Happy 5th Birthday Supabase In the last 5 years we’ve made countless mistakes - too many to list - so instead I’m going to write out some of the big things I think we got really right and helped turn @supabase into the product, company, and open source community it is today. Finding the right co-founders Deciding who to work with is the very first decision we got majorly right. From my perspective there’s very few people in the tech world who work as hard as @kiwicopple does. As a pair we don’t labor on decision making, I think this comes from each being willing to compromise our position because we believe in the competency of the other, and it turns out this scales further than just co-founders. Our early hires all behave in this way. We trust each other’s ability to execute and own large parts of the business. @Rorstro for example runs everything revenue related, and @everConfusedGuy runs product and engineering. Both quit their previous startups to work on Supabase and the founder mindset that they both possess means they take on responsibility by the truck load without needing to be asked. There are ex-founders in many key positions in Supabase, and it shows in the flexibility of the organization. The team have effortlessly adapted to large and ongoing changes in the way software is being built, both inside of large corporations and by fast growing one-person startups. Viewing Support as part of the product I think the first “Head of” we appointed in year 1 was a Head of Support. We always saw our ability to offer a truly world class support experience as a major advantage we would have over competing services. We even went as far as writing “Your number one responsibility is front line customer support” at the top of everyone’s contract, regardless of role. And we still do that today. We don’t care if you’re CFO or designing UI components, if you see a customer experiencing an issue then it’s your duty to assist. Support will never be an afterthought at Supabase. Once we grew past just a handful of team members our remote first nature enabled us to fairly quickly offer 24/7/365 support. Much earlier than a typical organisation of our size would usually be able to do so. Now, having devs and support engineers across more than 30 countries means there’s never a moment in which we won’t be around to assist with potential issues. Choosing Remote first As it turns out, round the clock support is just one of many benefits of having a remote and globally distributed team. We were part of a small cohort of tech companies founded around the start of 2020 that due to The Great Remote Revelation (something which I feel has since been mostly forgotten) were not expected to move to San Francisco to unlock funding. We always felt that all the most important work is done hands-on-keyboard, and so far - this continues to be true. Being fully globally remote and with no geo-adjustment on salaries means that we can hire the very best person for the job regardless of where in the world they happen to live and without needing to trade off on our requirement of being an incredible human being who is a pleasure to work with every single day. This has been great for culture, and fantastic for the quality of life for the folks who work at Supabase. Making Everyone an Owner A couple of days ago I got asked by a technology leader of a much larger, more established business, “if all of your staff work remotely, how do you know they’re working and not playing video games all day?”. My answer was one of motivation, and one of the ways we choose to motivate folks is through meaningful company ownership with a 10 year exercise window. A challenge here however is that folks in different geographies value stock in very different ways. Those familiar with Silicon Valley startups typically want as much stock as they can get. Some others, who may not be that familiar with the dynamics of fast growing startups would sooner choose an additional $1 of cash over $50 of equity. We educate new joiners as much as possible on the potential upside of Supabase stock and are as transparent as possible with everyone within the company on the dynamics of fundraising and the impact it has on their ownership. We’ve found this does indeed translate into some incredible outcomes (both for the business and for Supabase team members individually), and is something we’ll continue to invest heavily in. Building the Platform from Day 1 A lot of open source software companies start self-hosted and offer services before later expanding into a hosted cloud offering (think MongoDB). At Supabase we decided to offer a managed service from day 1. It wasn’t as obvious a decision as it might seem today. Managing databases is a capital intensive business requiring a large team of experts, constant security and abuse management, and an extremely capable support team. Something we had to build from scratch. But boy are we glad we did it this way around. Platform considerations inform product more than you might think, and scale is built naturally into everything we do. It was also a more natural path to monetization, since the part of running a database people typically hate the most is configuration and infrastructure management - folks scaling fast readily hand that part off. Don’t Build, Don’t Buy Being fully open source wasn’t so much a decision for us as a core belief that this is objectively the best way to build sustainable software. There was one decision we made early on related to OSS however that helped us on our way. Whenever faced with demand for a new product or feature, we start by scouring the earth to find an existing open source tool and associated community we can adopt and embrace. As a good example, all the Go server code for Supabase Auth was originally written and maintained by @Netlify. We backed @andrewkane's pg_vector project early on before it went on to revolutionize the vector storage space, and we also heavily invest in the long term sustainability of the @postgrest_org project which powers our Auto-generated APIs. There are times of course that suitable tools don’t exist (perhaps they’re written in Java) and we’re forced to build or buy, but default mode is to Adopt and Support. Taking the right partners During the ZIRP (zero interest rate phenomenon area) period and with clear product market fit and traction we had the rare luxury of lots of potential suitors when it came to raising money. We started by going round all the smartest techies we knew - folks like @swyx, @biilmann, @Chr_Bach, and @rauchg and asked them to invest. These folks continue to give incredible advice and in the early days helped bootstrap our product marketing efforts across social media. We took funding from @ycombinator which was a natural launch pad for a business like ours, and went on to build a close relationship with @DavidCahn6 and @carynm650 of Coatue. Caryn, having led comms at Meta across their most explosive eras of growth, I feel will never truly be impressed by our growth numbers - and she’s right: capturing developer mindshare is not enough, we’re seeing now that AI powered developer tools are actually expanding (read: exploding) the TAM of DevTools - and the companies able to position themselves effectively will grow orders of magnitude larger than any previous generation company ever could. We Rode the Big Waves In the five years we’ve been building Supabase, there have been about as many major tech movements. Each time we managed to strike early addressing the emerging usecase without straying from our core competencies. Make no doubt that Supabase is a database company, and it turns out just about everyone/everything needs a database (Metaverse devices, NFT marketplaces, RAG systems, AI agents). Choosing Postgres for it’s exensibility was the best decision we made in our 5 years, and we now have an entire team of Postgres Hackers dedicated to making Postgres better for everyone. If I’m writing this post again in 5, 10, or 20 years - it will be because we doubled down on Postgres every time. I’m eternally grateful for everyone in the team and community who has helped us over the last 5 years, and to those who continue to support us every single day. I can’t wait for what comes next.

@OpenAI joining mega launch week

We're seeing a lot of AI customers combining @supabase and @clickhouse Let me show how you can use these tools together yourself, why you would, and a few updates both Supabase and ClickHouse are releasing today to make this easier 🧵

We are now beyond the threshold of asking ourselves if generative models can generate consistent videos. A good model is now the new baseline. Generating pixels with prompts has become a commodity. The difference lies (as it has always been) in what you do with a model - how you think about its applications and use cases, and what you ultimately build. There has been an obsession with technology, with people trying to figure out what to do with models. Now is the time to start from the other side and work backwards to the technology. The why matters. Finally.