ZachLloyd

LubaZach, thank you so much for coming on the show.Link

ZachYeah, thank you for having me. This is cool.Link

LubaI really appreciate your time. I learned an interesting fact, that your grandfather, Lloyd K. Lloyd, was a famous San Francisco entrepreneur.Link

ZachThat is right. I don't know if I'd call him famous. He was in the insurance business. He had a successful business. He was an entrepreneur. Yeah.Link

LubaDid you get a lot of time with him, or...Link

ZachHe passed away when I was like 13 or so. But I definitely have a lot of memories talking to him. He was a very good salesman. That's what his specialty was. So, yeah.Link

LubaWhat made him a good salesman?Link

ZachI think a little bit, partly, I think he was just a super personable guy. When I remember him, he was always just funny. He had a lot of stories and could make good relationships with people. And I think if you're selling something, it really is a relationship-driven thing. So he was awesome at that.Link

LubaDo you remember any specific stories that he would tell you?Link

ZachTrying to remember this. I remember him being very proud of me when my elementary school had this... it's called a magazine drive. It probably dates me. The idea was you would go door to door and sell magazine subscriptions to your neighbors or your friends or whatever. And I got very into it, and I sold him a bunch of magazines.Link

LubaBut also...Link

ZachLike stuff he didn't need. And I sold so many... I wanted to win a Game Boy, I think it was, and then I ended up winning a big-screen TV from all the sales stuff I did. I remember him being very...Link

LubaProud of you.Link

ZachYeah, psyched that I was going out selling stuff door to door. That's one thing I kind of remember.Link

LubaThat's amazing. Do you feel like any of those memories have translated into your skills as a salesman in the developer tools world?Link

ZachI don't know. The idea of trying to have good relationships makes a ton of sense. He was also, I think, a really kind manager. My dad was also... I got this from him, too. I think he put a lot of value on treating people who worked for him really well.Link

I don't know. I wouldn't consider myself an awesome salesman, although what I do as a founder is a lot of sales. Whether it's convincing an investor to give us money or convincing someone to come work at our company, running a company is sales one way or another, even if it's not directly trying to get someone to pay for the product. So I think I've gotten better at it for sure. But my real DNA is more around building, I would say, than selling. And so engineering... I actually think I get a lot of that from my other grandfather, who I never met, who was also an entrepreneur.Link

LubaAlso in San Francisco?Link

ZachOh, no, in LA. He had a big textile business. So both of my grandfathers had pretty successful businesses. I wouldn't say that they were huge.Link

LubaSo that was the Lloyd part of the family in San Francisco, and then the other part of the family was, I don't know the last name of...Link

ZachExactly. And then, you might know this, but my cousin is Marc Benioff of Salesforce.Link

LubaYou told me about your grandfather, actually.Link

ZachYeah. Okay. So there's a lot of good business people in my family. Marc's legendary, obviously. Marc's been a real supporter of me in different parts of my career, which has been very cool. And he's also great at sales. I think he's also great at marketing.Link

LubaDid you guys grow up together?Link

ZachHe's older than I am, so I wouldn't say that. But I do remember when I was maybe eight or something like that... I want to say he went to USC for college, and I grew up in LA. And I have this vivid memory of him... he had this white BMW convertible, and I think he was already successful somehow, and I remember him picking me up and driving me around in that. So I remember him from when I was a kid, but he's...Link

LubaHe was like a cool cousin.Link

ZachYeah, it was cool. Yeah.Link

LubaSo it seems like entrepreneurship really runs in your family.Link

ZachI mean, if that's a thing. I've always wanted that. My dad started a number of businesses, and, yeah, it was always what I wanted to do.Link

God, he started things all over the map. He was in the business of video production for a while. I forget all the businesses that he did. He ended up doing most of his career in public relations. But, yeah, I think starting a business is definitely a thing. Although with my parents, I wouldn't say that's what they wanted me to do. I went to law school for a year, and I think they were pretty pissed off when I left it. They would have been very happy with me being a lawyer, as a safer career path. I'm very glad I didn't actually do that. But, yeah, I wouldn't say there was ever any family thing of, like, time for you to start a business. They were pretty excited for me to go to law school, honestly.Link

LubaSo it's interesting hearing you say that you've always wanted to start a business, because I've also heard you say that it kind of took you longer than your peers to figure out what you really wanted to do. You know, the law school, the philosophy...Link

ZachYeah.Link

Luba...degree. I think you did a master's in philosophy, right?Link

ZachI did, yeah. I kind of suffered from a little indecision coming out of college, which I don't think is such a bad thing. But when I graduated school, I was of two minds. I was like, do I want to go into tech? And so I did a couple jobs right out of school that were pretty engineering...Link

LubaIt was like jet propulsion at NASA.Link

ZachYeah, I worked at NASA, which was cool. It was very cool. And then my undergrad... I studied philosophy a bit. My major was a weird, interdisciplinary combination of math and philosophy and computer science. And so, I don't know, I had a lot of different interests, and I had a hard time being like, this is what I want to commit to. So I think it's pretty different. There's a lot of people who start companies right out of school.Link

LubaOr drop out of school, or, I don't know.Link

ZachYeah. I was nowhere near that level of conviction that I should do something like that. I almost got a PhD...Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

Zach...in logic. I was all over the map, you know. I dropped out of law school. It took me a while to figure it out, which I think is fine. Would it have been cool if I had started an awesome company when I was 22? Probably. But it's also cool to start when you're in your 30s or whatever. So I don't really regret it.Link

LubaWhat do you think you were seeking when you were hopping around different subjects and industries, from NASA to philosophy to thinking of doing a PhD?Link

ZachThat's a good question. I think that I was looking for something that I was passionate about. And I liked a lot of things. And I had a little fear of commitment, that if I picked one thing, I wouldn't be able to do others. And I was, I think, kind of lucky. I was pretty good at doing both engineering stuff and more humanities-type stuff, which I think is a strength that I have, that I'm kind of interdisciplinary. I think that's a strength. So I wasn't a pure CS person, for instance. And I always liked writing. I liked stuff outside of tech as well. So, yeah, it was just hard for me to pick a lane.Link

LubaSo for someone listening who's also looking for their passion and is having a hard time committing, what would you recommend to them?Link

ZachSo first of all, I think that's fine. I think that there's value in having a bunch of different experiences. I'm glad that I have a philosophy degree, that I worked at NASA. I lived abroad for a year. I worked in a recording studio. So I don't think there's such a big rush. I think there's actual value in getting a bunch of different experiences. So that would be my first thing: don't torture yourself. Spend some time trying different things.Link

I do think at some point, though, it makes sense to commit to something. I would pick something where you care about it. And the reason I ended up picking working in tech was I ended up, you know, needing to make some money. I was like, what do I know how to do? I know how to program. I went back and started programming, and I was like, you know what? I actually really like this. It's fun to build stuff. The reason I stuck with it was because I was like, this is awesome. I actually ended up liking doing it. I like building. I felt like it was a positive thing to do for the world. And I got a little bit less focused on doing the perfect thing and more focused on just doing something that I found interesting.Link

