Peter Zaitsev: Open-Source Entrepreneurship and the Percona Story
00:00:03 - Peter Zaitsev
I think I perform well with my back against the wall. So hey, you know, Peter, you have to build a business and start getting income money flowing in in a month because you don't have any other freaking choice. That is the best outcome for me. Right. I think for some people it's kind of stressful, right? Maybe, you know, just stall, but you.
00:00:21 - Scot Wingo
Know, so the amount of work you can do and the ideas you say yes to becomes unbounded. And that's where some of the best ideas welcome to Triangle tweenertalks, a weekly podcast by Builders for Builders where we explore the startup journey from the idea to the exit and all the lessons in between. With an exclusive focus on founders from the Triangle region of North Carolina. Tweener Talks is produced by Earfluence. Now here is your host, serial founder and general partner of the Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo. Hello and welcome to this episode of Triangle Tweener Talks featuring Peter Zetsev. A fruit stumbled onto Percona in 2015. When I did the first tweener list, I did a double take. Here was a company I'd never heard of that was relatively large here in the Triangle. I found the founder Peter and realized that he was a rock star in the open source community. And this whole company was right here in our backyard in the Triangle. At the time, Percona was maybe 5 million in revenues and now it's much larger. As you'll hear when Peter and I meet, we usually talk about tactical issues that are happening in a particular moment in business. So it was great to sit down with Peter for this episode. Hear the story from the beginning. The story starts in a very unusual place for a Triangle Tweener. It starts in Russia, then it threads through the United Kingdom to Seattle, back to the United Kingdom and then back to Durham. This episode is sponsored by bank of America. Bank of America's transformative technology group helps game changing tech businesses and founders realize their boldest ambitions across a wide range of technology sectors. With hands on support, world class resources and an extensive network, BofA provides the stability and scalability that tech companies need to rapidly grow today and into the future. Smashing Boxes A local Durham based lean design centric digital transformation company Robinson Bradshaw, a full service business law firm with a passion for supporting the Triangle entrepreneurial ecosystem. Learn more about Robinson Robinson Bradshaw Startup and venture capital practice@robinsonbradshaw.com Eisner Amper formerly HPG, one of the world's largest business consulting firms with a dedicated technology practice offering outsourcing, accounting, tax and Advisory services Discover how Eisner Ampner's stage specific solutions and industry expertise can help you achieve your milestones, whether startup, international expansion, MA or ipo. And finally, special thanks to our friends at Earfluence for helping produce this podcast. Peter is the founder of Percona, an open source product that helps companies achieve scale and high performance from their open source databases like Postgres and MySQL. Today they have over 350 people and their revenues are over 50 million. Here's my discussion with Peter Zetsev where we dig into how Peter built Percona into this very successful business across two continents. Yeah, so what's it like, you know, going to school in Russia and you know, when did you get on a technology track? Was it pretty in Russia? Is it like Europe where you're pretty young, like kind of even like middle of high school level? So let's call it like 15. And you kind of have picked a.
00:03:44 - Peter Zaitsev
Path probably even before that. Right. So I think for me it was interesting in terms of overcoming the challenges. Right. Because you know, growing up in the Soviet Union, I did not have their computer. Right. So I would be a summary of who would learn kind of programming languages pretty much by writing the programs like on the paper. Right. And then figuring out how they would be run. Right. It was a while until I got my.
00:04:11 - Scot Wingo
So you had an imaginary computer. So you'd read a book about what was the first programming language you, you read a book about?
00:04:16 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I, I think it was a Pascal in this case. I also did something with BASIC then. I also like this very, you know, understanding things. Right. And that's how I got excited about the assembly language. So that's also.
00:04:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, if you're going to be writing stuff, you might as well do assembly.
00:04:35 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. No, I mean, it's not really using those days like as a programming language a lot, but I think it's fantastic to understand how things work essentially. You know what was great, I think in late 80s, early 90s, as things have been so much more simpler than right now. Right. I think as any industries. Right. They start with simple and then become very, very complicated. Much harder to understand for one person.
00:05:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Sometimes it does help to understand how, you know, getting down to the metal works because like you find something inefficient in a program and ultimately you, you can figure out what it is. Right?
00:05:12 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, absolutely.
00:05:13 - Scot Wingo
If you need to, you can get your hands pretty dirty on that. Okay. So then you got a master's in the Soviet Union as well.
00:05:19 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, kind of, I Think we have a different system. So I studied for five years. Right. Which can be evaluated as a master's in. In US, I guess.
00:05:29 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. In the university. Was it still very theoretical like on paper or did you, you had access to computers?
00:05:35 - Peter Zaitsev
No, I mean, I do, I did have access to. To computers, yeah. Right.
00:05:40 - Scot Wingo
Would these be like IBM PCs or different? Like.
00:05:42 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I mean, it was different. Right. I think it was a very interesting. What they have a different mix. We both have IBM computers at the time. We also have like a lab sponsored by Sun Microsystems. Right. And we had like some old Unixes. I don't even remember what it is. Right. But some very kind of slow and painful to work with. So we had a variety in this case. Right. And we did have some practical education. But I think it also goes. What about education in Russia? There is a very strong kind of theoretical background often in us and that's even kind of start with schools they say, well, we teach you the tools like hey, here is a formula. You apply how to square. You solve a square equation and now go and solve thousands of them. And you'll be very good in very fast solving square equations. But maybe not understanding how and why you solve it. Right. In Russia it's very theoretical. Okay. We want you to actually to be able now to prove what that is a way to solve them. Where did that formula comes from? And I think that's a lot carry it to their computer science, at least like in the university I went to. Right. So make sure you really have a very, very strong foundation, which I think that was wonderful. Even though the practical skills I got, I got elsewhere. Yeah, right. I mean, I started my first startup when I was what maybe like a third year in the college. I got my first kid about the same time.
00:07:14 - Scot Wingo
So you're like 18, 19?
00:07:16 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh yeah. My first kid was born in 19 when I was 19. Yeah.
00:07:19 - Scot Wingo
So.
00:07:20 - Peter Zaitsev
But the good thing about the Russian education also, it was kind of more flexible when I see kind of my kids experience in school. Right. So I actually didn't go to school that much. Right. I typically would work full time and then I would take sort of vacation. Then I would have to prepare for exam and then I would do that and you know, a week, maybe two weeks go pass exam and you know, kind of continue on.
00:07:45 - Scot Wingo
Was that a personal choice? You just didn't. You knew you could teach yourself faster than going to the lectures or like.
00:07:50 - Peter Zaitsev
I mean some of that is kind of personal choice, some of also of a need. Right. If you are, you know, Young father, you got to be making some money. Yeah, right. And well that's. Yeah, you want to work.
00:08:05 - Scot Wingo
So you're a young father, you're in college and you decided to start a business.
00:08:09 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, yes.
00:08:09 - Scot Wingo
So walk me through. And I think that one was called Spylog.
00:08:12 - Peter Zaitsev
Is that. Yes. Yeah, that's right.
00:08:14 - Scot Wingo
So tell me about Spylog and how you came up with this idea.
00:08:16 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes, well, in that case, I was one of the two partners. I was cto. We just, I don't even remember, but somehow we came up with that idea. It was interesting to, you know, measure things and like Russian Internet. And at some point that was pretty big and, and famous, right? We really have a lot of folks using that. And that was before like Google Analytics.
00:08:43 - Scot Wingo
So it was measuring Internet traffic on a website or were you pulling down the logs of the browser?
00:08:48 - Peter Zaitsev
No, I guess it was kind of similar. Similar way as Google Analytics would work, right? You have like a little pixel on your, like a JavaScript on the websites and we can do the traffic. And we also did some early stage kind of we could do like an audience comparison between sites, help them to do advertising in the Russian market. That was kind of very interesting. And for me that was also very interesting from technology standpoint, right? Because if you think about that, that's a lot of data. There is a lot of kind of high performance, low latency, right?
00:09:20 - Scot Wingo
And it's this never ending fire hose of data coming in. And then so you've got this inbound, lots of data, never stopping. And then over here you've got a user that's running queries and you know, so you've got like, you know, basically, you know, two inputs kind of happening and then the queries across all this data could be relatively unstructured. People may want to see a traffic trend, they may want to see user data, they may want to see what's going on in this page. Meanwhile, traffic continues to, you know, data is always coming into the database at a tremendous pace.
00:09:51 - Peter Zaitsev
And I would say for me that was probably like the real education, at least in the startup phase, right? Because like I was like a very young kid, you know, no, nothing even kind of from technology standpoint, probably not knowing nearly as much as I needed to do, right? And then there had to be, you know, so many mistakes made, which I kind of was allowed to do, right? Because I think if you go to a larger enterprise, often you don't get kind of authority to do things which matter. If you are just, you know, a.
00:10:18 - Scot Wingo
Young kid, a 19 year old person would not be a CTO at a large company.
00:10:22 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh yes, that was. Yeah, that was fantastic.
00:10:25 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, I see you're wearing an Open Source hat. Was. Was the database, was this like a MySQL or.
00:10:30 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I think it was an interesting. Also like a foundation for me. What is interesting to know about that time in Russia, right? You know, all software was free software, right? Nobody would pay for licenses, so I could use, use whatever, even the commercial software. Well, not really in a legal way, but nobody cared.
00:10:50 - Scot Wingo
I remember Windows saying Bill Gates was really frustrated with Russia because they had all these users and only like 2% paid.
