Transcript
[00:00:00] Victoria Melnikova: Hi everyone. Welcome to 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 and introduce our guest, Sam Lambert, COO at Planet Scale.
[00:00:20] Sam Lambert: Hi, how’s it going?
[00:00:22] Victoria Melnikova: How is it going for you?
[00:00:24] Sam Lambert: Good. I don’t know when this is going out, but we are recording this in the afternoon after.
Sort of a 12 hour AWS US East, one instant where thousands, maybe millions of websites have been offline. So I’ve been, you know, sleeping on and off since midnight. I got paid at midnight last night with this instant. Luckily, you know, in touch with, it’s been completely fine for our customers and clusters, but it’s been a fun day today, I would say.
[00:00:51] Victoria Melnikova: So I’m watching Silicon Valley for the first time. Oh yeah. Ever. Right. And as you know, Pied Piper made a bet [00:01:00] on, on metal. Mm-hmm. So they built their own infrastructure in their garage. Yeah. And I’m like, how funny is that, that today I’m interviewing Sam and we’re talking about metal. Yeah. So. Tell me about this bet on metal.
Like did you ever envision two today’s day? Like was it all built up to this moment? Is it your star hour?
[00:01:24] Sam Lambert: We still run in AWS, so our metal machines are still inside our mm-hmm. So a lot of, there are folks with like metal products. That run outside of the cloud. Mm-hmm. In their own infrastructure. You’re seeing from Twitter today, a lot of people are very excited about running their own infrastructure.
What we do differently is obviously have it inside Amazon. The best thing about today for us, I think was how resilient our software was throughout all of this, and that was really less about metal and more about kind of. Dedication to kind of extreme fault tolerance as a post out there, you know, by us that talks about our rules for extreme fault tolerance and this kind of played out today [00:02:00] with this instant going pretty nice for us and outstripping a lot of other services, availability, which was good.
[00:02:07] Victoria Melnikova: So for you, was this decision kind of like the planet scales mode or was it just like a wild bat? Maybe one day this will pay off
[00:02:17] Sam Lambert: is part of our mode, I think is operational maturity. Someone asked me about this today, they were like, wow. I mean it’s pretty amazing that you’ve been able to like just stay up and go through all of this.
And I said, yeah, I mean, it shows like the day the marketing pays off. You have to have days like this to to show that you actually are resilient. So it does feel good, but at the same time, these types of things are so rare. You know, most people are gonna. Go back tomorrow and, and not, hopefully, not many people will change too much of their behavior.
Hopefully they’re not gonna start doing crazy multi-cloud, multi-region things, you know? Yeah. The, the, the fact that today was so kind of extraordinary is because it doesn’t happen often, it doesn’t really go on much for me. The thing that I think is more [00:03:00] of a mode of plants go is that the constant reliability.
In an environment that is obviously very hostile, which is the cloud and the scale we run out, and the amount of machines that we deploy, always having a kind of constant replacement, always being very, very resilient and reliable is something we’re proud of. It’s what we do. Our job is to keep these large brands online, these large customers that depend on their databases.
That’s what we’re here for. We call ourselves like a tier, A tier zero database because mm-hmm. How critical our infrastructure is to the world.
[00:03:28] Victoria Melnikova: It’s interesting and you are betting on guys that are growing, right. And Chardon is part of that mm-hmm. Philosophy and the only way to make it happen for big, big guys.
And recently you also added Postgres offering to your, to your, you know, to planet scale. Mm-hmm. Services so. Where do you find yourself today? Like who is your ideal customer? Is it like enterprise that, or is it startups that are growing crazy fast? Kind of like whop?
[00:03:59] Sam Lambert: It’s [00:04:00] both actually. So we, I think a lot of people think we’re for enterprise only, and forget that, you know, you can just thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people have started their companies just choosing power scale straight away.
Like the entry price is like 30, $34. Yeah. So it’s not very expensive. You get like a ton for that, right? You get a higher availability setup that you don’t have to try and configure and mess around with yourself. But some people think, you know, it’s, we are just truly, for large databases, enterprises, that’s just not true.
Mm-hmm. We need to generally try and do a better job of that because we talk about scale, talk about scalability, talk about some of our large customers, and people look at that and go, well, we’re not there. It doesn’t matter. But generally, anyone that wants high variability, uptime and performance from their database, which I think is most companies, once they get to a level of seriousness that is.
Who we’re for
[00:04:44] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:04:45] Sam Lambert: Postgres, though we’ve seen a lot more skewed towards startups there. You know, we, we are seeing some large Postgres deployments out there, but nowhere near the amount and the scale of the MySQL deployments that we have. But in terms of like diversity of customer base mm-hmm. That’s where Postgres is, is because, you [00:05:00] know, that product has been GA for, it’s a third week GA and it’s growing incredibly, just incredibly quickly.
In terms of revenue and customer base, which is really amazing to see. Yeah. And that comes from like lots of smaller customers. So Vess is our MySQL shining product. Mm-hmm. We are building ESS for Postgres, which is Nike. That’s coming at some point next year. It’s going very, very quickly. We have customers migrating to us now ready to be ready for Nike.
