Well friends, this is the change log. I'm Adam Stikoviak, editor-in-chief here at ChangeAll.com, and today I'm talking about Jay Kolkarni, co-founder and CEO of TigerData. We trace this path of becoming a CEO, we dig into the themes that have shaped his career, and we explore how father values end up forming company culture. From his enterprise days to building time scale, renaming to TigerData, we come with a whole journey, and here's where it gets really, really interesting.
Agents in the database, not the hype, the real thing. The real thing, baby. We get into how fast you can go from idea to shift these days, what it actually means to talk to your database and the whole API, CLI, MCP, and the skills landscape we're all working in. At J-drops this gym, build skills, not agents, and we impact that in this episode.
A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io. That is the home of ChangeAll.com. Give your home to learnmore at fly.io. Okay, let's talk Agents in the database.
Well friends, I'm here with a good friend of mine, again, Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of Depo.dev. Kyle, we are in an era of disruption, right? I would also describe it as rethinking what we thought was true, and I guess that's kind of the definition of disruption. But from your perspective, how are teams, reliability teams, CICD, pipeline teams, how are they all rethinking things, and where does Depo fit into that?
In the conversations that I have with customers, a lot of DevOps teams, platform teams, site reliability teams, they're really looking at this new era of software engineering that we're all living in, and they're starting to question, like, the bottleneck is no longer the act of writing code. The bottleneck is shifting. The most time consuming part is integrating the code. It's everything that comes after.
It's the build, it's the pull request review, it's the deployment, it's the getting it into production. Once it's in production, it's scaling up support teams to support it. It's adding documentation, all of these downstream problems. And so through the lens of Depo, what we're really starting to think about is, there's a very realistic possibility that within the next two to three years, maybe even sooner, that we're going to enter a world where an engineering team of three people could theoretically have the velocity of an engineering team of 300 people.
And what's the consequences of that? What's the consequences of the code velocity spiking up to that level with such a small team? There's no way three engineers are going to be able to code review all of the code that's being created if there's three engineers and 297 agents, also creating features and fixing bugs. So that's just like from a pull request perspective.
But then you think about it through a build lens too of if your builds take 20 minutes with three humans and now you're going to have three humans and 297 agents also running. Well, you definitely don't want to build taking 20 minutes because now the entire pinch point is the build pipeline. And so we're starting to think a lot about how do we eliminate the bottlenecks that come downstream and what can we do with Depot that streamlines that? So obviously friends, we are in an era of disruption.
Things are changing, you know what, I know it. That's how it is. And the thing with production and what Kyle's talking about here is how in the world do you get your builds to be faster? I get them to be more reliable, faster, more observability around those deployments.
You need it, it's required and Depot is there to help you. So a good first step is to go to depo.dev get faster, drive the trial is too easy. Again, depo.dev is where to go. It all begins at depo.dev.
So friends, we're here with Ajay Kolkarni, a new friend of mine from Tiger Data previously timescale. We've had this relationship, we've worked with you as a sponsor and I've been a fan obviously of Time Series Data. And I had ideas for you all, I've been working with Isabel behind the scenes. And then it finally came back to this moment.
Here we have the Gente Postgres, which is just super interesting to me. So I thought we would dive deep into who you are Ajay, what your journey might be and how you've come to Love Building Database. So that's right there. Yeah, yeah.
I'm assuming that you live in the databases. You know, I love building. I love building and I love solving problems. Now databases are interesting, right?
But it would not be the only thing I've done in my career. You know, I've been in Love with Technologies and Suzzakay and I remember using the internet for the first time in high school in 1995, 1996 and thinking, I don't know what this is, but this is fun. And I was a pre-med at that point, Applionic Colleges and I switched to Peter Science went to MIT. And I guess the rest is history.
MIT is where I met my co-founder, by the way, so I met each other for 28 years. That's wild, to know a co-founder of 28 years. And the history and the level of trust and maybe somewhat antitrust. I don't know if that's the best way to research.
It's not antitrust, but you know what it is? It's... I don't know what abilities I mean by that. When he and I started working together at this point, probably 10 years ago, like I remember thinking, I know what I like about Mike and I know what I don't like about him.
And I want to work with this guy. I know. And I'm sure he felt similarly, and I think it's a little bit of like a, I'm not sure what to call it a spouse or relationship, but almost, you know what? You're like, hey, like, I like you for who you are the whole package, even though sometimes that package annoys me.
And I'm sure you say the same thing about me. Well, Mike is not here, so we can't speak for him, but I might say something like that. So CEO of Tiger Data, you were under a different name, a different moniker before. I do want to go there, but I kind of want to zoom back out a second just to kind of identify who you are.
But you know, more so how you got here. You mentioned MIT, Long Road, 20 years, knowing Mike met him at college university. You know, what was the journey from there to go into, I suppose your career and what are some of the things you've done that you really feel have defined or identified who you are today? Yeah, I think I've tried to always follow the thing that kind of tugs my heartstrings to be like, hey, like, I don't know why, but this is interesting.
And really to listen to that. That's why I ended up at MIT. My high school guidance counselor tried to dissuade me from going. And I was like, no, I'm going to go.
I'm going to go. And knowing it was hardly, it was great. I graduated during the dot com collapse. So that point was not hiring, and which just sounds crazy at this point.
And I ended up on Wall Street as a bond analyst, but very quickly after a couple of years and look back in Palo Alto, working for a startup, networking and startup since. What year was that? Roughly. Oh, back to Palo Alto.
2004. Okay. I know exactly what I was doing that year. I was so wayward then.
That was the beginning of my developer career, I would say. So not that this is my sort of, but just so you kind of understand the cloth there, at the timing. That was a senior, my daughter was born. She is now 21, so that's 21 years ago for you, almost 22 as of this January, if that was the case for you too.
