Supabase is a backend-as-a-service platform built around PostgreSQL, with a focus on developer experience and open source.

"I didn't build the startup for investors. I just built what I thought would be the best product for developers," explains Paul Copplestone, founder and CEO of Supabase.

Paul describes the company's core mission in straightforward terms: "The simple way to explain it is a backend as a service. Our tagline is 'build in a weekend, scale to millions.' So we aim to provide developers especially with all the tools that they need to build the infrastructure centered around PostgreSQL."

The company is often known as an open-source Firebase alternative, but their commitment to open source runs deep. Paul emphasizes, "Everything we do is open source, and we've got a really fantastic community around our open source and we try to support them as much as they support us."

Timestamp: [00:00-01:19]

Paul's entrepreneurial journey began far from Silicon Valley, shaped by his international background and early fascination with databases.

"You can probably tell from my accent that I'm not from the US. I'm from New Zealand, and I grew up there. New Zealand is not a really tech-heavy country. There's a few breakouts — I think Xero is the most famous."

Growing up with an entrepreneurial father influenced Paul's mindset: "To be honest, I didn't even really know the concept of a startup when I was growing up... for a long time I just thought, 'I'll build things.' My father was an entrepreneur and is an entrepreneur, so it's just what I knew."

Paul's technical journey began as a contractor, with his first professional job centered around databases. "My very first professional job actually was building with databases. It was very database-centric, and I could see how difficult they were to use, but I kind of was fascinated by them."

Interestingly, Paul's current venture isn't his first attempt at a database startup. "I remember one of the first things I did, probably 15 years ago now, was I wanted to build a startup around databases. I literally went and found a millionaire in New Zealand and I pitched him this idea of building a database startup." Looking back at that old email, Paul realized, "That's basically what we're building right now with Supabase, which is kind of cool. I would have failed miserably — it would have been the wrong time."

Timestamp: [01:19-03:18]

Paul's journey to Supabase included valuable lessons from two previous startups in Southeast Asia, where he learned what not to do and developed the skills that would later become crucial.

"This is my third tech startup. My first one was a marketplace, very similar to I think Thumbtack in the US. We took that model and we implemented it in three countries in Southeast Asia."

As CTO of that first venture, Paul and his co-founder (who had experience with Groupon China) built and scaled the business in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Despite raising money, they faced market challenges. "It just wasn't the right market, and also super hard to build a three-sided marketplace."

Paul's biggest lesson from this experience was about avoiding what he calls "playing startup" — a common first-time founder trap:

"The really classic what you should not do, which is done by almost everyone in their first one, is kind of 'playing startup.' You'll see this very often when you go to a startup meetup. One of the first things people ask is 'How many people in your team?' or 'How many do you employ?' This is like a classic trap. You say it almost with pride."

He elaborates on their mistakes: "What we did was we took on the funding, we put the posters up, we hired a lot of people, 'blitz scaling' or whatever, but we didn't really have product-market fit. And there's no point blitz scaling until you've actually got a really good product that people want to pay for."

This experience directly informed how Paul approached hiring at Supabase: "We in the early days really only hired when we had a hair-on-fire problem... It always felt like we're a little bit behind on hiring, but that's good because it keeps the density, the velocity up. When we hired someone, they just had a ton of work to do."

Timestamp: [03:18-05:14]

Paul's journey from being a self-described "shy Kiwi" to successfully fundraising for multiple startups illustrates the cultural adjustment many international founders face when entering the global startup ecosystem.

"I remember the first meetings that I had with VCs and I was a shy Kiwi where I didn't even want to promote anything that I had done in the past. It's very different, the Kiwi mentality to the US mentality."

Despite his natural reluctance to self-promote, Paul quickly adapted: "I had that beat out of me very quickly." He credits his first co-founder with teaching him valuable fundraising skills, noting that this ability to raise money easily contributed to their "playing startup" mentality.

After his first venture, Paul moved on to his second startup in Singapore, building a business similar to "Managed by Q" focused on office management services. This venture found more success: "It's still going and it's doing very well actually." Importantly, many of the technical foundations for what would become Supabase were laid during this period: "Most of the tech that we use now at Supabase was what I implemented in my second startup."

When 2020 arrived, Paul was ready for his next venture and reached out to his current co-founder: "When 2020 came along, I reached out to my co-founder Ant and said 'Hey, this is what I'm going to build, do you want to do it?' And he said 'Yes, luckily.' And here we are five years later."

Timestamp: [05:14-06:46]

Between his first and second ventures, Paul helped launch numerous startups across various industries, developing a philosophy of shipping quickly that would become central to Supabase's value proposition.

"Between the first and the second business, I think I helped maybe five or ten people launch their businesses. There was not much tech talent, so what I became very good at was essentially this kind of 'build in a weekend' type idea."

This consulting experience taught Paul to focus on high-leverage tools and finishers, not just starters:

"I wanted to find the highest leverage tools that we could through open source. A lot of the time developers think 'I'm going to build this myself.' The temptation is always just to build, but not to get to the finish line. And I was like that at the start as well, and at some point what clicked in my brain was: it doesn't really matter what you start, it matters what you finish."

This philosophy of finishing and shipping quickly transcended industries. "I helped Web3 companies launch during that time... was trying to launch an AR/VR startup during that time, very deep tech as well. I helped several companies launch because I went through an accelerator."

The through-line of all these experiences was developing expertise in rapid time-to-market: "I just became very good at finding how to get people to market very fast."

