Nikita Shamgunov, CEO of Neon, on Providing the Fabric That Runs the Internet
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Separation of stores in computer obviously is an architectural advantage, but is also means to ends what actually people want. Consuming infrastructure in the cloud is a Better development experience. Well, the thing that really most excite me is to provide the fabric, the grounds internet. At the end of the day, developers build ops and they put IT on a platform. And if you want to create a massive ve ubiquity pot form, that should be an only source post form at the infrastructural .

level from G G V. This is founder real talk, where we get real about the chAllenges that founders and start up executive faith and how theyve grown from tough experiences. I'm your host gland, Solomon. Without further ado, here's today's episode.

On today's episode of found a real talk, i'm joined by my G G V colleague, dan khana. Hey, dan.

have to be here.

We're really excited to welcome nick ta shagul to the show. Nais, the cofounder and C E O of non the server less post gress company with separated computing storage. Neon is offering an instant, scalable and cost efficient servers database that brings the best of software workflows to the database world.

Before neon, naka was cofounder, co CEO and chief strategy officer at single store, a database for complex analytical and transaction workloads, which he helped to grow to over a billion dollar valuation in. Prior of that, an engineer at facebook in microsoft, he's also a partner at coastal ventures. Nion was founded just sixteen months ago and today announced a thirty million dollar series a, which we H G G V.

Feel very lucky to have LED sorry to series a one. And this is part of a grand total of fifty four million that the company has raised date. The company has just begun to talk publicly about what they're building and has already generated a huge wave of interest from developers.

Anticipation is building for this product to go ga. We're super excited to chat when the kiddo about his experience in the database world. What's the come for neon and lots more? Naa, it's great to have you.

Welcome to found a real talk. Excited to be here. awesome. So as I mention, neon is not your first radio in the database face. Give us a little bit of background on yourself, your story, what got you excited to build in the world of database and what your journeys look like to get you at this point.

So at first of all, I have a long standing career in data bases, probably started in what as I finished my PHD back home and and same Peters burruss a then I joined microsoft to start on the single server er team. That's where I develop my laugh towards systems and database technology in general. You absolutely right.

This is not my first rodeo. And the company I help create is single store. I used to be called that equal.

There are a few realization that I realizations I had as building and equal, which became single store. One is the database is, is, is a gigantic market, is one of the largest I T markets. And the size of IT is roughly hundred billion dollars every year within that market.

There's like several oceans and various current that move not just stuff, but kind of workload from one place to another. The major ones are all lap online. A little process soon.

And that was the focus of single store. And the other one is O L T P or Operational workload es. And in the way, that's the focus of neon. The idea of neon started to develop probably three, four years ago in my head, and there are few things I observed as building and working with single store customers. The first one is I still opposed this everywhere.

And single stories focused on the enterprise, every single enterprise, or almost every single enterprise, where single store, how customers had posed this somewhere for a different part of part of the business service in different workloads, something that we we a single store and just in the general in the database industry in general, called tear two. Those are your commodity workloads. Here's a APP. I need the database.

What's the no regret database I can use? And often times that no regret database was posed. This really IT was between post grass, mango and mysql.

But we started to see that every time people talked about post grass, there was like a twinkle in the, in people's eyes, like they really liked. And they love that technology. They wanted to put there up and post gress.

The second thing is that I just knew, because I spend so much time in the database industry about the rise of A W. S. A. war. And aurora pioneer this architecture of separation of storage and compute.

Some of my former colleagues that take server were found the engineers on the oral team, namely alex for bisk, who is all the papers. And I kept in touch with him just talking about technology. And that's, mind me, one of my superpowers.

I am extremely passionate about technology and you can call me at two A M at night and say, well, can we talk about this technical thing or in this particular case, databases? And i'm game like like i'm super, super cautioned about system stack and data abase tag cloud native architectures in all of that. And the third kind of peace that were was level input is just the Better understanding of how to build successful businesses quicker with antico single store.

We arrived there over time, and I started to think, what would I be if you engineer? Are some of those things ahead a time, if you think about hard problems ahead a time? And then focus is incredibly narrowly on your interest into the market? That became me .

on maybe to that point. You mentioned, you know, single story been lost some success story, but like with most other up through ups and downs, not always up to the right. And we want to understand and maybe dig into some of the kind of specific lessons you took from the experience of building that company that you're working to and transfer over as you start on this new journey.

On great question. First of all, I want single stories in incredible company. And there are a lot of things that we did, right? And there are a few things that we paid for with time. And so I think that we did rise is since day zero, we assembled an unbelievable engineering team. This is something that I always gonna be proud of.

And the caliper of that engineering team stayed there for many, many years, which has actually really, really hard to accomplish in such a competitive talent market that is, uh, the silicon valley over time, single store added, uh, very, very strong management team is run by a great deal, right? Verma right now. And I think there is very few things that stand between tingle so and go in public.

But he also write, IT took a long time when we started in twenty eleven. So it's after eleven years, these companies worth over one hundred billion. This stuff that I think would be lessons learned is the breath of the platform that we set out to build.

