Dev Propulsion Labs
Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San Francisco with founders behind companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale to talk about what actually makes developer-focused businesses work.Dev Propulsion Labs is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Enjoyed by 45K+ listeners.
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Matt Biilmann of Netlify: why agent experience is the new developer experience | Evil Martians
<p>Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify (https://www.netlify.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why agent experience (AX) is replacing developer experience in developer tools. He also shares how Netlify went from a bootstrapped two-person team to the deployment platform behind Bolt, Lovable, and ChatGPT-generated sites. </p><p></p><p>Matt is excited by agentic coding and explains the addressable market for Netlify just jumped from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion people. He shares the four pillars of agent experience (access, context, tools, and orchestration), why leading with developer experience beat leading with performance...
Lingo.dev co-founder Max Prilutskiy: AI localization, AX, and having a lean team | Evil Martians
<p>Max Prilutskiy, CEO and co-founder of Lingo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why localization is still far from a solved problem in the age of AI, how a six-person team ships 56 pull requests a week, and what agent experience actually means for developer tools in 2026. </p><p></p><p>He also shares his journey from a hackathon with zero ideas to Y Combinator, how 30 cold exploration calls taught him more about messaging than any sales book, and why he rebuilt the entire Lingo.dev platform from scratch in December and January. Plus, Max gives a...
Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast
<p>Amir Rustamzadeh, partner at Firestreak Ventures, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to spot a force-of-nature founder before anyone else does, why most developer tool ideas are no longer venture scale, and what the current state of VC really looks like for early-stage founders. He also shares his journey from interning on NASA's Curiosity Rover at Jet Propulsion Labs to sleeping in his car at SpaceX, to coining the developer experience role at Cypress, to becoming a hands-on investor backing companies like Lovable, Daytona, and Perplexity. Plus, Amir gives a rare, sober take on inflated seed...
Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast
<p>Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder and COO of TrueFoundry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to sell enterprise AI infrastructure when nobody trusts you yet, how TrueFoundry evolved from an ML deployment platform inspired by Meta's FB Learner into a full enterprise AI gateway, and why every Fortune 1000 company now can't avoid AI. He shares why trust is the only exchange currency in enterprise sales, how thought leadership and education sessions replaced cold outreach, and why voice agents are the next big niche to bet on.</p><p>Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer...
Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast
<p>Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcast</p><p>In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acquisition closed in 30 days with 90 lawyers. He explains why Neon skipped sharding, how Replit's agents stress-tested their infrastructure overnight, and why the current moment is a gold rush for builders who...
CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast
<p>In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill shares how CodeRabbit went viral in Japan before anywhere else, why AI code generation makes code review more important not less, and what it takes to run PLG and enterprise sales at the same time. He breaks down how open source became their best marketing channel, why the old startup playbooks don't work anymore, and why the next Amazon is already being founded right now.</p><p>Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works...
David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast
<p>David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast</p><p>David Gomes, product engineer at Cursor, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why the world's best engineers are fully adopting AI while half of developers haven't started, why AI coding is a learnable skill that takes practice, and how he built a 50-person engineering team in Portugal from scratch. He shares what it was like going through Neon's $1B Databricks acquisition, why diverse teams outperform business-obsessed ones, and why his next company will be his own.</p><p>Victoria Melnikova...
Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast
<p>Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast</p><p>Monica Sarbu, founder and CEO of Xata, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how Xata pivoted from an Airtable-style builder tool to a modern Postgres platform focused on database branching and developer velocity. She shares why they rebuilt the platform from scratch, how asking "what's your biggest problem?" instead of "what's your problem with Postgres?" changed everything, and why hiring a gender-diverse team with complementary skills leads to better products.</p><p>Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert...
Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev: intent signals and devtool GTM | Evil Martians podcast
<p>Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why go-to-market is the hardest unsolved problem in developer tools, how companies can have millions of open-source users and still not know who their customers are, and why timing beats volume when selling to developers. He shares how three months of nonstop customer conversations shaped Reo.dev, why their first product was a Google Sheet, and how intent signals turned a 2% response rate into 26%.</p><p>Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs...
David Cramer, founder of Sentry: building for the Fortune 500,000 | Evil Martians podcast
<p>David Cramer, founder of Sentry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built a developer tool used by 4 million+ developers without partnerships or enterprise sales — purely through bottom-up adoption and mass-market pricing. He explains why 20-year-olds should stop starting companies and go learn from other people's mistakes first, how he delegated both CEO and CTO roles while keeping immense influence without a title, and why Sentry builds for the Fortune 500,000 instead of the Fortune 500.</p><p>Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She wo...