Timestamp: [06:46-08:16]

Paul's decision to build Supabase on PostgreSQL was informed by careful observation of industry trends, while the company's unique approach to data portability reflects their core competitive philosophy.

"The idea of PostgreSQL was pretty obvious to me because I consume Hacker News so much. Kind of before my finger on the pulse is just going through Show Hacker News, reading Hacker News."

In 2019, PostgreSQL wasn't yet the dominant database it is today, but Paul could see its trajectory. "It wasn't at the time, 2019, the world's most popular database. Now it is, and I could see the trajectory that it was on."

The open nature of PostgreSQL aligned perfectly with Supabase's business model:

"It has some very nice characteristics if you want to build a business around it. It's open source, is not owned by any particular commercial entity. In fact, it cannot be owned by any particular commercial entity. So that was good for us because then we could build an offering and we'd compete on experience, not on license or anything like that."

What truly sets Supabase apart is their commitment to data portability, which has been a core principle since day one:

"The thing that makes us unique is exactly that. We literally compete inside our principles. We've had them since day one, how we build our platform. One of them is portability. We think that if our platform is not the best, then you should be able to take your data and take it to any other PostgreSQL provider."

This approach confounds some observers who question the business model: "A lot of people think that's nuts. Like, 'Oh, where's your moat? You can just download and reinstall.' But I think that's fantastic. The reason people choose us is because we're competing all the time for their love, essentially."

To Paul, this expresses confidence in their product, so much so that "we've literally helped people migrate away when we were not satisfying what they needed."

Timestamp: [08:16-09:53]

• Supabase positions itself as a "backend as a service" with the tagline "build in a weekend, scale to millions," offering developer tools centered around PostgreSQL
• The company is fully committed to open source, with a focus on building and supporting its community
• Paul Copplestone's journey to Supabase included two previous startups in Southeast Asia, where he learned valuable lessons about avoiding "playing startup" without product-market fit
• At Supabase, Paul implemented a disciplined approach to hiring, only bringing on new team members for "hair-on-fire" problems rather than hiring for show
• Between ventures, Paul developed expertise in helping founders launch quickly across various industries, cementing his philosophy that "it doesn't matter what you start, it matters what you finish"
• The choice of PostgreSQL as Supabase's foundation was strategic, based on observing its growing popularity and open nature that couldn't be controlled by any single commercial entity
• One of Supabase's core differentiators is its commitment to data portability, allowing customers to easily take their data elsewhere if needed - a principle some find counterintuitive but that Paul believes creates the right competitive dynamic

Timestamp: [00:00-09:53]

Companies:

• Supabase - Paul's current company, an open-source backend-as-a-service built on PostgreSQL
• Firebase - Google's product that Supabase is often positioned as an open-source alternative to
• Xero - Mentioned as New Zealand's most famous tech company
• Thumbtack - US marketplace similar to Paul's first startup in Southeast Asia
• Groupon China - Experience of Paul's first co-founder
• Managed by Q - US company similar to Paul's second startup in Singapore

People:

• Paul Copplestone - Founder and CEO of Supabase, previously launched two startups in Southeast Asia
• Ant - Paul's co-founder at Supabase
• Arun Matthew - Podcast co-host
• Gonzalo Moore - Podcast co-host

Concepts:

• Backend as a service - The category Supabase operates in, providing infrastructure tools for developers
• "Playing startup" - Paul's term for the mistake of focusing on appearances (team size, funding) without product-market fit
• Blitz scaling - Scaling rapidly, which Paul warns against doing before achieving product-market fit
• "Build in a weekend" - Core philosophy at Supabase focused on developer velocity and rapid time-to-market
• Data portability - Core Supabase principle allowing customers to easily move their data elsewhere

Timestamp: [00:00-09:53]

Supabase made a bold decision to build on PostgreSQL rather than creating their own database engine - a move that went against conventional startup wisdom but aligned with their developer-first mindset.

"The first thing is I didn't build the startup for investors, you know. So I just built what I thought would be the best product for developers, and I truly thought PostgreSQL is the tool."

Paul explains that PostgreSQL's extensibility was key to their vision. Rather than just offering a database, Supabase provides a complete backend ecosystem: "We don't just offer PostgreSQL. We offer these autogenerated data APIs, we've got a storage service, an auth service."

This suite of services addresses the real needs developers face when building applications quickly: "If you want to launch a business very fast, over a weekend — 'building a weekend' — it turns out you don't just need a database, you need a bunch of tools. Imagine you're going to build Instagram. You want to log your users in, you want to store those images and files, and you can't store them inside the database, and maybe you want an API to access the database securely."

While competitors focused on building more scalable PostgreSQL offerings, Supabase focused on the developer experience: "That's not what the developer needs when they're choosing a database. What they need to do is get to market very fast, and they don't want to think about whether it's super scalable. They just want to think whether it's super easy to use."

Timestamp: [10:01-11:55]

Supabase's product roadmap has been largely shaped by its developer community, with key features emerging directly from user feedback and public discussions.

"We've been pretty fortunate in that our roadmap's almost been defined for us by our community."

The company's first significant exposure came unexpectedly in May 2020 when someone else posted about Supabase on Hacker News. While they received positive feedback on their positioning as an "open source Firebase alternative," users immediately identified what was missing:

"What we had was a database and a data API, but no auth, and they said 'This is great, but we can't use it until we've got auth.'"

This feedback defined their focus during Y Combinator. Paul recalls weekly meetings with YC partner Michael Seibel, who eventually challenged them:

"Paul, for like four weeks you've been telling me you're going to build auth. When the f*** are you going to ship auth?"

