Zach Lloyd

First thing from rewriting Google Sheets is I would say don't rewrite things.

We rewrote Google Sheets because it's at crazy scale.

And so if you have something that has

hundred million plus users, which is what it had at the time.

I think it's now like a billion users.

It really matters that the thing is awesome.

And so it's worth the effort of like 30 to 40 engineers for a couple of years to like get it right.

Right.

But I would say for the audience, for this show, which assumes more founders, like rewriting is like a horrible idea.

It's like pausing time.

So for the startup people out there, I think try to pick the right thing to start is a little bit better advice.

One lesson I did take for this is for warp.

For instance, we built it the hard way to start meaning like, you know, I could kind of see around the corner, like if we built it on sort of web tech or whatever, we're going to run into a bunch of performance problems, which is a lot of what we were trying to fix with the, the sheets rewrite, like good engineering matters.

But I think it's highly dependent on like where you're at in the stage of building a thing.

And so yeah, rewrite, if you have like crazy product market fit and you know, a hundred million plus users, it needs to be perfect.

If you're really early, I think rewrite is a little scary.

I guess if you literally have no one, fine.

But my take is like in startup land speeds everything.

And the anti-pattern that I'm looking out for is like, okay, I was a Google engineer building for tons of scale and then go to a, found a company.

And like, it's very easy to get like,

anchored on sort of the beauty of the engineering and trying to get the engineering perfect.

And if you don't have a product that anyone cares about, I think like that's a crazy place to be spending your time at the beginning of a company.

It should all be around like, can I build something that people want to use?

And there's a engineering mindset mistake I think that people will make where it's like, well, they don't want to use it because the performance isn't like 30% better.

That's not a good place to spend time.

I think Google's at risk.

Like I would never have said that five, 10 years ago.

I find myself using ChatGPT more and more.

And so I think they have big innovators dilemma problem.

This isn't directly answering your talent question, but I think it's more of like incentives where it seems like they're really slow on AI is like my take.

I'm definitely not impressed by how Gemini is integrated into their consumer products.

I think Gemini as a model is good.

It's in the three models that we care about at Warp are Gemini, GPT-5, and Claude.

So it's there.

I don't know, they had a lead.

They wrote the paper on Transformers.

It's not an awesome outcome from my standpoint.

And then from like a talent perspective, there's still a ton of very, very smart people at Google.

It just seems like a super risk averse place to me right now.

Like the people I know who I respect a lot, to be clear, are by and large staying at Google because they're super well compensated.

And it's like a very, very like cushy thing, but it tends to like...

keep around the sort of like people who wanna take fewer risks.

So I don't know, I'm not loving what I'm seeing from the outside, but I had an awesome experience working there back when I was an engineer.

Sell all of my position in Google.

Sell it.

So here's the bull case on Google is they have crazy distribution, they have a crazy brand, they have amazing infrastructure.

So it's like, I don't think Google's like beyond hope, but like- Crazy distribution, crazy brand.

They have 10%- Waymo is awesome, by the way.

Have you been in a Waymo?

Waymo is crazy.

Waymo is very, very cool.

No, I've never been, but I think- Oh, Waymo is the coolest product I've been in a long time.

I really like Waymo.

Yeah, but I think the culture is super slow.

And so I don't think a super-duper slow culture, they're going against very, very aggressive, fast-moving companies.

I think OpenAI's execution on ChatGPT is really good, but maybe the inertia of just being so big and having such distribution is enough.

I don't know.

The two leaders are GPT-5 and the Claude models.

And so we measure them.

First of all, it's not so much gut.

It's like we literally have a whole bunch of benchmarks.

We run SweetBench.

We run TerminalBench.

Claude and GPT-5 are the two best.

Claude, they have different personalities, which is kind of interesting.

When you're using them for coding, Claude's a little friendlier.

GPT-5 is a little bit more like...

Let me do a whole bunch of thinking.

It takes a long time is my biggest issue with it.

But then it tends to come back with something that's really good.

And at the moment, Gemini, which is on 2.5, and I'm sure they're working on Gemini 3, is not as good.

I would say that GPT wins consumer.

I don't know who wins enterprise.

I think developers is open.

I'm biased here because the situation that I want actually is competitive dynamic at the model layer for all the coding models.

I don't know that anyone has like a super strong moat at the API layer, just to be totally clear.

Yeah.

So just in the development space, I think the market is going to be there's going to be two pieces to it.

So there's going to be like a set of interactive productivity tools.

So think of like things that developers literally are using.

