mysql
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Sam Lambert
Sam Lambert is the CEO and President of PlanetScale, the database company built on Vitess, the MySQL scaling technology that once powered YouTube. A database engineer by trade, he started as GitHub's first DBA in 2013 and spent roughly eight years there, rising to VP of Engineering leading a 350-person infrastructure and platform organization through the era GitHub scaled to tens of millions of users. After a short stint at Facebook working on internet-scale video infrastructure, he joined PlanetScale as an investor and advisor, became Chief Product Officer, and was named CEO in July 2021. He is known for a product philosophy centered on databases that 'just work' and never go down, a bias toward taste and craft, and blunt views on leadership.
Kevin Harvey
Kevin Harvey is a General Partner and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, which he helped launch in 1995 alongside Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Val Vaden. Before turning to investing, Harvey built and sold two software companies - StyleWare (acquired by Apple's Claris in 1988, becoming ClarisWorks) and Approach Software (acquired by Lotus in 1993) - giving him rare operator credibility. At Benchmark, he has backed transformative companies including eBay, Twitter, Upwork, MySQL, OpenTable, and Proofpoint. Outside of venture capital, Harvey is the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a critically acclaimed winery focused on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, where he applies the same data-driven rigor to terroir as he does to startup evaluation.