Summary From zero to $380M in 2 years | How Nikita Shamgunov built Neon - YouTube (Youtube) youtu.be
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Speaker 0 So I was studying all those companies. I was studying Manga was studying Rev hat, trying to understand what good looks like and how these guys managed to to create a public company. On top of Open source.
Speaker 1 Hey, everybody. Welcome to a hundred percent builders with Jan. Today, we have Nikita Shamgunov on the podcast. Is the founder and Ceo of Neon. That's powering the next generation of Ai applications using a fully managed server list post.
Speaker 1 It Nikita is an engineer, a founder and an investor who’s been building cutting edge database solutions over the past decade. Prior to founding Neon, he found a single store formerly known as Meme, a next generation distributed transactional database. And was even at meta on the infrastructure team in the early days. We can't wait to dive into his builder journey. Nikki thank you so much for being here
Speaker 0 They started to be here.
Speaker 1 You are 1 of those people who started as an engineer and became started your own company, became a founder Cto. And eventually became the Ceo and then you started another company. So you have a very interesting perspective about how you went to that journey, would love to know how you started the company and adapt it to learn new things on how to run a company that would love to know more about that journey.
Speaker 0 Yeah. I I think the important mindset for this is kind of the North mindset. And when you wanna do something new. 1 of the best ways to figure that out is to to see what good looks like. So there is a ton of information out there.
Speaker 0 About how to do whatever you want well. You know, you can you know, make latte art, well and you can go to Youtube and learn how to do that, or you can go on Youtube and learn how to run companies well. And so earlier in now we're kinda a brief chat before we start the clock cast. We were discussing, you know, how to operate, and you can go on Youtube, and I was telling how was I was just rewatch keep boy lecture 14 in the stanford series of of how to operate. So there's a lot of information out there, You know, The thing is when you're a founder and when you need to do something and you put yourself into the position where you have to figure that out.
Speaker 0 Not only you have, you know, the intellectual curiosity. The the situation... Forces you to go and figure that out. And you are faced with choices, you know, we can do a versus b versus z and and you you need to make those choices and and you need to act on them. And when you build your company, there isn't that much time.
Speaker 0 So you have to... So you learn belt by living through this and by the pressure of acting fast and making the decisions fast. And if you if you tend to do things quickly, your your your speed of learning improves as well. So the faster you spin the the gears and the faster your feedback loop, then the faster you learn you saw. It's kinda interesting that when you build software, your feedback loop is very, very thoughts.
Speaker 0 You know, you you... Write a program and you write some tests and whatever and like it either worse or it doesn't. And so you're you're in control in a way, run of your own productivity and then then the computer system kinda gives you that feedback. In in the real world, that's not always the case. And when you do something against the real world, the world does give you a feedback.
Speaker 0 And sometimes this feedback is it in action. You know, Sometimes that means it didn't work or sometimes that means... It did work. I don't know. Like, so you have to be constantly interpreting the feedback that that the world gives you to your action.
Speaker 0 And and and adjusting those actions. And your tools there are technology Your tools there are are communication and presence. And that was 1 of the things I have to really learn as I took over as Ceo. And the your tools are your $380M, which is probably the most important thing for for for driving impact in this world. So, yeah, I guess the short answer is like the nerd mentality for doing whatever is the right mentality in my opinion.
Speaker 0 And when you learn how to be Ceo, it is about about your North star, about your team, and it's actually about funding because like, it is on the Ceo's agenda that's to not run out of money.
Speaker 1 You know, I love this idea of having the Nerd mentality And you said something super interesting because the former engineer, I I like get that point where You have this a quick iteration, quick feedback loop when you're doing something, seeing if it's working, and you wanna apply to same mentality. You're learning a new skill. But navigating that the the the feedback loop in the real world is very different, difficult in a way where it's not clear all the time. So as someone who was transitioning for our audience of was transitioning from, like, a technical role to being a ceo or founder, what advice do you have for people making that transition and learning with qui add feedback loops.
Speaker 0 Well, the first 1 I think is is is great to have mentors And there are mentors that will enter you because they like you. And generally, it's a surprising because it's flattering to mentor someone actually. So there is actually a lot of people who are willing to mentor you in and in a way... You kinda wanna choose. And hopefully, you will will you will you will find amazing ventures, and they will likely do it for free.