You're sitting there, you're telling an agent what to do.

You're like, hey, write this code for me.

Help me understand this production problem.

And then there's going to be a set of automation tools.

That's going to be more like, OK, crash came in.

What was the root cause of it?

Is there a PR that can fix it?

And it's going to do it automatically, and you'll have some developer who's reviewing it.

Those are going to be the two classes of things.

I think over time, the automation is clearly a better market, the more valuable thing.

Companies are going to want to just pay for stuff that automatically creates software.

It's a huge market.

It goes into the labor spend a little bit.

But I think the productivity piece is also...

I don't see it being, I'm just guessing at timeframes here.

Five years is a long time with these AI models, just to be clear.

But in the next few years is what I see happening.

So those are the two big buckets.

And I think more and more will go into automation.

They use warp.

We're now fully into like the coding agent space, like history of the company.

Obviously we started as a, as a terminal, but the terminal form factor

is the preferred form factor for doing agentic work at this point.

Whether you're using like a terminal app like Cloud Code and Warp, you just literally use the GUI app to do it.

And so every single coding task we do starts with a prompt, which is the big shift in productivity that's happening right now.

We don't necessarily finish every task with a prompt.

There's certain things that are too hard.

It doesn't matter which tool you're using, but everything starts with a prompt.

Then we try to get all the way to completion if we can with prompt.

That's funny.

It sounds kind of stupid.

It's like, oh, start with a prompt.

The general thing is like, are you starting with some expression of human intent?

And I'm using prompt for shorthand of that.

And it's more than just you're writing some paragraph or something.

It's like, what's going to matter more and more is the total context that the model has available to it.

And that context is going to come from more and more places.

It's not just going to come from a person saying to do something.

But yeah, I think generally, if you're doing something creative and it's not totally deterministic what needs to be done, there needs to be some expression to the computer from a builder to do the thing.

It's not going to read your mind.

So yeah, I think it's like, even though it sounds kind of stupid, I think that is the thing.

If you're comparing it to developer productivity tools, like a million percent yes.

The budget for developer productivity tools is not that big.

It's like people paying for Postman or whatever.

I don't know what your old school developer tool is.

It's like a small dollar amount per seat per month.

And you're using it to increase the productivity of someone who you're paying like $200,000 a year.

Maybe.

I mean, again, I think like thinking of it per developer is thinking of it through the productivity lens.

Like you're thinking of it in terms of like, how do I multiply a developer's output?

I think at some point you just get into the lens of like, what's this software worth to my business?

Yeah.

which is a lot like every company at this point to greater lesser extent is like a software company.

It's the biggest lever that they have.

And so it's going to be orders of magnitude more that companies are willing to pay for these types of tools.

Cause they're just, it's not, it's not a productivity tool.

In terms of whether we're seeing productivity gains, I think no one knows.

There's a bunch of studies that show not really.

Again, I would be a little more nuanced.

So if you are using lovable, then yeah, of course.

You're going from I can't do anything to I've built an app.

That's insane.

And so the cases where it's zero to one, yes.

I think when you go into the professional development environment, which is where Warp is focused,

There's a bunch of studies that show not really.

It's sort of like the noise that's created by people who are attempting to use like a vibe coding technique on a production code base kind of outweighs or can slow you down.

And so I think that's the big problem with it right now.

And this is what we see when we talk to companies.

It's like they all kind of rush to deploy some sort of agentic coding solution.

No one really knows if it's working and whether it's working or not depends a ton on like how

how you use it.

And so you can't just vibe code with it.

I'm not a huge vibe coding person to begin with.

And so there's like a way you have to use it in order to get productivity gains.

And then it needs to be figured out how you're going to measure those.

So great question.

In like the prosumer market, there's like strong product market fit, but it's not, I would say it's not a great market.

Meaning like they're very high churn, price sensitive customers who are building things that don't have a ton of economic value.

In the enterprise market, I actually think the thing that has most product market fit is like autocomplete.

which is not the sexiest type of AI.

It's not agentic AI, it's like Cursor's original product or even copilot.

If you're doing hand editing of code, it's clearly helpful to have the thing show you the gray text and read your mind.

when you get into like warp or cloud code or cursors agent or yeah even i think cognition's its own beast honestly it's like it's more of like an automation thing i think it's like really early in that market and people there's like a lot of like intuitive signal that it's helpful

And there's a ton of willingness to pay.

But in terms of will companies get measurable impact from it, it's going to happen.

It's going to be transformational.

