Ep # 158: How Postgres Branching Boosts Adoption & Retention ft. Tudor Golubenco (CTO, Xata)

Tudor Golubenco 0:01 In a couple of months of private beta, we've already reached the same level of revenue as years of Xata Lite, so that was pretty cool to see. And we haven't even really opened it up yet, so it's just working much better from the revenue point of view. We have fewer customers, but they are actually spending serious money. Taylor Kenerson 0:26 Welcome to the Hyperengage Podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearth the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh 0:46 Hey, greetings everybody—this is the Hyperengage Podcast. It seems like I've grown old with this, like it's a hundred sixty, one seventy episodes down, and I wanted to do something different because, sitting in the Valley with more than 70 Y Combinator–backed companies, all of them are mostly AI-powered. They want to just ride that wave in recent times, and I was bored—with maybe slightly different technology, but they're serving the same customer, like GTM tooling, sales, support, marketing, product. So now we are exploring more about these tools that are basically helping the brains behind everything—technology—like developers, programmers, people that are setting up the databases and all. So today, we are going to talk to the CTO of Xata.io. I'm not sure if I've pronounced his name. It's “Sata,” right? Tudor Golubenco 1:39 Yep. That's good. Adil Saleh 1:40 Yeah. So, CTO of Xata, Tudor—thank you very much for taking the time today. Tudor Golubenco 1:45 Sure. Thanks for having me, and looking forward to the call. Adil Saleh 1:48 I love that. This has been going on for long—by long, I mean in this era of AI, “long” is not more than two years, right? So in the last two years, a lot of these startups are trying to build their databases because they're using AI. They're capturing freemium models; they're capturing a lot of data, especially customer data. They're conducting a lot of quality assurance units and testing parameters for that. They need to make sure the database is secure, it's optimizing the cost—of course it's serverless. At the same time, it gives them the ability to deploy onto their own cloud. Say they're not absolutely reliant on this. There are some players that you already know that came along with big bucks in their back pocket—with Hot Pockets. So that's why we want to have this conversation. I know there has been a lot in the past five years that you guys have pivoted— not on the product or technology (you might know better inside), but on the front side, on the marketing or business standpoint—the vision and maybe the sum of the feature set that has changed or shaped over the last, I would say, two to three years. So I would appreciate it—just tell me a little bit about the inception of Xata and how you guys transformed into what you are today, and what is the biggest— Tudor Golubenco 3:05 Yeah. Adil Saleh 3:05 —problem that you hear from your customers when they start the onboarding? Tudor Golubenco 3:10 Yeah. Adil Saleh 3:11 Awesome. Tudor Golubenco 3:11 Yeah. Today—let me start with today—we are a Postgres platform. Our differentiators are Copy-on-Write branching, anonymization workflows, and things like scale-to-zero. So we're a very good platform, especially for staging and developer environments, because we have this instant Copy-on-Write branching—that means branching with the data. That's very convenient when you do QA and so on. Other players like Neon also have it—there are not so many that have it, but Neon has it. However, we are investing more in the anonymization parts. So if you have sensitive data in your production database—which is what most companies have, right? They will have some sort of PII, whether it's email addresses or something like this—then you don't want that data to end up in the developer branches because that would be against compliance. And also there's the risk—maybe you are emailing everyone in your list by mistake and stuff like that—that's just embarrassing. So together with Copy-on-Write branching, anonymization is really important. That's our focus, if you want. Otherwise, it's a very good Postgres offering with all that. It can be used for production; it can be used for AI memory—we're seeing all sorts of use cases, actually. But now, to go back a little bit—because, yeah, there's definitely an arc to the story. We started Xata in 2021, and our first idea back then was to make a database that's super easy to use. We were seeing people using Airtable. That's what people were doing back then—they were using Airtable as a production database. That was relatively nice because you were getting an API and so on, and it was SaaS—no waiting times to provision and so on. But of course it was limited to, I dunno, 50K records or something like this. It was not meant to be a production database, really. So that's where we started. We wanted a database that's super easy to use—almost like a no-code/low-code type of tool. And that's where we started. Over time, however, we got pulled more and more into the developer aspect of it. A lot of people were asking for Postgres direct SQL access, and we were using Postgres under the hood, but we were not exposing it—we were exposing through our own API. So little by little we moved into being more Postgres-native. And that has helped move our target user from being what we call the “builder” persona (people who do hobby projects or personal projects, sometimes nonprofit and so on) slowly toward actual companies that use it for their business. And it's critical for their business, which is ultimately what we need to build a sustainable business—other businesses depending on you. So yeah, we were changing our architecture little by little to expose more and more of the underlying Postgres until, maybe about a year ago, we said, “You know what? We should actually start a new platform.” We actually started from scratch. Where we are right now is that what used to be Xata we have renamed to Xata Lite. That still exists and it's still useful to a very large number of people, but our development focus goes into what we call now simply “Xata,” and it's this new platform. When we built this new platform, we took all our learnings—of course—both from a technical point of view and from a marketing/positioning point of view. And this new platform is doing great, so we're really excited about it—both from what it does (benchmarking and so on) and also customer attraction. We're actually in private beta, so we haven't opened the doors very wide yet. But we're allowing customers in, and even in a couple of months of private beta we've already reached the same level of revenue as years of Xata Lite, so that was pretty cool to see. And we haven't even really opened it up yet, so it's just working much better. From the revenue point of view, fewer customers, but they're actually spending serious money. Adil Saleh 8:23 And also adoption is the biggest concern too. They're able to adopt; that's why they're able to see the value; that's why they're paying. So in platforms like these, if you're able to serve the top line, the bottom line will follow. It's so simple. Tudor Golubenco 8:37 Exactly. Yeah. Adil Saleh 8:38 You know what I hear a lot from our—my CTO and the team members that are actually technical people on our team: We're also a B2B sales company. You've done really great engineering, and along the lines where you were doing it, there are players that came up and they didn't—I would not say an average job—but they are trying to position themselves separately. Talking about some platforms that we were evaluating while we were doing all for our databases: Supabase is one of those. I don't hate to name because we're not going to be biased for anybody, but it's— How do you see—from a business model standpoint—yourself as a different business model? Is that a different customer segment? Is the feature set different otherwise? What—how do you see yourself different than these models? Tudor Golubenco 9:26 Yeah, yeah. And actually you said something interesting—if you start with the top line, the bottom line will follow—and that's actually the strategy that we're following. We have a little bit of a hack because the problem—one thing that we learned in this database space—is that there's a lot of data gravity. It's not easy to move from one database provider to another. You need a pretty serious reason, and that reason could be instability—many outages and so on. It needs to be something very serious. Sometimes it can be cost—people are saying, “Oh, this does what I need, but it's just costing me too much.” But incremental features or just having a nicer UI—that's not going to convince anyone to switch database providers because there's so much risk in switching. You have to plan it; you cannot afford downtime. Usually there's this complex procedure to change it and so on. So it's hard for database companies to get existing businesses. Greenfield projects—that's relatively easy, and that's what we had a lot with Xata Lite as well. But in order to get existing businesses, that's pretty difficult. Our hack is that we're making it possible to get most of the benefits without moving your production database. At a high level, the architecture is something like: let's say you have your production in RDS or Aurora on AWS, and you are happy enough with it. So we say keep your production where it is. We start the staging replica on the Xata platform, and the data is being copied and anonymized. What you have on the Xata platform is very similar to your production data, but it's anonymized so there's no PII concern, and so on. And from there you can do Copy-on-Write branching, and then— Adil Saleh 11:36 Deploy it onto your own cloud as well, at the end— Tudor Golubenco 11:39 Yeah, you can also deploy in your own cloud. So it's actually very flexible from this point of view. You can deploy in any cloud; you can have on-prem; but you can also use our platform, which is the easiest and the cheapest option. But the point is: you don't have to move away from your production database. We're not replacing, let's say, AWS Aurora; we're making it better by offering you things like Copy-on-Write branching and anonymization workflows and so on. This allows us to get much larger companies and better logos. And then there's always going to be people who say, “This is working great for staging and dev. We have a relationship now. I see your support is responsive and so on—let's move production as well.” So ultimately our intention is that we will run production for large companies and small companies alike. But for the big companies, it's easier for us to get into these staging, testing, QA environments. So that's our— Adil Saleh 13:00 Yes. Tudor Golubenco 13:00 —that's our hack, if you want. Adil Saleh 13:04 I love the way you are making these products so sticky and pitched within the workflows of these teams, because that's super important—making sure that workflow is pretty much integrated so they don't have to go anywhere else. Tudor Golubenco 13:16 Yeah. Adil Saleh 13:18 They stay within their workflow. So now, thinking about the customer adoption side of things—I know that you're a technical co-founder; I know you don't know a whole lot of the strategy and everything—but what kind of operating principles do you have in terms of customer adoption? I know that a lot of these platforms are used by technical teams, so they're already familiar with Postgres and all these databases and all those. But thinking about making it user-friendly and, I would say, delivering value fastest—time-to-value, which is the biggest concern. You mentioned that you were in private beta for the last two months. I know that you are still making sure that whatever platforms are using in the beta, you are able to deliver the value and whatever feedback you can capture to increase the value for the customers to come after you go public. So what kind of parameters do you guys have internally? I know you have conversations with your other co-founders. Tudor Golubenco 14:14 Yeah, we're keeping it simple, actually. We're just looking at the revenue that we're bringing and the churn rate. Because, at the moment at least, we're pretty selective on the companies that we like. With the private beta, the nice thing is you can select which