The Token Budget Problem Nobody Is Talking About (Matan Grinberg, Co-Founder & CEO of Factory)

The biggest threat to OpenAI, Anthropic, or any of the model labs is not each other. It's open models. Because if open models are really good, then it really puts a lot of pricing pressure on them. Mm. So their interest is it's just, you know, the big 4 and no one else. No one can compete. And so the best way to do that is say, you know, it's either us or the Chinese models. The future of software engineering is you're not building the software, you're building the factory that builds the software. Mm. It's crazy that we've lived in a world where engineers who are some of the smartest people who spent years becoming experts in their craft, spend hours and hours and hours fixing CI. Yes, it is not a good use of their intelligence. And so we're figuring out ways to automate the low-leverage use of their time so that those key moments where it's like their deep insight is essential, they can do that more.

What do you think looks different about AI in a year's time? And what do you think looks different about Factory?

I think AI a year from now, there will be less focus on—

In 2023, Matan Grinberg Then a Berkeley physics PhD, took a 30-minute meeting with the venture capitalist Sean McGuire. It became a three-hour walk, at the end of which McGuire issued a dare: drop out and start a company. Three years later, and Matan's company Factory is valued at $1.5 billion. Factory helps enterprises like Nvidia, Morgan Stanley, and Adobe. Automate software development through the use of droids, AI agents capable of chewing through the endless drudgery that consumes so much of developers' time. Factory's growing rapidly, consistently doubling revenue month over month, and growing from 25 people to over 100 since just the start of the year. Today, Matan and I discuss his decade in string theory, the existential crisis that drove him to entrepreneurship, AI's fraught power dynamics, and our mutual love for the films of Paolo Sorrentino. Matan also shares the unusual ways he runs his company and why he believes both the AI space and his business will look very differently in 12 months' time. I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist. This episode is brought to you by .tech Domains. I spend a lot of time speaking with founders and builders who are building the next generation of technology companies. For all of them, finding a compelling and distinctive company identity is essential to breaking through the noise. That starts with a great name and a great domain. That's exactly the thinking behind .tech domains. For companies building in tech, a .tech domain gives your project a clean, confident identity from day one, instantly communicating what you're building. Nothing.tech, 1x.tech, Aurora.tech, CES.tech. The list of companies choosing .tech is growing quickly. It's not surprising that many venture-backed startups secure their .tech domain early. If you're building a technology company, it's worth thinking about how you want to show up from the start. Secure your .tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. The best founders aren't spending their time on expense reports. They're busy building. Brex is the agentic finance platform that makes that possible. High-limit corporate cards, banking, and AI that handles the back office automatically so your team never has to. Expenses get captured, books get closed, and spend stays in policy without anyone chasing it down. Your team gets their time back to focus on what actually moves the company forward. Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram already run on Brex. 1 in 3 startups in the US does too. It's time to get Brex. Go to brex.com/solutions/startups. Matan, it's been a long time that I've wanted to have this conversation and a long time that we've actually known each other. So, um, excited to have you here.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

You know, I've been thinking about how we should start this conversation because it's such a busy week in AI, uh, when we're talking. But you have such an unusual background that I think it would almost be a waste to start too much on the AI side. There are not many string theorists to CEOs that I've come across. So let's start somewhere different. Emmy Noether, her first law is a physical law that you apparently are a big fan of. You can see that already I'm off my footing here. Tell me what that means to you.

Yeah, so Emmy Noether, or Emmy Noether, that was a great German pronunciation. Thank you.

I had the look of the phonetics. Oh, it's good. Yeah.

I mean, she's a legend. And I think every good physics undergrad learns how I call it Noether's theorem, which basically says with every continuous symmetry that exists in the universe, there is a corresponding Conserved quantity. Now, there's something so beautiful about it because you know let's go abstract very you know dumb it down. Basically, if things are symmetrical in some way, then there's something in the universe that is conserved accordingly, like something that we know. And let's put some exact examples. Like suppose we're in empty space. If you are you know at one point in and one point in space or another point in space. or if you're moving versus not moving, these are things that you can't really tell the difference if you're in empty space, or if time is translated. Like if an hour passes and you're in empty space, there's no difference of empty space. It all looks the same. And so naively, it's just, you know, okay, these are things that are symmetrical. The universe doesn't change based on change in position of space or in time. But it turns out that secretly behind this, we get— What? conservation of energy and conservation of momentum because of this. And it's like, you know, maybe the mathematics of it tells a more beautiful story than I can, but there's just something so fundamental about and so beautiful about these very simple things that like a 3-year-old would understand or a 5-year-old would understand. Like if you just imagine, you know, you're in a black abyss and an hour goes by, nothing is going to change about your world. But that is like conservation of energy. That is the source of where that comes from. The mathematics makes it even more fascinating because in kind of different toy universes that you can build, you can create different conserved quantities and it leads to these different theories of physics. But yeah.

Do you remember when you sort of like encountered this as an idea, as a theory?

I think the first time was probably like junior year in high school at some point.

Okay. Wow.

Yeah.

What is it about it that appeals to you so much? Like, are there sort of connections you make today to it?

You know, people in Silicon Valley always talk about first principles and first principles thinking and all of that. That is an example of like in physics, one of the most like, you know, basic first principles is like you always look at what are things that are conserved? What are things that are symmetries where if this thing changes, it doesn't matter, right? And obviously like, you know, the first principles thinking leads to a lot of good kind of mantras or decision-making ideas in, you know, business or startups or tech. And I think what really appealed to me was it's kind of this like base that you can always, no matter what complicated problem you're dealing with in physics, you can always think, okay, what are the things that are conserved? Or what are the things that are symmetries here that I can then find something that's conserved? And that kind of gives you a baseline upon which you can stand and then look at some of the more complex things that are not symmetrical or not conserved. but it gives you like a basis to stand on. And there's just something so deeply satisfying because you could break down a lot of problems into what symmetries are conserved and which ones are violated.

Mm-hmm.

And then when you separate out, okay, these things are conserved, but then, so for example, suppose we were in empty space and there's a sun nearby. Now it is no longer a symmetry where if I move forward or backward, nothing changes because now if I, you know, go light years away, I'm affected less by the gravity of this, or I even have a reference point of how it's going to interact with me. And so now suddenly there's a new dynamic and there's a symmetry that's violated. However, one that remains conserved is there's a sun or whatever object there, and I wait an hour, nothing changes. So, you know, we still have that conserved.

