Shows
In DepthWhat Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)Ankur Goyal is the founder and CEO of Braintrust, an end-to-end platform for building AI apps. Before that, he founded Impira, a data management platform that was acquired by Figma, where he went on to lead the AI team. Ankur kickstarted his career when he dropped out of college to join the founding team at SingleStore (formerly MemSQL), a formative experience that shaped his views on building for high-bar users.
In today’s episode, we discuss:
• Ankur’s early lessons on quality from MemSQL
• How frustration with evals at Figma led to B...2025-07-241h 10
EOLeaving $1.5B Startup Behind for AI's Next Wave | Neon, Nikita Shamgunov | EO
Leaving $1.5B Startup Behind for AI's Next Wave | Neon, Nikita Shamgunov
Nikita Shamgunov is CoFounder and CEO of Neon, a serverless Postgres platform revolutionizing database infrastructure. From founding SingleStore, a company that reached $1.5B in valuation, to establishing Neon with a fresh approach to growth, Nikita's journey demonstrates the power of embracing new challenges. He shares invaluable insights on navigating rapidly evolving technologies like AI and what it takes to stay adaptable in today's fastpaced tech landscape.This interview series is sponsored by .tech Domainsthe very domain the startups featured in the series build their websites on. Building...2025-07-2311 min
(A)bsolutely (I)ncredible PodcastDatabricks Is Buying Database Startup NEON For About $1 Billion DollarsData analytics startup Databricks said Wednesday that it's buying Neon, a cloud-based database software vendor, for about $1 billion. It's the latest big deal for Databricks, which bought artificial intelligence model training startup MosaicML for $1.3 billion in 2023 and paid over $1 billion last year for data optimization startup Tabular.Neon has over 18,000 customers, Databricks said in a statement. Clients include OpenAI, Adobe, Boston Consulting Group, Replit and Vercel, according to Neon's website. Many developers have flocked to Neon, which is open source and billed as an alternative to top cloud provider Amazon Web Services' Aurora Postgres database service. The...2025-05-1401 min
Database School20 years of hacking Postgres with Heikki Linnakangas (cofounder of Neon)In this episode of Database School, I talk with Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon and longtime PostgreSQL hacker, to talk about 20+ years in the Postgres community, the architecture behind Neon, and the future of multi-threaded Postgres. From paternity leave patches to branching production databases, we cover a lot of ground in this deep-dive conversation. Links: Let's make postgres multi-threaded: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/31cc6df9-53fe-3cd9-af5b-ac0d801163f4%40iki.fi Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36284487 Follow Heikki: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heikk...2025-05-062h 00
Scaling DevToolsNikita Shamgunov - founder of Neon: storytelling, pricing and hiring execsNikita Shamgunov is the founder of Neon, an open-source serverless Postgres company. Before Neon, Nikita co-founded MemSQL, now SingleStore, which is valued at over a billion dollars. He has also worked as a VC at Khosla Ventures and held engineering roles at Meta and Microsoft. Nikita is known for his strategic thinking and transparency about his decision-making process.We discuss:The importance of storytelling and providing a clear narrative for your companyWhen to introduce a sales team and how to build a sales and marketing "machine"Pricing strategies, including pricing for storage and compute in...2025-03-0647 min
Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech LeadersS10 Bonus: Nikita Shamgunov, NeonNikita Shamgunov is a native of Russia, coming to the US for grad school in 2005. Eventually he worked at Microsoft on the SQL Server product. A fun fact - Nikita quit business school on the first day, and decided to join Facebook and find his future co-founder. All of this worked out, and he and his co-founder built SingleStore, which is one of the highest valued companies at YC. Outside of tech, he was a semi-professional athlete in Ping Pong, achieving the status of Top 10 in Washington State back when he was at Microsoft.Nikita completed his "...2025-02-0627 min
10KMedia PodcastEpisode 54: Nikita Shamgunov, CEO & Founder of NeonAdam sits down with Nikita to discuss the explosive growth of Postgres, the recent investment from Microsoft's M12, and why infrastructure tools need to be serverless in the age of AI.2024-09-2345 min
