SQL, every mention
132 scenes across 20 shows · ← back to SQL
tap a year for its mentions
the MAD Podcast 112
Latent Space 24
the a16z Podcast 17
Lenny's Podcast 15
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 10
No Priors 7
20VC 5
Top Founders 412 more shows
every year every show the MAD Podcast 112 Latent Space 24 the a16z Podcast 17 Lenny's Podcast 15 the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 10 No Priors 7 20VC 5 Top Founders 4 
In Depth 3 
Another Podcast 3 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 3 
Acquired 2 
Cheeky Pint 2 
American Optimist 2 
the Green Blueprint 2 
Innovators & Investors 1 
Startups For the Rest of Us 1 
We Live to Build 1 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 1 
Sourcery 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: passages where SQL comes up on the MAD Podcast, Latent Space, the a16z Podcast, Lenny's Podcast, the Y Combinator Startup Podcast
How AI Changes the Economics of Innovation
- ▶ 37:20 Martin Casado So you know the, or SQL.
AI deployment
- ▶ 6:07 Toni Cowan-Brown And going back to the concept of that phrase, like saying we're an AI-enabled company, like, it was interesting thinking back of just, like, we didn't used to say we're an electricity-enabled company or an SQL-enabled country, uh, company,…
Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA · Y Combinator
- ▶ 10:56 Jensen Huang You know, it could be SQL, some domain specific language, some algorithm.
Software in the Age of Agents | The a16z Show
- ▶ 47:13 Steven Sinofsky Like nobody wants to, to just be put in a corner and said, your job is to just store the, this SQL format for expense reports and do nothing more.
Box CEO on AI Agents & Why Enterprise Can't Keep Up | a16z
- ▶ 28:06 Steven Sinofsky But, of all the points that Martine made about, about, um, about the, the LLM stochastic model, which is, you're not gonna be able to figure out, it's not like a record in a SQL table that you could just apply ACLs to.
⚡️ How to turn Documents into Knowledge: Graphs in Modern AI — Emil Eifrem, CEO Neo4J
- ▶ 19:58 Emil Eifrem Which is the first sibling language to, to SQL.
⚡️Monty: the ultrafast Python interpreter by Agents for Agents — Samuel Colvin, Pydantic
- ▶ 1:50 Samuel Colvin We do a bit of both in particular because Logfire lets you write arbitrary SQL to query your data. 4 times in the scene
Atlassian CEO on the SaaS Apocalypse, AI Agents & What Comes Next
- ▶ 1:16 Alex Rampell The airlines had been around for a long time, and then it put them in a, in an early SQL database.
Snowflake vs Databricks: The AI Data War | CEO of $SNOW · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- ▶ 19:20 Sridhar Ramaswamy And maybe wrote a SQL query or two, to actually being really good and proficient with coding agents in order to deploy actual problem, you know, solutions to problems for our customers.
Satya Nadella describes how lessons from Microsoft’s history apply to today’s boom
- ▶ 5:40 Satya Nadella He would have loved it if everything was a SQL database. 2 times in the scene
No Priors Ep. 139 | With Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy
Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code | Kevin Rose and Anish Acharya
- ▶ 1:14:02 Kevin Rose We don't need to teach people SQL or, or no one needs to learn these things in school.
The Future of AI Video: How Fal.ai is Making AI Video Faster & Easier
- ▶ 5:39 Burkay Gur And we got a lot of inspiration from Snowflake's success with SQL.
⚡️The Future of Notebooks - with Akshay Agrawal of Marimo
- ▶ 1:52 Akshay Agrawal Uh, you can, they have SQL built in, and you can connect to your own databases or data lakes.
Cline: The Collaborative AI Coder
- ▶ 1:05:59 unnamed speaker And the agent can kind of reason in this almost like SQL like language working with this knowledge graph to do these kinds of global operations.
Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search · Y Combinator
- ▶ 6:41 Aravind Srinivas Uh, one tool that we were building was Natural Language to SQL, which we actually thought about it as a search tool, searching over relational databases. 2 times in the scene
Satya Nadella: Microsoft's AI Bets, Hyperscaling, Quantum Computing Breakthroughs · Y Combinator
- ▶ 4:25 Satya Nadella One of the questions is, is the model like, uh, SQL? 5 times in the scene
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 2:09:20 David Rosenthal Snowflake uses Claude to answer key business questions with just English instead of writing SQL.
