PODCAST · technology
Dev Propulsion Labs
by Evil Martians
Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San Francisco with founders behind companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale to talk about what actually makes developer-focused businesses work. Dev Propulsion Labs is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Enjoyed by 45K+ listeners.
Episodes
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William Imoh, founder of Hackmamba: AEO is just good SEO | Evil Martians podcast
William Imoh, founder and CEO of Hackmamba (https://hackmamba.io/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why AI search optimization is mostly just good SEO that has had time to compound, how developer-facing companies end up marketing to an audience that will never buy, and what it…
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Kate Holterhoff of RedMonk: AI slop, agent experience & the open source crisis | Evil Martians
Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk (https://redmonk.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about what AI is doing to open source, developer tools, and the analyst business itself. She also shares her winding path to the role: painting murals in Cincinnati, a Carnegie Mellon…
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Matt Biilmann of Netlify: why agent experience is the new developer experience | Evil Martians
Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify (https://www.netlify.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why agent experience (AX) is replacing developer experience in developer tools. He also shares how Netlify went from a bootstrapped two-person team to the deployment platform...
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Lingo.dev co-founder Max Prilutskiy: AI localization, AX, and having a lean team | Evil Martians
Max Prilutskiy, CEO and co-founder of Lingo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why localization is still far from a solved problem in the age of AI, how a six-person team ships 56 pull requests a week, and what agent experience actually means for developer tools in 2026. He also...
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Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast
Amir Rustamzadeh, partner at Firestreak Ventures, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to spot a force-of-nature founder before anyone else does, why most developer tool ideas are no longer venture scale, and what the current state of VC really looks like for early-stage founders.…
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Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast
Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder and COO of TrueFoundry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to sell enterprise AI infrastructure when nobody trusts you yet, how TrueFoundry evolved from an ML deployment platform inspired by Meta's FB Learner into a full enterprise AI gateway, and why...
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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 podcast In 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…
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CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill shares how CodeRabbit went viral in Japan before anywhere else, why AI code generation makes code review more important not less, and what it takes to run PLG and enterprise sales at the same time. He breaks down how open source...
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David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast
David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast David Gomes, product engineer at Cursor, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why the world's best engineers are fully adopting AI while half of developers haven't started, why AI coding is a...
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Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast
Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast Monica Sarbu, founder and CEO of Xata, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how Xata pivoted from an Airtable-style builder tool to a modern Postgres platform focused on database branching...
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Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev: intent signals and devtool GTM | Evil Martians podcast
Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why go-to-market is the hardest unsolved problem in developer tools, how companies can have millions of open-source users and still not know who their customers are, and why timing beats volume when selling to...
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David Cramer, founder of Sentry: building for the Fortune 500,000 | Evil Martians podcast
David Cramer, founder of Sentry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built a developer tool used by 4 million+ developers without partnerships or enterprise sales — purely through bottom-up adoption and mass-market pricing. He explains why 20-year-olds should stop starting...
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Abhi Aiyer, co-founder of Mastra: TypeScript for AI agents and making moves | Evil Martians podcast
Abhi Aiyer, CTO and co-founder of Mastra, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why TypeScript is overtaking Python for AI agents, how education-first marketing turned a free book into Mastra's biggest growth channel, and why they raised their seed round from 120+ builder-investors...
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Michael Grinich, founder of WorkOS: the plumbing behind OpenAI and Cursor | Evil Martians podcast
Michael Grinich, founder and CEO of WorkOS, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how WorkOS became the invisible infrastructure powering enterprise features for OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel. He explains why AI companies need enterprise readiness faster than any...
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Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona: walking from $300K ARR to build for agents | Evil Martians podcast
Ivan Burazin, CEO and founder of Daytona, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why he walked away from $300K ARR to rebuild his company from scratch for the age of AI agents. He explains why agents will outnumber humans to the power of ten, how Daytona creates composable computers that...
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Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone: scaling to 5M developers with no meetings | Evil Martians podcast
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone reveals why hiring ex-founders with beaten-down egos builds better products, how internal meme workshops became part of their culture, and why vibe coding isn't a bubble that will burst. He shares the accidental origin of…
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Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale: databases that never go down | Evil Martians podcast
Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how PlanetScale stayed up during the AWS outage that took down millions of sites, why they grew Vitess usage 61,000% in four years, and what it actually costs to build tier-zero infrastructure that never goes down.…
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Zeno Rocha, founder of Resend: $18M Series A by obsessing over every detail | Evil Martians podcast
Zeno Rocha, founder and CEO of Resend, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built an $18M Series A email API company by ruthlessly cutting scope to ship perfect products fast. He shares why seeking rejection accelerates growth, how building work so good your heroes want to copy…
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Jeff Huber, co-founder of Chroma: context engineering and modern AI search | Evil Martians podcast
Jeff Huber, co-founder and CEO of Chroma, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why RAG became industry brain rot, how context engineering replaced it as the real job to be done, and what it takes to build modern search infrastructure for AI. He shares his framework for commercializing...
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Sarah Wooders on why LLMs are like Memento and building the infrastructure for stateful AI agents
Join us for a conversation with Sarah Wooders, CTO & co-founder of Letta AI, as she reveals why LLMs are not there yet and how stateful agents will unlock the next generation of AI applications. From Berkeley PhD to YC alum to building the infrastructure for truly intelligent agents. Key insights...
