Nikita Shamgunov is the founder of Neon, an open-source serverless Postgres company. Before Neon, Nikita co-founded MemSQL, now SingleStore, which is valued at over a billion dollars. He has also worked as a VC at Khosla Ventures and held engineering roles at Meta and Microsoft. Nikita is known for his strategic thinking and transparency about his decision-making process.

We discuss:

• The importance of storytelling and providing a clear narrative for your company
• When to introduce a sales team and how to build a sales and marketing "machine"
• Pricing strategies, including pricing for storage and compute in the data and analytics space
• The evolution of revenue models in DevTools: from selling seats and storage/compute to selling tokens
• Lessons learned from hiring MongoDB’s VP of Engineering, focusing on improving reliability and building strong team management processes
• The benefits of using a high-quality recruiting firm and avoiding the pitfalls of bad hires
• Balancing competitiveness with respect for competitors to maintain credibility, particularly in the developer tools market
• The idea of “developing your taste” in product development, inspired by Guillermo Rauch from Vercel
• How modern dev tools can monetize through seats, storage/compute, or tokens, with tokens currently being the most profitable
• Why Nikita advises DevTools founders to understand the business model framework and align it with their strategy

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. 

Links:

• Neon
• SingleStore 
• Khosla Ventures 
• Fusion Talent