E60: Building Highly Scalable Databases with PlanetScale

Sam Lambert is CEO of PlanetScale, the serverless MySQL database platform for developers.

PlanetScale is powered by the open source database clustering system Vitess which was originally built at Google to scale YouTube.

The company has raised over $100M from investors including KPCB, Insight, SignalFire, and a16z.

In this episode, we discuss PlanetScale's positioning as a database platform rather than a database, the importance of authenticity and showing off capabilities with every launch, transparency around pricing, proving the ability to scale, looking at the quality of companies and people in the community as a measure of success, thinking about GTM very early, and much more!