Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp and former engineering manager at Google. He advises early-stage startup founders on engineering strategy.
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“For the audience for this show, which I assume is more founders, like rewriting is like a horrible idea. It's like pausing time.”
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More from Zach Lloyd
Opinion
Lloyd: The VC trope that product quality is not a moat is false
“I feel like there's like a VC trope right now around like, well, product's not a moat. I think that that's like kind of bullshit, especially when everyone else in the market has the same product.”
Zach LloydOct 17, 2025▶ 27:1120VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
AssertionPartly supported
Lloyd: Anthropic API Margins Are 60%, OpenAI Margins Are 50%
“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.”
Zach LloydOct 17, 2025▶ 39:3520VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
PredictionOpen · timeframe Oct 2030
Lloyd: Open-Source Models Will Not Win at the AI Frontier
“I don't think open either, if I'm being honest. The reason I don't think open, like, is that it's just so damn expensive to build these things, and so what's the economic incentive?”
Zach LloydOct 17, 2025▶ 40:3820VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
Opinion
Lloyd: Google faces a classic innovator's dilemma in AI
“I think Google's a 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.”
Zach LloydOct 17, 2025▶ 7:3620VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
AssertionSupported
Lloyd: OpenAI and Anthropic models beat Google's Gemini in coding benchmarks
“The two leaders are GPT-V and the Claude models, and so we measure them. Like, first of all, it's like, it's not so much gut. It's like we literally We have a whole bunch of benchmarks. We run sweet bench. We run terminal bench. Claude and GPT-V are the two be…”
Zach LloydOct 17, 2025▶ 10:0020VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
Opinion
Zach Lloyd: No AI provider has a strong moat at the API layer
“I don't know that anyone has like a super strong moat at the API layer, just to be totally clear.”
Zach LloydOct 17, 2025▶ 11:0920VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
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