And we didn't stage at the right way. In addition to that, a lot of things we were building for today rather than building for the future. Specific example of that is cloud. When we started in twenty eleven, there was an obvious that you could build a big cloud only business. And everywhere we went talking to customers, they wanted to run things prom.

Now the lesson that learned was, if you have a strong conviction of where the market is going and that is the future, you actually know that is gonna some time to build your company from zero to where the company is at, then you can start building for that future. And in that particular case, that future should have been cloud and potentially, we should have started with cloud only. And i'm only saying potentially because, well, here's the company that has very high probability and go in public and you actually don't know how the things would have shaken, shaken out if we made certain, certain strategic decisions, but that breath of what we set out to do and then the actual work that gets into going into and building all of that.

And then if you do that, you also need to, to drive revenue and revenue growth over time. So that is the part I think we could have done Better at neon. We're super narrow ly focused.

We are not trying to boil the ocean of building a alford for transactions and analytics. That's what really single story is. We are focusing just on the transactional workloads and just on this and be admit Marks in the beginning.

And so we're super narrow on the customer profile where super narrows on the workload. We're obviously delivering cloud only, and we also only doing post gress and only survey less. So aura is posed as mysql and we are doing only post this.

Aurora is a grand menu of options. Oh, this size workload, that size workload. And we are only serves. There's nothing to choose. You pushed the button.

then you get IT sounds super compelling naked a year. You're not the sole founder. You have hike and stars as cofounder ers. Can you tell us a little bit about each of them and how you guys came to come together to go found the company?

absolutely. So neon is IT as an incubation at coastal ventures. When I joined coast's live ventures as a partner, A, I didn't want to lose my Operating a chops and and instinct.

I was also super passionate about this idea. So we decided, you know, I was almost a condition for me coming to costly adventures to incubate this company. Within that, I particularly studied mixes iser.

I certainly knew almost everything about snowflake and wide successful. I knew their cultural values. I knew their team. IT was cleared to me through that lens of some of the decisions that we made, a single store that slow us down. So that prompted me to study snowflake first and foremost.

But I also studied other incubation out of sutter hill and and my expires, such as symon, logic and pure. I'm also that a habit of gravy coffee was called decent and getting tea take, both helping with a kind of a single store journey, but also learning from him and his experiences in that model, which initially there was a colonic copy pace model from mike. The idea is that you put a mega technical team that is position super well to deliver on the problem that you said without to solve.

In this particular case, the important part was to get posted hackers on the team. I initially was thinking of having even more founders then stand hake. And I wanted to have a blend of posters, DNA and some kind of modern systems DNA from people train from google, facebook, as well as kind of product engineering because mean, as a strong system, technical core, but the consumption model looks more like a consumer product rather than like a an enterprise product.

So I kind of was thinking, you know, we can link up, up to four co founders. We ended up lining up three and one didn't workout very, very quickly in, in, in a month time frame. IT was quite obvious that that he wasn't the right one stash haki turned out to be.

And they came through the post gress read that I called, and I spoke to a lot of people from that community assign the ride the right found in team where it's a combination of luck and judgement, to be honest, where you trying to quickly gage if this person can be a fantastic co founder and your insurance is actually the the fact that their multiple co founders and maybe someone workout. And the other part is luck, right? And I think i'm incredibly lucky with haki, who is not only oppose with committed, but one of the most prolific poseuse.

Which is he writes article and you can go and repo and just see how much haki contributed to the core engine. And the other person that I got really lucky with the stars, stars not only is opposed to hacker, he basically brought in that product engineering DNA that I really thought we would need. And that is how to around a service, how to build the front and team, how to build a back and team, a product engineering back and team, how to build A S A team. And so haki demonstrated tremendous amount, depth and test demonstrated moto breath. So i'm very, very lucky with having thousand eight on the team.

A of the neon team brings both deep systems experience and for very unique product focus. And any part why we got so excited about the company is that the architectural advance advantages that you've made and namely, kind of the separation, storage and computer, are both very difficult technically and kind of directly enable a Better experience for the developer. And so is you bring me onto market, understand how you think about kind of the value prop to everyone from the individual developer all way up to, you know, larger teams using this.

definitely. So separation of stories in computer, obviously, is an architectural advantage, but is also means to an end what actually people want. Consuming infrastructural in the cloud is a Better developer experience.

And separation of stories and compute allows you to a uh, create server less suffering, right? Because once you separated storage in compute and your computer is stateless and stateless allows you to run compute, you know, let's say, inside containers, you can we schedule compute from one note to another, you can have that server less experience in the cloud. You scale things a lot easier.

The other thing that separation of storage and can you allows you to to do is, well, you now control that storage because you built and you are offering that storage to developers as a service that in return allows you to create new experiences to developers such as branching that were impossible before in the monolith. Our architecture, where posters doesn't support branching, but post is running on ion does. When we started the company, we really thought about just open source of a.

