In this conversation from Startup School Paris, Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone explains how a frustrating firebase migration led to an open-source side project that became one of the fastest-growing dev tool companies in the world.
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Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
00:56 — Paul’s Origin Story
02:13 — Two Failed Startups First
04:12 — Why Postgres? Why Open Source?
07:11 — The Pivot That Actually Worked
08:03 — Targeting YC Startups from Day One
09:45 — Fully Open Source — The Risky Choice
12:04 — Winning Developer Trust
13:33 — Time to Value: 8 Minutes → 5 Seconds
15:45 — The AI Second Life Begins
17:48 — Supabase for Platforms
19:09 — Everything Going Up Into the Right
20:44 — When Agents Became the Users
22:26 — Advice for Founders Building Dev Tools Today
23:47 — Why Open Source Won the LLM Era
25:32 — $500M Round, $10B Valuation
26:01 — What Keeps a Founder Grounded
28:31 — 360 People, 60 Countries, Zero Offices
30:14 — Outro
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