Who's Coding Now? - AI and the Future of Software Development
- ▶ 39:24 Guido Appenzeller For, say, a database of a sickle, right, in the early database of the, the transaction databases, where how does the database under the sickle query work? 2 times in the scene
Smart Seed Investing With Illuminate Ventures Founder and Managing Partner Cindy Padnos
- ▶ 10:27 Cindy Padnos So we had, for example, Mike Stonebreaker who had invented SQL.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 31:20 Ben Gilbert Or at least efficient for the programmer, because you're not switching over to write SQL queries in the middle of your program.
Snowflake CEO on Winning the AI Arms Race
- ▶ 48:43 Sridhar Ramaswamy There's always been pain associated with getting data out to business users, especially new data, different kinds of insights very quickly, because they live in, in tables, and people have to write this language called SQL or bits of… 3 times in the scene
George Bonaci, VP of Growth @Ramp: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever |E1264 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 43:35 George Bonaci They need to like learn SQL.
Agent Engineering with Pydantic + Graphs — with Samuel Colvin, CEO of Pydantic Logfire
- ▶ 34:02 Samuel Colvin One of the reasons we've built Logfire the way we have, and we allow you to write SQL directly against your data, and we're trying to build the, like, powerful fundamentals of observability is precisely because we know we don't know the… 4 times in the scene
Inside Braze’s blitz to $500M in CARR | Building broad, going global, and outfoxing the competition
- ▶ 37:52 Bill Magnuson It wasn't this batch process where you run a SQL query and you get a bunch of people out of it and you write them down 2 times in the scene
Trino, Iceberg and the Battle for the Lakehouse | Justin Borgman, CEO, Starburst
- ▶ 55:38 Matt Turck We've, we've talked a lot about SQL search and structured or semi-structured data.
Understanding Data Engineering in 2025 | Ben Rogojan, Seattle Data Guy
- ▶ 0:52 Ben Rogojan (Seattle Data Guy) SQL isn't going anywhere. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:59 Ben Rogojan (Seattle Data Guy) I think that that's just the, the way it is, uh, in terms of skill sets, uh, it's usually things like SQL, Python, or some programming language.
- ▶ 17:54 Matt Turck And so you mentioned SQL, um, so how proficient do you need to be at SQL? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 51:39 Ben Rogojan (Seattle Data Guy) The next one I said, I, I, I said SQL isn't going anywhere, and I kind of said that for more than one reason. 2 times in the scene
OpenAI o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point)
- ▶ 3:46 Ben Hillock Um, I think specifically it seems to like confuse like quick, uh, click, click house, uh, SQL, um, syntax less, but these are very hard things to like articulate to people in an example.
Dan Gill, CPO @Carvana: The Most Wild Story in Public Markets | E1243 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dataiku's Secret to Scaling AI in Global Enterprises | Florian Douetteau, CEO, Dataiku
- ▶ 15:38 Florian Douetteau And indeed, early adopters of big data technologies were clear that they could not build everything on top of SQL queries in Hadoop.
Why Compound AI + Open Source will beat Closed AI — with Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI
Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO)
- ▶ 22:44 Amjad Masad So in this case, it's, it's actually doing a SQL queries.
Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll
- ▶ 5:31 Lenny Rachitsky It's powerful notebook UI lets you analyze data in SQL, Python, or no code in any combination and work together with live multiplayer and version control.
Replit CEO Builds an App with 100% AI in 20 Min: Future of Coding?
- ▶ 31:14 Amjad Masad So here we are, I think, in like, you know, uh, you know, 15, 20 minutes, we were able to build an application, we deployed it, we did a data migration, we moved it to SQL, we pushed it to GitHub, and we're on our way.
Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of SurrealDB
- ▶ 15:10 Tobie Morgan Hitchcock Um, I think the interesting thing that people find when they come to CyrilDB, because you have graph databases out there, and you have document databases, and you have time series databases, um, or just to add to that, you can also query… 2 times in the scene
Turbocharging Postgres for Time Series & Vectors — Timescale CTO Mike Freedman | Data Driven NYC
- ▶ 8:28 Mike Freedman But because it's in a database, you could continue to do rich filtering in SQL, on your metadata, on time, on geospatial information, or based on tenant permissions, all which is normally very difficult in vector space.
The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)
- ▶ 27:22 Camille Fournier They're like, we build amazing things in PHP and, you know, relatively simple SQL and so much of tech is over engineering things and, you know, and, and I think it, I, I don't, I don't totally disagree.
