AI makes a personal database useful to everyone

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 9:59

   some of your own personal software recently yeah talk about what you've been cooking it's just grown yeah it's sort of like the end of one stuff but it's just grown out of um getting really addicted to open claw actually like maybe six months ago now embarrassed i said it i said like there was going to be no uis and it was all just going to be like chat through my open claw but turns out actually and i also was really determined not to use a database for a long time i just wanted everything to be in markdown um but yeah it turns out actually you hit a point where like a database is useful and you do need ui and so i've just been building that over the last couple of weeks in particular and so it's like um i mean i call it control tower but it's just like sort of every section of my life i know like i have like a ui to like triage all my email so i

2. 10:41

   don't need to read my inbox um finances tracking like spending health like both like tracks my weights and my workouts and everything is all in like one place but i like the magic of it is sometimes it's a mind-boggling thought actually is like i think about like the finance section of like my one app for myself is better i think is at least feature parity to mint or monarch or all of these things but in some ways actually better because you can start doing really personalized context like it can figure out what a transaction is by looking up in my the name in my g-brain to figure out who that person is oh like that you know that's like and and categorize it correctly and that was like a whole company like several startups just doing personal finance and now you just like build it for yourself and i don't need it to work for anyone else or like

3. 11:26

   have anyone else's opinion on it it's just like kind of like my thing is like it's kind of awesome we see a lot of that one like where it's finance and health uh basically the two like ones where you want your own data so we see a lot of people doing that and syncing on the devices to to a single database is kind of a magic skill then you can like prompt it to like build these correlations across it's the correlations that are really bad like again like if you just take the health example it's like yeah all of that there is in like my toothpaste database but then it also has access to my calendar so it knows things like it's like oh like your way i know your weight went up recently but like you were traveling so that's okay like you can just like get back on track um next week and it just has like this context that's really valuable

4. 12:09

   i also found that as i started to use the personal agents like i'm getting a little bit paranoid that i'm putting all of like all of the um like routines and everything and the crm is becoming like um boxed into one agent and so now i'm slowly extracting it out into one so that if i want to to attach different agents on top then i know that like i can use any any agent so the crm is another really critical one yeah that's why you guys are so valuable is like actually like it's like the it's sort of like the store record what's the the the database is actually the thing that's valuable like you don't you want to own your own database and then build all the applications or agents on top of it versus having that all in like someone else's database which is a totally wild idea. If you just think about the history of databases, it used to be the case that the world

5. 13:00

   had only a relatively small number of very large databases run by large companies. And I remember when Supabase got started, you kind of had this idea that it should be really easy for everyone to make a database. And it almost didn't make sense at the time why so many people would want to do that. Because unless you can write code, what can you do with a database? And there's just not that many people who can actually like write code and build a personal crm like that like it's just like too much work for most people pre-ai like another example actually like where super is really valuable for me is like the other section i have is just like a file upload it sounds very simple but like any file i can sort of get forward via email or just like dump it in this ui and then like my agent like figures out what that is and how it's relevant to my life and

6. 13:44

   like what to do with it um but that's all being stored on super base and so yeah in general it's just like super base is actually going to end up having like all of the like data about my life in a single place and like i'm i wouldn't yeah i would never have thought about wanting a personal database like a year ago because it wouldn't have made any sense but now i'd like that's actually like the most valuable thing yeah you have like an s3 compatible super base files thing and all my stuff is in that oh really nice yeah yeah it's default in gbrain great thank you do you think this is the future paul where like basically everyone in the world not every developer every person will have a super base database that has stuff about their life in it their health their finances their relationships yeah we'd love that i mean i i certainly think that it'll be the case

7. 14:33

   that everyone in the world with access to ai will become a builder of some sort like you can build anything you can customize it you want to make tweaks to some app some ui then you don't have to be beholden to to someone of course like we think of ourselves as an index company we when we came into yc we just focused on yc companies we wanted to win all yc customers and like now that was because we knew that we had to be there on day one when businesses were getting started the mission didn't change just the aperture has like increased significantly now as more builders come online we know that we need to service them which is actually a whole different problem to solve but kind of an exciting one significantly meaning like 10 million x yeah like so what we launch now a million databases every single week but i mean if you do some basic arithmetic let's

8. 15:29

   say with chat gpt i think they said they've got 1.2 billion weekly active users and let's say all of them want to launch something every month that's 1.2 billion databases a month and so that's like the scale that we're moving towards architectures that we need to have so that we can actually cater for for that scale which is something that has never had to happen before on the database database realm can you even do that with postgres you're going to have to build your own database.

9. 16:00

   Engine to scale to 1 billion new databases per week. I think, yeah. Well, if we could negotiate better with AWS, then maybe we could, but it turns out that everyone wants computers at the moment. And actually, I don't know if you need such a Ferrari for a lot of these workloads. We made an acquisition recently, Terso. They've got an architecture that's compatible with Postgres, and actually it's compatible with SQLite.

10. 16:30

    as well. I think SQLite's a phenomenal database. And so we'll provide this tier, which we call Supabase Spark, which is basically for these getting started workloads. The idea will be the same. You get started with the same experience. You can scale up to petabytes. So our taglines kind of prototype to petabytes. And we as a company need to make sure that we can provide for everyone. And if they do scale up and their business keeps growing, then we make sure that they have a great time yeah that's something i was curious about how you think um about this