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Adam Frankl on why 2025 is the best year ever to build a developer tool startup
Join us for an incredible conversation with Adam Frankl - author, advisor, investor, and the final boss of development marketing. In this episode, we dive deep into the biggest challenges facing developer tool startups in 2025 and how to overcome them. On the AI boom opportunity: 2025 has gotta…
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Jason Bosco on building a profitable search engine serving 10 billion searches without VC funding
Jason Bosco, CEO and co-founder of TypeSense, shares how he and his co-founder built a profitable search engine serving 10 billion searches monthly without taking VC funding. From Dollar Shave Club VP of Engineering to bootstrapped founder, Jason reveals the unconventional path to building...
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Anna Veronika Dorogush on why having high-density talent on the team is crucial for Recraft
Anna Veronika Dorogush, founder and CEO of Recraft, reveals how she built one of the world's leading AI image generation platforms by solving real professional design problems instead of chasing AI hype. Some key insights: "My whole back-end team is medalists and finalists of World Championship…
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Michael Magán, co-founder at tambo ai, on how a friendly octopus makes AI more approachable
Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools Links: - tambo ai: https://tambo.co/ - Michael Magán on X: https://x.com/mrmagan_ - Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians - Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
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José Valim, creator of Elixir: building a language from curiosity, not trends | Evil Martians podcast
José Valim, creator of Elixir and founder of Dashbit, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how following curiosity over market trends led him to build one of the most loved programming languages. He shares why he made technical decisions over adoption-friendly ones, how decentralizing...
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Adam Wenchel, CEO at Arthur AI, on building AI guardrails, the last mile problem, and coaching code bots
Adam Wenchel has been building AI infrastructure since before it was cool. As CEO and co-founder of Arthur AI, he's spent six years solving the "last mile problem" - getting AI from impressive demos to reliable production systems. In this conversation, we dive deep into why Adam open sources...
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Sam Bhagwat on Gatsby and Mastra, YC and tapping into your inner child
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, we sit down with Sam Bhagwat, the dev tools visionary who co-founded Gatsby and is now transforming AI development with Mastra - the TypeScript framework that's rapidly gaining adoption among serious AI developers. After selling Gatsby to Netlify, Sam...
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Jono Bacon, former Director of Community at GitHub & Ubuntu, author of “People Powered”
Your dev tool needs to harness the power of community — whether you’re building your own or connecting to larger forums. The new episode of the Dev Propulsion Labs podcast is packed with Jono Bacon’s insights on building relationships with your audience: he has built over 300(!) open source...
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Alice Chen, CTO & Co-Founder at OpenContext
We’re blasting off the third season of our podcast with a new host, Irina Nazarova, CEO at Evil Martians, and a new guest—Alice Chen, CTO & Co-Founder at OpenContext, a platform that drives clarity of context across the organization. Prior to co-founding OpenContext in 2021, Alice rose up in the...
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DHH: 20 years of Ruby on Rails and why one developer can build everything | Evil Martians podcast
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp and HEY, reflects on 20 years of building Rails, why he believes single developers with the right framework can build entire products, and how he's changed his mind on...
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Hahnbee Lee - Co-Founder at Mintlify
This week's guest is Hahnbee Lee, Co-Founder at Mintlify. Prior to founding Mintlify, Hahnbee co-founded pe•ple and worked as a software engineer at Duolingo. The best developer companies (think Stripe, Twilio, MongoDB) have effective and user-centric documentation at their backbone. Mintlify…
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Miško Hevery - BuilderIO, Angular, Qwik
As the CTO of Builder.io, Miško Hevery directs the technological prowess behind the platform's innovative projects including Qwik, a web framework for building instant loading apps and sites. Prior to this, Miško played a pivotal role in Google, not only pioneering Angular and AngularJS but also...
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Shanea Leven - CodeSee
Shanea Leven is CEO and co-founder of CodeSee. CodeSee is a developer platform that helps developers master understanding codebases. CodeSee's mission is to build software better. Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products....
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Ivar Østhus - Unleash
Ivar Østhus is the Co-founder and CTO at Unleash, an open-source feature management software for Enterprises. What started as a side gig in a basement in Norway, Ivar and his brother turned their SaaS into a full time business in early 2021. The tool allows teams to build features together, ship...
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Peer Richelsen - Cal.com
This week we are featuring Peer Richelsen who is disrupting the scheduling space with the open-sourced Cal.com. Tooltips Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. https://evilmartians.com/
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Monica Sarbu - Xata
This week's guest is Monica Sarbu, Founder and CEO at Xata, a serverless database platform powered by PostgreSQL. Prior to that, she worked on an open-source monitoring solution called Packetbeat which was acquired by Elastic in 2015. She is also the co-founder of tupu.io, a non-profit initiative...
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Nikita Shamgunov - Neon
This week we are learning from Nikita Shamgunov, CEO at Neon and Partner at Khosla Ventures who previously co-founded MemSQL and scaled to ~40M ARR. Neon is fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. They separate storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and…
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Stefan Avram - WunderGraph
This week we talk to Stefan Avram, Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Wundergraph, a Backend for Frontend Framework to optimize frontend, fullstack and backend developer workflows through API Composition. Tooltips Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San Francisco with founders behind companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale to talk about what actually makes developer-focused businesses work.
Dev Propulsion Labs is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Enjoyed by 45K+ listeners.
HOSTED BY
Evil Martians
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Dev Propulsion Labs have?
Dev Propulsion Labs currently has 38 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Dev Propulsion Labs about?
Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San...
How often does Dev Propulsion Labs release new episodes?
Dev Propulsion Labs has 38 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Dev Propulsion Labs?
You can listen to Dev Propulsion Labs on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Dev Propulsion Labs?
Dev Propulsion Labs is created and hosted by Evil Martians.
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