I don't feel good that we had to do that, but it was, like, absolutely one of the best decisions we made. There's so many companies that without Aphritia, they would get no growth at all.

I'm joined today by Sam Lambert, who is the CEO of PlanetScale. You probably all know PlanetScale at this point. They have just been taking over the online airwaves.

You might not be thinking in a way that would drive you to be the most successful. I don't think the best people should ever care what their boss thinks. The best people I've always worked with have intrinsic motivation that far exceeds anything their boss could ask from them. It's been complete chaos since that happened. It's just been nuts.

Feels like something tangible has has happened from the outside. Is that reality or is it kind of a perception?

Yeah. So I mean it is reality. I always I'm always cautious about these things because we're very we're very kind of very secretive culture at PlanetScale. You know, we don't talk much about things that, you know, are not ready to be chatted about. Right?

So, like, you know, there's people but I think people can feel some things happening from the outside, which is really good. The Postgres launch was huge. It's been complete chaos since that happened. We're, like, two we're two weeks out now, and it's just been nuts, trying to catch up with everyone that wants to move onto the platform. And and and we're migrating people really rapidly, and that's that's really awesome.

The yeah. Like, AI has been really interesting for us. I think AI is affecting the database industry in various different ways. Right? Like, it's driving incredible user growth on three tiers around the industry for people that wanna do, like, one off projects that aren't really production workloads.

Yep. That's kind of interesting and bringing some success for companies. And it's also meant that, like, some very serious consumer companies, rapidly growing consumer companies need, like, highly available databases at rapid massive scale, and that's what PlanetScale offers as a cloud product, essentially. And so we've seen a bunch of these, like, very successful AI companies migrate to the platform and start using it and pushing it to its limits. And it's been really exciting to go and see those things.

And I think this just really, like, tracks along with the kind of progress of infrastructure companies, which is it just takes a very, very, very long time to build something that's good and trustable. And, I mean, you may never make it during that journey because it can take too long, and you might not strike any luck while doing that. But, yeah, it also starts to compound. Right? There's this thing about trust, which is you can't it can be transferred, it's very social.

And so when big companies see other big companies getting success on your platform, it feels de risked for them, and they wanna go and do it. And so we've kind of got the other side of some very big migrations for some very big and cool companies. And now we can talk about those, and we've got more to talk about. Other people like it, and they and they buy it. And I I mean, I think, you know, someone said to me recently, the launch of Postgres was really interesting to them because it showed that PlanetScale really had a brand.

Like, people knew what planet scale for postgres meant. Like, that was it. That was the we were talking forever about how to frame this and do this, and I think we just we settled on just say that. And if people know what we're really about, then that would say pretty it all. We were right and right, and we'd really underestimate how many people just understood that.

They just actually got it, and, you know, when people email me wanting to onboard to the platform, they're they they're already guessing and knowing what we're they're getting, and they know what they're coming for too. Right? And that's that was a really nice surprise to see that we're known that way as a brand.

Yeah. And and my my impression of that from the outside is that it's all about, like, it works at a massive scale and you fought a lot about and you've tested and, you know, it it just it won't fall down and it'll be reliable and and whatever scale you operate at.

Scale is about that. Right? Scale about is about doing the same things over and over again. Aeroplanes are one of my favorite analogies of just how reliable and known because they've just failed in in every way.

Mhmm.

And, you know, the black box recorder is incredibly important because when it does go wrong, you can't miss any information you can extract from that. Right? So we are very much the same, which when things do go wrong, they're very novel in terms of way things fail, and we really do a lot of introspection and understanding and learning around how, like, we could do better, and there's, like, a really long tail of those things. And that just means that we can sell that. Right?

We can just sell the fact that it's just worn and trustable. And, like, great infrastructure is all around us, and I think people underestimate how much just good infrastructure in like, kind of informs their buying decisions. Amazon is another great example of this, and I'm not talking about AWS. Their amazon.com is a really horrible website to use. It's extremely confusing.

I never know if I'm actually getting the right products to look at. Every page is owned by a different team and that you can tell. Like, it's just, like, really hard to navigate. I don't care. I want to buy every product I can through there because the shipping is always good.