Speaker 0 Hey sometimes they might be advisors to your company. But you know, if somebody reaches out to me and says, you you get a... I want you to be my mentor. I actually not gonna ask for equity in regard. And the reason to that is, I think, you know, paying forward is a good thing generally, and then The moments you put compensation on this thing, it becomes a job.
Speaker 0 And it takes out the important they they the most important bit out. You taking the most important bit out, which is What is this whole thing about? It it's about basically maximizing the potential of of of of this specific individual? And so having mentors is importance. In addition to, it's actually good to have a coach that you pay for.
Speaker 0 And and the reason to have a coaches is, well, there are certain things you you cannot talk to you your word about because... For that for the board, you want to work through problems and project confidence. Sometimes you're just not sure. And or sometimes you... You you thunder.
Speaker 0 Like, whatever. Like it there's not everything you can discuss with the board. In a way c foreigners are also you you know, You you measure in any way, it's like, you wanna discuss a relationship with your c founder. Well, you don't wanna to do it every day, at least, like, you know, you can have a a conversation about it. The sell something you wanna talk everyday about.
Speaker 0 And that's what A coach is good for. It's just, like, help you navigate through this information and, you know, give you the the opportunity, to say something completely dumb and call you on that and this kind of stuff. It's like Now, that's that is a support system. The other advice... Is...
Speaker 0 Well, there's a lot. I I think at the end of the day, you know, Ceo, you wanna... You'll you'll you're driving the company somewhere. Right? You have a vision and and You set in that direction, you're allocating funding to the company where, you know, well well, this team is doing this versus this team is doing that.
Speaker 0 You inspiring people. So there's all those things that are doing that's new that you might not have been to any as an engineer. Sc seo, and I think it's... It... It's easier with founders and hired Ceos.
Speaker 0 You have a a model of your company and you feel it. And when you feel the company and people just often have, like, similar feelings towards the company they have to own kids. It's like another kid or something like this. They tilt peace physical pain and the company is not doing well and stuff like that. So that allows you to to refine.
Speaker 0 Of what is the 1 2 most important thing you can do for the company? And Seo, ideally you wanna focus on those things and get those things done. And then build the team around you that we'll pick up the rest. But by which is like, in the company usually the way to run it is everything is important. That's like a classic starter mantra, you know, you'd rather not do do something at all, rather than doing it poorly.
Speaker 0 Because if you do it poorly, it sets or standard for the company, and it you know, and, like, people get sloppy because, like, while get an mixed excuse because that thing in the corner is not is not up to the standard. So you'd rather do less, but whatever you do, you, you know, everything is important. And so as you're building your team, the Ceo and that's what you wanna spend a good amount of time on. You can focus on 1 to high order, you know, key partnership, you know, key investment, key customer, key hard technological problem where you dive deep and then and understand, like, you know, a paradigm shift can show up, which it just did right with Ai, generated Ai. And like, what does it mean?
Speaker 0 What does it mean for my company? And and you figure that out. But as you do that, you need to make sure that the wheels don't come off, and that's the strength of your $380M.
Speaker 1 That's super helpful. And you know, you just mentioned Ai. Maybe it's it's a good time to talk about Neon. Can you tell a bit more about what Neon does and why did you start the company?
Speaker 0 So I had this idea for about 7 years now. And I first had it when I was at single store. And single stores are distributed, transactional database where a very strong analytical capabilities now positions itself. It's like 1 stop shop for everything data. And 1 of the problems there, I wanted to solve for to become the all database for a very broad use case.
Speaker 0 So you know, when when you, you know, go a Single store, like, it's cool because you support very very large high end workloads. So I think our largest customer is like a 37000000 dollar deal for single star for many years. And we solve a very important problem for this large financial institution. And there a certain amount of pride there, But there's not that many workloads of that complexity out there. And there are...
Speaker 0 A ton more kinda of mundane workloads, which you see a lot. Right? You know, Bread and butter database workloads. Well and as he goes to the enterprises, you see people using, you know, something like single store, word it could be like, large scale solution like Snowflake data breaks, that kind of stuff Hadoop or whatever. You know, at least big data, Large scale workloads competing on on like different capabilities in Cd4 4 help us to be faster in real time and this kind of stuff.
