doing an amazing job in supporting builders, and I think. I think you as a company need to choose. Either you go after builders or go after SMBs and companies.
I don’t think you can do both because I feel like it needs to be the founder and that that is able to understand that audience better. It’s just for us, we, it’s much better fit the, you know, the audience, the ICP, if you and the, the companies as a, as audience and also the team that we have. You know that we have a very strong technical team internally, and they’re more excited to build features, more complex [00:21:00] features for larger scale companies.
Yes.
[00:21:03] Victoria Melnilova: Something that I talk to founders a lot about is this concept, Zenna. Roha shared it, and the, the idea, it’s called Genius Zone. So basically each person has a set of skills that. Comes naturally very easily to them. Ideally, when it’s multiple founders, they compliment each other with those skill sets.
So when we talk about you, what is your genius zone, what are some tasks that come naturally for you and what are some skills that you’re strong at, but it didn’t come hard to you.
[00:21:38] Monica Sarbu: Yeah, I think, uh, this is a very good question and to be honest with you. I was not sure about myself either. Like many years ago when I was working at Elastic, I went, because back then, me and our CTO, we are leading together teams.
And when we started to introduce, uh, like titles in [00:22:00] Elastic, I went to our back, CEO, Shai, been on the CEO of now CEO of Elastic, and went and asked like, what should I be and what. Our CTO should be, and he fought for a second. He, and he said like, you are good people. You should be the people manager. And he’s a very good technical person.
So he has be, he should be the tech lead. So I think at that moment I realized that I should, you know, it happened naturally like this that I was doing more like everything related to people manager project and so on. And since then we are trying to, you know, compliment each other and I do more of that part and he’s doing more of that part.
I think it’s important for people to. Like do what they are good at, you know? And for me it is like this is, you know, I was also very good engineer back in the days I [00:23:00] was a seed developer and that’s why it was harder to decide where I should be. But I think. You know what people like about me is being a manager and being like a people manager.
I usually don’t think about this. Things think so much because I like my team not to think about me as a CEO. I like, I want them to think as, you know, another team mate and you know, because I always do this one-on-ones with everyone in the company and try to. Make them feel comfortable to come to me with any kind of problems.
So I think titles and, and these are not very important. I think it’s important to kind of encourage people and see their strengths and encourage them to do that more, what they’re comfortable with and not come with random, dis like random goals for, for people that they’re not [00:24:00] comfortable with. So I think you have to.
I answered quite a lot. Yeah,
[00:24:03] Victoria Melnilova: it’s, it’s actually very interesting because I think you’re the first founder who talks a lot about the happiness of people and the comfort of people that you are overseeing, basically. And this is very interesting to me. And you mentioned that you’re an extrovert, which is also quite rare in this industry for, I would say for technical founders, it’s, it’s not common, yes.
To be an
[00:24:24] Monica Sarbu: extrovert, I had to learn how people feel. Like not, not too many meetings. Yes. And, but for me it is very, it doesn’t bother me to have many meetings and interactions with people. Yeah. You know, I just. I had to learn this, that other people function differently. Yeah.
[00:24:41] Victoria Melnilova: So it’s interesting that those interactions actually feel your cup, right?
Like you feel great after talking to people. Yes, and I mean, even reflecting about myself, I remember that when I joined Devil Martians, it’s a very technical team, right? Like really great engineers and I really felt like an outcast [00:25:00] in a, in a way because. I felt like, like my skillset is not needed. You know that I have great soft skills, but they’re not necessarily needed at a company.
And I remember how my colleague Amanda told me that it’s a culture add. The company needs you because you have those skills that for other people they come less easy, you know? And. Because it comes easily to you. You don’t realize how important it can be, you know, for a team or for our company, which was not like, it took me years to understand that, you know, because I felt like, oh, I should be also technical and like this very, you know, reserved and things like that.
So, yeah. It’s interesting that you had. Somewhat similar experience, you know, and it was, you kind of like discovered that that’s your strength.
[00:25:47] Monica Sarbu: Yeah, I think someone else discover it for me and, but you know, you, you, you have to start somehow, somewhere. I think it’s more important if someone else is telling you.
Yeah. Because it is [00:26:00] just, it’s, it’s just reassurance that you are on the right track.
[00:26:05] Victoria Melnilova: So how big is Sayta now? How many people do you have? We are
[00:26:09] Monica Sarbu: 25 now, and, but we are growing quite a bit now.
[00:26:14] Victoria Melnilova: So what’s your day to day looking like with the team? Do you have just meetings every day or you have to make trips to San Francisco?
What do you do on a daily basis?
[00:26:24] Monica Sarbu: I’m very strict in how I spend the time. So I do meetings. I, I start 6:00 AM because the team is in. My, most of the engineering team is in Europe, so I have lots of meetings in the morning, but I think it’s great here because I have time to concentrate more in the afternoon.
