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...

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 ta...

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...

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 e...

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 contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acq...

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...

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 learnable skill that takes practice, and how he built a 50-person engineering team in Portugal from scrat...

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 and developer velocity. She shares why they rebuilt the platform from scratch, how asking "what's your...

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 fi...

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 ke...

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 convince...

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...

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 har...

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...

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 operationa...

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 buildi...

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...

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 Meme...

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 w...

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...

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 te...

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

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...

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...

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 themselv...