No Priors Ep. 73 | With Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu
Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash)
- ▶ 29:45 Jessica Lachs Uh, I completely self-taught, uh, in terms of SQL and Python.
- ▶ 1:03:37 Jessica Lachs We'll help teach you SQL. 2 times in the scene
State of the Art: Training 70B LLMs on 10,000 H100 clusters
- ▶ 1:23:49 unnamed speaker Um, one thing I do spend a lot of time thinking about is, um, you know, for the stuff that doesn't fit in a SQL table, 4 times in the scene
How To Hire AI Engineers (ft. James Brady and Adam Wiggins of Elicit)
- ▶ 44:21 James Brady But then by the time you're down into your SQL queries, for example, as long as you've done your input validation, things are pretty well defined, and that, as we said before, is not really the case.
Why not asking for what you want is holding you back | Kenneth Berger (exec coach, first PM @Slack)
- ▶ 34:46 Kenneth Berger The SQL database or whatever.
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek)
- ▶ 34:03 Vikrama Dhiman The very first thing that I learned in my career was SQL and Oracle.
The $9B Startup Going After Snowflake and Databricks | Renen Hallak, CEO of VAST Data
- ▶ 15:55 Renen Hallak You can write a parquet object and then query it using SQL natively off of our platform without needing any higher layers on top.
Is AI a platform shift or a paradigm shift? With Benedict Evans
- ▶ 3:52 Benedict Evans and so you could go back and talk about, like, SQL, and say, like, imagine explaining SQL to a supermarket in the late seventies, it would not be obvious why this was useful, or what the, what you're going to be able to do with this stuff,… 2 times in the scene
The "Normsky" architecture for AI coding agents — with Beyang Liu + Steve Yegge of SourceGraph
- ▶ 45:07 Steve Yegge I mean, seriously, do you guys ever write SQL queries now without using a model of some sort?
The ultimate guide to product operations | Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles
- ▶ 20:43 Lenny Rachitsky I imagine PMs listening to you saying, I don't have to learn MongoDB and SQL anymore would think like, that's actually, no, I think that's good. 2 times in the scene
Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor)
- ▶ 3:41 Lenny Rachitsky It's powerful notebook UI lets you analyze data in SQL, Python, or no code in any combination and work together with live multiplayer and version control.
Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, TripAdvisor)
- ▶ 8:11 Maggie Crowley Maybe they'll even write a SQL query, get a dashboard going, figure out what the number is today.
Powering your Copilot for Data - with Artem Keydunov from Cube.dev
- ▶ 7:22 Artem Keydunov So that was the first step, and that's where, you know, like it didn't really work well, because we all this limitation of us not having foundational technologies, but then from the multi-dimensional query we wanted to go to SQL, and… 3 times in the scene
What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom)
- ▶ 3:20 Lenny Rachitsky It's powerful notebook UI lets you analyze data in SQL, Python, or no code in any combination and work together with live multiplayer and version control.
How to leverage intuition, customer support, and raw effort | Colin Zima (Omni & Looker)
- ▶ 28:59 Colin Zima And it's like you have to get great at teaching people, you know, SQL and the product and the culture of the company and sort of like how we show up in front of customers and things like that.
Christian Kleinerman: Do OpenAI and Anthropic Have a Sustaining Moat? Who Wins the AI Wars? | E1063 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 12:25 Christian Kleinerman Frankly, it's just for a few people, like writing SQL statements is not something that most people in a company do, and that was the role of that technology to do, to do that translation, but it still requires some mapping and curation,…
How We Scaled Founderpath to Process 200 Million Rows of Financial Data Per Day
- ▶ 2:06 Charlie Martin So we'll talk about the three core vitals of computers, and then talk about perf testing application code, and making sure that you have all of your indices in SQL.
The 25 problems you don't need to solve
- ▶ 11:30 Derek Steer The other problem was, it turned out that even though these things were driving traffic, it was kind of a drop in the bucket, because we had this sequel tutorial that, you know, now does hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month.
M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs)
- ▶ 21:27 Julia Schottenstein We, we have a SQL templating tool at our company. 2 times in the scene
The Single Platform for Everyday AI - Fireside Chat with Florian Douetteau (Dataiku) & Matt Turck
- ▶ 11:37 Florian Douetteau But of course, if you are more like kind of like a coding person, if you want to take things into control, if you want to use or integrate your own specific algorithm or piece of code, I'll do some, uh, whatever, a sequel for…
Will poor data hold back the potential of AI on the grid?
