Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify (https://www.netlify.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why agent experience (AX) is replacing developer experience in developer tools. He also shares how Netlify went from a bootstrapped two-person team to the deployment platform behind Bolt, Lovable, and ChatGPT-generated sites.

Matt is excited by agentic coding and explains the addressable market for Netlify just jumped from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion people. He shares the four pillars of agent experience (access, context, tools, and orchestration), why leading with developer experience beat leading with performance or security in Netlify's early days, and why he believes everyone is about to become at least somewhat of a developer.

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

Max Prilutskiy, CEO and co-founder of Lingo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why localization is still far from a solved problem in the age of AI, how a six-person team ships 56 pull requests a week, and what agent experience actually means for developer tools in 2026.

He also shares his journey from a hackathon with zero ideas to Y Combinator, how 30 cold exploration calls taught him more about messaging than any sales book, and why he rebuilt the entire Lingo.dev platform from scratch in December and January. Plus, Max gives a candid take on what didn't work in go-to-market, why word of mouth remains the only reliable growth channel, and how source code is becoming the ultimate input for AI agents.

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/devtools

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

Amir Rustamzadeh, partner at Firestreak Ventures, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to spot a force-of-nature founder before anyone else does, why most developer tool ideas are no longer venture scale, and what the current state of VC really looks like for early-stage founders. He also shares his journey from interning on NASA's Curiosity Rover at Jet Propulsion Labs to sleeping in his car at SpaceX, to coining the developer experience role at Cypress, to becoming a hands-on investor backing companies like Lovable, Daytona, and Perplexity. Plus, Amir gives a rare, sober take on inflated seed valuations, why big-name firms at pre-seed can hurt more than help, and where he still sees opportunity in the race to build infrastructure for agents.

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

Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder and COO of TrueFoundry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to sell enterprise AI infrastructure when nobody trusts you yet, how TrueFoundry evolved from an ML deployment platform inspired by Meta's FB Learner into a full enterprise AI gateway, and why every Fortune 1000 company now can't avoid AI. He shares why trust is the only exchange currency in enterprise sales, how thought leadership and education sessions replaced cold outreach, and why voice agents are the next big niche to bet on.

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

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 stress-tested Neon's infrastructure

26:42 Agent experience and fraud considerations

32:00 Can you tell if a database was created by an agent?

33:06 The $1B Databricks acquisition story

38:59 Closing the deal in 30 days with 90 lawyers

40:27 Why Neon kept its brand post-acquisition

43:24 Life inside Databricks one year later

47:41 Market trends for technical founders in 2026

51:09 Using AI in day-to-day engineering work

54:15 What makes Stas feel great

54:49 Could AI accelerate theoretical physics research?

58:06 How to get started with Neon

In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill shares how CodeRabbit went viral in Japan before anywhere else, why AI code generation makes code review more important not less, and what it takes to run PLG and enterprise sales at the same time. He breaks down how open source became their best marketing channel, why the old startup playbooks don't work anymore, and why the next Amazon is already being founded right now.

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/

David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast

David Gomes, product engineer at Cursor, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why the world's best engineers are fully adopting AI while half of developers haven't started, why AI coding is a learnable skill that takes practice, and how he built a 50-person engineering team in Portugal from scratch. He shares what it was like going through Neon's $1B Databricks acquisition, why diverse teams outperform business-obsessed ones, and why his next company will be his own.

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 Introduction and guest welcome

01:44 Current state of AI-assisted coding and market adoption

03:33 Developer resistance to change: senior vs junior engineers

05:19 World's best engineers fully adopting AI coding

07:36 Having personalized workflows

08:19 Different engineering styles inside Cursor

10:42 AI coding as a learnable skill requiring practice

14:12 Future of agent coding and AI SREs

15:35 Growing up in Europe vs living in America

19:27 David's career path: competitive programming to SF

26:17 Building a 50-person engineering team in Portugal

29:50 Working at Neon and the $1B Databricks acquisition

32:50 Why developer tools experience is universal

39:35 Having a diverse team of engineers

42:05 Leveraging your coworkers' strengths

44:00 David's blog and writing philosophy

46:00 The engineer-manager pendulum and startup ambitions

47:23 Customer love as the only metric that matters

48:34 Try Cursor with Neon and Databricks MCP servers

Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast

Monica Sarbu, founder and CEO of Xata, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how Xata pivoted from an Airtable-style builder tool to a modern Postgres platform focused on database branching and developer velocity. She shares why they rebuilt the platform from scratch, how asking "what's your biggest problem?" instead of "what's your problem with Postgres?" changed everything, and why hiring a gender-diverse team with complementary skills leads to better products.

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