Dev Propulsion Labs

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

Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en

Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/

Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder and COO of TrueFoundry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to sell enterprise AI infrastructure when nobody trusts you yet, how TrueFoundry evolved from an ML deployment platform inspired by Meta's FB Learner into a full enterprise AI gateway, and why every Fortune 1000 company now can't avoid AI. He shares why trust is the only exchange currency in enterprise sales, how thought leadership and education sessions replaced cold outreach, and why voice agents are the next big niche to bet on.
Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians.
https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.
https://evilmartians.com/
Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable.
https://www.trychroma.com

Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcast
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acquisition closed in 30 days with 90 lawyers. He explains why Neon skipped sharding, how Replit's agents stress-tested their infrastructure overnight, and why the current moment is a gold rush for builders who stay in the loop.
Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians.
https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.
https://evilmartians.com/
Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable.
https://www.trychroma.com
00:00 Intro
00:34 Who is Stas Kelvich?
01:42 From quantum physics to software engineering
05:10 How Stas became a key Postgres contributor
06:08 Early career: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Postgres
06:57 Why databases as a field keep pulling him in
09:47 The early days of Neon and the co-founder origin story
13:42 Key bets: building the cloud, separating storage and compute
16:38 Enterprise vs. product-led growth strategy
18:54 Why Neon didn't solve sharding — and why that was right
23:03 Designing for the agent era without planning for it
25:44 How Replit's agents stress-tested Neon's infrastructure
26:42 Agent experience and fraud considerations
32:00 Can you tell if a database was created by an agent?
33:06 The $1B Databricks acquisition story
38:59 Closing the deal in 30 days with 90 lawyers
40:27 Why Neon kept its brand post-acquisition
43:24 Life inside Databricks one year later
47:41 Market trends for technical founders in 2026
51:09 Using AI in day-to-day engineering work
54:15 What makes Stas feel great
54:49 Could AI accelerate theoretical physics research?
58:06 How to get started with Neon

In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill shares how CodeRabbit went viral in Japan before anywhere else, why AI code generation makes code review more important not less, and what it takes to run PLG and enterprise sales at the same time. He breaks down how open source became their best marketing channel, why the old startup playbooks don't work anymore, and why the next Amazon is already being founded right now.
Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians.
https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.
https://evilmartians.com/

David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast
David Gomes, product engineer at Cursor, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why the world's best engineers are fully adopting AI while half of developers haven't started, why AI coding is a learnable skill that takes practice, and how he built a 50-person engineering team in Portugal from scratch. He shares what it was like going through Neon's $1B Databricks acquisition, why diverse teams outperform business-obsessed ones, and why his next company will be his own.
Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians.
https://x.com/vmelnikova_en
Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups.
https://evilmartians.com/
Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable.
https://www.trychroma.com
00:00 Introduction and guest welcome
01:44 Current state of AI-assisted coding and market adoption
03:33 Developer resistance to change: senior vs junior engineers
05:19 World's best engineers fully adopting AI coding
07:36 Having personalized workflows
08:19 Different engineering styles inside Cursor
10:42 AI coding as a learnable skill requiring practice
14:12 Future of agent coding and AI SREs
15:35 Growing up in Europe vs living in America
19:27 David's career path: competitive programming to SF
26:17 Building a 50-person engineering team in Portugal
29:50 Working at Neon and the $1B Databricks acquisition
32:50 Why developer tools experience is universal
39:35 Having a diverse team of engineers
42:05 Leveraging your coworkers' strengths
44:00 David's blog and writing philosophy
46:00 The engineer-manager pendulum and startup ambitions
47:23 Customer love as the only metric that matters
48:34 Try Cursor with Neon and Databricks MCP servers