00:10:57 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, absolutely right. And the last 2% probably would be from American companies which are having to work in Russia. But in any way I somehow made a choice to go with Open Source. So we worked with early stage with Linux. Early stage in MySQL or what is it like, late 90s, early 2000s. And that is fantastic. I think it's to be at this really early stages of technology. That is where so much development happens. So many. It kind of goes fast and it's also kind of time for heroes, if you will, right? You can be that person who would be the first to solve this particular problem with MySQL with Linux, right? And then as things go, it becomes different, right? You can say, hey, for pretty much every problem you can just take the things from a shelf and say, that is what works, do it, apply it. Which is a different game.
00:11:55 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it's like this ethos of the software is free, but instead of owing money for it, I want to make it better and I need to contribute to it. A lot of the Open Source people feel very strongly about that. And it's almost like this checks and balances of every individual kind of like has their own. I've pulled this down and I've kind of put this back up into.
00:12:15 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, absolutely right. And I think here is also interesting thing, right? If you look at that time, the Open source was hard, right? And what that means is people would self select. It also would be pretty intelligent, very skilled developers in that thing, right? And then you would talk to your peers, right? They all can understand what you're talking about. Go very deep, right? And solve a problem together, right?
00:12:38 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. There was no Red Hat version where you could just buy it and install it in.
00:12:42 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right. And now Open Source changed so much, right? Like, I mean, think about for example, WordPress. Yes, it's open Source, it runs a bunch of web apps. But most people, you know, just go and buy it from one of providers. They don't, they're users of WordPress but they don't give a shit what. It's open source. Right. Maybe don't even know what open source is.
00:13:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Back in those days, did you have a. So let's start with Linux. Did you ever check anything into Linux and did you ever have interactions with Linus?
00:13:09 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, you know what, it's kind of interesting for me first. Yes, I did have interactions with Linux torrells right at that time in the Linux mailing list. Right. But for me, while I could write and I had some of software training, I found it's kind of rather slow. Right? It's slow process requires detailed and because I had this kind of experience with startup and I was given a chance to hire people, I was fine. Well, you know what, what is actually much more interesting and wonderful is just to tell people what to do. So you can have you know like 10 people writing the code you could be writing. And you know what, that is going to be so much faster. Right. So I was often this kind of guy who would like be very opinionated. I could go and say, well what you are doing is wrong and it is a kind of better way to do it right Than here's why you should do it rather than doing that myself. So we often would have some low level discussions. I found some kernel bugs and so on and so forth. And yes, that's a free Note but with MySQL that was even more.
00:14:15 - Scot Wingo
Because it was newer.
00:14:16 - Peter Zaitsev
That was newer. I was kind of drinking from a fire hose versus having so many crashes. And I would again, you know, like Russians are kind of all Russians in heart. Right. So I would go and kind of really, this is trash. Why are you saying, you know like unleash that right on the MySQL mailing list. And a good thing I think is the, you know, the MySQL founder, Monty, he would take that in a good humor, right. And we actually had a very, you know, good productive discussion. Right.
00:14:52 - Scot Wingo
Is he a Russian dude? Like I don't know the MySQL story. Jose, is the MySQL founder a Russian?
00:14:57 - Peter Zaitsev
No, no, he's actually a Swedish speaking Finn. Yeah, so. But, but he's also kind of this guy, right. Who appreciates heated discussion. Right.
00:15:12 - Scot Wingo
So yeah, a lot of super engineering people. It's almost like the Socratic method in law. Like when I met people that had first gone through law school, I was like, what's this Socratic? Like I understand who Socrates is But I didn't understand like how they apply it. And it's like, well, you can just like be assholes to each other and then be able to forget about it. And I was like, oh, we do that in the technology world all the time.
00:15:29 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, that's right. And I think what is interesting in this case, if you look at this case now, like on last few years, right, for example, Lino Storls, right, A few times say, oh, I'm kind of sorry, I was kind of too brutal, right. Or something. Because he's also a guy, somebody who likes, you know, to tell things not only directly, but maybe how he feels it. Right. And if you communicate through, let's say written media, right. I mean you only rely your feelings, right. Probably with words versus no other method, right. So it really can become very brutal. Right.
00:16:03 - Scot Wingo
Well, what's nice is it's in engineering discussions like that. It's not subjective. It's subjective, right? Because if you say to the MySQL founder, this thing's garbage and it's crashing here, that's either true or false. Like there's. There's an answer, right? So.
00:16:16 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, yes.
00:16:16 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So he can't, you know, if he says no, it's not, you know, it doesn't crash. And then we can prove that. Right. And if you're right, then the other person's like, okay, mia culpa, you were right, I was wrong. Let's.
00:16:25 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, so that's what's nice.
00:16:27 - Scot Wingo
There's a purity in there that I really like.
00:16:28 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. And I like that. I think the challenge, I think what happens, you see in some of engineering groups, right, they want to like optimized for comfort driving productivity, right. And yeah, I mean, I'm not a big fan of that, as you can imagine.
00:16:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you start spylog. You're still in the Soviet Union and you're 19, you've got this startup. I imagine you didn't get venture capital. I didn't. I would imagine nothing like that really existed.
00:16:57 - Peter Zaitsev
That is Russia, right? At that time, it's late 90s, right. And this is kind of, I would say this very lawless stage right of state of freedom in a, in Russia right there, all the rules fall apart and the news are not created yet with the company. We had like my partner in business, right. He was, you know, personally wealthy. He could invest a little bit of money, right? And then he had some angels. We were almost to get, get money. But you know what? Then 2001 came, right? And 2001 was brutal in us but it was even worse in Russia because you know what? Here you could come to Hankin Road, right? And knock on the door and beg. Well, you know what? In Russia, just all Americans, they packed up and left.
00:17:54 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:17:54 - Peter Zaitsev
Right. And they just, you know, no money and nobody to even ask for. So that was very, you know, very problematic. Right. And that also was the reason why I end up later leaving Spilog because we got somebody who, you know, provided money who was, I don't know, like, associated with, you know, criminal environment.
00:18:22 - Scot Wingo
Little sketchy.
00:18:23 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, a little bit sketchy. Like, and then things stop going down. They would say, well, you know what, what do you want? Right? Do you want to give you. Give you equity or they want to give you a kidney? Right. Like that is kind of discussion happened, right? And Humi saying, well, you know what? You can have my equity, but of course I'm not, you know, as entrepreneur. Right. You don't want to work for startup. We don't have an upside anymore. So I left that business then ended up being sold somewhere and integrated something else. So it didn't collapse. Good.
00:19:01 - Scot Wingo
But yeah, still operating today. Somewhere in the.
00:19:04 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, well, it's kind of tricky for me to say. I know it was bought and then that company was bought by other. So it probably was folded if a different technologies.
00:19:16 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah.
00:19:17 - Peter Zaitsev
But for me, that was also like the thing saying, hey, you know what? I probably do not want to want to have another business in Russia. Right. That is was one of think I was thinking, hey, you know, I should leave a country and do it somewhere else. Because my relationship to risk, it's kind of, you know, like very two things. Like when it comes to business risks, I love risks. Right. Heavy, risky, whatever. But you know, when it comes to my, you know, health, life, freedom, my family, that is where pretty attached to my kidney.
00:19:50 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah.
00:19:51 - Peter Zaitsev
That is where I want to have a risk. And I think it's interesting, right? In us you can separate it, right? Hey, you know what? You raise venture capital, right. You know what? You take maybe a lot of risks. Hey guys, you make a lot of money or maybe not, but it's not really connected to your question of you keeping your kidney.
00:20:08 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So you decided to immigrate. How was that process?
00:20:12 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, so I immigrated twice, actually.
00:20:17 - Scot Wingo
Twice?
00:20:17 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah.
00:20:18 - Scot Wingo
Double immigration.
00:20:19 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. So the first one was after I decided it's time for me to quit spylog. I went ahead and I went to Michael Vidinius Monty, founder of MySQL, who I knew at that time Asking him if he would give me reference because I am looking to look for job. Of course, strategically I was hoping he would give me the job. Right. But I thought that would be kind of put me in a better negotiating position if I'm not begging him for a job. Right. But letting him talk about to me, which he did. And then I started with MySQL remotely from Moscow, Russia first. But I also negotiated saying, hey, you know what, I actually want to leave Russia. So guys, I understand you don't want to invest all this kind of time and money to relocate me. You don't know me, but you know, if I work out, well, you do. Right. And that was, you know, pretty obvious. I was, you know, one of the best people in the group I belong to. Right. So they had to invest in relocating me. So back in 2004, I moved to Seattle area.
00:21:33 - Scot Wingo
Got it.
00:21:34 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. And I spent there about two and a half years. And by that time MySQL was, was growing and it's have been, I don't know, becoming more corporate and kind of boring for, for me. Right. And I think it's also like have been some culture changes, Right. Because initially then MySQL was started, I think it was started on this kind of like a classical open source fss. Hey, we are here to change the world, right? Those people would not so much care about making money and buying an island, but make a change in the world. And that is what we were.
00:22:13 - Scot Wingo
And up until then, your database choices were Oracle. They were kind of like the 800 pound gorilla. And then Microsoft had SQL Server, both of which were crazy expensive. You could get into my startups, we would use SQL server and you were looking at 50k to 100k entry point, point, which is huge. And then oracle was like 2 to 5x.
00:22:30 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right.
00:22:31 - Scot Wingo
That's the databases you have. Yeah.
00:22:32 - Peter Zaitsev
There was no cloud, right. Where you can say, hey, if you, if you want to do it on the small scale, it can be, you know, pretty cheap even if you go with commercial data.
00:22:39 - Scot Wingo
And the, and the, the, the conventional wisdom was you could never, you know, they had so much R and D and it was so hard to solve. You could never have like, you know, anything cheaper, much less free. Yeah, well, I think you guys proved that wrong. Yeah, that was like a huge unlock for, for a lot of things.