Congrats, that's incredible. Thank you. I was in Canada at the time. Oddly enough, I'm an American, I mean, United States.
Served our military. I don't say that is like a nationalist necessity. What did you serve? In the army, but just to say that I'm not Canadian, not that I'm against me.
I'm just not Canadian, so I want to be clear about that. Some people think because I lived in Canada for a bit, they're like, are you Canadian? I'm like, no, no, I don't say it. Probably because you're so friendly, but he must be Canadian.
Well, yeah, maybe that's it. But I was fresh, so I didn't go to college or to MIT or to a computer science school or get a degree in that. I learned by messing with GeoCities that same year. And that's so funny to even think about it.
Sort of playing with WordPress, got a job, and almost got fired from a company called IT Weapons, still around in Canada, ITWeapons.com. One of the most formative moments in my career, I got hired into a sales role. I could not do well because their sales style was so different when I was used to. And I was terrible at that job.
And I knew I was like so close to getting fired. And I took it upon myself to be like, nah man, you're not getting rid of me. Almost like you were with your guys and I said, I'm gonna do this. And so I defined the business development role for the company and started to add value to the online what they thought that I could add.
And they never really told me directly that I was like minutes away from getting fired, but I knew it, I knew it my soul. But I also saw the turnaround and the benefit there. And it was pretty awesome. Anyways, I know I like that story because I feel like that is something you don't know you have until it's tested.
Yeah. Which is the hey, I didn't know I had it today. I was like, what do you, I had a wife and a brand new daughter coming, you know, so in those moments, so like that timeframe for me, I could not survive, I had to find a way. It's I think that's some combination of grit, but also just like an FU mentality.
It's like, listen, I was like, oh no, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna do something about it, I'm gonna figure it out. So I've always been good at connecting the value dots, I would say. You can call it sales if you want to. And I think that's the easy, you know, in quotes word you can use, but I really think I have this uncanny ability to, and I've just grown into it in my career and I've leaned into it, where I've been able to connect the dots between things that just aren't normally connected and the express and redefine and help shape that value in those connected dots.
It's great, I like that story. Let's go back to you though. Now, this is not about me, I'll be at least encapsulate what was happening in 2004 between our lives. So much different perspectives, right?
But similar, I would say like we're, I'm not a co-founder or a CEO of a tech startup, but certainly a tech brand, right? Change.com has been around for an institution at this point, 18 years, Jay, we started in 2009. I mean, in the tech industry, that's like 100 years. So that is, you know, we're a Wikipedia basically, but not really, I'm just gonna, like Wikipedia is the eighth, ninth, tenth, one of the world, one of those two things or something like that.
Yeah. So I'll tell you what's been the theme in my career, is that when I was on Wall Street, it was a really interesting, like an eye-opening experience, because I was around some really smart people, I was like, I was a quant around people who all had PhDs, some had multiple PhDs, really hard-working. It wasn't like, it was a meritocracy, it wasn't like a lot of, you know, FaceTime, I mean, you would work, but it was, you know, and I was paid really well, but I didn't like it. I didn't like it, and I was like, you know what?
I feel like this is not who I am. And I felt like I was someone who needed to build and needed to create. And I actually, like, I remember going soul searching, like, hey, should I go into consumer packaged goods? Should I go into, I won't point out about starting like a record label, because I'm like, I like music and I like business, and maybe I'll start a record label, I remember by a book about it, and doing research, and at some point I started a chocolate company.
And I kind of realized, and it's kind of obvious in hindsight, that like, dude, like, if you want to build something to make it impact, like tech is the best way. Yeah, I'm even more so now, but even back then. And so I think, I think that's what kind of probably the tech, I think that's what keeps feeling me, is like, yeah, just the ability to have a positive impact in the world, and in other people. And it's not always fun, it's not always easy, but I think that's probably the main thing that's been driving me, at least since that insight.
Can you expose some scars, some hard years, some bad choices that you can not reflect on that are formative to who you are today? It's kind of like what I do with you a little bit. Yeah, it's like life choices. Yeah, we're the forks in the road that you're like, man, that's the moment where I learned this hard lesson, or that's the moment, not even mentioned Mike in 20 years, maybe that's one of those forks, but just those moments where you look back now, and in the moment, it's kind of funny because in the moment sometimes, we can't see the force for the trees, right?
And we think like this choice or this thing happening is the end of the world, it's the biggest choice ever. And it may be in that moment, but when you get past it, you sort of get past it with hindsight, and that's why it is truly 2020, because you look back, with so much clarity, what were some of those moments where it was unclear a choice you had to make, but now it's clearly defined who you are today. As a mistake or a good choice? You pick, whatever direction you want to go.
I'd like mistakes somewhere in cars, buddy, Knuckles. They, sometimes mistakes can be either or sometimes the positive choice we make can be either or a scar or a buddy, Knuckles. I mean, look, I think you probably know, this entrepreneurship is a series of mistakes, and the key is just like not letting the company die despite your mistakes. There's many I made over the years, bad hires, vast strategic decisions.
I'll tell you one actually that started even before then. I used to work at this company, and I wanna mention you, because I'm not trying to throw anyone out of the bus, but I used to work at this company where I was in charge of an engineering team, and somehow, like I thought I was on track to get more responsibility, and somehow there was this internal uproar, and I realized people didn't like me, and it was uproar, and I ended up getting sidelined. And that hurt for a couple of reasons. Number one, I'm kind of a sensitive guy, I'm an entrepreneur, but I'm like, look, dude, if you genuinely don't like me, I'd be like, why?
