Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor still writes production code for the startup
Clay Bavor · Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100K Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 4, 2026 · at 26:45
Clay Bavor is the co-founder of Sierra, an enterprise AI startup valued at $15.8 billion. Bret Taylor is his co-founder and former chairman of Twitter.
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“Brett is actually still an extraordinarily capable software engineer. It's remarkable. So, you know, some of the code that is in production, right, he has written”
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“Every one of our rounds, we actually guided to and took a lower price than we could have.”
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“The capital expense the ongoing capital expense to create what is effectively a highly perishable bag of floating point numbers just doesn't work. Just doesn't work for any, but a small number of companies.”
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“I think if you have the US based labs and hyperscalers developing the frontier models. There's an obvious, you know, like, are they going to compete with themselves and drive, you know, price pressure on the frontier models by, you know, developing and releasi…”
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“We have software engineers who are completely AI-pilled and using Cloud Code, Codex, our own internal agent we call Pinecone that we used to run much of the company on, and they estimate they are between three and 20 times more productive in terms of features …”