Unlock Opportunities In The Data Warehouse and Redefine Backend Economics With MinusOneDB
June 17, 2025
What if you could eliminate 90% of your query compute costs and ship production-grade infrastructure that scales in weeks, without hiring a single backend engineer? In this episode of Finding Future Fit, host Heidi Hysell sits down with William Wechtenhiser and Israel Mirsky, the founding team behind MinusOneDB, to explore a physics-defying reimagination of backend infrastructure. This isn’t just about shaving costs or speeding up queries; it’s a platform-level rethink of how startups scale, fund, and iterate in real time. Whether you're a seed-stage founder duct-taping a backend in Postgres or a venture partner looking to future-proof your portfolio, this conversation digs into how new infrastructure primitives can unlock entirely new business models.
In this episode of Finding Future Fit, host Heidi Hysell sits down with William Wechtenhiser and Israel Mirsky from the founding team behind MinusOneDB, to explore a physics-defying reimagination of backend infrastructure.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why most modern infrastructure is built to maximize cloud vendor profit, not performance.
- How co-locating storage and compute can help cut query costs by up to 95%.
- Why “don't hire an engineering team yet” is surprisingly great advice.
- The three critical stages when this architecture becomes a startup superpower.
- What real-time, fungible data environments mean for AI workflows, experimentation,
- and time-to-market.
- How one founder launched an enterprise-grade application in 9 weeks, not 6 months.
About the Guest(s):
William Wechtenhiser
Founder & CEO, MinusOneDB
William is a veteran technologist with a rare cross-industry resume, spanning AI research in defense, developer tools at Adobe, Wall Street quant work, cancer research at Novartis, and Hollywood media infrastructure. After decades of solving the same data bottlenecks across wildly different verticals, he founded MinusOneDB to reimagine how modern startups handle storage, compute, and scale. His mission? Kill the plumbing so builders can focus on product and unlock the next generation of software faster, cheaper, and smarter.
Israel Mearsky
Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer, MinusOneDB
Israel Mirsky is a repeat operator and strategic thinker with a track record of building and scaling systems at the intersection of media, data, and automation. Across roles in global advertising, product innovation, and emerging tech, he’s helped companies navigate messy data ecosystems, design more responsive infrastructure, and unlock new capabilities at the edge of what’s possible. At MinusOneDB, he leads strategy, ecosystem development, and evangelism—championing a reimagined data stack that gives high-growth teams leverage once reserved for the giants - and gives giants undreamed of abilities.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here.
We share these conversations to help you build a transformative future; please remember this is for informational purposes and is not a substitute for your own professional and financial due diligence.