Because I'm curious, because I'm like, did I do anything to offend you? But also, I was just caught off guard, and what I realized is that part of that was my fault. Part of that was I think I came across more like dictator like than I intended, but part was I would say, maybe indirectly my fault, where there were some decisions that were made, where I took the heat for, where it wasn't actually, it wasn't the decision that I made. I guess I don't know, maybe a long story, I kind of realized that, I think I changed my style, but I also realized that you have to look out for yourself, and your manager, whoever, they will not necessarily look out for you, but also conversely, I've tried to be the type of manager who looks out for people.
I don't know, that's an interesting story, I don't put like, well, so let's zoom into maybe, how are you changed as a result? Like what did you do to, what are I'm trying to go to? How did you get here? In terms of not just where you're at in this moment, but like the person you are leading the company you are.
What are some of the things that were in your past, or in your choice line, that has now helped a JA today via J to lead? Yeah, I would say that I've made, I'm not sure what I call the mistakes, or just I've had learning experiences over the years, and I think that I've formed who I am today. I think the key theme, and it's not all of them, but I think one key theme is, I have learned how to trust myself. Like I remember early on, I would make some hires, for example, in sales, that didn't like gut feel right to me, but I was new to enterprise sales, I was new to the database business, and in hindsight, like I was right, like hey, the general, I like to say in a fast moving industry, expertise is a liability.
So like in the database world, as the databases were moving from enterprise sales, and on-prem to like cloud and PLG, the people who could sell this, would be the totally wrong people for this. And I kind of felt that, and I can articulate it, and I made a hire, and I made a few hires that, you know, I had to let go, and that's my fault, that's on me. But I think that's one thing that taught me that, like hey, like you got this far for a reason, like listen to your gut, and if you can't articulate it, then try to take the time to articulate it. I think more recently, like, look, I have a conversational style, that myself, my both, my both, and I talk about this, it's called cooperative overlapping, but we interrupt because that's how we talk, like if you're in trouble to me, I feed on that, you feed on me, you know?
And one thing we realize is that, like, well at one point, there's some people, you know, I'm like executive team, and we're like, we need to interrupt less. And I remember thinking, my first thought was, right, we should interrupt less. And my second thought was like, no, this is who we are, you know? Like we got this far for who we are, you know?
And either you ask the founders to change, or you ask the whole company to change, you know? And what I realized is that, there are people in the company who liked who we are, they liked that we interrupted, you know? And so I got the point, I was like, but like, you know, we talk about like California mentality versus New York mentality. Like New York mentality is, hey, I'll be kind to you, but I may not be nice.
Like, I'll be gruff on the street, but I'll help you. And that's just the New York way. And if you're in New York, you have to realize that, when people are like too busy to talk to you, it's not they're not being rude, they're actually trying to be respectful of your time. So yeah, I think like, I don't know, I feel like over the years, not trusting my own instinct has, I mean, you live with the consequences.
And so I think I've learned that like, hey, just trust your instinct because whether you win or lose, it's on you. Only I wrote down a while back. This is actually 2012, September 2012. And it was a question of where does a company's culture come from?
And essentially it's bull down to what you just said, what there, which is he found his values and principles to find the company's culture. And so these things, they're kind of, they're top down the way, but if you don't have, I guess fortitude and who you are and why you are the way you are to push back when somebody says, hey, maybe that's not cool. And you're like, you know, I can kind of see that, but at the same time it's kind of who I am. And here's why I'm delivering my message this way or why the way I speak this way.
And it's less about interrupting, but more about that cooperative, would you call it cooperative overlap? Is that right? Cooperative overlapping, I think that's the technical term. And so it does put a name to it that tame it.
So it's not interruption. It's meant to be a courteous interrupt to probably provoke deeper conversation or to provoke more collaboration and involvement, right? Now, and that probably the reason. No, no, no, no, totally.
But I think it's also a function of like, don't try to shore up your weaknesses, try to lean on your strengths. Yeah, right? So like, like I am an intense person. When I was younger, I would feel bad about it because somebody would be like, oh, well, you're intense.
But now I'm like, no, it's who I am. And some people love that about me. And there's some things I can do really well because I am intense, you know? So I am, you know, like that, but cool, we haven't worked together, right?
You know, similarly, like, I talk a little fast. Like I remember one point, like I was giving a presentation and like some of my peers were like, oh, why don't you slow down, you're talking really fast. And I slowed down and they were like, no, this is worse. Like it was better when you talk fast because your energy was there, you know?
And I was like, you know what? Yeah, like I talk fast and maybe it's like, you know, maybe I might model some words sometimes, but like that is who I am. That's how my energy comes through. And just lean on that.
I haven't talked about it with Mike. It's like, we both have weaknesses. We both have flaws. And in the past, I would have been like, oh, we have to work on these.
And now I've said, you know what? Like, like don't try to teach a fish to climb a tree. You know, like if you're a fish, like swim better, you know? Don't be like, oh, I can't climb a tree.
It's like just keep swimming, right? Just keep swimming. Yeah. And so she's got the best advice.
Don't worry. Yeah, that's right. Keep swimming. But it's just like, I figure out who you are.
Yeah, and lean into it. I mean, people talk about this in athletics, how like once upon a time, maybe 50, 60 years ago, the idea of the ideal athlete was someone who was just balancing every possible way. Not too tall, not too short, not too strong, not too weak, you know? And now they realize that like, no, like you actually want the genetic freaks.
That's where you get the alpha, you know? You're someone who's like, if your wing is like, massive wingspan. Yeah, I do totally. Michael Phelps is like what, 6'4", 6'5", I think?
