Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz

Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz

Author: Lukas Biewald March 31, 2026 Duration: 43:31

"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-5762094

ClickHouse: 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 Trailer

00:57 The Origin Story: From Yandex to ClickHouse Inc.

04:43 Building ClickHouse Cloud & Raising $300M

10:36 Growing Up Around Xerox PARC

12:51 Salesforce, Mark Benioff & the Dot-Com Bust

15:32 Cloud Skeptics vs. AI Skeptics | History Repeating

18:05 Building a Modern Go-To-Market Playbook

21:57 The SaaS Crash, Agents & the Future of Infrastructure

27:09 The Datadog Love-Hate Story

35:21 Hardest Moments: Russia, SVB & Sleepless Nights

43:16 Outro


Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
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