00:22:56 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. I would say like some of the mistake for that was the open source always follows this kind of a 2080 rules, right. You can say, hey, you know what this problem there was A lot of investment done. The companies figure out what the product should be, what functionality is more or less important. And that is actually very hard job. Right. I think it's figuring out what to build is harder than actually building it in many cases. And now after it's figured out, oh, you know what you figure out? We are going to use relational databases which pick SQL, they're going to look this way. Well, you know what? We can now go and build the open source databases which will be good enough for 90% of applications with a small fraction of investment. And also as an open source, we can build it together. Right.
00:23:47 - Scot Wingo
And if someone does want to get to that last 5%, they can just do it themselves.
00:23:51 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes, they can do it themselves. Right. And look, I mean, also, it's not the point of solving everybody's problem. Right. I think that's if you look at a lot of initiatives where it's still done with a proprietary software for various reasons or maybe some property extensions of an open source software. But we come to a point where more and more the foundational software infrastructure software is open source.
00:24:22 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so then what was your. Just to stay at MySQL and I definitely want to get to the second immigration story.
00:24:28 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah.
00:24:29 - Scot Wingo
So in MySQL what was your role? Were you on like the front end, back end? How did they, how was the company?
00:24:35 - Peter Zaitsev
It's interesting, right? So first my school was like a very engineering company, so everybody was to join as an engineer. So I would join. I actually even kind of wrote some, some code in MySQL. But where I was kind of more gravitated is working with customers because I think it's one of my superpowers, if you will. I am good with technology, but I'm also reasonably good with people compared to many.
00:25:09 - Scot Wingo
You can turn off the Russian a hole and then be nice to customers.
00:25:12 - Peter Zaitsev
I can at least make it.
00:25:13 - Scot Wingo
Some engineers can. You don't put those in front of customers because they'll tell the customer they're dumb. Yeah, that's a, that's a huge problem.
00:25:19 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh yeah. No, I mean, I did it many times. But you know what I think it's like. Well, you know what? Sometimes I think if you have that if you're on a call with somebody, right. You have this like a overwhelming respect. Right.
00:25:32 - Scot Wingo
Then that can actually tell them they're wrong.
00:25:34 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, that can be cute. Right? That can be, can be different. Yeah. But in any way I moved to do things that you kind of. They're not code related. Right. So I was Doing a lot of consulting, customer support. I also developed a lot of training material. Like actually not training material that you will do too much writing, but actually questions. Right. For certifications. Right. And that was kind of one of my challenges. If you look at like why I looked at left MySQL and I think that's often happens with like as a company became more mature, you go from generalists, like to more specific. So I was saying, okay, do you want to be, you know, consultant? They want to be support. Well, I kind of want to do both. No, you can't. Right. And then you get like a close and close. Right. And you are put in the box. Right.
00:26:24 - Scot Wingo
And then suddenly it's like not just any customer, it's this segment and then now it's not that. It's like government customers that are in Seattle on this side of town. Yeah, yeah. Your world is here and it like starts to get so incredibly narrow.
00:26:37 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right. And that was not very satisfactory for me. So yeah, I felt it would. It's time for. It's time for me to go and you know, go something on. On my own. Right. I think deep down I also knew, right. What while I had to sort of like take this, the corporate job to get out of Russia, it is not my destiny. Right. I am this, you know, person who likes to do my own stuff and probably likes the freedom and independence, you know, above anything else. Right. And that's on. I think you can only reach that as entrepreneur, right. Or yeah. So. So yeah, so I needed to figure out a way to get out of MySQL and hopefully stay in us or at least somewhere us at the time and even kind of still now is not very friendly. Right. For. For entrepreneurs. Right. Like there is no like a startup visa, right. As in some. Some countries. So instead I actually moved to United Kingdom. Right. We had at that point where high skilled visa program, right. Where I could just, you know, get, you know, some points and boom, you know, I moved to UK and I can do whatever. I'm not tied to my job as I was tied in, in MySQL. Right. And that's.
00:28:07 - Scot Wingo
Is your family moving along through all these?
00:28:09 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, oh yeah, of course we move. And as usually, right. As I said, the first startup, right. I had like a very young kid. The second in this case was a similar. So when we moved to uk, my daughter was having like eight months or something and I was looking to start the business with almost no savings. Right. And yeah, I mean I can just admire my wife Right. For trusting in me, you know, able to figure it out. Because I don't know, for me, I think I perform well with my back against the wall. So, hey, you know, Peter, you have to build a business and start getting income money flowing in, in a month because you don't have any other freaking choice. That is the best outcome for me. Right. I think for some people it's kind of stressful and I mean, you know, just stall.
00:29:04 - Scot Wingo
But you know, the amount of work you can do and the ideas you say yes to becomes unbounded. And that's where some of the best ideas come from.
00:29:11 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, so that's exactly.
00:29:14 - Scot Wingo
Have no bounds of like what you will do to solve problems when you get in this kind of against the wall things. Yeah, yeah.
00:29:20 - Peter Zaitsev
So that's when we got started with, you know, Percona was born in August 2006.
00:29:28 - Scot Wingo
Okay. I didn't know it was in London.
00:29:30 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah.
00:29:30 - Scot Wingo
Where were you? In London or.
00:29:32 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I was in. In London area, kind of.
00:29:34 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. You picked the most expensive part of the UK as well, so that's always fun.
00:29:38 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, I was kind of the outskirts of London. Yeah, outskirts of London. Right. I could try to get as far from London as possible, but then if I would have, you know, some work in. In the city, I could still get. Get there. But you know what to my surprise actually, as I still got most of the business outside of of uk and that is also a business I like. Right. I think UK changed right now. Right now there's like some more startup culture. But at that time it was, you know, just suits. Right. It's kind of, you know, kill me now. Right. Yes. You could make a lot of business and you know, banking, insurance and so on and so forth. But that was not.
00:30:20 - Scot Wingo
The businesses are very conservative and they don't. They kind of like have the innovation cycle of hospitals. They like are glacial. Glacial adopters of technology.
00:30:28 - Peter Zaitsev
I remember there was like sometimes somebody hired me to do the job, right. And they like allocated a week for that. That was like to do the job for two hours then was like about 140 freaking pages of a paperwork. Right. To fill out. Yeah. And then it's kind of, you know, the do nothing for remaining three days. Right. And they say, well, you know what, can you please do something? Because you just say, hey guys, I'm done. What else do you want me to do? Right. Then you will make other people look bad.
00:30:58 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Have you ever done the thing? A lot of times you do business in London and like their form of what we would Call notary. In the us, like, you actually visit a barrister and it's like a dude in the wig and stuff.
00:31:08 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I've had to do that.
00:31:09 - Scot Wingo
Like, we set up a London office and they're like, all right, you're gonna have to fly to London and you have to go see a barrister. It's like, what? Like, there's a guy, like, literally, and you're like, you know, ask me four questions and like, boom, boom. And like, you know. Yeah. It's crazy how like, it like kicks out to like some Almost, you know, 1800s level process sometimes in these European countries.
00:31:25 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. I think there is a lot of a traditional or I think in UK they like things to look tradition. Right. It's kind of very interesting. Like when they build a house, like a new one, right. And then you look at that three years later, you wouldn't recognize it. Looks exactly the same. Right. As the houses they built a century ago. Right. And they like it.
00:31:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. What was the idea that led you to Percona? Well. And has that, did you. Is what Percona is today different than what it was?
00:31:51 - Peter Zaitsev
It was, of course, very different. Well, so first, to be frank, right, I was thinking, hey, I will run Percona as this kind of like a very simple services business because these are very easy to start, right. And I can start feeding my family like now and then I figure out and maybe go and build some different product business or something like that. Right. But then, well, it's kind of took a life of its own, Right. In this case and evolved. Of course. Now you're asking what was the idea now stepping back a little bit maybe to throw your kind of Russian experience, right? What do you really know about United States if you live in Russia? Well, you boys.
00:32:38 - Scot Wingo
Guns.
00:32:39 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, yeah, yeah. But you know what? You also like watching movies, right? And it feels like this is like a sort of like a country if, you know, rule of law. Right. And everything's supposed to be kind of so wonderful. Right. In this case. And then what you would come to the. So I was surprised in that our technical industry is what. When you have a lot of consulting done, it's actually extensions of a sales team. If you hire the Oracle consultants, for example, they're not going to say, well, you know what? Actually, Oracle is not the best choice here, actually. You know what, for your particular use case, the Microsoft SQL would be better choice. Of course they're not going to do that for you. Right. They are out there, actually, to make sure you use as much Oracle as possible. Right. And you are as deep into Oracle as possible, so you cannot migrate. Right. So it's kind of always extension of that sales team. Right.
00:33:35 - Scot Wingo
And they would never bite the hand that feeds them because all their leads come from Oracle.
00:33:38 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right.
00:33:39 - Scot Wingo
And if they ever sold something that's not Oracle, that would get cut off from our side.
00:33:42 - Peter Zaitsev
Kind of getting that may building on the open source spirit. I was thinking, well, what if you would really put the customer first, right. And act as, you know, fiduciary if you will, for a customer. Right. So that was the first idea, say, hey, you know what, we are going to be working for you. You pay us money, that is going to be going to give you the best advice we can. Right. And you know what, we are not tied to any kind of particular technology to the best of our ability. Right. At least we are not compensated in this way. Right. And the second one was for me is also really how to build the best customer experience. Right. Because I found especially with larger organizations, if you look at support, there is like a so much. Have you tried turning on and off again, right. Or people really, you know, reading some text from a knowledge base and you can really hear what they don't even understand what the hell they're reading about. Right. There's having so much of that kind of low quality supporter. I felt we could make a difference. Well, and I think we did, right. That was a foundation of our early stage success.