LubaYeah. Your story of hopping around really reminds me of the story of Jean-Denis as well, because he also went to law school, in my recollection.Link

ZachI forgot that he did.Link

LubaYeah. He was also like, yeah, I was looking for something that I was passionate about, and it's fine to take your time. But I think right now we're living in such an environment where everyone's feeling like, oh my God, if I don't jump ship now...Link

ZachSo much pressure.Link

Luba...six months later, the opportunity will go away. So it's very counter to what's happening in the space right now.Link

ZachYeah. No, and I get that. I get the feeling of, you need to do everything all at once. But I think in reality...Link

LubaLife is long.Link

ZachYeah, I think so. I think that they'll look back... It's not like I regret trying a bunch of different things. It's a bunch of cool experiences.Link

LubaDo you feel like you studying philosophy, symbolic systems, and, you know, a little bit of everything here and there, is showing up in how you're building and leading right now?Link

ZachDefinitely. Like I said, I feel like it was a really good learn-how-to-think-broadly experience. And I think if you want to found a company, one of the things that is valuable, if you can do it, is to try to be a generalist and be cool with tackling whatever the most important problem for the company is at any given time. And that could be something that you're totally unfamiliar with, like marketing or sales for me. And so just having a background where I studied a lot of different stuff, especially philosophy, which I think teaches the kind of first-principles style of thinking and analysis, and teaches you how to write, I think is very valuable if you're in a role where you have to do a lot of different stuff.Link

LubaYeah, for sure. And I like that you said "learn how to think."Link

ZachYeah, I think that's really important. That is the main skill, I think, people coming out of college should try to get. It's just general critical thinking at this point, especially with AI. What I wouldn't bet on is some particular niche skill that an AI is going to be able to do very well, like coding. I would bet instead on: how do you think broadly? How do you do systems thinking? How do you do problem solving? How can you be really adaptable? And so philosophy is decent for that. There's a lot of degrees that are good for that. Whether it's...Link

LubaWhat are some of those degrees?Link

ZachI think any STEM degree, honestly, is going to be pretty good. I think if you study math or you study physics, those are good degrees for learning how to think clearly. I would focus on anything where you need to learn how to reason well, because that's the main skill that's very valuable for working with AI. That, and actually writing well. Being able to communicate your intent very well is very important in a world where you're basically telling AI to do things for you. So, yeah, that's what I would recommend. And I wouldn't get too anchored on a vocational skill, because I think that a lot of knowledge work vocations are going to kind of... yeah, I think so.Link

LubaOkay. So fast forward to you graduating. You end up at Google, and at Google, you were working on Google Sheets?Link

ZachYep.Link

LubaOne thing that stood out to me is that you said that a lot of stuff that you've learned about how to be a leader and run an engineering org came from Fuzzy.Link

ZachYeah.Link

LubaFuzzy... I do not know Fuzzy personally, but he's now the CTO at Notion, right? So tell me more about what it was like working with him. What specifically did you learn from him? And what role did he have at Google Sheets at that time? Was he your manager?Link

ZachSo Fuzzy is one of the creators of Google Sheets, for context. He was my manager. I joined Google Sheets when it was about five people.Link

LubaAnd it was a part of Google Labs. It was a very...Link

ZachIt wasn't a fully launched thing yet. For a Google product, it had very few users. It was really early in it. And I don't know Fuzzy... you should talk to him at some point. He's just known as the greatest people manager you'll ever meet. And what he's really good at is, first off, as a manager, he makes you feel like he is really thinking about your interests. How do you advance your career? How do you grow your skills? I would say it always felt like he was looking for opportunities for me to do harder things, which is pretty empowering. So it was never about him telling me what to do. It was more about him making space for me to do things that had impact and helped me grow.Link

He's super empathetic. He just has great interpersonal skills, and he's also very, very good at setting up a team that wants to work together, and setting a goal that we all cared about. So, again, a lot of the way that I try to manage an engineering team, I would say, comes from those principles. And if you're managing really smart people, and at Google there's a lot of really smart people, I think figuring out how you can empower people who are working is one of the main jobs of a manager, and he's really good at that.Link

LubaYeah. This reminds me that in my conversation with Michelle, who was the second engineer at Warp, she spoke very warmly about the fact that you looked out for opportunities for her, because she came to you being like, I want to start a company someday. And she really felt like you empowered her to have different opportunities to learn what it's like to be a founder.Link

ZachThat's great. That makes me really happy. Yeah, she's exactly the mold here, where she joined Warp basically out of college, but she's super-duper smart and talented and very driven. And the thing that was best for Warp, and I think best for her... she always wants to take on a challenge. She's really good at learning how to do it. And so she did engineering, then she ran our growth team, then she ran product for a little bit, and she did early sales for us. And she was good at everything because she's just a talented, capable person. And so that's who you want to hire, just to be clear. At a startup, especially in the early stage, one is: hire a super talented generalist. So that's cool, that she felt like she got opportunity.Link

LubaYeah, definitely. Do you have any stories with Fuzzy where you felt super empowered with the work that he gave you, so you could grow your skill set and your role on Google Sheets?Link

ZachHe made me the engineering lead really early, which...Link

LubaYou felt you were ready for, probably?Link

ZachI mean, it wasn't a thing I was looking for. And it was a thing I was slightly uncomfortable with, because he was the creator of it, and there were a few other people on the team who had definitely been there.Link

LubaAnd when you say he was the creator of it, he had the idea and executed it? Is that what you mean?Link

ZachSo he had actually started a company. Google Sheets was an acquisition of a company that wasn't exactly a collaborative spreadsheet. It was a different product, but it was similar, and it was him and this guy Jonathan Rochelle. And they came in... so I think they get credit for starting the thing, and they built a lot of the first version of it.Link

But then another cool thing that Fuzzy always did... so he put me in charge on the engineering side, which was a lot of trust for something that he started. And then he used to brag about how we had gotten rid of all of his code.Link

LubaBrag? Like, he was not salty?Link

ZachNo, no, he was like, this is great, get rid of it all. And he always used to tell this story about when I first started at Google. Google had, you know, it's really swanky, they had these massage chairs.Link

LubaYeah, yeah.Link

ZachAnd I had started at Google, I was just learning how all this Sheets technology worked. I was really in over my head. I did not understand how any of it worked. And so at the end of the day, I went and sat in this massage chair, and he walked by. It was probably like eight at night, and he was like, oh God, is he okay? I was so stressed out from all of it. And so he always tells the story about how me having to deal with his code... he was afraid it was gonna make me quit Google or something. So, I don't know, he's just a real humble dude. I think humility is a really good trait that he exhibited.Link

LubaSo would you say that to be a really great people manager, you've got to look out for opportunities for your teammates? Humility and empathy?Link

