Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale: dropping the free tier was a great decision

I don't feel good that we had to do that, but it was like absolutely one of the best decisions we made. There's so many companies that without a free tier, they would get no growth at all.

I'm joined today by Sam Lambert, who is the CEO of PlanetScale. You probably all know PlanetScale at this point. They have just been taking over the online airwaves.

You might not be thinking in a way that will drive you to be the most successful. I don't think the best people should ever care what their boss thinks. The best people I've always worked with have intrinsic motivation that far exceeds anything their boss could ask from them. It's been complete chaos since that happened. It's just been nuts.

Feels like something tangible has happened from the outside. Is that reality or is it kind of a perception?

Yeah, so I mean, it is reality. I'm always cautious about these things because We're very, we're very kind of very secretive culture at PlanetScale. You know, we don't talk much about things that, you know, uh, are not ready to be chatted about. Right. So like, you know, there's people, but I think people can feel some things happening from the outside, which is really good. The Postgres launch was huge. It's been complete chaos since that happened. We're like 2, we're 2 weeks out now and it's just been nuts, trying to catch up with everyone that wants to move onto the platform. And we're migrating people really rapidly, and that's really awesome. Yeah, like AI has been really interesting for us. I think AI is affecting the database industry in various different ways, right? Like it's driving incredible user growth on free tiers around the industry for people that want to do like one-off projects that aren't really production workloads. That's kind of interesting and brings some success for companies. And it's also meant that like some very serious consumer companies, rapidly growing consumer companies need like highly available databases at massive scale. And that's what PlanetScale offers as a cloud product, essentially. And so we've seen a bunch of these like very successful AI companies migrate to the platform and start using it and pushing it to its limits. And it's been really exciting to go and see those things. And I think this just really like tracks along with the kind of progress of infrastructure companies, which is it just takes a very, very, very long time to build something that's good and trustable. And I mean, you may never make it during that journey because it can take too long and you might not strike any luck while doing that. But yeah, it also starts to compound, right? There's this thing about trust, which is It can be transferred and it's very social. And so when big companies see other big companies getting success on your platform, it feels de-risked for them and they want to go and do it. And so we've kind of got the other side of some very big migrations for some very big and cool companies. And now we can talk about those and we've got more to talk about. Other people like it and they buy it. And I think, you know, someone said to me, Recently, the launch of Postgres was really interesting to them because it showed that PlanetScale really had a brand.

Yeah.

Like, people knew what PlanetScale for Postgres meant. Like, that was it. That was the— we were talking forever about how to frame this and do this. And I think we just, we settled on just say that. And if people know what we're really about, then that would just pretty much say it all. We were right and right, and we'd really underestimated people, how many people just understood that though. They just like actually got it. And, you know, when people email me wanting to onboard to the platform, they're already guessing and knowing what they're getting and they know what they're coming for too, right? And that's, that was a really nice surprise to see that we're known that way as a brand.

Yeah. And my impression of that from the outside is that it's all about, like, it works at a massive scale and you've thought a lot about and you've tested and it just, it won't fall down and it'll be reliable and whatever scale you operate at.

Scale is about that, right? Scale is about doing the same things over and over again. Airplanes are one of my favorite analogies of just how reliable and known because they've just failed in every way.

Yes.

And, you know, the black box recorder is incredibly important because when it does go wrong, you can't miss any information you can extract from that, right? So we are very much the same, which when things do go wrong, they're very novel in terms of the way things fail. And we really do a lot of introspection and understanding and learning about how like we could do better. And there's like a really long tail of those things. And that just means that we can sell that, right? We can just sell the fact that it's just worn and trustable. And like great infrastructure is all around us. And I think people underestimate how much just good infrastructure, like kind of informs their buying decisions. Amazon is another great example of this. And I'm not talking about AWS. Amazon.com is a really horrible website to use. It's extremely confusing. I never know if I'm actually getting the right products to look at. Every page is owned by a different team and that you can tell, like, it's just like really hard to navigate. I don't care. I want to buy every product I can through there because the shipping is always good. Okay. Very rarely goes wrong. It arrives. Prime rapid delivery just works and is extremely good. Uh, that's infrastructure. That is incredible supply chain management deployed to the extreme to back an e-commerce experience, a delightful kind of a buying experience. And people want more of that. It's the same with databases, you know, people get excited about fucking around with databases and fixing those problems because they don't have other things going on. Like the people that are really successful in building really quickly resent doing anything that isn't the core thing they want for their company.

