# Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/stas-kelvich-co-founder-of-neon-1b-acquisition-and-databases-for-agents-evil-martians-podcast
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/stas-kelvich-co-founder-of-neon-1b-acquisition-and-databases-for-agents-evil-martians-podcast.md
Podcast: [Dev Propulsion Labs](https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290)
Published: 2026-03-10T02:45:00+00:00
Episode link: https://rss.com/podcasts/dpl/2612450
Audio file: https://content.rss.com/episodes/239660/2612450/dpl/2026_03_09_15_02_54_83dff46d-1902-403e-9e82-1829aeb6345c.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3523

## Resource

Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcast In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acquisition closed in 30 days with 90 lawyers. He explains why Neon skipped sharding, how Replit's agents stress-tested their infrastructure overnight, and why the current moment is a gold rush for builders who stay in the loop. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com 00:00 Intro 00:34 Who is Stas Kelvich? 01:42 From quantum physics to software engineering 05:10 How Stas became a key Postgres contributor 06:08 Early career: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Postgres 06:57 Why databases as a field keep pulling him in 09:47 The early days of Neon and the co-founder origin story 13:42 Key bets: building the cloud, separating storage and compute 16:38 Enterprise vs. product-led growth strategy 18:54 Why Neon didn't solve sharding — and why that was right 23:03 Designing for the agent era without planning for it 25:44 How Replit's agents…

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