And it sometimes is transformational now, but not with every coding test and maybe not in the aggregate.

Favor is the higher quality.

And this is counterintuitive.

It actually causes a lot of problems with people who don't know what they're doing in a professional environment.

So if you are a newer engineer, or more junior engineer, or maybe just not that sophisticated of an engineer, it's a problem to me.

Because you want to use these tools the most, but they end up producing code that you don't understand, or that can't be shipped, or they won't get through code review, or they contain security bugs.

Whereas to successfully use these tools, you need to be like more sophisticated, smarter, more experienced.

And if you can do that, you can get a crazy productivity gain, but you already kind of need to know what you're doing.

So I think it's a little bit counterintuitive.

Like I would much rather have senior developers using these tools.

There's a little bit of a paradox in that they don't necessarily want to use these tools.

Like they feel like they can do the thing themselves.

But if you get a senior developer who's really good at wielding these tools, it's very powerful.

I think we're going to have fewer more senior engineers who are managing the work of a lot of agents.

In terms of collapsing of all the roles, if I had to like design a role for the Uber person who builds with AI, it would be like a product oriented senior engineer.

We see a lot of like product managers and designers who will use the tools to make prototypes.

And that's actually very cool.

But to get stuff to production, I think what you want is like someone who, like I said, more sophisticated than the agent.

And I think there's a real cap on what a product manager or designer is able to build with this stuff right now.

So I guess short answer is I don't really think so.

And if there was like a role I would design, it would be a product minded engineer.

Yeah, so our motion is PLG.

So I think I've overstated how these tools aren't working that well for real devs.

They are working well for real devs.

You just need to learn how to use them right.

What does that mean, learn how to use them right?

Yeah, so if you're someone building in a sort of naive way, and I kind of blame vibe coding for this, what you'll do is you'll be like, build me this thing that looks like X. And the build me this thing that looks like X doesn't tell the agent how the thing should work, at least from the engineering side.

And so if you do this on like a big, complicated code base, it fails or like it produces something that just like wastes a bunch of your time.

It might like iterate and go in circles for hours and finally get you something that like seems to work from a user perspective, but it won't be something that you will actually want to release.

So to make it work in a production setting, it's like you need to tell it how to build it.

And that means you need to understand the code.

And so it's just it's very liable to like kind of lazy usage, which doesn't work well.

Is that a fair concern?

I think it's a totally fair concern if you're doing it the same way on like a code base that matters.

Yes.

They don't tell you.

Do margins matter?

I think like, yes, definitely.

If only because let's say your users cost you money.

It just gets super duper expensive the faster you grow.

And that's like, so you can't have that.

Are you positive margins?

Not right now, but not like we're working on it.

It's really, really costly.

I mean, so to talk about like the pricing stuff, here's the fundamental problem with pricing these AI products is like consumers expect, like if you're going for the prosumers, let's say for a second, not the enterprise.

Because enterprise, we're margin positive.

But on the consumer segments, it's like, it's very, very hard.

They expect something that looks like SaaS pricing.

So they expect like, you know, 20 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month.

50 bucks a month is a lot.

You get more than that starts to get into like their comparing to like their gym membership or something, right?

The more they use it, the more it costs you.

So the better your product market fit in a sense of like the product is getting better, the like worse your business is from like that perspective.

And to some extent, I think it's actually fine to subsidize.

Like if you're subsidizing users who are going to turn into enterprise leads, but I don't think it's like super smart to subsidize people who are building...

Personal websites where there's no strong economic incentive.

Yeah, I think to an extent you do that.

At some point, though, it's like if you're growing so fast, Warp is not growing really fast.

We're adding like a million dollars in ARR every week.

You're doing a million a week.

Adding a net new ARR.

Yeah.

Can you just say that again?

We're now adding a million net new ARR every week or even less.

Honestly, recently, it's accelerating.

People love the thing.

However, it's like, yeah, you can do the accounting for it however you want.

You know, from our perspective, we want to be growing that in a sustainable way.

So I think it's crazy to just be like, no, margins don't matter.

At some point, you're going to run out of money if you're growing really fast.

And though we could probably go raise more money, like for sure.

But can I ask you, like, how are you thinking about that as an investor when you're seeing a company like Warp that's growing?

We're growing extremely quickly.

I think we're still like, I think that's outlier growth.

How do you think about how sustainable that growth should be?

I know I'm not supposed to be interviewing you here, but do you think that there's some inherent lock-in that they have that other companies don't have?