He's huge, yeah. And there's a marathon runner who I think is like 5'7". And I'm reading an article that talked about how they wear the same pants. Oh, like, cause the marathon runner is all legs.
And Michael Phelps is all torso. Yeah. And you're like, yeah, you know, like you don't get good at a sport by being balanced and everything. You find the thing where you have the edge and you lean into that.
You know, yeah. One thing you mentioned was this, it seemed like you got some history in enterprise sales, enterprise database, you mentioned PLG, partly growth. Help me understand some of your backstory when it comes to, I guess just databases in general, how did you get into that world? What was that world for you and how has it changed to now?
Yeah, I mean, I've been using databases since the late 90s, I guess, ever since I started getting its computer sites. I started using probably my sequel in 2004, Postgres in 2011, I think, thanks to Heroku. So it's always been involved in databases. I think what's interesting to me is when I, when we started this company, which was then TimeScale, we entered a world that was where the success stories were companies like Hortonworks and Cloudera, really big on-prem.
And that was not my background at all. I'd never, never been a salesperson, never worked with enterprise salespeople. And now I know what these terms mean, but back then capacity planning, quota coverage, territories, they meant nothing to me. And we slowly had to learn it.
But also, as you know, I also had this inkling that like, hey, you know what, I feel like the database industry is changing, it's changing from that old model to like, something looks more like SAS. And SAS is less about enterprise sales, more about building a great product. And I knew how to do that. And so I think like, that was part of the journey, was like starting off as a user, getting into an industry not really realizing how, how the business worked.
But then again, I think following my instinct to be like, hey, I think this industry is shifting. One thing I like to say about myself and my co-founders that were very good students of the game. And so we were new to open source licensing and then became open source licensing experts. I would say we were new to PLG and sales, but I think now we're a much more for experts, but I think we're probably top core Tyler, whatever for that.
You know, I think about the way databases have changed and the way the sales of them have changed. Like largely, it's as if you're not an open source database, you know, you're not worth your weight in goal because it's a black box, things can change. Even if even the term, you know, and you may, this may cut deep to you potentially, is Postgres compatible. I think Timescale has never been Postgres compatible.
It's always been Postgres native. That's right. But some out there choose that Postgres compatible. And that's because they want to do business differently when it's licensed differently.
And I think the PLG model has obviously won. I feel as a developer, if I can't go and play with your tool, even not so much in a free capacity, but the ability to explore it and learn it and then trust it, that's the way. That's the way of the developer. You got a side project, you got an issue on this graph, you want to try this different thing.
And if you're not going that route, it's kind of hard to really instantiate change in your organization. You may go from one database to another where you have an idea. And if you can't go and explore it and carve it off yourself and present it to your team, that's the way of PLG, that's the way of open source. Yeah, no, it's fascinating because I think databases like software used to be something where the key decision maker was the CIO or CTO, and that deal was done in a stake house run of golf course.
That's what used to be. And with a shift to SAS and then to shift the cloud for databases, that decision moved to like, no, it's a developer sitting at their computer just making the choice based on some combination of what they read, what their peers told them, and what their own visceral experience was. And I think that's been fascinating for me because I think it's totally cham. I mean, the core job that database does has not changed, but I think the way you build the business is totally changed from being more sales led to being more product led.
I think that's been interesting. Yeah. What was the original challenge you faced to even consider creating time scale? Like, what was that moment?
When was that moment? We started off as a company building an IoT platform, internet of things, and it's like 2015. Yeah, I mean, back then, I just spent 10 years in mobile. Like, and I remember thinking, wow, like mobile was really exciting, but around 2014 started to get a little bit boring.
Like, you know, pre and post-iPhone was exciting, but then 2014, you're like, okay, I have it on apps. I'm like, what's the next thing? And IoT felt like the next wave of computing. And so we started off building what we thought the market needed, which was a data platform for IoT devices.
And that idea was moderately successful. We tracked a run of a dozen devices. We raised a seat around to build a small team, but we needed a database to sort all this data. And, you know, we were using a time-series database, we were using a relational database.
And I remember at one point, we wanted to like, I think sort the console by like uptime, but then show all the device metadata. And what should have been a simple SQL join, and it being like a two-week engineering sprint will use you to connect these two silos systems. And I remember thinking, oh, this is awful, this sucks. And one of our engineers said, hey, I could build this on Postgres, but it'll take me a month.
And I was like, okay, cool, you're optimistic engineer, so probably take me three months. And, you know, 12 months later, we had this database, and I'm trying to sell this IoT platform. And look, as much as you learn to listen to signals when someone is really engaged. And when someone's like, oh yeah, that's cool.
That's not cool. But when someone's like, wait, wait, hold on, can you tell me that again? You're like, okay, there's something that's interesting to you. And so here I am trying to sell this IoT platform.
I'm meeting with the German head architect of this large shipping logistics company, I mean, in the Mountain View. And I'm telling him it's an IoT platform. And he's like, look, there's so many IoT platforms that the web makes for us. And I was like, oh, we built our own database, it does SQL skills for time series.
And then he was like, wait, hold on, can you tell me more about that database? And I think that's when I realized, wait, this is solving, this is actually solving the right problem. And that's why we came to database companies. So yeah, long story short, we kind of scratched our own itch and realized that other people had the same itch.
But, you know, again, like we are students, we are, we listen really well to the market, we try not to be dogmatic. And when someone says that thing's not interesting, but this thing is, we're like, hey, we're not here, just to build that thing, we're here to solve a problem. This solves a bigger problem. That's an extra one.
