Supabase set aside $1 million in stock for community members

Transcript

From the transcript Latent Space publishes with the episode.

1. 35:47

   So, so last year at Supabase Select, we announced that we were gonna do a crowdfunding round. It's something we've always wanted to do, and we should have done it much earlier on, but we just, you know, had so many other things going on. And basically then we spent the last year fighting with the lawyers who are saying, you know, for the number of people we wanna be involved, there is no mechanism to do it without people being accredited investors.

2. 36:12

   Until we asked them the question, "Well, what if they don't invest? What if we just give them the stock?" [laughs] And they were like, "Yeah, we'll look into it." And then they came back, and they were like, "Actually, there is a mechanism [chuckles] where if you really just wanna give the stock away, you can." And so now we've earmarked, like, um, a million dollars in Supabase stock that we're basically gonna give to a bunch of the community members.

3. 36:34

   The first community member we're, we're gonna stand up on stage and sort of announce is, is this guy, his name's Gary Austin in the Supabase Discord. And this guy's, like, a legend of the Supabase community Yeah He-- We looked into his stats, and Gary has answered, uh, 20,000, in the last six years, 20,000, uh, questions in the Supabase Discord. And the crazy thing is 13,000 of them he answered within the first hour of them being asked. Hmm. And he's not a Groq bot. Like- [laughs]... he's a real human. [laughs] Yeah. Have you met him? What, what does- Yeah.

4. 37:11

   We- What does he do? He's real. We, we have met him. He, he was basically, like, retired- Yeah... and just interested in Supabase. Gary Austin. Gary Austin. Or Gary Abbott? Yeah, Gary Abbott- Yeah... is his real name. Okay, this guy. Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. Okay. And, and he loved Supabase because he basically built his own som- sommelier, um, app 'cause he loves red wine. Mm-hmm. Um, and then was just getting a kick out of, you know, he's got the Supabase logo on his Christmas tree.

5. 37:36

   [laughs] And he's also, like- By the way, this is my favorite Supabase memes, like, just, like, you reminding me that, like- [laughs] Yeah... I'm about to run out of my Supabase. That's the announcement is we're basically, like, um, anyone who's a, a legend in the Supabase ecosystem we can now- Yeah... um- Is Discord still a strong... I mean, I, I got mixed feelings about Discord. It, it is, it is the best chat. You know, Slack sucks. But also it is not public, right? So all the work in there is- Yeah... not scalable. Yeah. Have you found anything to solve that?

6. 38:06

   There was some tools that we looked at, uh, in the early days. We, we decided not to do it because you still needed to police, like, what things you wanted to be public and, and what things you didn't. But the original debate that I remember we debated a lot was, okay, we wanna host the community. Do we do a Discord? Do we do a Slack community? Do we do a Reddit? And we tried a few different options, but we landed on this thing of, like, Discord users are gonna use Discord, Reddit users are gonna use Reddit, and we basically had to do all of the above. Just be where they are.

7. 38:38

   Yeah. And be where they are, yeah. That's the answer. Which there was a lot of work. [laughs] Yeah. And it worked out, right? I mean- But-... that was the right answer... but then there's a lot of, like, great tools that started popping up, right? Um, Orb- I don't think anyone has la- has, uh, s- stood the test of time, let's call it. No. Um, but yeah. There, there- But, but it helped... there are, there are tools that are Discord mirrored to public Q&A site. That is a thing that people do. Mm-hmm. I don't know if it's been successful for anyone. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, like, Common Room, um, helped a lot.

8. 39:06

   Actually, the only thing that we did was for ourselves. So basically anyone who had asked a legitimate question on any one of these, we then would basically scrape the question and the response into our own website. No, actually, we scraped it kind of into GitHub Discussions- Mm-hmm... and mirrored that onto our website. And so the content that was getting slurped up- Ah, used GitHub as a CMS. Yeah, we used it- Yeah... as a CMS.

9. 39:30

   Exactly. Yeah. It was a great strategy because everyone-- Ultimately, everyone was asking the same questions over and over again. So we were just- It is true... like, "Okay. Well, we'll surface it each time." Yeah.