ZachI think humility, empathy, helping people grow. But I also think there's another person on the manager side I liked a lot. Do you know Kim Scott?Link

LubaSounds very familiar. So she's at...Link

ZachNo, no, no, she was at Google, and then she's written a book on management.Link

LubaOkay.Link

ZachCalled *Radical Candor*.Link

LubaOh, yes. Of course. I've read *Radical Candor*. It's very similar to *Difficult Conversations*.Link

ZachYeah. And so I think the other thing you've got to do, especially if you're managing very capable people, is you have to be able to tell people the truth. And the mistake you can make, if you want to emulate Fuzzy without being sophisticated about it, is imagining that your job as a manager is just to be a coach and a cheerleader. But the thing that you also have to do is you have to be able to tell people how to improve and give them feedback about what they're not doing.Link

LubaWell, that's kind and direct, and to just...Link

ZachBe direct and honest, and it should be out of the interest in helping them improve. So you can't just be a cheerleader. A mistake that people will make, especially with really smart, high-performing people, is just to never give them...Link

LubaAnd you, radical...Link

ZachYou just never give them honest feedback about how they can improve. So that is a really important part of being a manager, the feedback. I mean, you have to hold people accountable. So it's not all cheerleading, but it's a mix of them. But always having some combination of their interests and also what's the goal of the team or the company in mind.Link

LubaJumping a little to Warp, which we'll also come back to in detail. But on the topic of radical feedback, do you feel like, as a founder of a now decently medium-sized company, you're still receiving honest feedback?Link

ZachI'm a solo founder, so I'm missing a source of a peer, which would be nice. I basically get feedback from people who are on the team, where, again, I think we have a pretty good culture around this. We do a process called retros, where every month we get together as an entire company and basically go...Link

LubaOh, it's the entire company.Link

ZachIt's our company.Link

LubaAnd you guys are, what, like 50 people now?Link

ZachWe're like 60, 65 people, or something like that. We get together and we basically go through what's going well, what's not going well, which we tend to focus more on, and then what are the concrete changes that we want to make. And people are pretty honest. One of the company values that we have, and one of the things I explicitly tell people when they come on the team, is I really want honest takes. Everyone on the team is really smart and has a good take. So I hope people give me good feedback. I think it can be hard just because I'm the CEO or whatever, and there's this power dynamic that I don't always realize, where people could be not wanting to say what they think to me.Link

LubaSo how do you encourage a culture that stays honest and true despite the power dynamic?Link

ZachI try to be kind of self-critical, and get ahead of what are the things that I'm messing up, to sort of disarm people. I do office hours, where I encourage people to come and talk to me. But it is a challenge. Sometimes you can ask people directly, like, what do you think?Link

LubaAnd they would be like, everything's great.Link

ZachYeah. It's just hard. People have a natural instinct, when you're talking to someone who has authority over them, to not say anything that's going to get them in trouble. We do other stuff too, where you can be anonymous. We do a culture survey, and it's always kind of eye-opening, because I'm like, oh, people think that? I had no idea.Link

LubaWas there anything recently that surprised you, where you were like, oh shit, I need to change that?Link

ZachYeah, it's like, people think they're working real hard. And I was just... fair. People are working real hard.Link

LubaBut are you guys on 996?Link

ZachNo, no, no, we explicitly don't do that. But the expectation that we have is like 50 to 60 hours of work a week, which I honestly think for an early-stage startup is pretty reasonable. But it's a lot. It's more than...Link

LubaIt's more than a...Link

Zach...a regular job or whatever.Link

LubaI wanted to say more than a big tech job, but never mind. I know Meta is really working their employees really hard.Link

ZachSo, but, you know, in our culture survey, people were feeling pretty burnt out. Which I was like, oh, really? And then I was like, okay, I guess that makes sense. We're pushing very hard, and we're pushing, I would say, way harder recently, because the space that we're in is changing so quickly. And it's so extremely competitive, which is good, by the way. You want to be in a space that people care about. But, yeah, we're pushing people hard. We're really working hard.Link

LubaI want to come back to the space and talk a bit more about how it's changing, and why you went into tech, starting with the terminal. But I want to jump back to your post-Google time. So post-Google, you go to start SelfMade as a CTO.Link

ZachYeah, so the story there. I left Google. I had a really cool career at Google. By the time I was done with Google, I was leading engineering for all of the Google Docs suite. And I kind of was like, I want a different kind of challenge.Link

LubaYou were there for like seven years, or...Link

ZachLike seven or eight years, something like that. And so I was like, I want a different kind of challenge. I always wanted to start something. I had an idea for, in retrospect, a pretty bad idea, for a photo-sharing mobile app, which, I don't know what I was doing. I was like, oh, this is an Instagram...Link

LubaBut I guess that was already past.Link

ZachYeah, it was not a good idea. And then I didn't know how to do it at all. I left Google, I was like, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna build this myself. And so I worked on that for like six months, and I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. I probably should network a bit and get a bit more education. I got... people used it, maybe it had a few thousand users, but it was not...Link

LubaThat's pretty solid. Yeah, I guess compared to hundreds of millions, like Google, it was okay.Link

ZachYeah, I was like, this is going nowhere. So I was like, what should I do? And I ended up trying to just build my network, understand a little bit more how founding worked. And I got sort of set up, fixed up, with a co-founder.Link

LubaCo-founder dating?Link

ZachYeah. With a co-founder...Link

LubaMarriage.Link

Zach...who was starting this company and was looking for, you know, a partner, a technical co-founder. And he's a friend of mine. He's a very good salesperson. And basically, I got convinced that it was a good thing for me to work on. So we started the company. The original concept was basically photo editing as a service. So this is before AI. It's been totally displaced by AI, but it was before AI. And the concept was you'd basically have a mobile app where you would submit photos, and some photo editor would improve the photo somehow, whether it was retouching it or making it look like marketing copy or whatever. So that's where it started. It pivoted a bunch of times, and we grew it. We had multiple millions of revenue. And we raised a Series A. So it had some semblance of product-market fit, but it wasn't...Link

LubaA rocket ship.Link

ZachIt wasn't a rocket ship. And it was also not the right fit for me, from a what-do-I-care-about standpoint. A lot of the customers were heavy into social media, or they wanted to be influencers.Link

LubaYeah, you don't seem exactly like...Link

ZachI couldn't care. I just don't care. And so, I mean, I can go through the lessons of it, but I was there for like three years, and then we kind of had a little founder breakup, which was very, very, very stressful. And, yeah, that was that experience. That was my first startup experience.Link

LubaSo I read somewhere that you wrote a really long postmortem.Link

ZachI did. Yes.Link

LubaDid you ever share it?Link

ZachI'll never share it, because it's got very unfiltered thoughts about a lot of stuff. But I did it for myself. The first thing I did when I left the company was I spent a month writing, and it's like 40 pages of learnings or whatever. What happened? What can I take away from it? And I'm glad I did that, because I think I would have forgotten. But I'll never share it.Link