The team delivered auth just three weeks before demo day and returned to Hacker News to announce it. The community response was enthusiastic:

"It went to the top of Hacker News again, and people like the fact that you listen to what they asked for and you deliver on exactly what they asked for."

This responsive approach to development became central to Supabase's process: "That's been the cadence. Basically, each time we launch something, we see what they ask for, the feedback, and then we've almost got that three-month roadmap ahead of us."

They formalized this cadence with "launch weeks," which Paul notes "started with us coming out of YC and not having the demo day looming in front of us. So we wanted to recreate that feeling."

Timestamp: [11:55-14:53]

Supabase's product philosophy centers on creating tools that work seamlessly together while remaining independently useful, all built around PostgreSQL as their foundation.

"Generally we just see things through a PostgreSQL lens — that's I guess the overarching theme. We do a lot of principles around our product. We try to stick to existing standards, we try to make sure everything's portable, composable, and integrated."

Paul explains that this approach involves two seemingly contradictory principles working in harmony:

"One is that everything feels integrated. For example, when you come into Supabase, it should feel like it's just a single API and everything fits together. But actually we have, say, five different products — auth and storage and database — and you can use each one of them as a standalone service, and very often people do."

This composability, which Paul compares to Lego, allows users to pick and choose components: "They might just use auth and the database, or they might just use the database with existing providers. It could be Drizzle or Clerk or Zod or anything else."

While designing systems this way is challenging, maintaining this approach from day one has proven valuable, particularly with the rise of AI builders:

"These AI builders came along — the Copilots, the Devin AI's, the Vercel v0's, Cursor's, and everything — and what we found was actually they really enjoy this single API feel of the platform. The reason why is because as soon as you have to stitch together many tools, then it becomes more difficult for the LLM to actually figure out the context between, say, three different platforms."

This architecture serves both AI builders, who benefit from the integrated experience, and enterprise customers, who often start with just PostgreSQL and gradually adopt more services: "What we're finding is this almost divide where both have proven equally important. And even more so, we're seeing attach rates for the AI builders for different products like real-time that we had never seen for just developers building on our platform."

Timestamp: [14:53-17:46]

Behind Supabase's growth is a deliberate long-term vision paired with agile adaptability to emerging technology waves, guided by a foundational question about the future of databases.

When asked about the balance between strategic decisions and fortunate timing, Paul reveals the central question driving their efforts:

"The deliberate thing is... I said this to you guys right, the question we always wanted to answer was: if you want to build the next Oracle, how do you go about it? So that's the deliberate thinking in our brain. Like, we need to build towards that vision."

This long-term vision provides direction while allowing for short-term flexibility: "Then you can scope it right down to what's the next three months, what's the next three months, what's the next three months."

Supabase has encountered various technology waves during its growth, from Web3 and NFTs to the current AI surge. Paul explains their approach to these opportunities:

"Generally we just see them happening, and they've got some direct three-month requests. It's not like you give up on this long-term vision of building the next Oracle, it's just that you need to solve some decisions in the next three months that won't conflict with that long-term goal."

This pragmatic approach allows them to adapt their roadmap without losing sight of their ultimate objective: "It's very easy. They'll ask us 'MCP is the one at the moment' — that means that people can spin up more databases. Is that conflicting with the Oracle goal? No, it just might displace some of our roadmap. It will take us a bit longer because we have to build this new thing."

More challenging strategic questions involve positioning and branding: "If we move completely towards this world where people are building and they might not even know what a database is... will our brand become just for non-developers? Can we actually reach the enterprise? These are much more deliberate things we need to think strategically about — the product, the packaging, how to position ourselves."

Timestamp: [17:46-19:58]

• Supabase deliberately chose to build on PostgreSQL to create the best developer experience rather than to please investors, focusing on ease of use over building a proprietary engine
• Beyond just a database, Supabase offers a complete suite of backend services (auth, storage, APIs) to enable developers to build applications quickly
• The company's roadmap has been largely defined by community feedback, with their first major feature (auth) being developed in direct response to user requests
• "Launch weeks" became Supabase's formalized approach to shipping new features, inspired by the cadence and accountability of Y Combinator's demo days
• Supabase's product philosophy embraces a dual approach of integration and composability — everything works together seamlessly while each component can be used independently
• This architecture has proven particularly valuable for AI builders who benefit from the single API experience that simplifies context for LLMs
• The company maintains a long-term vision ("building the next Oracle") while adapting to technology waves and market opportunities in three-month increments
• Strategic challenges include maintaining a brand identity that appeals to both sophisticated enterprise customers and newer developers who might not even understand database fundamentals

Timestamp: [10:01-19:58]

Companies and Products:

• Oracle - Referenced as Supabase's long-term aspiration ("building the next Oracle")
• Y Combinator (YC) - Startup accelerator that Supabase participated in
• Drizzle - Mentioned as a third-party tool that can be integrated with Supabase
• Clerk - Authentication service that can be used alongside Supabase
• Zod - Validation library that can be integrated with Supabase
• GitHub Copilot - AI coding assistant mentioned as benefiting from Supabase's integrated API
• Devin AI - AI developer assistant mentioned as part of the AI builder wave
• Vercel v0 - AI coding tool that works well with Supabase's architecture
• Cursor - AI-powered code editor mentioned as part of the new wave of AI builders

People:

• Michael Seibel - Y Combinator partner described as the "godfounder" who pushed Supabase to ship auth

Concepts:

• "Build in a weekend" - Supabase philosophy focused on enabling rapid development
• Launch weeks - Supabase's formalized approach to shipping batches of features every three months
• MCP (Multi-Cloud Platform) - Current feature request that allows users to spin up multiple databases
• AI builders - New category of AI-powered development tools that benefit from Supabase's integrated API
• Composability - Core product principle allowing Supabase components to be used independently
• "Single API feel" - The integrated experience that makes Supabase particularly valuable for AI tools
• Web3/NFT wave - Previous technology trend that Supabase navigated before the current AI wave

Timestamp: [10:01-19:58]

Supabase's global team structure was shaped by both necessity and design, evolving from COVID-era beginnings into a deliberately distributed organization with unique operating principles.