Data Engineering PodcastNeon: A Serverless And Developer Friendly PostgresSummaryPostgres is one of the most widely respected and liked database engines ever. To make it even easier to use for developers to use, Nikita Shamgunov decided to makee it serverless, so that it can scale from zero to infinity. In this episode he explains the engineering involved to make that possible, as well as the numerous details that he and his team are packing into the Neon service to make it even more attractive for anyone who wants to build on top of Postgres.AnnouncementsHello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show...2024-07-0857 min
Founded & FundedBuilding a Modern Database: Nikita Shamgunov on Postgres and BeyondIn this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Investor Paul Goel and Neon Co-founder & CEO Nikita Shamgunov dive into the database market and the importance of creating a killer developer experience while balancing that experience with performance and reliability. Nikita also shares just how bullish he is on AI, his excitement for AI agents like Devin, and advises founders to not wait on an idea they’re passionate about. Full transcript here: (00:00) Introduction (00:46) Nikita's Background and the Genesis of Neon (02:50) The Right Time to Build Neon and Database Mar...2024-04-1831 min
Tech Talks DailyInnovating Postgres for the Cloud Era: Neon's Story with Nikita ShamgunovHave you ever paused to consider the rapidly evolving landscape of database technology, especially in the era of cloud computing and serverless architectures? Today's Tech Talks Daily Podcast episode welcomes a visionary in this domain, Nikita Shamgunov, the CEO and Founder of Neon. This pioneering startup is not just altering the Postgres database scene; it's revolutionizing it with serverless capabilities, a transformative step that recently attracted a staggering $40M investment, pushing their total funding to an impressive $100M. Our journey today with Nikita isn't just about numbers and investments. It's a narrative of innovation, determination...2024-01-2039 min
Dev Propulsion LabsNikita Shamgunov - NeonThis week we are learning from Nikita Shamgunov, CEO at Neon and Partner at Khosla Ventures who previously co-founded MemSQL and scaled to ~40M ARR.Neon is fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. They separate storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.https://evilmartians.com/2023-11-3035 min
Heavybit Podcast Network Master FeedJamstack Radio - Ep. #136, Serverless Postgres with Nikita Shamgunov of NeonIn episode 136 of Jamstack Radio, Brian speaks with Nikita Shamgunov of Neon. This conversation explores how Serverless Postgres is revolutionizing the database game, making it easier, more scalable, and more cost-effective than ever before.2023-10-2636 min
Jamstack RadioEp. #136, Serverless Postgres with Nikita Shamgunov of NeonIn episode 136 of Jamstack Radio, Brian speaks with Nikita Shamgunov of Neon. This conversation explores how Serverless Postgres is revolutionizing the database game, making it easier, more scalable, and more cost-effective than ever before. Together they explore topics like orchestrating micro VMs, utilizing databases as a service (DaaS), building a scalable cloud service for Postgres databases, and getting started with Neon.The post appeared first on Heavybit.2023-10-2636 min
Heavybit PodcastsEp. #136, Serverless Postgres with Nikita Shamgunov of NeonIn episode 136 of Jamstack Radio, Brian speaks with Nikita Shamgunov of Neon. This conversation explores how Serverless Postgres is revolutionizing the database game, making it easier, more scalable, and more cost-effective than ever before. Together they explore topics like orchestrating micro VMs, utilizing databases as a service (DaaS), building a scalable cloud service for Postgres databases, and getting started with Neon.The post appeared first on Heavybit.2023-10-2636 min
DealMakers: Entrepreneur | Startups | Venture CapitalNikita Shamgunov On Building A $1 Billion Business And Now Raising $54 Million To Create A Cloud-Native Database ServiceNikita Shamgunov built a $100M revenue company, before joining Khosla Ventures to invest in other startups. Now he is going at it again, with a new tech startup that has raised $54M in just 16 months. The company, SingleStore, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Prosperity7, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell Technologies Capital, and Insight Partners.