people you let in and so on, and we have very tight conversations with those people so we know what they're trying to do, what their goals are, and so on. And then we can follow on. But then, just to keep ourselves honest, it's really: are they in the end actually paying us? Even for a private beta, that's what we're looking at—the actual revenue that we get. And we know it needs to be a relatively high per-month value that we're getting for the whole thing to work. So we're keeping it simple from that point of view. And when there are things that didn't work out and the customer churned, then we're looking at why. Is it functionality that we don't have yet? Were there problems they hit? Did they simply not have time for it, or did they decide to build something internally? So it's very qualitative at the moment. Adil Saleh 15:49 Interesting. That's the name of the game. You’ve got to make sure that you are able to sense the competition and see—let's say even the customers that leave and churn for a feature or any functionality or any investment they were not able to find inside your platform. And then you need to track them—“Hey, where are they going? Are they going to some platforms like Neon or any other database? Are they building their own, using AWS like RDS?” How is that tracking going on? Even during the evaluation part—while they're evaluating Xata and other platforms as well—do you have any kind of data model or any sort of success-metric tracking, any sort of journey tracking? Any tooling that you guys are using for the customer data? Tudor Golubenco 16:43 No, we're not super advanced on that. We're using, like, Hosco/Huck to see—to track—which product features are used and such. But in the end, what we care is that the databases have started, and they're running, and they're actually using them—like they are active users. We're not super advanced from that point of view. Then on the go-to-market side, and especially on the Xata Lite side where we get a lot of influx of new users all the time and so on—there, we would do a bit of enrichment, especially when we want to separate. What we're trying to do is understand, okay, from this flux of users, which ones are actually trying to use it for a work project versus a personal project? Adil Saleh 17:51 You try to correct the business use cases. Tudor Golubenco 17:54 Yeah, exactly, exactly. And for that, we were using Clay and various automation tools and enrichments. To be honest, the biggest predictor that we have is if they signed up with their work email versus a Gmail. And actually that's the most reliable predictor. And it's so simple, right? But then sometimes there are people that sign up with Gmail just because they did the social login and maybe they didn't pay attention or something like this—so it would still be their Gmail, but it's a very interesting company. So then we'll try to reach out and see, okay, what are— Adil Saleh 18:40 Okay, so there is somebody who does and manually tracks that company, or is this—and you're using Clay for that, like companies that are signed? Tudor Golubenco 18:50 Yeah, we have someone we call a go-to-market engineer who has set up all these automations and enrichments and Slack notifications for the various branches where it happens. And then it's typically Monica, our CEO, who would email manually the more interesting people. We also have automatic emails for sure—just to welcome everyone and so on. Adil Saleh 19:18 Interesting, interesting. Now, looking at—I know that you might not be the right person to ask, but I'm just putting an open question. You have raised funds back in 2022, and since then you're not able to raise, or you have not raised the funds. Tudor Golubenco 19:33 Sorry, what was the question? There was a little bit of an interrupt. Adil Saleh 19:37 You guys were able to raise funds back in 2022. It's been like two and a half, three years. And you have not raised funds ever since then? Tudor Golubenco 19:45 We have not, yeah. But we still have a very long runway. We have been spending the money very consciously. So our burn rate is pretty small even though we have this generous free tier in Xata Lite and so on. We don't need to [raise]. We're looking now—we are waiting to see how this new platform is doing and so on. If we see really good momentum, we might go for raising another round, but our runway is a good number of years, so we're not under pressure from that point of view. And we're trying to really find a very strong product-market fit—not let ourselves lose by, like, temporary momentum. Adil Saleh 20:48 Yes. Because this new cloud platform can give you guys a new shift, especially in the enterprise segment. And the freemium models—they are not so much relied on by enterprise/small-to-midsize enterprise companies. And although to be able to give a freemium, you cannot offer a whole lot of features—talking about databases—with the underlying cost that you're building on top of Postgres and all of that. So now this is the opportunity, and I wish you guys good luck. You guys are doing a great job at engineering, and now you told me that on the go-to-market side as well—like two months in the private beta and you already have paying customers. And those two are like enterprise customers—enterprise meaning companies that are doing at scale, managing databases at scale. Tudor Golubenco 21:33 Yeah. Adil Saleh 21:33 So that is the biggest validation for you. And I think the time is not far that—if things weren't great—you've mentioned that you already optimized on the team resource. I was thinking—we came across a lot of startups, founders with like 30, 40, 50, a hundred, $150 million in funding. And they have teams between— Tudor Golubenco 21:57 Yeah. Adil Saleh 21:57 —800 to 1,500 people. And I was quite surprised that you guys are pretty lean on the team. Is there any specific reason? Tudor Golubenco 22:05 Yeah—like 25, 26 people. But I feel like a small, motivated team can often be a lot more efficient than a large team where you need to have layers of management and product managers and so on. Large design teams that sometimes work against engineering instead of working together. You get all these big-company problems, and especially in today's world with all the boost that we get from AI—AI coding tools and such—everyone is super productive. We're just moving fast. And it's also a matter of—this is another learning from some mistakes we did on Xata Lite—our architecture was just too complex, too ambitious, if you want, which ended up slowing us down and the rate of features. On the new platform, everything is a lot more flat—flat infrastructure, and everything is basically tools that speak with Postgres. That's the API, ultimately, and everything is decoupled. So then we can actually move fast and with higher reliability. So then you don't really need that many engineers and people. And you sidestep the big-company problems—and those are significant. Adil Saleh 23:55 Yes. Tudor Golubenco 23:55 Often they're significant. You see— Adil Saleh 23:57 Yeah. Tudor Golubenco 23:58 —companies with hundreds or thousands of engineers, and they're shipping no features. There's a lot of work going on internally on stuff that you don't see, but often those are self-inflicted problems—quite often—and by avoiding those— Adil Saleh 24:23 Because having a really big team and operations globally developed—you put yourself in the back seat, and you are less self-reliant and relying more on the team, even as a leader. Just imagine, Tudor, you have a team of 30 people—30 engineers. If anything comes across—let's say you're doing some research or you're going to an event, you talk to people that are doing at scale and all of that—and there's a problem that pings into it, “This is something we can solve within our infrastructure.” Anything engineering-wise you can do differently. If you have a team of 30 people, imagine you would not take action right away. And then, to be able to articulate that vision to someone who is not you is another job—that's going to take a lot more time. Tudor Golubenco 25:10 Yeah. The more layers that you have, the more the vision gets diluted before people understand it, and there's always more red tape in doing a project. You're like, “Oh, I have to ask five people. I better not start on this,” even though sometimes the work is five minutes, but getting everyone aligned is the actual work. With a small, tight team, you just avoid a lot of those problems. Adil Saleh 25:44 Yeah, so a couple more questions that I have that are more region-specific—and these are just my viewpoints, frankly. All these Europeans—like central Europeans—they're so good at products that are— I know that Americans have done a lot of products too, but when it comes to these folks from Europe, they're so good at building these core, engineering-heavy kinds of SaaS products. I still remember—there are four or five people that I recall out of my pocket. There are loads of Europeans that came up. One was a senior executive of Zendesk. There was another—VP of Trustpilot—now building Dreamdata; that's also pretty big in the attribution space. So now, what is that reason? Tudor Golubenco 26:30 That's a good question. There's definitely deep and difficult tech in the US as well. But if you look at Europe’s success stories, there are quite a lot of companies that are doing data, deep tech. I think to some degree it's maybe a little bit less competition on the very strong talent—people that want to be remote and don't want to work for a US company necessarily, because that would mean lots of late-night meetings and so on. So there's a little bit less competition for very good talent. And then the university centers are also good, I would say—especially when it comes to things like operating systems or databases and so on—they're probably on par with the US ones. But then there are just differences in terms of opportunities after people graduate. So more people will choose maybe not the Uber or Airbnb type of companies to work for, but a small startup that does really interesting technical things. So maybe that's one aspect of it. And then if you look at the open-source landscape—because this often goes hand in hand, right? A lot of these technical companies are doing open source—a lot of their work. Open source is very… a lot of Europeans do open source and like the open-source idea, so the two might also be intertwined to some degree. I worked, for example, for a long time at Elastic. And Elastic is essentially a European company—nowadays, not anymore. It basically has moved all the executive [team] to the Bay Area. But it started as an Amsterdam-based company. Adil Saleh 28:52 Yes, yes, I know that. And they've done it at scale in the days when nobody knew, in that open-source category and all of that. So one of the category leaders that you have. So now, one more question before I talk a little bit about your team culture, operating principles—what you're doing these days. You mentioned backstage that you are now in the Bay Area. What are the goals? How is life there? What is different that you're doing—maybe working with the customers, living closer to the customers, or whatever? So now, thinking about you being a platform that is funded—and it's always good to be a model like Basecamp—those folks, Jason, Fried, and David—I'm sure David is someone you also admire—have done a really good job building Basecamp and Ruby on Rails and all these folks. So how do you see the business model? Should it be sustainable in a longer-term view—meaning 10 to 15 years—being funded and serving the board members and hitting the numbers consistently and serving their growth metrics rather than serving your vision or depending on the investment or user? Or do you see a pretty open approach, like, “Hey, we need to choose our investors—like Index Ventures and similar to these—and they give us the freedom and they actually trust our vision and they're pretty much aligned with what we want, what kind of impact we want to make in 5, 10, 15 years”? So what's your viewpoint on— Taylor Kenerson 0:26 Welcome to the Hyperengage Podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearthed the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh 0:46 Hey greetings everybody, this is Hyperengage podcast. it seems like I've grown old with this, like it's a hundred sixty one seventy episodes