"Now we're in Supabase, it's over 100 people, we're in 30 different countries, so very split. There are no... there's no HQ. We have offices, but they're just WeWorks, and only if people want to use them."

Paul and his co-founder Ant initially met in Singapore before quickly getting accepted into Y Combinator. While they had planned to relocate to San Francisco, the COVID pandemic forced them to build the company remotely from the start:

"We got into YC almost immediately in the first couple of months, so the plan was to move of course through YC to move to SF, but that's when COVID hit. We had to build... it was the first fully remote YC batch. So we ended up building it directly from Singapore under complete lockdown."

Their early hiring strategy leveraged existing relationships and the open-source community:

"A lot of the people we recruited at the time were ex-employees from our previous startups or companies that we knew. The next phase of employees were more the open-source maintainers who really knew the product... they were contributing a lot to the product itself."

This approach proved advantageous, as Paul notes: "The open-source community is almost like, you know, they're very accustomed to doing an async type environment. You do pull requests, you detail out your GitHub issues, and you do everything fully remotely. Not only that, they're used to working for free, so for us to offer them payment to do this job, they're very excited to do it."

Timestamp: [20:05-22:38]

Supabase has embraced a radically asynchronous approach to communication, with minimal meetings and a strong emphasis on written documentation that has become central to their company identity.

"We use generally Slack for synchronous comms, we use Google Meet for synchronous calendar invites, meetings... There's very few. We have one meeting per team per week, and that's it."

This minimal meeting policy has proven challenging for some new hires:

"That was very strange for a lot of people joining actually. We had a lot of people join at the start and they said that would be impossible... Because at the time during COVID, everyone had worked remotely. So we would ask people, 'Have you worked remotely before?' and they say, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've done it.' And then they'll get into Supabase and they're like, 'Oh, what I meant was like same time zone, right?' And what they didn't realize is you spend 95% of your time coding, and then like 30 minutes a week you see people, and that's it."

This approach has become a defining characteristic of the company:

"We had built up this written culture that really... we became very good at weeding out the people who just didn't like that type of culture. So the written culture is the most important thing of Supabase now."

Rather than dictating the roadmap, Paul focuses on hiring capable people and facilitating consensus: "I don't dictate too much the roadmap or anything. We hire very good people, a lot of ex-founders who just know what they're doing. Then it's really about getting alignment and consensus around what we might ship, how we might ship it."

Timestamp: [22:38-24:14]

Supabase relies on a structured Request for Comments (RFC) process to make decisions, emphasizing problem definition and multiple solutions to avoid personal attachment to ideas.

"We used Notion a lot at the start, and we do this thing called an RFC, which is very common in open source. It means Request for Comments."

The RFC process has evolved over time to address natural human biases:

"What I found, which is natural for humans, is that when you do this, generally you come up with a solution in your brain and you formulate a problem. So the RFC now is like: problem, who are the customers asking for it, and then three solutions."

Paul explains the psychological benefits of requiring multiple solutions:

"The three solutions are really good because generally you'll think of only the first one and you become very attached to that idea. And especially in an async environment, it could be a day or two before you receive any comments. So having to put three decouples the solution from your ego essentially, and allows you to think a little bit outside the box."

This process remains central to Supabase's decision-making:

"That's how we do it still to this day. If someone's going to make a big change, they create an RFC with a problem, customers, and three solutions. And then they put it out to the entire company where anyone can comment, and then at some point there'll be an approver, maybe me, and we approve it and they start building whenever they want."

Timestamp: [24:14-25:30]

Supabase maintains accountability through a deliberate practice of manually tracking key metrics in a weekly ritual that creates alignment and ownership across the distributed team.

"It's very tempting to automate that so that you just can see [your metrics] any time, but YC says, 'Ah, don't automate it. Just write it down every week, start a spreadsheet and manually input it.'"

This advice has become a lasting tradition at Supabase:

"Still to this day, every week on Slack, Ant starts a thread called 'Monday Metrics Madness,' and it's the same spreadsheet that we had since YC, now with a million metrics. And the teams have to go and update manually their metrics, whatever they've decided are their key metrics."

This thread serves multiple purposes beyond tracking numbers:

"Inside that thread, they essentially do a team standup, and you can follow all the replies. And that's how we keep alignment across the teams: 'Hey, we shipped this, this is what we're working on.' And then if anyone's got questions, they pop them off into the relevant team."

Paul explains the psychological rationale behind manual data entry:

"The rationale of manually inputting the metrics is that the team owns it or understands it more, that they've got to have the finger on the pulse. If it's automated, you're not going to look at it."

This approach creates deeper engagement with the numbers:

"The edge functions team should know the number of projects that were launched last week and what percentage of those launched started using edge functions. And they should have that number directly, and they do. They get really proud of like how many people are using their product. And when they see it going up, then they dig into why that was and what changes they made. And that's the behavior you want to drive."

