Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz
Shownotes
"Companies designing for agents, not humans, are going to get a lot of lift."
ClickHouse started as an internal tool at Yandex. Today it's the database Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Tesla all run on.
In this episode, CEO Aaron Katz joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he turned an open source project into a $15B company, why he acquired LangFuse knowing it could cost him customers, and what he's actually building for the agent era.
Snowflake, Datadog and Databricks all come up. He doesn't shy away.
Connect with us here:
Aaron Katz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-katz-5762094
ClickHouse: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clickhouseinc/
Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/
Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/
00:00 Trailer
00:57 The Origin Story: From Yandex to ClickHouse Inc.
04:43 Building ClickHouse Cloud & Raising $300M
10:36 Growing Up Around Xerox PARC
12:51 Salesforce, Mark Benioff & the Dot-Com Bust
15:32 Cloud Skeptics vs. AI Skeptics | History Repeating
18:05 Building a Modern Go-To-Market Playbook
21:57 The SaaS Crash, Agents & the Future of Infrastructure
27:09 The Datadog Love-Hate Story
35:21 Hardest Moments: Russia, SVB & Sleepless Nights
43:16 Outro