Yeah.

And people have realized they can just kind of pay their way out of these problems and give it to a company like us. And that's nice. That means it's really, we've done something and it's a long grind. It's a slow game to play, but it's really fun to see those things pay off when people know.

Yeah. And how do you kind of, because I feel like some, some things like if you like your, you know, if your differentiator was like, really nice design, people can kind of come and see, like, oh, the website reflects that they care a lot about design, or that sort of thing. But for, like, reliability and kind of really rock-solid infrastructure, how are you able to project that? Because I imagine everyone that runs a database says that, you know, that's important to them and that they're good at that. But how are you able to kind of— You know, show that, I guess, like to the outside world.

Yeah. Yeah. How to convey it to the world is to do it through customers. Like only they can really advocate for whether you do what you say you do. And it's the opposite. They'll also tell people when you don't do those things, like it goes out there publicly. I mean, there's certain providers that have, you know, not done this and it becomes a meme or whatever. And that's really hard to shake for, you Mongo are far past data loss issues. It's a very mature, very, very good database product. Every day on Twitter, you see someone taking a dig over data loss or whatever. Completely unfair. A decade-old assumption. It just lives forever with you, right? So you just, you have to just take it very seriously that you can't have these things happen. And if you're building in the database world, Being slow to do something, but know it's reliable and isn't going to let people down, is always the fastest way to do it. Like, the downsides are too much. Like, this is why we took, you know, we took a very long time to get to doing stuff in the Postgres world. We just didn't feel we'd even met our own standard in the Vitesse or MySQL world, and that we could provide something unique. Like, who are we to show up in a different community pretending we can add any value until we know we can add value? That's why we launched it the way we launched it with a bunch of benchmarks. to just show that, like, here we go, this is different, and uptime is different, and all of these things so that we can provide actual unique value for what we do. But it took a very long time to get here to be able to say we could do that.

Scaling DevTools is sponsored by WorkOS. If things start going well, some of your customers are going to start asking for enterprise features, things like audit trails, SSO, SCIM provisioning, Role-based access control. These things are hard to build and you could get stuck spending all your time doing that instead of actually making a great dev tool. That's why WorkOS exists. They help you with all of those enterprise features and they're trusted by OpenAI, Vercel, and Perplexity. And if you use them for user management, you get your first million, yes, million monthly active users for free. I honestly don't know any dev tools that have a million monthly active users apart from GitHub maybe. So that'll get you pretty far. Here's what Kyle from Depot has to say about WorkOS.

We use WorkOS to effectively add all of the SSO and SCIM to Depot. It's single-handedly like one of the best developer experiences I've ever seen for what is like a super painful problem if you were to go and try to roll that yourself. So for us, we can effectively offer SSO and SCIM and it's like 2 clicks of a button and we don't ever have to think about it. It's like one of the best features that we can add to Tipo. It's super affordable, which effectively allows us to like break the SSO tax joke and essentially say like you can have SSO and SCIM as like an add-on onto your monthly plan. Like it's no problem. So it really allows smaller startups to essentially offer like that enterprise feature without a huge engineering investment behind it. Like, it's literally, we can just use a tool behind the scenes and our life is exponentially easier.

Yeah. And you kind of launched with customers, like actually use it, like people were using it by the time you did a public launch, right?

We, yes, that is the way we always do it because anyone can write a blog post saying we like our own product. We think it is good. We think it scales. And I don't want, I mean, okay. Yeah. I mean, that's, yeah. Do you know what I mean? It's like easy.

Yeah.