Timestamp: [25:30-27:21]

Supabase has developed a unique approach to scaling their organization by hiring former founders who bring entrepreneurial experience and the ability to operate independently in a distributed environment.

The interviewers note that Supabase's approach is "a super unique way of building" that aligns with both their product and talent strategy: "Finding the best talent anywhere in the world to work together... to get former founders that are used to having independence and freedom to sort of join forces and be part of the organization."

Paul sees their organizational model as forward-thinking:

"To be honest, I think the system that we've built is the scalable solution that most companies need to find eventually. Like, you can't be across everything as a founder. I literally just cannot. So we're building this distributed organization that eventually a 2,000, 3,000 person company has to find their feet on."

Their strategy of hiring former founders provides unique advantages:

"We hire these ex-founders who have done that themselves, so they know. They probably don't want to manage, they're reluctant managers, but they know that they have to do it and they've done it before. So I feel like we've kind of gotten ahead a lot on what the next stages of the company are going to look like."

Timestamp: [27:21-28:49]

Supabase implemented a strategic approach to talent acquisition inspired by the "Moneyball" concept, looking beyond traditional tech hubs to find exceptional talent worldwide while maintaining cost efficiency.

"'Moneyball' of course is the movie where they had very little money, so they hired people in baseball with the best statistics but maybe were super cheap."

Paul applied this concept to tech hiring as a startup strategy:

"We didn't have a lot of money at the start, and so we're a startup and we're going to have to go up against the AWS's of the world. How can we compete? Well, open source was one of the ways that we did that, and the other really good way of doing that is just not looking only in SF and New York for your talent."

This global approach to hiring became a fundamental advantage:

"We hired from anywhere in the world, and not many companies were willing to do that. So our company being distributed across 30 countries is literally because we would scour the earth to find the right person for the job that we actually needed."

The company's hiring philosophy prioritized aptitude and work ethic over location:

"It didn't matter where you are, as long as you are willing to put your head down and do that job, we would hire you."

Paul notes that this approach continues to evolve: "Now our salaries are going up, so it actually also has a really nice effect," suggesting that their financial capacity has grown while maintaining the global talent strategy.

Timestamp: [28:49-29:58]

• Supabase has grown to over 100 employees distributed across 30 countries with no central headquarters, offering WeWork spaces only as optional resources
• The company's remote-first culture was established during COVID when they built during Y Combinator's first fully remote batch
• Early hiring leveraged ex-colleagues and open-source contributors who were already comfortable with asynchronous collaboration
• Supabase operates with minimal meetings, implementing just one meeting per team per week, which has required new hires to adapt to their written culture
• Decision-making follows a structured RFC (Request for Comments) process requiring problem definition, customer identification, and three potential solutions to reduce ego attachment
• Teams manually track metrics weekly in a tradition called "Monday Metrics Madness," which creates team ownership and deeper engagement with performance data
• The company strategically hires ex-founders who bring entrepreneurial experience and can operate independently in a distributed environment
• Their "Moneyball" hiring approach looks beyond traditional tech hubs like San Francisco and New York, allowing them to find exceptional talent worldwide while initially keeping costs manageable

Timestamp: [20:05-29:58]

Companies and Organizations:

• Supabase - The company founded by Paul Copplestone, now with over 100 employees across 30 countries
• Y Combinator (YC) - Startup accelerator that accepted Supabase, running its first fully remote batch during COVID
• WeWork - Provides optional office spaces for Supabase employees who want them, though Paul notes they're rarely used
• AWS - Mentioned as a larger competitor that Supabase needed to develop strategies to compete against

People:

• Ant - Paul's co-founder at Supabase who starts the weekly "Monday Metrics Madness" thread
• Arun - One of the interviewers, jokingly referenced as someone who "loves a good meeting"

Concepts:

• RFC (Request for Comments) - Structured decision-making process adapted from open source that Supabase uses for major decisions
• "Monday Metrics Madness" - Weekly ritual where teams manually update key metrics in a shared spreadsheet
• Moneyball - Strategy referenced from the baseball movie/book about finding undervalued talent, applied to Supabase's global hiring approach
• Written culture - Core aspect of Supabase's company identity emphasizing documentation over synchronous meetings
• Weekly active projects/databases - Mentioned as Supabase's key performance metric
• Edge functions - Specific Supabase product feature mentioned as an example of team-level metrics tracking

Timestamp: [20:05-29:58]

Supabase's global hiring strategy has evolved into a significant competitive advantage, protecting the company from location-based talent poaching while maintaining salary competitiveness.

"If we hire you in Peru, there's no way a Peruvian company will compete with Supabase salaries."

Paul explains how their distributed model creates natural talent retention:

"Over time generally you have attrition, maybe because your best people look at your company and they say, 'Oh, Supabase are good, let's take their people.' Well, now they're not willing to take our people because they're based all around the world."

This approach presents a stark contrast to location-concentrated hiring:

"Whereas if we had hired here in SF, then of course they could just skip over to, I don't know, OpenAI or something like that where they'll get paid really well."

Paul sees this global distribution as a strategic advantage that has "just worked out really well for us" as the company continues to grow.

Timestamp: [30:04-30:39]

Supabase maintains its distinctive culture through deliberate hiring practices focused on finding individuals who already align with their core values rather than trying to change people to fit a predetermined mold.

When asked about maintaining cultural consistency while scaling, Paul presents a contrarian view on culture building:

"I guess there's always two ways of thinking of that. You come up with a culture and then you develop people into your culture. I don't think that really works. I think you have to realize, be very deliberate about the type of culture you want, and then hire the people that fit that culture already."