Yeah. And that will then be even better for unlocking scalability for the Postgre as well. Mm-hmm.
[00:05:30] Victoria Melnikova: You’re kind of dragging me into the hot topic of multi grass. Mm-hmm. So I was just at Super Bay select the, you know, the other week and they announced multi grass, which is built by creator of Vitas, one of the creators, one of the authors.
Do you think that that competition is good for you? It means that there is a big market or what are your general, like, what’s your general sentiment on that?
[00:05:54] Sam Lambert: I don’t think it’s ne, neither good nor bad. Suu left the project four years ago. [00:06:00] Left Planet Scale four years ago. Four years ago, ESS had maybe 15 large users.
That was it. The user base for Vetas in the last four years has grown by 61000%. Yeah, so huge change. What ESS is today is a combination of hundreds of engineers work going into the project over time, all of the learnings that we’ve gained in production and. You know, we are still the Vertes maintainers.
Mm-hmm. Nine out of the 10 maintainers for VER test work for plant Scale. The other one works at Nozzle. So yeah, I mean, founding something and being part of that is one thing, but Verta is far past what it used to be. It’s an evolving thing. Mm-hmm. And really it comes down to hosting it in the cloud.
[00:06:45] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:45] Sam Lambert: You know, we are the only kind of company outside. Of Amazon that hosts anywhere close to the size of workloads that they do. In fact, some of the largest that run on like, so the largest Aurora Limitless customer migrated [00:07:00] from that to ess. Mm-hmm. So you can have an open source project. There’s a copy of ess.
Nike’s architecture is not a copy of vass. It takes heavy inspiration. You know, that’s one way it diverges. We wouldn’t just copy the test. For test was built for MySQL. And the architecture’s better. Mm-hmm. It’s actually like we, some of the things that have, we’ve decided for Nike are actually gonna get back ported to ss.
[00:07:20] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:21] Sam Lambert: You know, VITAS is been around a long time. It was built at YouTube. We spent four years bringing it into the hands of so many more people. We’ve learned a lot of things. Mm-hmm. So those learnings will go back into Nike. So the competition’s not really relevant, you know what I mean? There’s nothing to learn from it.
It’s not, they’re not taking any approaches that we would take. It’s from a, you know, a 4-year-old version of the test is not necessarily mm-hmm. Gonna be the same as what we would build today. And we’re building it and we are serving queries from it. Right now, it’s going into prod, so, yeah. I don’t really think about it.
You, you just have to stay in your own lane. Like Yeah. We’ve, we’ve proven that our ability [00:08:00] to operate mm-hmm. Is completely unrivaled by any company, whether or not there was a thousand multi-res or NAS out there. It really comes down to who’s gonna host those workloads. I don’t see any competition for planet Scale in that world from any, from anybody, anybody at all.
[00:08:15] Victoria Melnikova: I’m also curious about the future of planet scale. So when it comes to, let’s say, my SQL and Postgres offering, how do you see that? Ratio like in, let’s say five years, you know, when some of your customers grow up a little bit mm-hmm. And they become those like hefty databases. What do you think?
[00:08:35] Sam Lambert: I think we will probably see more customers by number.
[00:08:40] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. Using
[00:08:41] Sam Lambert: Postgres just because it’s kind of the default database now for startups and
[00:08:44] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:08:45] Sam Lambert: And, and that none of them get like massive, like there’s just this giant power law to the all, all of tech. Whereas I think you’ll still see the over amount where like sort of overwhelming data and query volume [00:09:00] being among the ES customers.
When I say it’s a power law, we have single clusters on planet scale. Mm-hmm. That will do a lot more qps
[00:09:07] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:09:07] Sam Lambert: Than any of the other Postgres providers total for their entire platform. We are talking about. When people talk about scale, I don’t think people will truly understand what scale means. And when I, and you know, I was going into some talk conversation in DM with someone on Twitter recently that, you know, I was talking about scale and I kind of asked them to guess some numbers, like, what do you think we think a large customer cluster is?
Yeah. And they were like, I dunno, a hundred replicas. I was like, Hmm. Thousands and thousands of replicas. Mm-hmm. In a single cluster. So yeah, I mean, a long way of answering that is essentially, I think the majority of the scale will be among the tests. With Postgres and Nike rapidly changing that over time, but within the five year scale, I think you’d still see the majority of QPS and storage with ESS and then lots of smaller companies.
And it’s how it’s looking like now. Like we’re just seeing just a crazy amount of signups for the Postgres product. [00:10:00] None of them are just gigantic.
[00:10:02] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah,
[00:10:02] Sam Lambert: because it’s where Postgres is right now. Yes. That’s just how it is. I mean, my sequel was in this position at the beginning of the tens. And that’s why MySQL is where it is today, is because it was the chosen database of that era.
It no longer is as the default, although huge websites run on it. Pretty much all of the top 100 of the internet runs on it. And when you look at the scale of even the top 10, we’re talking like millions of servers behind every one of those websites. It’s gonna take a long while for that to change. And Postgres is gonna go into that era now with AI and it’s gonna get better.