We don't really want to do that. We don't want to overhype or overmarket anything. We just want to say, well, this is, you know, this is validated by a customer that you probably heard of running on this. It's just a much harder way to do and release software because you can get like shipping something on like, that's not as ready. You can actually often get away with it too. You can just get things out there, say big words about it, do hype, hype, hype, billboard, flashy animation, whatever, and it will get tons of eyes and it'll work for a certain audience. It just doesn't work for mine. And so we just have to do it with customers and show we're serious. And our customers love it. Like, you know, we've been told by a number of our customers, the most popular blog on their engineering blog is the one they did with us. as part of a launch with us. That's really fun. I mean, that's really nice. I mean, everyone likes to nerd out about these things and be part of something cool. So it's a good way to do software announcements.

Yeah, that is very cool. And kind of as well, like coming back to like how you show that you care a lot about stuff, one of the things like, because I've spoken to so many DevTools now, like, whenever someone says like they're good at something, I always like, I'm always thinking, okay, so like, what, what are you not good? What's like the, you focus on this thing, what do you neglect kind of in that? And so I thought that your, when you dropped the free tier, I thought it was like actually a really cool example of this where like, you're kind of being very clear about what you're going to focus on and what you're not going to focus on.

Yeah.

But it was like quite a, it was at the time, it was like quite a shocking decision on Twitter, at least like, because you were getting a lot of traction on the free tier, I believe. Um, yeah. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Mm-hmm. Um, actually, I'll address the bit about knowing what you don't do well. First of all, it's really funny, you know, we try and be really honest with people what we can and we can't do. And there's definitely a few million dollars of revenue that we would have, but the customers would not be as happy, I think, if we'd have said yes to things. So like a common thing people come to us with is what really should be like an OLAP workload. So we're like an OLTP database, which is for extremely fast queries for experiences, like product experiences, basically. We have to get data back to fill a, you know, hydrate or fill a page for a product or an app. That's like very different trade-offs and optimizations, and it's not a hard problem until you need to do it across lots of machines or lots of data. In the OLAP world, they're naturally built for lots of data and much slower queries that do tons of number crunching, and it's a completely different problem set with a completely different set of trade-offs. Very often people have accidentally backed themselves into an OLAP workload thinking they need an OLTP database, and like, we could do it. I mean, And we are often telling people to go and like talk to Snowflake or something, right? Go and do a different option because we're not the right one. And the other one is like when it comes to database migrations, we've got a customer that's quite a large customer now. And it was a very unintuitive sale because, you know, they had their own self-sharded kind of very complicated database cluster. And they were like, what would you do? I mean, we've, we're committed to this, you know, moving to you is going to take a very long time. It's going to be very difficult. And, you know, I said, Well, I've done your job before at other companies. I'd probably stick with it and not try and move to us. If it's going to be really hard for you to do and it's kind of working now, I would do it. And he kind of looked at me really strangely. And then I think that's actually earned more trust because they then became a customer. But I do believe that too. I think people shouldn't do things that is unnatural or make changes for things that aren't working well. Anyway, so one thing we don't do well is support hobby projects. Like we don't, The minimum outlay for a cluster at PlanetScale is not tiny. It's not huge either. I mean, the entry level to buying a PlanetScale database is $39. I don't think that's a lot of money if you're building a business, but also people are building businesses in different ways and people don't always want to pay for, you know, everything if they're just experimenting or kind of vibe coding and playing with software engineering. They might not fully conceptualize what we're doing for them anyway. So that $39 feels really expensive. I get it. And even when you're like bootstrapping a company, the costs add up and, you know, that's a thing. Luckily, people start in free tiers of other projects and migrate to us, which is fine when they like need a more serious kind of database platform to do things with. But it was painful to say goodbye to the free tier. Like, I can tell, you know, There is a ton of users we'd have on the platform. We wouldn't be monetizing them, but they would be there, right? I get 5 to 10 emails a day of people asking what's happened to the free tier. That started to die down a bit, and it's back again because of the Postgres announcement. But yeah, people would always ask about that. Some of the LLMs still hadn't kind of updated their latest knowledge to know that we didn't have one anymore. So people were kind of asking LLM, what's the best database?