down and I was, I wanted to do something different because, sitting in the valley with more than 70 Y Combinator backed companies, all of them are mostly AI powered. They want to, just ride that wave in the recent times, and I was bored, with Maybe slightly different technology, but they're serving the same customer, like VTN tooling, sales, support, marketing, product. so now we are exploring more about these tools that are, basically helping the brains behind everything, like technology, like developers, programmars, people that are setting up the databases and all. So today, we are going to talk to, the CTO of, Xata.io I'm not sure if I've, pronounced his name. It's Sata, right? Tudor Golubenco 1:39 Yep. That's good. Adil Saleh 1:40 Yeah. So CTO Xata Tudor Thank you very much, for taking the time today. Tudor Golubenco 1:45 Sure. Thanks for having me and looking forward to the call. Adil Saleh 1:48 I love that. This has been going on for long. by long, I mean in this era of AI, the long is not more than two years, right? So in the last two years, a lot of these startups, they're trying to build their databases because they're using AI. They're capturing freemium model, they're capturing a lot of data, especially customer data. They're conducting a lot of quality assurance units and testing, parameters for that. They need to make sure the database is secure. It's optimizing the cost, of course it's serverless. It gives them, at the same time, it gives them ability to, deploy onto their own cloud. Say they're, not absolutely reli with this. There are some players that you already know that came along with like big bucks on their, on the back pocket with Hot Pockets. so that's why we wanna have this conversation that, what's, I know that, there has been a lot in the past five years that you guys have pivoted, not on the product or technology, you might know better inside, but On the front side, on the marketing or business standpoint, the vision and, maybe the sum of the feature set that has changed or shaped, over the last, I would say two to three years. So I would appreciate, just tell me a little bit about inception of, Xata and how do you guys transform into what you are today and what is the biggest- Tudor Golubenco 3:05 Yeah. Adil Saleh 3:05 Problem that you get to hear from your customers when they start the onboarding? Tudor Golubenco 3:10 Yeah. Adil Saleh 3:11 Awesome. Tudor Golubenco 3:11 Yeah. today, let me start with today we are a Postgres platform. our differentiators are Copy-on-Write branching, anonymization workflows, and things like scale to zero. So it's, we're a very good platform, for, especially for doing, staging developer environments because we have this instant Copy-on-Write Branching, that means branching with the data. That's very convenient when you do QA and so on. And other players like Neon also have, there's not so many that have it, but Neon has it. However, we are investing more on also the anonymization parts. So if you have, sensitive data in your production database, which is what most companies have, right? They, will have some sort of PII, whether it's email addresses or something like this. Then you don't want that data to end up in the developer branches because it's, that's just, like that would be against compliance. And also there's a, the risk then, I don't know, maybe you, are emailing everyone in your list by mistakes and stuff like that, that's just embarrassing. So that's where, that's why, together with Copy-on-Write branching, anonymization, It's really important. So that's, like that's our focus if you want. But it's a, it's otherwise a very good, Postgres offering with all that. So it can be used for production, it can use, be used for AI memory, it can be used and we're seeing all sorts of use cases actually, but now to, to go back a little bit because yeah, there's definitely an arc to the story. So we started data in, in, 2021 and our first idea back then was to make a database that's super easy to use. Like we wanted something that, we are seeing, people using Airtable. That's what people were doing back then. They were using Airtable as a production database and that actually was actually relatively nice because you were getting like an API and so on, and it was a SAS, no waiting times to provision and so on. But of course it was also limited to, I dunno, 50 K records or something like this. It was not meant to be a production database really. So that's what, that's where we started. We wanted a database that's super easy to use, so almost like a no code local type of tools. And that's where we started. Over time, however, we have, we've got pulled more and more into the developer aspect of it. like a lot of people were asking for, Postgres direct SQL access, and we were using Postgres under the hood, but we were not exposing it. We were exposing through our own API. So little by little we moved into more, being more Postgres native. And that has helped with moving a little bit to our target user from being, like what we call the builder persona. That's people that do hobby projects or personal projects, sometimes nonprofit and so on. It has helped us to move slowly towards actual companies that use it, like for their business. And it's critical for their business, which is, ultimately, that's what we need to build a sustainable business, other businesses, depending on you. so yeah, we were changing our architecture little by little to expose more and more of the underlying Postgres until, like maybe about a year ago, we said, you know what? We should actually start a new platform. I like just, and we actually started from scratch and where we are right now is that what used to be Xata, we have renamed it to Xata Lite. So that still exists and it's still useful for to, to a very large number of people. but our development focus goes into what we call now simple Xata, and it's this new platform and we, when we build this new platform, we took all our learnings, of course. Both from a technical point of view and from a marketing positioning point of view. And, and, yeah, this, new platform is doing great. So we're really excited about it. again, both from what it does, benchmarking and so on, and also customer attraction. we're actually in private beta, so we haven't opened the doors very wide yet. But we're allowing customers in and even, In a couple of months of private beta, we've already reached the same level of revenue as years of Xata Lite so that was pretty cool to see. And we haven't even really opened it up yet, so it's, just working much better. From the revenue point of view, like a lot fewer customers, but that are actually spending serious money. Adil Saleh 8:23 And also Adoption is the biggest concern too. they're able to adopt, that's why they're able to see the value, that's why they're paying. so in platforms like these, if you're able to serve the top line, bottom line, it will follow. it's so simple. Tudor Golubenco 8:37 Exactly. Yeah. Adil Saleh 8:38 You know what I hear a lot from our, my CTO and, the team members that are actually technical people on our team. We're also a B2B sales company, you've done a really great engineering and, along the lines where you were doing it, there are players that came up and they didn't, I would not say an average job, but they are trying to position themselves separately, talking about some platforms that we were evaluating while we were, doing all for our databases, Superbase, is one of those, I don't hate to name because we're not going to be biased for anybody, but it's. How do you see from a business model standpoint yourself As a different business model, is that a different Customer segment is the feature set, does, is that different, otherwise? What, how do you see yourself different than these models? Tudor Golubenco 9:26 Yeah. Yeah. And I actually, you said something interesting. Yeah. if you start with the top of the line, the bottom of, bottom line will follow, and that's actually the strategy that we're following. We have a little bit of a hack to, because the problem with one thing that we learned in this database space is that people, there's a lot of data gravity, like it's not easy to move from one, database provider to, to another. You need a pretty serious reason, and that's, that reason could be, like instability, like there are many outages and so on. Needs to be something very serious. Sometimes it can be cost. like people are saying, oh, I'm just, this does what I need, but it's just costing me too much. But incremental features or, being, just having nicer UI and so on, that's not going to convince anyone to switch database providers because there's so much risk in switching. it's like you have to plan it. you cannot afford downtime. So usually there's this complex procedure to, to change it and so on. So it's hard for database companies to get, existing businesses. Greenfield Project, That's relatively easy and that's what we had a lot with Xata Lite as well. But in order to get existing businesses, that's, pretty difficult. And our hack is that we're making it possible to get most of the benefits without moving your production database. And so the, architecture at the high level is something like, let's say you have your production in RDS or Aurora, let's say on AWS. And you are happy enough with it. So we say keep your production where it is. We start the staging replica on the Xata platform, and the data is being copied and anonymized, What you have on the Xata platform is not, it's very similar to your production data, but it's anonymized so there's no PI concern and so on. And from then, from there, you can do copy-on-write branching, and then Adil Saleh 11:36 Deploy it on onto Your own cloud as well, at the end Tudor Golubenco 11:39 Yeah, you can also deploy in your own cloud. So actually very flexible, from this point of view. You can deploy in any cloud you can have on-prem, but you can also use our platform, which is the, the easiest and the cheapest option. yeah. but the point is you don't have to move away from your production database. We're more like. We're not replacing, let's say AWS Aurora, we're making it better by offering you things like copy on write branching and anonymization workflows and so on. And this allows us to get just much, much, larger companies and better logos. and then there's always going to be people that say, This is working great for staging and dev. We have a relationship now. I see you are responsive, your support is responsive, and so on. Let's move production as well. So ultimately our intention is that we will run, we are running production for, large companies and small companies alike. But for the big companies, it's easier for us to get into this, staging, testing, QA environments. so that's our, Adil Saleh 13:00 Yes. Tudor Golubenco 13:00 That's our, hack if you want. Adil Saleh 13:04 I love the way that you are making these products so sticky and pitched within the workflows of, of these teams, because that's super important, like making sure that workflow is pretty much integrated so that they don't have to go anywhere else. Tudor Golubenco 13:16 Yeah. Adil Saleh 13:18 They stay within their workflow. So now thinking about, the customer adoption side of things, I know that you're a technical, co-founder, I know you don't know a whole lot of the strategy and everything, but what is, what kind of operating principles that you have in terms of customer adoption? I know that a lot of these, platforms are used by technical teams, so they're already familiar with Postgres and, all these, data, databases and all those. But, thinking about making it, user friendly and I would say making it, deliver value fastest. Time to value, which is the biggest concern. You mentioned that you were in the private beta for the last two months. I know that you are still making sure that the, whatever platforms that are using in the beta, you are able to deliver the value and whatever feedback that you can capture to increase the value for the customers to come after you go public. So what kind of, parameters that you guys have internally, I know you have conversation with your other co-founders. Tudor Golubenco 14:14 Yeah. like we're, keeping it simple actually. And there we're just looking at the, revenue that we're bringing and the churn rate. because, at, the moment at least, we're