Speaker 0 Large And then you see, like a ton of bread and butter clothes and people are using, like pose dress by seat will Mon go, And you like Mon we see Mon everywhere and and then you see Who’s public the company it doesn't do anything like crazy hard, but like there's a lot of it out there and they're kind default for a document store. Public So so the question of being the default for something that's really general purpose was an interesting 1, and I was trying to figure that out for single stuff first, and then I came up with this idea that instead of surfacing scene very high end workloads. Can you drop the barrier to entry for the most basic bread and butter. So come to the market from a completely different end so it's a different side side of this gigantic market. And then, you know, you see Manga everywhere, by by being in the market and selling Single store, and nec posters everywhere and posters doesn't have a vendor.
Speaker 0 And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And so... But the... But that doesn't mean that you can be that vendor. Right?
Speaker 0 Like Linux doesn't have a vendor maybe well. Red hat could be 1. But, you know, like, you know, how many how many linux extenders are are are there. So you gotta have something unique that is also def, from the technology standpoint And so so I was studying all those companies. I was studying Manga with was studying Rev hat trying to understand what Good looks like and how these guys manage to to create a public company on top of open source to.
Speaker 0 And then the the light bulb went up when I was studying Aws or aurora. Which is a big now multi billion dollar service or for for Amazon and being in baby database see the architecture of separating storage and compute, and that's where like, well, what if like, well, we have this proprietary stories that they build. But what if we had an an Open source storage like this? Because it is generally useful in the cloud, And if it is open source and you can counter position yourself is something that's very large. So that was like their the origin rejuvenation of the idea.
Speaker 0 And well, can we build that storage. Well, you know, we built whole database just now, including storage, so, like, I mean, hell, yeah, we can build that storage. And and so... But then I was trying to actually fund this idea instead of ability because Ryan Single store. I was calling my friends working at Aurora and saying, like, hey, you know, maybe we can inc it together or something, and like, were no takers.
Speaker 0 So eventually, when I transitioned from Single store to C, I decided to inc a somebody. And then it took off, Like company only 2 years old and change. And we already you know, value the 380000000 and have hundred and 50000 databases on the platform. So it's say that that low end hypotheses is is starting to to work and play out. So that was their the origin imagination of of neo.
Speaker 2 How gonna go back to something you said? Before you started your company, you studied the competitors. What does study mean? And for anyone listening who’s about to start a company, what are the 2 things they should do? To der risk it based on what you learned in that process?
Speaker 2 And
Speaker 0 So I think there's is this thing, yeah. And I think Andres actually talks about as an idea maze. And if you listen to his podcast, I think that was... Most recent 1 with Le Friedman. Well, he talks about the Idea maze, and it's basically a a path that you plot in your head first, you can write it down?
Speaker 0 How are you gonna build this company like, In lay terms, can you just explain? What are you gonna do first? What are you gonna build first? How are you gonna get to first users? Why they gonna show up?
Speaker 0 What are you gonna do exactly? Are you gonna be flying around the country? Are you gonna call your friend? Like, what are gonna do? And why do you think it's gonna work?
Speaker 0 And what are the risks? And so which ones are you gonna der risk? Sooner or rather than later? And and starting I think studying the companies I is just useful and humbling. Because until...
Speaker 0 So... And and and they have a lot of cars building Single store where I think we made a... Did a lot of things right, and we have made a lot of mistakes too. And that all generates scar tissue. But it doesn't stop you from trying to do more of that or again or different company because, you know, Building is accelerating.
Speaker 0 I think starting is useful in condensing, the results of your study in something that looked like the idea is that they went through, and It trying to explain it to your friends. It's like, look, you know, this is what I'm observing, Like these guys they're right. Do you agree? And they're like, well, yeah, I agree. And that's what it's looking from the outside in.
Speaker 0 The benefit of living in the Silicon valley is also... You can, like call off some people who are part of their journey and, like, compare compare notes. And they will confirm or are not that, so and that will make you better in understanding the world, which I You know, am I good at it is? Well, I keep learning and I'm trying to become better and better at is. And this is an interesting exercise that we'll train that muscle.
Speaker 0 Of of understanding the world. And if you understand the world well and you find little holes that the world's missing, So you can fill out those holes and that's your company. Right? And so now you move the world in it in in an in a wider way.
Speaker 2 As you were doing this process. How are you collecting insights and what did your notes look like at the time? Like, how are you organizing all this?
Speaker 0 I don't have a assist. I don't think, you know, I have no books. And and have a pen. I'm mostly right. I don't read.
