Dev Propulsion Labs

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, shares his insights into the challenging world of go-to-market strategies for developer tools. He highlights why understanding customer intent is crucial, revealing that many companies lack true knowledge of their users despite high engagement. Piyush emphasizes the importance of timing over volume in sales, the complexity AI adds to enterprise sales, and how genuine customer conversations fuel successful products. With practical advice for founders, he encourages early engagement with go-to-market strategies from day one.

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, Founder and CEO of Daytona, dives into his bold decision to walk away from $300K ARR to rebuild for the AI era. He discusses the exponential growth of AI agents, predicting they may outnumber humans tenfold. The conversation touches on creating composable computers on demand and the importance of a seamless developer experience. Ivan emphasizes his team's unique approach to market positioning, community engagement, and the urgent need for innovative tools tailored for agents, all while racing against competitors in a rapidly evolving landscape.