pretty selective on the companies that we like. We have the private beta that's nice about it, that can, you can select which people you let in and so on, and we have very tight conversations with those people so we know what they're trying to do, what their goals are and so on, right? and then we can follow on. But then, just to keep us ourselves honest, it's really are they in the end actually paying us? and even from, for a private beta, that's what we're looking at, the actual revenue that we get. and we know it, it needs to be, A relatively high per month value that we're getting for the, for the whole thing to work. So we're keeping it simple from that point of view. And when there's, when there are things that didn't work out and the customer churned. They're not looking at, like, why is it something that we, it's functionality that we don't have yet. Were there problems that they hit? Did they, did they, simply didn't have time for it or they decided to build something internally. So this is, like it's very qualitative at the moment. Adil Saleh 15:49 Interesting. that's, a, that's the name of the game. You gotta make sure that you, you are able to sense the competition and, see, let's say even the customer that leave and churn for feature or any functionality or any investment, they were not able to find inside your platform. And then you need to track them, Hey, where are they going? are they Going to some platforms like Neo or any other database that they're using, they're building, their own, using AWS like RDS, these kind of, How is that track going on? Even we, during the evaluation part when while you're evaluating, they're like evaluating Xata and other platforms as well. So do you have any kind of a data model or any sort of, success metric tracking or any sort of, journey tracking? Any tooling that you guys are using, from, for the customer data? Tudor Golubenco 16:43 No, we're not super, we're not super advanced on that. We're using like Osco Hulk to see, like to track which product features are used and such. But it's, That's, yeah. In the end, what we carry is that, the databases, they have started databases and they're running and they're actually using them. like they are active users, and yeah, that's, it's like we're not super, super advanced from that point of view. Then on the go-to market side, and especially like on the Xata Lite side, where we get, like a lot of influx of new users all the time and so on. There, we, would, yeah, we're doing the bit of enrichment and like especially when we want to separate, What we're trying to do is understand, okay, from this flux of users, which ones are actually trying to use it for a work, work project versus a personal project. Adil Saleh 17:51 You try to correct the Business use Cases. Tudor Golubenco 17:54 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. and for that, like we were using clay and various automation tools and enrichments. To be honest, the, the biggest, predictor that we have is if they signed up with the, with, with their work email versus a Gmail. and, actually that's, the most, the reliable predictor. And it's so simple, right? But then sometimes there are people that sign up with Gmail just because they did the social login and maybe they didn't pay attention or something like this, so it would still be like, like their, Gmail. But it's a very interesting company. So then we'll try to reach out and see, okay, what are, Adil Saleh 18:40 Okay, so There is somebody on does and manually tracks that company or is this, and you're using clay for that, like companies that are signed? Tudor Golubenco 18:50 Yeah, we have a, someone we call a go-to market engineer that has set up all this automation and enrichments and slack notifications for the various branches. Where it happens. And then it's typically, Monica, our CEO that would, that would, email manually the more interesting people. We also have automatic emails for sure, just to, welcome everyone and so on. Adil Saleh 19:18 Interesting. Interesting. Now, looking at, I know that, you might not be the right person to ask, but I'm just put it, an open question. you have raised funds back in 2022, and, since then you're not able to raise, or you, have not raised the funds. Tudor Golubenco 19:33 Sorry, what was the question? there was a little bit interrupt. Adil Saleh 19:37 You guys been able to raise funds back in 2022. It's been like two and a half, three. And you have not raised funds ever since then? Tudor Golubenco 19:45 We have not. Yeah. But we still have a very long runaway. We have been, spending the money, very consciously. So our burn rate is, pretty small even though we even know like we have this generous free tier in Xeta Lite and so on. But we don't need to. and then we're looking now, it's like we are waiting to see how this, This new platform is doing and so on. So, if we see really good momentum, we might go for, raising another round, but we are, our runaway is a good number of years, so we're not under, pressure from that point of view. And we're trying to, like really. Really fi find a very strong product, market fit. Not let ourself lose by, like Temporary momentum. Adil Saleh 20:48 Yes. Because this new cloud platform can give you guys a new shift, in terms of, especially in the enterprise segment. And because the premium models, they are like not so much relied by, enterprise, small to midsize enterprise companies. And, although to be able to give it a freemium, you cannot offer a whole lot of features. Talking about databases. Yeah. With this under underlying cost, that you're building on top of Postgres and all of that. So now this is the opportunity and I wish you guys good luck. You, guys are doing great job at the engineering, and now you told me that it's at the, go-to market, go to market side as well, like two, two months in the private beta And you already have paying customers. And those two are like enterprise customers, like enterprise meaning like. Companies are that are doing at scale managing databases at scale. Tudor Golubenco 21:33 Yeah, Adil Saleh 21:33 So that was the biggest, that is the biggest validation for you. And, I think, the time is not far that, if, things weren't great that you've mentioned that you already optimized on the team resource. I was thinking that. we came across a lot of, startups, founders in the like 30, 40, 50, a hundred, $150 million, in, in funding. And they have like teams between Tudor Golubenco 21:57 Yeah. Adil Saleh 21:57 800 to 1500 people. And, I was quite surprised that you guys are pretty lean on the team. Is there any specific reason? Tudor Golubenco 22:05 Yeah, like 25, 26 people, but, it's, I feel like a small. Small motivated team can often be a lot more efficient than, like a large team where you need to have, layers of management and product managers and so on. Design, large design team that has to sometimes works against engineering instead of, like working together. You get all these like big company, problems and it's especially in today's world with, with, like all the boost that we get from AI and so on, AI coding tools and such, everyone is super productive. It just, we're just moving fast. And it's also a matter of, this is, like another learning from, from the, some mistakes we did on Xata Lite Our architecture was just too complex, too ambitious if you want, which we ended up slowing us down and the rate of features. On the new platform, everything is like a lot more flat infrastructure and everything is like basically tools that speak with Postgres. That's the, the, API ultimately, and this just everything is decoupled, so then we can actually move fast and, with higher reliability. So that's, then, you don't really need all that, that many. Than many engineers and people. And you don't, you just side stepping the, the big company's problems and they are, those are those are significant. Adil Saleh 23:55 Yes. Tudor Golubenco 23:55 Often they're significant, like you see, Adil Saleh 23:57 Yeah. Tudor Golubenco 23:58 Companies with hundreds of, or thousands of engineers and, they're doing no features. It's like there's a lot of work. Going on internally on stuff that you don't see, but, often those absolutely, that those are self-inflicted problems quite often, by, just, by avoiding those, Adil Saleh 24:23 Because having a bigger, really big team and, operations globally developed you, you Put yourself in a backseat and you are less self reliant and you're relying more team even as a leader. Do you have a team just imagine you, just imagine Tudor, you have a team of 30 people, 30 engineers. If any, anything that comes across, let's say you're doing some research or you're going to an event, you talk to people that are doing at scale and all of that, and there's a problem that pings into it and this, this is something we can solve within our infrastructure and this is a problem, let's say. Anything engineering wise, you can do differently. So you have a team of 30 people. Imagine you would not do it, you would not take action right away. And then to be able to articulate that vision into someone that is, not you, is another job. that's gonna take a lot more time. Tudor Golubenco 25:10 Yeah. The more layers that you Have, the more the vision gets diluted before, like before people understand it and so on, and it's always more red tape in doing a project. You're like, oh, I have to ask five people. I better not start on this, even though sometimes the work is five minutes, but getting everyone aligned is the actual work, with a, small, tight team, you just avoid a lot of those problems. Adil Saleh 25:44 Yeah, so some of us, couple of more questions that I have that are more region specific, and these are just my viewpoints, frankly. Viewpoints, all these, like Europeans, like centered Europeans, they're so good at, products that are, I know that Americans have done a lot of products too, but when it comes to, these, folks from Europe, they're so good at building these core. Engineering heavy kind of SaaS products. I still remember there's, there's four or five people that I recall outta my pocket. There are loads of, European that came up. One is, one was from senior executive of Zendex. There was another that was, PT of, Trustpilot now was, building, dream data that's also pretty big in the attribution space. So now what is that reason? Tudor Golubenco 26:30 That's a good question. there's definitely, deep and difficult tech than, than in the US as well. But yeah, if you look at the Europe, success stories, that's quite, quite a lot of companies that are doing data, deep tech, and I think to, to some degree is. Maybe a little bit less competition on the very strong talent. like people that, you know, like just, want to be remote. And, and don't want to work for a US company necessarily, because that, would mean, like lots of late night meetings and so on. So there's a little bit less competition for very good talent. And then the university centers are also, Good. I would say, especially when it comes to things like operating systems or databases and so on, they're probably on par with the US ones. but then, there's just different in different, in terms of opportunities after people graduate. So more people will, choose the, maybe not the. Uber or Airbnb type of companies to work for, but a small startup that does really interesting technical things, so maybe that's one aspect of it. yeah. And then if you look at the open source landscape, because this often goes hand in hand, right? A lot of these technical companies, they are doing open source, a lot of their work and such. Open source is a very, like a, a lot of Europeans do open source and like the open source idea and so on, so that the two might also be intertwined to some degree. I worked, for example, for a long time at, elastic. And Elastic is essentially like a European country was now, nowadays, not anymore. It basically has moved all the, executive and so on has moved to the Bay Area. but it started as a Amsterdam based company. Adil Saleh 28:52 Yes. Yes, I know that. Yeah. and they've done it at scale in the days when nobody knew in the, in, in that, open, open source category and all of that. So one of the category leaders that you have. So now, one more question before I talk about, a little bit about your, team culture, operating principles, what you're doing