Ryan Peterman

But for that, I kind of want to start at the beginning.

How did you get into building database systems?

I saw that Ingress was competing with Larry Ellison's offering at Oracle.

Yes.

I saw that Ingress was certainly better than what they were offering, but they were still competing somehow.

How did they compete?

Interesting.

Yeah, I had interviewed someone who worked at Sun Microsystems and they had a similar opinion that Larry Ellison was a little bit shady.

So it seems to be a commonality.

I also saw somewhere else and something that you had said was that when Oracle acquired MySQL, that everyone kind of got afraid of that and moved to Postgres.

So you created Ingress and there was a lot of technical innovations in it so that it was better than the incumbents, but ultimately it went away and you developed Postgres.

What was the thing that Ingress didn't do that Postgres would do?

Well, the big thing that guided us at the very beginning

uh but the implementation absolutely sucked and it got taken out after a while so there were a huge number of of really nifty things in postgres you mentioned you you want to hire extraordinary software engineers and i think you've you've said before that you have no trouble finding those people how do you identify those people in your hiring that they're the extraordinary ones

It's usually pretty obvious.

On the flip side, you had this interesting quote.

I wrote it down.

He said, I can't stand people who aren't really smart.

It's challenging to talk to them.

How do you identify the people who aren't smart?