But as you start building IT, you start to to stumble upon things and discover things, and you as you go to the next level of debt and then you realize how how much the world changed around developer experience specifically. And the way we are we're building applications today is in fact, very different from you know five, seven years ago. That's where server lous and branching are actually much bigger than they may sound.

The there is a number of surveyors developer platform that now mean fits into like a glove. And i'm speaking about platforms like A W S lada versie netlist y cloud flared workers. You have to be server less to be part of that ecosystem. And since every application needs a database, then it's it's very natural to consume survey less database out of those platforms.

The other thing that we observe is since everybody runs SaaS products now, like when you think about a new APP, usually this APP has a back end and back and is delivered to you as a service everybodies running cid, which stands for a continuous and integration, continuous delivery. That workflow is relatively new. IT was introduced.

I don't node IT was introduced more than a decade ago, but IT really became popular with the rise of of good lab. You have actions. And now next generation platforms ourselves specifically are embracing that workflow.

In that workflow, it's the pieces the legal breaks that at the developer puts together need to support instance creation of of sand blocks environments. That is what allows you to be so much more fluid. You can spin up a sandbox environment, send IT to a friend of yours, get commons to your colleague, get some commons.

And then as a part of the workflow, and that workflow is changing how we do things. The observation that we made is that databases do not fit into that workflow. And this means that we either go to create a new database, but that's a lot of work, which is did in a single store.

And I know this is a ten year trip or with the neon texture, we can deliver that branching functionality that plugs into C I, C, D in poverty and post gress in is is on the right side of history. That was a revelation that we made, and that is one of those things that you can do if you separate storage and computer and you control storage and you on this in the cloud. So just like lego bricks, the whole thing comes .

together very cool. You mentioned the hand in glove fit with developer front and developer platforms like for sell that you should drive for listeners. This podcast will recognize that G T V, A proud western resell as well.

And we've had gar mo on the pod. And obviously, there's there's pretty amazing action on the vers l platform and a travel manner, developer usage and adoption. We know that you'll you will experience the same.

Want to just ask, we've mention you mention the database markets one hundred billion and size. There's a lot of oceans and currents within IT. As you look forward, what you hope non becomes like look into your Crystal ball for us and tell us a little about what you want to build with the on three plus years out.

Well, the thing that really most excite me is to provide the fabric, the rounds internet. I think that's only possible if a that fabric is open source, is open force because at the end of the day, developers build ops and you'd put IT on a platform. And if you want to create a massive ubiquity platform, that should be an open source plata at the infrastructure level.

And infrastructure is special in this regard. And the open source is Better than not. The second thing is, the end of the day, internet is helps.

Internet websites and internet is ops. And who is building those ops? Those are developers.

I think the the stuff that excites me very much because i'm a developer myself, is to giving the developers the best possible user experience, which is called developers experience and delight in building apps and interfacing. The database database are treasurer of hard problems. You know, we can talk about for a long time.

We can talk about storage and curry optimization and big trees and then column stores and and the list of those hard technical components that go into the database, they don't really end. But to the end developer, IT doesn't matter as much. But I think what does not matter to the end developer is how easy is to consume that technology and how reliable IT is when you put this up into production. Does that help me day today? And serving that category of users is a super exciting thing for me personally.

It's super exciting for us as well. We can't wait to see where ion goes, but before we let you go, we're onna put in the hot seat and ask some speed round questions to say the first thing that comes to mind, make you do what book or article to recommend to other founders. I'm not reading .

empted up from slotman. I think there is a lot of goodness there.

to be honest. That's a frequently recommended book on the shell.

What advice would you give to a Young .

that that's gonna a controversial, don't do A P, H D. I know so many P, H, D, and they will disagree with me. And then I carve out as like, it's Young niki, it's not you like bhd. Probably we've been at what is is a great church for you, but but for me delayed my life by five years. So I wonder A P, H D again.

Okay, maybe not a no more P, H D. School work, but you are a fitness junkie, and we know that you pride yourself on a very low resting heart rate because we talk to about your heart rate after you got covered and IT wasn't a little bit you you were arched by that. So we know you keep yourself in great shape. What's the best fitness activity or class you like to do to kind of clear your head and stay baLanced?

I'm a big benefit ness. I think IT keeps you grounded and IT keeps your mood stable. Well, as you can see results of grinding.

And then, you know, you get rewards from that. To me, lately, IT IT has been barriers you should talk to, key to the boy by berries. I think he will tell you a lot more things.

This for me, it's to me it's is just a great workout, a different parts of my life. I I spent more time biking. I had a cross fit period in my life, and now I feel, I feel like i'm a little old to do cross fit. But I still take cross fit every time I travel because profits everywhere. So these are my poisonous.

and I like that is very much with poisoned, like cross fit and barriers you really live in on the edge in nokia. But listen, thank you so much, dan. I and in the rest of our team and G, T, V are super excited with the announcement today and can't wait to see where neon goes. We're really looking forward working with you in your team, and we know that the future is bright.

So thanks so much. Very excited to work with the ugly and and then .

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