LubaYeah, so we're not getting any exclusives. But what did you take away from that experience that informed you in starting Warp?Link

ZachYeah. I mean, there are a bunch of lessons. I would say the really big ones were: you've got to work on something you care about. So what I mentioned before, working to help social media influencers share better pictures, I couldn't care less about. It's very hard to sell a thing if you don't believe in it. I really wanted to work on a software business, and this was a business that was...Link

LubaVery operationally heavy.Link

ZachVery. We had like 150 people working for us.Link

LubaWow. Editing photos?Link

ZachYeah. But like a hundred of them were in Jakarta, Indonesia.Link

LubaOh my God.Link

ZachSo it was just this massive people-coordination thing. And that is not my passion or strong suit.Link

LubaSo for a little bit after... I spent a few years, like four and a half years, at Airbnb. And when I decided I wanted to take the leap to start my own company, my first stint was helping companies hire Eastern European engineers. So it's kind of like an outsourcing business, right? I wasn't the one managing the operations. I had a partner in Belarus who was managing operations. But whenever I was getting into the weeds of the recruiting, getting people to sit on the bench while the projects were still in flux, or looking for a project, I was like, oh my God, I do not want to ever deal with these ops-heavy businesses.Link

ZachNo. I like building software. I wanted to work on something that I thought was more of just a positive thing for the world. Not that helping social media influencers is bad. But again, it wasn't what I was gonna tell my kids. Like, what'd you do with your life? I helped yoga teachers post better pictures on Instagram. It's very not motivating.Link

LubaDo you think your kid will be jazzed to hear that you reimagined the terminal?Link

ZachI think he'll be jazzed that I worked on something that I care about. And that's the lesson that I want him to take away: work on something you care about.Link

And then the business itself, I would say we never got true product-market fit, even though, like I say, we did scale the revenue. We were always able to sell the thing. There was demand from people who wanted what we were selling. But the product itself wasn't ever awesome. And so we had a lot of churn, a lot of customers complaining. It was just not fun. And you're always gonna have some of that. Starting a company is extremely hard, just as a rule. But because it had all these problems and I didn't really care about the mission, it put me in a weird spot where I was selling things I didn't really believe in. And so that was the biggest thing. And then I took all those lessons, and when I decided I wanted to start Warp, I was like, I'm not gonna make this particular set of mistakes again. I might make other ones, but I really wanted to avoid making those.Link

LubaSo I think it's interesting... I guess you look back and you see patterns, or connect the dots, that Google Sheets was redefining a product that already existed. And then you decided to take apart the terminal.Link

ZachAnd basically follow it. I was like, what's a product that a lot of people use that isn't very good, that I think could be made better? And when you use it, you create a lot of economic value. People use spreadsheets to create a lot of value. The original concept behind Warp was to modernize the terminal, but it was also to make it collaborative. And so, again, there's a parallel with Google Sheets there. I saw an interesting parallel, and I was like, I think I can build a really good version of this. I think I know how to do it. It fits my skills really well.Link

LubaSo did you take more of an academic approach, trying to find your next startup idea, or was it like you were called to the terminal?Link

ZachNo, it's a little bit more like... my thought process was, I kind of had a general realm of the type of things that I was interested in.Link

LubaSo, software.Link

ZachSoftware. Generally, I was going to do something to help knowledge workers or to help developers. I was like, those are the things I know and I care about, and I think I would feel good about working on. And then within that realm, I was like, well, what are the things that I personally experienced some pain with, and where do I think I could build something useful? And I could have easily built something in the knowledge work space. I ended up going for the developer space because I felt like I knew that well.Link

LubaWere there any people who were helping you out with the idea maze while you were in it?Link

ZachYeah, so I worked with a couple people who would become investors in the company. One was this guy Greg at BoxGroup, which is a seed-stage fund. And the other was Erik at GV, who I know you talked to. I would say I did most of it, and the way it would work would be I'd spend the week prototyping or thinking of ideas, and then I would check in with them every week or two and be like, hey, what do you think of this? And then I kind of circled in on a few different things that I thought were cool, and ended up going with the terminal, which was cool.Link

LubaSo for someone listening who is in the idea maze, would you recommend that they spend time with VCs? Because I know that sometimes incentives can be not exactly aligned.Link

ZachYeah, I think everyone's different. I don't think there's a system. I had worked with both Greg and Erik from even before SelfMade, so I had known them for a while. You know, Erik was an engineer at Google, so I trusted them a bunch. And it was almost like working with friends, kind of. But they did want to invest. I don't know, it might be better to work with a potential co-founder. It might be better to just put ideas in front of potential users. There's a lot of ways to go about it, so I don't...Link

LubaWhy did you decide not to look for a co-founder?Link

ZachPrimarily because, at the first company I did, I didn't love the experience of being... I was the CTO, not the CEO. It's kind of an uncomfortable position, to be one of the two main people but not be the person who's ultimately making the calls. I just really didn't want to repeat that. And then for Warp more specifically, I felt like there wasn't a complementary skill set that I really needed. Because it was such a developer thing, I thought I could do most of the product. I had the domain knowledge. I felt like I could hire people well. That was one of the things that I actually really learned from SelfMade, how to hire. So I felt like I could do it.Link

LubaSo how do you hire?Link

ZachYeah. So like I was saying before, I think hiring really is sales. If you want awesome people to come work for you, you have to convince them that that's a good idea. And anyone who's really awesome is going to have a lot of opportunities. So it's not just money or anything. You have to convince them, really, that you're likely to succeed at some level, or it's a great mission, it's going to be a great place to work.Link

LubaBut I'm sure you have to pay up now, too, because the market is insane.Link

ZachYeah. Although you would be surprised. You definitely do. But the best people are very motivated by mission, not necessarily by the financial side. And for startups, the best people tend to want, I would say, equity and ownership. And so I would much rather do that than really stretch on salary. And I'm kind of wary of people who want huge salaries to go work at startups, because you want everyone to realize what they're getting into at a startup, which is: you should be there because you want the company to win. You believe the company has a chance to win. And if you are financially motivated, which is totally cool and reasonable, you should be there for the equity portion of it. People obviously need money to live day to day, and so we'll try and be as competitive as we can. But you want people who are more in it to have the company win.Link

And then the key thing, if you want to convince someone who's awesome to come work with you, is you've got to really have a compelling pitch as to why. And so for Warp, this was my entire focus in the first part of the company: how to present what we were doing in a way that would be compelling enough, honestly, for a great engineer, or someone like Michelle, to turn down whatever else she could be doing, which is a lot, and take a bet on the company. And so you've got to present the product vision. You've got to present what's the business opportunity. You've got to prove that you can be a competent manager and leader and all that. So for anyone starting a company that has capital to hire a team, I would really focus on just attracting the absolute best people you can from the beginning, and that takes a lot of work.Link

LubaSo rebuilding the terminal doesn't sound like a very obvious idea right off the get-go. Did you have more cheerleaders, people who were like, oh yeah, I get this, or more people who were not getting why you decided to embark on this mission?Link