Speaker 0 Settle. It's a way. I ride Really... So I think it's more a tactile feeling of putting stuff on paper, but I think the higher this just remember. They're on the hard.
Speaker 0 If you're if you're obsessive about something, then your brain filters, the information that is not useful and whatever the useful stuff you remember, like, the, you know, that like the Rat had thing trying to understand how how those came about and and and why it worked and like, where are they now when they went into the multi product journey, and how they responded to the comm monetization of their core business and the cloud. Right? Which was the acquisition of whatever the Kubernetes is saying in eventually, they didn't work. So worked only up to a point and then they they they sold off to Ibm idea. So large non growing business.
Speaker 0 So... And then why Mon worked and Mon is like the... Well, the database technology. So near and dear to my heart and I spend so much time in the industry that a manga is fascinating, because they didn't have good technology for all long time. And but they did have the developer front door.
Speaker 0 And eventually, they built out it and now it's very solid, took a long time. But you they managed to balance technology the the adoption of the of the users and some of them would have bad experience. But that create a feedback and they will respond it to the feedback loop and use Open source to be able to put that flow to not die down and stay on the learning curve and error rate and eventually the product matured. And then I started obsessively their go to market. And I understood what it doesn't work.
Speaker 0 And I spoke to their heads of sales and and their transitions and, you know, F1 X23I know their currency, Previous Ceo. So And everything just points into 1 thing that the the developer or low translates to eventual value.
Speaker 1 Wow. You know, either you are clearly someone who is, or takes him for any deliberate approach, like when like, solving specific problems, like, very thoughtful about it. And suddenly people we're saying earlier I really caught my attention, like Neon valuation is almost half a billion Right now, you started 2 years ago, over a hundred thousand databases. What are things that you... What are the things you did to get your first customers?
Speaker 0 Yeah. So... And I'll tell you the single thor story as well, we got our first customer by knocking that well, we'd publish something on, you know, Eric and I wrote a blog post about how to run something at scale. Or how to ability distribute a system and somebody reached out. That was Z.
Speaker 0 And that was our first customer first material, Actually, first customer we got through Gary Tan and instruction for y comb and this startup up is called back pain, which is no more. And then Z reached out after I publishing the I show a distributed system. Then we hired a Of sales and went straight to our enterprise and the rest is history and that's kinda set the company on that enterprise high end sale. And with N it was different. So we never hunted for customers.
Speaker 0 We We basically... First, we we put out our code? And then certain people would reach out. And then those we asked if they want to be our early customers and some said yes. From there, we saw the Github star growth on on Github.
Speaker 0 So now we're, like, on know, 10... Not 19000 stars or something like this. Well, the storage product. And then for just like, you know, the the kernel of Me, but N is a managed service So it's say it's a piece. And then and then we put together a waitlist.
Speaker 0 And then we launched and our website leaked in hacker news and people started to sign up on the waitlist list. And that started to January traffic. And so it's not like there's like 5 early customers that you know by need. It's more of, You have a daily traffic on your website. Was people signing up on on the wait list, which we redirect to a survey.
Speaker 0 And they're filling out that survey and then that informs us of what they care about and what they currently on and why they care about, what we're off frame. And then we launched it publicly. I will start on onboard those users and make sure they are successful, dash by badge train And then we started to see more and more of them successful started to increase the the number of those dashes and eventually we dropped the waitlist list. December 6 last year. And since December sixth, we we we're now at a hundred and 50000 databases.
Speaker 0 So that's... It's a different way of generating customers or end users that I... A better way to say is users. Because in the way they're little anonymous to us, I mean, sure they sign up with their emails and stuff. But it's not like this 5 day companies that you know, you know, the the engineering $380M of and by name and all of that.
Speaker 0 It's more of a to complete the self serve product, a bunch of nerds twisting knobs on the back end. And, you know, staring at retention cold words, look you, measuring product analytics, trying to make sure it's incredibly easy to consume. And that's the Act 1 of the company and we're still not out of the Act 1. And then the Act 2 will be going into more of a mid marketing eventually enterprise... In the enterprise world, we will be known our customers by name and talking to the Cios and stuff like that, but that hasn't arrived yet.
Speaker 2 Buyers Traditional silicon valley, lore is. Shit fast, chip messy, test, live. But the thing with the databases is, if it's low quality, who’s trust in the company forever, or, like... Like, you can't use a database, it doesn't have a hundred percent up $380M performance. Clearly you're someone who moves fast, How how did you think about the Mvp?