Well, friends, I'm here with my good friend, Chris Kelly, over at Augment Code. Chris, I'm a fan. I use Augie on the daily. It's one of my daily drivers.
I use Cloud Code, I use Augment, Augie. And I also use Antcode and others, but Augie, I keep going back to it. And here's where I'm at. I feel like not enough of our audience knows about Augment Code, not enough about Augie, the CLI.
It's amazing. I love it. What can you share? Augment is the best coding assistant you've never heard of.
And that's both frustrating as to some of the works there. And it's like very proud of the work we've done. But also like inspiring, like we want to go and sort of punch above our weight because like we aren't anthropic and we aren't open AI. And so the quality of the product itself, you know, with our context engine, when to do touch it, people are like just blown away by that.
And so like that keeps you going every day. So not the best of the lead here, but this is a paid spot. You are sponsoring the show to get this awareness. Now at the same time, we're selective.
And I love to use as your tool. But there is in the world. So a lot of developers look at the space and say, okay, well, how long can this work? How long is this sustainable in the case of cursor or a windsurf?
Or you pick the name and you think discount tokens help me shape a lens for audience? I think it's a lot of awareness, right? Like cursor got a lot of publicity early on for like fast revenue growth, which well deserved. I think, you know, frankly, some of the media got this, gets the story wrong and that like, if I gave you a dollar 50 for every dollar you sent me, I'd be the fastest growing startup in the valley.
And so when you're selling discounted tokens, yes, of course you're going to go very fast. But all that money plus more goes to the model providers. So I think the real story is the story of anthropic and you know, being an API provider. I think the market just moves so fast and there's so many pieces of competition out there that it's just hard to get noticed.
So friends, I love augment code and I love using Augie. And I highly recommend you use it. I love using Augie. I can hand Augie a well-defined specification, a well-defined PEP as I call them in my world, an agent flow and it executes falsely.
So the cool thing about Augie that I love most really is that context engine and I can hand it a task and it just churn away on my well-defined plan and just never bother me and accomplish the mission. It is so cool leveraging the latest models, the context engine and all the fun things behind the scenes in that awesome CLI. So yes, go try it out, augmentcode.com. Right in the top there is a CLI icon, a terminal icon, click that, install it, and change the world, it's gonna be awesome.
Augmentcode.com. Today you're not called TimeScale though. That's right. And so there's a name change of recent, which I think is challenging, but it kind of maybe shows the evolution, what's the evolution of that discovery, that 12 month discovery, scratch your own itch, IoT company to TimeScale to now be tech or data.
We started off thinking we were building a TimeScale series database for IoT. That's where we started. And so when we kind of pivoted to becoming database company early 2017, we called it a TimeScale. This is like a good name for Time Series database.
That's cool, it's pretty self-explanatory. And we actually saw there was a big demand in Time Series that was more than IoT, some in finance and events and then soon crypto and some other areas. But over time, again, we're gonna have this journey with the industry. We started with enterprise sales motion.
And being in the pandemic, we went all in on cloud, stopped selling on-prem and said, hey, we're gonna be a cloud company. And yeah, at that point, we were running databases for customers and we got to see a lot of data. And I saw, wow, there are a lot of companies who are like 20 people spending $50, $150k with us. And I were asking like, what are you doing?
Like, you know what he's this for? And one of them was like, hey, I think of you as a better Postgres. I don't think of you as just a Time Series database. I think of you as my main, you are our main database.
You are a 50% of our cloud spend. You are our main database because we're a better Postgres. And then we realized what we had built was not just a better Time Series database, but a better Postgres. And we kind of expanded that a better Postgres theme by adding vector support and better native AI support.
And we got to the point where this year, we realized, hey, we keep calling ourselves TimeScale and people view us as a Time Series database, but we had already become something more than that. It's as if like Amazon.com has started off as books.com. You know, and you're like, hey, books.com, we also sell CDs. People would be like, yeah, but you're a books.com.
And I would also sell like socks. Yeah, but you're books.com, right? And that's what TimeScale was. TimeScale was like, yeah, you do AI, but with Time Series, right?
And we're like, well, no, AI, you know? And I think, you know, our first attempt was trying to make TimeScale mean more than Time Series. Like, you know, when it's time to scale. I don't know.
And I'm not sure if you've ever seen the movie Mean Girls, but there's a line in there that Mike has quoted where he goes, it's like trying to make fetch happen. Like, it's not going to happen. Like, we're trying to make this term stick, which wasn't sticking. And so we're like, hey, you know what?
We didn't need a new name because we are Amazon. We're not books.com. And, but we're not pivoting. We're actually changing the name to properly reflect who we'd already become.
Yeah. And Tiger Data was like the perfect name for us because we, our mascot's always been a tiger. Internally, we talk about Tiger Time. That's our whole hands.
We talk about State of the Tiger. Monthly is my monthly presentation to the company. New people who join the company are Tiger Cubs. And yeah, like we've been telling Tiger mascot.
And so the name Tiger just worked because it was who we already identified with. And, you know, to our existing customers, it looked like, yeah, like it's your same logo, who I get it. And some new people were a little confused, but we were like, you know what? Like in 12 months, you will not be confused.
And this is a right thing. So that's why you made that change. Was it scary to get to the point where you're like, you know what? The only way forward is a name change.
Nothing else, just the name. It's, you know, it got to the point, which probably means we'd waited too long. It got to the point where it was painfully obvious to us. Yeah.
And I remember, and I told the team, look, this is not going to solve any problems. But it is going to remove an anchor that is holding us back. Like it's still on us to kind of move the ship, you know? But like it removes an anchor.
