How Supabase became the essential infrastructure for the AI era | Paul Copplestone (Co-founder, CEO)

**Paul Copplestone** (0:00)
We thought we were getting DDoSed at the time, actually, because we just saw this customer launching lots and lots of databases.

**Brett Berson** (0:05)
For today's episode, I'm sitting down with Paul Copplestone, co-founder and CEO of Supabase, the open-source backend platform that millions of developers now build on. The company started as a side project, and now it's the backend for a huge slice of the Internet.

**Paul Copplestone** (0:21)
It was obvious to me how hard it was for developers to use databases. If the problem exists, then the opportunity exists.

**Brett Berson** (0:29)
But it wasn't always like this. Before Supabase, Paul built other startups that never took off in the same way.

**Paul Copplestone** (0:36)
There's something like painful about the chewing glass of trying to find product market fit and you're trying everything and sometimes you just don't know what else to do.

**Brett Berson** (0:45)
When AI app builders like Bolt and Lovable launched, every new app needed a backend, and many chose Supabase.

**Paul Copplestone** (0:52)
These are the tools that are using more of the CLI MCP type workload now happening off a base of seven, eight million developers.

**Brett Berson** (0:59)
In our conversation, Paul reverse engineers why Supabase worked. He shares why he refuses to lock in customers and how he's building towards self-driving databases run by agents.

**Paul Copplestone** (1:11)
We want to build a generational database company.

**Brett Berson** (1:14)
He also gets into the chaos of hypergrowth and how he tackled the success problems that come with scaling too fast without losing himself in the process.

**Paul Copplestone** (1:23)
I want to look back at the end of my life and think, oh, not only did I build a big fucking company, but I also did it my way.

**Brett Berson** (1:30)
Let's dive in.
You worked on multiple companies before you started Supabase that were seemingly less successful than this company, depending on sort of how you measure it. What are your reflections on the value of a good idea or a few of the foundational things that clicked into place with this company that didn't click into place with other companies?

**Paul Copplestone** (1:57)
Well, I think a successful startup takes like a thousand things to go right and a lot of luck. The first ones were probably never destined to be as big. The ambition behind them was not as large, so they could have been successful in a local maxima. Why is that? Well, they're geographically constrained for starters. The first one was a marketplace in Southeast Asia. The reason why that first one didn't go well was it didn't have your product market fit. We're modeling against one here in the US actually called Thumbtack, which is of course markets are all different the way things operate. There's a different mentality to how you do things in the US versus, say, even Malaysia or Thailand.

**Brett Berson** (2:45)
When you were working on it in the early days, did you have a less ambitious mindset?

**Paul Copplestone** (2:49)
No.

**Brett Berson** (2:50)
Versus where you started? All of that was, you're just saying that it turned out to be less ambitious, not the intention.

**Paul Copplestone** (2:55)
Yeah. I mean, the mindset is still the same. I mean, the ambitiousness, could we build that to be a $100 billion company? No. So I think my ability to assess a market dynamic is much more honed now. In fact, I think I even worked, I would say harder on that one. I was pulling 90 hour weeks or something like that to make it work. So we're definitely ambitious and I learned a lot from that one. I had a co-founder who is extremely ambitious, great salesperson, extremely good at fundraising, and all of these things were assets that I picked up from him.

**Brett Berson** (3:31)
What about the second experience?

**Paul Copplestone** (3:32)
Yeah, it's funny because the journey trickles onto Supabase. My country manager for my first startup said, I'm building this company and it's going to be, he explained it and it's like an office management tool, but it also owning the services. So very similar to the first one, but de-risking a lot of the things that were in the first one. He had some moats, like some permission from the government to do. Certain things, so that was good. But I said to him, look, I'm a developer, I'm going to launch it at DevTools company.

**Brett Berson** (4:03)
That's what you were thinking about doing at the time?

**Paul Copplestone** (4:04)
Yeah. He said to me, well, just give me a couple of years, come brainstorm, build it and build with us on the side, or inside. So that's actually where I started building. I took a lot of those learnings from all those companies that I was launching, and then I honed the tech stack and I built the second company, it's called Nimbus. I built Nimbus with the same tech stack, and that tech stack now is what is Supabase.