The Exchanges

Q is like, what's valuable to me more than like the Terminal itself. Why people like cloud code is to bring it around, you know? And like with warp code, it's like, I would love to bring it around, but you can imagine somebody saying, I'm not getting anything from warp outside of warp code. So why do I have to only use it in warp? You know what I mean?

A Doing like a headless, like CLI version is interesting. My take on that is that there is a lot of value in what we can do at the UX that if it's a pure CLI app, you just can't do. So like, There's no way for cloud code running in ghosty, let's say to have an editable diff. Uh, now you might say like, well, why do I need an editable diff? Like if it does it perfectly, even if you don't want to edit the diffs, I think honestly, like the next thing that we'll probably be building is like basically a way in warp of code reviewing what the agent is produced. Cause I think that you totally want, like if you're having an agent write code, I find it very, very cumbersome to like push all the changes up to GitHub. Review it myself, then come back into my tool and have the, you know, then retell it to do it. And so there's all these like native UX things that I believe you want if your primary workflow is like launching and managing agents. There is not available for your CLI app. I would say like our likely path forward on that is like, we will probably at some point make a warp CLI app where if you really want to run it headless, like you want to run it in CI. Cause I do think this is an advantage of like cloud code. You can run it there, but I think for like the hands-on keys, like I'm a developer coming into work and I want to like use these tools to delegate work. I think it's a muc…

AI assessment note: “there is a lot of value in what we can do at the UX”

Q Do you have any public numbers that we can reference of, like, What are you saying regarding growth trajectory of Warp just, just to establish in people's minds if they've never heard of you?

A You know, it's like almost 600,000 active users on Warp right now. Our revenue since the beginning of the year is growing, like, depends on the week, between five to 15% every week, and so, like, it's actually a pretty fast revenue ramp. Now, we're not nearly at the scale, just to be clear, of, like, Curse or even Windsurf, but, like, we have pretty Awesome product market fit with people who discover the coding and paid parts of warp. So the other thing is we're in an amazing market right now is the other thing I would say is like the, um, and this wasn't true a year ago, but like now it's, uh, it's very expected to pay for developer tools. And for the first time we have companies that are coming to us being like, my developers aren't using the latest AI tools. Like how do we get them to use it? And that's like a totally new, Development, which is very good for us. So we're growing really, really well, and we have this very big existing user base, you know, not big like relative to like chat GPT is like five hundred million users or whatever, but for a developer product, like pretty substantial, and that's also growing pretty quickly.

AI assessment note: “almost 600,000 active users on Warp right now. Our revenue since the beginning of the year”

Q well as you could. I think it, It's, it could be cleaner, but you know, sometimes you just have to compete where you compete. I think that the challenge for you is just the sheer amount of firepower the big labs are putting behind their agents, right? And you're coming out saying you got a better agent than them. Good for you, but also like, you know, you're fighting them.

A So it's an interesting position because we are competing with them. And we're also their customer. And it's, it's interesting question to me from their perspective. How much do they want to own the end user relationship? How much do they want people building on their APIs? There's this interesting dynamic where I think Anthropic is like pretty clearly the leader in the, in the coding models right now, but I don't know if that's going to be perpetuity. Like they have a competitive dynamic with each other also. Right. Whereas we have this interesting advantage of like, If Gemini became the best coding model in two weeks, everyone who had, like, gone all in on cloud code would be, like, in a little bit of a weird position, whereas we're just like, okay, we'll make Gemini our default model. So there is, like, some advantage to being where we are at a layer above. You know, I'm sure that the model companies are thinking, like, how do we lock people in? Because they don't, like, that's a very big risk for, for Anthropic, in my opinion. Uh, to just be like, okay, like, Gemini's best next week. Cursor moves. Like, cursor I think is some very significant portion of their revenue. I don't totally know, like, is the short answer, but the certain north star for us is like, can we build the best user experience around these, like, around the models? I do think there's a bunch of alpha in te…

AI assessment note: “So it's an interesting position because we are competing with them.”

