“This year, I just saw that actually no one's coming to the dashboard. Like no one visits dashboards anymore. So how are agents going to build? … I just kind of put out a product memo to the team that said it has to be code first. … If it exists on the dashboard, it basically has to work in lockstep in code, infrastructure as code, essentially.”
Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Context
Paul was walking through the eras of his company: a dashboard product, then an API, then the agent era. This is how he describes rebuilding around code-first tools once the humans clicking through dashboards were replaced by agents.
Transcript
I think like those shifts happened. So the first one, actually, yeah, I think you were saying like, why would a database company exist when we came into YC? It seemed
like such a contrarian idea at the time, actually.
…AI, I think we talked about this on the other podcast. The AI API shift was because we had someone integrating with us and they were like, oh, we want to launch lots of databases. We need an API to do all of this. And that was like 2021, maybe. And it turns out that was exactly the right move for 2024 when the likes of Bolt and Lovable and all of these people started building on top of us. Then this year, I just saw that actually no one's coming to the dashboard. Like no one visits dashboards anymore. So how are agents going to build? In this one, I just kind of put out a product memo to the team that said it has to be code first, get native. Superbase just has to shift to code first. So if it exists on the dashboard, it basically has to work in lockstep in code, infrastructure as code, essentially. And we re-architected a lot of the CLI and everything to work in sandboxes in code.
Were you guys maybe too far back, but were you ever inspired by PaaS, another white company?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. PaaS and Firebase, I liked both of those companies. And it's funny these waves, right? Because they did the back end and Firebase acquired by Google, PaaS by Meta. But in some ways, I think they like blazed the trail for us to come along and actually have a legitimate database…
Yeah, PaaS has sort of forgotten that. But it was like actually a really well-built product. They launched just when I was building iPhone apps for the first time. And it was like quite nice to switch to a nice RESTful API that I was trying to deal with.
More from Y Combinator Startup Podcast