Like, it very rarely goes wrong. It arrives prime rapid delivery just works and is extremely good. That's infrastructure. That is incredible supply chain management deployed to the extreme to back an e commerce experience, a delightful kind of buying experience, and people want more of that. It's the same with databases, you know.

People get excited about fucking around with databases and fixing those problems because they don't have other things going on. Like, the people that are really successful in building really quickly resent doing anything that isn't the core thing they want for their company. Yeah. And people have realized they can just kind of pay their way out of these problems and and give it to a company like us. And that's nice.

That means it's really we've done something, and it's a long grind. It's a slow game to play, but it's really fun to see those things pay off when people know.

Yeah. And how do you kind of because I feel like some some things like if you like your, you know, if your differentiator was like, you know, really nice design, people can kind of come and see, like, all the website reflects that they care a lot about design or that sort of thing. But for, like, reliability and and kind of really rock solid infrastructure, how do you kind of how are you able to protect that? Because I imagine everyone that runs a database says that, you know, that's important to them and that they they're good at that. But how how are you able to kind of, you know, show that, I guess, like, to the outside world?

Yeah. How to to convey it to the world is to do it through customers. Like, only they can really advocate for whether you do what you say you do. It's the opposite. They'll also tell people when you don't do those things.

Like, it it goes out there publicly. I mean, there's certain providers that have, you know, not done this, and it becomes a meme or whatever. And that's really hard to shake for, you know, Mongo. A far past data loss issues. It's a very mature, very, very good database product.

Every day on Twitter, see someone taking a dig over data loss or whatever. Completely unfair. A decade old assumption. It just lives forever with you. Right?

So you just you have to just take it very seriously that you can't have these thing you can't have these things happen. If you're building in the database world, being slow to do something but know it's reliable and isn't gonna let people down is always the fastest way to do it. Like, the downsides are too much. So I guess this why we took, you know, we took a very long time to get to doing stuff in the postcodes world. We just didn't feel we'd even met our own standard in the Vitesse and MySQL world and that we could provide something unique.

Like, who are we to show up in a different community pretending we can add any value until we know we can add value? That's why we launched it the way we launched it with a bunch of benchmarks to just show that, like, here we go. This is different. And uptime is different and all of these things so that we can provide actual unique value for what we do. But it took a very long time to get here to be able to say we could do that.

Scaling DevTools is sponsored by WorkOS. If things start going well, some of your customers are gonna start asking for enterprise features. Things like audit trails, SSO, SCIM provisioning, role based access control. These things are hard to build, and you could get stuck spending all your time doing that instead of actually making a great dev tool. That's why WorkOS exists.

They help you with all of those enterprise features, and they're trusted by OpenAI, Vercel, and Perplexity. And if you use them for user management, you get your first million, yes, million, monthly active users for free.

I honestly don't know any dev tools that have a million monthly active users apart from GitHub maybe.

So that'll get you pretty far. Here's what Kyle from Depot has to say about WorkOS.

We use effectively add all of the SSO and SCIM to Depot. It's single handedly, like, one of the best developer experiences I've ever seen for what is, like, a super painful problem if you were to go and try to roll that yourself. So for us, we can offer SSO and SCIM, and it's like two clicks of a button, and we don't ever have to think about it. It's like one of the best features that we can add to depot. It's super affordable, which effectively allows us to like break the SSO tax joke and essentially say, like, you can have SSO and SCIM as, an add on onto your monthly plan.

Like, it's no problem. So it really allows smaller startups to essentially offer, that enterprise feature without a huge engineering investment behind it. Like, it's literally we can just use a tool behind the scenes and our life is exponentially easier.

Yeah. And you you kinda launch with customers, like, use it. Like, people were using it by the time you did a public launch. Right?

We yes. That is the way we always do it because anyone can write a blog post saying we like our own product. We think it is good. We think it scares. And I don't want I mean okay.

Yeah. I mean, that that's yeah. Do you know what mean? It's, like, easy. Yeah.

We don't really wanna do that. We don't wanna overhype or overmarket anything. We just wanna say, well, this is, you know, this is validated by a customer that you've probably heard of running on this. It's a much harder way to to do and release software because you can get, like, shipping something on like, that's not as ready. You can actually often get away with it too.

