vitess
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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.
PlanetScale
PlanetScale is a San Francisco database company that turns the hard parts of running relational databases at scale into a managed cloud service. Founded in 2018 by the creators of Vitess - the MySQL-sharding system built at YouTube and later used by Slack, GitHub and Square - the company sells a serverless database platform known for non-blocking schema changes, branching workflows borrowed from Git, and, more recently, Metal instances built on locally-attached NVMe drives. In 2025 it extended the same platform to Postgres, chasing the fastest-growing part of the database market while still, in its own words, loving MySQL.