Why Everyone Is About To Have Their Own Database

So this is a really big shift. What have you guys actually done to facilitate or encourage this shift from, you know, obviously software engineers are going to keep choosing Superbase. But how do you get the agents to come over in the first place? yeah we largely have seen like three chapters in superbase we started as a dashboard company then we went to an api company and now we're very much a code first company so we try to have the modalities that the agents really want to build with which is code first they really want to use clis most of the time the other thing is just being chosen as a default uh in the llms which i think we were a huge beneficiary of the timing of which we started to become a default choice for databases. How much do you think being open source played a role in it too? Because the agents love open source things. You know, it's hard to know the counterfactual, but I think it was critical. I mean, everything that we do is open source and it seems to have been a huge benefit to us. And we do it in a very open source-y way. Like we try to support existing tools. It's not just super based tools we we support like postgres is a very um famous tool for the postgres

ecosystem and we help to maintain that so we kind of got sprawl across many communities i would guess that the agents actually really like And source, because when something goes wrong, it can just look at the source. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I noticed the agents really like feeling powerful, and they love data. And there's nothing more frustrating than hitting a brick wall, and then you don't know what's going on, and you can't fix it. I think it's going to be increasingly important as well, because now with, you know, security being so important, I think a lot of the, say, enterprises are going to want to inspect the source code to know that it's secure. And if you've got closed source code, then you probably won't want to adopt them as a vendor.

Is developer even still sort of the core user that you're going after? Or how do you think about it now in 2026? yeah i think that the world where we're moving and at least what we're seeing this year is like kind of builders builders are coming online and it's like a crazy amount of people coming online the crazy thing about this year is usually when you're like our top of funnel our signups are accelerating and usually when this happens you see a lot of the other numbers start to decline activation conversion but actually this year all of them are kind of going up into the right which is a bit insane just because the models are getting so good at building and we're starting to see people who traditionally wouldn't have a software engineering background able to come in and build things that's the distinction is like builder as in they might not be actually software engineers they might just be someone who needs to build a thing and they're just you know popping open cloud code and then it turns out files only get you so far yeah and in some ways like this category of people have all these pent-up ideas that they could never convince a software engineer to like help them build and now they don't have to convince anyone they've got all these ideas

that they're churning out software engineers still make up a huge portion but the rate of the growth of the builder segment is is pretty pretty big also like i don't know where the ceiling is on this one like i i remember our early investors were saying ah plg product like growth it's going to tap out at this revenue and you'll have to start moving into this segment of the market and there just appears to be no ceiling so far and i i can't see where it stops i mean that was basically true like two years ago or one year ago but definitely not true this year yeah i was just talking to someone actually this last weekend he fits the builder category it's like a fintech founder just exited his company of like over a billion dollars and um he's always been sort of product adjacent like studying math that like as an undergrad and sort of like kind of could pull together some ruby scripts but like always need an engineer to like build the software and now it's side projects he's just building his own stuff and he has all the knowledge from how to build a fintech company so he can actually build pretty sophisticated just like for his own personal finances like balance sheets and tracking software and knows how to

like integrate in with banks and he's writing all the integrations from scratch and it's just like the kind of software that would never have been built um even two years ago these are the perfect type of builder as well because like developers like me i have very like developer focused ideas and things that i want to build but then you've got all these domain experts and they know exactly the niches of oh this is an unsolved problem in my niche and so they're actually able now to like dig right into those niches without having to convince someone else to join them i think you guys were talking about this when you and nyc like the profile shifting even from from who you're bringing into the cohort i think that if you look at the sort of era of what 2022 2025 there's sort of this real shift thinking like, well, AI is coming and suddenly having software engineering as a core, you need a technical co-founder no matter what.