ZachIt's funny. I still don't even know if it was a good idea. So the investor thesis of it was, look, it's a tool that pretty much every developer has open every day. They do a lot of very valuable work for their business in that tool. The actual existing state of the product is pretty bad, in my opinion. Some developers really like it.Link

LubaYou mean the existing state, like the old terminals?Link

ZachLike the pre-Warp...Link

LubaOh, got it. Like iTerm, like Terminal.Link

ZachSome developers love those. I think that they suck. They don't work the way that I would like the terminal to work. And so the investors saw it as, well, okay, that's a big opportunity to get a bunch of developers as users. And then for venture-backed companies, there is a little bit of, well, if we can do that, we'll figure out how to monetize it. They liked that it was kind of non-obvious, right?Link

LubaIt's not like everyone's going to jump and work on this specific idea.Link

ZachYeah. It's a little bit of an opportunity to build something good without incredible competitive pressure right at the beginning. I think they would pattern match. The investors do a lot of pattern matching. They're kind of like, oh, it's similar to Figma, or similar to Airtable, or...Link

LubaRight. They were also building for a long time before they came out to the public.Link

ZachYeah. And it's really hard technically to do a good job of this. And so they were like, it's gonna be hard to copy if we do it well, which is very true. Now, the challenge was, well, what's the business model?Link

LubaYeah.Link

ZachWhich is very legit. In our theory, the business model was going to be around collaboration. That didn't prove to be what the business model really is, although it's becoming more relevant again.Link

LubaYeah, with agent development. But with the terminal, you guys tested out collaboration, tried to put a business model on it, and it didn't work.Link

ZachOr it was more like there just isn't that strong of a pull to collaborate in the terminal.Link

LubaThat's fair.Link

ZachWhich makes sense. We had a theory of different use cases where it would be really valuable, but it's just, I don't know, sometimes... We were right about people wanting a better terminal. We immediately got a lot of user traction, and have always had really good user traction and user growth.Link

LubaYeah.Link

ZachAnd we're one of the most popular terminals in the world.Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

ZachOh, yeah.Link

LubaHow many terminal users do you guys have?Link

ZachWe're nearly a million. Which, again, doesn't sound like much compared to Instagram or whatever, but there's not that many developers. And so that's a significant number. If you think about a tool like Claude Code or something, I don't know their exact user number, but it's like 5 million.Link

LubaOh, I guess Claude Code specifically.Link

ZachYeah. So in developer tools, if you get a million developers, that's...Link

LubaThat's a lot of developers.Link

ZachA lot of developers. And so we were always popular on the user side. The business side was always kind of unclear until AI became a thing. And we kind of got very lucky with that. We didn't start thinking that there were going to be AI agents. We started in 2020. But that has turned into our business model, which is basically putting an agent inside of Warp.Link

LubaSo tell me more about when you guys realized that that's where you needed to go.Link

ZachYeah. We realized that, I would say, early, but gradually. So we had AI features in Warp even before ChatGPT came out. I think ChatGPT was, what, '22? So we had a feature in Warp where you could type in English and it would turn into a terminal command. And people were like, whoa, that's really cool. And then when ChatGPT came out, we were like, okay, this is going to be very relevant to us, because so much of what you do in the terminal is entering these really arcane...Link

LubaCommands.Link

Zach...hard-to-do workflows. There's all sorts of errors with them. And so having AI directly in there would be useful. And so within like a month after ChatGPT, we had an AI feature in Warp that was useful, but it was more like a chat panel. And then it took us a bit more time to realize that it's not a native enough use of the technology, and that there was a better way to do it. And so I would say by the end of '23, we were pretty much all oriented around AI, not so much around collaboration or anything else. And then we had basically a feature that worked like Claude Code or Codex in Warp six months before them.Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

ZachYeah. But it didn't really code. It just did terminal stuff. That was the mistake. So I would say...Link

LubaDo you regret that?Link

ZachYeah. There have definitely been a bunch of things where we saw the future actually pretty early, but we should have gone harder at it.Link

LubaWhat do you think prevented you from doing it then?Link

ZachWe were just talking about this internally in one of our retros. I think that we were a bit afraid of alienating our existing user base, who wasn't totally bought in on AI. And so, you know, developers adopted AI at different paces. For a long time, there was a lot of anti-AI sentiment amongst developers. They felt like it was...Link

LubaIt wasn't good enough. It's going to be awful.Link

ZachYeah, exactly. We went maybe 50% of the gas down on AI, when I think we should have been bolder, 100% down on it. And now we're only doing AI, and we're not even focused on the terminal part of AI. We're 100% focused on what we think is the next big thing, because everything is changing so quickly.Link

LubaWhat's the next big thing?Link

ZachSo in software development, the next big thing is automating development. It's moving away from this idea that coding agents should be these interactive things that you sit at on your laptop and type into, and moving much more to a world where agents live in the cloud. They're all oriented around your team, and they are just doing parts of the software development lifecycle for you. So they are responding to bugs, they're fixing server crashes, and they do as much as possible with just pure automation.Link

LubaSo then you just come and approve, or...Link

ZachYeah. It's like...Link

LubaHumans...Link

ZachHumans still do the hard parts. What should you build? Is this being built in the right way? Is the product working the right way? But increasingly, every company is going to set up what we call a cloud software factory. And that software factory is going to automate a significant portion of your work. And so at Warp right now, we basically fully automate like 30% of our work, which is significant. And that's going to just grow. And it doesn't mean that we're not doing interesting stuff as engineers. We are. We don't write code very often, but we improve that cycle. And so we're all focused on how do you improve that, so that you can build something that's more useful for people, faster and at lower cost. Cost is a big thing now too. These tools have gotten very expensive.Link

LubaDoes the engineer become a product manager, then?Link

ZachIt's like, they're not really... The key things that the engineers still do... they do have a big product piece. And I've always hired people on the engineering side at Warp who care about the product. We've always given all of our engineers a product management interview. It's one of the unique things we do. So I'm very big into product thinking. But they also need to be able to think about the system, because one of the big risks with automating more of it is the agent can do something really catastrophically bad if you don't understand what the hell is going on. And so they're kind of systems thinkers and leaders. Make sure this gets built in a reasonable way. Make sure that we're not doing something that's going to make the app terribly slow or buggy, or going to crash or lose user data. And so they're the guardians of that. And they also provide the product guidance. So those are the two roles. So it's not pure product manager.Link

LubaBut a little bit of product thinking.Link

ZachYou have to be a good product thinker. Absolutely. Yeah.Link

LubaComing back to that point of regret, that you regret not going full speed on AI back in 2022, '23. How do you, as a leader, decide when to go full YOLO, send it? What's the process?Link

ZachIt's an awesome question. I think one of the things that I am trying to get better at, in all honesty, is fully committing, because we've had a lot of moments at Warp where it's like we're doing this and that, instead of just picking the thing and being like, screw it.Link