I think the key thing is you just have to stick to the decision and be like, yeah, it's going to be messy. It's going to be maybe a year of people being like, who are you again? You know, like, yeah, we're Tiger Data, you know? I actually think the name is catching on faster than I expected.
I think the name changed when it's smooth as I could have hoped. And I think people, timescaled EB, I think still has more brand awareness, but I think Tiger Data is catching up. Yeah. Some people made fun of us, but like whatever.
Oh, well, hey, it's hate, right? Haters hate, dude. Yeah. Haters do hate.
So, you know, our audience knows this. You've been a sponsor for a bit too. And, you know, I mentioned maybe in the pre-call, maybe in the early part of it, Isabelle's is someone who works for you and we've known each other for years since the month of DB days. And we would have conversations, and this is when you were timescale.
And this is what I do whenever I sit down with the brand and I think about how can we help them reach our audience in a way that is informative, educational, and just something that helps them be curious and try it, if it's something that fits in their world, essentially. And, you know, I always do this version of an investigation to some degree, like, look at your home page, look at your products, what are you doing? And, like, things just didn't, didn't pair up, especially, like, when you mentioned with, yeah, like, yeah, it's time series, but it's also just Postgres. And it was hard for me, because I would tell Isabelle, like, hey, I would write her.
You gotta change that headline on your homepage. It just doesn't work. Like, actually, something that's not fitting here. And so, when I saw the name change, you know, reflecting on your mention of, it seemed natural, essentially.
When I saw the new name, the first thing I did was email his bill and I was like, listen, that's an awesome name, we gotta talk. When can you make time kind of thing? Because it's been a few months since I talked to her. And that's what happened to you, do a rebrand and change your name.
You rethink your monitor, think your brand, and you come back out with a new plan. And that's what I saw. And so, the moment, just to kind of reiterate, the moment I saw this new brand, Tiger Data, I was like, mm-hmm, that makes those sense. The Tiger's there, logo's awesome.
It makes sense. I'm glad you felt that way, because I feel like people who knew the company mostly felt that way. Which was like, we didn't even change our logo. Our logo stayed the same.
We just changed the name. And people were like, no, they get it. And by the way, Tigers are cool. Tigers are cool, Tigers are cool, right?
They're cool. They're cool. What I like to, when you did this, was the logo animated from Timescale to Tiger Data. Logo stayed the same, right?
The mark that you have. That was a nice little subtle touch. That was a running team. No.
Also, I'm not a, I think a lot of your like dark mode. And I think your previous set was all dark mode. And you may even offer a dark mode version of your site. I don't know, because I see the dark white version of it.
It doesn't bother me. Like the yellow and the white and the black. It's a whoever was in charge of that process. Did a great job.
Thinking through the core of who you are and how you come back at the side, not being completely different. But being different at the same time. Yeah. That was a team effort, but marking team drove that kudos to them.
But I think it definitely gives you like some thought and like, hey, does the name really matter? And I think where I'm landing right now is that the name may not help you, but it can hurt you. I mean, the two schools I thought, one school thought is you name yourself books.com. Other school thought I name yourself Amazon, which you know, could sell books, right?
And I like the clarity of Timescale because it was like, hey, Timeseries. But you know, in hindsight, it was limiting. Like Tiger, dude, Tiger could be anything. Tigers are cool.
Tigers are cool. One of the things that you have now, I think, is this burgeoning idea of agents in our databases, right? And I think I'm at this point where there was this arc of acceptance, I would describe it, of, hey, come on, how AI hype, I'm over it too much, this and that. And I think the game changed when Cloud Code changed the game.
That's where I really think it happened. I had been a user of chat GPT, like many people. I'd been the API to do something in chat GPT and copy it out somewhere else. Whether it was written material, whether it was an idea, whether it was a framework in terms of a thought framework or maybe even a bash script, because AI is pretty good at bash script.
And then you kind of get to this other side where you're like, you know what? Wow, agentic is really revolutionary. And I think Cloud Code really changed that game from the new browser or the new destination point for developers. It is still in the IDE, right?
And that's still taking place today. But I think you're seeing this shift to the CLI that is just truly revolutionary that now the terminal, it was never not cool, but it's cool again, right? A lot of folks are hanging out there. Cloud Code kind of put that on the map in a way.
And then a lot of folks decide to fall that direction. And I imagine that's kind of what you thought too, was like, I'm probably doing a lot of agentic coding. You're probably playing with side proctors, you're getting curious again. And you're like, well, the next best thing is to, how can I just talk to my database?
How can I just put an agent in my post-res? Talk about that. Yeah, I think, yes. I had a very similar experience with Cloud Code.
I remember one of my friends talking about agentic workloads in 2023. And I remember thinking like, what are you talking about? What is agentic? What does that mean?
And now I use agentic at least five times a day. Yeah. And Cloud Code was that moment. Cloud Code, I mean, Chatsy Piti was cool.
But it was like a party trick. It was kind of cool. It could edit for me. For developers, it was a part trick.
I mean, for everyone else, it's pretty powerful. But as a developer and Chatsy Piti, it's not the right interface. Cloud Code. Yes, but not.
I remember building, because I was trying to talk to a friend. I was trying to talk to a friend. And he was like, oh, can we build an app that tracks push-ups? And I'm like, I don't know.
Let's try it. And I think 45 minutes later, we, Chatsy Piti, Cloud had gone out and found the right computer vision library and other stuff. And I had a mobile web app that would use computer vision to detect if you're doing a push-up or not. And it didn't get it always right, but it got her at maybe 80% of the time, which was pretty good for 45 minutes of work.
And I remember thinking, dude, I can build anything. I can build anything now. And I went with you. I think Cloud Code, if I was like, wow, this is actually an agent doing work for me, writing code, making decisions.