He addresses potential misconceptions about this approach:

"I guess people think that's controversial because they think, 'Ah, then you've got no diversity,' which absolutely is not true. We've got extreme diversity, but the way of working is the thing that's important."

Paul identifies the specific cultural traits they seek:

"Just being very focused on work, intrinsically motivated, low ego - all of these characteristics. It doesn't matter which country you're from or anything like that, or which gender you are or anything. We just look for these characteristics within people, and if they don't fit that, that's the kind of final bar raiser, then we just don't hire them."

Timestamp: [30:39-31:52]

Supabase envisions its organization as a series of concentric circles extending from core team members outward to the broader community, with fluid movement between these layers.

"You can almost think of Supabase like concentric spheres of a company, essentially getting looser and looser all the way out into a community. So we've got the core team that we hire, then we've got even the contractors, the maintainers, and then the community, and then the wider audience. That's largely how we thought about it from the start."

This model enables mobility across different levels of engagement:

"People can move in and out of these concentric circles. We quite often hire people directly from the community as contributors. Some of our first hires were just maintainers of tools that we needed. They could be based in Peru or Spain or something like that, and we would hire them because we're fully distributed."

Paul views the community as Supabase's greatest competitive advantage:

"The community has been amazing, honestly, and that's to be honest our biggest moat is just how awesome our community is. They can help, they can contribute, they find bugs, they report them, they give feedback, they hold us to a certain standard."

While the company initially tracked traditional metrics like GitHub stars (where they rank in the top 100 repositories), their focus has shifted: "We stopped caring a lot about those sort of metrics early on. Now we're more focused on making sure that the community itself are really benefiting."

Timestamp: [31:52-33:50]

Beyond just engaging with their community, Supabase has implemented concrete financial support mechanisms to sustain their open-source ecosystem.

"We do things – we don't publish them too much – but if people are regularly maintaining, we sponsor them. We pay maintainers for doing some of the periphery projects."

Paul provides examples of this support:

"Like maybe our client libraries of different languages that, you know, we haven't yet made official. We can sponsor people to do all of that."

This approach represents one of "many, many initiatives that we've got going on just to try to support the community" and demonstrates Supabase's commitment to maintaining a healthy ecosystem around their product.

Timestamp: [33:50-34:28]

Paul identifies a common pattern where developer-focused companies lose touch with their communities as they pursue larger enterprise customers, and explains Supabase's approach to avoiding this pitfall.

The interviewer frames the challenge: "We see a lot of companies that start off with this mission around focusing around the community and investing in the community. And then they get bigger, they get more mature, some of them move up market, and they lose a little bit of focus on the community."

Paul describes the typical downward spiral:

"What typically happens is developer tools business starts scaling up with their community, then they start getting bigger and bigger customers. Those big customers take a lot of the attention, especially of the founders, and then the founders lose sight of the community because they have to cater to the big customers."

The consequences become apparent over time:

"Then eventually they realize – they look back over their shoulder and they think, 'Oh, our sales are slowing down, what can we do? Let's re-engage the community.' And at that point, it's too late. You lost it."

He emphasizes the need for continuous community engagement:

"I mean, you have to keep your community. That's the thing that I've seen happened time and time again. I'm old enough now to have seen so many great developer tools that I've loved slowly wane in terms of the community love because I feel they lose the pulse of their own community."

Paul's solution focuses on leadership commitment:

"The only way to solve it really is to make sure that those people who are significant in the company, the likes of Ant and myself, continue to engage the community. And we know that it's going to be in the long term our number one moat."

Timestamp: [34:28-36:22]

Paul shares the tactical approaches Supabase has used from day one to monitor and engage with their community, demonstrating a hands-on founder involvement that remains constant even as they scale.

"From a tactics point of view, it was very easy at the start because our name is Supabase with an 'a,' and like that's unique. So I just literally received to my inbox every single mention of Supabase on the internet."

Using simple tools, Paul maintains visibility across all community discussions:

"I use this one F5 bot which kind of does Reddit. It's very basic, but to this day I still receive all those emails. I mean, there's too many for me to keep up with, but I skim through."

He prioritizes direct engagement, particularly with critical feedback:

"I'll jump in, and I'll like search on Twitter when people mention us, and I'll actually respond to people. Just yesterday someone said, they pinged me and they said, 'Ah, you know, I'm missing this on the open source repo.' And I jumped into our Slack, said to the front-end, 'Hey, is this missing?' Our front-end person responded, and then within the space of 12 hours, we had fixed this issue. It wasn't even a GitHub issue, they just pinged me on Twitter."

Timestamp: [36:22-39:13]

The unusual name "Supabase" came about through a combination of necessity and humor, becoming a permanent fixture despite the founder's initial reservations.

"The basic origin was that we was trying to find a good database name, and it was going to be like UltraBase or like HyperBase or some sort of Base, right? It had to have 'base.' I couldn't find anything."

When traditional variations with "super" weren't available, Paul tried a different spelling as a temporary measure:

"Super is S-U-P-E-R, that was taken, and so as a joke, I just put S-U-P-A-base, and it was a placeholder for Ant and myself to exchange ideas."

There was also a cultural reference behind the choice:

"Actually, the real reason was because Ant and I like a lot of memes, and 'Supabase' is a Nicki Minaj song. So we could make a lot of... it's his favorite song."