LubaDoes it tie back to when you were...Link

ZachLooking around? My problem, it's like, oh, I want to do philosophy and I want to do symbolic systems. Yeah. And so my weakness, or one of my weaknesses, is that I'm like, well, we can do this and that. Whereas what you should really do is place a big bet and go maximal focus on it. And you might be wrong, but if you're right, the outcome is going to be way better. And so we've hedged a little bit too much. But we know that. And so we're not doing that.Link

LubaSelf-aware. Yeah.Link

ZachYeah. Again, we're always trying to look at what we're doing and be like, hmm, what are our bad tendencies? What are our weaknesses? And this is definitely one of them. And so now we're just very consciously being like, you know, there's a million things we'd like to do, but we're only going to do this cloud software factory concept. That's what's going to be the future. We have full conviction in it. We'll figure out how to bring our terminal user base along to that. But what I don't want to do is be like, oh shit, I saw that coming, but we didn't fully take the risk on it. So that's one of my more recent things as the founder that I think about a bunch: how can we go full conviction, full commit, on more things, and not try to catch...Link

LubaYeah. And as a founder, is someone holding you accountable? Is someone helping you out? Maybe it's an executive coach, or maybe it's your board, or maybe it's your wife.Link

ZachMy wife is holding me accountable for being a decent dad, and making sure I don't spend all my time working and make myself miserable. Honestly, the thing that holds you accountable as the founder, at the end of the day, is that you have to build something that is a working business. And so it's the market more than anything. Because at some point, if you don't do that...Link

LubaBut, you know, the market can still be showing you that whatever you're building is kind of working. You had that with SelfMade. It was kind of working, but you don't know how well it would have been working if you...Link

ZachYeah, but ultimately, no. You can kind of trick yourself into thinking it's working. But at SelfMade, we were churning people too quickly. And so you have to build something that, at the end of the day, is a good business. So that's the ultimate thing.Link

Our investors... that's true, I think that their philosophy is definitely not to manage the founders. Not at all. What they're doing is they're placing bets on founders and trying to let the founder execute. They'll provide a supporting role, but they're certainly not managing me. So no one's really managing me.Link

LubaYou have to manage yourself.Link

ZachYeah, basically. And what we're doing either works and it's great, or eventually it doesn't work, and that's kind of on me. And, yeah, it's really hard to be a founder, but that is the dynamic of it. First and foremost, most startups don't work. So it's risky. I wouldn't recommend being a founder unless you're down to endure a lot of shit going wrong. But that's good. If you want to do anything worthwhile, I think it's gonna be really hard.Link

LubaWhat would you say are the pains that you're enduring right now as a founder?Link

ZachI mean, literally, my back hurts. That's just me getting old. That's not a founder pain.Link

LubaI'm sorry that we're walking now.Link

ZachThe walking is good for it. I'm just getting old.Link

I'll just give you some random examples. Anytime someone leaves the team, I hate it. I feel like we've screwed up in some way. And people are always kind of coming and going, and people move on for different reasons, and sometimes we let people go and all that. But when there's good people who we want to keep, and they decide to move on, whether because we burnt them out or they have some other opportunity or they're getting poached by Anthropic or whatever, it's real frustrating, because it's so hard to hire people. So that's always the thing in my mind.Link

It's hard to make everyone on the team happy at all times and keep them motivated. And, you know, numbers go up, numbers go down. You have to disconnect and take the long view. If you're staring at your graph every day and it's not going up as fast as you want it to, it can just take over your life. So trying to figure out ways to disconnect and be like, we can't really control the outcome. All we can control is how we execute, and the outcome is what it is. Just having that kind of mindset is something that I'm always trying to do.Link

I don't really have an executive coach. We do have a communications coach on the team who's really good.Link

LubaWhy a communications coach?Link

ZachI guess her specialty is kind of executive comms. She's just a mature external person who's a consultant for us, who helps me think about how to talk to, often, press, but also just frame things in general in the right way to the company. So that's been helpful. But, yeah, I don't have a CEO coach at the moment.Link

LubaDo you meditate, or have any sort of mental health or stress management techniques?Link

ZachI like to exercise. When I'm not... when my back's not bugging me, I like to exercise. I think that's my best outlet. I try to exercise every day. I like to spend time with my kid. He doesn't give a shit about my company, right?Link

LubaYeah.Link

ZachAnd so that's a good thing. And then the other stuff that I like to do that's kind of mindless... I really like to cook. And when I'm cooking, I really like watching cooking competition shows.Link

LubaOh, that's awesome.Link

ZachYeah, that's a thing I'm weirdly into.Link

LubaLike *Top Chef*? Like fucking *Top Chef*?Link

Zach*Beat Bobby Flay*. I like all these stupid, mindless cooking shows, for some reason. It's my favorite way of unplugging.Link

LubaDo you cook?Link

ZachI do, because where I live right now is rural, and we literally can't even get a Domino's Pizza delivered.Link

LubaWow.Link

ZachYeah. It's ridiculous. So between me...Link

LubaI want to start a farm-to-table...Link

ZachI wish we had that. We don't. I'm just cooking out of necessity.Link

LubaHow was it, starting the company, for your partner? I think you guys didn't have a kid just yet. Did you have to give up anything, given that you already had a family? And what did that look like at home?Link

ZachSo when I started Warp, we weren't even married. We got married a couple of years in. I mean, she's super supportive, and I think I'm supportive, too, in the sense that we have moved someplace where she can work. She's a ski instructor in the winter. And then with the kid, I do a lot, but she does more, she would say. She gets that I'm in a super intense, highly competitive thing. I care most about my kid, and then I care second most about the company. And she's super supportive. You know, she'll take the kid so I can work on weekends. She'll do a bunch of stuff that lets me make sure I'm trying my hardest to make it more successful.Link

LubaSo bottom line, find a partner who understands your ambition and is supportive.Link

ZachYeah. I mean, I think if she didn't understand that, that would suck, because starting the company is a lot. Again, I don't want to make it a bigger deal than it is, because it's not like I'm saving the world or something, but it's more than a job. And I do feel like I owe it to everyone who has come to work at Warp, everyone who has invested, all the people who use it and like it, to try to make it into as successful a thing as possible, so it's around for as long as possible. And that's a fairly intense amount of pressure. I actually really feel a lot of pressure.Link

LubaYeah. Being a founder is incredibly stressful.Link

ZachIt is very stressful.Link

LubaYeah. So that was one of the reasons why I also wrapped up my founder journey, after being at it for about three and a half years.Link

ZachI get it.Link

LubaRight. Yeah, it's very stressful, especially solo. I was solo as well.Link

ZachSo I don't have a peer to talk to. Our investors are very, very good, and I talk to them, and I'm very honest with them. But there's just a ton of pressure that I constantly feel to do everything I can to make it successful, but it's not totally in my control.Link

LubaWhat have you learned from your investors? Who do you talk to the most?Link

ZachYeah, so there's three of them who I talk to the most. It's Greg and Erik, who I started the company with. And then it's Andrew...Link