2023-03-0243 min
Open Source Startup PodcastE73: Building Scalable Postgres with Serverless Database Platform NeonNikita Shamgunov is Co-Founder & CEO of Neon, the open-source serverless postgres database platform. Neon separates storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage. Their open source project, also called Neon, has 6.5K stars on Github.
Neon has raised $30M from investors including GGV and Khosla.
In this episode, we dig into the Neon founding story of starting a scalable alternative to AWS Aurora, why it's important to separate storage and compute, Neon's partner strategy, Nikita's thoughts on the "DevCloud" movement & much more!2023-02-1637 min
Changelog InterviewsJust PostgresThis week we’re talking about by Postgres with Craig Kerstiens, Chief Product Officer at Crunchy Data, and a well known ambassador for Postgres. Just Postgres. That’s what this week’s show is about.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Sentry – Working code means happy customers. That’s exactly why teams choose Sentry. From error tracking to performance monitoring, Sentry helps teams see what actually matters, resolve problems quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the fronte...2023-01-201h 11
Changelog Master FeedJust Postgres (The Changelog #523)This week we’re talking about by Postgres with Craig Kerstiens, Chief Product Officer at Crunchy Data, and a well known ambassador for Postgres. Just Postgres. That’s what this week’s show is about.
Discuss on Changelog News
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Sponsors:
Sentry – Working code means happy customers. That’s exactly why teams choose Sentry. From error tracking to performance monitoring, Sentry helps teams see what actually matters, resolve problems quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the fr...2023-01-201h 11The Changelog: Software Development, Open SourceJust Postgres (Interview)This week we’re talking about by Postgres with Craig Kerstiens, Chief Product Officer at Crunchy Data, and a well known ambassador for Postgres. Just Postgres. That’s what this week’s show is about.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Sentry – Working code means happy customers. That’s exactly why teams choose Sentry. From error tracking to performance monitoring, Sentry helps teams see what actually matters, resolve problems quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the fronte...2023-01-201h 11
The Swyx Mixtape[Tech] Separation of Storage and Compute (Databases) - Nikita ShamgunovListen to the Changelog: https://changelog.com/podcast/510TranscriptSo elastic compute makes sense, and scaling down because you have like ephemeral on-demand resource usage, right? Like, all of a sudden, I have to answer a bunch of HTTP requests, and so my server has to do stuff, and then everybody leaves, and my website doesn’t get any hits, and I could scale that down. With databases, if I’ve got a one-gigabyte database, it’s just like, it’s always there. I mean, all that data is there, and I could access any part of...2022-12-2111 minChangelog InterviewsTaking Postgres serverlessThis week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0.
We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — whe...2022-10-141h 24Changelog Master FeedTaking Postgres serverless (The Changelog #510)This week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0.
We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — whe...2022-10-141h 24The Changelog: Software Development, Open SourceTaking Postgres serverless (Interview)This week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0.