You can just get things out there, say big words about it, do hype hype hype, billboard, flashy animation, whatever, and it will get tons of eyes, and it'll work for a certain audience. It just doesn't work for mine. And so we just have to do it with with customers and show we're serious, and our customers love it. Like, you know, we've been told by a number of our customers the most popular blog on their engineering blog is the one they did with us as part of a launch with us. That's really fun.

I mean, that's really nice. I mean, everyone likes to nerd out about these things and be part of something cool. So it's a good way to do software announcement.

Yeah. That that's very cool. And kind of as well, like, coming back to, like, how you show that you care a lot about stuff. One one of things like because I've spoken so many dev tools now like, I whenever someone says like they're good at something, I always like I'm always thinking, okay. So like what what are you not good?

What's like the you focus on this thing. What do you neglect kind of Yep. In in that? And so I thought that your when you dropped the free tier, I thought it was like actually a really cool example of this where like you're kind of being very clear about what you're gonna focus on and what you're not gonna focus on. Yeah.

But it was like quite a

it was at the time, it

was like quite a shocking decision on on Twitter at least like because you were getting a lot of traction on the free tier, I I believe. Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about that? Mhmm.

Actually, I'll address the bit about knowing what you don't do well, first of all. It's really funny. You know? We try and be really honest with people what we can and we can't do. And there's definitely a few million dollars of revenue that we would have, but the customers would not be as happy, I think, if we'd have said yes to things.

So, like, a common thing people come to us with is what really should be like an OLAP workload. So we're like an OLTP database, which is for extremely fast queries for experience like, product experiences, basically. We have to get data back to fill up you know, hydrate or fill a page for a product or an app. That's, like, very different trade offs and optimizations, and it's not a hard problem until you need to do it across lots of machines or lots of data. In the OLAP world, they're naturally built for lots of data and much slower queries that do tons of number crunching, and it's a completely different problem set with a completely different set of trade offs.

Very often, people accidentally back themselves into an OLAP workload thinking they need an OLTP database, and, like, we could do it. I mean and we are often telling people to go and, like, talk to Snowflake or something. Right? Go and do a different option because we're not the right one. And the other one is, like, when it comes to database migrations.

I we've got a customer. There's quite a large customer now. And it was a very intuitive sale because, you know, they had their own self sharded, of very complicated database cluster. And they're like, what what would you do? I mean, we've we've committed to this, you know, moving to you is gonna take a very long time.

It's gonna be very difficult. And, you know, I said, well, I've done your job before other companies. I'd probably stick with it and not try and move to us if you're if if it's gonna be really hard for you to do and it's kind of working now, I would do it. And he kind of looked at me really strangely. And then they and then I think that's actually earned more trust because you Yeah.

Then became they then became a customer. But I do believe that too. I I think people shouldn't do things that is unnatural or make changes for things that aren't working well. Anyway, so one thing we we don't do well is support hobby projects. Like, we don't the minimum outlay for a cluster of PlanetScale is not tiny.

It's not huge either. I mean, the the entry level to buying a PlanetScale database is $39. I don't think that's a lot of money if you're building a business. But, people are building businesses in different ways, and people don't always wanna pay for, you know, everything. If they're just experimenting or kind of vibe coding and playing with software engineering, they might not fully conceptualize what we're doing for them anyway.

So that $39 feels really expensive. I get it. And even when you're, like, bootstrapping a company, the costs add up and, you know, that's a thing. Luckily, people start in three tiers of other projects and migrate to us, which is fine when they, like, need a more serious kind of database platform to do things with. But it was painful to say goodbye to the free tier.

Like, I can tell, you know, there is a ton of users we'd have on the platform. We wouldn't be monetizing them, but they would be there. Right? I get five to 10 emails a day of people asking what's happened to the free tier. That started to that started to die down a bit, and it's back again because of the Postgres announcement.

But, yeah, people would always ask about that. Some of the LLMs still hadn't kind of updated their latest knowledge to know that we didn't have one anymore. So people were kind of asking LLM what's the best database. And they get told PlanetScale, and it's got a free tier or whatever. And then people come here, and they don't have a free tier, and it upsets them or whatever.