LubaAndrew?Link

ZachReed. Andrew Reed, who's an awesome investor. And they all have different perspectives. Erik was a software developer, so he's got really good perspective on the product and developer feedback. Andrew is super smart strategically and on big-picture stuff. I really trust his sense of what matters in the world, what's the high-level direction we should take the company, just because he's invested in so many really, really good companies. And then Greg is maybe the one who I'm closest with. The company wouldn't exist without him. He would be the first person I would call if I was having an issue managing someone or whatever.Link

LubaThat's a very complementary mix.Link

ZachYeah. They're awesome. I feel very lucky about that. But, you know, you have to realize they're investors, and they don't have the same amount of...Link

LubaInsight?Link

ZachYeah, insight, or skin in the game. They're not in the day to day. They have outside perspective, which is good. But it's not the same as living in the mess of it. If I had a co-founder, I think that would be the most useful thing, to have someone who is a peer who you really can talk to.Link

LubaSo your suppliers, Claude, ChatGPT, or I guess OpenAI, Anthropic, are also your competitors. How do you think about that?Link

ZachYeah, we're trying not to compete with them. They're too big. And they basically have cost advantages on providing AI that we can't compete with. So I would say for a little bit, I conceived of them as competitors. And at this point, as much as possible, we try to be complementary to them, which means we are trying not to be in the business of reselling inference or reselling tokens, and are more about being in the business of how do you help people... they can even bring their own tokens... have the best interface and infrastructure for building agents. So for a minute we were like, oh, they're competitors. Now, obviously, they're not our competitors. They're too big, they have too much traction. They can offer way better prices on anything token-related. So we've kind of pivoted away from that.Link

LubaSo now you guys are headed to this cloud automated agent world.Link

ZachExactly. And we're trying to be sort of Switzerland there. So as a company, you can bring your own inference. You can use open-weight models. Actually, those are totally changing the dynamics of the market right now. And so we're trying to position ourselves as, hey, you don't have to choose us or them. You can use us with them. You can use us with whatever you want. Basically, whatever is the best inference or model or agent in the future, you can invest in our platform and infrastructure and still be able to use that. So that's how the positioning has changed, because the competitive angle is too hard.Link

LubaThat makes sense. Tell me more about what that developer future looks like.Link

ZachYeah. So I think the future is something like: if you're a company, you're still going to have an engineering team. They're going to be very product-minded engineers. And they aren't ever going to be writing code by hand. That's almost done now. They're not even going to be sitting at their computer telling Claude Code what to do, or Codex what to do.Link

LubaIt's going to be automatic.Link

ZachFor the most part. Yeah. It'll be like, okay, there was a crash. An agent diagnoses it, an agent figures out, here's the root cause. The agent comes up with a fix. If it's a simple fix, the agent merges it. Maybe the human looks at it, maybe not. The agent monitors the fix. For things that aren't simple bugs or stuff like that, the job of the engineer is going to be, well, how do I figure out what to build? It's really important that you build the right thing. You have to build something that solves the user problem. And then, how do I make sure that this factory actually creates the right product? And that might mean, did it build the right user experience? Did it build it in a way that will scale? And so you're managing this. And then you want to make sure that that thing gets more efficient, because it's expensive to apply intelligence. So your job is going to be, as we call it, almost like becoming a factory engineer. You're going to be managing that factory.Link

LubaFactory engineer. That's good. You know, like forward-deployed engineers.Link

ZachThat's what I call it. I did a keynote at the AI Engineer World's Fair on this topic. And I do think that's what's going to happen. Another way of putting it...Link

LubaIt's like managing a factory floor.Link

ZachYeah. You're going to be building the system that builds the product, rather than just building the product. And if you have to directly go build the product, it's kind of like you're taking a car off the assembly line to hammer a door onto it. That's not what you want to be doing. You want to be building the robot that can do a thousand doors, right? So it's a change in mindset for what engineering is.Link

LubaSo by what percentage do you think engineering as a profession will be reduced?Link

ZachI don't know if it will be reduced. It's a great question. I know that it will change. Whether there will be more or fewer engineers in the world, I don't know. I would bet strongly that there will be way more software, because the cost of code is going to zero. The cost of producing software, which is a little bit distinct from just writing code, is going down. But there's also infinite demand for software in the world. Every company in the world has a sort of infinite backlog of things that they want to do to improve the experience of their product and their customers, and new businesses they want to start. So I don't know if the increase in demand will make it so that there may still be just as many developers, but their job is going to look very different.Link

LubaRight. I heard you have this point of view that apps will become obsolete, and it's going to be all from idea to an output or result. Tell me more about it.Link

ZachYeah. So my idea here was, if you take what's happening now, where you can basically pull up a prompt and ask Claude Code or Codex or Warp to build you an app, if you take that idea to its extreme, you get a world where every app is built just when someone needs it, and it's tailored just to their exact use case. And that's kind of a better experience, in theory at least, than some people making an app. And by app I mean... Google Sheets is a good example. Rather than using a Google Sheet these days for a lot of stuff, what I'll do is I'll just paste a CSV into an agent and I'll be like, do the analysis.Link

LubaYou will not have the interface of interaction with this product that is Google Sheets.Link

ZachI don't need to go in there and type a bunch of formulas, and bold, and drag rows and columns. Anything that has that kind of interface, where I have to do all that work and learn how to use that interface, is a waste of my time compared to just being like, hey, here's some data, I want to understand XYZ about it. Maybe I'll be like, can you make me a graph from it? Maybe I'll be like, can you just explain the insights, or do the statistical analysis that I want? But the idea of having these intermediate productivity apps where the user has to spend a lot of time learning how to use them... I think so.Link

LubaSo what companies are safe? What do you think from the software world will stay and what will be up?Link

ZachSo I think things that are safe are things where the value is in... like DoorDash. Anything that's physical, for now, before robots become more of a thing, is very safe. So DoorDash, which is not really a software company in my opinion. It's a software-enabled delivery company. I think Stripe is pretty safe and set to benefit, because they have done something that's very hard from an integration standpoint, and there's a huge network effect where everyone uses Stripe. And I think anything with a huge network effect is pretty safe.Link

I think things that are productivity tools... again, I'll say Google Sheets, which I worked on. I don't think spreadsheets are going away, but pulling up a Google Sheet is not my first instinct anymore for data analysis. And so those use cases are going to be eaten by these general agent interfaces where you can just do everything that you want to do, on demand. And so there's a whole class of apps like that. I think apps that are just specific SaaS interfaces on top of databases, the SaaS interfaces...Link

LubaAre going to be unnecessary.Link

ZachIt's useless. The database is still very useful. So, you know, to pick on Marc's company, if you're Salesforce, I don't think the way that people are going to want to use Salesforce in the future is through their UI, which has never been that awesome. But Salesforce might be just fine, because they have all of this data and business logic and workflow around it that I think is still valuable.Link

