Dev Propulsion Labs
Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova, a business and go-to-market expert. She interviews founders of successful developer-focused companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale about what makes their businesses work. The show is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.
Episodes
Kate Holterhoff of RedMonk: AI slop, agent experience & the open source crisis | Evil Martians
Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk (https://redmonk.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about what AI is doing to open source, developer tools, and the analyst business itself. She also shares her winding path to the role: painting murals in Cincinnati, a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D., a decade in academia, and frontend engineering before joining the industry's only developer-focused
Matt Biilmann of Netlify: why agent experience is the new developer experience | Evil Martians
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 ad
Lingo.dev co-founder Max Prilutskiy: AI localization, AX, and having a lean team | Evil Martians
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 tau
Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast
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 of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast
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 en
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 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 acqu
CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast
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 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 scratc
Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast
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 b
Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev: intent signals and devtool GTM | Evil Martians podcast
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 firs
David Cramer, founder of Sentry: building for the Fortune 500,000 | Evil Martians podcast
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, co-founder of Mastra: TypeScript for AI agents and making moves | Evil Martians podcast
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 of WorkOS: the plumbing behind OpenAI and Cursor | Evil Martians podcast
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 of Daytona: walking from $300K ARR to build for agents | Evil Martians podcast
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
Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone: scaling to 5M developers with no meetings | Evil Martians podcast
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: databases that never go down | Evil Martians podcast
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 of Resend: $18M Series A by obsessing over every detail | Evil Martians podcast
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 of Chroma: context engineering and modern AI search | Evil Martians podcast
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
Sarah Wooders on why LLMs are like Memento and building the infrastructure for stateful AI agents
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 Memento
Adam Frankl on why 2025 is the best year ever to build a developer tool startup
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 wha
Jason Bosco on building a profitable search engine serving 10 billion searches without VC funding
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 so
Anna Veronika Dorogush on why having high-density talent on the team is crucial for Recraft
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 team
Michael Magán, co-founder at tambo ai, on how a friendly octopus makes AI more approachable
Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtoolsLinks:- 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: building a language from curiosity, not trends | Evil Martians podcast
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, CEO at Arthur AI, on building AI guardrails, the last mile problem, and coaching code bots
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
Sam Bhagwat on Gatsby and Mastra, YC and tapping into your inner child
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 themselve
Jono Bacon, former Director of Community at GitHub & Ubuntu, author of “People Powered”
Your dev tool needs to harness the power of community — whether you’re building your own or connecting to larger forums. The new episode of the Dev Propulsion Labs podcast is packed with Jono Bacon’s insights on building relationships with your audience: he has built over 300(!) open source communities, including GitHub and Ubuntu, and he still backs many of them on their continued path to sustain
Alice Chen, CTO & Co-Founder at OpenContext
We’re blasting off the third season of our podcast with a new host, Irina Nazarova, CEO at Evil Martians, and a new guest—Alice Chen, CTO & Co-Founder at OpenContext, a platform that drives clarity of context across the organization. Prior to co-founding OpenContext in 2021, Alice rose up in the ranks of massive companies like HP and Informatica. In our conversation, we dug into her strategies
DHH: 20 years of Ruby on Rails and why one developer can build everything | Evil Martians podcast
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp and HEY, reflects on 20 years of building Rails, why he believes single developers with the right framework can build entire products, and how he's changed his mind on everything from TypeScript to overwork culture. He shares how Rails spawned Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb, wha
Hahnbee Lee - Co-Founder at Mintlify
This week's guest is Hahnbee Lee, Co-Founder at Mintlify. Prior to founding Mintlify, Hahnbee co-founded pe•ple and worked as a software engineer at Duolingo. The best developer companies (think Stripe, Twilio, MongoDB) have effective and user-centric documentation at their backbone. Mintlify helps any company achieve the documentation they need effortlessly, so that they can focus on building wha
Miško Hevery - BuilderIO, Angular, Qwik
As the CTO of Builder.io, Miško Hevery directs the technological prowess behind the platform's innovative projects including Qwik, a web framework for building instant loading apps and sites. Prior to this, Miško played a pivotal role in Google, not only pioneering Angular and AngularJS but also co-creating Karma.Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, a
Shanea Leven - CodeSee
Shanea Leven is CEO and co-founder of CodeSee. CodeSee is a developer platform that helps developers master understanding codebases. CodeSee's mission is to build software better.Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.Host: Victoria Melnikova
Ivar Østhus - Unleash
Ivar Østhus is the Co-founder and CTO at Unleash, an open-source feature management software for Enterprises. What started as a side gig in a basement in Norway, Ivar and his brother turned their SaaS into a full time business in early 2021. The tool allows teams to build features together, ship new features in small increments, and enables transparency within teams and stakeholders.TooltipsEvil M
Peer Richelsen - Cal.com
This week we are featuring Peer Richelsen who is disrupting the scheduling space with the open-sourced Cal.com.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.https://evilmartians.com/
Monica Sarbu - Xata
This week's guest is Monica Sarbu, Founder and CEO at Xata, a serverless database platform powered by PostgreSQL. Prior to that, she worked on an open-source monitoring solution called Packetbeat which was acquired by Elastic in 2015. She is also the co-founder of tupu.io, a non-profit initiative that offers free mentorship to women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in the tech i
Nikita Shamgunov - Neon
This week we are learning from Nikita Shamgunov, CEO at Neon and Partner at Khosla Ventures who previously co-founded MemSQL and scaled to ~40M ARR.Neon is fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. They separate storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, a
Stefan Avram - WunderGraph
This week we talk to Stefan Avram, Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Wundergraph, a Backend for Frontend Framework to optimize frontend, fullstack and backend developer workflows through API Composition.TooltipsEvil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products.https://evilmartians.com/