Speaker 2 Speed versus quality, and how does your team continue to deliver quality today? All moving fast.
Speaker 0 So, you know, back to my Staples server days and that was told to me by by 1 of our board members used to be my boss, Quentin Clark. Which was told to him by his boss. Who’s name is Tad Cooper, who’s in... They the single store board. They're like, 2 date sins in the in the world of databases, and everything else will be forgot, you know, forgiven, but not those 2, which is corrupted data and wrong results.
Speaker 0 So don't corrupt people's data, which is lose people's data and don't give them wrong results. We haven't done that at Neil. We haven't lost people's data, and we haven't throttle results. We have, however, had downtime. And the counter to that is being free and heavy each tier.
Speaker 0 And being in the technical preview longer that you think you should be. And be upfront about your $380M. So there's neon status dot com and then you can see all the outages. And when Somebody runs into an issue, our ob ability system, logs it, and we reach out to them and let them know. I think that level of transparency is, Probably what...
Speaker 0 And then being free for a period of time. Is is some of that def. Being free is having a free $380M is an incredible way just to test the limits of your system and have us few surprises? As possible as people, you know, roll up to the serious workloads, and it cost you something. Right?
Speaker 0 But Despite the fact that their a single percentage point conversion from free to paid. Last month, we are consumption on unpaid exceeded our consumption on free. So like paid users, they cons they they just consume a lot more than than the free users. But the fact that we are having incredibly... Efficient cost efficient each year, let's us practice running a large fleet.
Speaker 0 So... And that's why starting from free to small and medium business to mid market to enterprise. Allows you to learn as you build. Because obviously in the beginning, there will be bugs, I I mean, and everybody who’s is trying to build a you know, a storage system or any systems project and say that we're not gonna have outages like They. Because, you know, you can do it absolutely perfectly.
Speaker 1 I love it. Nikki nikita, you know, a lot of your users and customers, are building Ai applications. How are they leveraging Neon?
Speaker 0 So Ai is 1 of those things that you cannot be ignoring today. And the the first question we asked is what does that mean for us? And what does it mean for our users? And we arrived into 2 distinct answers for now and we funded those. The first 1 is, there as people build Ai applications, they need memory, they need Vector stores.
Speaker 0 And just so happen, post this as a platform, there's already Vector store quality j vector. Which we support, and so by that nature, we can't already have it. So but having this and having expertise in it is at 2 different tapes. And so we decided to get better, at vector stores, and we funded our own effort and we built our own vector index, which Lp embedding. And we positioning it not as a competitor to Pg vector because we support both.
Speaker 0 We positioning it as a competitor to commercial record databases. Such as pine cone and, you know, open sword, but still separate. We and the Yada yada the others
Speaker 1 there's a million of them know.
Speaker 0 The reason we're doing that is 1 of the biggest sins are ignoring paradigm shifts. And so it doesn't really matter where you start and, you know, vector stores is just like something that people want, in the in this new world, and they might not want back tomorrow body way. His like, who knows maybe open Ai will pull in that functionality into $380M and we would just want need to to have those vector stores anymore. But what that allows us to be is it allows us to be an the Lori curve. And he wanna be on the learning curve providing functionality, that the people want today, and then being conversation if people who are building those Ai off of 1 ones in the future.
Speaker 0 And so, From there, we kind observed that, okay. Well, vector store is a piece of infrastructure, but what are they what are the means doing? Right? It means to but what is they're actually building in this Ai ops. And I think that splits into a couple couple categories.
Speaker 0 1 is what is called reg, retrieval augmented generation, which is basically like a next generation search system or to a recommendation system, people build search systems, recommendation systems and people build image image search, and then people build just kinda like all of that together, call it multi model. So okay. Well, you know, what are the oled dated pieces that you need, in order to to build a full app. And of course, you have a database, you have a Vector store, you have Open Or any other large language model And... But then there's, like, all this other things around.
Speaker 0 So that creates an ecosystem and an app stack and and you trying to see What is your place there and how much of that functionality you pull in at your platform and how much you integrate partners? And so as you go into that exercise, it's important to shit. So we ship Pg embedded, we gonna build more of that functionality there. And and that's still cut a part of the vector store. We actively exploring rags and and rags have...