So, So, yeah, it was like a pain for I don't feel good that we had to do that or did it, but it was like one of the best decisions we made. Absolutely one of the best decisions we made. It's a topic that comes up at every event I go to. I've had founders of many companies tell me they wish they could do it. They just feel they absolutely could not.

I think the real metrics around free tiers are very, very interesting. Like, every company has to kind of basically report them as, like, marketing spend essentially. Right? And and it's a very large marketing spend, so people have to kind of really do some gymnastics to show that that spend is turning into real dollars. At a lot of places, that data does not back that up.

It's very rare that someone is free for six months and then becomes a rocket ship company. You'll find that, you know, they people who are gonna pay you money start paying you money very quickly if they're going to. Right? They'll they'll they'll be out of a free tier within the first week or two weeks, and you can almost, like, guarantee if they're still in it after three months, they probably never will be. And we saw this in GitHub too, not because we're free tier, but the long tail of software projects.

Like, there's just power laws all over the world of technology, and repository usage was just a massive power law. Like, there's a tiny amount, in a relative sense of repositories that got any active usage, and then there's just massive long tail of people's college projects. And it's actually really interesting is since killing the free tier, I get emails about the free tier, it's always students pitching me, like, I need to do this for a project. I need to do this. And it's like, I'm not I'm unempathetic to that.

Like, people have to learn. They have to of course, they have to learn. They have to do things. Those are gonna be the builders of our next generation of software. However, it's very instructive that, like, you just know that's never turning into a production app.

It's not happening. And we want to build an enduring business that's based on stability, and you have to manage a really good business to do that and be really responsible and have a very long runway. You you don't do that by giving away things that cost you money for free in the long run. And so we don't, and we don't regret that. And there's a thing about, you know, being profitable is you know the business is gonna survive.

Unprofitable database companies, whenever they get a new user, their runway goes down. It's very bad. That's scary, really. You know, it's like everyone who joins Glasgow extends our life and makes us money and means we can reinvest and make things better for them. It feels really every time we hire someone, it's hired with real money.

When we did our office with nice things in the office, it was built with Yeah. Real money, not borrowed hopes and dreams.

Nice office, by the way, as well. Of course.

Thank you. We quite like it. It's nice to have a physical space to hang out with people and bring the community in.

Super cool. Yeah. That that makes sense. And because I was there's pretty a theme on trigger.dev just because I was with them as I was, like, trying to think of these questions. Great guys.

And they they they they kinda gave me permission almost to, like, ask you, you know, they have a free tier. And if they were thinking about not having a free tier, how how would you think about it? I'm kind of

It's highly dependent on what your business does. There's so many companies that without a free tier, they would get no growth at all. It, like, really depends on what people are looking for from you. The best like, there's so many comp products I've bought and got started because they had a free tier. Like, that's just even the low barrier of, like, putting a credit card can just get people out the door too quick.

Right? Like, if you need to show someone if you've got other steps that make, using your product difficult to do, then payment and free is another friction. Right? And things like this. And it really depends.

It depends on the market you're selling into. It's really hard to give that type of advice, without knowing the kind of ins and outs and the metrics of every business. There's also other things like that around that sliding scale of free tiers, which is timed timed trials, for example. Right? Like, you you amount of access for a certain time, and that rolls into, a pay plan or a canceled account.

We've all bought products like that too. Like, there's just so many dimensions that you can kind of figure things out. It also depends what it costs to give a free tier. Some products are purely SaaS products. Right?

Their margins are exceptionally good. And so just the freeness or the cost of the product is really just a dimension of, you know, how they wanna monetize. Database companies are giving away Amazon resources, and they are not cheap. Right? We're giving away real things that, you know, have to be spun up and used.

That's not cost effective to give away for free forever. So it just highly depends. You know, you could be you could have a product, and there's some out there that have developed. They say you're an order or two magnitude cheaper. You've got a technical advantage for your product that is all around cost.

Right? Like, you're a metrics platform, and your back end storage engine is a 100 times cheaper to to store metrics on than an incumbent, then a free tier could be really a really, like, nasty way of attacking them by just giving ridiculous amounts of things for free to, like, do the bit. You know? It's like it's so make it so funnily hilarious that your free tier is so big that people start to really consider you, and that becomes the advertising. And then you're getting more, you know you like, Google kinda did this.

