Dev Propulsion Labs

Evil Martians

Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San Francisco with founders behind companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale to talk about what actually makes developer-focused businesses work. Dev Propulsion Labs is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Enjoyed by 45K+ listeners.

  1. Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast

    14 ABR

    Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast

    Amir Rustamzadeh, partner at Firestreak Ventures, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to spot a force-of-nature founder before anyone else does, why most developer tool ideas are no longer venture scale, and what the current state of VC really looks like for early-stage founders. He also shares his journey from interning on NASA's Curiosity Rover at Jet Propulsion Labs to sleeping in his car at SpaceX, to coining the developer experience role at Cypress, to becoming a hands-on investor backing companies like Lovable, Daytona, and Perplexity. Plus, Amir gives a rare, sober take on inflated seed valuations, why big-name firms at pre-seed can hurt more than help, and where he still sees opportunity in the race to build infrastructure for agents. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    59 min
  2. Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast

    24 MAR

    Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast

    Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder and COO of TrueFoundry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to sell enterprise AI infrastructure when nobody trusts you yet, how TrueFoundry evolved from an ML deployment platform inspired by Meta's FB Learner into a full enterprise AI gateway, and why every Fortune 1000 company now can't avoid AI. He shares why trust is the only exchange currency in enterprise sales, how thought leadership and education sessions replaced cold outreach, and why voice agents are the next big niche to bet on. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    46 min
  3. Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

    10 MAR

    Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

    Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcast In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acquisition closed in 30 days with 90 lawyers. He explains why Neon skipped sharding, how Replit's agents stress-tested their infrastructure overnight, and why the current moment is a gold rush for builders who stay in the loop. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com 00:00 Intro 00:34 Who is Stas Kelvich? 01:42 From quantum physics to software engineering 05:10 How Stas became a key Postgres contributor 06:08 Early career: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Postgres 06:57 Why databases as a field keep pulling him in 09:47 The early days of Neon and the co-founder origin story 13:42 Key bets: building the cloud, separating storage and compute 16:38 Enterprise vs. product-led growth strategy 18:54 Why Neon didn't solve sharding — and why that was right 23:03 Designing for the agent era without planning for it 25:44 How Replit's agents stress-tested Neon's infrastructure 26:42 Agent experience and fraud considerations 32:00 Can you tell if a database was created by an agent? 33:06 The $1B Databricks acquisition story 38:59 Closing the deal in 30 days with 90 lawyers 40:27 Why Neon kept its brand post-acquisition 43:24 Life inside Databricks one year later 47:41 Market trends for technical founders in 2026 51:09 Using AI in day-to-day engineering work 54:15 What makes Stas feel great 54:49 Could AI accelerate theoretical physics research? 58:06 How to get started with Neon

    59 min
  4. CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast

    23 FEB

    CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast

    In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill shares how CodeRabbit went viral in Japan before anywhere else, why AI code generation makes code review more important not less, and what it takes to run PLG and enterprise sales at the same time. He breaks down how open source became their best marketing channel, why the old startup playbooks don't work anymore, and why the next Amazon is already being founded right now. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/

    39 min
  5. David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast

    10 FEB

    David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast

    David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast David Gomes, product engineer at Cursor, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why the world's best engineers are fully adopting AI while half of developers haven't started, why AI coding is a learnable skill that takes practice, and how he built a 50-person engineering team in Portugal from scratch. He shares what it was like going through Neon's $1B Databricks acquisition, why diverse teams outperform business-obsessed ones, and why his next company will be his own. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com 00:00 Introduction and guest welcome 01:44 Current state of AI-assisted coding and market adoption 03:33 Developer resistance to change: senior vs junior engineers 05:19 World's best engineers fully adopting AI coding 07:36 Having personalized workflows 08:19 Different engineering styles inside Cursor 10:42 AI coding as a learnable skill requiring practice 14:12 Future of agent coding and AI SREs 15:35 Growing up in Europe vs living in America 19:27 David's career path: competitive programming to SF 26:17 Building a 50-person engineering team in Portugal 29:50 Working at Neon and the $1B Databricks acquisition 32:50 Why developer tools experience is universal 39:35 Having a diverse team of engineers 42:05 Leveraging your coworkers' strengths 44:00 David's blog and writing philosophy 46:00 The engineer-manager pendulum and startup ambitions 47:23 Customer love as the only metric that matters 48:34 Try Cursor with Neon and Databricks MCP servers

    50 min
  6. Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast

    26 ENE

    Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast

    Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast Monica Sarbu, founder and CEO of Xata, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how Xata pivoted from an Airtable-style builder tool to a modern Postgres platform focused on database branching and developer velocity. She shares why they rebuilt the platform from scratch, how asking "what's your biggest problem?" instead of "what's your problem with Postgres?" changed everything, and why hiring a gender-diverse team with complementary skills leads to better products. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    46 min
  7. Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev: intent signals and devtool GTM | Evil Martians podcast

    12 ENE

    Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev: intent signals and devtool GTM | Evil Martians podcast

    Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why go-to-market is the hardest unsolved problem in developer tools, how companies can have millions of open-source users and still not know who their customers are, and why timing beats volume when selling to developers. He shares how three months of nonstop customer conversations shaped Reo.dev, why their first product was a Google Sheet, and how intent signals turned a 2% response rate into 26%. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    36 min
  8. David Cramer, founder of Sentry: building for the Fortune 500,000 | Evil Martians podcast

    16/12/2025

    David Cramer, founder of Sentry: building for the Fortune 500,000 | Evil Martians podcast

    David Cramer, founder of Sentry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built a developer tool used by 4 million+ developers without partnerships or enterprise sales — purely through bottom-up adoption and mass-market pricing. He explains why 20-year-olds should stop starting companies and go learn from other people's mistakes first, how he delegated both CEO and CTO roles while keeping immense influence without a title, and why Sentry builds for the Fortune 500,000 instead of the Fortune 500. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    54 min
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Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San Francisco with founders behind companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale to talk about what actually makes developer-focused businesses work. Dev Propulsion Labs is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Enjoyed by 45K+ listeners.

Información

  • Creador
    Evil Martians
  • Años de actividad
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodios
    34
  • Clasificación
    Apto
  • Copyright
    © Evil Martians 2023
  • Mostrar sitio web
    Dev Propulsion Labs