Databases, Drive, and Diversity - Lessons from Xata's CEO Monica Sarbu

Monica Sarbu, the CEO and founder of Xata.io, talks to us about her inspiring journey from getting into tech to building Xata - the serverless database platform for modern apps. We chat about the founding of her first company, Packetbeat, its acquisition by Elastic, and her time as a director there. We talk about mentoring, diversity, and hiring engineers that have high agency. We also cover some of the technical decisions at Xata - we even chat a bit about the Zig programming language :)

Where to find more about Monica and Xata:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicasarbu

- X - https://x.com/monicasarbu

- Xata - https://xata.io/

- pgroll - https://github.com/xataio/pgroll

- Tupu - https://www.tupu.io/

Where to find Bartek:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bwplotka/

- X - https://x.com/bwplotka

Where to find Ivan:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-valkov/

- X - https://x.com/ivvalkov

As always, feedback and questions are welcome! You can use this form - https://forms.gle/NmUGeqMtyP6H6mMP9

Episode breakdown:

0:00 - Episode intro

2:25 - Monica's introduction

4:00 - Monica's software engineering background

5:52 - Founding her first company Packetbeat

15:30 - Elastic acquisition and being a director there

25:34 - The role of managers

28:38 - Founding Tupu and diversity in tech

38:44 - The founding story of Xata

44:35 - Open source, serverless, and Zig vs Go

51:17 - Hiring high-agency engineers

1:00:37 - Where to find out more