I'm dwelling on it in a way because you are operating in like the most changeable part of the economy at the moment, like AI, and then within that code generation, which is the absolute like heat center of all of this. And so the idea that you've really trained your mind on what is conserved in these moments and thinking through these things, like I almost, maybe I'm over-deriving it, but like I see some of that in the strategy that you guys have been—

I'm so glad you mentioned that. I actually think it is so important because there are a lot of people that are going out there and saying things like, all jobs are going away, or we're gonna automate everything, or, you know, this language about like the permanent underclass or things like this. And it really upsets me because not only is it inaccurate, but it's really harmful to like the psychology of a lot of people that I think have a very important role to play in the future of humanity. And the reason you can actually break it down to some of these things that are kind of conserved or symmetries or however you might define it. And so one thing I think we can say is, first of all, there are a lot of problems in the world. I think we could all agree. There is a lot of problems, many of which we are not solving. Okay, so let's take this group of problems that we are currently not solving. I would argue that a very large percent of them could be solved with software, but they are not currently being solved with software. Okay, so we know that there is a huge amount of problems, many of which could be solved with software, but are not being solved with software. And we'd also probably agree that the number of problems that exist generally tends to grow over time, not shrink. As every new technology comes about, or even as, you know, the quality of life for every human grows over time, So too does the problems that they have and the things that they expect and the things they want to solve.

Do we think that's true? Do we think that the problems multiply? Or doesn't this, the fact that the quality of life improves so much, suggest that we're somehow getting rid of a lot of problems along the way?

I think that we kind of climb the ladder of what type of problem. So I think right now, mental health is a very important problem. I don't think that existed in like hunter-gatherer times.

Yes, probably not. You didn't have to worry about it.

Yeah, because it was just like, where is the boar so I can, you know, hunted and bring food for my family or something. So maybe there wasn't kind of, that it wasn't something that emerged at the time.

We don't have robust data on this.

Yeah, we don't have data. I mean, I think that's a fair point. But I think even putting that aside, if the number of problems grows or if it's static or it shrinks, what's clear is there are way more problems than are currently being solved. And the tools that we are creating, and in particular for factory, for software engineers, these give every engineer more leverage. And so that means that they kind of have more power to solve any given problem. Now, it might mean that certain problems need fewer people to solve it. And so if you pick one particular problem, you could say, okay, people are being replaced because they're not, you know, we used to need 1,000 engineers to solve this problem. Now we only need 100. And so on a local basis, that could be true on a per-problem accounting, but there are so many other problems that we are not solving that we can solve. And I think the kind of beauty of what is happening here is by giving everyone more leverage, we will solve more of those problems. And that is a net good for the world because there are so many problems that need to be solved. There's so many problems that also need to be solved with great software, not shitty software. Like even something like the DMV. Why do we live in a world where the DMV has the most atrocious software? That doesn't need to be true. Yeah. Like it has been true. because of funding reasons, or maybe it doesn't attract the best talent, but it doesn't, we don't need to live like this. Like, we can live in a world where the DMV is nice, and I'm very excited for that world.

I think we will live in that world. On the topic of the jobs, since you bring it up, it sounds like your impression is, or your view would be that there is a huge amount of displacement from these positions where, because of frontier models and open weights models, being so capable at this point that plenty of companies get more leverage, they cut down their teams, but that there's sort of such an abundance of problems that humans are still very, very relevant to addressing them. Is that a fair encapsulation?

Yes, I think that's right. I think also some people are experimenting because there's going to be more dynamics that emerge, which is pick any random vertical. You might say, great, now we can get the same done with fewer people. But generally the free market has competition for a reason. And so maybe you have a competitor who doesn't do that and doesn't lower their staff and they can actually give a much better experience to the consumers. And then they might end up winning. And whoever ended up taking that like preemptive layoff or whatever it might've been, maybe they end up losing a huge amount of market share. And so there are probably going to be verticals where, you know, actually writing software wasn't a core competency. It was just a kind of a thing that had to be done, in which case maybe they will have fewer people doing software engineering. But I think there will be other verticals where actually every software engineer you have gives you more leverage and every tool that you give them gives them more leverage. And so that helps the business even more. And so you might not want to stop hiring at all. I think it just depends kind of vertical by vertical.

It sounds like that version of the future, which I could very well see being the case, is predicated on like some version of a jagged intelligence where humans are more capable at some things for a period of time. And that maybe we remain like very compute constrained or models are so expensive that humans are still like on a relative basis, the ROI on a human is good. Like, is that sort of how you think about it?

Yes. And I think kind of every company will have a resource allocation problem that I think is very interesting where basically CIOs or CTOs or kind of CEOs will have a problem where They will have, for every incremental dollar, they will have to decide, do we put that to more headcount? Do we put that to more like data on the market or understanding our users? Or do we put that to more compute? And by compute, I mean like token budget per person.

Yes.

And so within that even, and I think this is kind of related to what we're doing is, you know, we're in the middle of, there was a crazy, you know, spike in usage of all these tools. They didn't know what the ROI was. So they're going in and putting in user limits. We're in a very interesting interim period where people are kind of preventatively putting in user limits of $1,000 of tokens per month for everyone in the company. There is absolutely no way, and we can timestamp this and check, there is no way in 12 months orgs are going to do such a kind of blind allocation of tokens where everyone gets the same. Absolutely not. There is going to be a resource allocation problem of If I have an incremental token to move the needle for my business, where do I put it? Does it go to the sales team, the marketing team, within the engineering team? Is it platform? Is it customer support? Is it billing?

Yes. You're investing in some capacity. You need to get a return on it.

And so we just have the most, right now we have these like resource allocation things, but they're the dumbest way possible, which is like, hey, should we hire more people? Should we give people token budget? It's like, I don't know. Yeah, let's do this. Let's do that. But it's very not data, like it's not data-backed at all.

Yes.

And I think we're about to enter a world where we'll be able to have very clear metrics on actually, we want to spend more tokens in this department. Actually, tokens don't matter for this other department. We need more people, maybe for sales. Because sales, I don't know if tokens do that much. Sales, it's like you want the face-to-face time. You want those people who are great at connecting with other humans. And so it's going to be very interesting to see this resource allocation play out.