Speaker 0 A vector store piece, which is like, step 3 or something like this that it's a multi stage ranking, this like, all of all everything around reg. And We we still don't know what we're gonna do. Are we're gonna have an integrated rag experience that you can build around Post chris or we find partners for each piece of it and then take, you know, maybe just the vector extra piece and and do that very well integrate with everybody else. Weird exploring that. No no no decision.
Speaker 0 Yet. The other thing that we're observing you is like, hey, And there's 1 crazy 1 too. The crazy 1 is, like, do we need to host Llama or it would not need to host llama. And I don't have an answer to that question so like, at least we're debating that shortly. But the other thing that that is that that there are completely different ways to look in at the problem is Okay.
Speaker 0 So if when I manage the database. When I run on database is a developer I can run it with consumer of a database, you know, I'm building an app and I'm running an app, and then there's all the things that you need to worry about to to manage and tune the database. And there is even a title for those people, which shows a Dba, right? Database administrator. Well, can you have a dba a dot ai?
Speaker 0 Can you have an Ai dba? Because if you do, then you save people from not... For a lot of people can just not have it at all. And a lot of Shamgunov organizations that have large proofs of Gb, they can have very leveraged Gb. So they can have much fewer of the Gb that manage much larger fleets of the database.
Speaker 0 And what is managing at the end of the day? While managing is not just provisioning and run and upgrading? Managing is also making sure the runs smoothly and that means, creating indexes said changing settings, inside database and and and, there's like a bunch of creating and supporting the developer workflow as you're doing it on because with when people build apps, they as they build apps, they also need functionality there. So a lot of that stuff could be automated. And now, you're not making something like 20 percent more efficient than a similar product from Amazon.
Speaker 0 You making kids, you know, maybe even the same efficiency, but hey, you know, there's a whole bunch of people around that system that you don't need at all. And so that created makes the product a lot more valuable and and and a lot more usable. So it's another way of of looking at the... And the Ai value that you can bring with your products.
Speaker 1 Thing that gets me really excited about. When I hear this, Nikita is... And for audience out there, for building anything or you're building something in Ai. Is it's like a 1 stop shop, and you can build the things that you normally build what with fewer people. And that's really exciting.
Speaker 0 And and and that's the new trend. Right? So that's why people are saying, you know, every paradigm shift usually usually creates jobs and people are like, but this 1, we don't know. Like should you. We'll see.
Speaker 0 We'll see about this way.
Speaker 2 1 1 thing that really sticks out is... Clearly, you're you're very thoughtful. Your frameworks for thinking, both in how you plan what work on next as you're planning how to out to leverage each paradigm shift? How would do you structure your day, your week, as a Ceo to give you that space and time to think? To give you space and time to learn what do you delegate what do not?
Speaker 2 How do you set yourself up, continue to do that for the company?
Speaker 0 Well, the first thing is this it's changes. It changes as as the company grows and it changes with the set of priorities that you have. A lot of this is hiring. A lot of this is hiring. And then creating enough activity to understand...
Speaker 0 We either know what you wanna do next, and they you have 1 or 2 priorities. And then blind on get that done. And that could be signing up a partner, a particular partner or, you know, getting that Ai thing through, and then you look at your odd calendar and your calendar better reflect your priorities. And if it doesn't, you're doing something wrong, The other 1 is hiring and then usually in hiring, if you have 1 or 2 hires that you that you you you want to make for your company right now, we're looking head of Ai, for example, and we we might know who that is. You know, if we sign them, then then it's great.
Speaker 0 If not, you know, keep searching Then again, like, your calendar should reflect the fact that you're you're going offer hiring those people. So I'm a huge fan of having even for yourself, ideally want, but, like worst case 2 priorities. Of course, and that's what Keith says in his lectures as well, If you have many priorities, you tend to procrastinate more and you tend to focus on the wants that you know how to solve, but not the ones that the highest needle mover for the business. And so that's where you need to be extremely honest with your salt. And and and also raise the white flag if you if you're failing and and light get some help from your $380M or externally.
Speaker 0 And if you have 1 problem, that's the 1 that you obsessed about, and that's the 1 you're talking to everybody about how to solve and and that what helps you eventually soul solve that. So that's 1. On the the the the other bit that you cannot stop doing is invest your team and and making sure your team grows. And mh. As as you work with your people with as your people, you can either grow people, you can buy expertise.