00:34:56 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool.
00:34:58 - Peter Zaitsev
All right.
00:34:58 - Scot Wingo
So you start as a service business and you're in the uk One thing kind of in this era I had a question about is today postgres is like, you know, seems to be almost at parity with MySQL I don't know if that's controversial in your world or not. I know the history a bit of of MySQL where did Postgres come from? Was it. What's the story on that?
00:35:18 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, well, Postgres was like very interesting, right. The PostgreSQL was coming from a number of larger universities and such and at that time it was still coming to the market. Right.
00:35:36 - Scot Wingo
Did they do it because of. Was it like some PhDs as a, as a thesis or like was there some need that MySQL didn't need or.
00:35:45 - Peter Zaitsev
No, I think. Well, look, I mean, if you look at this case, right. I mean, I don't think things in open source happen. It's like somebody looked at that kind of need, right? And those are people who are having some, you know, market analysis, product analysis, some organic thing. Yeah, some do, right. Like right now. But at that time it's like, well, I have built this kind of like a baby, right. This is kind of my thing, right. And I go around and I look at everybody use it and try to use it, right. And then somebody wins, right. Just like even if you look at operating systems, right? Well, there is of course Linux, but you know what, there was, you know, and is still FreeBSD as well. And there's like also if you look at that, there is like a whole bunch of even kind of slight smaller operating systems stuff. It just, you know, went nowhere. Right. So there was a different community building postgres, Right. It came from a different.
00:36:38 - Scot Wingo
Was it European? Like what were the universities?
00:36:41 - Peter Zaitsev
No, I mean a lot of that stuff was actually there's like a famous person in a database ecosystem, right. Michael Stonebraker. Right. And he kind of did research projects for many of them of databases. Right. And that's kind of one of the origins of postgres, right? It was kind of postgres. It was postgres as kind of 95 or something. This was kind of changing different names. I don't even remember all of them anymore. But in the end it kind of went out from academia and was founded as this kind of very unusual community. Yeah, right.
00:37:24 - Scot Wingo
Have you worked with those people as well or not as much as the MySQL no, no.
00:37:27 - Peter Zaitsev
I mean at that time I picked MySQL yeah, right. And there PostgreSQL was at that time, you think approach was like this. The PostgreSQL was much more elitist. It was like the database for smart people. If you can't figure this out, well, you know what? You should not use postgres. That's something. Hey, we have this SQL and you have to understand it and so on and so forth. And then the MySQL was. It didn't really have a very good SQL support. It was kind of hackish. It was like a very user focused. Hey, you have this kind of thing to do. You need to build a web page or something. We just figure out how you can do it. With MySQL it was kind of very practical, very hackish. It build a lot.
00:38:17 - Scot Wingo
We call our get stuff done in PostgreSQL. It has to be perfect in this way and wherever.
00:38:23 - Peter Zaitsev
And obviously over time, kind of now decades, a lot of things much more coalesce, right. Like where you would PostgreSQL became much more user friendly and then MySQL getting a lot more robust and Getting more advanced features. But you know, I mean, I think it's this kind of MySQL versus PostgreSQL competition that is kind of yet another very big story. We can go into what's the split of the two?
00:38:52 - Scot Wingo
If you know it like, is it like pretty even or does it depend on.
00:38:55 - Peter Zaitsev
No, I think it's kind of interesting. Right. In this case, if you look at right now, momentum has switched. Right. When we were starting in Those kind of 2006, for example, there was a lot of stuff from PostgreSQL ecosystem. How can we catch up with MySQL because it was so much bigger. Right now you can see what. There is still a lot of MySQL especially because of that huge amount of application built on MySQL for over 20 years. But if you look at where momentum is, where the new applications are being build its postgres. And now it is a kind of a question in this case, well, you know, how can MySQL what kind of MySQL do to, you know, to catch up? Right. Or at least kind of slow that.
00:39:42 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, that's my perception.
00:39:45 - Peter Zaitsev
Sounds good.
00:39:46 - Scot Wingo
Interesting to have that value.
00:39:47 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes. Yeah, yeah.
00:39:48 - Scot Wingo
So two more nerdy questions, then we'll get on with the entrepreneurial. Sure. So people don't realize, I think that you're kind of like you're an authority on this stuff. So do you have code that's in Linux running today?
00:40:00 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, in the Linux.
00:40:02 - Scot Wingo
Can you look in the kernel and see that's my code.
00:40:05 - Peter Zaitsev
Probably not in Linux, but there is a little bit in MySQL I mean, as I mentioned, I like, that's a.
00:40:10 - Scot Wingo
Big badge of honor for hardcore engineer software engineers at school. And then you're frequently invited, even kind of in the early days of Percona, I think. I don't know when this started, but you're, you're always a speaker at a lot of these industry events about anything related to open source databases and a lot of these topics. What is it you talk about at these events and what is your.
00:40:35 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, I think it's interesting. So let me kind of take it back. Right. Because it also may be kind of relevant. So for me, with my work at MySQL at the time, I also had opportunity to create one of the early blogs in that field called MySQL Performance Block. Yeah, right. And that was wonderful. Right. That is where what I later kind of had grown from. Right. If you will, as my source of leads and everything. Right.
00:41:09 - Scot Wingo
And I Also it's an early, what today founders would call content strategy or inbound. By being the technical expert on one piece of MySQL you just had leads flowing in for free.
00:41:21 - Peter Zaitsev
It was fantastic. And also at the same time I got also on a conference circuit. Right. First speaking on behalf of MySQL and then also on my own. A lot of that focus was first focused on some very specific technical, in depth presentation. How to design, how to run your applications, how to optimize queries or whatever.
00:41:47 - Scot Wingo
So you're in the performance. These are people that are pushing MySQL to the edges, either in size or performance needs. And you're starting to build this database of. Well, you should shard it. I don't know if that's a thing. You know, here's how to segment the database to get the most performance on this. If it's disk bound, throw some more memory at. You know, like sometimes maybe there's a hardware recommendation, sometimes it's an architectural.
00:42:09 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, yeah. So I think I covered like a pretty large set of topics, but kind of focused on that. And then gradually it has been changing. Right. Like if you look at all for so many years later, has a company growing and my responsibility changes, I don't spend as much time kind of hands on anymore. Right. So you often talk maybe a little bit. High level questions. Right. I also got involved besides databases a lot in the open source community at large. Kind of, hey, you know, talking on topics related to that. That's also what I do a lot.
00:42:47 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Do you still do the blog today?
00:42:51 - Peter Zaitsev
I do, yeah. I mean I actually like, I do have like several ones. I contributed like a Percona blog. Right. When I have my own personal blog.
00:43:00 - Scot Wingo
Do you still have the MySQL performance blog?
00:43:02 - Peter Zaitsev
MySQL performance blog. Over years it was just wrapped into Percona Blog.
00:43:09 - Scot Wingo
Okay. So you've been doing it. You're in the cycle where you kind of write on a pretty regular basis.
00:43:14 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah.
00:43:15 - Scot Wingo
Interesting. Yeah. When did you start doing that? That was like 2006 time frame or.
00:43:20 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, that was before. Right. So it probably was 2005. Ish. Maybe it was like at least a year before I left MySQL yeah.
00:43:29 - Scot Wingo
The other thing that writing does is it makes you learn a lot more. Right. Because the best way to. I had Robbie Allen on here and he said the best way to learn something. He wrote a lot of books for O'Reilly. And you know, the best way. If you're going to write a book, suddenly you have to like know something flat to be able to. Yeah, you ingest all this information, then you have to like spit it back out. So another human.
00:43:51 - Peter Zaitsev
Absolutely, absolutely, yes. I mean, and I also have a O'Reilly book. For me, one is enough.
00:43:58 - Scot Wingo
Oh, you wrote an irl. What was your animal?
00:44:00 - Peter Zaitsev
The animal. It's. Yes. What is like. It's something like a hawk.
00:44:04 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, nice. A nice raptor. So. Yeah, yeah, was around my sequel.
00:44:08 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. So high performance. MySQL.
00:44:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, interesting. You know, that's a good four years.
00:44:11 - Peter Zaitsev
That was like a. Pretty much like a best selling book on that, on that topic. But you're right, I think that's always. Now I encourage all of the engineers and hey, you know, to really understand something, you know, write about it, you know, teach people about it, because that's fantastic. You often, you know, you know, go through that stuff and say, huh, I actually don't understand that. I can't explain it. Right. And then you have to dig some more.
00:44:37 - Scot Wingo
So, yeah, there's also a concept of, it's like compounding, right. So yes, you've been at this 19 years, but there's a compounding that starts. It's hard to explain this to people. Like, everyone understands financial compounding or like, you know, interest compounding or something like that, but there's this knowledge compounding. And what I have found, I've been doing kind of similar thing is you almost like can predict the future because you've seen it and it actually is more than those 19 years. It feels like you've got 50 years in there. It's like hard to explain to people, but this may be landing with you. And like, I bet someone could walk up to you and say, I'm having this performance problem. And you could probably ask three questions and you would give them, you know, you know the pattern immediately and you can give them like, you know, five bullets that will be life changing for them. Is that is like that, Is that your superpower now? Because you've been at this for 19 years.
00:45:26 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes. I mean, I think that is always severe. I think you get a lot of that knowledge out there. I think a lot of value also comes because when you had a chance to look at the systems kind of through a history, you often understand it kind of much more than they have because often developers come and they say, well, oh, that is a problem you're having. But then if you look about that, how that's going to evolve in a kind of few years, you see some complexity which they don't think about.
