Databases, Drive, and Diversity - Lessons from Xata's CEO Monica Sarbu

Optimize All The Things

Monica Sarbu, the CEO and founder of Xata.io, talks to us about her inspiring journey from getting into tech to building Xata - the serverless database platform for modern apps. We chat about the founding of her first company, Packetbeat, its acquisition by Elastic, and her time as a director there. We talk about mentoring, diversity, and hiring engineers that have high agency. We also cover some of the technical decisions at Xata - we even chat a bit about the Zig programming language :)

Where to find more about Monica and Xata:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicasarbu

- X - https://x.com/monicasarbu

- Xata - https://xata.io/

- pgroll - https://github.com/xataio/pgroll

- Tupu - https://www.tupu.io/

Where to find Bartek:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bwplotka/

- X - https://x.com/bwplotka

Where to find Ivan:

- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-valkov/

- X - https://x.com/ivvalkov

As always, feedback and questions are welcome! You can use this form - https://forms.gle/NmUGeqMtyP6H6mMP9

Episode breakdown:

0:00 - Episode intro

2:25 - Monica's introduction

4:00 - Monica's software engineering background

5:52 - Founding her first company Packetbeat

15:30 - Elastic acquisition and being a director there

25:34 - The role of managers

28:38 - Founding Tupu and diversity in tech

38:44 - The founding story of Xata

44:35 - Open source, serverless, and Zig vs Go

51:17 - Hiring high-agency engineers

1:00:37 - Where to find out more