these days. You mentioned backstage that you are now in the Bay Area. What are the goals? How is life there? What are, how is it, what is the different that you're doing? Maybe. Working with the customers, living closer to the customers or whatever. So now thinking about, you being a platform that is, funded and it's always good to, be a model like Basecamp, those, folks, Jason, Fred and David, I'm sure David is some guy that you also admire, has Done, really good job in, building Basecamp and Ruby and Rails and all these folks. So how do you see the business model, Should it, be sustainable in a longer, longer term view, meaning 10 to 15 years being funded and, serving the board members, and hitting the numbers consistently and Serving their growth metrics rather than serving your vision or making, or depending on, on, on the investment or user? Or do you see it like, a pretty, open approach like, Hey, we need to choose our investors. Like Index, investors ventures and similar to these, and, they give us the freedom and they actually trust our vision and they're pretty much aligned in What we want, what kind of impact we want to make in 5, 10, 15 years. So what's your viewpoint on. Tudor Golubenco 30:26 Yeah, first of all, we are taking it one step at a time. it's it's nice to dream about, we're going to IPO and so on, but there's just a lot of work to do until then and such. And then yes, when we, got our, our series A, this was a, very key point and this is why, you are, asking, you haven't raised for three years and so on. But actually, the board was on board with this plan from the beginning that we're going to take our time. And, the database business, I would say is special. Like you wouldn't, You wouldn't necessarily look for the same, for the same, path, as with other companies, because you, it takes longer to develop and reliability is key. So it's, you cannot, you should, you can, but you shouldn't. You cut corners and so on. This is, it's some competitors of ours are hitting a hard time because of real reliability issues and so on. So that was something that we agreed from the beginning that we're going to keep our burn rates down and develop very strong. Technical solutions, and at some point we're going to increase our investments when we see that it's the moment to do it, but, but we're not in a particular rush to do it. And that's, like it takes a special type of investor to. To, understand this and look at the company and its particulars versus preset models of how companies should grow and so on. So, that was important for us and we got that in, in the Red Point and index. yeah, beyond that, I know like ideally we would go to the The VC path to an IPO type of exit. This is, like our long-term goal, but as I said we're taking it step by step. It's, which. It's not something that we're really thinking about. Yeah. Adil Saleh 32:46 Not too far out. Like best part about, I was listening to Jen and the CEO of Nvidia and he said we don't have tomorrow's plan. We plan for one day. We get, we manage one day at a time, and we move on to the next. Yeah. We don't have even Weeks planned or months planned? I know it's easy to say. It is easier said than done, out in public, but, with development teams and trap now coming back to your team, I know that, there is a, specific trait that you want in an engineer, be it for database, whatever that is, secondary, like what kind of technology or industry, but for an engineer, what kind of traits that, do you think that are. That are going to make them A players like Google, say 10 x engineer. But now it's the AI so much and it gets as a technical leader, as somebody that wants to, hire a players, it's so hard to identify the A players before you get them onto the ship. And. Of course you need to sail the ship at the, wrong time and disturb the all the passengers to get my point. So hiring the wrong engineer that is not with the same intent, motivation, intellect, which is pretty critical. Even using ai. With using ai, you cannot have them onboarded onto the ship. You want to make a really good decision in the, in the first place. how things are changed with ai, with identifying the A players? Tudor Golubenco 34:13 Yeah, it is part, Adil Saleh 34:14 By the way, this is our Challenge as well, Tudor to be very honest. This is our challenge as well. So I wanted to explore with you. Tudor Golubenco 34:22 Yeah. It, I think it's difficult to identify the A players because it's not just the technical skills and even now maybe, the role, technical skills, maybe they're even less important now because, you can use AI help for a bunch of things. But it's, it's beyond the technical skills is, or the, let's say the very hard technical skills is about, I don't know, having a little bit of technical intuition to know, like what, the right path is. Because you can have anyone like massive amounts of code. But if, the assumptions are, not correct, if they don't match the. Business requirements directly, they, it might just be in the wrong direction, a whole lot of effort. Adil Saleh 35:16 Can you also give us some Examples for audience to understand deeply onto this? Tudor Golubenco 35:23 Yeah, so for example, some, a challenge that we had internally in Xata, and it was, it's my mistake. It was a very humbling experience because, like, I've been CTO at other companies, I have been technical leaders at, large companies and so on. It's different in, In a series A startup that's building something from, from, absolutely nothing with requirements changing all the time and so on. It's humbling. this is primarily my mistake, but, our, architecture was, if it makes sense just to, to explain if it, it was like a tower, which means that functionality was based on other functionality underneath, And that makes it coupled, it's like, a tower will never be as, as strong and stable as a more wide base structure. That, that just makes sense. And this actually applies to software as well, because, if you have a component, you build a component and then on top of it you build something. Maybe two other components and on top of those two components and so on, you just get taller and taller. And that makes it coupled you cannot change any of the middle components without being afraid of breaking too much. and that makes everything, like shaky if you want. if you have a very, flat base and a very strong base, and then just do small features here and there and which are all decoupled, you can just move faster and, you're not so worried that you might break other things because things are decoupled. So this was the, like a learning experience. And that's why on the new platform really this, base is simply Postgres. and then most of our features, like for example, we were doing, We're doing blue green deployments, which is like a pretty advanced feature of moving branches, database branches from one instance to another with zero downtime and so on. We're building that as a generic Postgres tool so that even it'll even work outside of Xata This has the advantage that we can open source it and make an open source project out of it. we can, it means we can use it from, for me, migrations between clouds, from like from Neon to us or the other way around even, or, it's it can be used be between cloud providers as long as they support Postgres and it's. It's own thing, it's not coupled with a lot of other platform code and so on. This just, this, whole thing just makes, it, just makes it better, and yeah, the, that's where, the A players, I feel like they're thinking of this design, architecture, design levels, and put. Put you on the right direction or they don't let you do these mistakes, and this is pretty, pretty rare and doesn't really change, I think, with ai. At least not, not in the near future. Adil Saleh 38:38 Yeah, absolutely. Because you need to understand the deep, I would say ecosystem in depth. You, talk about a data Tudor Golubenco 38:46 And you need to even understand The problem. it's like the, a startup. it has, a problem space and you need to understand it very well in order to be successful. this is like a little bit like, if in, in high school or whatever when there was a hot math problem and it took, it took you maybe an hour to understand it, but then once you actually understand the problem, then the solution is obvious, right? So I think it's a little bit like that with, with, with software architectures. With startups as well. it's actually the challenging part is actually understanding the problem space. Then the solution is pretty simple Adil Saleh 39:31 Yeah. Perfect. Love that. So now last, little bit of segment, we have around four to five minutes. what does make, your team really successful in terms of creating outside of, the technical skills and as you mentioned, the hardware skills and, understanding around the problem and all. Is there customer support? Is there a proactive approach? like What, is the biggest thing that makes your. Technical team win the team that you supervise? Tudor Golubenco 40:04 Yeah, I think a little bit. All of this, so definitely looking for engineers to have, product level understanding of their features and how their, how customers will interact with it. That's really important because we don't, we try to empower them to. To design the feature to, to, to some degree. And there's help, there's, we have, we have a product manager and design, UX design expert and so on. So those people are there to help and provide the basis, but ultimately we want the engineers to understand the, like who they're building for and what they need. So then they build the simplest possible solution to you like really nail the feature. without a lot of complexity, and this again, makes us move faster and create features faster. So that's important. Then, being proactive because we have a, we're, like we have, We're offering a service that companies rely for as their production database and so on. They're very sensitive to downtime and so on, because of course, it's if your database is down, that practically guarantees and, a really, big outage. So looking for people that are proactive in, in identifying issues early, that means, like at the platform level setting, setting the correct alerts, having this. Platform level interest, not just in building software. It's easier to hire people that have an interest in building software, but they don't care too much about how that code is executed and run and so on. It's more rare to find people that have an interest in both. And this is, who we're looking for because it's important. Yeah. So these things, yeah, these things combine. Adil Saleh 42:11 Perfect. Perfect. I'm a big Tudor,. I'm a big believer of learning from people and learning from people's mistake. You don't live long enough to make them yourself. I'm a huge believer of connecting with people. That's why we are having this event, and I'm so glad that you mentioned that you are in the SF I was thinking that, hey, this guy is doing a really good job. There's so much for our audience and ourselves to learn from this guy. When my CTO. Some of the people that we are founders that we are going to meet, at the meetup. And, it's quite an interesting times when it comes to deciding on, what platform to go for as a founder. It's a big pain to be very honest. And, a lot of, a lot of platform I'm doing really promising even. In this domain, these startup founders are not well versed. They're making a lot of mistakes. So it is super important for leaders like you to jump in and, stay closer to the community and keep educating them. And that's why, we are, thinking of having you on 28th, October 28th. it's, of course, it's. Anyway, I'm saying this out in public, but we are only going to have 25 people. people that we know and people that we need to make sure that it's, at the end of the day, it's a value of time for everybody else. And that's why we're trying to qualify people, based on those, those rates. of course we have people like that are GTM leaders, people that are doing a d like doing different products in 15 to different 16 different industries. So we cannot have like seven, eight people, like eight, nine people, like it's highly intimate, like 25, 30 people. So we can't have eight or seven or eight people same serving the same industry or same. So trying to make it, make it valuable for everybody. So I would love for you to come in for a couple, maybe two and a half, three hours, and, we'll have, good time. How's, by the way, your time in sf, how long have you been here for? Tudor Golubenco 44:01 Great. Yeah. I'm enjoying it. I'm here, for I think, four weeks now. And we'll be for another five months, so about six months in total. and it's been great. I, I enjoy it. I, like as a, like a, as a startup founder, you travel a lot to this area, but it is a actually a little bit different to actually be here, and have all the time in the world to meet with people and Adil Saleh 44:28 Yes, the mindset is different. Tudor Golubenco 44:29 Yeah. Yeah. to see other people in there. Environment. Adil Saleh 44:34 Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. And, definitely, Tudor It was really very nice having conversation with you. I love the energy and the way that you made, answers really specific for our audience. And I think alone in this episode, there's so much for all of us to learn even myself in the first place. So thank you very much for, the time and knowledge that you shared. Tudor Golubenco 44:53 Thank you. That was a very pleasant discussion. Thank you so much. Adil Saleh 44:56 Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please share your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io We definitely need it. we will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a customer success leader and how you can empower. Engagements with some building, some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day. Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please hear your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io We definitely need it. we will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a customer success leader and how you can empower. Engagements with some building, some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day. Tudor Golubenco 0:01 In a couple of months of private beta, we've already reached the same level of revenue as years of Xata Lite, so that was pretty cool to see. And we haven't even really opened it up yet, so it's just working much better. From the revenue point of view, we have fewer customers, but they are actually spending serious money. Taylor Kenerson 0:26 Welcome to the Hyperengage Podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearth the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh 0:46 Hey, greetings everybody—this is the Hyperengage Podcast. It seems like I've grown old with this, like it's a hundred sixty, one seventy episodes down, and I wanted to do something different because, sitting in the Valley with more than 70 Y Combinator–backed companies, all of them are mostly AI-powered. They want to just ride that wave in recent times, and I was bored—with maybe slightly different technology, but they're serving the same customer, like GTM tooling, sales, support, marketing, product. So now we are exploring more about these tools that are basically helping the brains behind everything—technology—like developers, programmers, people that are setting up the databases and all. So today, we are going to talk to the CTO of Xata.io. I'm not sure if I've pronounced his name. It's “Sata,” right? Tudor Golubenco 1:39 Yep. That's good. Adil Saleh 1:40 Yeah. So, CTO of Xata, Tudor—thank you very much for taking the time today. Tudor Golubenco 1:45 Sure. Thanks for having me, and looking forward to the call. Adil Saleh 1:48 I love that. This has been going on for long—by long, I mean in this era of AI, “long” is not more than two years, right? So in the last two years, a lot of these startups are trying to build their databases because they're using AI. They're capturing freemium models; they're capturing a lot of data, especially customer data. They're conducting a lot of quality assurance units and testing parameters for that. They need to make sure the database is secure, it's optimizing the cost—of course it's serverless. At the same time, it gives them the ability to deploy onto their own cloud. Say they're not absolutely reliant on this. There are some players that you already know that came along with big bucks in their back pocket—with Hot Pockets. So that's why we want to have this conversation. I know there has been a lot in the past five years that you guys have pivoted— not on the product or technology (you might know better inside), but on the front side, on the marketing or business standpoint—the vision and maybe the sum of the feature set that has changed or shaped over the last, I would say, two to three years. So I would appreciate it—just tell me a little bit about the inception of Xata and how you guys transformed into what you are today, and what is the biggest— Tudor Golubenco 3:05 Yeah. Adil Saleh 3:05 —problem that you hear from your customers when they start the onboarding? Tudor Golubenco 3:10 Yeah. Adil Saleh 3:11 Awesome. Tudor Golubenco 3:11 Yeah. Today—let me start with today—we are a Postgres platform. Our differentiators are Copy-on-Write branching, anonymization workflows, and things like scale-to-zero. So we're a very good platform, especially for staging and developer environments, because we have this instant Copy-on-Write branching—that means branching with the data. That's very convenient when you do QA and so on. Other players like Neon also have it—there are not so many that have it, but Neon has it. However, we are investing more in the anonymization parts. So if you have sensitive data in your production database—which is what most companies have, right? They will have some sort of PII, whether it's email addresses or something like this—then you don't want that data to end up in the developer branches because that would be against compliance. And also there's the risk—maybe you are emailing everyone in your list by mistake and stuff like that—that's just embarrassing. So together with Copy-on-Write branching, anonymization is really important. That's our focus, if you want. Otherwise, it's a very good Postgres offering with all that. It can be used for production; it can be used for AI memory—we're seeing all sorts of use cases, actually. But now, to go back a little bit—because, yeah, there's definitely an arc to the story. We started Xata in 2021, and our first idea back then was to make a database that's super easy to use. We were seeing people using Airtable. That's what people were doing back then—they were using Airtable as a production database. That was relatively nice because you were getting an API and so on, and it was SaaS—no waiting times to provision and so on. But of course it was limited to, I dunno, 50K records or something like this. It was not meant to be a production database, really. So that's where we started. We wanted a database that's super easy to use—almost like a no-code/low-code type of tool. And that's where we started. Over time, however, we got pulled more and more into the developer aspect of it. A lot of people were asking for Postgres direct SQL access, and we were using Postgres under the hood, but we were not exposing it—we were exposing through our own API. So little by little we moved into being more Postgres-native. And that has helped move our target user from being what we call the “builder” persona (people who do hobby projects or personal projects, sometimes nonprofit and so on) slowly toward actual companies that use it for their business. And it's critical for their business, which is ultimately what we need to build a sustainable business—other businesses depending on you. So yeah, we were changing our architecture little by little to expose more and more of the underlying Postgres until, maybe about a year ago, we said, “You know what? We should actually start a new platform.” We actually started from scratch. Where we are right now is that what used to be Xata we have renamed to Xata Lite. That still exists and it's still useful to a very large number of people, but our development focus goes into what we call now simply “Xata,” and it's this new platform. When we built this new platform, we took all our learnings—of course—both from a technical point of view and from a marketing/positioning point of view. And this new platform is doing great, so we're really excited about it—both from what it does (benchmarking and so on) and also customer attraction. We're actually in private beta, so we haven't opened the doors very wide yet. But we're allowing customers in, and even in a couple of months of private beta we've already reached the same level of revenue as years of Xata Lite, so that was pretty cool to see. And we haven't even really opened it up yet, so it's just working much better. From the revenue point of view, fewer customers, but they're actually spending serious money. Adil Saleh 8:23 And also adoption is the biggest concern too. They're able to adopt; that's why they're able to see the value; that's why they're paying. So in platforms like these, if you're able to serve the top line, the bottom line will follow. It's so simple. Tudor Golubenco 8:37 Exactly. Yeah. Adil Saleh 8:38 You know what I hear a lot from our—my CTO and the team members that are actually technical people on our team: We're also a B2B sales company. You've done really great engineering, and along the lines where you were doing it, there are players that came up and they didn't—I would not say an average job—but they are trying to position themselves separately. Talking about some platforms that we were evaluating while we were doing all for our databases: Supabase is one of those. I don't hate to name because we're not going to be biased for anybody, but it's— How do you see—from a business model standpoint—yourself as a different business model? Is that a different customer segment? Is the feature set different otherwise? What—how do you see yourself different than these models? Tudor Golubenco 9:26 Yeah, yeah. And actually you said something interesting—if you start with the top line, the bottom line will follow—and that's actually the strategy that we're following. We have a little bit of a hack because the problem—one thing that we learned in this database space—is that there's a lot of data gravity. It's not easy to move from one database provider to another. You need a pretty serious reason, and that reason could be instability—many outages and so on. It needs to be something very serious. Sometimes it can be cost—people are saying, “Oh, this does what I need, but it's just costing me too much.” But incremental features or just having a nicer UI—that's not going to convince anyone to switch database providers because there's so much risk in switching. You have to plan it; you cannot afford downtime. Usually there's this complex procedure to change it and so on. So it's hard for database companies to get existing businesses. Greenfield projects—that's relatively easy, and that's what we had a lot with Xata Lite as well. But in order to get existing businesses, that's pretty difficult. Our hack is that we're making it possible to get most of the benefits without moving your production database. At a high level, the architecture is something like: let's say you have your production in RDS or Aurora on AWS, and you are happy enough with it. So we say keep your production where it is. We start the staging replica on the Xata platform, and the data is being copied and anonymized. What you have on the Xata platform is very similar to your production data, but it's anonymized so there's no PII concern, and so on. And from there you can do Copy-on-Write branching, and then— Adil Saleh 11:36 Deploy it onto your own cloud as well, at the end— Tudor Golubenco 11:39 Yeah, you can also deploy in your own cloud. So it's actually very flexible from this point of view. You can deploy in any cloud; you can have on-prem; but you can also use our platform, which is the easiest and the cheapest option. But the point is: you don't have to move away from your production database. We're not replacing, let's say, AWS Aurora; we're making it better by offering you things like Copy-on-Write branching and anonymization workflows and so on. This allows us to get much larger companies and better logos. And then there's always going to be people who say, “This is working great for staging and dev. We have a relationship now. I see your support is responsive and so on—let's move production as well.” So ultimately our intention