Right? Like, back in the early days of Google, you just got this incrementing counter bite by bite of how much storage you were getting in Google, whereas, like, the experience on Yahoo is people were having to delete emails to to keep their inbox

Yeah.

Clear and not filling up. And so it can just be highly strategic. It's just very hard to say. I will just tell you, though, that, you know, whether or not people admit it publicly, privately, so many people have told me that they wish they could kill their free tier, and the only the only reason they're not doing it is public perception. That is it.

We did it and got a mixed bag of negative perception from people, and I understand why. We also got very positive. Like, it led to net way more growth for the company because people were like, wow. Actually, like, that one that was bold. I appreciate it.

We know that you're healthy as a company now, and they they kinda just, like, respect that seriousness, I guess. And so it just depends who your audience is, what your business is. I know that's very long winded answer, but, you know, there's lot of caveats. I don't wanna speak too highly with absolutes, but I will tell you it was a very good decision for us.

Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And just something that has struck me as well just on the kind of, like, trigger with, like for, like, with time to scale, you kind of in a sense, like, you kinda know what you're getting in the sense that people have used the database and, like, you that you're, like, a better database than, know, what they're considering also.

Like and say, okay. I'm gonna pay money for that. Does that maybe, like, triggers, like, kinda wanna try it out? Like, never it's, like, kind of a new way of doing things. People have done the trigger.

Like, you might not even know if it's for you in a sense, like, whereas

Exactly. Yeah. Like, we have screens in the office. A good example, we have these screens where I it's I wanna just, like, project stuff on the screen for, like, marketing reasons or just whatever. And there's like a 100 different, like, screen playing technology things, right, that you can add to a Fire Stick.

And though I definitely graduated to the one that had the free tier because I knew that I was, like, not even sure if this was the right solution. Maybe I need an Apple TV with a screen. I don't know what to do. Like, I'm just fucking around to try and figure it out. Yeah.

I mean, it's annoying to cancel subscriptions and whatever. So I did. I tried one that had a free tier. It wasn't a very good product, so I didn't use that. I tried the next one that had a free tier.

It was good. I lasted on the free tier for a month until I came in one day and it stopped working. I'd been happy for a month with this working. That was enough to, like, get used to it not having to think about this problem anymore. So they got an instant upgrade from me.

I mean, it's like $20 a month or whatever, so it's fine. But it worked. Right? It just worked for that reason. It's effective.

It's truly effective in certain ways.

Yeah. People should think about this and weigh it up, but not just not just take it as gospel that you should have a free tier they should consider.

Yeah. And the marginal cost of them giving me a free tier was nothing. Absolutely. It cost them pennies to give me that free use, and it beat their competitors. And now unless they screw something up or quadruple their price, I'm sticking around.

Yeah. Sam, one one side question again. Someone told me to ask you. You've probably been asked already. Are you the average database?

I'm not, and I do get asked this a lot. If I go to events, people ask me people ask me on Twitter. I've I've thought a few times I know who it is. I then other people tell me that, like, that wouldn't be part I don't know. I really don't know.

I appreciate them. If you're listening, obviously, we're like, you're funny, I guess. I'm not gonna try and piss you off, I guess. You know? But, yeah, I mean, I think you just have to take people in your community like that with a sense of humor.

There's funny people around the the industry. I find it funny because they're not particularly nasty. They've, like, say something that I don't like, but, like, they're not particularly nasty to us. So I appreciate people like that being around. We get trolled by other versions of that that don't like us.

It's just but, yeah, I mean, the industry is a funny place. It's it's it's amazing that we all work in an industry where there's so much on the line. Like, people make so much money. We do such serious things. Yeah.

Like, a few billion dollars of market cap is getting trolled by various anonymous accounts all over the industry. And, like, they somehow seem influential sometimes. It's very weird. It's very very funny. So, yeah, I I I kind of now play up to the joke that people think it's me, because it's just part of the thing.

It's kind of funny. Their website's funny. It's, yeah, it's people have been joking when will average when will like, we run on average database company or whatever.

