Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz
From Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI by Lukas Biewald
March 31, 2026 · 44 min · Season 1 · Episode 137
About this episode
Aaron Katz discusses the evolution of ClickHouse and its impact on AI infrastructure.
"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…
People in this episode
Host: Lukas Biewald
Guest: Aaron Katz
Topics covered
- database technology
- AI infrastructure
- business growth
- open source
- SaaS
- cloud computing
Keywords
- ClickHouse
- AI
- database
- SaaS
- Yandex
- open source
- infrastructure
- business strategy
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: ClickHouse, Yandex, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Tesla, Snowflake, Datadog, Databricks, SVB
Places: Russia
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