That's super interesting. I hadn't thought through how we will need to attribute that and how that sort of becomes possible. Maybe to give folks a sense of where you're coming into this conversation from, how would you describe Factory?

Yeah, so it's funny, you know, it's kind of, it's changed over time in terms of what the quick description is, but the mission has remained the same. And our mission since we started at the very beginning, since you first mentioned us in that newsletter 3 years ago, The mission has been to bring autonomy to software engineering. And, you know, in the first couple of years, the focus has been the software development agents that we build, which are called droids, focused on not just coding, but the full end-to-end software development lifecycle. They're kind of the fundamental unit of this new world of agent-native software development. But recently, as this is becoming more common and people are more familiar and using droids and, you know, there are orgs that have tens of thousands of users who are using this. Now the thing that becomes more relevant to discuss with them is not just the incremental droid, but rather the software factory that they build. The visual that we have sometimes is like, have you ever seen videos of Tesla's factories where they have like these robotic arms that are going in and doing all these things? Yes. The future of software engineering is you're not building the software, you're building the factory that builds the software. And so engineers are going in and saying, hey, actually, we need to tweak this arm this way and this arm that way. So it's going to go in and attach this widget and that widget. And it becomes much more of like a systems design problem. You're not locked into any one model, but now you have a resource allocation problem again of in our assembly line of this software that we build, we could naively use Opus for everything, but we probably don't need to. It's probably pretty inefficient. It's not good for our margins to do so. So where do we, you know, for this robotic arm, use an open model or for this one, actually Gemini might be really good at this language. Maybe we want to fine-tune a model for COBOL because it's some legacy code that the other models aren't good at. And so this language of like software factories is what is kind of really top of mind for the enterprises that we work with, basically figuring out how do they give every engineer more leverage? Because it's crazy that we've lived in a world where engineers who are some of the smartest people who spent years becoming experts in their craft, spend hours and hours and hours like fixing CI or writing documentation or doing like PRDs and meetings with 20 people. Like it is not a good use of their intelligence. And so we're figuring out ways to automate the low leverage use of their time so that those key moments where it's like their deep insight is essential, they can do that more. And the great thing is that's what engineers like doing. So

I've been droiding. I like using my droids. I think it's a really cool product. You've also shipped a lot of sort of new features. It feels like the cadence at which the product is expanding is really exciting. I'm thinking of Droid Computer. I'm thinking of Factory Router. There was even another one that I'm— oh, Automated Security. Like, how do you think about expanding the scope of this?

Yeah, I think it's actually, it's funny. The factory analogy is very helpful because it really does feel like that where, you know, you think about the assembly line, the point is you want to figure out what are the kind of biggest bottlenecks that stop us from producing that whatever unit on the assembly line faster. And so, you know, one of the things that emerged as another bottleneck was some of our customers were saying, hey, you know, this is fantastic, but we're subject to these regulations. Can you help us, you know, test for this in every code review? And not just review for, you know, is this good code, but does this adhere to these regulations or these security standards?

Ah, interesting.

And so kind of, these are things that allow us to level up, or droid computers.

Yeah.

If you're such a mature organization, such that everyone is using agents, you eventually come into a bottleneck where you're delegating so many tasks to agents, you can't do it on your computer anymore. Because also, what if you close your laptop? Then the agent's done. And so having the ability to spin up a remote machine where the droid can go and use it in a sandbox environment, generate the code, but also test it, and verify that that code is good and verify that it adheres to all these standards, or, you know, spend a week fixing CI if you have some really messy, you know, CI. By giving Droid that environment, then it is able to tackle just so much more of that software development lifecycle that engineers, you know, don't want to waste their time on.

What's your view on how many models people will ultimately use at a sort of end state? Like, are we trending towards a world in which All of us are using literally dozens of models for very specific things. And, you know, Factory is helping us route across all of them. Do you expect there to be sort of, I don't know, a set of 10 that are really top of the line and, you know, optimized in these different ways? Like, how do you think about that?

I think if we succeed, uh, our customers will know the model that they're using just as well as they know, like, where the electricity that powers their toaster comes from.

Yes, sure.

Which is like, At the end of the day, when you use a toaster, you just want it to toast your toast. And I think similarly, there are so many models, which is great. Like more models, the better. But also it just becomes a lot of like intellectual overhead as an engineer to even know, are you going to use like Opus 4.8 for this or GPT-5.5 Ultra High and 4.6 and this and that?

And KIMI does this.

And the KIMI K 2.5. Like it's just way too much when You know, some businesses, it's a core competency to know this stuff, like us, for example. If you're an engineer at, pick a Fortune 500 company, it is not worth your time to keep track of every single model that comes out and every time update your priors on, is it good at this? Is it good at that? This language, like you also might be doing Python sometimes, Java other times, COBOL other times. So not only will you need to know the personalities of these models, but also how they perform in these different tasks. Way too much, not a good use of their time. And that's kind of what we want to take on for our customers is deal with all of that, route according to whatever you want to optimize for. So whether that's cost, performance, latency, and then allow the engineers to focus on their core competency, which is moving the needle for their business, thinking about kind of the bigger picture of their team or their org or whatever feature they own, instead of just scrolling Twitter constantly to see the latest updates of every model.

How have you found you are winning customers sort of opening the door Or is it working on difficult migrations I've seen you talk about? Is it a certain sort of wedge that appeals most to the enterprises that you're working with?

Yeah, it's funny. I wish, for many reasons, I wish it was like kind of one thing every time, but it actually ends up being a different thing depending on what the bottleneck is for that org. So there are some orgs where they are very concerned about having vendor lock-in with just OpenAI or just Anthropic or just Google. And they see that we're model independent and are like, okay, great, we need that because we don't want to be kind of subject to the whims of one particular company. Then there are others who are like, oh my God, we've been working on this migration for 3 years. Please help us. I've heard that it works.

Yes.

And so that's, you know, in those cases, then there are others where developers, you know, found us on Twitter, started using it and start raising the pitchforks to their CTO, say, hey, we want this. So it kind of varies case by case. And it's, yeah, it's just, it typically ends up being different parts of the software development lifecycle that ends up being a bottleneck for that org.