So, like, look at the spelling of, if you spell it if you, like, write in a British way or something, but

Yeah. There must be a that that yeah. I wonder if you could probably figure that out. There's definitely it's not you're a Brit. Right?

You know that's not a British sense of humor. You you detect that. Right? I don't think that would Yeah. Be a British person.

Yeah. Actually, I don't know. I hadn't really don't I think I'd thought about Ashu from that perspective, but I I I don't think so. I mean, there's a guy who's like, kind of like, seems to be related to it, I don't know if he he's a real person.

Yeah. It could be a collective. Like years ago, I knew years ago, took about like a decade ago, I knew someone who had a a pop like, I knew of a, like, a very popular anonymous Twitter account. And it turned out to be five different people actually. So there's a chance that there's, you know, multiple maybe you could detect that.

I don't know. It's like oh, that's funny. Yeah.

Really Maybe it's all of you. And it is actually an average. It's like Well, it is every yeah. It's every get joined up. You're not gonna tell me, but as soon as you start one, like, I don't know.

Just get invite you to

into the group.

Yeah. One of the things that I did also wanna ask you about is content. And then so I know you didn't actually talk about this before, but like I was looking at some of your blog posts recently and like the interact like the one in particular I was looking at was like caching and it's like Mhmm. For people that haven't seen it, it's a blog that's explaining how caching works. And it's like much more than a blog in a sense.

It's almost like not a sufficient way to describe it because

Mhmm.

It's very interactive. You can actually like click things and see how how things work and there's like these really really nice visuals. And I I I heard you talk about how you wanna like do different things. So you don't wanna spend you wanna just like spend a month writing a blog when everyone else is just like pumping out like AI stuff. How how do you think about content?

I feel the same about content as I have for a very long time, and it's it's almost a borrowed learning from when I joined GitHub. So when a part of the GitHub onboarding that a lot of people that now work at GitHub and didn't and and worked there in the later years didn't experience was a thing that in the earlier days I wasn't incredibly early at the company, but early enough to experience some of the very early cultural tenants that made that company successful. You would get an education in, like, the voice of the company and how to speak and how to speak with authenticity and speak in a very genuine way and not cheapen how you speak. So, like, our blog post at CI to to text for certain phrases that just mealy mouthed and washy and and Oh, really? Yeah.

No. So I had to I had to you sort of got this appreciation that content is really important to people that think deeply about things. And so one of the reasons I ended up at GitHub is I read a blog post by someone who's a very dear friend of mine to this day, know, Ted, who's the CTO who wrote, you know

Oh, that's what

I'm saying. About he was running about memory allocation my sequel. And it was just like a short, succinct, really well written post, and it, you know, it grabs an appreciation from me to, like, pros representing really good technical work. And if you can marry those things together I'm not a very I'm not a good writer at all. But when there's people around that are good and can do those things, you can you can read and read things that are poignant and stick with you.

And I think you can strive to do those things. And if you can achieve those things, it's, again, that's unfair to your competition because they have to write slop all the time. They're doing constant SEO optimization to just try and, you know, juice these numbers, and it doesn't really produce anything enduring or interesting. Some of our most performing blog posts are old, but are just interesting and enduring and and people reference them. And so, yeah, like we've we've started to take even more time on blog posts because then we'll produce something we're really proud of, like the caching post has just gone out.

And Ben and Holly, they do really great work on making this possible. You have to support them going and doing this stuff because it takes, you know, it takes time. Yeah. So I just think it's a good contribution. I don't really see the end goal all the time of is just like having a strong CTA that gets people into your product.

Yes. If someone reads it and goes, oh, that was valuable to me to learn this knowledge. Clearly, PlanetScale knows something. They will think about us in the future. It just it doesn't all have to be take take take.

Right? Like we can we can give and maybe it just comes back in other forms and smart people tend to appreciate learning from other smart people.

Yeah. And I think what you're saying there between the lines, Sam, is that like you're not you're not measuring these things as like do we get a return on like how much time you spend? Like you're you're being more like you believe that it's like this you kind of like principles kind of you you believe that if you write really good content, you've seen in the past that this has a way of like being worth it even Yeah.