Mm-hmm. And there’s companies like us that are operating, bringing our kind of perspectives from running at that sort of scale. And so I think Postgres gonna go through this wonderful kind of maturation from the ecosystem and from the technology. Mm-hmm. Itself. And back when I went to the San Francisco MySQL user group in say 2013, you’d have Google Twitter.
GitHub, [00:11:00] Facebook, Yelp, box, all these companies coming together and they were still young. Mm-hmm. Companies are small in comparison to where they are today. And by them adopting those technologies and us all working together to improve the ecosystem, my SQL got significantly better. And most importantly, the tooling around MySQL Guard significantly better.
We’re about to enter that age for Postgres, I think. Mm-hmm. And there’s a lot to mature, and it’ll be great to see
[00:11:25] Victoria Melnikova: a big. Portion of those users that are using Postgres right now are vibe coders. The other day you actually posted something like, oh, you can’t actually vibe code the infra, you know, database infra.
How do you think that like code gen and vibe coding, how they change in the way the tooling? Is being served the way the tool has been built, particularly when we talk about databases.
[00:11:52] Sam Lambert: So firstly I’ll say I love AI coding. It’s great. I mean, I spend significant, my portion of [00:12:00] time doing it. We use tons of AI at Planet scale, but it’s humans guiding that process, right?
Yeah. Like it’s, it’s humans with their intent, the designs, and what they want to build. That’s different to vibe coding. For me, vibe coding is just talking to an agent. Going through and you don’t really care about, like what is the quality of what it’s coming out with. Like in the last year, I’ve created more websites than I probably have in the rest of my career.
That’s like vibe coding. I suck at making websites, like I’m not making really seriously informed choices. These are also just not production grade apps. They’re, they’re things for demos or mm-hmm. Small marketing sites where it just doesn’t matter so much. That’s vibe coding. I think there’s value to that.
I think it’s massively over hyped by certain vibe coding companies. That are just kind of pretending essentially, that you can just type in, make me this business and it just like produces something. I just, that’s just not true. Mm-hmm. That has not happened. Mm-hmm. There’ll be certain small cases, but there’s gonna be some fun in that area when this kind of comes in, you know?
Mm-hmm. There’s these high churn rates for all these and so [00:13:00] that, that as vibe coding, the impact that’s had on database infrastructure has been very little, except people are optimizing towards building databases that are designed to turn off or be very cheap to run. That. Again, it’s like the power law.
We know from speaking to people at these companies that support the infrastructure behind a lot of vibe coding is that within the first hour of a database being used, it will never get used again. So you’re seeing these incredible user growth numbers for companies. Yeah, but the retention is abysmal because it’s just not, they’re not necessarily, they’re created on a branch of an experiment.
It creates a database. So those databases better be cheap to run and cheap to switch off and cheap to stay at rest. None of those things, anything we’re interested in. Mm-hmm. Our database is designed to be cost effective, running 24 7 3 6 5, under extreme load constantly. There is just no off time for some of these global applications, and so it’s a completely different set of constraints.
[00:13:55] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:56] Sam Lambert: We would not make the optimizations to to be easily switched [00:14:00] off or be cheap. Cheap to run. Mm-hmm. We wanna be cost effective, obviously, but like cheap in the sense that it can just power down and do nothing. Like that’s fine. Single use databases are great. I don’t even understand why people use Postgres for that.
I think you’d probably just use SQL Light, but whatever, people can do what they want. It’s a weird error in tech, but I think a lot of that’s gonna pass it. I don’t think it really relates to mm-hmm. Real production professional databases in any, in any way. Lots of hype though. Lots of noise.
[00:14:27] Victoria Melnikova: So you understand a lot about dev tools.
You invest in dev tools, and some of the dev tools that you invest in are loved by people, right? Mm-hmm. And we’re talking like railway, graphite, right? Mm-hmm. What are some others that you fly? Fly? That I always is awesome.
[00:14:46] Sam Lambert: Some of those are more infrastructure providers than dev tools. Mm-hmm. But dev tools is a really interesting space.
It’s a very difficult space. Yeah. I think it’s very, very hard. I’ve watched, you know, friends of mine in the purely dev tool space go through it [00:15:00] and it’s really, really tough. Power scale’s not a dev tool, right? It’s an infrastructure provider, so, but I also worked on, it’s an infrastructure provider. It’s GitHub, but it’s probably considered among the dev source communities.
It is being one of the greatest. In terms of not just the scale we took it to, like we pulled together a community of a hundred million people, but also how beautiful that product was. I think it it, if you look around the industry now, or you look at some of the earliest things that were, you know, are now accepted in the industry, they were pioneered by GitHub, so it was great to be part of that and see it.
It’s a great space to be in, but it’s a hard space to be in, right? Yeah. We, we see continually that you can, you can provide dev tools that even just exist on every single person’s laptop. Monetizing that into a business is extremely difficult. That’s why I’ve always wanted to stay in consumption, right?
Like the way the thing we charge people for is mapped to them using our product more, and it’s infrastructure, right? We provision service for you. They stay on at a certain amount [00:16:00] of time. They have a cost to us. We have margin on top and we charge you for that. That’s very pure. Dev is harder to monetize in that sense.