Mm-hmm.

And they get told PlanetScale and it's got a free tier or whatever. And then people come here and they don't have a free tier and it upsets them or whatever. So yeah, it was like a painful, I don't feel good that we had to do that or did it, but it was like one of the best decisions we made. Absolutely one of the best decisions we made. It's a topic that comes up at every event I go to. I've had founders of many companies tell me they wish they could do it. They just feel they absolutely could not. I think the real metrics around free tiers are very, very interesting. Like every company has to kind of basically report them as like marketing spend essentially, right? And it's a very large marketing spend, so people have to kind of really do some gymnastics to show that that spend is turning into real dollars. At a lot of places, that data does not back that up. It's very rare that someone is free for 6 months and then becomes a rocket ship company. You'll find that you know, people who are going to pay you money start paying you money very quickly if they're going to, right? They'll be out of a free tier within the first week or 2 weeks. And you can almost guarantee if they're still in it after 3 months, they probably never will be. And we saw this at GitHub too, not because of a free tier, but the long tail of software projects. Like there's just power laws all over the world of technology and repository usage was just a massive power law. Like, There was a tiny amount, um, in a relative sense of repositories that got any active usage. And then there's just massive long tail of people's college projects. And it's actually really interesting is since killing the free tier, I get emails about the free tier and it's always students pitching me like, I need to do this for a project. I need to do this. And it's like, I'm not, I'm unempathetic to that. Like people have to learn. They have to, of course they have to learn. They have to do things. Those are going to be the builders of our next generation. of software. However, it's very instructive that like, you just know that's never turning into a production app. It's not happening. And we want to build an enduring business that's based on stability, and you have to manage a really good business to do that and be really responsible and have a very long runway. You don't do that by giving away things that cost you money for free in the long run. And so we don't. And We don't regret that. And there's a thing about being profitable is, you know, the business is going to survive. Unprofitable database companies, whenever they get a new user, their runway goes down. It's very bad. That's scary, really. You know, it's like everyone who joins PlanetScale extends our life and makes us more money and means we can reinvest and make things better for them. It feels really, every time we hire someone, it's hired with real money. When we did our office with nice things in the office, it was built with real money, not borrowed hopes and dreams.

Nice office, by the way, as well.

Thank you. We quite like it. Um, it's nice to have a physical space to hang out with people and bring the community in.

Super cool. Um, yeah, that, that makes sense. And, um, cause I was, There's probably a theme on trigger.dev just because I was with them as I was like trying to think of these questions. Great guys. And they kind of gave me permission almost to like ask you, you know, they have a free tier and if they were thinking about not having a free tier, how would you think about it? And kind of—

