Dev Propulsion Labs Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast
Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcast
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres 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.
Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.
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.
00:00 Intro
00:34 Who is Stas Kelvich?
01:42 From quantum physics to software engineering
05:10 How Stas became a key Postgres contributor
06:08 Early career: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Postgres
06:57 Why databases as a field keep pulling him in
09:47 The early days of Neon and the co-founder origin story
13:42 Key bets: building the cloud, separating storage and compute
16:38 Enterprise vs. product-led growth strategy
18:54 Why Neon didn't solve sharding — and why that was right
23:03 Designing for the agent era without planning for it
25:44 How Replit's agents stress-tested Neon's infrastructure
26:42 Agent experience and fraud considerations
32:00 Can you tell if a database was created by an agent?
33:06 The $1B Databricks acquisition story
38:59 Closing the deal in 30 days with 90 lawyers
40:27 Why Neon kept its brand post-acquisition
43:24 Life inside Databricks one year later
47:41 Market trends for technical founders in 2026
51:09 Using AI in day-to-day engineering work
54:15 What makes Stas feel great
54:49 Could AI accelerate theoretical physics research?
58:06 How to get started with Neon