So I do a lot of things. So it’s, you know, as a CEO, you, you kind of have to jump from a meeting with the lawyers, uh, to, uh, people problem or project problems or roadmap discussions, or. You know, lunch [00:27:00] and branding or a website. I don’t know. I do a lots of stuff and I also deal with, you know, finding people for our team.
I think this is, I spend a lot of time with recruiting and yeah, so I do a bit of everything. What I don’t do, I, I don’t write good.
[00:27:22] Victoria Melnilova: What are some qualities that an ideal candidate Foxer has?
[00:27:27] Monica Sarbu: Yeah, I think that’s a very good question. So for us, we have a high bar for hiring people in the company, and for me, the most important skill is that we always look after either technical leaders or engineers, ex founders, that are able to drive projects by themselves.
I am kind of against me as a person, as a manager, if you want to give tasks to engineer, and this is not only Xata, it also happened in my teams over my career. When I was leading, I was kind of [00:28:00] leading more or less, my entire career basically is for a very important to, to hire, basically, if you want, we hire after this profile.
[00:28:11] Victoria Melnilova: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:12] Monica Sarbu: But not after the skills like, you know, I like to hire people that have complimentary skills. I think it’s very important to have, because if you have the same profile, all the engineers have the same pro, pro profile, then you are gonna build project in such, in only this way. And then you have to imagine that the, your audience is diverse.
So for me it’s important diversity, and I learned that. Not only diversity in like gender diversity, but also diversity in like, you know, education and so on. In order to make like, um, you know, a com a very good product, I think it matters every, and also gender diversity. I think this is very important and I noticed in my career [00:29:00] that when you have a diverse team, a gender diverse team, you tend to have better products.
[00:29:06] Victoria Melnilova: When we talk about those high agency engineers and high agency technical leaders that you mentioned, autonomous leaders, do you think that’s that’s a skill that can be trained or it’s something that person just is born with or, I don’t know, raised with?
[00:29:24] Monica Sarbu: I think that’s a very good question. I don’t know if it’s born with, but I think it depends how the evolution of that person was.
I feel like people need to be confident in themselves to be able to be in that role and take the, even if maybe they’re not very confident, but they, they want to lead a project and you know, I know people that they didn’t believe in themselves, but they were excellent leaders. And I think it’s important, I noticed this in my career over and over.
When you give someone the trust [00:30:00] to lead a project, to lead a project, they will do amazing. I think it’s just, uh, your perspective, you know, in trusting them and let them lead the project and, and then, you know, they have to, and most of the time they, they do an amazing job.
[00:30:19] Victoria Melnilova: I liked how you said that you basically like to delegate.
From what I hear, you like to hire people that are really high agency and they take ownership of the project going forward. Yes. Was it always easy for you to delegate? Like is it kind of like, oh, I found this person. I have trust in them, so I’m giving them all my ways for, for this attempt to, to do the project like other.
Benchmarks at, you know, certain benchmarks that you check them on later on. Like, how do you see whether it’s not working out? Do you have any tips as to how to delegate and give that trust to a new person?
[00:30:59] Monica Sarbu: [00:31:00] Yeah, so usually I trust everyone you know, at the beginning, you know, again, kind of give them the power to lead and then if something doesn’t work, then you are gonna see it.
But usually I prefer to, I wouldn’t say to delegate, but basically you can’t do it all. And I see myself in like, instead of me spending 20 minutes of my time thinking about problem, you’ll do a worse job regardless of how good you are on doing this. But someone that thinks about this problem 24 hours has realistically higher chances to do a better.
To do better, you know? So that’s why I think it’s important to kind of split responsibility between different teams. Different teams and different people as well. And that’s why the way we work in our company is that we have projects and we have, everything is a project and we [00:32:00] have project leaders, and every project has a weekly sync.
Or be biweekly depending on, on how big is the project. And usually it’s a project lead and multiple people from different teams that are part of that project.
[00:32:17] Victoria Melnilova: And you said that you’re very critical of the product as well. How do you handle feedback? How do you give feedback? Do you tend to be, ‘cause you seem like a very caring person.
Do you try to be nice about things or you’re. Straightforward kind of feedback giver.
[00:32:32] Monica Sarbu: Yeah. That’s a very delicate problem. Right. I always see things that can, can be improved. Right. But it’s, it’s very difficult to give feedback, right? So you have to be careful, especially, you know, if sometimes people think, yeah, the CEO gives feedback.
And so you have to be very careful with that, how we provide feedback. Yeah.
[00:32:56] Victoria Melnilova: So no, no recipe, no kind [00:33:00] of secret recipe that works for all.