Absolutely. And you do feel the return over time. It's just it's slower, but more meaningful. Right? Like, it just it takes more time.

If you're measuring how many sign ups you've got from, like, the attribution of a clickbaity post and that, you know, that's your metric, you have to write clickbaity b baity posts that are just, like, diluted by the fact that they're pushing you to a CTA or whatever, you might see great results. I mean, there's some companies that they only generate revenue by doing that kind of thing. And all power to them, that's what they should do. I do think in the long game of building databases, it's for people with serious problems, and they appreciate serious content. And so it just it it feels it still feels like the strategically best way to do it and happens to align with what I really believe in.

And also just like, there's maybe it's a flaw, but there's certain ways I wanna win. And there's certain ways, you know, you could win, and sometimes you don't wanna win in certain I don't really wanna do those types of marketing. I don't wanna do that kind of cheap. I wanna feel proud of the things you write and inspired when when I get you know, I I when I read that first draft of what the team have written, I feel lucky and feel inspired and and privileged to work with these people. So it's it's good all around.

It it feels like it's quite hard to it feels like a very real thing. There's like you just doing what you putting your real beliefs like having the, I don't know, courage to just like do it your way whether or not everyone likes it or not and or like and just not not kind of trying to like sit between two, you know, have your foot in one camp, put halfway in one and in the other. It's like go all in on like, okay. We're gonna we're gonna deliberately not do, like, SEO stuff. We're just gonna go really hard on writing really high quality content.

Yeah. You kinda have to, you know, go all in one or the other. There's very few cultures that can do both of those things well. So, yeah, I think to make one good or the other, you have to kinda take it to the extreme. And the confidence comes from luck.

I'm the product of getting to work with some exceptional people that figured this stuff out on their own, and I got to watch. And so I'm very privileged in that sense.

Okay. That's amazing. I guess people listening, they should know that this is a it's a proven strategy.

For us, not for everyone. And I don't have the counter factual if we've done it the other way, so I'll never know. And that's I guess that's the kind of power of confirmation bias across the entire industry is you you might never see the other opposite playbook, you know.

Yeah. Actually, on but on that, Sam, how do you when you make a when you're like because, like, you know, being a CEO, being like, how like, you have to make these decisions. You have to kind of tell everyone or not tell everyone, but, like, you have to lead the company to to act in this way that you believe. Not everyone might agree with you or it might not be obvious that this is, like, a correct decision. How do you, like how do you go about it?

Is there anything that you would advise to people that are thinking about, you know, being more assertive as the leader of the company?

And just ask you a I mean, so I don't really presume I'm right about anything. I mean, I try to be. I like to just throw things out in a very transparent way to the company, and we hire very smart people. We're a very small, very small team of very, very smart people. It's a collection I've worked of people I've worked with, people we've just met that have joined and done really well, or people that I've wanted to work with.

Right? I just we just hired someone I tried to hire at GitHub for, like, eight years, and now they finally are coming to plan. So I don't know why they chose us this time, but it's a great thing on timing. Right? There's no point just not listening to their feedback.

Right? You know, you put things out there and you're collaborative. You get to learn from the great people that you have. They'll work with you. However, there is one other thing I do believe, which is if you're running a company, you have a unique perspective.

And it doesn't mean it's a right perspective, but you're you're doing a job that no one else does. Like, you're having conversations that no one else has, and and you have it's the only role where everything runs up to you. It's the you know, everything's in balance. In in big organizations that are zero have a zero sum mentality internally, sometimes acting against the company's interest is the best thing you can do for yourself personally. Right?

You see this inside big companies of politics. They might starve out another organization to make them lose, so you get the project and you get the promotion. Do all these terrible things that happen. So if you make those things not work, then you can, you you know, act more honestly and openly and talk more openly with your company. But at the end of the day, like, me being successful as a human being in my career is symbiotic with the company being successful, which is everyone being successful.

But when you have that unique perspective and the consequences of everything. Right? You have the consequences of finance being unhappy if something costs too much to do or engineering being unhappy because they're not given the resources to do something. It all rolls up to you. And your decisions, you're the one that will live with them for the longest.

