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Lightcone · 3 min · Oct 30, 2026
Supabase wants to win startups on day one and scale with them
Paul Copplestone cites an estimate that 40% of AWS revenue comes from startups that began there and scaled.
In this episode
Full episode- 9:55AI makes a personal database useful to everyonePro pick 7 min
- 32:18Agent memory turns into a retrieval problemPro pick 6 min
- 19:55Supabase moved from dashboards to code as agents arrived3 min
- 23:31Supabase wants to win startups on day one and scale with them3 min
- 29:42Supabase makes errors actionable for coding agents3 min
- 17:53Supabase lets engineers choose their AI tools2 min
- 43:21Small SaaS teams can make fundraising optional2 min
- 45:25Supabase uses dogfooding and team capacity to adapt3 min
“something like 40 percent of aws's revenue comes from like startups that started on them and then scaled up”
Takeaways
- Copplestone cites a 40% AWS revenue estimate tied to startups that scaled there.
- Database migrations make it difficult to win customers later.
- Supabase aims to support customers from their first workload through growth.
About this segment
Paul Copplestone cites an estimate that 40% of AWS revenue comes from startups that began there and scaled. He wants Supabase to win customers early because database migrations are hard.
Paul Copplestone is cofounder and CEO of Supabase.
Garry Tan, Host · President & CEO, Y Combinator
Co-founded Posterous and Initialized Capital, an early Coinbase backer.
Harj Taggar, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator
Co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers and later Triplebyte.
Diana Hu, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator
CTO of Escher Reality; after Niantic bought it, ran AR for Pokémon GO.
Jared Friedman, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator
Co-founded Scribd, which YC funded in 2006; has advised 20+ YC unicorns.
From “Why Everyone Is About To Have Their Own Database”, Oct 30, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 23:35
early because i think i mean if you go even further back this is like heroku was the first where it's like hey like just start with like the best developer experience and then scale up but it is actually can be quite hard to like scale up with people and i think like you know heroku i don't think could quite bridge that gap um to how do you keep people on you like as the apps get bigger and and need to be more performant etc etc Like, historically, every company's had to figure that out. And I know you guys are looking that way, but you might not have to. Like, honestly, if the market for just owning, like, I know, call it zero to 10, whatever, like, keeps expanding at this rate, it's going to be huge.
- 24:14
Yeah, well, we won it all. So we might not have to, but we'll definitely do it. And like, kudos to Heroku. I think they popularized Postgres. But at the time, Postgres was pretty, it was still pretty, nascent and it's still got some scaling um limitations and so yeah we've had to wrap postgres and some tooling that will allow it to scale indefinitely but i mean i guess a very analogy for you guys is more like aws was able to actually like get people early and they can scale yeah and so do yeah like what are the lessons maybe like how do you think about making sure you can scale infinitely the lesson i think that they i heard a stat and was telling me i might get it wrong so fact check me but something like 40 percent of aws's revenue comes from like startups that started on them and then scaled up and like that's the category
- 25:08
that we want you know like we know that to convince people to migrate to from one database provider to another is near impossible and so we just want to be there on day one make sure that they have a great time and then make sure that they actually don't want to leave the same business model to strive i mean it's like basically the best business model on earth if you can get it but you get them on day one and yes i scale with like the fastest growing companies in the world infinitely and you just do that for a generation and you become a generational business that's pretty much it yeah it's hard for us because what does day one look like that's rapidly changing so in the past day one for me was always like yc customers and now day one is becoming like okay, everyone's a builder. What are they going to use? What are the modalities? How are they
- 25:55
going to choose their databases? These are tricky questions. YC's next batch is now taking