Premal Shah on databases
From How We Made That App Episode 6:Data Dreams and AI Realities with 6Sense co-founder Premal Shah · · SingleStore
“If I were starting today I'd probably still start with MySQL — it's easy to get started locally and AWS has a lot of support — but many people love Postgres as well; my flavor historically is MySQL for transactional small-data use and quick POCs.”
On , Premal Shah, Cofounder at 6sense, spoke about databases during How We Made That App Episode 6:Data Dreams and AI Realities with 6Sense co-founder Premal Shah on SingleStore.
About Premal Shah
Premal Shah, co-founder and head of engineering at 6sense, discussed the company's technical evolution and current AI initiatives in a February 2024 podcast. He stated that 6sense, founded in 2013, originally focused on predictive analytics for B2B sales and marketing and has since become a large intent data provider. Shah described the company's infrastructure, including a migration to Kubernetes, the use of Hive and Spark for big data processing, and the adoption of SingleStore to address data fragmentation. He noted that 6sense is experimenting with generative AI and RAG, building an internal Slack bot for support that performs RAG-style searches over a knowledge base, and relying on external LLMs such as OpenAI rather than building and hosting models internally. In a 2019 interview, Shah reflected on his earlier career, including his time at PayPal and his role as co-founder and former president of Kiva, the online lending platform. He recounted his initial belief that Kiva was the right approach to combining PayPal and microcredit, and his disappointment when the board chair told him he would not be able to continue as CEO. Shah said he felt "very worthless" and "angry" after that experience, and that he later applied to a well-being project. He described a subsequent "rebalancing of life" toward family, health, and connection with others.
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