The way the value maps is not always as clean or easy.
[00:16:11] Victoria Melnikova: What do you think makes a successful deft till founder
[00:16:15] Sam Lambert: taste? Intuition? The ability to intuit what communities want.
[00:16:20] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:20] Sam Lambert: And to market that to those communities. Developers are very tribal. People don’t like to, A lot of people think software engineers we’re the most objective buyers that.
Out there. We’re making it purely on technical criteria. That’s not true. People, you know, it comes down to brand. Yeah. The chosen language. They like, like just the wars and the arguments. I get into these about my SQL and post grads. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter for all intent, like, you know, we’re experiencing this right now.
Right. I’m, you know, midway through a very long blog post about the difference between post grads and my SQL replication. My SQL being significantly better.
[00:16:52] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. It doesn’t
[00:16:53] Sam Lambert: matter. People don’t really cares. I mean that she’s Postgres. The cloud providers take care of that for them. So it’s just lessons in how we’re not [00:17:00] always cold in calculating when we pick things.
Mm-hmm. We pick them because the brand we like the way make us feel. And that’s fine, but you, you have to encapsulate all of that if you’re gonna be a dev source founder, like people are just not. Reading papers and benchmarks all the time to just find the right tool. Yeah. It’s often what community they’re part of, how quickly they can get building, how quickly they can get going.
Like there’s amazing tech in the Java ecosystem and people see new companies like adopting this style of doing stuff and like the Java community, like how on we’ve been doing this for years. Yeah. Again, no one cares, like it’s just. It just depends the generation you’re in and, mm-hmm. So a dev tools founder has to be very good at intuiting what communities want, understanding that it’s relevant to their community, and that they can be successful that way.
[00:17:43] Victoria Melnikova: How long does it take you to kind of evaluate whether an idea or a founder has potential to grow into something like a big product? Is that something that takes time,
[00:17:55] Sam Lambert: like for certain things? It can, for certain. You can see. [00:18:00] The, the person, the founder, the idea is so compelling and that they all just will it into existence.
Mm-hmm. First met time, I met Guillermo from Versa out, it’s just like, you just know he knows his audience. He understands branding. Mm-hmm. He understands that, that that has an ordinate impact on his community, and so he, I just knew he would make something huge and he has, he’s owned twice now, V zero again, just his intuition towards creating brands and products.
He knew it had to be a separate brand. It has the, it’s the perfect name, like everything. There’s just certain people that just, they get it and they fully understand it. And the GitHub founders were exactly the same. They just understood their community, multiple great products and communities came out of Ruby in those days.
Yeah, like Ruby was the thing. When GitHub was created, DevOps came out of the Ruby community too. And so to GitHub. GitHub is so uniquely a Ruby product. It’s just unreal. You know, that was a different generation of folks that really cared about developer experience. That was the kind of early discussions around developer experience.
Ruby was a language that [00:19:00] traded off performance for the experience of writing it. You, you had to, it was there to be enjoyed. The founders insisted on, on GitHub having very good technical writing. Mm-hmm. There was a GitHub voice that you were trained in when you joined. All of these things were intangible things.
They created a greater sum of, of the parts of caring about taste.
[00:19:20] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:21] Sam Lambert: Interactions and all of these things. And, and it wasn’t talked about as devex then it was just talked about things that were as obvious and, and things that you just should do anyway when building a product that people love. And it just came from that.
And so it really, it is about a place, it is often about, you know, a time, time and place for certain communities and the things they, they wanna do or that resonates for them.
[00:19:41] Victoria Melnikova: Do you think it’s possible to maintain and, you know, stay at that level of excellence as the product grows? Like let’s say with GitHub now that, I don’t know, like let’s say all the engineers in in the world are using GitHub, right?
Do you feel that [00:20:00] their level of developer experience and product excellence is still there, or inevitably with scale, you have to compromise that?
[00:20:09] Sam Lambert: I don’t think you have to compromise it. Maybe it has been compromised now. I don’t know. I think it’s difficult when you’re building for a very large user base.
Mm-hmm. Connecting to a lot of different products. It’s not impossible, you know, it’s still flourishing and still the default for every single developer on earth. We’re now entering a new era. They’ve been great stewards of that era. They brought AI coding to people early, if not first. Mm-hmm. Right. With copilot.
That’s an incredible thing that Microsoft did for GitHub vs. Code.
[00:20:48] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:49] Sam Lambert: All of these things, you know, it’s impressive at the scale they’ve done this, and not just the scale of the website, the scale of the organization. As far, it’s hard to get things done inside big companies. They’re clearly listening.
I think as long [00:21:00] as the CEO, the founder, the people involved, still care about what made the product successful and still understand it. Yeah, you can be fine.
[00:21:08] Victoria Melnikova: Let’s talk about you for a second. There is this whole thing about San Francisco and we can talk about that for a second because I’m one of those people that had a very rough first experience in San Francisco.
Like I didn’t like it at all.
Mm.
But when I moved here with my daughter, who was just one, I had the best experience, you know? So now when I hear a lot of like hot debate that San Francisco is. Not great for a family or, you know, whatever it is. Like there is no work life balance here. I actually don’t believe it because I have a very different experience.