I saw, you know, after the news of sort of the provisional Cursor acquisition from xAI was announced, you were sort of having a debate on Twitter with someone about, you know, the position of the other person was basically, it makes sense that these model companies eventually buy cursors, you know, the harness companies, the environments, because you need to sort of co-optimize between the foundation model and, you know, this other layer. And your take was like, there's no data for that. And it's not at all true based on our experience. Can you help me understand like what, why that's a position that you take and the data you have?

Okay. So I guess there are 2 things here. So there's one thing, which is the relationship between the model providers and like coding generally. And then the second is the relationship between agents and the model itself. So on the first one, I mean, I think something that I very much believe is that I think the Cursor SpaceX acquisition is good for SpaceX, good for Cursor, and it's good for us. And so I guess first, the reason it's good for SpaceX or xAI is they have a ton of data centers. They have all the infrastructure. They have good engineers. They don't have the distribution or data. to make their models really, really good at coding. Cursor has that distribution and has that data, but doesn't have the data centers and all the infrastructure and the like cash to make that work. So that's great for them. They also, you know, fantastic valuation, great for all of the team. So huge congrats to them. For us, it's also helpful because there needs to be an independent kind of software development factory provider that is not tied to one model in particular. And that was the only other big one out there really that we were seeing in the market. And so it kind of cleared the way for us to some degree. And so the great thing is now OpenAI is going to have great models for code. Anthropic is going to have great models for code. Google is going to have great models for code. And xAI, as much as people don't believe it, they're going to have good models for code by the end of this year. And that is good because the more choice we have, the better it is for the consumers or the enterprises or the people who are using these. Now, the thing I disagreed with was this claim that if you make the models and the agent or the harness, you're going to make them better together, you know, naturally, right? Like, you know, an example here being Claude Code and the Claude models or Codex and the Codex models. What we find empirically is that it's actually not the case. So by making Droid model independent, we actually end up making it perform better with Opus, better with Codex, better with any model than those models do in their respective harnesses. So we can outperform Claude Code with Opus by using Opus in Droid. Naively, it might not make sense, but I think a good analogy here is let's throw back 5 years ago. If you wanted to make AI that was good for you as a personal assistant, you could make the argument of, hey, you should train it on just your data because it's your personal assistant and you want it to know you better than anyone else. What the last 5 years have showed us is actually, if you want it to be a really good personal assistant for you, you should train it on the whole internet. And then it's going to be much better for you. And there's an analogy that emerges here where basically what data is to a model, models are to the harness.

Really? You find that?

Yes. And so the more models you expose the harness to, the more kind of nuances and intricacies you find, and you avoid overfitting harness to the nuances of that model in particular. And so these are on axes like compaction, which is how the agent deals with kind of being over the context limits, which is going to happen oftentimes when you're dealing with large codebases. Also on the axis of token caching. So basically how often are you caching the tokens in a way that basically makes each query more cost effective? Because a cached token is kind of like a repetitive token. that costs a 10th as much. So you want as much caching as possible. We end up outperforming that. And then also like tool use and environmental feedback. By seeing the kind of intricacies of the different models, it ends up performing better with all of them, which is pretty crazy. And my friends who work at the model companies get very frustrated by this.

Really? Yeah, I mean, I bet. You have to put this out in research, I think. Then that would be amazing, right? Like, I feel like people will, that will really like change people's priors.

Oh yeah. We have a couple of blog posts about like, caching in particular or compaction in particular, but I think not the collective story of here is why you need multiple models to make it perform better.

I think it would be really cool. You've also talked a lot about the need for open weights models and the value of that and talked, I think, also a little bit about how you don't like it when folks sort of classify these as Chinese models because there needs to be a robust US open source system. Where do you feel we are on that front at the moment? Like, are there enough good players in that space?

Yeah, I think the reason why I don't like when people do that is because naturally, you know, if you're a, like the biggest threat to OpenAI, Anthropic, or any of the model labs is not each other, it's open models. Because if open models are really good, then it really puts a lot of pricing pressure on them. So their interest is it's just, you know, the big 4 and no one else, no one else in town, no one can compete. And so the best way to do that is say, you know, it's either us or the Chinese models. Yeah. Oh, like,

you know,

it's potentially, you know, it's our enemy. You don't want to use their models, right? When the reality is, no, it's like, it's them versus the open models. And currently, yes, the best open models typically come from China. However, you know, NVIDIA has Nimatron, which is actually catching up quite a lot. Still not at the frontier. And I do think it's really important to see US open models get better. I think it's just a little like sinister phrasing to try and get you subconsciously. And it works. Like enterprise CIOs that I speak to, they will often say like, oh, we don't use Chinese models. And I'm like, okay, we can use other open models. Those aren't the only ones. Yeah. Yeah. But it's crazy. Like the propaganda works to get them to think, oh no, you can only use these. And so just like kind of ringing the alarm bells on that is something that matters to me. It also matters to me that we have good US open source.

You, you, uh, had a spicy tweet earlier this week after the Fable 5 launch that seemed like it actually had a, you know, maybe it contributed to positive outcome in some respect. Safe to say you were not a fan of the way the Fable 5 rollout happened from Anthropic.

Yeah. I think there were 2 things that I was really disappointed to see. One being they changed their policy to have mandated data retention for the purposes of security or safety rather, which is important. But I think it sets a precedent for basically, and that's even for the enterprise. Typically models, if you use it in the like, you know, self-serve plan, there might be data retention. That's pretty standard. In this case, it is for everyone, even the enterprise requiring data retention, which talk to a financial services company. They're going to be like, absolutely not. And all indications suggest that they want that to be the case for every model going forward. It sets a very bad precedent of basically we get to see everything that's happening. And I think what's worse is— They also, at least initially, were posturing that they would either deny your service or hamper your performance, not based on violating terms of service or violating the law, but doing things that they don't agree with. Yes. And that, I think, is the line that's really important we don't cross. And even the fact that it's a possibility for any of these providers to do makes it so important that we have one competition in the closed models, but also open models. Because the crazy thing that is still the case right now is that if you are doing something that they deem competitive or risky, initially without telling you, would degrade the performance of the model and have it give you kind of garbage answers.

Specifically on AI research, right? I think on the bio research they tell you, no?

Like AI research, in theory, yes.

Okay. You think it's just like a little very broad—

Oh, whoops, we made a mistake. Who knows? It's hard to attribute it to malice or just making mistakes. But I think the precedent that it sets initially was going to be without telling you, it would dumb it down.

Yes.

