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.
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And so because there's so much interest in Rust in the world, we were making GitHub trending for Rust many times throughout the history of NEON. And that just gives us a boost and it's a self-reinforcing kind of loop. So now that repo shows up on the trending, some people follow Rust trending and whatnot. So that got us a good number of GitHub stars.
I think we executed this part perfectly because early on in the zero to one of company building, especially for a long term systems project, the market fit is a big question mark. If you build in public, if you build open source, if you make it stupid simple to go and try your technology, your market fit signal is a lot more clear than otherwise.
So giving technology, putting technology into the hands of people is just a very good idea.
Very early on, I wrote in the original pitch deck, I wrote a 1-2-3 strategy. The first one was to build separation of storage and compute. That's what we did in about a year. Of course, at that time, it wasn't super mature. It has all sorts of bugs and limitations. But it allowed us to launch, and it allowed us to start to attract users.
And once you start attracting users, they all give you feedback. And so now you have that flywheel going. And because we had a free tier and it's so easy to start, that flywheel, it gives you a statistical way because some things just don't work or people are constantly pushing the ceiling of what's possible.
That's the advantage of having a popular service on the internet that people use and depend on. The second part was win hearts and minds of developers and establish and sign up channel. And I said, it doesn't matter how long this part is going to take, but we're doing a good job if we cross the 5 million in revenue run rate through this.
In the first two parts, I made a point that we are not going to have a Salesforce. I thought, because there's so much Postgres out there, I thought we should be getting to 5 million in ARR without the Salesforce, purely in self-serve. But we will have a partnerships team that will allow us to establish strategic partnerships with, at the time, I thought, Cloudflare, VMware, Microsoft. and Google.
Then Google built a competitive product less than a year after we started a company that's called AlloyDB. So Google was turned off. Cloudflare never happened, but then Vercel happened. And so we partnered with Vercel and we launched a product called Vercel Postgres. And then the third part of company building was basically spinning up an enterprise sales force.
We're past 5 million in ARR, but we are not starting an enterprise sales force. So that's a deviation of our original plan. And of course, the reason that there is a deviation from the original plan is the change in the market and all the activity around GenAI.
This is my second company. And in the first company, we focused on competitive programming. And so we hired a bunch of people from kind of world champions in International Olympiad in Informatics. And there's another programming contest. It's called ICPC, which is a student contest. And I think that strategy works. And the reason it works is you have an asymmetric advantage for talent.
And it doesn't have to be competitive programming, but it has to be something that you have advantage over the rest of the world. Keith Rabois said that startups are built on undiscovered talent. And undiscovered talent is either young, is it somebody who hasn't been discovered by the world? And so in the Silicon Valley,
Traditionally, undiscovered talent is new grads or people very early in their careers. It also could be people with non-traditional background. So for example, the leader of the very popular Gen-AI product is not coming from like a top school. And so sometimes you get those kind of craftsmen that grew up in a different environment, but they're extremely talented.
But the world hasn't learned their name just yet. At Nian, our advantage is the fact that we are fully distributed. And it went out of vogue in the venture community. And there's a lot of like back to the office type energy that is happening. But because we're a Postgres centric company, we need Postgres committers and contributors. It's fairly natural for us to be remote first.
And we built a critical mass of systems engineers in Europe. So that allowed us to be a really cool brand for people in, I don't know, in the UK, in Germany, in the Netherlands. And that got us asymmetric access to talent. Stas is Russian. The first four people on the team were the ones that Stas hired.
Obviously, Russia started war on Ukraine, and it became, for a US company, we could not afford to have anybody in Russia. Everybody on that team moved out of Russia, every single person, in the next few weeks after the war had started. So that kind of removed that dependency. But because Stas was a star and he was able to attract some really high quality talent early on also helped us.
As we go along, there are a couple of things that you can also do. And you can only do it if your company is doing very well. So you either take an approach of hiring slow and firing slow, or you can take an approach of hire fast and fire fast, but you don't have much tolerance for that. And I was reading that book that's called Amped Up by Slootman.
And he was saying that contrasting data domain and ServiceNow, and in ServiceNow, he was a lot more aggressive in terms of both hiring fast and firing fast. I have some kind of similar approaches. At SingleStore, we hired extremely slow. We had very involved interviews. And it means we're hiring much faster when we used to hire than a single store.
But we also have much less tolerance for underperformance. And I think the net result is roughly similar in the quality of talent. The DNA is different because there was a lot more systems talent at single store because it was building software and on-prem software. And here we're running a service. So there's a lot more kind of like product engineers and SRE DevOps type DNA.
Because it's remote, the talent for the most part, more senior, because if you build in the Silicon Valley, you're forced to hire more junior people and have them grow really fast. And they mostly grow by osmosis. And the reason to that is like, it's hard to pull the top tier talent out of good places because good places make sure that top tier talent is very happy.
We hire and fire faster at Nian versus single store. And again, I'm very happy at the quality of the talent that we have at Nian. I'm not a huge fan of remote first. I'd rather prefer everybody in the office. But we're also driving a bunch of benefits by being remote.
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