LubaWhat do you believe today about developer tools, or being a founder, that only gets stronger every day?Link

ZachYeah. So I think that developers as a market are inherently very fragmented. And there are basically no examples of products that dominate the market, which is interesting. There are products that dominate it for a moment in time, but nothing enduring. The one that I think was closest is GitHub.Link

LubaYeah, yes.Link

ZachBut I think even GitHub is at risk of being disrupted. If you look at developers as a group, they all want to try the newest thing. They all...Link

LubaVery opinionated.Link

ZachSo opinionated. They want to customize the shit out of their thing. You know, some of them will love a thing, some of them will hate it. And so that's a lesson about the market that I think is really, really interesting. But on the flip side, they're also very, very valuable customers. They're the most influential buyers in any company. They're the ones who are driving all of the explosive growth for Anthropic and OpenAI right now. So I don't think it's a bad customer to build for. But you have to understand that there is no such thing as "a developer." Every developer is different.Link

LubaSo there are a bunch of reports now about productivity that was enabled by AI, and various reports say that it's like a 2 to 5% increase in productivity. Do you see that?Link

ZachI think... most customers that I talk to... and I talk to engineering leaders all the time who measure the throughput of their development teams, and they typically measure it in terms of how many changes are merged. They see about a 2 to 3x.Link

Luba2 to 3x?Link

Zach2 to 3x increase in velocity. So at least in the engineering world, it's way more than a few percent. I think the mistake that everyone makes is that then they're like, okay, so we paid all this money for these developer tools, we've increased our throughput by 2 to 3x, why don't we see a huge impact on our business or revenue? And there's a couple reasons for that. One is just that there's not a linear relationship between shipping more software and making more money. That's just a fact. And then the other thing is, all your competitors have access to the exact same technology, and so there's not really any competitive advantage if everyone is shipping 2 to 3x more stuff.Link

And so I think you're seeing backlash right now. People realize you ship way more, but they're kind of like, is this worth it? You know, I spend millions of dollars on tokens, and they really want to see ROI. They want to see business value, which is reasonable. And the techniques for measuring that aren't quite there. Like I said, there's not a direct correlation between more PRs merged and more money coming into your company's bank accounts. So it's a little bit of a weird situation. But I do think you can see in the metrics really clearly that...Link

LubaThe output...Link

ZachThe output has certainly increased. And we see it internally at Warp. Like I said, we're automating 30% of what we do now.Link

LubaSo what do you think people should be measuring, if output does not necessarily equal business ROI?Link

ZachYeah. This is not a new problem for development. This is a problem that has been around for a long time. There's different...Link

LubaRight. Because there are a lot of developer productivity tools.Link

ZachYeah, exactly.Link

LubaThe question of, does it actually do anything?Link

ZachAnd like I said, I don't have the answer to that, because that's how do you connect shipped software with more revenue? It's really hard to know, oh, I shipped this feature or fixed this bug, and therefore it caused my business to grow by Y. And that's just an inherently hard problem. So I don't have a solution to that.Link

LubaYeah. So with Warp going into cloud automated... sorry, cloud...Link

ZachAutomated cloud factories. Cloud factories.Link

LubaYeah. It's a really giant swing. And you really care about taking a big swing with whatever you do. Where does your ambition come from? Like, why not, you know, pick a nice developer niche, make a bunch of money in it, become a semi-prominent product?Link

ZachI'm not opposed to picking a niche and making a ton of money. That sounds awesome. It's just, the mission of our company, what we are trying to do and what we're set up to do... our goal has broadly been, let's help developers ship more software, let's help better software exist in the world. So from a mission perspective, this is the thing I think gets as close as possible to achieving that.Link

And then, yeah, I don't know. You get one career. Maybe you get a few careers, a few swings. I just am interested in trying to do something as impactful as I can. And I think, at this moment, probably the biggest economic opportunity is how do you really efficiently help the world build software? Software is kind of the driver of every business. And so I think it's a fun, interesting, hard strategic problem that I have no idea if I'll win at or not. But it's a thing I'm excited to try and do.Link

LubaAnd what do you think needs to go right for you guys at Warp for that to happen?Link

ZachYeah, so I think that the product needs to be awesome, and that's mostly under our control. I think we have to position the product so that the market understands what's different and unique and most valuable about our particular version of it, because we are not the only ones who are like, this is the direction software development is going. So the positioning needs to be super clear. The marketing needs to be good. We need to be really good at sales. This is much more of an enterprise-sales-led type of product, and our DNA is probably more about building things directly for developers. So we need to get excellent at that.Link

And then, I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff that's beyond our control as well. The market... there's so much AI bubble talk. There's all these macro things that we can't control. We can't control what happens with regulation, and we're kind of at the mercy of that. And so there's just a lot of stuff where we're doing our best to see the future, and then pick an area that we think there's opportunity in and execute as best as we can.Link

And, you know, I think the good news is we're in a huge market. I think we don't have to win 80% of it to have a really, really meaningful, big business. But our competitors see that too. It's competitive, and it's the craziest time to be in this space. We're in the craziest space at the craziest time, where literally the fastest-growing companies in history are Anthropic and OpenAI.Link

LubaCrazy.Link

ZachYeah. And so we're very dependent on that whole ecosystem. And, you know, who knows?Link

LubaHopefully it will work out well.Link

ZachYeah, I hope so.Link

LubaWhere does the name Warp come from?Link

ZachThere's not an amazing story. We just wanted to pick something that was short, memorable, evoked speed, kind of futurism. You know, one of the names we considered, which is kind of funny, is Cursor.Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

ZachWhich is, you know, Cursor is obviously huge. But we liked the name Warp, and that's all.Link

LubaI do think it's a cool name.Link

ZachThank you.Link

LubaWe're gonna round off with the lightning round. What's the trait you're most grateful for?Link

ZachI don't know if it's a trait, but I actually like public speaking, which I think for a lot of people maybe causes anxiety. I actually really like it. I find that it energizes me in a way that I wouldn't have expected. And I've been doing more and more of it recently, so I think that's pretty good.Link

LubaYeah, that's super useful as a founder, to be into public speaking.Link

ZachYeah, I like it.Link

LubaAnd what's one thing you'd never do again?Link

ZachI'd never live on St. Marks again. St. Marks is just this ridiculous party street in New York that I thought would be a fun place to live when I was in my 20s, and I couldn't sleep. I had an apartment where it was so small I couldn't sit straight on the toilet. So I'm out on St. Marks.Link

LubaThat's funny. And what's your life philosophy in one sentence?Link

ZachYeah. I want to do something useful or impactful for other people, and feel like I've really tried hard to have that impact. You know, I know that I can't really control what that outcome is, but as long as I feel like I've picked a thing that is useful and tried my hardest at it, I think I'll be satisfied with that.Link

LubaWell, on that note, Zach, thank you so much for being here. This was awesome.Link

ZachThis was fantastic. I got my steps in for sure. This was awesome.Link