Yeah, I think the competition from the model providers is an issue.

But it's like, why start a company?

So I guess I'm not going to speak for the whole coding app industry, but for Warp, it's like a different product.

So every other single product out there is either a clone of VS Code, which, again, is Codex or Cursor or WinSurf or whatever.

They're all the same product.

Or they are terminal apps.

And I do think like, even if you believe that it's like really cheap now to clone software, it's really not cheap to clone Warp.

We were building this thing for five years and it's a very, very differentiated product experience.

I don't think that's enough.

Maybe I feel like there's like a VC trope right now around like, well, product's not a mo.

I think that that's like kind of bullshit, especially when everyone else in the market has the same product.

So I'll speaking for Warp, I actually think we can differentiate on the product quite a bit.

If you believe, though, that it's all just like they're all the same thing and it's like whoever has the most money wins, I guess I see what you're saying.

But I don't agree with that.

Product quality with some amount of like, again, I don't want to like say like lock in it, but there's stickiness in the product.

There's stickiness in features.

So there's stickiness just in like the product experience itself.

It's like, okay, I've become accustomed to this thing.

There's stickiness a little bit in the fact that

We have a ton of users.

We have way more users than Cloud Code, for instance, or Codex.

We have 700,000 users because we've been doing this for five years.

That's not sickiness, but that's like there's a great funnel.

Do you have more users than Cloud Code?

I'm like 98% sure of that, yeah.

So I can tell you part of the reason I believe that is because of where we sit in the stack, I can actually see how many people are using Cloud Code and Warp.

And I can see the trends of all these other products, which is, again, is an interesting thing about where we are.

And it's not super high volume.

What trends are you seeing?

So every time one of these model providers puts out a thing, whether it's Cloud Code or Codex or Gemini, you see like a temporary spike in their thing.

people using it within Warp.

And I think the nature of the developer market, which is kind of over, I don't know, underappreciated, overlooked, whatever, is like developers just want to try the newest thing, always.

It's a fragmented market.

They want to try the newest thing.

Again, this can work against Warp as well.

But all of these other things are basically equivalent, right?

They're all the same product, whereas Warp is not.

And you can see the spike.

You can see it settle down.

I don't think the model providers, based on the data I'm seeing, are winning here.

I think, honestly, if I look at the space, the one that comes up the most is Cursor.

I think Cursor's execution is really good.

I think their fundamental product of autocomplete is really, really good.

They're like a better version of Copilot.

And Copilot, it's actually, again, I think it's a testament to what startups can do.

Copilot had their product.

And you might be like, why did Cursor win?

Cursor won because their thing was better.

It worked better.

It provided more accurate suggestions.

And developers care about that.

So that wedge was really good.

The switching cost into it was really low.

And then Cursor, I think, has been really fast with enterprise.

I don't think Cursor's agent product is that awesome.

They've done a really good job.

Everyone knows Cursor.

Yeah, but this is like the repeated story with bigger companies who don't have the same pressure to innovate.

Yeah, they were asleep at the wheel.

They had Copilot.

It's not as good.

It's literally, it's like a bunch of like, I know the guys at Cursor, like some smart people from MIT who are like, they were actually working on something else.

And then they just kind of out executed on the autocomplete part, which again, I don't think autocomplete is the future.

So I don't feel like I'm like,

seeding competitive ground here to cursor the future is more like developed by prompt but really really good execution on their part our curse are paying massively for talent i've spoken as far as i know like they are they are paying massively for talent do you feel the pressure to pay massively for talent

Yeah, I do.

It's like a super competitive space.

Like I think we can offer, cause we're like earlier, like we can offer more equity.

They can probably offer more cash, but yeah, it's like a crazy, crazy space that we're in right now.

Very competitive, which again, I think, I think reinforces the, like the importance of senior engineers is not going down.

It's never been more competitive for us to hire someone good.

Do you mean in terms of like the VC valuation or what people are getting paid or just the whole thing?

Yeah.

Do you, I think it's like, do you fundamentally believe that this is transformational technology?

If you do, I think, I mean, it's crazy, but it's like not crazy.

I think it's, I'm a skeptical person by nature, but I am a full believer that AI is going to change every single business.

So there's going to be some big losses, I put it that way, but there's also going to be some big winners.

I think it's going to depend a bunch on what industry you're in, what the short-term impact is.

I think for highly competitive, unregulated things, like for startups, for SaaS businesses, I think it's going to change everything.

For knowledge workers, if you're not in a regulated industry, I think it's a big deal.