We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — whe...2022-10-141h 24
Podcast – Software Engineering DailyOpen-source Serverless Postgres with Nikita ShamgunovPostgreSQL is a free and open-source relational database management system. Postgres-based databases are widespread and are used by a variety of organizations, from Reddit to the International Space Station, and Postgres databases are a common offering from cloud providers such as AWS, Alibaba Cloud, and Heroku. Neon is a serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rssxvnur03rechsoftwareengineerin.substack.com2022-10-0553 min
Software Engineering DailyOpen-source Serverless Postgres with Nikita ShamgunovPostgreSQL is a free and open-source relational database management system. Postgres-based databases are widespread and are used by a variety of organizations, from Reddit to the International Space Station, and Postgres databases are a common offering from cloud providers such as AWS, Alibaba Cloud, and Heroku.Neon is a serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres. It separates storage and compute and substitutes the PostgreSQL storage layer by redistributing data across a cluster of nodes.Today, we spoke with Nikita Shamgunov of Neon. We discuss how Neon scales Postgres, how it saves cost and the...2022-10-0552 minThe Swyx Mixtape[Tech] Serverless Postgres - Nikita ShamgunovListen to Founder Real Talk: https://overcast.fm/+n6UYkhIo4/03:162022-09-0721 min
Founder Real TalkNikita Shamgunov, CEO of Neon, on Providing the Fabric That Runs the InternetNikita Shamgunov is the CEO of Neon, a new company building the next generation serverless Postgres database. Nikita got his PhD in St. Petersburg and worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Facebook before going on to co-found SingleStore, an analytical database company. At SingleStore, Nikita realized the massive size of the transaction databases market and the ubiquity of Postgres, the popular open-source database, all of which led him to found Neon. Neon separates the storage and compute functions to create a truly affordable and compelling cloud native Postgres. In this episode, Nikita talks to us about working with his...2022-07-2623 min
Ventured Growth with Hercules Capital#12 – Leading With a Servant’s Heart | Raj VermaShare your thoughts with us!Raj Verma is the CEO at SingleStore, a database management system that helps modern applications be fast, frictionless, and flexible. When Raj started at SingleStore, he was Co-CEO with SingleStore’s founder, Nikita Shamgunov. By building a healthy relationship and friendship with Nikita, Raj was able to lead with the company’s founding principles, keeping that essence that makes SingleStore so special. Raj’s transition to Co-CEO and later to CEO has as much to do with his mindset and leadership skills as it does with the CEO job description. 2022-04-2837 min
Practical AIOperationalizing ML/AI with MemSQLA lot of effort is put into the training of AI models, but, for those of us that actually want to run AI models in production, performance and scaling quickly become blockers. Nikita from MemSQL joins us to talk about how people are integrating ML/AI inference at scale into existing SQL-based workflows. He also touches on how model features and raw files can be managed and integrated with distributed databases.Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:...2020-06-2954 min
HumAIn PodcastThe importance of Data Management and AI during COVID-19 with Nikita Shamgunov[Audio] Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSSNikita Shamgunov co-founded MemSQL and has served as CTO since inception. Prior to co-founding the company, Nikita worked on core infrastructure systems at Facebook. He served as a senior database engineer at Microsoft SQL Server for more than half a decade. Nikita holds a bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate in computer science, has been awarded several patents and was a world medalist in ACM programming contests.Episode Links: Nikita Shamgunov's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in...2020-06-1848 min
DevOps ChatDatabase for Cloud-Native Apps at Speed And Scale, memSQLData and database technologies are experiencing disruption. The volume of data collected is exploding, creating new potential for disruptive services and new companies. Data is distributed across locations in the cloud and the data center. Also, cloud technologies bring a plethora of database types, distribution options, analytics capabilities, and AI/ML processing. Any company not leveraging data to the benefit of its customers and business are just asking to be the next victim of disruption.
Nikita Shamgunov, memSQL Co-CEO / Co-Founder, joins DevOps Chat to discuss how these disruptive factors changed how containerized and cloud-native applications approach data collection and storage...2019-09-2321 minData Engineering PodcastCombining Transactional And Analytical Workloads On MemSQL with Nikita ShamgunovSummaryOne of the most complex aspects of managing data for analytical workloads is moving it from a transactional database into the data warehouse. What if you didn’t have to do that at all? MemSQL is a distributed database built to support concurrent use by transactional, application oriented, and analytical, high volume, workloads on the same hardware. In this episode the CEO of MemSQL describes how the company and database got started, how it is architected for scale and speed, and how it is being used in production. This was a deep dive on how to build a su...2018-10-0956 min
The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)Real-Time Machine Learning in the Database with Nikita Shamgunov - TWiML Talk #84This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I had a great time at this event getting caught up on the latest and greatest machine learning and AI products and services announced by AWS and its partners. In this episode, I’ll be speaking with Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of MemSQL, a company offering a distributed, memory-optimized data warehouse of the same name. Nikita and I take a deep dive into some of the features of their recently released 6.0 version, which supports built-in vector operations like dot...2017-12-1239 min