Speaker 0 Right? And sometimes people say companies grows faster, that the people That is the case sometimes, right? That's obviously a function of how fast the company is growing and have far and the individual is growing. So in a way, if an individual is growing, the companies are slowly, individual is growing faster, you can keep giving more and more responsibilities to that individual. The company is hockey is ticking as well sometimes You need to go and and and and get that expertise externally.
Speaker 0 It's interesting that at N, a lot of the people are homegrown and head of engineering kind of products. Head of Dev is external ex long, and head of P g motion. And Head Partridge telling I I worked with before. But also in a away homegrown home girl because who’s it's like the first time she's is doing. The the kinda like the the the top roll.
Speaker 0 I'm a big believer in that. And that's where you know, you invest in your team and the reward is that the team performs very, very well. And and there is there is that appreciation of people's capabilities that come in and the ability of people to step up to to those challenges. So to me, that's like wheel forums. And that's where where what drives the enjoyment of a work to is to to see how capable people either already are becoming and and and and I graduate graduate into the next level of excellence.
Speaker 1 But Pin, it sounds like It's 1 of those things that you said earlier, like when you are helping these people grow. And when you are helping yourself grow. Like finding a mentor in that journey is super important. What are some steps people can take to find a great mentor.
Speaker 0 I think we... Well, people should try. Right? So when you build the company naturally meet a lot people. And you start with investors.
Speaker 0 Right? And your company already works without any... General investments or you raise around the funding. While you already have people who are very interested in your success, who are your investors? External And maybe you can sign up some angels that also, you know, writes smaller checks your company.
Speaker 0 And that's your initial network. Right? Investors in the Silicon Valley are naturally very connected. So they can always introduce you to to other Ceos. And they'd like to do that.
Speaker 0 That's a part of their job. And ideally, they they can introduce it to executives. They can introduce you to scale Ceos. They can increase some retired Ceos who have more time in their hands and. Can help you out.
Speaker 0 So that's 1 conduit to to building that network. Another 1 is Well, if you... If there is a particular person you you admire and a soft like z musk like, maybe Like, you know, not not as big because these people are, you know, extremely busy. I guarantee you will have a response, if you just email this person out. It's like, I'm I'm a Ceo of, this little company XYZ, there is aspiring to become this big company.
Speaker 0 And I'm modeling a lot of that stuff from your experiences who can I buy you coffee? Just like rather. Why email this short, and like 70 80 percent, he will get a response and he will get you coffee. And if it clicks, you know, this... That person can become your.
Speaker 0 The other place we which it generates interesting mentorship and just like networking opportunities is exec. So exec searches cost you. Got a lot of money. So each exec search is like hundred hundred and 40000 dollars. Know that.
Speaker 0 Yeah. It's expensive. So... And then you're hiring, you know, head of a jury had a product like, whatever. Vp level, person.
Speaker 0 And through that, you just need a lot of people. He meet a lot of people and They're unlikely your mentors. But they're useful useful nose in their in their silicon Valley graph of of capable individuals. And with some you connect very well. Yeah And if you go and search for, you know, a Coo or a board member or a Ceo and, you know, we...
Speaker 0 We did search for a Ceo at at single store at some point and eventually I took over. Well, you meet some serious people through that process. And some of them specifically like Devon eventually became the board member of single store and and a very good relationship since. Hidden. Become Single star Ceo, but we connected super well and, you know, we...
Speaker 0 You, with friends. So that's that's an example of what else generates networks in the Silicon Valley. Partnerships. Ceo summit, you know, meet us with other founders, investors, super angels, a lot gil, for example, or nets Friedman are like this. Super conductive material that's connected to everything in the Silicon Valley.
Speaker 0 And and they're happy to help us their job, to introduce you to to, you know, person ABC.
Speaker 2 There's so much we want to ask you, but we're out of time. Make nikita. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people follow? Neon, your work, your learnings, your journey,
Speaker 0 Follow me on Twitter, my handle is Nikita database as in, like, 1 Size I decided that I'm gonna be flipping who’s for the for the rest of my life. That's my that's my handle. And then the the Neon handle on Twitter is Neon database. We couldn't get Neon, but Neon data is is close enough. So please follow follow us on Twitter.
Speaker 0 There's a lot of good stuff coming in. We we're shipping continuously. And sharing all the takes on the on the on the systems and data world.
Speaker 2 Nikita. Thanks for coming.
Speaker 0