I think what I mean is like, if you're working at, there's a few different angles.

There's the business angle and there's the worker angle.

I think the cost to start a sort of software driven business is gonna go way, way, way down.

That's one thing.

I think from a worker perspective, if you are working at a place like,

I'm going to pick a random company, Salesforce, and there's no real regulatory blocker for the deployment of AI and you're in like a competitive market.

AI is going to be deployed really, really rapidly and change what daily work looks like.

I think if you're in like the healthcare industry or the government, and it's like, I'm still filling out paper forms when I go see my doctor right now, it's less a question of like, is the technology transformational than like, are the incentives there to deploy the technology?

And like, I worry that it's just going to take a long time.

I think it's more like a 10.

I think like, again, the technology is going to run way ahead of the deployment of it just because the deployment of it takes a long time.

You'll see the deployment go fast in industries where there's not a lot of barriers.

This isn't like the most profound point in the world, but if you go to the DMV, you're still going to be dealing with like some annoying old school stuff because it's just hard to deploy technology in certain areas.

We're doing it now.

Maybe you could tell me as a VC it's stupid, but like, you know, we send a big check to Anthropic.

We send a big check to OpenAI.

If I pay you a dollar, how much goes to Anthropic?

I don't know if I want to explicitly say that right now, but they get a lot of, let's say they get a dollar.

Let's just say that for a second.

And so I don't know if I'm going to get in trouble with investors or whatever for being so candid.

No, but let's say they get a lot of it.

And so what we're doing, again, because it's growing so fast, which I think is good, I think it makes sense to be like, how do we make the usage of these models more efficient?

How do we change our pricing so that it's more aligned with customer value?

So we make more money as users use Warp more, not less money as users use Warp more.

It's a big focus for us right now.

The trick is like, can we do it without harming growth?

You know, that's like where this question of like maybe the smarter thing for us to do is to like just take it to a certain point, keep growing, raise more capital.

What does Andrew say?

Andrew says we are in an awesome spot and should like get the margins a little bit better and then raise more capital.

basically that's such a VC thing is but hey keep growth high but get better margins and then basically Andrew's not in there being like well what we could change the number of requests we offer on this plan by why it's he's like you know he's like we're doing awesome we have a thing people love don't fuck that up first of all like don't fuck that up make the product even more compelling

Because I will say, we're not competing on price.

So here's where I would be worried about margins if I were in this space.

If we were reselling Claude for $0.75 on the dollar or whatever, it's like, what's the point of being in that business?

We're not perceived as inexpensive.

We're like a premium product for people who are doing serious coding.

And it's still very expensive because we're somewhat inefficient in terms of how we do it.

If we were competing on price, I would say like, let's just find a different business.

Or you have to, you have got to be really strategic and find the right cohorts that are paying, that are like super profitable.

And so Andrew's like, just try to make the product as awesome and different as possible.

Try to get the enterprise motion going as much as we can because those are better customer segments.

Don't mess up the growth.

Be sensible with the margins so that we're not just like incinerating VC capital willy-nilly.

But like, we're in a very cool spot.

Your face is so funny right now.

That's like what doing a startup is.

It's like I.

So, okay, to give Andrew more credit, now I feel like I'm going to piss Andrew off in this interview.

Andrew's very, very smart.

He's an awesome investor.

Brilliant.

It's way smarter than me, by the way.

I think if we had to prioritize, we would say, don't screw up the revenue growth.

But there's nuance.

And I think it's very easy to go on a podcast and be like, revenue growth, revenue growth, whatever.

It's like, no, we have to also make some progress on the margins.

Because if you're a smart investor, you're going to want to leak.

And the way to think about the margins, at least, is there's an immediate concern with burn, which probably we can get more money.

I think the bigger long-term concern is like, are you a below market reseller of intelligent tokens?

That's not a good business to be in.

And so we don't want to be in that business, but I don't believe that.

And so it's like, do what you need to do right now to like get the thing to a good enough spot without screwing up growth is kind of the main point.

End state's not obvious because it totally depends what happens in the model market.

Somewhere there's going to be a margin, right?

Like Anthropic has a big margin on their API business right now.

What I've heard is 60% margin on Anthropic's API.

I've heard 50% on OpenAI's.

Again, I've heard this.

I don't know if it's exactly right or not, but if there were no margin anywhere in this stack, I think it's really bad, but there's margin.

The question then is like, well, who's capturing that?

And I think it depends.

If the model providers are really competitive,

even better would be like some open source model that's good enough, I think the app layer is going to get a lot of value.