It's highly dependent on what your business does. There's so many companies that without a free tier, they would get no growth at all. It like really depends on what people are looking for from you. The best, like there's so many products I've bought and got started because they had a free tier. Like that's just, even the low barrier of like putting a credit card can just get people out the door too quick, right? Like if you need to show someone, if you've got other steps that make, um, using your product difficult to do, then payment and fric— is another friction, right? And things like this. And it really depends. It depends on the market you're selling into. It's really hard to give that type of advice without knowing the kind of ins and outs and the metrics of every business. There's also other things like that are on that sliding scale of free tiers, which is timed trials, for example, right? Like you amount of access for a certain time and that rolls into like a pay plan or a canceled account. We've all bought products like that too. Like there's just many dimensions that you can kind of figure things out. It also depends what it costs to give a free tier. Some products are purely SaaS products, right? Their margins are exceptionally good. And so just the freeness or the cost of the product is really just a dimension of, you know, how they want to monetize. Database companies are giving away Amazon resources and they are not cheap, right? We're giving away real things that, you know, have to be spun up and used. that's not cost-effective to give away for free forever. So it just highly depends. You know, you could be, you could have a product and there's some out there that have developed, they say you are an order or 2 magnitude cheaper. Like you've got a technical advantage for your product that is all around cost, right? Like you're a metrics platform and your backend storage engine is 100 times cheaper to store metrics on than an incumbent. Then a free tier could be really, a really like nasty way of attacking them by just giving ridiculous amounts of things for free to like do the bit, you know, it's like, it's so like, make it so funnily hilarious that your free tier is so big that people start to really consider you and that becomes the advertising. And then you're getting more, you know, like Google kind of did this, right? Like you, back in the early days of Google, you just got this incrementing counter byte by byte of how much storage you were getting in Google. Whereas the experience on Yahoo is people were having to delete emails to keep their inbox clear and not filling up. And so it can just be highly strategic. It's just very hard to say. I will just tell you though that whether or not people admit it publicly, privately, so many people have told me that they wish they could kill their free tier. And the only reason they're not doing it is public perception. That is it. did it and got a mixed bag of negative perception from people. And I understand why. We also got very positive, like it led to net way more growth for the company because people were like, wow, actually like that one, that was bold. We appreciate it. We know that you are healthy as a company now. And they kind of just like respect that seriousness, I guess. And so It just depends who your audience is, what your business is. I know that was a very long-winded answer, but there's a lot of caveats. I don't want to speak too highly with absolutes, but I will tell you it was a very good decision for us. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Just something that struck me as well, just on the kind of like trigger with like, for like with PlanetScale, you kind of, in a sense, like you kind of know what you're getting in the sense that people have used the database and like, that you're like a better database than, you know, what they're considering or something like, and so, okay, I'm going to pay money for that. Was that maybe like Trigger is like, you kind of want to try it out. Like, you don't really, it's like kind of a new way of doing things for people that don't know Trigger. Like, um, you might not even know if it's for you in a sense, like, whereas—

Exactly. Yeah. Like we have screens in the office, a good example. We have these screens when I, it's, I want to just like project stuff on the screen for like marketing reasons or just whatever. And Um, there's like 100 different, uh, like screen playing technology things, right? That you can add to a Fire Stick. And I definitely gravitated to the one that had the free tier because I knew that I was like, not even sure if this was the right solution. Maybe I need an Apple TV with a screen. I don't know what to do. Like, I'm just fucking around to try and figure it out. Um, yeah, I mean, it's annoying to cancel subscriptions and whatever. So I did. I tried one that had a free tier. It wasn't a very good product, so I didn't use that. I tried the next one that had a free tier. It was good. I lasted on the free tier for a month until I came in one day and it stopped working. I'd been happy for a month with this working. That was enough to like get used to and not having to think about this problem anymore. So they got an instant upgrade from me. I mean, it's like $20 a month or whatever, so it's fine, but it worked, right? It just worked for that reason. It's effective. It's really effective in certain ways.

Yeah. People should think about this and weigh it up, but not just take it as gospel that you should have a free tier. They should consider. Yeah.

And the marginal cost of them giving me a free tier was nothing. Absolutely. It cost them pennies to give me that free use and it beat their competitors. And now unless they screw something up or quadruple their price, I'm sticking around. Yeah.

Sam, one side question again. Someone told me to ask you, you've probably been asked already, are you the average database CEO?

I'm not, and I do get asked this a lot. If I go to events, people ask me, people ask me on Twitter. I've thought a few times I know who it is, then other people tell me that, like, that wouldn't be possible. I don't know. I really don't know. I appreciate them. If you're listening, average CEO, like, You're funny, I guess. Um, I'm not gonna try and piss you off, I guess, you know. Uh, but yeah, I mean, I think you just have to take people in your community like that with a sense of humor. There's funny people around the, the industry. I find it funny because they're not particularly nasty. They've like say some things I don't like, but like they're not particularly nasty to us. So I appreciate people like that being around. We get trolled by other versions of that that don't like us. It's just a— But yeah, I mean, the industry is a funny place. It's amazing that we all work in an industry where there's so much on the line, like people make so much money, we do such serious things. Yet like a few billion dollars of market cap is just getting trolled by various anonymous accounts all over the industry. And like, they somehow seem influential sometimes. It's very weird. It's very, very funny. So yeah, I kind of now play up to the joke that people think it's me. Because it's just part of the thing. It's kind of funny. Their website's funny.

Yes.