Mm-hmm. You know, and I understand that it’s kind of like almost my responsibility to make the city work for me, you know? Mm-hmm. Because it’s a big city. You can choose very different lifestyles here. Let’s quickly talk about your stance on San Francisco, just because I know that you’re [00:22:00] RFM.
[00:22:00] Sam Lambert: I love San Francisco.
I also know why I wouldn’t be for everybody, but I personally do love it. I think the issues of San Francisco are very visceral. They’re very visually disturbing, and they don’t think anyone wants to be cold or uncaring to these issues. I think there’s also, without getting too vertical, there’s a number of issues that are.
Just down to corruption and problems generally in that area, which is, makes it feel arbitrary or makes it feel as like an own goal. Like it’s, it’s not necessary to have these issues. And I would agree with that. I’m from the uk, I’m now an American citizen. I’m a proud American Citizenism and I’m proud because of the opportunities this country gave me.
I don’t think I could do what I do now anywhere else. And certainly San Francisco, if you’re CEO in tech, it’s like the place to be right where your customers are. I took a short Uber ride over [00:23:00] to here to do this recording and I would go back. It’s a really amazing place to be, and no matter where you work remotely, at least the leadership team of your company has to come here and do sales.
Mm-hmm. And that all have a satellite office. So it’s one just very, very important to tech. And I think that might lead into some of the dislike people have, which is. If you don’t like it here, you may feel forced to be here or
[00:23:20] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm. As
[00:23:20] Sam Lambert: if it gets an unnatural level of praise for what it is.
[00:23:23] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:23:24] Sam Lambert: When those problems and issues are so severe and it is vis viscerally terrible, and I mean all of the hotels are in the area of the town that are just, just horrible.
People are really, are suffering. On the other side, when you live out in the neighborhoods where like the residents live, this is where the, it becomes this kind of,
[00:23:42] Victoria Melnikova: yes.
[00:23:42] Sam Lambert: You don’t see any of this. You live in a really nice, actually suburban, you know, before I was doing a lot of business stuff and I was just doing engineering.
I never went downtown. So Yeah, you could something, you could spend a whole year and go twice. Right. So you just don’t see this stuff.
[00:23:54] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:23:55] Sam Lambert: You could live out in the neighborhoods and have a lovely time and there’s beautiful parks and the weather’s [00:24:00] okay. It’s not the best. LA weather would be nice. So I would, I would swap that for sure.
But like, you know. There is a lot of good here. Mm-hmm. You just don’t get to see it. If you stay here from Monday to Friday in the center of the city and you miss it. Yeah.
[00:24:12] Victoria Melnikova: Do you feel like there is like a good era starting? I feel like there is a lot of like great energy in San Francisco right now, so I only moved here in March.
Mm-hmm.
And since March I see that there are a lot of events, many more than two years ago when I visited for the first time. Yep. A lot of people are trying to move here and I see that on Twitter everywhere. You know, there’s like a lot of excitement around ai obviously, and as you said for young founders, it’s almost like, you know, the only chance to make it with ai.
Like you have to come here and you have to be here physically and network with other founders and network with, with VCs and you know, do all of that leg work here on the ground. So I actually feel like it’s getting [00:25:00] better.
[00:25:01] Sam Lambert: I would say things are definitely improving. It’s improving in multiple ways. So we have a different mayor.
He seems to be more engaged in improving things. So I, you know, people do comment that. It is cleaning up. You know, recently some, someone came by to visit the office that used to live here three or four years ago and said, wow. It’s like,
[00:25:16] Victoria Melnikova: yeah,
[00:25:17] Sam Lambert: it’s definitely improving in that regard. It was pretty dark during COVID.
I did, I did worry. It was like very dead. It was scarily dead. And I, you know, now, and then I would take a trip to New York and New York felt like it bounced back so quickly and it, it was, everyone was having a great time. And San Francisco still felt,
[00:25:30] Victoria Melnikova: yeah,
[00:25:31] Sam Lambert: very quiet and very dead. That I think we’re moving out of.
It does feel like more like when I moved here. I moved here in 2015, but I was coming here all the time from 2013 when I joined GitHub and tech is very all consuming. Mm-hmm. That’s the problem with tech is your competitor is likely obsessed with what they’re doing.
[00:25:47] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:25:47] Sam Lambert: And their job means they can be online constantly.
Like I work seven days a week in some form. It’s not all day, every day on weekends, but I can move things forward. I can,
[00:25:58] Victoria Melnikova: yeah, talk
[00:25:58] Sam Lambert: to customers. I can write, [00:26:00] I can talk to other employees and, and do things on the weekend. And so when you are almost having to do that level of obsession. Mm-hmm. Then moving to a place where there’s lots of other obsessed people, it’s really beneficial.
You can go on a hike with people that care about tech. You can go. Meet folks at networking events and when you’re young, you should, I mean, socializing and meeting people when you’re young is difficult. I’m not thankfully no longer young in that regard. Um, but when you’re in that period, you know, your twenties, it’s, you know what it’s like you’re insecure.