And that's really, really dangerous. And so because of a lot of the pressure, I don't know if my tweets had an impact there, but I think a lot of people had a really bad reaction to it. They walked back just one part of it. They walked back the part where it would do it without telling you. Now it would do it while telling you.

Yes.

Which I think is still really bad because it's still degrading performance. And I saw countless people and friends of mine as well, where they were doing cutting-edge bio research, looking into prostate cancer markers, and they were being denied their requests. And the thing is, even if they go and then fix it, the point is they now have an ability to, at any point in time, deny your service and then say, oh, sorry, it'll take a week to fix. Oh, it's there. And so as people become more and more reliant on these tools, you want to make sure no one can kind of quickly affect you over this period of time. And this breaks that precedent and does so not just in the weights of the model, where before in the weights of the model, if you're like, whatever, hey, build me a nuclear weapon, it'll say no, like I'm not going to do that. Now it's kind of programmatically added on top, where in theory, there's someone over there who could like change a line of code. And now it's like, oh, Anytime Mario asks about like world events, like convince him of this crazy political ideology and like just send him in this other direction without you knowing. And that's crazy.

I do think the transparency piece for me like felt like the obvious misstep, but I'm almost, I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that you do have to have some limitations of what people can use these models for. Like I do think flagging some cutting-edge bio research, or, you know, there are obviously bad uses there. Like, where do you think the right place to set the line is when you're operating at the frontier here?

First of all, the one thing that's an obvious, like, kind of baseline is the law. And like, you know, we live in a country that has laws and we should defer to the government to enforce those laws. And to the degree to which we can, we should work with the government on figuring out what the best way to help that is. And like, obviously platforms like Facebook and Twitter work with the government a lot to Make sure, you know, on one hand you can have free speech, but on the other hand, you adhere to like laws about hate speech and things like that. And so I think, you know, we should take from that and act in a similar manner there. And then I also think whichever way we go down, it has to be very clear who is getting what and it needs to be equal. I think that's the thing that's really not obvious to me is like, Tech has a history of people doing bad things and then getting punished for it later when it's already past the point of no return. And that's the thing that I think worries me is like, for example, all of these model companies trained on the whole internet without asking anyone permission.

Yes.

Right? So we already know that there are companies, and I'm not saying any of these companies right now would do that or anything like that, but we know that tech has a history of like doing things that is irreversible and then suffering later. But like, What penalty could you provide that would make up for that? There's nothing you could do. It's like once you pass the point of no return. And so like, take for example, data retention. If you retain all the data of all the financial services companies and all that, you could train on all of it. Oh no, it's a whoopsie. And you try to make up for it 10 years later.

Yes. It's

going to be in courts forever. You're past the point of no return. You could have trained on every company's data. It's illegal and you break the law, but that hasn't stopped tech companies before. Now, I'm not like super pro-regulation, But I think the important thing is like having the right checks and balances in place to make sure that no one company can kind of go too aggressively monopolistic in any of these directions.

Yeah. You know, I think, uh, someone who we had on the podcast who, you know, in this, in this location, uh, was Vincent from Prime Intellect. And I liked the way that he frames the idea that, you know, a safer world is ultimately one with sort of multiple superintelligences rather than just one. And, you know, that was the first time I'd had someone put it to me in that way. And the more I thought about it, the more I sort of think that's fundamentally correct. And so, you know, this is why you do need this robust ecosystem that you are sort of helping companies operate into and abstracting away that complexity. Maybe let's take a step back to some of your story. How does one decide to become a string theorist? Is that like you first want to be an astronaut and then you know, make a jump? Like what was the childhood ambition there?

I was quite a rebellious child. Like I would, you know, in elementary school and middle school, I was always like skipping class, getting in trouble. Like generally I was just bored by things and would just kind of get into a lot of trouble, but I was always good at math. But I didn't really try in school because I was like, oh, I want to do whatever other random things. And then my 8th grade geometry teacher, told me that I should retake geometry in high school. And that was like a trigger. I was like, what the hell? Like, she thinks I need to retake geometry. Shout out Margie Greenwald, 8th grade geometry teacher. Look what she created. But, and so, so I was like, I can't believe, like, I'll show her. And so my first order on Amazon ever was textbooks for Algebra 2, trigonometry, precalculus, Calc 1, 2, 3, linear algebra. And I studied all of those textbooks in the summer before 9th grade. Um, and then I asked my dad what the hardest math was. He said string theory. And I was, technically it's physics, it's not math, but he said string theory and I was like,

okay,

I'm going to be the best string theorist in the world. And that was like, that was all I cared about for basically the next 12 years of my life.

So you, you have a very laid back personality, clearly. Uh, wow. Fascinating. Were your parents academics?

They're both engineers. So my father was— immigrated from the Soviet Union. He studied chemical engineering and ended up working— actually, what brought him out to the Bay Area, he worked at IBM. My mother was a programmer at a hospital.

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Yes, that's right.

So you sort of run on spite for 10 years through some very impressive places. You worked with what I understood from my research, you know, I wouldn't have known myself, I'm embarrassed to say, is like sort of the greatest living string theorist.

Juan Maldacena.

Yes. What was that like? Like, what does one take from a mind like that. I imagine that to be that person, you know, the sort of most numinous, luminous, you know, person, mind of this field of your generation, you must have a very unusual way of operating, unusual way of thinking that sort of goes beyond even that domain.

It was a huge privilege. He's one of the kindest, smartest people I know. Also, I think very fascinating. He's quite religious as well, which is typically rare for a string theorist. And, you know, it was a huge privilege working with him while I was at Princeton as an undergrad. But I think it also, even having that happen, that was a lesson and one of the examples for me of why mentorship matters so much. Because initially I was going to do research with this, with this different professor. But there was this one grad student that I knew who kind of took me under his wing and was giving me a lot of advice about, you know, what I should do. And he was like, no, Matan, you need to go and talk to Juan. You should try to get him as an advisor. But Juan technically wasn't at Princeton. He was at what's called the Institute for Advanced Study, which is like a very closely affiliated but technically separate institution that had no teaching obligations. So in other words, they didn't have to deal with the pesky undergrads.

Yes.