At the end of the day, you're wed to the company. Right? Like, it's you if I always think to myself, if your company fails, the the CEO or the founders or whatever will be the last person to turn those lights off and shut it all down. You're there till the very end. And I have seen people do that while regretting not doing the thing they believed in.

Right? Or, like, trying someone else's decision because they felt they had to give someone else a win, and that goes wrong, and it builds resentment. Like, you just you become resentful. I think in a lot of times, people fundamentally know what they need to do or want to do and don't act on it. And I think if you're gonna be the one that holds most of the consequences for those, you have to act on it, and you have to take take these things very, very seriously.

And at the end of the day, you have to take seriously that everyone who works for you can leave if they want to. So try and be more right than you are wrong. Be really open when you're wrong, and build that trust. And if you do build a track record where people trust you and they're right and you're right most of the time, they'll want to know more. They'll, like, you know, know you have a perspective and they have a perspective, and the union of the two can probably build something right.

So, yeah, you just have to be assertive and and you have to really know when you're gonna spend those chips on something you're truly convicted in. And if people don't wanna join you on that, that's fine. You have to be fine with that.

What why do you what do you think the best people care care most about in terms of, like, joining you? I don't think

the best people should ever care what their boss thinks. I genuinely mean that. I think the the the best people I've always worked with have intrinsic motivation that far exceeds anything their boss could ask from them. And so if the company you're joining is a vehicle for you to achieve those intrinsic desires and goals, then you found the right company. If you're waiting for validation from somebody else, and that that validation will be satisfying to you, you might not have what it like, you might not be thinking in a way that would drive you to be the most successful.

That's a really good point.

I could be completely wrong there, but, like, I've, you know No. I've always wanted my boss to agree with what I'm doing, but Yeah. I never stopped at, okay. I've made them happy. It's like I've achieved what I wanna achieve.

It's made them happy. It's made other people happy. It's made me happy. That's really what it is.

And so is it just fine is it just more about finding the people that care a lot about like, if you're trying to recruit the best people, just trying to find, like, the people that are intrinsically motivated for the problem that you're focusing on and talking about how they can achieve their goals with you. Or is that Yeah.

That's one of them. And then it's also showing them the environment they're gonna get to work in. Have them meet other good people, and if and if they're happy. You know, one of the ways I I have hired certain candidates that I really wanted to hire is I've told them, do not tell me who you're gonna reach out to, but you can go on LinkedIn, you can go on Twitter, and find any one of our employees and reach out to them and talk to them. You know, they can they'll tell you the real experience, what's good and what's bad about being at the company.

And if that maps to you, if you think they're a good person or they're funny or you like working with them, you might wanna be here. And it works because I'm proud of everyone we work with. I'm I'm proud of anyone at PlanetScale I would send to talk to a customer to just represent ourselves. And so they chat to more people and think, wow. I could work with that person or, you know, we gelled in some way.

You maintain the level of groupthink. You also have to own that the way your company works is not gonna be for everybody. I this most companies in the world, I would be very bad there. I would not be a good employee. I wouldn't be the right type of employee.

I wouldn't succeed in that environment. The idea that everyone can or should or has the right to succeed in the environment you're creating is not true. You want you want people that you know, if you express your culture and express your opinions really deliberately and show people that they're here to come and be part of that and advance it in certain ways that are unique to them, but not necessarily change what's working,

it

gives people an honest way of evaluating whether they they think they'll be there. And if you line up, it lines up. And and if it doesn't, it doesn't. You know? It just it it it is what it is.

Right? You know? It doesn't always work out and that's okay.

Yeah. That's it sounds a lot like your customer how you're talking about with your customers as well, putting putting them forward, like letting people talk to and then just being not not being trying to be all things for everyone and just same for employees and and customers.

Yeah. At the end of the day, I mean, no one's buying a database because of a flashy website. And the ones that are are not gonna have the problems that eventually you get to charge money for. You know? It's just this self fulfilling thing.

There's some products that can the only differentiator is how good their sales team is. There's others where it can barely have a role and shouldn't.

Sam, that was amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Where should people is there anything you wanted to shout out or anything?

Send people to?

Planetscale.com. That's it. Read what we do. Learn about what our customers like about us and maybe become a customer yourself.

Yeah. Sam, thank you so

much. Thanks for having me.