People have been joking, when will average, when will, like, we run on average database company or whatever?

So they were like, look at the spelling of like, if you spell it, if you like write in a British way or something.

Yeah, there must be a, yeah, I wonder if you could probably figure that out. There's definitely, it's not, you're a Brit, right? You know, that's not a British sense of humor. You detect that, right? I don't think that would be a British person.

Yeah, actually, I don't know. I hadn't really, I don't think I'd thought about actually from that perspective, but I don't think so. I think there's a guy who's like, kind of like seems to be related to it, but I don't know if he's a real person.

Yeah, it could be a collective. Like years ago, I knew, years ago, I'm talking like a decade ago, I knew someone who had a pop, like I knew of a, like a very popular anonymous Twitter account. Um, and it turned out to be 5 different people actually. So there's a chance that there's multiple, maybe you could detect that with, I don't know.

It's like, um, That's funny. Maybe it's all of you and it is actually an average.

It's like, what if it is every—

yeah, it's every single— you're not going to tell me, but as soon as you start one, like, I don't know, you just get invited into the group. Um, yeah, one of the things that I did also want to ask you about is, um, content. And then, so I know we didn't actually talk about this before, but like, I was looking at some of your blog posts. recently. And like the interact— like the one in particular I was looking at was like caching. And it's like, for people that haven't seen it, it's a blog that's explaining how caching works. And it's like much more than a blog in a sense. It's almost like not a sufficient way to describe it because it's very interactive. You can actually like click things and see how things work. And there's like these real, really nice visuals. And I heard you talk about how you want to do different things. So you don't want to spend, you want to just spend a month writing a blog when everyone else is just pumping out AI stuff. How do you think about content?

I feel the same about content as I have for a very long time. And it's almost a borrowed learning from when I joined GitHub. So when A part of the GitHub onboarding that a lot of people that now work at GitHub and didn't, and worked there in the later years, didn't experience was the thing that in the earlier days, I wasn't incredibly early at the company, but early enough to experience some of the very early cultural tenets that made that company successful. You would get an education in like the voice of the company and how to speak and how to speak with authenticity. and speak in a very genuine way and not cheapen how you speak. So like our blog posts had CI to detect for certain phrases that just are mealy-mouthed and washy and—

Really?

Yeah, no, so I had to, and I had to, you sort of got this appreciation that content is really important to people that think deeply about things. And so one of the reasons I ended up at GitHub is I read a blog post by someone who's a very dear friend of mine to this day, Ted, who was the CTO, who wrote about memory allocation for MySQL. And it was just like a short, succinct, really well-written post. And it grabbed an appreciation from me to prose representing really good technical work. And if you can marry those things together, I'm not a good writer at all. But when there's people around that are good and can do those things, you can read things that are poignant and stick with you. And I think you can strive to do those things. And if you can achieve those things, it's again, that's unfair to your competition because they have to write slop all the time. They're doing constant SEO optimization to just trying, you know, juice these numbers and it doesn't really produce anything enduring or interesting. Some of our most performing blog posts are old, but are just interesting and enduring and people reference them. And so yeah, like we've started to take even more time on blog posts because then we'll produce something we're really proud of, like the caching post that's just gone out. And Ben and Holly, they do really great work on making this possible. You have to support them going and doing this stuff because it takes, you know, It takes time. Um, yeah, so I just think it's a good contribution. I don't really see the end goal all the time of is just like having a strong CTA that gets people into your product.

Yes.

If someone reads it and goes, oh, that was valuable to me to learn this knowledge, clearly PlanetScale knows something, they will think about us in the future. It just, it doesn't all have to be take, take, take, right? Like we can, we can give and maybe it just comes back in other forms and Smart people tend to appreciate learning from other smart people.

Yeah. And I think what you're saying there between the lines, Sam, is that like, you're not measuring these things as like, do we get a return on like how much time we spend? Like you're being more like, you believe that it's like this, you kind of like principled kind of, you believe that if you write really good content, you've seen in the past that this has a way of like Being worth it even.