If you think that it's going to be like one model provider runs away with it, then that's horrible for us.

I don't think that's going to happen.

I think that's, there's too many smart people who are working on building these models.

So our bet is like, there's competition.

It might look like G cloud, AWS, Azure level competition, or it might look like actually like open source, like database competition.

And then we're going to have an awesome business, but I don't know.

Do you think it's open?

I don't think open either, if I'm being honest.

The reason I don't think open is that it's just so damn expensive to build these things.

And so what's the economic incentive?

It's not like open source software.

People make the analogy like, oh, open.

I'll take the word open and apply it to open models.

Open source software works because it's a bunch of hobbyist developers who are giving their time to build something really hard.

Open models, somebody's got to spend all the money to make the thing competitive.

But here's the flip side.

Here's the way it could work is like it could get to a point where just like for coding, let's say our domain, it's basically solved, meaning like models that are good enough and you don't need the frontier model.

And what actually starts to matter is like, how good are you getting context in from a company?

How good is your interface?

How good is your automation, like an orchestration stuff?

And that's not crazy to me.

Like it's crazy to me that the frontier model would be open, but it's not crazy to me that there's like a good enough model that is open.

yeah i mean i it's not how i frame it i would frame it as like coding may literally be solved which is a crazy thing to say but like at the model layer it might just be the level of intelligent token is like good enough that if you feed it a code base and a prompt and a bunch of context it can make the right coding change and you don't need this year's this year's model to use a elvis costello

reference to actually get the good to get the good results so i would look at it more like that and then yeah if there's competition or you can do model routing like if you're like squeezing margins like that i think it's a more precarious place to be but i think that you know the price per intelligence for any fixed level of intelligence is definitely falling

I love Elvis Costello.

This is a fun recording.

Oh yeah, yeah.

No, trust me.

I'm a little scared of my level of transparency in this, but whatever.

And now I'm being like, ah, that was really, I'm very bullish on open AI for no good reason.

Like other than like, I think that they have the, I think they have the magic consumer product, the next generation of it.

And it's worth so much.

That's interesting.

I mean, I haven't gotten the VC transfer of wealth to me yet.

It's not exactly why I'm in it, but yeah, let's see.

So I have done the formal process thing before.

I didn't do it with Warp.

I did it with the company before Warp, where when we went out to raise a Series A, we flew out to Silicon Valley and pitched 20 firms in a week or whatever, kind of took the best term sheet, and then got in bed with an investor.

And I did not think that process led to an amazing result.

And so with Warp, I really tried not to replicate that.

The way I did it with Warp was as I was developing the idea, I was talking to a few investors I knew who I'd known for a really long time who just, when I was like, I'm ready to do this idea, were like, we love the idea.

We want to invest.

So not every founder is going to have that opportunity.

But if you have that opportunity, I think that's...

way preferable.

And then for the subsequent rounds of Warp, which were Dylan Field led the A and Sequoia led the B, that was all preempted.

And so those were... How does Dylan come to lead the A?

So Dylan was a small angel investor at the seed.

And then from the get-go, he was just super excited by what we were doing.

I think some extent of pattern matching with...

Our thesis was reinvent a horrible tool that developers spend all their day in.

So I think that that resonated with him.

And then we were doing well, but still very early.

And he came and was like, I'd like to lead your A. And I was like, OK.

And then Andrew wasn't that different.

We were still really early.

Can I ask how big was the A?

We raised like, this was in 2021.

It was like a $17 million A.

Wow.

Things have changed, by the way.

We're, you know, we started it back in like the dinosaur era, but like a five-year-old company.

Well, so Dylan introduced me to Andrew because Andrew's on Figma's board.

And Andrew and I really hit it off.

And again, we didn't need the money at that time.

It was just a totally different time in the company.

We were like,

You know, it was a free product at that point with good user growth, but not really like a good business model or not a business.

Like we weren't even monetizing.

You weren't monetizing at the B. We were not monetizing at the B. This is this was so this was another frothy, crazy period.

Right.

So this was like pre-AI.

And I don't know if I speak for Andrew, but I think Andrew again was like there's some amount of pattern matching.

And then I think he liked me.

And I think he liked that we were building a really hard app in a big market.

And so they invested very early.

How much did he invest?

How much was the round?

That was a $50 million round.

Which I think, by the way, he's going to look very smart.

We talked about it for a long time.

Again, I'm probably unusually transparent for founder here.

But we're a terminal company, which is not a real market, just to be clear.

