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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Naturally, in a startup, you will have a handful of people that are responsible. Like these are the people you call to if there is a fire. And as the company scales and the user base scales, and now we have 5,000 databases spun up every day on the platform, you're going to get fires. That's just what's going to happen. And then you keep reaching out to the same people.
My co-founder Stas was one of them. Eventually, you start burning those same people out. And there are ways to address this. And typically, you address it by starting to distribute the workload or... You address it by having stronger team leads and whatnot. From the CEO standpoint, you can think about it as you have a bunch of balls in the air.
If the company is growing exponentially, the number of balls in the air starts growing exponentially as well, and then they will just start falling. In our case, the symptom of that was the stability of the service about a year ago. So 12 months ago, all hell broke loose as the number, the usage on the Neon platform was growing exponentially. And then we started to have outages one after another.
And our competitors started to make fun of us on Twitter by, like, referring to us without naming our name. And it was just, like, it was embarrassing. By that time, we were already for self-postgres. Guillermo was sending angry messages to me every time we were having instabilities. The classic from the CEO standpoint is once this is happening, you start building your staff team.
That's when I started. I opened up a number of searches and we brought head of engineering, head of product, head of marketing. And then we were like, do we need a head of finance? Do we not need to get insight? I was like, fuck it. We're just going to bring a head of finance as well.
The learning there is once you start building a staff team, if you have some folks on the staff team who are professional executives and some who are not, the ones that are not better step up really quickly. Or you will have weird staff meetings going on where the bar for communication and getting things done is different and uneven.
Once you flip the switch and start building a staff team, I think you're better off just having a professional staff team. And that's what we did in the beginning of this year. And now the service is super stable. With a capable staff team, you're much better positioned to solve problems in a very robust way.
It's mostly the team, the team that puts max effort into the opportunities that the world presents to us. That's how I think. And I read this in a book that's called Wooden Leadership. It's like a very old book about basketball. But that's how I think about the team and the people I work with. Life is too short to work with people who lack passion or not talented in any way.
The greatest joy in life and when you see people grow and do things that thought were not possible for them. That's what I'm proud of the most.
There are a few folks that are not here on the team anymore that I wish I had not hired. I wish things went somewhat differently. Everything that we do and it worked, I wish we had started sooner. And I wish we had started the Gen AI effort sooner as well. Generally, I think that's another thing that I learned from that Woodham Leadership book. The team who makes most mistakes usually wins.
Just being more aggressive in general and allowing yourself and the team making mistakes is, I think, is a very good thing.
I think we're living through a transition today of software. That transition is driven by AI, by large language models. While Nian is an incredibly useful database service, I think the future is a lot more in a platform and in the agentic space. In the future, I strongly believe, A, we're going to have a billion developers.
So right now we have 20 million professional developers and another 80 million or so tech people, product managers, designers, sales engineers, whatnot. And we're going to have a billion developers. The other thing that I strongly believe in is that each of us will have a bunch of agents that are running around the Internet doing tasks for us.
And it's the amount of information that and like various accounts that we have on the Internet is like absurd. Right. And especially those who have kids. I do.
there's all this like flow information coming from the school and things that that you need to get done and just like the amount of digital work is huge so we're gonna have all these agents running around internet doing work for us and all of those agents are going to be built somewhere on on a platform
Definitely all of them are going to need the database, but they're also going to need a bunch of other things. So I think the future of Neon is more of a serverless agentic platform and not just a Postgres database. And that's why I'm really rethinking part three of the original master plan, because in the original master plan, I'd be spinning up an enterprise Salesforce right now.
But that agentic opportunity isn't front of us. We're seeing software being built on top of the Neon platform. And so we want to catch that wave. And I think that's the most important thing right now.
It's many people. I learned a lot from Vedat Khosla, working for four years at Khosla Ventures. And it's both a mindset, the Swiss-taking mindset, and thinking about the world in terms of asymmetric opposites.
And so taking risks and and thinking about like investments and return of investments and you putting time and energy into things and you want to put them into things that are higher, potentially higher in risk. But they have like gigantic asymmetric upside if they work. And it's OK that not all of them work. You just need a handful of them to work.
And then how you think not just one, two years out, but try to think about five, ten years out and create a thesis and then be directionally correct. And if you're directionally correct, you'll arrive into a good future. So that was a big influence. And then I read a lot of books. I read books about leadership. I read books about founders. Obviously, I read about Steve Jobs. I read about Elon.
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