Dev Propulsion Labs

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 behind Bolt, Lovable, and ChatGPT-generated sites. Matt is excited by agentic coding and explains the addressable market for Netlify just jumped from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion people. He shares the four pillars of agent experience (access, context, tools, and orchestration), why leading with developer experience beat leading with performance or security in Netlify's early days, and why he believes everyone is about to become at least somewhat of a developer. 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_en Evil 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.com

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 shares his journey from a hackathon with zero ideas to Y Combinator, how 30 cold exploration calls taught him more about messaging than any sales book, and why he rebuilt the entire Lingo.dev platform from scratch in December and January. Plus, Max gives a candid take on what didn't work in go-to-market, why word of mouth remains the only reliable growth channel, and how source code is becoming the ultimate input for AI agents. 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_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/devtools 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.com

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. He also shares his journey from interning on NASA's Curiosity Rover at Jet Propulsion Labs to sleeping in his car at SpaceX, to coining the developer experience role at Cypress, to becoming a hands-on investor backing companies like Lovable, Daytona, and Perplexity. Plus, Amir gives a rare, sober take on inflated seed valuations, why big-name firms at pre-seed can hurt more than help, and where he still sees opportunity in the race to build infrastructure for agents. 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_en Evil 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.com

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 every Fortune 1000 company now can't avoid AI. He shares why trust is the only exchange currency in enterprise sales, how thought leadership and education sessions replaced cold outreach, and why voice agents are the next big niche to bet on.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.com

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

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 became their best marketing channel, why the old startup playbooks don't work anymore, and why the next Amazon is already being founded right now.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/

David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcastDavid 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 learnable skill that takes practice, and how he built a 50-person engineering team in Portugal from scratch. He shares what it was like going through Neon's $1B Databricks acquisition, why diverse teams outperform business-obsessed ones, and why his next company will be his own.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 Introduction and guest welcome01:44 Current state of AI-assisted coding and market adoption03:33 Developer resistance to change: senior vs junior engineers05:19 World's best engineers fully adopting AI coding07:36 Having personalized workflows08:19 Different engineering styles inside Cursor10:42 AI coding as a learnable skill requiring practice14:12 Future of agent coding and AI SREs15:35 Growing up in Europe vs living in America19:27 David's career path: competitive programming to SF26:17 Building a 50-person engineering team in Portugal29:50 Working at Neon and the $1B Databricks acquisition32:50 Why developer tools experience is universal39:35 Having a diverse team of engineers42:05 Leveraging your coworkers' strengths44:00 David's blog and writing philosophy46:00 The engineer-manager pendulum and startup ambitions47:23 Customer love as the only metric that matters48:34 Try Cursor with Neon and Databricks MCP servers

Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcastMonica 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 and developer velocity. She shares why they rebuilt the platform from scratch, how asking "what's your biggest problem?" instead of "what's your problem with Postgres?" changed everything, and why hiring a gender-diverse team with complementary skills leads to better products.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.com

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 developers. He shares how three months of nonstop customer conversations shaped Reo.dev, why their first product was a Google Sheet, and how intent signals turned a 2% response rate into 26%.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.com

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 companies and go learn from other people's mistakes first, how he delegated both CEO and CTO roles while keeping immense influence without a title, and why Sentry builds for the Fortune 500,000 instead of the Fortune 500.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.com

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 instead of traditional VCs. He shares why "generosity breeds luck" became a core principle, how YC convinced him to leave LA for San Francisco, and why good documentation means optimizing for not talking to people.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.com

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 previous generation of SaaS, why product always beats sales methodology, and why forcing yourself to talk to users is the only algorithm that burns out bad ideas. Michael shares the moment he fired his entire marketing team, how Webflow's CTO integrated WorkOS over a weekend, and why the best product is one that disappears.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.com

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 agents can spin up on demand, and what it means to race competitors on a moving train. Ivan shares hard-won lessons from 16 years building cloud development environments — starting with Codeanywhere in 2009, a decade before the market was ready.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.com

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 Launch Weeks, explains why Supabase is building for a 30-year timeline, and breaks down how they scaled to 5 million developers across 40 countries with barely any meetings.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.com

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. He shares the journey from a 750-user consultancy to hundreds of thousands of developers, why operational excellence beats feature velocity, and why vibe-coded databases are a completely different market from what PlanetScale builds.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.com