00:46:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And if you wrote a web analytics company, when was that spylog was like 2001 or the late 90s? That was hard. But like, you know, today's traffic on the Internet is 100 a thousand X. Yeah. So what's also nice is you've seen, you know, the things you were talking about performance in 2005 are not the same problems people are having today because the amount of data we're producing is compounding and it's a whole nother set of problems.
00:46:26 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, and I think, you know, it's kind of very interesting how the performance problem kind of have been, you know, separated. Right. Because on one side, if you look at this kind of a real high performance on the Internet and we kind of stock trading, gaming and so on, so there is like a very important thing to squeeze. That's kind of a last percent. Right. Because the scale is so massive. On the other hand, we have this kind of like absolutely bloated half a gigabyte Facebook application on your phone, which you can say, oh my gosh, how can. This is like a so powerful device. Right. And it's kind of still freaking slow. Right. Because of how technologies have been optimized for simplicity for developers rather than performance. Right. In so many areas.
00:47:11 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Interesting. Cool. So back. So you're in London, you've got Percona and you've got your performance blog. So leads are coming in, you're turning them into consulting gigs. When did Percona become a product?
00:47:26 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, yeah, so first I would say what happened is I moved back to United States. Right. I spoke or spent only about a year and a half in in uk. I felt like, wow, there's a lot of customers I'm finding in US and it seems to be kind of more fun. So I ended up, you know, getting myself as kind of like a manager visa to go and move to to United States in 2008.
00:47:55 - Scot Wingo
Did you have to hack it by opening a US subsidiary for Kona and then bringing yourself over as a manager of that?
00:48:00 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, it was kind of like a funny. Right? Because it's like a government would require a business plan and you know, like as a bootstrapper. I mean, it's like, well, you don't have investors, you don't have a board. Right. You don't need that kind of, you know, pages and pages of business plan. So I remember I hired somebody like, for maybe like 500 bucks from Costa Rica or something, you know, to come up with some, you know, business plan. I look at that and Say, there seems some graph, you know, it makes sense. Well, I'm sure it's going to be good enough for, you know, immigration officials, Right. They're probably only also going to scroll through it. Right. And yeah, it's funny. Anyway, yeah, it went through, right. I got my visa, moved, moved to US to. To California, right at that time. And it was also very interesting time, you know, like, I think it's kind of like if you look back at those kind of O2 achievers, like so many cases where luck is involved. Because for me, on one extent, it was 2008, right. That was this sort of like a crisis, right. A lot of people want to save money. Well, why? What is one of the ways you save money? You don't use Oracle.
00:49:14 - Scot Wingo
Yep.
00:49:15 - Peter Zaitsev
Right. So there was a lot of business.
00:49:19 - Scot Wingo
Migrating off the big iron into the.
00:49:21 - Peter Zaitsev
I mean, it was not. So we didn't do a lot of migrations, right. In this case. But if people are still building a new app, new solutions, right. I mean, technology kind of never stops, right? And they would use MySQL for that. That was one.
00:49:35 - Scot Wingo
So they were going hybrid. They had some Oracle legacy stuff, but the new stuff was.
00:49:38 - Peter Zaitsev
And then the other big thing is what? The MySQL was acquired by Sun. And that is also kind of a big thing because, you know, like, when one company acquires another company, there is always a lot of.
00:49:50 - Scot Wingo
I forgot about that.
00:49:51 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, A lot of shit happening, right. So there have been a lot of opportunity for us. And hey, you know what, While they're having those like a digestion period, right. And things are kind of not so solid with what they are doing. Right. Well, come to Percona and that's where you get solutions. Right. And that is also then, as you said about the product, a lot of our products were born almost kind of by kind of accident, if you will, because we were really focused on how can we provide value to our customers. And often you would get a MySQL you tell them, hey, that's how you configure that, how install it, how you design schema, tuned queries, wherever. But then it's kind of not enough, right? Kind of Oracle, Not Oracle. Sun acquired MySQL it kind of became slow. They didn't fix certain things. There was a lot of some other complicated political structure in MySQL space. And that is how we end up saying, hey, we actually have to create our own version. That is where we're going to serve for MySQL was born because, well, we have to in this case. And then we also somewhere around that time also moved from pure consulting model to support which is recurrent subscription revenue. Which is a whole different game if you think about it.
00:51:23 - Scot Wingo
So kind of like red hatted MySQL Yes, MySQL is interesting because they were going to be one of these where a lot of these open source. There's a pure open source project piece and then a commercialization piece that are different. That's right, yeah, yeah. And then like WordPress has the pure part and then what is it? WP? What's the. There's another entity.
00:51:42 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, WP engine.
00:51:43 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah, yeah, WP engine.
00:51:46 - Peter Zaitsev
But I think in this case what you're saying is like there are two, two kinds of open source projects that you can think about more like a foundation driven or community driven. You know, think about Linux, Kubernetes, Postgres. And then there are a vendor, right, like MySQL well, it's owned by specific vendor now it happened to be Oracle. Right. And they do whatever you want with it. Right. You have no freaking say. While it's kind of very different in PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. Right. And there is some sort of public government's process and so.
00:52:25 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. So you guys took MySQL and then you basically solved a lot of the performance. You took your best practices for performance and kind of baked them in.
00:52:33 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, yeah. I mean it started with performance when they also looked, you know, as a customers take you tell you what they need. We had a lot of improvements in terms of security havability and yeah, this.
00:52:46 - Scot Wingo
Is the part of stuff you didn't have to copy left it back into the. The core. You kind of. It was your proprietary code.
00:52:53 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, not quite. Right. So because it's. It's kind of built together in a single product. It also has to follow the same license which is gpl. Right. So it was our extension but the end product was and still remained open source. Okay, right. So this is kind of very Percana model has been very unusual. Right. We have this. If you look at the Oracle, what they're doing, right. Or SAN did before that we have MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. MySQL Community is open source available for everybody. But it's kind of crippled all the kind of good stuff goes in the MySQL enterprise. Right. And that is proprietary. What you'll do with percon we can say, well, essentially provide you like the same stuff that exists in the enterprise version but it is open source, right? And that's how we can differentiate.
00:53:48 - Scot Wingo
Now some people, people could just use it without paying you.
00:53:52 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes, right. And this kind of is a question, say, like, well, Peter, how do you.
00:53:57 - Scot Wingo
Make money off free software?
00:53:58 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. Is that a good business model? You know, like, how is it going to work? Well, but reality is, if you're speaking about like a larger enterprise customers, which is like our bread and butter, right. For, for this is they are not going to go it alone, right? Imagine somebody in a bank going and kind of downloading something off the Internet and then just say, hey, if this thing crashes, I just go on the forums and hopefully somebody responded me quickly, right?
00:54:26 - Scot Wingo
And if that employee leaves the whole, they're toast.
00:54:29 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right. They also need like in this case, yes, there is this kind of an open source project and it's kind of wonderful. But they're serious users. They want commercial relations, right. They have compliance needs, right. You want, you know, just to make sure if something goes there is somebody to call, somebody to blame and so on and so forth. Right. And with that, even though we have, our software is open source, you can just, you know, go and run it in a while. We have very good current revenue business, right. With similar margins as an enterprise. Right. And a pretty high retention. I think there's also something else which is kind of interesting in this case, right? Because if you look somebody like Oracle, like, have you ever felt like, why like support often the first kind of property vendor is so bad? Well, because in many cases just can't get away with them. For them, you are stuck.
00:55:28 - Scot Wingo
If you have a monopoly, there's no reason to spend money. But they have high maintenance fees. Oracle famously has like, what is it like, almost 50% of your licenses.
00:55:39 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right. I mean, there is a high maintenance fee, high subscription. But you know what? Because you are stuck with a product, right? You cannot fire them. You have to kind of repot all your system. Then it often goes with the support becomes kind of crap in our case, right? Because that is a core proposition. They don't have to rip out the software, right. And if you really don't make sense, right, then, well, you know what? They can just fire us. And I think that puts you in a situation when you have to kind of be great or die. And I actually like it, right. Because that doesn't leave space for mediocrity, right. Where you could otherwise gravitate to.
00:56:19 - Scot Wingo
Do you have competitors that have taken your open source and compete with you.
00:56:22 - Peter Zaitsev
On the, I mean, There are some. Yes. Number of companies which go ahead and run Percona.
00:56:30 - Scot Wingo
Sounds good in practice until someone takes your stuff and peace with you. That's like, that's a, it's a little bit hard to swallow being a, a Russian guy.
00:56:37 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, no, I mean I think that is kind of works as design because.
00:56:42 - Scot Wingo
It does force you up your game. Absolutely.
00:56:44 - Peter Zaitsev
I go and like think about this. Like for a software I produce per Corner server for MySQL, 90% of that is actually Oracle's work. Right. Like you say, I cannot say, oh, I just did that all myself and they kind of stealing it. Bastards. No. Right. You know, I'm steady on the shoulder. Fake giants. And you know what? As Firkona has grown, that is kind of sort of your medal of achievement. And somebody, somebody's staying on on your shoulders as well. Right. That is how open source ecosystem is supposed to work. Right. And in many cases they serve like I have like somebody in India and some other companies. They serve sort of local markets. Right. Where we wouldn't be very good at serving them anyway. So it's, it's kind of cool of me.
00:57:30 - Scot Wingo
Cool. So you had your first product, you're in California. What year is it now?
00:57:34 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, I moved to California. 2008. Yes. Yeah.
00:57:38 - Scot Wingo
Okay, before we go there, did the movement the cloud. So you know, AWS came out like around 06, but even then it was simple storage. Like the, like the true AWS was coming out around this time did that would have a huge impact because a lot of these open source systems are the default standard for most of these cloud projects.
