SingleStore was founded by Nikita Shamgunov after he left Microsoft, where he worked on a scalable transactional database that never shipped. Nikita joined Facebook and realized the power of such a system, leading to the co-founding of SingleStore in 2013. The company initially started as an in-memory system, which allowed for high-value workloads and early adoption by analytics teams. However, Nikita notes that building a fully scalable and elastic transactional system took time, with significant technological advancements required. SingleStore's architecture is based on RAM as the storage of the future, but has evolved to support both disk and memory due to rapidly dropping costs for flash memory. The company prioritizes consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (CAP theorem) in its distributed database design, sacrificing some availability to guarantee consistency and partition tolerance. Nikita discusses key architectural decisions, such as converting from row-oriented data to column-oriented data, which is I/O-bound and not CPU-bound. Performance optimization involves three buckets: in-memory query optimization, network optimization, and compression and vectorization. SingleStore is a general-purpose database that supports general-purpose workloads requiring scale, with typical use cases including real-time dashboards, Web 2.0 and mobile applications, portfolio analysis, and real-time financial reporting. The company aims to invest in managed services and Kubernetes integration, strengthen its engine, and improve the developer experience, while also exploring AI and ML workloads.