Q What are you using for the speech to text? Just the Mac OS?

A We're using whisper flow, which is another startup, which has got like a really good API around doing speech for text. And I do find the speech for text when doing this kind of prompt driven development is like a magical thing. Otherwise I'm just like typing these long things while this is going, I'm going to go over here and fix another issue. So this is one of the cool things about Using something like the terminal form factor, uh, is that you can naturally multi-thread, uh, while doing this work. And actually I can see notifications going on. If I come back over here, as this agent is working, I'm going to start over here. For this, we have a null pointer exception, annoyingly, in our Go code base that is, uh, being tracked in Sentry with this issue. So I've kind of like You know, set this up to do this. I'm going to ask warp at the same time to go ahead and try and fix this for me. So I'd be like, could you look up this century issue? It doesn't get that perfect century issue and diagnose why there's a null pointer exception. I'd like you to look through the code, figure out where it's happening and suggest a plan for fixing it. Once we have a plan, I would like you to create a new branch and on that branch, let's go ahead and implement the fix. Assuming the plan looks good, and then we will write some unit tests for it as well.

AI assessment note: “We're using whisper flow, which is another startup”

Q I think like there's also the more history of the company, kind of like getting started the first pitch, pitching Dylan Field. I know Dylan has been very active also in the AI space and kind of talking about that. Any fun backstories that you haven't shared?

A I mean, so the original, yeah, the original, like, Pitch and vision, uh, was, Hey, there's this like tool that most developers use every day, which, you know, the terminal that I think is like kind of hard to use tool. Hasn't really changed in a long time, but if you get really good at using it, you can be like an incredibly productive developer and like all the best developers or a lot of the best developers I've worked with that are really good at using it. And so it was like, can we build a better version of that as a product? I think from like a business standpoint, it was like, you know, there was like a lot of question marks. Uh, I think I got like a good amount of trust from our, our investors based on, I guess kind of based on my background. So I was, uh, I used to be the lead engineer on Google docs. I was a principal engineer at Google. And, um, I think that they gave me a bunch of trust. I think it was also like a, a weird moment in history where it was like COVID and pre LLM. From an investor perspective, I think it was like a weird, like, what do I invest in at this time? Do I do more SaaS? Like people were trying to like pattern match. They're like, oh, there's no collaboration platform for developers around this tool. And like Figma was like, you know, successful with adding, you know, making design collaborative. And so I think there was a bunch of that going on…

AI assessment note: “I don't have any like super specific fun story other than that.”

Q The first part of the stack was agent harness, but basically, yeah, that's the real question, right? What will you own versus what will you like sort of collaborate with?

A The way I think about this is like, we've been a terminal, right? So like the, the, like developer tools landscape, I think for a long time has been like, are you a terminal? Are you an IDE? Or maybe are you like a CLI app? Or like an ID extension, I guess would be the other like thing. What our thesis is, is that, uh, the primary workflow of development is changing and, you know, it's changing from your primary development workflow being like, Hey, if I want to make a coding change, I'm going to open an ID. I'm going to open a bunch of files. I'm going to hand edit them. Then I'm going to open the terminal and I'm going to like Run a bunch of commands, and I'm going to do a bunch of stuff with Git, and I'm going to do stuff with Docker. I don't think that's how developers are going to be working. Like, I think the way that developers are going to be working is primarily by prompt. Instead of like, if I want to make a change, I'm not going to open an ID and open five files and use autocomplete and LSP and all that stuff. I'm going to ask an agent to make a change. If I want to do something in production, I'm going to ask an agent to figure out like why my servers are failing. And You know, this may sound like out there, but I think that you want a new type of workbench for that workflow. And that is what warp is like aspiring to be. We don't fit cleanly in any of those boxes. I…

AI assessment note: “you want a new type of workbench for that workflow. And that is what warp is”