00:58:04 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes, absolutely. Well, I think it's interesting because cloud came if you think about like a MySQL market or let's say Percona market in kind of two different ways. Right. On one extent you can say, hey, now we have infrastructure, you know, your EC2 nodes, right. Like a storage whatever is much easier accessible. And then you go ahead and you use that with open source software and it's kind of awesome. And that's actually created the market because you know what? Very few people would go ahead and say, oh, I'm spinning out this EC2 windows and I'm going to easy to instance and I'm going to put Windows and Microsoft SQL right. To work on it. Right. That was kind of a first stuff. Right. But then also you have RDS and Aurora come about. Right. And for me it was very interesting thinking of this innovators dilemma thing kind of happening in practice. Right. When you can think, oh, that something is A toy, Right. Like. Oh, you know what, it's kind of like a very basic. It's not really tuned well. It cannot handle large folks that don't.
00:59:08 - Scot Wingo
Know what are those things.
00:59:09 - Peter Zaitsev
So the RDS stands for Relational Database Servers, right. What that can also be described as what they call like a fully managed database in the cloud. So they just provision the database for you and you are using that. You don't have to be responsible for.
00:59:26 - Scot Wingo
You don't even care what it is underneath.
00:59:27 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. For maintaining it.
00:59:28 - Scot Wingo
And this is like Amazon's.
00:59:29 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes, that's Amazon's. Right. And then the next step up from that is what is called Aurora. That is when they just don't give you the open source kind of vanilla MySQL or postgres. Right. But it has a number of bells and whistles for better performance and some other things.
00:59:50 - Scot Wingo
Would you say that kind of competes with the Percona?
00:59:53 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes, of course. Look, I mean, I think if you look at reality, like our business change a lot, right. And I think if you look at our earlier business, right. If you look at the customers who were Percona customers in 2008, a vast majority of them are running in the cloud. And Amazon right now, right, where Percona was successful is moving up in the enterprise. Right. Because there have been many companies which just have been, I would say, like washed away right by the cloud because.
01:00:28 - Scot Wingo
They just, just suddenly everything got very easy.
01:00:31 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, make it easy. Right. And I would tell to people, hey guys, you know, remember at some point somebody would come to us and say, well, you know, we are, let's say, going to run like a small website. Can you please, you know, set up for us a secure and highly available cluster for two databases? Right. And then you go ahead and do it. Now, boom, it's all gone, right? Because there's no point to hire some expert.
01:00:56 - Scot Wingo
Check, check, check.
01:00:57 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes. You just go in there, right. And most likely you don't even build your own website for E commerce. You go and you know, do Shopify, right. Or there's like so many of those, like a platform for pretty much anything you can. Anything you can.
01:01:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. It seems like your sweet spot. If there's a pyramid of companies, the ones that are going to need performant databases are going to be financial services. Would be a big one. Anything that has compliance because the logging and that kind of stuff. So some of that can be government kind of stuff. And what are some of the other. Are those like the two.
01:01:28 - Peter Zaitsev
What are the big part of it? I would say healthcare in this case. Right. A lot of, I would say also the larger technology companies, they typically have some very complicated database installations and such. I think what is also interesting in this case is I think living in a bubble, as you always do, it's hard to understand how different cloud adoption in the different regions in the world is because in certain cases you have run everything in the cloud. In some other cases people are much more worrisome about it. In some cases you see large government or regulated industries, they're even not allowed to run in the cloud providers. And often it's saying, well, you know, we are not allowing you to run in American cloud providers because you know what, we don't quite trust the American government and we don't actually have any local cloud providers to speak of. Right. So you still end up running that in legacy data centers.
01:02:38 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And then everything always has another edge. So even though cloud simplified, there's complexity too, right. So there's now hybrid. So you're off, you're, you're on prem and off premiere. So that's one complexity. Another one is your multi zone. So now the database has to work across different zones and then there's like a disaster recovery. So if a zone goes down then you have to have something and then there's like the whole backup scenario where the database, you have your active, active, active, inactive and all that kind of jazz. So that seems like that would have all been good for you.
01:03:11 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, absolutely.
01:03:12 - Scot Wingo
Because you're priority thinking about all these things across data centers. So it's relatively easy for you extract it up into the cloud, whereas a lot of these other systems don't really anticipate that level of complexity.
01:03:23 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, and I would say this, right, so if you look at your corner business, one is we do significant amount of business with Amazon folks which people would run those kind of managed versions. Right. It's kind of interesting, right, how it's marketed, right. Because on one extent the Amazon likes to tell you like a Google whatever, oh, it's kind of fully managed. Oh, that means I don't need to have dba. That's cool. So who's going to be responsible for security? Oh, that's going to be shared responsibility. Oh, what about performance? Well, that's going to be shared responsibility too. Of course. You have to optimize your own queries and so on and so forth. Right. So you kind of get that somewhat kind of a bait and switch. Right.
01:04:05 - Scot Wingo
The hardware is fully managed, but any, yeah, they're happy to have you not perform it. So they can give you more hardware. There's a misalignment there too.
01:04:12 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. And they would love to spin up.
01:04:13 - Scot Wingo
A very, you know, a very high end database entity for you.
01:04:16 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, that's right. Yeah. I mean I think what I like the token is what cloud vendors, they like tuning by credit card because that is their motivation. If you say hey guys, have you tried going to the highest instance size possible? Right. If not, then well, that is probably your number one solution. And then only then we'll talk to you about how it's possible to, you know, actually optimize your application, optimize your database.
01:04:40 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. They do not want you to understand optimized in a way.
01:04:42 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. So anyway, I mean for us we do have some customers, right. When they actually provide that more of a white glove treatment saying hey, you know what, we really want somebody to even kind of try the interface. We have developers, we don't have a clue about databases. We need somebody to well to deal with that fully managed environment, right. But actually to deal with what we have to do on our side of that shared responsibility. What you also have a lot is I would say like a different approach to the cloud, right? Because I think it's interesting like how technology is somewhat kind of circular, right? Because if you remember 90s, right. The late 90s at that time you have those kind of awesome operating systems like a Windows databases like SQL Server or Oracle kind of came about and we would go ahead and go and use it, right? And then this kind of disruption wave open source came. Now we had this kind of a second wave. You have cloud vendors like Amazon, Google and go ahead and build for us it's a very property but this kind of very nice, well integrated cloud, right? And then they want to use that, use kind of like a highly differentiated features which we can charge you a lot for in which I can make sure that cloud is not commodity. So you have have no ability to move from Amazon to Google or Azure or whatever.
01:06:08 - Scot Wingo
We're kind of back to the Oracle trap.
01:06:10 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, that's right. And people understand that. So there is alternative things that in an open source, right. You may heard about talking about like a cloud native. That is something which is built at an open source technology, right? And that is something which allows you to use cloud as commodity, saying hey, cloud is good, right? It's wonderful to be able to, you know, spin up a hundred servers, right. With a single click, right. But we do not need to pay for all that like a software, which software bringing. We can bring open source, right? And that is where it's a portability layer. Yes. Like you may heard about like technologies like Kubernetes and that is where we see that a lot. Right. Because if you look at the large organization you can say wow, if you actually bring that Amazon Kool Aid to its fullest, right. And use all those, you know, very property, very expensive services they want us a is going to be super expensive now. And guess what? They're not stupid. We are rising prices every year, right. So it's going to be more and more expensive and harder, harder to move. While if yes, they're sticking on the open source software. We are in a good negotiating power. We want to raise the price. If we can say hey actually do you guys really want us to go to Google? We can. I mean it's very affordable. Yeah. And you see a lot of more companies making that choices, right. And again sort of like a resurgence interest of running. There are like a truly open source databases just in a different way.
01:07:37 - Scot Wingo
This is where the blogging is helpful. So you can be a thought leader on this and you can say, you know, here's the best way to structure things so you don't get stuck with a cloud provider. And you know, you can almost like move the market towards kind of where you want it to be. But it's also the right thing for certain customers.
01:07:53 - Peter Zaitsev
It also becomes kind of very interesting. Like it goes in the market the same thing. If you look at 90s, right. There was always kind of like a standard way kind of media controlled by Microsoft and the like, right. You have a very kind of first like you become Microsoft certified professional. They tried to get the kids at school, right. Like a Microsoft had a presence and gave all that kind of, you know, Microsoft tool for free in our university, right. And so on. So and it took a while to break down that thing with open source technology, right. Which happened I think in the late 90s, early 2000s, right. Where a lot of people say wow, that is actually cool. That is kind of usable and you don't have to deal with all that kind of, you know, like the expensive corporate crap. Right now we had the new generation of developers which have been educated in a genre of the property cloud. You go and you become Amazon's Borg, right? Do this like Amazon well architectured infrastructure which of course going to use maximal lock in solutions. And not a lot of open source.
01:08:57 - Scot Wingo
Use their queuing thing, use all their stuff.
01:09:00 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right, yes. But again we can see people now say well you know what, there is actually this Kind of a better way. Right. And we can do things and do it, you know, more cost effective, better and so on. Right. And I think that is a big change which is, which is happening right now.
01:09:19 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, so it's 2008, your Percona's in California. How do we get to North Carolina?
01:09:25 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, how do we get to North Carolina? I think it's like a couple of things. Like. Well, you can rationalize things, right. You can tell the truth.
01:09:35 - Scot Wingo
Whatever version you want to tell the PR story or like.
01:09:38 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh yeah, yeah. So you know, like if you want to rationalize it. Right. I can say, well, I wasn't as customer facing anymore. Right. So I did not need to be with customers on site in California as much. And then moving to east coast that also allow me better coverage for my team in. In Europe group. Right. Which you had plenty of people out there.