The name stuck when they received unexpected public attention:

"When we hit, we eventually got found and someone put us on Hacker News, and it went to the top. And at that stage, we realized, 'Oh, we can't actually change the name.'"

Paul admits some ambivalence about the name:

"It's like one of my regrets, but now everything inside the company is like 'super something' – Super Troopers and all these names, and it makes me cringe all the time. But we're stuck with it."

Looking ahead to potential future milestones, he jokes: "I'm sure when we get to IPO, maybe it'll be... yeah, and the ticker symbol can be 'SUPER.'"

Timestamp: [37:07-38:24]

The transition from founder-driven community support to self-sustaining community engagement represents a critical milestone for Supabase, personified by dedicated community members who take ownership.

When asked at what point a community becomes self-sustaining, Paul shares a specific example:

"The point that it becomes self-sustaining is basically when you find someone like Gary Austin, who's like our guy on Discord."

This community champion emerged organically:

"He's, I think, like maybe in his 60s, and maybe I think he worked at IBM. I don't actually know all those details, but he worked at IBM for a while and kind of retired, and he was a bit bored, so he was just in our Discord answering all these questions."

Gary's contributions have become so valuable that his absence is notable:

"Now it's a bit of a meme, like when he's offline, the community doesn't know what to do."

This example illustrates how community members can take on roles that were initially filled by the founding team, creating a more resilient and self-sustaining ecosystem around the product.

Timestamp: [39:13-39:56]

• Supabase's global hiring approach has created a natural defense against talent poaching, as their team members are distributed across countries with varying compensation markets
• Rather than trying to change people to fit their culture, Supabase focuses on hiring individuals who already possess their core values: being work-focused, intrinsically motivated, and low-ego
• The company conceptualizes its structure as concentric circles extending from the core team outward to contractors, maintainers, the community, and the wider audience, with fluid movement between layers
• Supabase provides concrete financial support to community members who maintain peripheral projects, particularly client libraries in various programming languages
• Paul identifies a common pattern where developer tools companies lose touch with their communities as they pursue enterprise customers, and emphasizes that founder engagement is crucial to prevent this
• From day one, Paul has monitored all mentions of Supabase online and personally responds to user feedback, sometimes leading to issues being resolved within hours
• The name "Supabase" was initially a joke placeholder referencing a Nicki Minaj song, but became permanent after gaining traction on Hacker News
• Community self-sustainability is exemplified by Gary Austin, a retired IBM employee who voluntarily helps users on Discord to such an extent that his absence is noticed

Timestamp: [30:04-39:56]

Companies and Organizations:

• Supabase - Developer platform with a distributed team across 30 countries
• OpenAI - Mentioned as an example of a company that might poach talent in San Francisco
• IBM - Former employer of Gary Austin, a prolific Supabase community member
• Hacker News - Platform where Supabase gained initial visibility
• Discord - Communication platform where the Supabase community actively engages
• Twitter - Social platform where Paul directly responds to user feedback
• GitHub - Where Supabase maintains one of the top 100 open-source repositories by stars

People:

• Paul Copplestone - Founder and CEO of Supabase, personally monitors all mentions of the company
• Ant - Co-founder of Supabase, mentioned as sharing Paul's interest in memes and helping name the company
• Rory - Mentioned as part of the Supabase team
• Gary Austin - Retired IBM employee who has become a key community supporter on Discord
• Nicki Minaj - Artist whose song contains "Supabase," which influenced the company's name

Concepts:

• F5 bot - Tool Paul uses to monitor mentions of Supabase across the internet
• Concentric spheres model - How Supabase conceptualizes its organization, from core team to wider audience
• "The enterprise trap" - Pattern where companies lose focus on their community as they pursue larger customers
• Culture fit vs. development - Paul's philosophy that hiring for culture alignment is more effective than trying to change people
• Community self-sustainability - The point at which community members take ownership of supporting other users

Timestamp: [30:04-39:56]

I'll create a fresh set of cards for this final segment, focusing exclusively on the content provided in this transcript portion.

Supabase has found value in nurturing community members who serve as connectors between their internal team and the wider user base, creating a more organic support structure than traditional employment relationships.

When discussing Gary Austin, their prolific Discord helper, Paul explains why they took a different approach than simply hiring him:

"At one point we thought, 'Oh, should we employ him?' But actually, he's more valuable to us as a community member that we keep a looser relationship. He's kind of like the bond between the flyby community members and the internal team."

This intermediary position is supported through specific communication channels:

"The way we work with him, we also have a contributor Slack where he sits in a single channel, and then he kind of fits between our Slack and the Discord and GitHub."

This approach creates a more authentic bridge between the company and its community than could be achieved through a traditional employment relationship, demonstrating Supabase's understanding of the unique value that community champions provide when they maintain a degree of independence.

Timestamp: [40:03-40:29]

When faced with competing priorities between community requests and commercial interests, Supabase maintains focus by making clear decisions about what they won't do, guided by their core mission of building a world-class database company.

When asked about balancing community wants with upmarket customer needs, Paul frames open source as a core value rather than a tactic:

"We don't do it because it's a tactic or anything. We use open source tools, we benefit from open source tools. PostgreSQL is like the core of our business. It's our way of giving back as much as we can."

For Supabase, the question isn't whether to serve the community, but the extent: "It's often not a 'should we do it or not?' It's usually 'to what level can we reasonably do it?'"

Paul provides a specific example of maintaining focus by declining a common community request:

"A really common ask is, will we do hosting of websites? And I get it all the time, and I just say no. And this one comes from that famous Steve Jobs quote where he's up on stage and he says, 'Focus is about saying no.'"

