Nikita Shamgunov
speaker
65 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Nikita Shamgunov’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The original idea was to build an open source alternative to AWS Aurora. The key idea of Aurora, which we took to the next level, was separation of storage and compute. In a year, we were ready and we started to onboard some internal users. As we started to work on the launch, it leaked, right? Because we didn't hide the website behind a password. So suddenly posted in Hacker News.
and we had a lot of traffic coming to the website. Right before that, we started to see our GitHub repo, and we were building in the public. The stars started to go vertical. We started to get validation that we're onto something. My name is Nikita Shamgunov, and I'm a CEO and co-founder of Neon.
You need to really want it.
While the first company that I built was mostly driven by my understanding of database technology and the desire to build a startup, Neon was engineered not just as a product, but as a company as well. So after my tour of duty at Single Store, where I was CTO first and then CEO, I joined Coastla Ventures, which is a tier one venture firm here in the Silicon Valley as a partner.
As I walked in to work with a famous venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla, I told Vinod, hey, I have this other idea. Maybe we can incubate it here at Khosla Ventures. And the idea was to roll up all Postgres usage in the world. While building Tingle Store, I noticed that there is so much Postgres out there.
And the other property of Postgres is that a small startup would be using Postgres and a very large enterprise would be using Postgres. And then as a technology, nobody really owns Postgres. There isn't a dominant software company that owns Postgres code. There isn't a software company that owns Postgres trademark. So it's like open source in the best definition of being open source.
Since then, I started thinking, what are the key properties of a successful Postgres company? One thing I learned from the node is the team you build is the company you build. And so the second question is like, what is the right founding team to build a dominant Postgres company? And then I started engineering that founding DNA of the company.
I started calling all the Postgres committers and contributors. And then I started to think about the architecture as well. The architecture is the architecture of separation of storage and compute and therefore you need people who understand storage very well and you need to bring them into the company.
The company also depends on the knowledge of Postgres internals as well as the ability to plug it into the Postgres ecosystem and be accepted by the Postgres community. The two co-founders, Stas and Heike, are from the Postgres world. Both contributed to the Postgres engine. Heike is like a legend in the Postgres community and a committer for 20-some years.
And then Stas worked at the Postgres company, but also worked at the tech prime as well, at the largest company in a tech company in Russia at the time. And then the thing is, you need to, what Bezos says, you need to be stubborn on your vision, but flexible on the details. There's a bunch of things that we discovered on the way.
The first thing that we discovered, it came mostly with one of our angels. Guillermo Rauch, who is the CEO of Vercel. And through his eyes, it became obvious how important developer experience and how important serverless is in building of this company.
So if you're building a developer-first product, there's all those things across the production quality, the ability to deliver your technology in a serverless way, integrating into developer lifecycle. All of those things, they're obvious in hindsight.
But it takes actually a good amount of effort to build and deliver both on the technology, on the experiences, on the production quality, and on the team as well. But then as we went along, we realized that developer experience, integration with JavaScript frameworks and the JavaScript ecosystem are a big deal, and that had a big impact in the company DNA as we went along.
And of course, that statement, the team you build is the company you build, can be applied at every stage of the company. And so this year, the team you build is the company you build was applied to the management team. So we have now a fantastic staff team, VP of engineering coming from Mongo, VP of product coming from GitHub.
So we apply this team you build, the company you build, to each iteration. And the year 25 is going to be about GenAI, and then we're bringing some of the AI talents to the team as well.
The original idea was to build an open source alternative to a very popular product called AWS Aurora. The key idea of Aurora, which we took to the next level, was separation of storage and compute. What you do is you build kind of one storage for everyone. And what I mean by that is it's one global multi-tenant storage system.
Compute is still good old compute of a virtual machine in which Postgres lives and then attaches to your storage. So the first version of that was built in about 12 months. And then in a year, we were ready and we started to onboard some internal users. And then we started working on the launch process. As we started to work on the launch, it leaked, right?
Because we didn't hide the website behind a password. So suddenly posted it in Hacker News and we had a big discussion on Hacker News as well as a lot of traffic coming to the website. And then we also, right before that, we started to see our GitHub repo and we were building in the public, the stars started to go vertical. And we're like, wow, what's going on?
We started to get validation that we're onto something. And the GitHub repo was, again, public. And the description in the repo was, this is an open source alternative to AWS Aurora. And there was high velocity on the repo, right? So we were shipping a lot of code.
The tools that we used also helped both from the standpoint of how fast we can build hardcore foundational technology and from the marketing standpoint as well to believe it or not. So our storage is written in Rust and GitHub has this viral loops that's called GitHub trending that are on a per language basis.
Showing 1–20 of 65 · page 1 of 4
Next →