Scaling DevTools Nikita Shamgunov - founder of Neon: storytelling, pricing and hiring execs
Mar 6, 2025
47:07
Nikita Shamgunov is the founder of Neon, an open-source serverless Postgres company. Before Neon, Nikita co-founded MemSQL, now SingleStore, which is valued at over a billion dollars. He has also worked as a VC at Khosla Ventures and held engineering roles at Meta and Microsoft. Nikita is known for his strategic thinking and transparency about his decision-making process.
We discuss:
- The importance of storytelling and providing a clear narrative for your company
- When to introduce a sales team and how to build a sales and marketing "machine"
- Pricing strategies, including pricing for storage and compute in the data and analytics space
- The evolution of revenue models in DevTools: from selling seats and storage/compute to selling tokens
- Lessons learned from hiring MongoDB’s VP of Engineering, focusing on improving reliability and building strong team management processes
- The benefits of using a high-quality recruiting firm and avoiding the pitfalls of bad hires
- Balancing competitiveness with respect for competitors to maintain credibility, particularly in the developer tools market
- The idea of “developing your taste” in product development, inspired by Guillermo Rauch from Vercel
- How modern dev tools can monetize through seats, storage/compute, or tokens, with tokens currently being the most profitable
- Why Nikita advises DevTools founders to understand the business model framework and align it with their strategy
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