That was like a mega idea that, you know, really. came to the fore at YC during that time period. It was always sort of true, but like sort of doubled down on that. And then really in the last year, we sort of said, actually, yeah, builders, like we're starting to see people who are able to like, I mean, the much harder thing to do is to know what to build. You know, being able to build is something that anyone can sort of have on tap now. And that's actually a really cool thing. Like, can you imagine all the things that never would have built exactly for what you said it's like oh we know that people would buy this we know that there's a problem here but at the margins those people couldn't convince an engineer to work on it do you have some examples fall of like apps that people have built on super base maybe just for themselves that are the kinds of things that would have never been built before well one kind of cool example was at our conference we had the conference here and afterwards this guy from brazil came up to me and he's built an entire taxi app from his phone and it's um kind of like a little mini uber for his local market and i just thought he's a taxi driver himself i don't actually know why he built it but the fact that he could build

it and he came up extremely grateful and that he could do this and also like with the type of energy he's he was like 50 years old or something like that but he had the energy of a like teenager building suddenly which i think is kind of cool because now it's kind of getting to that stage where i i think it's a little bit there's so much uncertainty around like what is the future of work going to look like but in this category of builders there's that excitement of the future and that's really what i love about super bass it's like something that people can come in and those who are uncertain now are discovering this skill set and these opportunities where previously they were just blue-collar workers these type of profile hard you've been building

actually is like the classic sort of software company you start with you know maybe early stage startups like in a yc batch and then you sort of have one eye towards the enterprise and i feel like especially if you're a database company like pre-ai the conventional wisdom as

well like you want to be oracle so you got to get to the enterprise as quickly as you can because that's where all the money is and so you start building out like enterprise features you sort of leaning into sqlite is sort of going the opposite direction like how do you how do you think about it like are you sort of looking both ways yeah yeah we're having to do both which is like incredibly difficult um basically we've got two products that cater on the two ends so multigressor scale up to petabytes and then terso scale down to like these prototyping and sqlite type workloads so trying to do this uh at the rate of growth with like having to employee more people it's just even with ai is becoming or has been a real challenge but a fun

apps for the first time and it was like quite nice to switch to like a nice restful api that's

trying to deal with these shifts always happen with like inflection points right so at that point there were two things that happened in the market somehow mongodb convinced everyone that no sequel was supposed to be like an amazing uh way to store your data and um the second was mobile and so you know we're fortunate that we had a couple of these waves as well and now we're right in the thick of it and yeah i mean this is what i was asking about sort of like how you think about the enterprise

applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. It's kind of a different customer segment. Like initially when you started, there was not an individual market

for databases like the idea of a database company being a direct to consumer business would have just like sounded like a syntax error yes um but now you actually have two segments you have the like early stage companies that that has this powerful strike business model but you're also like selling directly to consumers or to their agents perhaps yes yes yes and those use cases presumably will not scale the way startups will but they might just like continue to use you for for the rest of their lives because you're powering the app that runs their personal finance software or your taxi cab company or something like that.

And as their lives grow and they accumulate information, that is basically an index of our own growth. So they just store more. People are collecting more data. This kind of prosumer market is essentially a good growth factor for us. I guess, do you think about the personal agent world through that perspective then? If coding agents want super based, very clear like do you think about the next phase as being assuming we all have personal databases like do you need to do anything to make sure that it's easy for personal agents to talk to you is that any different or is it basically the same thing yeah i'm very bullish now on personal agents after a week of my ea being away and me learning exactly what they can do and now i'm just kind of obsessed with the idea of building for personal agents and it's true that i i said to our company like we're code first um like we're building for humans that are doing code first but actually we're doing it for agents those humans pretty soon won't actually be interacting so like the way i've been building is i'm using dots thoughts.

I just sit on a phone call with it all the time and I'm chatting to it and saying, oh, can you make these changes? And my kind of heuristic to make sure I'm building or dogfooding correctly is that I just don't look at the code and I don't allow myself ever to check the architecture, except when I want to check that it's actually building things correctly. But when I'm making these changes, I just want to talk to it and see what it can change. One of us. Yeah. it's crazy as well like it's doing some phenomenal stuff that i just it feels like something out of a sci-fi movie from like two years ago but now like i'm having so many of these moments that i'm just mind-blowing if you had shown someone this six months ago they would have just thought it was impossible yeah you i was at um your super base select conference a couple of weeks ago which is awesome conference by the way and i had this like kind of crazy thought i was sitting there and you're talking about all these awesome new features that super base was putting out and i was like you know if i was building an app on super base maybe i wouldn't even care to understand all these awesome features myself i want to like send my agent to super base