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 it became Resend's north star, and why a 20,000-person waitlist before launch came from years of building a founder brand. Zeno also breaks down investing $3M in email security, why the hybrid work model is the worst of both worlds, and how open source became Resend's launchpad — not its business model.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.com

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 open source — keep the engine open, monetize the car — why consensus is a death blow for great products, and how small opinionated teams with low egos build the best developer tools.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/

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 from this episode.On the core problem with LLMs:"It's kind of like if you've seen the movie Memento... if you have a person that just forgets every single day or forgets every five minutes... That's basically what LLMs are."Why 2025 feels like the early Internet:"I feel like with AI, this is our version of that. There's just so much opportunity. Everything is so undefined. There's a ton of white space... so much low hanging fruit."The difference between real agents and marketing fluff:"A lot of people just added LLMs into [existing workflows] and then called them an agent... that's inherently still very different from something that's like an agent that has identity, that works autonomously, that learns."On building in the AI boom vs 2020:"Right now is a much better time to be building a startup... the amount of value that's just being created and that you can capture is so much more."What's still missing in AI infrastructure:"MCP is super early... there's a ton of differences in how people implement the protocol. Auth hasn't really been figured out. There's a big lack of standardization."Why open source matters for AI tools:"We want to do that agentic orchestration in an open way... allowing developers to have as much control as possible over their context window, being able to see what tokens are going in and out."Links:Letta AI: https://letta.comSarah Wooders on X: https://x.com/sarahwoodersEvil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartiansVictoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_enEvil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools#AI #Agents #LLM #Startups #OpenSource #AItooling #StatefulAgents

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 be the best year ever for starting a developer tool startup because there is so much chaos, and that's what makes this exciting.The #1 mistake founders make:Problem not product. Become an expert on the problem. Talk about the problem. Write about the problem... Too many founders they wanna talk about the product. They want to demo the product... And quite frankly, no one is interested.Why you need to be obsessed:You have to pick a problem that the problem also picks you. It's the type of problem that you just can't sleep at night because you're thinking about it... You know when the problem is the right problem because it seizes a hold of your brain.The social media strategy that works:Your mechanistic goal is you wanna be posting about this problem every day. Because you want to be the authority on this problem. Authority author, it's the same root. To be an authority, you have to write.On enterprise sales in 2025:Budgets are being cleared for AI investments, and this is astonishing... top executives are basically clearing budget line items say we're gonna invest in AI.Why San Francisco matters:The reason you come to Silicon Valley is the best customers are here. And you're not gonna be closing these tech 100 companies if you are in Tokyo or Lisbon.The game-changing AI workflow:Make a recording. Make a transcript... And then use an LLM to anonymize but consolidate transcripts. And that can be extraordinarily powerful.Links:- Adam's book: "Developer Facing Startup" (Amazon #1 bestseller): https://www.amazon.com/Developer-Facing-Startup-market-developer-facing/dp/B0D4KGHQML- Alchemist Accelerator: https://www.alchemistaccelerator.com/- Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians- Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_enEvil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools#DeveloperTools #StartupMarketing #AI #Enterprise #SanFrancisco #DevTools

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 sustainable developer tools.Key insights from this episode:"If it is hard for you as a founder to convince someone to pay you, it's never gonna get easier from there." Find what people are willing to pay for early - don't build first and monetize later."We're opinionated and we want search to work out of the box right from the get-go." TypeSense chose simplicity over configurability, targeting 80% of use cases with zero-config search versus Elasticsearch's thousands of parameters."We don't want the gamble on TypeSense the company to end up affecting TypeSense the product." Jason explains why they chose profitability over VC funding to build a multi-generational product without the pressure of 10x returns."Doing dev tools in closed source is like playing it on hard mode." Open source creates better feedback loops with developers, leading to faster product iteration and stronger community adoption.Links:- TypeSense: https://typesense.org/- TypeSense Cloud: https://cloud.typesense.org/- Jason Bosco on X: https://x.com/jasonbosco- Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians- Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_enEvil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools

