Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz
Podcast: Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AIPublished On: Tue Mar 31 2026
Description: "Companies designing for agents, not humans, are going to get a lot of lift."ClickHouse started as an internal tool at Yandex. Today it's the database Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Tesla all run on.In this episode, CEO Aaron Katz joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he turned an open source project into a $15B company, why he acquired LangFuse knowing it could cost him customers, and what he's actually building for the agent era.Snowflake, Datadog and Databricks all come up. He doesn't shy away.Connect with us here:Aaron Katz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-katz-5762094ClickHouse: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clickhouseinc/Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/00:00 Trailer00:57 The Origin Story: From Yandex to ClickHouse Inc.04:43 Building ClickHouse Cloud & Raising $300M10:36 Growing Up Around Xerox PARC12:51 Salesforce, Mark Benioff & the Dot-Com Bust15:32 Cloud Skeptics vs. AI Skeptics | History Repeating18:05 Building a Modern Go-To-Market Playbook21:57 The SaaS Crash, Agents & the Future of Infrastructure27:09 The Datadog Love-Hate Story35:21 Hardest Moments: Russia, SVB & Sleepless Nights43:16 Outro
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