You are, you know, it’s difficult. Yeah, it is. You know, everything. Social media I think makes that way worse, but like, connecting with people, seeing people. You know, I try and talk to folks that are, are, are newer in the industry or they’re building things and try and chat with them and, and this is a place to make that really easy.
So I think SF is gonna stay strong for that. It’s very hard to unseat those places. Yeah. We’re in south, our office is in South Park and I always joke there’s like lay lines under South Park to have the magic for creating startups. You can look out as the building [00:27:00] where Square was founded, where Twitter started, where all these things.
It’s, it’s these sedimentary layers. Now, Friedmans always used to talk about the sedimentary layers that tech is built on, and I believe in that they, those sedimentary layers. The fact you can go and talk to, I’m like, I guess I’m old guard now, but then there’s an old guard of folks that I used to talk to about the first.com era while we were building.
You know what I mean? You just get to speak to people and, and I, and the thing I love about tech is people always pass it down as people seem to really want to help.
[00:27:26] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. The
[00:27:27] Sam Lambert: newer generations. And when that’s all in one place or very close to being in one place, then it’s very special. Yeah. And it’s hard to beat.
[00:27:35] Victoria Melnikova: So it brings me to the point of my hat. This is actually a very special hat and I want to to tell the story because when I just moved to sf, which was in March, I went to one of the mid ups, which was at Planet Scale, and this was the first hat I got in San Francisco, you know, since I moved. It’s my special hat.
I wear it all the time, like you can see me in Pack Heights wearing this hat because it is just [00:28:00] my go to hat. And when we agreed to, you know, to, to do this interview, I’m like super excited ‘cause I can finally wear my hat to the interview, you know, and it’s,
[00:28:11] Sam Lambert: you preserved it very well. It’s in great condition.
You
[00:28:13] Victoria Melnikova: know, I sweat a lot and it, ‘cause, you know, pi height is a lot of heels, you know, in
[00:28:18] Sam Lambert: good weather. But
[00:28:19] Victoria Melnikova: thank, yeah, I take good care of it so. The community around planet scale. You know, you do a lot of events, you do some educational events about migrations and things like that. What do you think is the most valuable resource for your users?
Like what helps people convert? And let me expand on this a little bit. Database is such a sticky product. Like if you choose a database you’re committed to it for, yeah, it’s very painful to migrate, right? So that decision early on. You know, it’s risky. Like you have to weigh different options. You have to think about pricing, you have to think about scale, like a lot of different things.
[00:29:00] And what do you think really moves the needle for your customers? Like how, like what is that spot that you can bring them relief on, you know, so they feel like you de-risked this, this deal for them.
[00:29:14] Sam Lambert: The magic phrase we hear from people is, I just don’t wanna think about my database anymore. Now that is a goal.
That’s tough because your application is often the reason the database is not Yeah. Always optimal. Right? Like it, you know, it depends. It, it being, you know, the thing I’m proud about with our uptime and the results we give for our customers is it’s not just that we have a service. It’s a service where we don’t control the client.
So I’ve worked, when I was at GitHub, we had control of the client. The problem was always coming from inside the house, usually, right? There’s some row query or something in the app, and we had control of the app. We don’t have control of people’s apps. We can make recommendations and they follow our recommendations.
Luckily, they know where the experts and we can talk about those things. But some people get into these conditions where it’s very, very tough. [00:30:00] Really. It’s when people want to hand off the, the daily opera, like nothing sits still in databases. Like if you are a company that’s growing. The database load, all of these things is just a moving target continually.
And you wanna rapidly develop your product. Yes. Especially in a world that’s as frenetic and moving as quickly as it is today. So you, you need to keep ahead of operations. It’s like this constant gardening that has to be done. Mm-hmm. And that’s where managed services are really powerful and that’s why we have this managed service and the kind of it being a product.
The kind of rising tide raises things for all boats. So we implement a feature for one customer, it has a tail impact for other customers. It’s great. Mm-hmm. And so we are constantly thinking with our, you know, with our team how to improve our database product Yeah. And manage its resilience. And, and when companies onboard, that’s huge for them.
Like, yeah. That takes tons of problems away. Like today, I, you know, during this US Swan apocalypse, I tweeted the picture of the status page of one of the largest consumer apps in America. [00:31:00] That runs on planet scale all green.
[00:31:02] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. And
[00:31:03] Sam Lambert: I’m sure they feel good. We feel good. It’s nice. It’s a customer outcome that I care about.
But really it’s about when people like need to have something be reliable or scale or be usable. And a lot of the time it is migrations in, we see a lot of people that run out of steam on RDS or Aurora.
[00:31:18] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. And run
[00:31:18] Sam Lambert: out of scalability there and have to migrate Because of this, we’ve sort of picked. An area of the market that’s the hardest to serve.
[00:31:25] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. Because
[00:31:26] Sam Lambert: they come to you with a real business. Downtime is not an option for them. Migrating has to be done online. Yeah. They have to test, they have to do all these things. So we go through these really long migrations for certain customers. Where like we have to do multi region testing game days.
