"Companies designing for agents, not humans, are going to get a lot of lift."

ClickHouse started as an internal tool at Yandex. Today it's the database Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Tesla all run on.

In this episode, CEO Aaron Katz joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he turned an open source project into a $15B company, why he acquired LangFuse knowing it could cost him customers, and what he's actually building for the agent era.

Snowflake, Datadog and Databricks all come up. He doesn't shy away.

Connect with us here:

Aaron Katz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-katz-5762094

ClickHouse: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clickhouseinc/

Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/

Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

00:00 Trailer

00:57 The Origin Story: From Yandex to ClickHouse Inc.

04:43 Building ClickHouse Cloud & Raising $300M

10:36 Growing Up Around Xerox PARC

12:51 Salesforce, Mark Benioff & the Dot-Com Bust

15:32 Cloud Skeptics vs. AI Skeptics | History Repeating

18:05 Building a Modern Go-To-Market Playbook

21:57 The SaaS Crash, Agents & the Future of Infrastructure

27:09 The Datadog Love-Hate Story

35:21 Hardest Moments: Russia, SVB & Sleepless Nights

43:16 Outro