Yeah, absolutely. And you do feel the return over time. It's just, it's slower, but more meaningful, right? Like it just, it takes more time if you're measuring how many signups you got from like the attribution of a clickbaity post and that, you know, that's your metric. You have to write clickbaity posts that are just like diluted by the fact that they're pushing you to a CTA or whatever, you might see great results. I mean, there's some companies that they only generate revenue by doing that kind of thing and all power to them. That's what they should do. I do think in the long game of building databases, it's for people with serious problems and they appreciate serious content. And so it just, it feels, it still feels like the strategically best way to do it and happens to align with what I really believe in. And also just like this, maybe it's a flaw, but there's certain ways I want to win and there's certain ways, you know, you could win and sometimes you don't want to win in certain— I don't really want to do those types of marketing. I don't want to do that kind of cheap. Um, I want to feel proud of the things we write and inspired when, when I get, you know, I, when I read that first draft of what the team have written, I feel lucky and feel inspired and privileged to work with these people. So. It's, it's a good all-round.

It feels like it's quite hard to— it feels like a very real thing. It's like you just doing what you— putting your real beliefs, like having the, I don't know, courage to just like do it your way, uh, whether or not everyone likes it or not. And, or like, and just not, not kind of trying to like sit between two you know, have your foot in one camp, halfway in one and in the other. It's like, go all in on like, okay, we're gonna deliberately not do like SEO stuff. We're just gonna go really hard on writing really high-quality content.

Yeah, you kind of have to, you know, go all in one or the other. There's very few cultures that can do both of those things well. So yeah, I think to make one good or the other, you have to kind of take it to the extreme. And the confidence comes from luck. I'm the product of getting to work with some exceptional people that figured this stuff out on their own, and I got to watch. And so I'm very privileged in that sense.

Okay. That's amazing. I guess people listening, they should know that this is a proven strategy.

For us, not for everyone. And I don't have the counterfactual if we'd have done it the other way. So I'll never know. And that's, I guess that's the kind of power of confirmation bias across the entire industry is you might never see the opposite playbook, you know?

Yeah. Um, actually, on, but on that, Sam, like, how do you, when you make a, when you're like, because like, you know, being a CEO, being, um, like how, like you have to make these decisions. You have to kind of tell everyone or not tell everyone, but like you have to lead the company to to act in this way that you believe, and not everyone might agree with you, or it might not be obvious that this is like a correct decision. How do you like, how do you go about it? Is there anything that you would advise to people that are thinking about, you know, being more assertive as the leader of the company?

That's a good question. I mean, so I don't really presume I'm right about anything. I mean, I try to be, I like to just throw things out in a very transparent way to the company. And we hire very smart people. We're a very small, very small team of very, very smart people. It's a collection of people I've worked with, people we've just met that have joined and done really well, or people that I've wanted to work with. We just hired someone I tried to hire at GitHub for like 8 years, and now they finally are coming to plans. I don't know why they chose us this time, but it's a great thing on timing, right? There's no point just not listening to their feedback, right? You know, you put things out there and you're collaborative. You get to learn from the great people that you have that work with you. However, there is one other thing I do believe, which is if you are running a company, you have a unique perspective. And it doesn't mean it's a right perspective, but you are doing a job that no one else does. Like you're having conversations that no one else has and you have It's the only role where everything runs up to you. It's the, everything's in balance. In big organizations that have a zero-sum mentality internally, sometimes acting against the company's interest is the best thing you can do for yourself personally, right? You see this inside big companies, the politics. They might starve out another organization to make them lose. So you get the project and you get the promotion and you do all these terrible things that happen. So if you make those things not work, then you can act more honestly and openly and talk more openly with your company. But at the end of the day, like me being successful as a human being in my career is symbiotic with the company being successful, which is everyone being successful. But when you have that unique perspective and the consequences of everything, right? You have the consequences of finance being unhappy if something costs too much to do, or engineering being unhappy because they're not giving the resources to do something. It all rolls up to you. And your decisions, you are the one that will live with them for the longest. At the end of the day, you are wed to the company, right? Like it's you. If I always think to myself, if your company fails, the CEO or the founders or whatever will be the last person to turn those lights off and shut it all down. You are there till the very end. And I have seen people do that while regretting not doing the thing they believed in. Right? Or like trying someone else's decision because they felt they had to give someone else a win and that goes wrong and it builds resentment. Like you just, you become resentful. I think in a lot of times people fundamentally know what they need to do or want to do and don't act on it. And I think if you're going to be the one that holds most of the consequences for those, you have to act on it and you have to take these things very, very seriously. And at the end of the day, You have to take seriously that everyone who works for you can leave if they want to. So try and be more right than you are wrong. Be really open when you're wrong and build that trust. And if you do build a track record where people trust you and they're right and you're right most of the time, they'll want to know more. They'll like, they'll know you have a perspective and they have a perspective and the union of the two can probably build something right. So yeah, you just have to be assertive and, and You have to really know when you're going to spend those chips on something you're truly convicted in. And if people don't want to join you on that, that's fine. You have to be fine with that.

