Paul Copplestone
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Episodes
Notes
Y Combinator · What Happens When Everyone Can Build Software
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How Do You Design Software That AI Agents Want to Use?
Paul Copplestone says you design software for AI agents by putting the fix inside the error. A generic developer-tool error, the old 500 that only says something is wrong, leaves a person to go search. An agent needs the message to say how to fix the error, or which docs to read, so the agent can remedy itself and one-shot the task.
Supabase got there by picking a use case and looping on its own error messages. He describes two stages to winning the agents. The first is being picked by the model. The second is the moment the agent gets stuck: give it the tools to fix the problem so it does not switch to something else. Agents are smart enough now to figure a lot out, and the product still h
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Why Build Software for Personal AI Agents?
Paul Copplestone is building Supabase for personal agents because the humans using it will soon not be the ones interacting with the product. He is very bullish after a week of his EA being away, the week he learned exactly what personal agents can do, and he is obsessed with building for them. The company is code first, built for humans who do code first, and the work is actually for the agents.
He builds by talking to it. He sits on a phone call with it all the time, chatting and asking it to make changes. His heuristic for building and dogfooding correctly is that he does not look at the code. He does not allow himself to check the architecture, except when he wants to check that it is a
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What Is the Stripe Model for Databases?
Paul Copplestone says the Stripe model for a database company is to get people on day one and then scale with the fastest growing companies in the world. Doing it for a generation produces a generational business. It is basically the best business model on earth if you can get it.
He might get the figure wrong, but something like 40% of AWS revenue comes from startups that started on them and then scaled up. Startups that begin on a provider and later grow are the category he wants. Convincing people to migrate from one database provider to another is near impossible, so the aim is to be there on day one, make sure they have a great time, and make sure they do not want to leave.
Day one is
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What Did a Brazilian Taxi Driver Build From His Phone?
Paul Copplestone says a taxi driver from Brazil built an entire taxi app from his phone, a little mini Uber for his local market.
After a conference, the driver came up to him. He does not know why the driver built the app. The man is a taxi driver himself. The driver could build it, and he was extremely grateful he could do it. The driver was like 50 years old and had the energy of a teenager while building.
He thinks there is a lot of uncertainty around what the future of work will look like. Among builders there is excitement about the future. People who are uncertain are discovering a skill set and opportunities. Previously they were just blue collar workers.
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Why Are Non-engineers Building Software in 2026?
Paul Copplestone says builders are coming online in 2026, including people without a software engineering background, because the models are getting so good at building. Signups are accelerating, and activation and conversion are rising at the same time.
Faster signups usually bring a decline in activation and conversion. In 2026 signups, activation, and conversion are all going up and to the right. Software engineers still make up a huge portion of users, but the builder segment is growing fast.
Early investors said growth would tap out at a revenue level and he would have to move into another segment of the market. There appears to be no ceiling so far, and he cannot see where it stops.
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How Fast Did Supabase Grow in a Year?
Paul Copplestone puts Supabase at 13 million signups, up from around 3 million 12 months earlier, with databases under management approaching 50 million versus 8 million a year ago. More than a million databases are created every week. He calls the inflection in the numbers a huge shift toward agents. The question he answers puts about 70% of the new activity on agents.
Signups moved from around 3 million to 13 million. Managed databases moved from 8 million to approaching 50 million over the same stretch, while creation runs at over a million databases a week. The new activity is mostly agents, and the inflection in the numbers is that shift toward agents.
More builders are coming online