I can steer it, making me more productive. And we're going to a social event that night. And I couldn't even talk to people because I was so excited. I went home early.
I was like, I need to go back to Cloud Code. I'm like, I've got to go. I'm trying to talk to people about Cloud Code. And they're like, are you OK?
No, this thing's amazing. You've got to try it. Was it nerds or was it non-people? It was partners, vulnerable people.
But even the nerds were like, I mean, Cloud Code had just come out. I think it was still like, yeah, I use Cloud. I'm like, no, not Cloud Code. Yeah.
You know? No, I mean, you know what I told you about that experience and identity six using the internet for the first time? That's what this felt like. Number one, it felt like, I don't know what this is, but I want to be a part of this.
This is fun, right? But also, it brought me, and I know a lot of my peers I feel this way, it kind of brought out this child's sense of wonder that I think, here's being an entrepreneur, had kind of beaten down. And it kind of brought it back to the surface to be like, is this fun? This is fun.
The way technology should be fun. Where you're just like, I just want to tinker with this. I don't know what I can build. I just want to build things, explore this new world together.
And yeah, so I'm really excited. I mean, I think as a company, we're excited because we see this trend that 80% of Cloud Code is written by Claude. The majority of new software that are next 12 months will be written by AI. We already have customers who tell us that 70% of their code is written by agents.
And you just look at this, you say, OK, that's happening, then what else is happening? Well, that means the surface area of software development needs to evolve for agents, right? So the surface area of databases. So not databases are serving a new user, not serving a human, they're serving a human using an agent.
So then you ask yourself, OK, then how does a database need to evolve for that? Well, number one, it's less of a GUI. So you remember databases went from on-prem to SAS by cloud. But now you're going from SAS to, I don't know, MCP, CLI.
It's like, the interface is totally different. It's no longer clicking, right? It's more like commands. And there's some other things too.
Like you want databases to boot instantly, you want to be the fork, and create sandboxes quickly in a safe way. It costs effective way. You probably want native search, native memory. Yeah, I mean, so I'm just excited, as the little kid in me, who just loves building things, excited.
But also as a company, it's like, yeah, this feels like a problem somewhat should solve. And the answer is probably Postgres, and we might as well solve it. This lyric lands for me in this moment. It's from, I don't know this by memory, but it's from Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell.
Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing, baby. So when you're in chat, GPT, and you're just ideating the future of what your software thing could be. If that's what you're kind of hanging out at, versus that experience of in-cloud code doing the same thing, but it's making the thing, right? It's making the real thing, and you're seeing the real thing change.
And maybe it's, maybe you don't get commits. Maybe you're doing spec driven or document driven development, and you're thinking a ton, and you're writing it down, or it's writing it for you, or it's writing the markdown. But the idea is in the vision and the direction is coming from your lived experience and your wisdom, and places you've been, and values, and cultists actually have been down. They're like, just not going there.
They may try to take you there, which is like, no, no, no. Hang on, let's grab that back. Let's go here. But you're seeing the real thing being made.
That to me was the, was I think the moment where I was like, that's pretty wild. Really? And, and, it could be like, OK, cool. Commit those changes and push them upstream.
Yeah. You know? And so you're like, oh, it's actually fitting, because Gonna use Replitter, loveable. They're fine.
But I was like, OK, cool, but I don't build this way. Maybe other people do. I don't. But now I'm like, yeah, I build this way.
Like, yeah, commit the changes, push it upstream. Like, yeah, cool, great. Show me the diff. You know, I laugh about this and I don't know how often you laugh about this, but I love when it makes a plan.
It's like, well, this is week one. This is week two and this is week three. Meanwhile, four hours later, the thing's done, you know, or an hour later, whatever the number is. That is always funny.
Yeah. I like how it manifests its time ranges. But I'm like, it's kind of funny, you know, it's still making a plan or it's making a plan with you. And the range of its time frame is, is maybe it's actually accurate to how it should be if it was done with a team of humans versus a team of one with an agent and an idea.
And I think that's kind of loud. It's just the. Or maybe it's just under promising over delivering, because that's like a new psychology. Something's going on there.
Even though even your mention of, you know, we had a conversation, you and I a few weeks back, you mentioned the same thing. You mentioned this childlike play and that's kind of definition of flow. Like flow state is that when you're in that state of flow, that state of play, a lot can happen there. You stay more engaged.
It's kind of, it's kind of addicting away. I'm a big fan of that idea, the concept of play. When something feels like play, that's when you know you're like, you're in it, like you're in the flow. You are doing the thing you should be doing.
Yeah. And if I ever read a book, I think the title will probably be play because I feel like that should be the driver. It's like look for things that feel like play. Because then those are things that really kind of fit who you are.
And you can find something that feels like play and also let's you kind of support yourself for your family. Yeah, that's the jackpot, right? Yeah. But the AI story kind of reminded me of something when the personal computer came out in the late 70s, people struggled how to describe it probably similar to how we struggled describing Shagie, between Claude today.
And Steve Jobs, who was probably the best one of the best tech marketers of all time, either he came up with this or Apple came up with this. But they would talk about how a computer is like a bicycle for your mind, which is like kind of a weird analogy. But like I get it, right? Because back then you're like, hey, this thing is like pre-spread sheet, right?
Hey, this thing, like we don't know what the key use cases are. But kind of like how a bicycle that you get from point to point B faster, like this is just making you better. And that's how about Claude code. And there's all this discussion about like, hey, are you just going to replace us?
I mean, maybe some of the things we do. But for most of the things, I think it'll be like a bicycle. It'll just help us get from point A to point B faster. Yeah, I don't know.
