E168: One (Multi-Model) Database to Rule Them All - SurrealDB

Open Source Startup Podcast

Tobie Morgan Hitchcock is the Co-Founder & CEO of SurrealDB, the next generation serverless cloud database for modern applications. Their open source database, also called surrealdb, has 30K stars on GitHub.

SurrealDB has raised $26M from investors including FirstMark and Georgian.

In this episode, we dig into:

• Taking a broad vs. niche approach to building a new database

• How coming from a non-traditional DB background helped Tobie take a new, first principles approach

• How graph databases best reflect how humans think

• The importance of design for infra products

• How enterprises vs. SMBs / individual users view their value

• How open source helped them develop trust with large companies

• Planning out their cloud offering