And so it's very much like we're displacing a free product

The thesis of warp was like, Hey, there's this, there's this tool that, you know, every developer uses every single day that kind of sucks.

And like, I still believe this, there's a much better version of this that could exist.

It's actually very hard to build.

It's going to take a bunch of capital to build, to get like people to work on it.

There's a non-obvious business model.

Like the business model that we started with was like collaboration, which makes sense from like my background on Google docs and Figma to some extent, we got lucky that AI came along because that's like a way.

It took us from being a really, really nice user interface product to something that's truly transformative for people's work.

But the general initial thesis was kind of right in that this product sucks and it's used by everyone and something better should exist.

And so I think that was the bet.

And then we'll figure out how to build a great business around that.

And it's turned out, I don't know if AIs can be...

Like I think verdict is out on app layer companies and AI like you're talking about.

But from a like, does this thing really help people do their job better standpoint?

It's like it proved to be right.

And not even a huge user base either, just to be clear.

Like when they did that round, we were in the thousands of wow.

And now we're like, you know, I think we'll hit a million active users, active developers this year.

And now obviously we're growing our revenue super duper fast, but it was like really, really risky.

And I mean, I wonder if Andrew thought it was reflected on.

It was like, what am I doing?

But like, I don't know.

I think it's actually going to work.

Right.

No, no, no.

And that's, by the way, like, again, from a founder perspective, getting to work with someone who's super secure and confident is a huge, huge advantage compared to working with someone who is like, you know, like the more junior person who doesn't have the wins.

Like, I feel like investors insecurity will bleed into the relationship.

Oh, so much.

Right.

That's where you want.

It's not necessarily easy to get and like, but like, if you have someone who's really confident, it's just, it's like, he's in a role of like supporting me, not pressuring me.

A little.

I'm a huge Sequoia fan.

Here's what Sequoia has done well for us.

There's a halo around the brand.

From a recruiting perspective, it's good.

From a customer conversation perspective, it's sometimes good.

I'll give you a really tangible example.

We were getting user reports that were being blocked by CrowdStrike.

So CrowdStrike is like this security software, right?

Which kind of makes sense.

Like we're at that layer of the stack.

Like we do all this crazy stuff to make Warp work on people's computers.

So we're like, oh, fuck, we're getting blocked by CrowdStrike.

That's like really, really bad.

And it's like we saw all of our usage start to go down at certain companies.

And so I reached out to Andrew.

I was like, can you help me here?

And then that day I was on the phone with the president of CrowdStrike.

And he's like, I'm looking into it.

I don't think that we've actually done anything.

I think this is a configuration issue.

Because we ended up being blocked at Salesforce, of all places.

I don't think you get that if you have your kind of random VC firm.

But the connections there are real.

It's freaking cool, right?

That's a cheat code.

And I was telling my wife that.

And she was like, oh, that is pretty cool.

So that's an amazing story to my take of like why Sequoia is awesome.

I absolutely love that.

Honestly, no, but I think, again, I think I'm like a little lucky here in that like I'm second time founder.

I had like some access to people I knew.

I think we're going to have to do one of these like competitive ones at some point.

So I think it would be like kind of arrogant to be like, oh, I hate this.

Like, it's like, no, it's cool.

People, you're running a business and people are interested in giving you money.

I think that is not the default case for most people in the world.

And so like for me to be like, oh, I don't, that's so annoying.

No, it's great.

It's awesome to have the interest from a like how to manage it as a founder.

I just basically don't take the calls.

right now.

I'll do them once in a while to just like gauge like the market and like where we're at.

But I have a strong feeling that like when we do it, I'm not going to do it based on an inbound email.

I'm going to do it based on like either existing investors or they're going to introduce me to someone who I like I'm optimizing for the relationship.

Right.

And so it's hard to get that from just like a sales pitch over an email.

I knew we were going to get along.

I'm concerned that I've been too open, but I think it's going to be interesting for people listening.

I'm very unfiltered.

Mark Benioff's my cousin.

So, yes.

So, take that for what it's worth.

But yeah, he's a significant investor.

no way benny off's your cousin benny off's my second cousin yeah i was you know i have pictures of me and him hanging out as a kid when when i was a kid and he was at he was at usc so i grew up in la and i have a very distinct memory like he was always like like precocious as a business person i have very distinct memories of him picking me up from my house as a kid and he had this white bmw convertible my parents being like that's your cousin mark he's gonna

be really successful or maybe he was already like at Oracle being kind of successful.

