I joined PlanetScale as a contract design engineer in late 2018. There was nothing but an idea, and a sizable VC paycheck. The founders were veterans of the database world, having worked on database systems at YouTube, building out Vitess; an open-source database clustering system that scaled YouTube’s database needs. Their vision was to build a database-as-a-service that would leverage Vitess to provide a highly scalable, developer-friendly database solution. The question was how do we deliver sharding as a plug-and-play solution to developers?

Designing for speed

I was the founding designer leading all design efforts while supporting an engineering team that grew from 10 to 30 engineers in a span of 2 years. I also contributed to frontend efforts to all user-facing surfaces: the marketing site, documentation site, and the web application itself. I was later supported by a dedicated frontend engineer, and a visual designer.

Impact

PlanetScale raised a Series B round of $22 million led by Andreessen Horowitz in October 2020. This was within 1.5 years of the company’s inception. We were doing something right, and the design was facilitating the desired experience.

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