Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcastIn this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acquisition closed in 30 days with 90 lawyers. He explains why Neon skipped sharding, how Replit's agents stress-tested their infrastructure overnight, and why the current moment is a gold rush for builders who stay in the loop.Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians.https://x.com/vmelnikova_enEvil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.https://evilmartians.com/Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable.https://www.trychroma.com00:00 Intro00:34 Who is Stas Kelvich?01:42 From quantum physics to software engineering05:10 How Stas became a key Postgres contributor06:08 Early career: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Postgres06:57 Why databases as a field keep pulling him in09:47 The early days of Neon and the co-founder origin story13:42 Key bets: building the cloud, separating storage and compute16:38 Enterprise vs. product-led growth strategy18:54 Why Neon didn't solve sharding — and why that was right23:03 Designing for the agent era without planning for it25:44 How Replit's agents stress-tested Neon's infrastructure26:42 Agent experience and fraud considerations32:00 Can you tell if a database was created by an agent?33:06 The $1B Databricks acquisition story38:59 Closing the deal in 30 days with 90 lawyers40:27 Why Neon kept its brand post-acquisition43:24 Life inside Databricks one year later47:41 Market trends for technical founders in 202651:09 Using AI in day-to-day engineering work54:15 What makes Stas feel great54:49 Could AI accelerate theoretical physics research?58:06 How to get started with Neon