They could just go do their research in peace. And I was like, wait, I, you know, he's at IAS. He doesn't want to work with undergrads. Like, you know, he's like, no, trust me. Send him an email about a paper of his that you read. You know, try to have some insight and ask if you can meet with him just to talk to him. And I was like, okay, you know, and so, you know, spent a lot of time, you know, preparing and, you know, sent him an email. And I ended up doing that. And he ended up inviting me over to his office. And before I went to his office, this advisor, this mentor of mine was like, by the way, the meeting will go well if at the end of the meeting, he very calmly and subtly poses a question. And Posey's like, oh, hmm, this is interesting. And basically you will have 24 hours to solve that problem. And if you solve that problem within 24 hours, he will likely take you on as a student.

Oh my gosh, that's so great.

And so I remember, you know, going into the meeting and being like super on edge, like ready to like find the— what's like the thing that he leaves. And Juan is one of the most— one of the most subtle and like soft-spoken people. And so we spend like 2 hours at a chalkboard and the meeting ends. And, you know, I've been taking notes. He was at the chalkboard and like vice versa. And, you know, the meeting ends and I was kind of disappointed because at the end I'm like, wait, he didn't ask a question. Like there wasn't a thing. And so I go and, you know, I have all my notes and I take it to that mentor and I'm like kind of going through it with him. And I'm like, hey, you know, it didn't go well. He didn't, he didn't You know, ask me the question. He didn't plant the seed. And so I go through the notes with this mentor of mine, and we're basically like recapping the whole 2-hour thing. And he was like, there, like that moment there, that was the subtle question. Like if you solve this equation and, you know, do this and send him an email, then he'll take you on.

Wow. It was truly that subtle that you had to sort of Talmudically go back through this. Wow. Fascinating. That's amazing. I love that story. In some ways, I would imagine the life of a theoretical physicist and the life of a startup CEO are almost like the total opposite ends of the spectrum. In some sense, I could imagine both being quite lonely, but like the startup operator, you know, it's almost like the Marcus Aurelius beginning of Meditations where he's writing about like, you will encounter, you know, annoying people today. You will encounter trouble. You like, you must expect these things. That's sort of the fundamental nature of like building a business, right? It's like rejection. stress, annoyances. Theoretical physics seems very monastic. How do you think about those parts of your personality?

Prior to just now, I would have always described it as completely opposite. But I actually do think you do have a point that there is something very similar. But on the surface, they're the most opposite because as a devoted theoretical physicist, my ideal day was alone in my room for 12 hours at a time, Just like reading papers. Like that is the ideal day, like not seeing the outside world whatsoever. Now I forced myself to do that for like 12 years because also partly out of spite, but partly also because the mathematics behind string theory is just so, it's so beautiful. It also like the chain of whys, like if you just ask why enough, it always goes to string theory or theoretical physics. Or then beyond that, it's philosophy, but you know, we can't, prove anything on that front. But like, it's kind of the base of everything. And there's something very beautiful about the mathematics there. So it did keep me going and it wasn't purely spite, but it is very monastic. And I would always, I've always been very curious just to like get to know people. And, you know, I've had people make fun of me at times where like, if I'll meet someone at a party, it'll be like an hour of me just like asking them questions. And then at the end, they're like, I don't know anything about you. Like, answer something. Yeah. But it just, you know, it was very enjoyable for me to like learn about different things. But I would always feel guilty doing that as a physicist because those were hours of my time not spent hard at work understanding more about the universe.

Yes.

And so I think the thing that's on the opposite side as a CEO and founder, the amount of context switching I do is insane. It's like, at the end of the day, I typically forgot what I did at the beginning of the day because it's just so varied. But that curiosity, especially when we're selling into the enterprise. It's so fun talking to all these CIOs and understanding the different nuances of how they build software. And it's very satisfying and I like engaging with people, but completely opposite where there has never been a time where I focused on one thing for 12 hours, literally for 3 years. Like I've never done that.

Really?

'Cause it's just, there's too many multivariate problems. But I think to your point about the similarity, there are 2 similarities. So on one hand, it is kind of the solitude, which is like, you know, you do feel a little bit isolated, I guess, in one case because of the responsibility, especially after going through the highs and lows.

Yes.

Where you see the people that are only there for the highs and then the people that are still there for the low, like that kind of really makes it obvious what the kind of solitude there is like. And then in the case of physics, it's like the literal Solitude. Also, you can't talk to anyone about it. Like no one at a dinner, like you could talk about black holes or whatever, but you can't talk nuance about it.

That makes total sense.

And also it's always kind of funny to people. Like if you talk at a dinner party about physics or about black holes, within 3 minutes someone will make like a Uranus joke. And then they're like, all right, I'm

done. We've done it. On we go.

Yeah, exactly. So it's, you know, similar solitude there. But I think there's also a similarity in accepting that there are going to be so many variables that you do not know. In the case of starting a company, there's just a million things happening all the time, especially when you get to a certain size. I won't know everything, but still being able to figure out how to decide what are the best next steps, how to make decisions, knowing that there are things that you don't have time to fully understand. Similarly, in physics, it would take you a full lifetime to read, more than a lifetime to read all of the literature that has come before. Yeah. And you just have to accept, okay, I don't know the full derivation of this equation, or maybe I don't have the deepest understanding of why this is true, but in order to make progress here, I just need to accept that, get some intuition about it, and just move forward. And so there is some parallels there.

At what point did your mind begin to wander from string theory? Was there a moment where you've noticed yourself sort of—

Yeah, so when I came to Berkeley to do my PhD, That was when I first had GSI duties or graduate student instructor duties. I've never been too fond of teaching. Not that I like, I enjoy it, but not as a job. Like it's enjoyable when people care. As a GSI at Berkeley, you teach people who do not care and are there just for the kind of, you know, requirements.

Yeah.

And it really, it took me until then to realize, but basically, I knew everyone who I would ever work with for the rest of my life. There are very few string theorists in the world. I'd met everyone that I would be working with basically for the rest of my life, except the potential students I would have. And I would basically be surrounded by children for the rest of my life as well, because you have to be at a university to be a theoretical physicist. And that kind of led to a cascade of, wait, oh my God, do I actually want to do this? Is this even the best, like, fit for me and my personality? And so it kind of led to this big cascade of kind of questioning everything. And then it kind of slowly broke down the stubbornness that I had. And I was like, okay, you know what, maybe there are other things that are out there for me.