- ▶ 50:22 Titian Palazzi But now, I don't know if any of you who are not coders have tried, but it's crazy how easily you can transfer natural language to code, especially like SQL. 2 times in the scene
No Priors Ep. 23 | With Snowflake's CEO Frank Slootman
- ▶ 25:32 Frank Slootman So it's all relative, you know, in the eighties we had SQL, which was back then, you know, also positioned as something that mere mortals could use to query data. 2 times in the scene
Why Vector Databases Are Exploding: Chroma Co-Founder Jeff Huber on Building AI-Native Infra
- ▶ 29:13 Jeff Huber Obviously, the, the classical way of doing queries and databases is SQL. 3 times in the scene
AI and the Future of Knowledge Work with Hebbia’s CEO George Sivulka
- ▶ 7:11 George Sivulka Where Excel took a technology, the SQL database, uh, and allowed just normal humans to wrangle it in an application and, you know, create value. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:05 George Sivulka Uh, on the input side, just like there's entire companies, industries even, built around getting data into a SQL database, um, we've done a lot of work on integrations, on parsing documents, on actually creating multiple types of indexes…
Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
- ▶ 8:26 Barry McArdle And it wrote me a SQL query that did that, or you can say refactor this Python code to be a function and it will do that for you.
- ▶ 22:42 Barry McArdle We, again, we have thousands of people already writing SQL and writing Python and doing data work and hex every day.
- ▶ 27:39 Barry McArdle One is we do have a pretty great data advantage, you know, already having hundreds of customers, thousands of users writing millions of lines worth of SQL and Python.
No Priors Ep. 7 | With Stanford Professor Dr. Percy Liang
- ▶ 14:27 Dr. Percy Liang And so one concrete application of this that I worked on for a while is mapping natural language questions into essentially SQL queries, which obviously has many different applications as well. 2 times in the scene
CRO Confidential: Guild Education SVP, Go To Market Strategy, Operations & Enablement Cherishma Shah
- ▶ 21:18 Cherishma Shah SQL queries, right?
The Composable CDP & The CX Hub | ActionIQ Founder & CEO, Tasso Argyros
- ▶ 1:57 Tasso Argyros The way this problem is solved in most enterprises is that you deploy armies of analysts, and they get tickets and requests, and they write SQL, right?
She built secret software to add $4m in deal volume to her brokerage last year
- ▶ 5:36 Nathan Latka And the next person needs to start from scratch because they have, you know, they want to build on Python instead of SQL or whatever, right?
ChatGPT and the Imagenet Moment
- ▶ 3:23 Benedict Evans And the way that I described this, in fact, I described it to, to Tesco was, like, imagine it's 1980, and I'm explaining SQL to you, and I say, so this is going to make it really easy to do arbitrary queries on your data, and they would…
- ▶ 4:30 Benedict Evans And meanwhile, unlike SQL, however, you have this continued primary research, and this continued primary research has produced this new thing,
Being Mario Was the Only Way We Survived Level One
- ▶ 45:53 Bryan Clayton And so, like, just having that triple R for Thursday holds me accountable to, to, to run the SQL queries and to understand, and to really dig into the data and understand, okay, actually this, this, this experiment that we're running is…
Modern Data Orchestration | Astronomer Co-Founders Pete DeJoy & Viraj Parekh
- ▶ 5:02 Viraj Parekh Um, what that really looks like for them is productionizing SQL queries and making sure new data is inside the warehouse. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:12 Pete DeJoy So I can see both my tasks, i.e. those SQL queries and Python functions I just ran, predict user trends, and I can introspect the tables that they're actually producing in my snowflake instance under the hood.
Automated Data Discovery | Select Star's Shinji Kim
- ▶ 4:06 Shinji Kim A lot of technical users and data analysts and engineers also ending up spending a lot of time, um, just searching through different SQL queries and trying to find, like, how this table was created, for example.
Flooring engineers builds tool for himself, breaks $11k MRR as 1 person team
Building Real-Time Data Pipelines | Estuary's Johnny Graettinger
- ▶ 6:13 Johnny Graettinger I'm just gonna uppercase every other one, ah, through SQL. 2 times in the scene
The Next Layer of the Modern Data Stack | dbt's Tristan Handy
- ▶ 23:58 Tristan Handy I get the impression that, that dbt is pushing the idea of, of SQL first when you think about how you write your data transformations, which, which feels at odds with trying to build abstraction layers on top of SQL, because with dbt,… 4 times in the scene
20VC: Scaling to $2BN AUM in 3 years, Fundraising Lessons and Tactics from 2,500 LP Meetings & What it Takes to Build a Firm That Stands the Test of Time with Harley Miller, Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Left Lane Capital
- ▶ 12:19 Harley Miller Every single person that works with us at Left Land on the investment team is trained on how to use SQL, how to use Alteryx.