And I remember riding around with him.

But yeah, he's my cousin.

I've heard him on your podcast, by the way.

Well, he was, he's been in all the funding rounds.

I don't know.

I wanted like, I wanted some variety.

And plus like Mark, Mark's awesome.

But Mark's not like sitting down with me and being like, here's, here's how to think about like your customer base.

Mark's not like closing candidates for me.

I just want to be, be clear.

Whereas like, you know, Andrew or even Dylan sometimes will help do that kind of thing.

So Mark's awesome.

Andrew and Dylan will close, will close candidates and customers for you.

Well, candidates, yes.

Customers, I haven't been asking them to do that.

But yeah, if I'm like, we have this incredible engineer who I want to join the team, can you explain to them why they should join Warp?

About a million percent.

Do you not do that for your portfolio companies?

Do I?

Yes.

But did most other VCs?

That's like one of the things that I'm actually wanting.

The other VCs I have are like, I have Greg from Box Group and Eric from GV and I trust them all to be like pretty cool.

He's good.

I mean, I worked with him at Google.

So, it's like there's just very, very long relationships here that I have with these people in terms of trust.

Well, I mean, you burned that relationship now.

I don't care.

Like, that's not a thing I'm afraid of saying.

Like, they need to, like, get their, like, I'm saying it all the time.

Like, you know, I have an 18-month-old son, right?

And his new favorite thing is to talk to our, we have Google Home.

And we'll be like, hey, Google, what's a horse sound like?

And it'll be like, meh.

And so he walks around.

He's like, Google, Google, whatever.

And the thing is broken half the time.

And I'm like, I don't get it.

It's like, I know the technology to do this well exists.

I get better results from like speaking to warp and like, it's just such a thing with the company's so fucking slow that I can just see myself in the meetings where the various product managers are like, how do we get Gemini into this thing?

And then it's like some Gemini org.

It's like some PM is coming in and we'll like, we can't put it in because it's like not translated into 70 languages or what I can just imagine the conversations there, which is like, why again, why I like starting company.

It's like way faster.

You know, whisper flow, whisper flows integrated in warp.

That's how you talk to warp.

Yes.

Amazing.

Okay.

No, it's a crazy, like not invented here or like whatever.

Like I don't know what's going on at these huge companies.

Oh, God.

I'm not like in my space.

Not really any of them.

Not to be a jerk, but it's like they all Microsoft, I guess.

But they like I think that they kind of screwed up Copilot.

I don't really know what Amazon is doing.

Like they put out a coding thing, which people seem to like.

OK, Google is not great at developer stuff.

Just period from my time there.

And Apple is always just like super duper slow.

So I don't know.

I guess Microsoft, if you put a gun to my head of like who's, I'm just talking about MySpace, who's doing the best.

I don't think any of those companies are doing a great job.

As I insult all of our potential acquirers.

But like, I, it's just like, I just don't like, I think that it's like, there's a big company thing.

That's a real problem.

They're going shopping again.

I don't totally get the strategy.

I'm not, I'm not plugged in on, but it's interesting.

my theory there is that the founder just loves certain products like loves like the browser company's product and they're like okay this is available i will buy it for 610 million i would love to be on the board of the browser company it's like in cash yes yes it's like if

Super, super cool product.

But yeah, no, it's, I don't, I'm a small, I'm a small investor in the browser company and I know Josh actually, but it's a crazy market.

No, I mean, well, I would listen to this episode.

I would be like, oh, this guy is interesting.

Do you know Granola?

Do you know Chris?

Have you heard of that product?

So he's a friend of mine.

I'm a small investor in that company.

The way he thinks about it, I knew him at his last company too.

He's building really cool AI native stuff.

So I think he's doing a great job.

It's like, get rid of the black box in Zoom.

It's like a very interesting, it just makes the product experience so much better.

So I like it.

That was it?

I can see if that's the pitch.

You're not making it the most compelling pitch.

So, I could see why maybe you passed.

Yeah.

I probably, I've like historically waited a little too long to hire people to like be leaders on the team.

So my default, like for instance, I like with someone else on the team, basically like ran our growth function at Warp for a few years.

And I think there's value to that.

Like it's better to like try and do something yourself as a founder first before hiring someone for it.

But there's also lots of people who know how to do stuff way better than I know how to do it.

And so I may have probably waited a little too long on that.

We hired a great growth person who's been awesome.

I would integrate X. They approach us all the time to put out their coding models.

But I need some reason that it's measurably better.