We have to make sure we have capacity. Like, like people are spinning up thousands of nodes at a time just to serve like a, a peak or all these things that we have to have answers for doing all this stuff. So it, it takes like a lot of coordination with customers that said, the easiest time to move your databases now.
Mm-hmm. If [00:32:00] your business is growing. And that’s why having products that address the bottom end of the market, they’re really important to us. And that’s why we try and make it easy to onboard. So we’re in a situation, we’re helping some customers, Postgres customers, very large ones moving out of, like Google, for example, their source cluster is now so contended that even getting the replication data out is very painful.
[00:32:22] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:32:23] Sam Lambert: And, and we’ve like, we’ve with public, with this, with joint customers with wap, right? Yes. They, they are just this phenomenal company of just. When I went to visit their offices, like, yes, this is exactly what it was like to be in a, every early company I’ve ever been at. Like the, it’s just this young team of infectious.
It’s infectious. They’re just, they know their audience so well. They’re genius marketers. Absolutely genius. And then they, they suffer from all that successful database problems. And you get very stuck, right? Like it’s you, the database becomes fragile, then migrating out of the database becomes fragile.
And that was an operation we had to do very quickly with them to get them out of that and that, but that, that’s obviously a situation that was very painful [00:33:00] and can be avoidable for most companies. If they think to themselves, well, we’re pre-launch or we’re, we haven’t been launched long, let’s get off of a previous provider that’s not doing so well.
Yeah. And move to something like Planet Scale, which another one is kick.com. Mm-hmm. Right. You see there. Graphics all over all the form sports events and whatever. I remember when they signed up and I, I remember I’d seen some controversy ‘cause they were migrating streamers and, and folks onto their platform and I remember they just signed up and created a net new database with the, the Kick app was just brand new against Planet Scale.
It was awesome. They were just from day one, like their first, they paid, like their first bill was just tiny on the credit card. Now their business has grown and become so successful that they’re in every sporting event I turn on, I see their logo and I’m like, yeah, I remember the day you created, like you had some foresight to think, you know, we are gonna build something successful, so we’re gonna bet on ourselves.
We’re gonna put it on a platform that we know has so much more runway for us, which is planet scale. Mm-hmm. And they’ve grown. And now, you know, they were having an event this [00:34:00] weekend and I just kind of checked in and saw. The traffic volume compared to where they started is immense. And the fact that they’ve not run into all those painful database issues that stopped them innovating has meant that their business can continue to scale really well.
Their customer base is happy and they grow. This is great. It’s a lovely success.
[00:34:19] Victoria Melnikova: That’s so interesting. You know, a lot of technical founders fall into this trap of overthinking scale. Like very early on they, they already envision how they’re gonna be skating. But it’s not like they haven’t found product market fit yet.
Mm-hmm. You know, so it’s too early and plan scale actually comes in nicely because it can scale with you, right? Yes. Like you don’t have to think about, oh, like what will I have to change to actually enable the scale.
[00:34:45] Sam Lambert: Correct. Later on. Yeah. There’s a lot of un o over engineering that happens. I rail against this on Twitter all day long, like mm-hmm.
I can’t stand it. You know, people are 50 microservices and this, and you know, at the end of the day, we’re just asking you to speak to a MySQL database. Or [00:35:00] a Postgres database not asking you to shard up front. That comes later. Yeah. Last week I was at CloudFlare Connect, where I sharted a database live, just to show people like,
[00:35:10] Victoria Melnikova: yeah,
[00:35:10] Sam Lambert: it used to be scary 10 years ago.
It used to be, hell, a really hard thing to do. Now it’s easy. Yeah, ish. But from day one, you’ll just connect to a Postgres. It’s just Postgres. It just works. God forbid. Knock on wood, if your business takes off, we are there for you. You are. You’ve got it locked in. You can, we can take you to scale and if you wanna be the next Cash app, you wanna be the next intercom, cursor, whatever, whoever runs on Planet scale, I mean, we’ll be there.
[00:35:35] Victoria Melnikova: I also had a question about your personal journey. So you, Joe, and Planet Scale as a CPO, right? Mm-hmm. And in just in a few months, you took over as a CEO. Mm-hmm. Can you just give a bit more like context what happened? Like what was it? That made you so like, such a good fit for this role?
[00:35:54] Sam Lambert: Mm, well it remains to be seen if I am, that, that, that, that gets meshed in decades or more.
But [00:36:00] I knew of Planet Scale and I was advised of the company before I joined. Mm-hmm. And I knew of them because GitHub used for Tess back then four years ago for Tess, was an immensely incredible technology, but it was a very niche technology. Powers scale was basically a consultancy. That had support customers like Slack and Bloomberg and folks like that that run for Tess on-prem.
And that was it really. There was really just, it was, it was not really a kind of a tech business. It was more of a, of a consultancy. Mm-hmm. It wasn’t a tech product and there’s obviously no future to just doing that. If you want to build, and you’ve taken venture capital money to go and build a platform.
You need a platform, you need cloud consumption. Yeah, that’s for sure. And now I remember ESS being so good at GitHub, like it was just, it did exactly what it needed for us, but we were at scale. We had lots of engineers dedicated to it. When I joined ESS was, you know, not broadly compatible with any frameworks.