This discipline is tied directly to their ambitious vision:

"For us, if we want to build the world's biggest database company, there's no way we can do that while simultaneously trying to solve front-end hosting. And to be honest, there are already... Vercel is phenomenal. Why would we bother even trying to compete with them?"

Paul concludes with a clear articulation of their strategic focus:

"We are focused on the database, and if we continue to do that, our outcome will be that Oracle outcome rather than some Heroku-like outcome, which is still reasonable. But we want to really solve database problems."

Timestamp: [40:29-42:08]

The explosion of AI tools and builders has brought a new wave of growth to Supabase, creating both opportunities and operational challenges that have influenced their priorities.

Paul acknowledges the role of timing and luck in Supabase's journey:

"Luck plays a huge amount within a startup. I mean, even going back to the early days, there's absolutely no way we could have built the database company that we have without that kind of VC hype cycle at the start. It takes a lot of cash to build a database company."

The current AI revolution has brought a new influx of builders that resonates with Paul's own experience:

"Now we see this new... the AI builders, the ChatGPT explosion, and it's this moment in time. I feel that a lot of builders, new builders, are pouring into the market. And I love it because they've got the same sort of energy that I did when I was learning to code. They just see that they're producing something rather than consuming something."

This surge has had tangible impacts on Supabase's operations:

"Our signup rate basically doubled overnight, which means support tickets double overnight, which means that traditionally your roadmap also gets delayed."

This growth has influenced their strategic focus for the year:

"Our question this year has been how to service both [traditional developers and AI builders]. And in particular, my focus this year is how to make that experience for builders phenomenal, like we did for developers."

Paul sees these AI-first builders as the next generation of developers:

"Eventually those builders will become the developers. They'll learn how to code for sure. I think maybe not to the level that a developer of 20 years has been doing, but I guarantee at some point they'll start dipping into it, and that's awesome."

Timestamp: [42:08-44:31]

As Supabase has grown, Paul's role has transformed from hands-on coding to culture building and team alignment, offering insights into the natural evolution of founder responsibilities in a scaling company.

"Technically, the role's changed from doing a lot of coding to doing no coding, which is a shame. But of course that's going to happen, and you can only hold on to that so long."

Paul describes the transition phase where he became less effective as a direct contributor:

"These days I start projects, and I don't have enough time to finish them. So that's actually... I became a liability."

This transition also brought humility about his technical skills:

"When I started, I thought, 'Ah, I'm a pretty good programmer. I can do some stuff.' And then I hired all these people, and I realized I'm nowhere near as good. The talent around the world is phenomenal."

As the company grew, his focus shifted to people development:

"You have to eventually become just more focused on developing the culture, the team, the people within the team. They're going to start managing people as well, so making sure that they've got the right mindset around how to manage, and usually that's a bit foreign for people who haven't managed before."

Paul distills his current role into a clear primary responsibility:

"Essentially, my job is finding alignment across everyone. As you are growing, you lack alignment, which is natural. How do you keep 100 people pointed in the same direction? So yeah, that's really my job, and it will be my job for the next decade or so."

Timestamp: [44:31-46:11]

• Supabase maintains "loose relationships" with key community members rather than hiring them, as they can be more valuable as authentic bridges between the company and community
• They use a contributor Slack channel to connect these community champions with their internal team while letting them remain part of public spaces like Discord
• When facing product decisions, Supabase focuses ruthlessly on their core mission of building a world-class database company, saying no to popular requests like website hosting
• Their approach to focus is inspired by Steve Jobs' philosophy that "focus is about saying no" and recognizing where other companies like Vercel already excel
• The AI revolution has doubled Supabase's signup rate overnight, creating both growth opportunities and operational challenges with support tickets
• Paul sees AI-first builders as having the same creative energy he had when learning to code, and believes they will eventually evolve into developers
• A founder's role inevitably shifts from coding to becoming responsible for alignment and culture as the company scales
• Paul experienced a humbling realization that the global talent he hired was technically superior to him, making his hands-on coding contributions less valuable
• His primary job now is ensuring 100+ people across 30 countries remain aligned toward the same goals, a responsibility he expects to continue for the next decade

Timestamp: [40:03-46:11]

Companies and Organizations:

• Supabase - Database-as-a-service company founded by Paul Copplestone
• Oracle - Referenced as Supabase's aspirational outcome ("that Oracle outcome")
• Heroku - Mentioned as an alternative business model that Supabase is deliberately not pursuing
• Vercel - Praised as "phenomenal" in the website hosting space, a domain Supabase deliberately avoids
• Discord - Community platform where Supabase users interact, including where Gary Austin provides support
• Slack - Internal communication tool used by Supabase, with a special contributor channel for community bridges

People:

• Paul Copplestone - Founder and CEO of Supabase whose role has evolved from coding to alignment
• Gary Austin - Community member who provides support on Discord and acts as a bridge between users and the company
• Steve Jobs - Quoted on the importance of focus being "about saying no"

Concepts:

• AI builders - New type of creators using AI tools who have doubled Supabase's signup rate
• Community-company bridge - Role where community members connect the internal team with users while maintaining independence
• Contributor Slack - Special channel where key community members can interact with the Supabase team
• Founder role evolution - The transition from hands-on technical work to alignment and culture building
• Strategic focus - Deliberately saying no to opportunities outside core mission, even when requested by users
• "The Oracle outcome" - Supabase's aspiration to build the world's biggest database company

Timestamp: [40:03-46:11]