I think that's part of the joy. It's being like, hey, this thing that used to take me a week, or I couldn't even do before now and get done in an afternoon, totally throw it away and start again like the next day. Try to juxtapose the time frame of IoT company using Postgres, needing time series, engineer, developer, employee, whatever. Comes to you and says, I could do this in Postgres, I could do it in a month, you're like, you're ambitious.
You could do it three months, 12 months later. That whole story juxtaposed that time to idea, to CLI. And we haven't even talked about the CLI yet. But getting to this point of agentic Postgres and building what it is, how fast did you go from idea to using the thing?
I'm going a lot faster. I think a day? I don't even know, man. I think this is a theme in the AI land, just ship.
Just ship, right? Right. We had a mixed company, so we have a slightly higher bar than maybe a classic app, but like, just ship. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a shift between, it used to be hard to build.
But now it's much easier to build, which probably means that the bottleneck then becomes a distribution and awareness. Which is like, I think something similar to what, you know, the iPhone is- It's just exacerbated now. Yeah, but I remember once upon a time, pre AWS, and you probably remember this too, which is like, to start a company, you need to serve a rack. You need maybe a couple of sun, micro, but you could use some machines in Oracle AI database.
And like, just to get started with such a high bar that a lot of people couldn't do it. I was actually going to say, I think it's what the smartphone did a photography, right? Like once upon a time, being a photographer was really hard, even before digital cameras, right? And you don't want to take so many shots, you have to develop it, it would take time, it was hard to get right.
You know, you would have to actually apply physical filters and physical lenses to change the thing. And with the smartphone, everyone became a photographer. And what that meant was that like, in the past, having great photos was set you apart. But now it's like, anyone can create a great photo, but how many followers do you have on Instagram?
You know, so kind of getting shifted to the burden from photography scale to like distribution. And I feel like we're going to go through something similar with software. How much do you know about the, I suppose, the details of the CLI and the MCP server that is, that is in your product. Because I felt pretty, when I look behind the scenes of the open source of that, you know, it's elegant, the way you've married a CLI and an MCP server in a single binary.
Like that's right. That's pretty wild. I think the design is, I had to borrow it honestly. That's great.
I got a couple of things I'm working on that are, one is a DNS resolver, and I want to like talk to the resolver. And so the obvious answer is to have an API, right? But then you also have to have a CLI that talks to the API. But then I'm like, why am I actually using an agent?
So I'm taking a playbook from a J and tag your data. And agent to Postgres. And well, the same CLI can offer an MCP server running at the same time. And you can talk to it and get back JSON for the agent or get back CLI response for the human.
Like the design there was so elegant. I want to know what you know about that design. I know the team that built it is really smart. You know, I know I think they looked at a couple of different options.
I think the way it works right now is that the CLI will run a local MCP server, which then speaks to a remote one that we have. And the remote one is where we index the RMCP will allow you to do things with Postgres and Tiger, but also lets you search the Postgres documentation, download best practices. And so we put that on its own kind of remote MCP server. I think MCP in general is such an interesting area.
And I feel like a lot of people hate on it because it seems so simplistic. But I think just the idea that people talk about in the physical world, like the idea of a design affordance, you know, this concept, it's this idea that like when you see something, like when you see this mug and you see this thing, you know, you can hold this right, right? You know, it's kind of like a door handle. You're like, I know I can turn this.
There's one reason why Tesla door handles trips on people off because they don't see the handle. What's going on? Yeah, it's just a day. I think that's bad design.
But an affordance is when the tool teaches you how to use it because it's designed the right way. Like games, like Mario, the Super Mario Brothers, the first game was like, that was why it was, that's right, level one was level one. It was teaching how to play level two and three and four. And so this is where MCP, to me, is not just an API.
It's essentially a way to expose tools for agents. So essentially think about like, hey, we used to make these handles for human hands, but now we're going to make them for agent hands. And that is a really growing art and topic who developed MCP. They're still learning best practices.
I think that's really interesting, you know, it's to figure out what proper tool design looks like. How many tools is too many? You know, I think right now tools are mainly a wrapper around APIs, but I think it'd be cool if they were actually doing the job, you know, not just the API. Yeah.
So I think the team's also good stuff. There's some really other, some good stuff that we're going to release soon. Yeah. But I think MCP, I think MCP design, I think this is his idea of a designing for a new user, the agent is, I think, a really fascinating area.
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Going for the term dev tools. And now we have agent tools. That's right. Right.
That's how I think about things. I've done a couple of toy seal eyes just to play with them. One for Proxmox. I'm a homelabber.
I don't know what kind of nerd you are, but I love to homelab. And one of the epicenters of my homelab is some version of a Raspberry Pi somewhere or an Intel NUC or maybe a slightly bigger one, which is a NAS, which is usually true NAS. And the next best big thing in the network for me, at least, is a Proxmox machine, which is dedicated to where I can do different things, whether it's a service or think with something or play with a new version of Linux or just distro hop or distro play. I don't even describe it.
But as I've explored this world a bit and I've understood what it's like, because I've never really built many seal eyes before. And I was like, well, the next thing you want to do there is really just you want to enable now that we have agent decoding. It's almost ubiquitous. So when you build a tool or you build a new seal eye, you think about a new way to create an API with a seal eye that lets you talk to a service, it's you can assume or presume pretty good with pretty decent accuracy that the person may be using an agent, likely using an agent or at least has one nearby and is working towards being okay with that.
Some people are still not okay with that. So I was like, you know, it only makes sense now that when you design these tools, you can't just design the old way, which was one design this obviously to solve a human problem. So it's going to be a human using it. Now we have humans that are still there.