Monica Sarbu, the CEO and founder of Xata.io, talks to us about her inspiring journey from getting into tech to building Xata - the serverless database platform for modern apps. We chat about the founding of her first company, Packetbeat, its acquisition by Elastic, and her time as a director there. We talk about mentoring, diversity, and hiring engineers that have high agency. We also cover some of the technical decisions at Xata - we even chat a bit about the Zig programming language :) Where to find more about Monica and Xata: - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicasarbu - X - https://x.com/monicasarbu - Xata - https://xata.io/ - pgroll - https://github.com/xataio/pgroll - Tupu - https://www.tupu.io/ Where to find Bartek: - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bwplotka/ - X - https://x.com/bwplotka Where to find Ivan: - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-valkov/ - X - https://x.com/ivvalkov As always, feedback and questions are welcome! You can use this form - https://forms.gle/NmUGeqMtyP6H6mMP9 Episode breakdown: 0:00 - Episode intro 2:25 - Monica's introduction 4:00 - Monica's software engineering background 5:52 - Founding her first company Packetbeat 15:30 - Elastic acquisition and being a director there 25:34 - The role of managers 28:38 - Founding Tupu and diversity in tech 38:44 - The founding story of Xata 44:35 - Open source, serverless, and Zig vs Go 51:17 - Hiring high-agency engineers 1:00:37 - Where to find out more