Web Masters

Peter Zaitsev explains how he built Percona, one of the world's foremost database performance and optimization consultancies.

Show Notes

You've probably never heard of Peter Zaitsev or Percona. And he’s perfectly fine with it. The fact that you haven’t heard of Peter or Percona means you’re probably not his target customer. More importantly, if you have heard of them, there’s a good chance you A) are his target customer; and B) don’t have a lot of other options.

That’s because Percona is a database performance optimization company. They specialize in helping companies using open source databases — MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc. — scale their database architecture to support millions of simultaneous users.
 
As you can probably imagine, there aren’t lots of companies in the world who need their databases to be able to handle that kind of volume, so, in relative terms, Peter’s target audience isn’t very big. Compare it with the market size of, say, Apple, and Percona’s market size would probably seem like a rounding error.

But that doesn’t matter for Peter. What matters is that the people who do need database optimization need it urgently, they have the money to pay, and they don’t have many other options.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

What is Web Masters?

Web Masters is an original podcast that explores the history of the Internet through the stories of some of its most important innovators. In each episode, host Aaron Dinin, a serial entrepreneur and digital media scholar, talks with Internet entrepreneurs who created important websites, tools, services, and features. Some are hugely popular, some you’ve never heard of, and all of them have impacted everything you do online. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how the Internet has enabled -- and continues to create -- some of the greatest business opportunities in history from the people who have proven they know how to build successful Internet businesses.