How the Renaissance Sparked an Entrepreneurial Explosion with Jeannette zu Fürstenberg · Joe Lonsdale
- ▶ 16:29 Jeannette zu Fürstenberg And we have one company that basically, um, does, does, um, build a data infrastructure product, but they basically have an interface that allows for SQL and low code to run in parallel. 2 times in the scene
Fireside Chat: Emil Eifrem (Co-Founder & CEO, Neo4j) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
- ▶ 13:20 Matt Turck Uh, and, uh, I'm just curious how that compares to SQL, which is really the language that sort of everybody knows for databases. 10 times in the scene
Fireside Chat: Mark Grover (Co-Founder & CEO, Stemma) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
- ▶ 3:33 Mark Grover They may have skills like writing, being able to write a SQL query or interpret a dashboard that are generic, but they don't have the organizational context.
Episode 563 | The Struggle, Calls to Action, Selling Above $1M ARR, and More Listener Questions
- ▶ 18:40 Rob Walling Python, pandas, web scraping, database, SQL, machine learning APIs, all applied to baseball statistics.
Fireside Chat: Abe Gong (Founder & CEO, Superconductive) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Fireside Chat: Wes McKinney (Founder & CEO, Ursa Computing) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
- ▶ 4:19 Wes McKinney Like it's more, you can step outside the bounds of what you could do in the SQL, uh, query language.
Fireside Chat: Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), Tristan Handy (dbt) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
- ▶ 1:00:40 Tristan Handy Going to be kind of a singularity type event when like people start doing this thing more and there are going to be emails sent to large groups of people accidentally because somebody wrote a SQL query wrong.
Fireside Chat: Ashley Kramer (CMO & CPO, Sisense) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
- ▶ 7:45 Ashley Kramer and we write the SQL queries and give you back the visualizations. 2 times in the scene
Fireside Chat: George Fraser (Founder & CEO, Fivetran) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
- ▶ 24:48 George Fraser So you can build your own data warehouse and you can hire a bunch of analysts who write SQL queries and then, uh, use a tool like Tableau or Looker to build dashboards that you present internally. 2 times in the scene
Fireside Chat: Nate Stewart (CPO & BOD at Cockroach Labs) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
- ▶ 10:50 Nate Stewart Eventually SQL came along, which was a, a really not going to say an intuitive, but a very powerful way to interact with the database and from the seventies to say the, you know, the web two point O era, the way these databases worked was… 4 times in the scene
How to Answer Data Questions Without Being Miserable // Ahmed Elsamadisi, Narrator (Data Driven NYC)
- ▶ 8:34 Ahmed Elsamadisi And the query, a little bit complicated unless you know SQL, but it's actually really simple. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Why Passion Is Overrated When It Comes To Starting Companies, Why VC Is Overrated As A Financing Mechanism & Why You Should Never Sell Your Company with Waseem Daher, Founder & CEO @ Pilot
- ▶ 24:41 Wasim Daher So if they say, oh, I need a front end engineer who knows react and knows how to use Git, but also like, can you SQL or whatever?
What's Next for Open-Source Time Series Data? // Paul Dix, Influx Data (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
- ▶ 11:05 Paul Dix Uh, so we created, uh, for the database, we created a query language, um, which, uh, looks kind of like SQL. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:25 Paul Dix so I, there were a couple of, like, we could have said, like, we'll just go with SQL, because that's a language that exists. 4 times in the scene
Fireside Chat: Solmaz Shahalizadeh, VP of Data Science & Engineering at Shopify (Data Driven NYC)
- ▶ 10:22 Solmaz Shahalizadeh Like, we, we have this, uh, we use mode analytics for, like, SQL.
Lessons from Gorgias: How to Close your First 1000 Customers Based Solely on Data
- ▶ 24:58 Romain Lapeyre So as much as possible, try to build dashboards, learning SQL, 2 times in the scene
The Case for Hiring More Analysts // Benn Stancil, Mode (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
- ▶ 18:24 Benn Stancil Um, and so, I think, yeah, at the end of the day, they're gonna need SQL skills, they're gonna, they might need Python or R skills, they'll need something like Excel, um, but those things are, are learnable, whereas I think, like, the way…
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