You couldn’t spin rails up against it. You [00:37:00] couldn’t spin up any, any major framework. So. I joined ‘cause I saw, saw the opportunity to turn planet scale into a cloud platform that would endure and, and bring the test and the best of the test to a mass audience. So that’s what I came to do. And so I joined the CPO, took over engineering, took over the product team.
And started to build a product, a, a, a cloud product, right? Mm-hmm. Like we then set about modifying Vitas to be much more compatible and the Vitas team did an incredible job going from very little compatibility with all of the frameworks to almost four compatibility. So we now have testing against all the major framework CI tests.
To make sure that when we push changes to Vitas, it becomes, it, it stays compatible. Mm-hmm. And performant for the app, so that that widened the aperture for how many companies could go in a adopt pilot scale Significantly. And like I said, the user [00:38:00] base for Vitas has grown 61000%. So it’s gone from maybe 10 to 20 hyperscale companies using it on-prem to now hundreds of thousands of users that use of a test.
Some don’t even realize, they think they’re just talking to MySQL and. We then coupled that with like a lot of operational excellence. So a bunch of folks joined from companies like GitHub, very large scale. Mm-hmm. And so it’s not just a technology, it’s the running of that technology in a way that can, can be trusted.
So the old version of the product, the old version of the cloud product before I joined, had about 750 users.
[00:38:35] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:38:35] Sam Lambert: Total. When it was shut down, we gained more than double that in the first day of announcing the beta of our new product and things really took off. And so it was kind of thought, well, you know.
It’s clear why this is happening. Maybe if we can put all the wood behind the arrow and Sam just runs things how they are, it would work and like I said, we dunno until the very end, but it seems to be working and I’m very proud [00:39:00] of what we’ve done. I’m proud of the VER test team They took, took a project that was Google where I’m not very applicable and it’s now applicable and behind so many companies like it.
It’s just a crazy experience to walk around. And I, we had the test team in town recently and we were just all talking about this and I, you know, I gave them a really heartfelt thank you because the work they do to run an open source project that impacts so many people, it’s really tough. I mean, every working ad adult in America interacts with our software constantly.
Like it’s, it’s just amazing. You know, some of my favorite products run on Plants Scale, and you forget, like every Slack message you send goes into the test cluster. It’s like wild, right? Every cash app transaction. It’s an amazing feeling and that team from that kind of from those early days have really turned verus into this incredibly broadly used product, and I’m very, very proud of them.
[00:39:55] Victoria Melnikova: So I always end my interviews with this question that I called a warm fives [00:40:00] question, and it’s about basically, it sounds like this, what makes you feel great about what you’re doing right now?
[00:40:07] Sam Lambert: I get to wake up and log online. Talk to 60 people that I find inspiring and challenging, and they are smart, kind, funny, and we control our own destiny.
We have a profitable company that supports incredible businesses that is continuing to grow and is growing very rapidly now. And I’m doing it with people I just like, and that to me is just. I just feel like the luckiest person in the world, like they’re so funny and so sweet, and so intelligent, and so caring about the customers that we have.
I just feel lucky. That’s it. And, and, and it’s, and it also is the same with customers. Databases are very difficult and they’re one of the most challenging parts of technology. They’re also just like databases. [00:41:00] When you see the products that get built on top, I get really hyped up about, mm-hmm. Our customers, like when I see them launch or raise or do anything, really anything, I’m such a hype man for our customers because I just, I love what they do, and you just gain this gratitude for you just think you trust us and you trust us when we were small and you bought in early and you’re part of our success, and it’s just this, it’s just so special that I just feel so lucky.
The ability to pick who you work with. Then do it for something that you feel matters is the greatest feeling ever. And I just wake up every day hoping it never ends. And that, and that truly is, I just love it. I, I, as long as I’m talking to customers, talking to our employees, and we’re doing good, and their vision is, is kind of coming into fruition, I’m very happy.
[00:41:49] Victoria Melnikova: Sounds great. Finally, I want to provide space for you to invite people to try planet scale. How can they find it? How they can start using it? Why should they consider it [00:42:00] for their product?
[00:42:00] Sam Lambert: Yeah, I mean, just go to plants go.com. It’s very good database technology. It’s highly available. It’s very fast backed by a team of people that care extremely deeply, and are and are experts.
If you have a database migration, you write into sales, it’s very likely you’ll, I’ll be the first person you talk to. We have a sales team, but I’m always infinitely curious. If you bring an interesting problem or you have an interesting product, it’s highly likely that I will show up and talk to you. If you write into support, I’ll often reply.
If you DM me with Twitter about questions, I’ll get back to you. So just come on board and try out, give, give us feedback. If it doesn’t work for you, you know it, it really is just. What I think is very good and well operated database technology for Postgres on MySQL and just try it or don’t whatever makes you happy.
Thanks.
[00:42:51] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you. Thank you, Sam, for coming. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for being honest, raw, excited. [00:43:00] Yeah. Thank you for that. Thank you for having me. 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 a developer tool needs help with product design development or SRE, visit evil martians.com/dev tools. See you in the next.
