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

On this Hyperengage episode, host Adil Saleh sits down with Tudor Golubenco, CTO and Co-founder of Xata.io, who explains the shift from an Airtable-style “builder” DB to a Postgres-native platform for real workloads. The new Xata centers on copy-on-write branching (with data), built-in anonymization, and scale-to-zero—ideal for staging/QA without leaking PII. Instead of risky migrations, teams keep production on RDS/Aurora, spin up an anonymized staging replica on Xata, and branch instantly; trust first, production later.

Tudor shares how a ~25-person team and a flatter Postgres-first architecture boosted velocity and reliability, with generic Postgres tools (like blue-green deploys) planned for open source. In private beta, they optimize for revenue and churn while running qualitative loops to learn why accounts expand or leave, using light enrichment and direct founder outreach to spot high-intent users. He also covers investor alignment for patience, what he seeks in A-player engineers (product sense, platform ownership, proactive ops), and why Bay Area customer proximity matters as Europe’s deep-tech scene thrives.