Show Notes
Ajay Kulkarni from Tiger Data (Co-founder/CEO) is on the pod this week with Adam. He asked him to get vulnerable and trace his path to becoming a CEO. They dig into the themes that have shaped his career, and explore how founder values end up forming company culture (whether you intend them to or not). From his enterprise days to building Timescale (and the rename to Tiger Data), we cover the whole journey — even the haters, because haters gonna hate. Here's where it gets really interesting: Agents in the database! Not the hype. The real thing baby. They get into how fast you can go from idea to shipped these days, what it actually means to talk to your database, and the whole API/CLI/MCP/Skills movement.
More from The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
This week I'm talking with Zeno Rocha, CEO of Resend, about scaling "boring" email to 3 million users, the secret Go rewrite behind it, and building for agents. We cover pricing.md, MCP, spam gangs, and why Resend keeps what's next for email.
Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw and co-founder of NanoCo, joins Adam to explain how a 40-hour weekend project became a viral open source hit and the foundation of an enterprise AI company. Gavriel describes the security concerns that led him to build a small, container-isolated alternative to OpenClaw, why he released it under the MIT license, and why the project's community and credibility are more valuable than keeping its code private.
This week I'm joined by Peer Richelsen, co-founder of Cal.com. What if the majority of open source repositories are already compromised and we just don't know it yet? That's the theory Peer brings to the table this week. We dig into how AI has flattened the knowledge graph to the point that a 16-year-old can vibe hack a power station just as easily as their mom can vibe code an iOS app, why the reporting culture that has kept open source safe all these years is collapsing under AI generated noise, Cal.com's move to fork its own codebase and take the sensitive parts private, and the eye opening reality that shipping "$1 of AI tokens for pennies on the dollar" is now a common startup business model.
Sam Lambert is back after 4 years and he does not hold back! We cover $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the Neki "do-over" of Vitess, agents shipping schema changes through deploy requests, rolling back a 500TB table in seconds, and the very real question of whether to open source any of it. Plus: why he thinks the sleeping, lazy giants should be broken up.
Haroon Meer is back! Haroon is the Founder of Thinkst, the ~50-person bootstrapped company behind Canary and Canarytokens — honeypots and tripwires you sprinkle inside your network and forget about until an attacker touches one. We talk about the AWS API key token attackers just can't resist trying, the real credit card token backed by an actual bank partnership, Breadcrumbs (their brand-new feature that leads intruders straight to your canaries), a live demo where a hardware Canary becomes a Synology NAS in one click, and how a company with zero outbound sales and no price increase in ten years quietly passed $22.5 million in ARR.