[00:33:01] Monica Sarbu: No,
[00:33:02] Victoria Melnilova: I
[00:33:02] Monica Sarbu: think you have to adjust, uh, you know, you have to be careful how you say it. Yeah. But in most of the cases, I think they say that we don’t only have problems, I have problems in the past.
It depends on the person. Some people, uh, take it very offended if you give feedback and we ha I had a very serious situation in the past. Where me and our product lead was trying to convince this person to change. Yeah. A week. Yeah, we spend a week, but yeah, it’s. I think it depends on the people. It’s, it is very hard to give a recipe.
The way I, I do everything in the company is that I don’t, every person is different the way I structure the one-on-ones with everyone, so I do one-on-ones with everyone, and I want to do one-on-ones with everyone, regardless of the size of the team. Now I do once a month and you know, it’ll come less than [00:34:00] that.
Rarely than that, but I think it’s important to do the one-on-ones with everyone and Yeah.
[00:34:08] Victoria Melnilova: Do you have a recipe for a one-on-one? The reason why I’m asking is because a lot of people struggle with one-on-ones. You know, especially when, let’s say I’m a junior new hire and I’m talking to a CEO, you know, how do I make sure that, I don’t know, I, it’s actually valuable for both of us, right?
Or for a manager, a lot of the times the struggle is to follow up on the things that you discussed, you know, especially if you’re not making decisions on certain things. So do you have any. Maybe like a template as kind of like what are some things that you do in one-on-ones that you find are helpful for the team?
[00:34:50] Monica Sarbu: So every one-on-one is different in the sense that I adjust based on the person. Some people prefer to talk more about this, they like to know [00:35:00] more about the business, they’ll like more to know about the family stuff. Everyone is different and you have to adjust based on the person.
[00:35:08] Victoria Melnilova: Mm-hmm.
[00:35:09] Monica Sarbu: Usually I encourage people to come with a set of questions.
Most of the time they don’t come with a set of questions. I also had issue, I had situations in the past that people didn’t want to do one-on-ones, so I didn’t do one-on-ones. So not with Sayta, but before in my career, you cannot apply the same template for everyone. You have to adjust based on the person and their way of, you know, being.
Some people are not very comfortable to share everything and yeah, you have to respect that and you have to make it different for them.
[00:35:51] Victoria Melnilova: You mentioned that the team is distributed, right? So you’re not all in the same time zone even. Do you have any offsites [00:36:00] or do you have maybe any traditions that can be online or whatever it is?
That really serve your corporate culture? Like are there any ways to make sure that everybody’s aligned and feel feels good in the moment working at the company?
[00:36:14] Monica Sarbu: I mean, most of the engineers are in European time zone, so we have quite a bit of overlap. Everything is, uh, synchronously. So you know, there is a different way how you lead the team fully distributed.
We don’t hire juniors, so we hire from senior and and above. So this makes it easier. I think because of our nature of fully being fully distributed, I am a bit worried to hire more junior people because I feel like you need to be there for them and mentor them more. Mm-hmm. And I think being physical together with them in a room, it makes it, it’s important.
Mm-hmm. And I don’t want to cause like a, make a bad impression. Well, for them working in the Air Force Company, I think this is, uh, very high. [00:37:00] Stake for us. So we are not doing this, at least for now. Yeah. Yeah. So we are fully distributed and we do everything. I think we meet twice a year face to face. And at this point, because most of the people are in the company for many years, you know, they, we know already the plus ones, the kids and so on, and everyone is coming.
The way we do it is that we also invite the plus one. And the kids. So we have a bigger group and already, you know, there are some activities that the plus ones are always organizing while we meet and discuss about roadmap and things like this. They meet and, and do different activities. They already, like, you know, they already had a few of sites that spend together and, and they really like it.
So everyone is so happy about the offside. I think we did a great job in, in our organizing. Great offsite so far, and [00:38:00] we do them usually in interesting locations most of the time in south of Europe. But we did also Iceland. Wow. This year we started with Iceland and we went to Rome. Next we go to close to Paris.
So we do them in different locations and for us it’s, it’s impor, it’s important to spend time. To know each other, and at this point we kind of know each other very well. For me, it’s important to also have the family over, especially smaller kids come, the kids as they go older and go to school is more difficult to bring them because of, you know, it’s hard to get kids out of school in Europe.
I think it’s a, it’s a very fun time for everyone and everyone is like looking forward. So what we have special, I [00:39:00] feel like because we have a higher percentage, almost 40% female in the company. Mm. We have, we already start offsite with a welcome, like, welcome dinner or welcome cocktail parties, something like this.
And everyone dress up. Not everyone. I would say the ladies are preparing moms in advance. They’re of it. That’s so fun. The guys are like, okay, yeah, we are, we are more relaxed on this, on this matter, but I think this is something special that we do and they feel so excited about idea of working with other ladies in different project, but also like, you know, doing something more feminine in this kind of events.