01:10:04 - Scot Wingo
Do you have a team over in Russia or somewhere or like.
01:10:07 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, yeah, well, we are distributed company. Right. We have a people now in maybe like 45 different different countries, but there's a big number of people in. In Europe, of course. Yeah. So that is like one of the story. But the other part of the story is I didn't quite like Clifford. Right. Like, I think it's kind of, kind of different. Different culture. I think this kind of like a venture funded startup culture. Right. Is not what I, you know, particularly.
01:10:35 - Scot Wingo
You're like the lone bootstrapper out there.
01:10:37 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, yeah. And I think also it's like super.
01:10:39 - Scot Wingo
Hippie and then you're like a, you know, relatively conservative Russian type person.
01:10:45 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. But I think it's also like from there's like a lot of traffic. We didn't quite like, you know how you have, don't have any kind of seasons out there. So. Yeah.
01:10:56 - Scot Wingo
And you're consistent. You're like Mr. Database Guy forever. Right. Which is good. And you know, out in California, like every four years it's a new thing. Like it's, you know, it's. For a while it was E commerce and then it was social networking and then it was crypto, blockchain, you know, whatever. And then now it's all AI, Right. And being the database guy, when, when it's crypto, they're like, you know, they're like, oh, that's super old fashioned. You have no idea what you're doing. There's like this attitude that like, if you're not doing the latest thing, you're like, it's stupid. Yeah.
01:11:31 - Peter Zaitsev
I think an interesting thing about the database, it's also Like a shovels which are usable for any gold rush. Yeah. There have been, I would say for us it's influx of crypto companies, right. Which are, you know, storing information about NFTs and stuff right in there, databases, Right. Or doing some, you know, blockchain analysis. Right. And then some, you know, crypto. Winter comes, you know.
01:11:54 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:11:55 - Peter Zaitsev
Some of them dies. Right. But then now there's like a lot of AI companies saying, I get that.
01:11:59 - Scot Wingo
It didn't hurt the business, but you as an entrepreneur, you know, you're not like, if you're not on the latest thing, then it's like not a hip, you're not a hipster.
01:12:05 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, yeah. No, that's fair. But anyway, I mean, and it was a while back, I think I've been here for like about 12 years now or so. I even kind of.
01:12:14 - Scot Wingo
Why'd you pick the triangle? Of all the places on these coasts.
01:12:19 - Peter Zaitsev
So dark, it's kind of silly. I would say like first of North Carolina, right. Once upon a point in time I ask a person I trust and well, you know what, if you ever would pick a place to leave United States, you don't have a family or job, right. Wherever that place would be. And he told me North Carolina, I'm saying, huh, interesting. I never kind of heard much about this place or something. Right. And so at, at one point, right, we decided to go with my wife and kind of visit the place. Right. So we came here in, in Durham, liked it enough, so I did a little bit of, of research and said, hey, here we go. It's also like a field for me. Like a field, basic parameters, right? Because I would look at that and say, well, you know, what if you go to the north, right. You know, well, one weather sucks, then there's like always kind of a traffic and it's.
01:13:21 - Scot Wingo
You're a Russian dude, you're supposed to like wear the jacket and the hat.
01:13:24 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh yeah. Yes.
01:13:26 - Scot Wingo
Well, you got, you got out of there and like you lost.
01:13:29 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes.
01:13:29 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:13:29 - Peter Zaitsev
You know, I like to come to winter, right. And to ski. Right. I don't want winter in my driveway every day.
01:13:36 - Scot Wingo
No winter to come to you.
01:13:40 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. So we didn't want to go up north. Like and then, you know, Florida. Well, you know, it's. It's to Florida.
01:13:48 - Scot Wingo
No seasons.
01:13:48 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, yeah. So then they look at what is in the middle. And then I also looked for things which kind of relatively startup friendly, but also not very, you know, big and crowded. And I think this triangle really was this very good fit, right. By this kind of like analytical stuff and then we just, Just, you know, liked it and at some point, you know, throw a dice, if you will.
01:14:13 - Scot Wingo
Could always move again. Yeah. If you didn't like it.
01:14:15 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, yeah.
01:14:16 - Scot Wingo
We're glad you stuck here. When, when did you move?
01:14:18 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I was in like it's about probably 12 years ago. Yeah. Maybe even. Maybe kind of 2011 because I remember it was like a. Still kind of reeling from that 2008.
01:14:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:14:32 - Peter Zaitsev
Financial crisis at that time.
01:14:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. All right, so 2011, you move here and I imagine you're talking less to customers because the organization's gotten bigger. Like how big is Percona today? To the extent you're comfortable sharing like counter size.
01:14:45 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. So we are about 350 people. Right. You know, somewhere in about 50 mil revenue. Within 50 and 100 revenue wise.
01:14:57 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. So let's just. So you have bootstrapped a 350 person company with over 15 million in revenue.
01:15:04 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, yeah.
01:15:06 - Scot Wingo
That's not easy. It's. Congratulations on that.
01:15:08 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, thank you.
01:15:09 - Scot Wingo
The only other person I know that's done that is Joe Colopy at Bronto.
01:15:12 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah.
01:15:12 - Scot Wingo
At that scale and obviously sass Dr. Goodnight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the OG bootstrapper. Yeah.
01:15:18 - Peter Zaitsev
I think it's like, I think one thing, if you talk about the bootstrapping. What I think what, you know, best money is customer money. Right. And that's fantastic. And if you can fund from a customers, it's fantastic. And we were lucky. Plus our business was kind of weird enough. Right. So we didn't have to invest in a lot of. In that kind of building IP before it can be used. But oh my. It takes a long time. And I think what I was reflecting on this coming here, I think it's when you are young and you're like. And look, I started Percona, what I was like 26. Right. You think you kind of.
01:16:05 - Scot Wingo
You're already a seven year veteran of startups at that point.
01:16:07 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, yeah.
01:16:08 - Scot Wingo
So the benefit of starting young, you've had a lot of time around the track.
01:16:12 - Peter Zaitsev
I did have experience, but even in that time. Right. I think it's kind of still. You feel like there is infinity of a time any place. Or maybe I did that. Right. And so hey, in this case, like, well, yes, it does take a longer.
01:16:26 - Scot Wingo
Time, but it becomes like another child. Like I had Channel Advisor for over 20 years and at some point it's almost like, you know, all right, time to go to college.
01:16:34 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's all. And it's Also like, if you're having fun, that I think is. Is important thing. And as you mentioned, there's like some other ventures on my list and not all of them are bootstrapped. Right. Because I think bootstrapping versus like getting capital defense on the type of a company. Also on the type of a person. Yeah like or team involved. So I'm not somebody who say, oh my gosh, you never ever should have taken any external capital.
01:17:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. If I look at. We kind of. I know we're hitting time, but we can do like a speed round on these. So you've got Invinco, Invinco, Altinity, Ferret, DB Corout. It looks like your founder are like pretty involved in those. Then you also do a fair amount of angel investing and you are an LP in the just so full disclosure. Yeah, we appreciate that too. So. Yeah. So tell me like how do the. Are these all in the. You know, it probably naturally comes to you when someone has a. Because you've owned this like, you know, this quadrant of high performance open source kind of like at that interesting quadrant which ends up being a good place to be. Are all of them in that kind of sphere?
01:17:45 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, yeah, to a certain extent. I think if you look at how do you come about right to this for. For me, I think it's like I don't. Like I was always having each. Right. And I think I always was kind of like a, you know, zero to one guy.
01:18:03 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:18:03 - Peter Zaitsev
Right. I think for me at all time in Fur Corner people say like, you know, Peter, please, please. You know what I understand like you have a 10 ideas before breakfast and all of them are good one. But you know, we cannot do all of them. Some of them are kind of naturally have appeared elsewhere. They say, hey, you know what? There are some people you met and you talk about AI, you'd say wow, that's cool. Why don't start a company around that. And that's what happened. Right. I mean I think before Karut I was not involved day to day significantly in those companies. I helped to start them, you know, connect people, you know, maybe some provide some initial capital. Right. But I wasn't involved in. In day to day.
01:18:52 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, so Corout's one that's like more of a. Have any of them had exits? Like what's the status of. So let's. I like the Ferret one. Let's start there. No.
01:19:01 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, fairdb, that's like a pretty early stage company.
01:19:04 - Scot Wingo
Right.
01:19:05 - Peter Zaitsev
So I mean, you know, no exits any of them.
01:19:09 - Scot Wingo
Starting to get some scale.
01:19:10 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I mean, I think I would say the largest. The second one besides Percona would be Altinity.
01:19:20 - Scot Wingo
Right.
01:19:20 - Peter Zaitsev
That's also, you know, like getting to significant scale.
01:19:25 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah.
01:19:26 - Peter Zaitsev
What's Alternity do just for, well, altinity. They provide solution around technology called Clickhouse and that is a very popular analytical database those days. Like also open source analytical database.
01:19:43 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay. Is it like an open source is authentically itself an open source? Like kind of the Percona model applied to this.
01:19:52 - Peter Zaitsev
It's not completely exactly the same. Right. And there is a reason, right. Like you may say, like, well, why you would for example have Postgres or MongoDB at per corner. Right. But not Clickhouse. Right. And it was kind of different company started. Right. And there's like a very big business reasons. Yeah.
01:20:14 - Scot Wingo
I'm not saying it should be in Percona.
01:20:15 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, no, but I'm saying. But, but in the end, yes, you can think about now. There is like a Clickhouse Inc. Which is like Oracle for MySQL, right. And then Clickhouse provides alternative software and a, and a cloud services in a Clickhouse market.