select to like listen to all the awesome new features and figure out how to integrate them into my code base oh that's wild a truly virtual conference we should do that a conference just for agents yeah a conference or agents they all turn up live live they can like talk to each other exchange tips on like live wow you can bridge it you can sort of airdrop and like the markdown files for everyone but you have to be there in like the the audience to get it we'll call it the artifactory oh man i quite like that we talked about before this like there's just a bunch of

building and build suites around that okay when you built gbrain you built it on top of superbase oh yeah talk about like how did you decide to build it on top of superbase well how was it

and you can improve your software because you're like wrapping this framework around it like do you think that in the future builders will have to actually know about these type of things maybe not i mean honestly i feel like we're so early that you know i'm just messing around and And, you know, I like doing it in open source and someone else, you know, I hope someone looks at that and says, like, oh, I can apply that, you know, like we're I think we're literally coming up with the primitives on how to use this stuff right now.

Yeah. I mean, I remember earlier in the year, you know, reading about Steve Yeggi's software factories and things like that, and then not being able to totally figure it out. And it's like, oh, no, no, I feel like now I've cobbled together something that works for me, at least. yeah yeah when we had boris tourney here um his vision of the future of coding was more like you just talk to claude like a friend and you don't have to know about evals and all this all this stuff and like claude just like figures out how to build the thing that you have in your mind i've got this domain name open usd.dev and it's because there's actually a file format called open usd and i collect domain names and then suddenly stripe and visa and everyone announced open USD and I was like oh I better put this domain to use now but I never had time to use it I was chatting to the dot, and it's developed this developer site with the ecosystem and everything. I was just chatting to it on my computer, and then as I was winding down my day, I called it on my phone as I'm getting to bed, which sounds sus, but I promise I'm just coding with it.

and i was like saying i don't like the information architecture of how like the ecosystem links to the the use cases can you make some suggestions and it did and i said okay yeah implement them and then 20 seconds later it said oh yeah okay i've done it do you want to refresh and i refreshed the site and it was really well written and everything was linking together and it's hooked up the seo type stuff and so i haven't done all the classic stuff that i'd have to do traditionally I've just been chatting to it, and it really felt like one of those moments where I sort of saw a glimpse of the future.

I mean, you can do that because you know what you want to build. That's the thing, yeah. So, like, I obviously have a background in engineering, so I kind of know how to prompt it. But I'm trying to not say anything. I'm trying not to, like, point it towards GitHub or anything like that. And I'm trying to code like a normie or someone will do next year so that I know it's basically so I can dog food Superbase and know that, oh, is it going to have a good time with Superbase in one year's time? Yeah, it's funny for Boris to say like, oh, I just wanted to do it automatically. And like certainly once it's into distribution, like literally the model has it, you know, in its weights, it can do it. But until then, it needs like some markdown.

so you just like a lit like not even a lot of prompting like very small amounts of prompting it can just do it I we're entering this very strange moment in society I think we're like it sounds like RSI really is here and it's like going from like the 20% to 80% moment of like AI research is just happening in sort of these inside these loops inside you know cloud code or codex or wherever it is and then simultaneous to that like society doesn't really have enough people like you paul who like know what to build and how to ask it and so it's like unstoppable force meets immovable object right now like the capabilities of the models are like going parabolic and then the number of people who know how to actually have an impact on society with it is like more or less constant yeah and want to be kind of excited by it i think that's the other thing i think a lot of people are getting paranoid but i'm genuinely excited about what the future could be for a lot of people a lot of my previous startups were focused on like blue-collar workers and like people who i was wrapping tech around a lot of people who just had to work a lot of their life you know and i the thing that i really love about super bass is that it's um like i see a lot of

entrepreneurship um because of the platform and so i can see this future where actually there is going to be so much more entrepreneurship and it's actually quite a fulfilling lifestyle for a lot of people so i'm pretty pumped about 2027 actually as long as we can keep this cadence up