Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

S10 Bonus: Nikita Shamgunov, Neon

Feb 6, 2025

Nikita Shamgunov, Co-founder and CEO of Neon, shares insights from his journey in tech, starting with his background at Microsoft and Facebook. He discusses the creation of Neon, a serverless Postgres platform, highlighting its unique architecture and challenges faced in an AWS-dominated market. Nikita emphasizes the importance of forming the right founding team with diverse skills, innovative strategies for scalability, and adapting to evolving tech landscapes. His advice for aspiring entrepreneurs centers on self-belief and leveraging supportive relationships.

27:12

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Episode guests

Nikita Shamgunov

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Quick takeaways

Nikita Shamgunov highlights the importance of team composition and remote work in building a successful startup, especially in tech innovation.

The strategic pivot towards AI integration and the adaptation to user growth challenges positions Neon as a contender in innovative database solutions.

Deep dives

Kinsta: Streamlining Website Management

Kinsta offers managed hosting for WordPress, focusing on enhancing website security and performance. It ensures lightning-fast load times and provides enterprise-grade security, such as SOC 2 certifications, which guarantees the highest level of protection for websites. Migration to Kinsta is seamless with unlimited expert-led migrations, resulting in significant performance improvements, with some customers experiencing 200% faster load times. This makes it an ideal solution for business owners and developers who want to focus on their core operations without the technical stress of website management.

Intro

2min

Building a Serverless Future with Postgres

5min

Building the Right Founding Team

6min

Building a Strategic Roadmap in Evolving Markets

4min

Strategies for Building a Remote Team and Talent Acquisition

5min

Navigating the Challenges of Scalability in a Growing Startup

5min

Navigating Team Dynamics and Future Visions

5min

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs and a Trade-In Promotion

2min

Nikita Shamgunov is a native of Russia, coming to the US for grad school in 2005. Eventually he worked at Microsoft on the SQL Server product. A fun fact - Nikita quit business school on the first day, and decided to join Facebook and find his future co-founder. All of this worked out, and he and his co-founder built SingleStore, which is one of the highest valued companies at YC. Outside of tech, he was a semi-professional athlete in Ping Pong, achieving the status of Top 10 in Washington State back when he was at Microsoft.

Nikita completed his "tour of duty" at SingleStore, and post that, he joined a venture fund. He pitched incubating an idea of his at the fund, which was rolling up all Postgres instances in the world. He started to engineer an approach, the team, and the architecture - and did so in some very unique, and deliberate ways.

This is the creation story of Neon.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

S10 Bonus: Nikita Shamgunov, Neon

Episode guests