What do you think the best people care most about in terms of joining you?

I don't think the best people should ever care what their boss thinks. I genuinely mean that. I think the best people I've always worked with, have intrinsic motivation that far exceeds anything their boss could ask from them. And so if the company you're joining is a vehicle for you to achieve those intrinsic desires and goals, then you've found the right company. If you are waiting for validation from somebody else, and that validation will be satisfying to you, you might not have what it— like, you might not be Thinking in a way that will drive you to be the most successful.

That's a really good point.

I could be completely wrong there, but like, I haven't, you know, I've always wanted my boss to agree with what I'm doing, but I never stopped at, okay, I've made them happy. It's like, I've achieved what I want to achieve. It's made them happy. It's made other people happy. It's made me happy. That's really what it is.

And so is it just fine? Is it just more about finding the people that care a lot about, like, if you're trying to recruit the best people, just trying to find like the people that are intrinsically motivated for the problem that you are focusing on and talking about how they can achieve their goals with you, or is that—

Yeah, that's one of them. And then it's also showing them the environment they're gonna get to work in.

Cool.

Have them meet other good people. And if they're happy, one of the ways I have hired certain candidates that I really wanted to hire is I've told them, do not tell me who you're gonna reach out to, but you can go on LinkedIn, you can go on Twitter and find any one of our employees. And reach out to them and talk to them. And, you know, they can, they'll tell you the real experience, what's good and what's bad about being at the company. And if that maps to you, if you think they're a good person or they're funny or you like working with them, you might want to be here. And it works because I'm proud of everyone we work with. I'm proud of anyone at PlanetScale I would send to talk to a customer to just represent ourselves. And so they chat to more people and think, wow, I could work with that person. Or, you know, we gelled in some way. And you maintain a level of groupthink. You also have to own that the way your company works is not going to be for everybody. Most companies in the world, I would be very bad there. I would not be a good employee. I wouldn't be the right type of employee. I wouldn't succeed in that environment. The idea that everyone can or should or has the right to succeed in the environment you are creating is not true. You want people that, if you express your culture and express your opinions, really deliberately and show people that they're here to come and be part of that and advance it in certain ways that are unique to them, but not necessarily change what's working. It gives people an honest way of evaluating whether they think they'll be there. And if you line up, it lines up. And if it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, it just, it is what it is, right? You know, it doesn't always work out and that's okay.

Yeah, that's, it sounds a lot like your customer, how you're talking about with your customers as well, putting, putting them forward, like letting people talk to, and then just being, not being trying to be all things for everyone and just same for employees and customers.

Yeah. At the end of the day, I mean, no one's buying a database because of a flashy website. And the ones that are, are not going to have the problems that eventually you get to charge money for. You know, it's just this self-fulfilling thing. There's some products that can, the only differentiator is how good their sales team is. There's others where it can barely have a role and shouldn't.

Sam, that was amazing. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Where should people— is there anything you wanted to shout out or anything, send people to?

planetscale.com. That's it. Read what we do. Learn about what our customers like about us. Um, and maybe become a customer yourself.

Yeah. Sam, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.