is that we will run production for large companies and small companies alike. But for the big companies, it's easier for us to get into these staging, testing, QA environments. So that's our— Adil Saleh 13:00 Yes. Tudor Golubenco 13:00 —that's our hack, if you want. Adil Saleh 13:04 I love the way you are making these products so sticky and pitched within the workflows of these teams, because that's super important—making sure that workflow is pretty much integrated so they don't have to go anywhere else. Tudor Golubenco 13:16 Yeah. Adil Saleh 13:18 They stay within their workflow. So now, thinking about the customer adoption side of things—I know that you're a technical co-founder; I know you don't know a whole lot of the strategy and everything—but what kind of operating principles do you have in terms of customer adoption? I know that a lot of these platforms are used by technical teams, so they're already familiar with Postgres and all these databases and all those. But thinking about making it user-friendly and, I would say, delivering value fastest—time-to-value, which is the biggest concern. You mentioned that you were in private beta for the last two months. I know that you are still making sure that whatever platforms are using in the beta, you are able to deliver the value and whatever feedback you can capture to increase the value for the customers to come after you go public. So what kind of parameters do you guys have internally? I know you have conversations with your other co-founders. Tudor Golubenco 14:14 Yeah, we're keeping it simple, actually. We're just looking at the revenue that we're bringing and the churn rate. Because, at the moment at least, we're pretty selective on the companies that we like. With the private beta, the nice thing is you can select which people you let in and so on, and we have very tight conversations with those people so we know what they're trying to do, what their goals are, and so on. And then we can follow on. But then, just to keep ourselves honest, it's really: are they in the end actually paying us? Even for a private beta, that's what we're looking at—the actual revenue that we get. And we know it needs to be a relatively high per-month value that we're getting for the whole thing to work. So we're keeping it simple from that point of view. And when there are things that didn't work out and the customer churned, then we're looking at why. Is it functionality that we don't have yet? Were there problems they hit? Did they simply not have time for it, or did they decide to build something internally? So it's very qualitative at the moment. Adil Saleh 15:49 Interesting. That's the name of the game. You’ve got to make sure that you are able to sense the competition and see—let's say even the customers that leave and churn for a feature or any functionality or any investment they were not able to find inside your platform. And then you need to track them—“Hey, where are they going? Are they going to some platforms like Neon or any other database? Are they building their own, using AWS like RDS?” How is that tracking going on? Even during the evaluation part—while they're evaluating Xata and other platforms as well—do you have any kind of data model or any sort of success-metric tracking, any sort of journey tracking? Any tooling that you guys are using for the customer data? Tudor Golubenco 16:43 No, we're not super advanced on that. We're using, like, Hosco/Huck to see—to track—which product features are used and such. But in the end, what we care is that the databases have started, and they're running, and they're actually using them—like they are active users. We're not super advanced from that point of view. Then on the go-to-market side, and especially on the Xata Lite side where we get a lot of influx of new users all the time and so on—there, we would do a bit of enrichment, especially when we want to separate. What we're trying to do is understand, okay, from this flux of users, which ones are actually trying to use it for a work project versus a personal project? Adil Saleh 17:51 You try to correct the business use cases. Tudor Golubenco 17:54 Yeah, exactly, exactly. And for that, we were using Clay and various automation tools and enrichments. To be honest, the biggest predictor that we have is if they signed up with their work email versus a Gmail. And actually that's the most reliable predictor. And it's so simple, right? But then sometimes there are people that sign up with Gmail just because they did the social login and maybe they didn't pay attention or something like this—so it would still be their Gmail, but it's a very interesting company. So then we'll try to reach out and see, okay, what are— Adil Saleh 18:40 Okay, so there is somebody who does and manually tracks that company, or is this—and you're using Clay for that, like companies that are signed? Tudor Golubenco 18:50 Yeah, we have someone we call a go-to-market engineer who has set up all these automations and enrichments and Slack notifications for the various branches where it happens. And then it's typically Monica, our CEO, who would email manually the more interesting people. We also have automatic emails for sure—just to welcome everyone and so on. Adil Saleh 19:18 Interesting, interesting. Now, looking at—I know that you might not be the right person to ask, but I'm just putting an open question. You have raised funds back in 2022, and since then you're not able to raise, or you have not raised the funds. Tudor Golubenco 19:33 Sorry, what was the question? There was a little bit of an interrupt. Adil Saleh 19:37 You guys were able to raise funds back in 2022. It's been like two and a half, three years. And you have not raised funds ever since then? Tudor Golubenco 19:45 We have not, yeah. But we still have a very long runway. We have been spending the money very consciously. So our burn rate is pretty small even though we have this generous free tier in Xata Lite and so on. We don't need to [raise]. We're looking now—we are waiting to see how this new platform is doing and so on. If we see really good momentum, we might go for raising another round, but our runway is a good number of years, so we're not under pressure from that point of view. And we're trying to really find a very strong product-market fit—not let ourselves lose by, like, temporary momentum. Adil Saleh 20:48 Yes. Because this new cloud platform can give you guys a new shift, especially in the enterprise segment. And the freemium models—they are not so much relied on by enterprise/small-to-midsize enterprise companies. And although to be able to give a freemium, you cannot offer a whole lot of features—talking about databases—with the underlying cost that you're building on top of Postgres and all of that. So now this is the opportunity, and I wish you guys good luck. You guys are doing a great job at engineering, and now you told me that on the go-to-market side as well—like two months in the private beta and you already have paying customers. And those two are like enterprise customers—enterprise meaning companies that are doing at scale, managing databases at scale. Tudor Golubenco 21:33 Yeah. Adil Saleh 21:33 So that is the biggest validation for you. And I think the time is not far that—if things weren't great—you've mentioned that you already optimized on the team resource. I was thinking—we came across a lot of startups, founders with like 30, 40, 50, a hundred, $150 million in funding. And they have teams between— Tudor Golubenco 21:57 Yeah. Adil Saleh 21:57 —800 to 1,500 people. And I was quite surprised that you guys are pretty lean on the team. Is there any specific reason? Tudor Golubenco 22:05 Yeah—like 25, 26 people. But I feel like a small, motivated team can often be a lot more efficient than a large team where you need to have layers of management and product managers and so on. Large design teams that sometimes work against engineering instead of working together. You get all these big-company problems, and especially in today's world with all the boost that we get from AI—AI coding tools and such—everyone is super productive. We're just moving fast. And it's also a matter of—this is another learning from some mistakes we did on Xata Lite—our architecture was just too complex, too ambitious, if you want, which ended up slowing us down and the rate of features. On the new platform, everything is a lot more flat—flat infrastructure, and everything is basically tools that speak with Postgres. That's the API, ultimately, and everything is decoupled. So then we can actually move fast and with higher reliability. So then you don't really need that many engineers and people. And you sidestep the big-company problems—and those are significant. Adil Saleh 23:55 Yes. Tudor Golubenco 23:55 Often they're significant. You see— Adil Saleh 23:57 Yeah. Tudor Golubenco 23:58 —companies with hundreds or thousands of engineers, and they're shipping no features. There's a lot of work going on internally on stuff that you don't see, but often those are self-inflicted problems—quite often—and by avoiding those— Adil Saleh 24:23 Because having a really big team and operations globally developed—you put yourself in the back seat, and you are less self-reliant and relying more on the team, even as a leader. Just imagine, Tudor, you have a team of 30 people—30 engineers. If anything comes across—let's say you're doing some research or you're going to an event, you talk to people that are doing at scale and all of that—and there's a problem that pings into it, “This is something we can solve within our infrastructure.” Anything engineering-wise you can do differently. If you have a team of 30 people, imagine you would not take action right away. And then, to be able to articulate that vision to someone who is not you is another job—that's going to take a lot more time. Tudor Golubenco 25:10 Yeah. The more layers that you have, the more the vision gets diluted before people understand it, and there's always more red tape in doing a project. You're like, “Oh, I have to ask five people. I better not start on this,” even though sometimes the work is five minutes, but getting everyone aligned is the actual work. With a small, tight team, you just avoid a lot of those problems. Adil Saleh 25:44 Yeah, so a couple more questions that I have that are more region-specific—and these are just my viewpoints, frankly. All these Europeans—like central Europeans—they're so good at products that are— I know that Americans have done a lot of products too, but when it comes to these folks from Europe, they're so good at building these core, engineering-heavy kinds of SaaS products. I still remember—there are four or five people that I recall out of my pocket. There are loads of Europeans that came up. One was a senior executive of Zendesk. There was another—VP of Trustpilot—now building Dreamdata; that's also pretty big in the attribution space. So now, what is that reason? Tudor Golubenco 26:30 That's a good question. There's definitely deep and difficult tech in the US as well. But if you look at Europe’s success stories, there are quite a lot of companies that are doing data, deep tech. I think to some degree it's maybe a little bit less competition on the very strong talent—people that want to be remote and don't want to work for a US company necessarily, because that would mean lots of late-night meetings and so on. So there's a little bit less competition for very good talent. And then the university centers are also good, I would say—especially when it comes to things like operating systems or databases and so on—they're probably on par with the US ones. But then there are just differences in terms of opportunities after people graduate. So more people will choose maybe not the Uber or Airbnb type of companies to work for, but a small startup that does really interesting technical things. So maybe that's one aspect of it. And then if you look at the open-source landscape—because this often goes hand in hand, right? A lot of these technical companies are doing open source—a lot of their work. Open source is very… a lot of Europeans do open source and like the open-source idea, so the two might also be intertwined to some degree. I worked, for example, for a long time at Elastic. And Elastic is essentially a European company—nowadays, not anymore. It basically has moved all