Ant Wilson

Wilson is from Liverpool, UK, and earned a master’s degree in software engineering at Imperial College London. His first job involved OpenIndiana. He later founded Crypto Squad and applied to Y Combinator repeatedly.⁠[1]

He met Paul Copplestone through Entrepreneur First in Singapore. Both had technical backgrounds and worked quickly together.⁠[2]

Wilson dates their first day of work to January 6, 2020: after discussing the product, market, and funding with Copplestone, development began immediately.⁠[3]

The team subsequently joined Y Combinator. An early user shared the product on Hacker News ahead of its planned launch, bringing growth and feedback.⁠[4]

Supabase provides application backend services around PostgreSQL. Wilson’s public GitHub account highlights the main Supabase repository, its JavaScript client, and Realtime project.⁠[5]

After the accelerator, the team adopted roughly three-month product cycles coordinated around launches. In March 2021, a single launch expanded into a week of announcements. Features could ship earlier, with rest and retrospective review following each cycle.⁠[4]

Wilson advocates public code as a way to build contributor communities, recruit talent, and improve products, rather than competing mainly by protecting code. He favors supporting existing open-source projects before creating new ones.⁠[6]

He argues that real contributions reveal code quality and asynchronous communication on both sides, while users can add integrations the core team cannot yet prioritize.⁠[6]

His hiring article emphasizes independent execution, helping colleagues, and continuous improvement. Product teams organize their work and remain responsible for documentation and user feedback.⁠[3]

Wilson says remote hiring broadens the talent pool and supports coverage across time zones. The company does not adjust pay by location, and offers coworking and team gatherings.⁠[7]

He also acknowledges limitations for people who depend heavily on face-to-face collaboration and questions around junior employees’ learning. Office-based or hybrid work may suit other companies better.⁠[7]

In a Notion interview, he discussed the shift after adopting the description “open-source Firebase alternative,” and using developer interests and humor to communicate about the product.⁠[2]

Supabase: Official website: https://supabase.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

Supabase author page: Official website: https://supabase.com/blog/authors/ant_wilson (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

GitHub public account: Official account: https://github.com/awalias (opens in a new window)⁠[5]