01:20:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay. And then what's Karoot do?
01:20:36 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, Karut is observability. Right. That is I think another like a passion of mine. Like, because if you are interested in any kind of performance, like high ability, all this kind of stuff, you figure out in many cases it is just people don't understand what the hell is going on inside the systems and that causes all the problems. And how do you deal with that? Well, you make sure you have some good observability systems and yeah, that's what you know, Karut is about. It has, I think is like a very interesting take on the observability ecosystem. Right. Where you would see a lot of evolution of the industry has been how we can provide get kind of more graph and more data and more graphs. Right. Maybe, you know, I mean, maybe you've seen some of your tech team have. It's kind of, you know, many, many thousands of dashboards.
01:21:28 - Scot Wingo
Datadog. Yeah, there's a lot of companies in this.
01:21:31 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right, yeah. And we are saying, well, you know, how can we sort of give you the minimum amount of data. Right. But so you can still resolve the problems because in many cases less is more.
01:21:44 - Scot Wingo
It's kind of. Right, you know, like specifically around database performance.
01:21:48 - Peter Zaitsev
No, no, it's more of an application performance. Databases. Yeah, full stack. Yeah. Databases is an important part of that, but it's not limited to databases.
01:21:57 - Scot Wingo
Okay. Cool. Have you ever done anything in crypto? Like, is that it seems like the kind of area you would get curious about?
01:22:04 - Peter Zaitsev
I mean, in this case I would say I have like some small investments, but haven't done like a big.
01:22:11 - Scot Wingo
Sometimes you don't have being the database guy. Sometimes you don't have time to go deep. And then, you know, I've been thinking a lot about AI and it didn't really click until me, until I started seeing these retrieval augmented generation systems where you kind of marry the LLM and all the natural language stuff it can do. And it's got its own issues with hallucinations. But once you kind of run it through a database of things, then it starts to get really interesting. Have you been poking around that at all?
01:22:38 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, yes. I mean, absolutely. I think AI is very interesting, Right. I like to compare that to something like akin to Internet, right. It's like, well, right now very few businesses can escape Internet, right? Especially businesses at scale. Well, you need to use Internet, right? Internet is not a whole. Right. Very few businesses say, well, we just do Internet, right. We use Internet for our business. And the same thing about AI, right. So yes, I mean I think we are always looking in all products, how to use that both for end users and also for internally for optimization. Right. Workflow, for example, it's very useful for things like a support or managed services. Right. How you can increase productivity.
01:23:26 - Scot Wingo
Seems like you'd have an affinity for the open source. Have you played with Llama and do you have like a llama instance running at home? I always imagine you having like a bunch of servers running. Crazy stuff.
01:23:35 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I mean, I do have some servers. Right.
01:23:37 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:23:37 - Peter Zaitsev
I mean I don't have specifically Llama.
01:23:41 - Scot Wingo
Or one of the open source ones. Yeah.
01:23:42 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh yeah. But out. Yeah.
01:23:44 - Scot Wingo
Okay, cool. Well, let, let's, let's wrap it up. So you've, you know, you've been at this a long time and you started all these companies and you, you built one, bootstrapped a $50 million company. What are, you know, so for, for listeners and viewers that are founders, what are some lessons that you would tell, you know, when you meet with a founder and they ask you for lessons?
01:24:02 - Peter Zaitsev
Well, there are a few. Right. So the first one, I want to say it's maybe described as UBU for me. Then I came to this space in, in MySQL we had Lev has like a first and kind of American, if you like a CEO, right. And he is this like a, you know, tall, very good looking, you know, movie star, like Spoken guy, right? And I was like, wow, can I be like him? Probably not. Not ever, Right? Like in this case. But then you figure out, well, you know what, like as a CEO, there is like so many different paths, right? And for me, it maybe took a while to overcome that kind of feel like, oh, the CEOs look like this and I'm not like that. Well, you know what? CEOs can come in all the shapes and sizes. Ubu, right? Now, as a CEO, as a founder, you have a unique opportunity, right? Like you can build the people of a teams around you, right?
01:25:03 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:25:04 - Peter Zaitsev
And you can make them to do whatever you want to do, Right.
01:25:05 - Scot Wingo
You want to pick your boss, can't pick your family, but you can, you can build your own company however you want.
01:25:10 - Peter Zaitsev
That's right. And I think that, and I think that is fantastic. Right. And I think the question in this case, as an entrepreneur, right, you need to be kind of selfish, right? You're starting the company, you need to see like, well, selfish in a good sense, right? What will help you to achieve the best, you know, best results. Right? So I think that's, that's important, right. For example, I know some CEOs are fantastic at selling.
01:25:35 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:25:35 - Peter Zaitsev
I'm not a guy, right. I am very quickly got somebody to, to do it for me. I was still big, you know, like maybe those dog and pony show in front of the customers, but you know, talking about those, like a negotiating contract, oh my gosh, kill me now. Yeah, right. Like some people are different.
01:25:53 - Scot Wingo
You don't like to spend hours in the indemnity clause. Yeah.
01:25:59 - Peter Zaitsev
So that's, that's a good point. Right.
01:26:01 - Scot Wingo
It's very painful.
01:26:02 - Peter Zaitsev
So that's one thing. And I think the second thing, what I would say is also very interesting, right. Is how much the CEO job changes. Because when you start, and if you really start with like a, like a bootstrapping, you start as one or maybe kind of two, right. You had like a two partners, started this, you know, pretty early on. But you're actually doing a lot of stuff yourself, right. You're kind of hands on, right. Everything is you. Right. And then you hire people, you tell them what to do, right. And then you hire other people, which tell other people what to do. Right. And then you kind of maybe more evolve in somebody who kind of, you know, deals with critical issues and kind of maintains the culture of a company. Right. And that things change. And the CEO of today is going to be different from a CEO of tomorrow, right? For me, the nature of that change Was and kind of like how much of a change it was. Was surprised at times. And also for me, when you have.
01:27:05 - Scot Wingo
A 350 person company, you're largely doing HR unless you've hired someone to take care of that, which you can do too.
01:27:10 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, of course I did. But I think that you bring to another interesting point, right then I remember when I was living in MySQL, it was interesting. That was about like a 400 people company. So like a very simple site. I was thinking like, well, you know what? I don't enjoy working for a large company, but you know what? I don't mind running that. And then I came to a point when I ran the large company company, right. I figure out, well, you know what? I don't like running the large company either.
01:27:45 - Scot Wingo
Be careful what you wish for.
01:27:46 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, I think it's kind of interesting, right? Because it's kind of, you know, like you may think, oh my gosh, I am a boss, I just tell people what to do, right? But there is a lot of those, kind of like a mutual relationship, what they expect from you, right? What you need to give a company for that to be successful. Right? And so about like two years ago, I say, well, you know what, okay, let me recognize who I am where, you know, my skills are best applied. And I hired the CEO to run the company, right. So I can be still involved in the, in the founder role, right.
01:28:20 - Scot Wingo
And kind of help and chairman is like a common.
01:28:22 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, chairman, like whatever you want to call it. But say, hey, you know, I am, you know, just to recognize I am zero to one guy, right. I am not somebody who enjoys steering that, you know, 350 people ship and will not enjoy steering even lighter ship myself. Well, you know, and I think that's important to recognize, right? I mean, because I also have seen some people who are very, you know, some people are good, right. They go and become a CEO of you know, 10,000, 100,000 people company, right? Even if they bootstrap time that well, good for them. Some people just have a lot of struggle because they think there's no, no way out. Kind of, you know, like when you get to a point where your business controls you, right? That's. Well, why did you start it? Didn't you started that to have that freedom?
01:29:14 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah, you can always, yeah, you always hire someone and you did. Yeah, yeah, you've referenced 0 to 1 a lot of times. Are you a big fan of Peter Thiel? And to me that lands as a reference to his book 0 to 1. And yeah, he was kind of like, I think he coined the phrase. I don't know if he coined it.
01:29:28 - Peter Zaitsev
Yes, yes. I like. I like that book and phrase as a reference. Right. And again, like, it's not like really 0 to 1. Right. But I think it's maybe, I would say 0 to 10. Right. Because for me, I think there is this kind of like a magic number. Right. Then you kind of all work together and everybody is kind of a. On the same page effortlessly. Right. That is what I like. Right. Because when you can actually spend the time of kind of, you're moving things forward, because right. When you are a larger company, it's like, oh, my gosh, you have to like a 350 have to be on the same page. You have to spend so much time to kind of really explain them over and over again, kind of same shit. And that is exhausting.
01:30:12 - Scot Wingo
Then you run a survey, and they're like, the thing they're most dissatisfied about is they don't understand the vision of the company. And you're like, you're talking about it literally 12 times.
01:30:20 - Peter Zaitsev
Oh, that's right.
01:30:20 - Scot Wingo
Yes.
01:30:21 - Peter Zaitsev
Okay, let's look. You had it on a call. It was sent to you by email. Your managers talked to you about that. How can you still don't freaking understand it? Yeah, well, that doesn't happen in the teams. You know, teams of 10 people are pretty clear.
01:30:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool. Any. Any other books or anything you want to leave people with or lessons before we wrap up?
01:30:39 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah, you know, I think. I think that's good in terms of.
01:30:43 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for doing this. It was great to hear your story linearly, and we're happy to have you here in North Carolina. Congratulations on Percola.
01:30:52 - Peter Zaitsev
Yeah.
01:30:52 - Scot Wingo
Okay.
01:30:52 - Peter Zaitsev
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
01:30:58 - Scot Wingo
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