the executive [team] to the Bay Area. But it started as an Amsterdam-based company. Adil Saleh 28:52 Yes, yes, I know that. And they've done it at scale in the days when nobody knew, in that open-source category and all of that. So one of the category leaders that you have. So now, one more question before I talk a little bit about your team culture, operating principles—what you're doing these days. You mentioned backstage that you are now in the Bay Area. What are the goals? How is life there? What is different that you're doing—maybe working with the customers, living closer to the customers, or whatever? So now, thinking about you being a platform that is funded—and it's always good to be a model like Basecamp—those folks, Jason, Fried, and David—I'm sure David is someone you also admire—have done a really good job building Basecamp and Ruby on Rails and all these folks. So how do you see the business model? Should it be sustainable in a longer-term view—meaning 10 to 15 years—being funded and serving the board members and hitting the numbers consistently and serving their growth metrics rather than serving your vision or depending on the investment or user? Or do you see a pretty open approach, like, “Hey, we need to choose our investors—like Index Ventures and similar to these—and they give us the freedom and they actually trust our vision and they're pretty much aligned with what we want, what kind of impact we want to make in 5, 10, 15 years”? So what's your viewpoint on— Tudor Golubenco 30:26 Yeah, first of all, we are taking it one step at a time. It’s nice to dream about going to IPO and so on, but there’s just a lot of work to do until then. And then yes, when we got our Series A, this was a very key point—and this is why you’re asking, “You haven’t raised for three years,” and so on. But actually, the board was on board with this plan from the beginning that we’re going to take our time. And the database business, I would say, is special. You wouldn’t necessarily look for the same path as with other companies because it takes longer to develop, and reliability is key. So you shouldn’t cut corners and so on. Some competitors of ours are hitting a hard time because of reliability issues and so on. So that was something that we agreed from the beginning: we’re going to keep our burn rate down and develop very strong technical solutions, and at some point we’re going to increase our investments when we see that it’s the moment to do it—but we’re not in a particular rush. And that takes a special type of investor to understand this and look at the company and its particulars versus preset models of how companies should grow and so on. That was important for us, and we got that with Redpoint and Index. Yeah, beyond that, ideally we would go the VC path to an IPO-type exit. This is our long-term goal, but as I said, we’re taking it step by step. It’s not something that we’re really thinking about now. Adil Saleh 32:46 Not too far out. The best part—I was listening to Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, and he said we don’t have tomorrow’s plan. We plan for one day. We manage one day at a time, and we move on to the next. Yeah. We don’t even have weeks or months planned. I know it’s easier said than done in public, but with development teams… Now, coming back to your team, I know there is a specific trait you want in an engineer—be it for databases or whatever, that’s secondary—what kind of technology or industry. But for an engineer, what kind of traits do you think are going to make them A-players? Like Google says, “10x engineers.” But now there’s so much AI, and as a technical leader who wants to hire A-players, it’s hard to identify them before you get them on the ship. And of course, you need to sail the ship at the wrong time and disturb all the passengers—if you get my point. So hiring the wrong engineer who isn’t aligned in intent, motivation, intellect—which is pretty critical—even using AI… With AI, you still can’t just have them onboarded on the ship. You want to make a really good decision in the first place. How have things changed with AI for identifying A-players? Tudor Golubenco 34:13 Yeah, it is part— Adil Saleh 34:14 By the way, this is our challenge as well, Tudor—to be very honest. This is our challenge as well, so I wanted to explore it with you. Tudor Golubenco 34:22 Yeah. I think it’s difficult to identify A-players because it’s not just the technical skills. And even now, maybe the raw technical skills are less important because you can use AI for a bunch of things. But beyond the hard technical skills, it’s about having a bit of technical intuition to know what the right path is. You can have anyone write massive amounts of code, but if the assumptions are not correct—if they don’t match the business requirements directly—it might just be the wrong direction and a whole lot of effort. Adil Saleh 35:16 Can you also give us some examples for the audience to understand this more deeply? Tudor Golubenco 35:23 Yeah. For example, a challenge that we had internally at Xata—it was my mistake. It was a very humbling experience because I’ve been CTO at other companies; I have been a technical leader at large companies and so on. It’s different in a Series A startup that’s building something from absolutely nothing, with requirements changing all the time and so on. It’s humbling. This is primarily my mistake, but our architecture—if it makes sense to explain—was like a tower, which means that functionality was based on other functionality underneath. That makes it coupled. A tower will never be as strong and stable as a wider base structure. This actually applies to software as well, because if you build a component and then on top of it you build something—maybe two other components—and on top of those two components, and so on, you just get taller and taller. That coupling means you cannot change any of the middle components without being afraid of breaking too much, and that makes everything shaky. If you have a flat, strong base and then small features that are decoupled, you can move faster and you’re not so worried about breaking other things. So this was a learning experience. On the new platform, the base is simply Postgres. Most of our features—like we’re doing blue-green deployments, which is a pretty advanced feature of moving database branches from one instance to another with zero downtime—we’re building as a generic Postgres tool so it even works outside of Xata. This has the advantage that we can open-source it and make an open-source project out of it. It means we can use it for migrations between clouds, from Neon to us or the other way around, or between cloud providers as long as they support Postgres. It’s its own thing; it’s not coupled with a lot of other platform code. This whole approach just makes it better. And that’s where the A-players shine: they’re thinking at the design/architecture level and keep you pointed in the right direction—or they prevent you from making these mistakes. That is pretty rare and doesn’t really change with AI, at least not in the near future. Adil Saleh 38:38 Yeah, absolutely, because you need to understand the ecosystem in depth. You talk about data— Tudor Golubenco 38:46 And you need to even understand the problem. A startup has a problem space, and you need to understand it very well in order to be successful. It’s a bit like in high school when there was a hard math problem—maybe it took you an hour to understand it, but once you actually understand the problem, the solution is obvious, right? So I think it’s a little like that with software architectures and startups as well. The challenging part is understanding the problem space; then the solution is pretty simple. Adil Saleh 39:31 Yeah. Perfect. Love that. So now, last little segment—we have around four to five minutes. What makes your team really successful outside of technical skills and understanding the problem? Is it customer support? Is it a proactive approach? What is the biggest thing that makes your technical team win—the team that you supervise? Tudor Golubenco 40:04 Yeah, a little bit of all of this. We definitely look for engineers to have a product-level understanding of their features and how customers will interact with them. That’s really important because we try to empower them to design the feature to some degree. There’s help—we have a product manager and a UX design expert, and so on. Those people are there to help and provide the basis. But ultimately, we want the engineers to understand who they’re building for and what they need, so they build the simplest possible solution to really nail the feature without a lot of complexity. This makes us move faster and create features faster. Then, being proactive—because we’re offering a service that companies rely on for their production database and so on. They’re very sensitive to downtime because if your database is down, that practically guarantees a really big outage. So we look for people who are proactive in identifying issues early. That means, at the platform level, setting the correct alerts, having this platform-level interest, not just in building software. It’s easier to hire people interested in building software, but who don’t care too much about how that code is executed and run. It’s rarer to find people who care about both—and that’s who we’re looking for, because it’s important. Yeah, so these things combined. Adil Saleh 42:11 Perfect, perfect. I’m a big—Tudor, I’m a big believer in learning from people and learning from people’s mistakes. You don’t live long enough to make them yourself. I’m a huge believer in connecting with people. That’s why we are having this event, and I’m so glad that you mentioned you are in SF. I was thinking, “Hey, this guy is doing a really good job.” There’s so much for our audience and ourselves to learn from you. My CTO, some of the founders we’re going to meet at the meetup—it’s quite interesting times when it comes to deciding what platform to go for as a founder. It’s a big pain, to be very honest. A lot of platforms are really promising, even though these startup founders are not well-versed in this domain. They’re making a lot of mistakes. So it is super important for leaders like you to jump in, stay close to the community, and keep educating them. And that’s why we are thinking of having you on October 28th. It’s—of course, I’m saying this out in public—but we are only going to have 25 people. People that we know and people that we need to make sure, at the end of the day, it’s valuable for everyone’s time. That’s why we’re trying to qualify people based on those rates. Of course, we have GTM leaders and founders building different products across 15–16 industries. We can’t have seven or eight people from the same industry. It’s highly intimate, like 25–30 people. So we’d love for you to come in for two and a half to three hours, and we’ll have a good time. By the way, how’s your time in SF? How long have you been here? Tudor Golubenco 44:01 Great—yeah, I’m enjoying it. I’ve been here for, I think, four weeks now, and I’ll be here for another five months—so about six months in total. It’s been great. As a startup founder, you travel a lot to this area, but it’s a little different to actually be here and have all the time in the world to meet with people and— Adil Saleh 44:28 Yes, the mindset is different. Tudor Golubenco 44:29 Yeah. To see other people in their environment. Adil Saleh 44:34 Yeah. Perfect, perfect. And definitely, Tudor, it was really nice having a conversation with you. I love the energy and the way you made answers really specific for our audience. I think in this episode alone there’s so much for all of us to learn—even myself in the first place. So thank you very much for the time and knowledge you shared. Tudor Golubenco 44:53 Thank you. That was a very pleasant discussion. Thank you so much. Adil Saleh 44:56 Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please share your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io. We definitely need it. We will see you next time with another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a customer success leader and how you can empower engagements by building meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring value to the listeners. Do reach out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.