[00:39:50] Victoria Melnilova: Speaking of feminine, I want to talk about the head. I just want to show it. Look how beautiful this is. Like to all the people in the, in the Silicon [00:40:00] Valley Bay area. This is gorgeous. Let’s talk about this. What does the emblem mean and the colors and everything. I just wanna know mm-hmm. All about it.
[00:40:10] Monica Sarbu: Basically, the logo means the butterfly, and it’s a butterfly because this is what I was able to draw in my previous. Startup. I had a fish and now I have a butterfly. You know, I have limited skills in what I can draw. And basically the idea was to build something light in order to like the idea of easy to use the color.
Initially we had multiple colors, similar with elastic logo, and then we changed it to uni color because it became difficult to. We so and everything and then I chose purple and not because it’s my favorite color, but because it was my, my [00:41:00] daughter’s favorite color back then. Now it’s not anymore. She is into other color colors as she grew up.
But yeah, I wanted something feminine because this is what, you know, defines us and we want to stand out with this and kind of have a different swag. We have a different swag. We stand up with our swag and we want that to make a difference.
[00:41:27] Victoria Melnilova: I feel very seen because you brought like a whole care package for me and I will wear it, I promise.
Do you find that people at the company wear your swag a lot or,
[00:41:38] Monica Sarbu: yes. I mean, this is something that I also spend time with trying to make sure that we have really great swag. I remember a few years ago. We had for guys different colors of t-shirts, like from pink, green, like light green, so different colors and uh, you know, [00:42:00] some, some prefer to wear those colors, some prefer only black.
And I think we need to have a high, yeah. Severity of those. But yeah, people are wearing the swag and we try to, we put a lot of effort in trying to make sure we are buying the right swag and which sometimes is very difficult for us. Yeah. Especially that we are in Europe and most of the high quality swag is based in the us but we have different ways how to do this.
[00:42:28] Victoria Melnilova: I know that Portugal has some places that do like fabrics and they, for example, they saw like massima duty stuff, so I’m sure there’re like secret spots where you can outsource.
[00:42:40] Monica Sarbu: Many times we had custom swag that you cannot really find, but for example, bags, we have a Louis Vuitton small bag that everyone likes.
It looks like Louis Vuitton, but it has the patterns of the Of the butterfly. Oh,
[00:42:58] Victoria Melnilova: that’s so fun.
[00:42:59] Monica Sarbu: [00:43:00] Yes.
[00:43:02] Victoria Melnilova: Every time I have an interview, it’s kind of a very, I feel like it’s a treat for me because I get to see your personality just right here, just to myself, and I feel this kind of. Soft power, you know, that’s how I would describe you.
And I think it’s, it’s very new to me because I typically speak with men and that’s not the vibe I get. So I feel like I am seen, I’m cared for and I’m sure that your team also feels that energy from you. So this brings me to my final question, and I call it warm f question. What makes you feel great about what you’re doing today?
[00:43:42] Monica Sarbu: I think for me. Is the team around me makes me feel great. People, I think what define a company, the product that we are building, and also customers. This is what makes me feel great. Yeah. If you have this free, then uh, [00:44:00] I’m happy as well. Yeah. Yeah. And then we are successful. Mm-hmm.
[00:44:06] Victoria Melnilova: Finally, I want you to invite people to try XA and maybe once again, give us a short pitch.
What is it great for and how can they find it? How they can become a user? Maybe bring it into their org.
[00:44:19] Monica Sarbu: Yeah. So if you are using Postgres. What we, we allow customers to do, especially large customers, is that they can keep production where it is, for example, in A-W-S-R-D-S, and they can try us for their development workflow.
So for example, they can create a, you know, production clone with anonymized data from production. And then from that production clone, they can create database branching branches with anonymized. Data for each request. And this is fantastic because really increases the developer velocity and gives the [00:45:00] confident that developer needs to push and deploy features in production faster and safer.
[00:45:08] Victoria Melnilova: Nice. We all need to be more productive, I think.
[00:45:11] Monica Sarbu: Yes. I think, uh, yeah, if you want to try it out, uh, just go to, say. Be better try and I would love to hear your feedback. We are also curious to to hear. Not only good feedback, but also best feedback, feedback, things that we can improve, features that we can add, um, we are always curious about.
Perfect. Thank you Monica. Thanks for coming. It was a pleasure.
[00:45:38] Victoria Melnilova: Thank you for catching yet another episode of Deaf Propulsion Labs. We at Evil Martians transform growth stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. If you are a developer tool needs help with product design development or SRE, visit evil martians.com/dev tools.[00:46:00]
See you in the next.