I imagine that was like extremely difficult if you've identified, you know, you've sort of attached yourself to this like vision of yourself. I certainly had versions of that where for much of my early life, I was dead set on being a lawyer and then working at a law firm disabused me of that notion. But it was painful. It was difficult to sort of remove yourself from the dreams you had. Like, what costumes were you trying on at that point of like, I might be this person, I might be that person?

That's honestly, that's such a good way of putting it because that is actually what it felt like. It felt like this costume. Like I had, if you had asked me, it was like, I was like a physicist before I was a human. It was like that deeply like associated. And so it was like, Completely earth-shattering, trying to understand what do I attach to? Like, this was everything that I spent all of my time on. At a certain point, like, kind of just leaning into the fear, it became somewhat freeing. Be like, I can just do it. Like, the whole, like, I felt so guilty about any hour I wasn't working on physics that now I was like, oh, okay, you know, let me explore other things. And so one thing was, you know, I hadn't explored humanities as much. And so set aside some time and I was like, you know what? I should become a more normal, well-rounded human. So I like watched the top 250 movies on IMDb.

Oh, wow.

As a way of like, okay, you know, you gotta— and that was so much fun. Like,

I've seen Batman.

Yeah. But like, I, you know, so many of them, you know, brought me to tears because they were just so beautiful. Or similarly, like the top 100 pieces of literature. I was like, you know, we gotta read these. And looking back, that was one of the most fun periods of time because it's like these pieces of literature are famous for very good reasons. Um, and getting to experience some of them for the first— some of the movies and books I'd read before for school, but like experiencing it for the first time is just so much fun because they're all just such legendary pieces of art.

Okay, you can't bring up this topic without giving some names because I love talking about books and films. Like, yeah, what struck you?

Okay, so the first piece of literature that made me cry, it's so cringe to say, but A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I remember I like called my dad because my dad also loves literature. I remember calling him and I was like crying and I was like, this is just so beautiful.

Wow.

Like Dorian Gray, uh, was fantastic. Brothers Karamazov I think is incredible, although there are some sections that are completely a waste and some that are just like absolutely beautiful. Honestly, like the best to ever do it, Shakespeare. Again, like underrated even though he's the go-to.

Yes.

He's just so incredible.

Yeah.

As for films, One that always sticks with me and I watch all the time is Harakiri. It's an incredible samurai film, black and white, but it's, it's beautiful.

Wow.

You should really watch it.

I would definitely

honestly watch it and tell me, like, I would watch it with you. I, anytime I get to rewatch it, it's fantastic. There's a good Italian film called La Grande Bellezza.

Oh, I love that film.

It's so good.

I went to the theater like 3 times to see that movie. Yeah. What a movie.

So good. Just visually so fantastic. I can't even relate to it that much. It's like about an aging,

you

know, man who used to be the center of the party and now is— I had nothing to relate to it, but somehow it still just like pulls your heartstrings.

Yes.

What are some for you?

I actually, I would often say La Grande Bellezza is one of my very favorites because I think it's just like so, so amazing. There's a French film you were mentioning, this black and white Japanese film. So maybe that's why it came into my mind called La Haine.

Oh, so good.

I love that film.

Juste pour

te voir bien, right? Like as he's— That's

right. Yeah.

Gosh, wow, I can't believe that. Yeah, that was really great. Yeah, I'd have to think more on ones that I would really ride for. My ultimate favorite, have you ever seen The Master by Paul Thomas Anderson?

I have.

I really loved that. I thought that was an incredible film. Okay, amazing.

So we could talk about this for hours. I also, there's like, I have a note on my Notes app. I have a list that I'm tempted to pull out, but maybe we save that.

Yeah, we'll do that. Yeah, we'll do that after. I feel obliged to at least ask you a little more about your journey. You have this moment where you sort of explore the glories of the broader world. At what point do you migrate sort of from literature to tech?

So in my head, I kind of, funny enough, there was probably a month where I was like, maybe I could be a writer. And I was just trying some stuff. Absolutely not.

Not for you.

Not my strong suit. And it became pretty clear, okay, I spent the last 10 years becoming pretty good at quantitative things or math. And so it seemed to me it was like either startups, big tech, or quant finance. Quant finance is what like all math and physics people go into. I almost did quant finance. Last second, another mentor gave me some very good advice, which was, don't do this. Stay at Berkeley, explore a little bit, because once you do quant finance, you're not going to do anything else. And you're never going to get worse at math. You can always go back and do that. But while you're at Berkeley, just stay and explore. And I was like, okay, you know what? I will. And so ended up taking some courses in machine learning and AI. And at first I really liked it mostly for competitive reasons because I hadn't done computer science before, but I was kind of doing better than some of the CS students. And so competitively it was satisfying, but it didn't really like scratch the true itch until I took a seminar in program synthesis, which we now call code generation. Mm-hmm. And what really like nerd sniped me there was it's not machine learning to create video or audio or images, but it's code with the explicit purpose of creating itself. And there's just something very fundamental about that. And that got me obsessed. And so I ended up staying at Berkeley for about another year to do that. And my advisor was very kind to just let me take these, you know, AI courses and do this research that was pretty unrelated to physics. Ended up realizing that the best way to pursue that problem was not academia, but rather, you know, working with some of the most complicated codebases in the world. And the only way you do that is by starting a company, which I knew nothing about.

Yes.

And so like any, you know, curious person does, I ordered Zero to One by Peter Thiel on Amazon.

It's a good starter.

And looked up on YouTube like how to start a company.

And then you immediately started a dropshipping business and, you know, whatever else. Yeah.

But yeah, so whatever, going into this rabbit hole of like a lot of trash, some good YC videos, And then stumble upon this podcast interview, uh, with a partner at Sequoia whose name I recognized because I had cited him in that paper that I wrote with Juan Maldacena back at Princeton.

Wow. Yeah.

It was weird to see like a VC who had been a string theorist before.

Yes.

And ended up, you know, sending him a note. Turns out he was also a physicist, had very similar reasons for getting into physics, similar reasons for leaving. He ended up daring me to drop out of my PhD, which I did. And that was kind of how we initially started Factory about 3 years ago.

And when you, you emailed Sean Maguire, right? Yes, that's right. And you go for this very long walk, as I understand. Yes, that's right. Which I love, you know, these parts of the startup story. At that point of time, did you have like an idea in your mind of what you wanted to build? How well-formed was like the Factory thesis at that point?