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 in programming." Strong people attract strong people, creating a talent density that enables a small team to compete with giants."We are just focused on producing the best models in image generation space for designers, for professional use cases." While others built general AI image generators, Recraft targeted designers' specific needs: brand consistency, style control, and professional workflows. "That's the major differentiator between ourselves and other AI native tools is we are building our technology from scratch in-house. And that allows us to solve for professional tasks." Training proprietary models in-house allows solving for your users' exact problems (controlling styles, brand colors, fonts)."At the first stage, think investors mostly are evaluating founders and founding teams. After that, investors are evaluating product market fit and retention and later, monetization starts to be very important. We've raised three rounds so far and on every one of those rounds, different things were considered very important." Links:Recraft: https://www.recraft.ai/Anna Veronika on X: https://x.com/avwritingEvil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartiansVictoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_enEvil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools

Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtoolsLinks:- 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

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 the community let Elixir reach domains he never imagined, and what he's building with Tidewave — higher-level AI tools that understand web frameworks, not just code.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/

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 million-dollar tools, how his enterprise experience at Capital One shaped his approach to developer empathy, and his provocative prediction that we'll soon need fewer developers but better "code bot coaches."What we cover:- Why the gap between 90% demo accuracy and 99% production reliability is make-or-break for AI adoption- The strategic decision to open source Arthur Shield and Bench instead of keeping them proprietary- How working inside a 50,000-person company taught him to build better developer tools- Whether AI will eliminate junior developers (and why the answer isn't what you think)- The future of software development: from 50-person teams to 5 expert coaches- What makes the perfect developer tool (hint: simplicity + a sprinkle of cleverness)Adam's journey from acquiring a 5-person startup to Capital One to building Arthur offers rare insights into both enterprise AI deployment and the evolving landscape of developer productivity. If you're building AI tools, selling to enterprises, or wondering how to future-proof your development career, this conversation is packed with actionable wisdom.Links:- Website: https://www.arthur.ai/- GitHub: https://github.com/arthur-ai/arthur-engine- Adam Wenchel on X: https://x.com/apwenchel- Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians- Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en

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 identified a critical gap in AI tooling that was forcing developers to build complex infrastructure themselves. Now, his YC-backed framework is helping startups and enterprises build production-grade AI agents with far less overhead.You'll discover:- The pivotal moment Sam realized existing AI tools weren't solving the right problems- Strategic insights from his YC Winter 2025 experience that accelerated Mastra's growth- Why TypeScript-first is the right approach for building maintainable AI applications- The thoughtful licensing strategy that balances open-source principles with business sustainability- What current AI frameworks are missing and how Mastra addresses these limitationsFor founders and technical leaders building in the AI space, this conversation offers valuable perspective on navigating the rapidly evolving agent ecosystem while creating a sustainable developer tools business.Links:- Dev Propulsion Labs podcast: https://evilmartians.com/devpropulsionlabs- Try Mastra: npm create mastra@latest- Website: https://mastra.ai- GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra- Book: "Principles of Building AI Agents" on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Building-Agents-Sam-Bhagwat/dp/B0DYH5GHDD- Sam Bhagwat Twitter: https://twitter.com/calcsam- Victoria Melnikova Twitter: https://twitter.com/vmelnikova_enBest comment on YouTube will be rewarded with a free copy of Sam's book

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 communities, including GitHub and Ubuntu, and he still backs many of them on their continued path to sustainability as part of the Community Leadership Core accelerator.Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. The podcast is hosted by Irina Nazarova.

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 ranks of massive companies like HP and Informatica. In our conversation, we dug into her strategies to sell open source to enterprise giants—to help you accomplish your next big sell.Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.

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 everything from TypeScript to overwork culture. He shares how Rails spawned Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb, what he learned from merging with a rival framework, and why hearing a four-year-old laugh beats every material accomplishment.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/

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 helps any company achieve the documentation they need effortlessly, so that they can focus on building what they do best.Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. Podcast host is Victoria Melnikova

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 co-creating Karma.Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.Host: Victoria Melnikova

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.Host: Victoria Melnikova

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 new features in small increments, and enables transparency within teams and stakeholders.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.https://evilmartians.com/

This week we are featuring Peer Richelsen who is disrupting the scheduling space with the open-sourced Cal.com.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.https://evilmartians.com/

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 that offers free mentorship to women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.https://evilmartians.com/

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 bottomless storage.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.https://evilmartians.com/

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.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.https://evilmartians.com/