Yeah, so this was probably 2 months after ChatGPT came out. And the main idea was like, hey, look, here are these coding problems. Let's play this fun game of you're not allowed to write a single line of code. How often could ChatGPT at that point in time, or GPT-3.5, how often could it output exactly the right solution and you didn't need to edit anything? And basically you as the human play the game of the orchestrator of like, oh no, we're in this code base. Oh, here's the context there. Here's the context there.

Yes.

And actually pretty often, if you properly subdivided the problem and you gave it the right context, it could do it very frequently. And it was like, okay, let's just now try to abstract away that orchestrator role. And then you have an agent. And so that from like when we started, the mission was to bring autonomy to software engineering. And it was like building autonomous agents. We actually initially were incorporated as the San Francisco Droid Company.

Yes. Which sparked a little issue, right?

Yes. Yeah. And then our lawyers were like, hey, you know, actually, Lucasfilm might be litigious. You should actually change the name. And so then the San Francisco AI Factory was what we went with.

But you managed to hang on to droids in there, which is great.

Thus far, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, thus far. We'll see. I think I've heard you talk maybe elsewhere, or maybe you wrote about it, that like the first year and a bit of Factory was not an obvious success. Like there was a real grind at various points. Like what were the hard parts there that sort of needed to get ironed out.

I think I refer to it as like our years in the desert where basically, you know, we had this mission, we had this team that was absolutely incredible that were turning down the ridiculous offers from, you know, all of the big AI companies to join us. And the enterprise was not ready for it. And I think the big learning, like the enterprise was barely even adopting Copilot, let alone autonomous agents to go work on, you know, coding and testing and reviewing and all that stuff.

Yes.

And I think the big lesson there was being early is the same as being wrong. No one gives a shit if you are early. You don't get a consolation prize. There's no pride in that. Like being early and not winning means you just lost. Like that's it. And I think, you know, maybe the secret benefit there was it's actually probably a blessing that we were early because one, it built very robust DNA for our team, which is we were all united in this mission. We all worked well together for a very long time. Despite all of the noise outside, and we made it through that adversity to now see that success.

Yep.

Whereas a lot of competitors out there, it's like day one, you're a unicorn.

Yeah, yeah.

That first fundraise we did is about to be unheard of. The valuation.

Yeah.

That first check was $5 million.

Wow. Good work from Sean. Yeah, good work. Yeah.

Like, no companies these days, it's like you're a unicorn immediately. Like, you're guaranteed to, like, it's got almost like victory is granted immediately. Whereas for us, Like we've been through that. And so now any hiccups are like,

wow,

nothing. Like we've been through so much shit as a team that's made us so much more robust where it gives me so much confidence going up against some of the most well-funded companies in history. And then 2, and this is maybe being a bit self-aware, it's good that we were early because I was probably not the right person if we were on time. Because this is the first and only job I have ever had.

Yeah. Yeah, I was wanting to ask exactly about that. Like, how did you learn to manage people, to, I don't know, do all the things that this job takes? Like, what was the learning curve?

Well, I had a nice 2 years of training, I suppose. But I think also, you know, some of it comes naturally. Some of it is just reading a lot. But I think also it's kind of a blessing to not have delusions of thinking I know what I'm doing. Like, I came into it very clear-eyed about like, I literally have no, I have never been paid for work aside from physics research. And so the nice thing is it's just like having deep curiosity means finding everyone I can who's really good at engineering, who's really good at product. Who do you think is the best person you've ever met at this? And kind of recursively following that and just like absorbing as much as possible, finding through lines, finding, wait, actually this person was just a bullshitter and they were just saying all these things, but actually they didn't do anything. And so this information, maybe throw that away. How do you do sales? How do you build good teams? How do you interview well? All of these things, it was just like, I mean, one, it was just so much fun because I love talking to people who have opinions about these things.

Yes.

And then also putting it in place and doing this and over time seeing what type of candidates end up doing well, what type of team structure allows us to execute quickly, what ends up slowing us down, what are the things that are fun but actually not worth my time? How do you make people feel empowered such that they can go and own decisions fully and it doesn't feel like you're micromanaging. Like all these nuances, it was just such a fun time to like get great advisors and mentors. And like some of the people that initially early on I read about are now people that I'm privileged to call mentors. Like Frank Slootman is now one of the people that I get to talk to and learn and hear his advice. And he's like one of the best to ever do it. Now, I mean, I'm sure he would be disappointed if I didn't disagree with him at times. And there are things that worked for him, his companies, or his era that don't work here. But I think a big thing is having the humility to hear and learn from as many people as possible. And then you kind of just have to trust your gut on synthesizing based on that and what's going to kind of work for you.

One of the things that I think a first-time CEO in particular must struggle with, and I, you know, I've seen it in many cases, is that you don't know what you're doing. And so it's very easy to take what people tell you at face value, right? But even when you're talking about someone like Frank, you're like, yeah, but he'd be disappointed if I didn't challenge him. How did you learn that for yourself? Like, is that just your personality in some way that you're sort of comfortable tuning out the noise, or is that a physics thing?

Yeah, actually, okay, again, I didn't think about that, but it is a very physics thing. Like, I remember any time, like, my friends or my siblings would be around while having physics conversation, people would think you guys hated each other. Because at the chalkboard, it's so, like, how do we get, because it's very hard to use the English language to describe equations. So you have to speak very succinctly and very bluntly. And to the external observer, it might seem like you guys are yelling at each other or not getting along. But in fact, it's just you need as optimal information transfer as possible. So you're very blunt at speaking. Yeah. There's no time for, Hey, that's a great idea. I really respect that. However.

However.

No, no, no. It's like, that doesn't make sense. You forgot that. It's very, very blunt. And I guess after a decade, that probably left a mark on me. But then also, I think talking to mentors like this, they feel like a kindred spirit. No one wants to be like, hello, kind sir. Thank you so much for taking the time of your holy day to speak with me. It's like, You know, I mean, another great mentor of mine is Chris Degenan, who's actually the CRO at Snowflake. And I think we initially met and I, the reason why he decided to even spend time working with us was because, uh, I guess I kind of forgot about this, but apparently this is how he describes it. Apparently after we first met, I was like texting him incessantly about like sales candidates and who he thinks is good, like sales reps. And he's like a CRO that took a company to $3 billion. And he was just like, honestly, like, I like the hustle.

Yeah, this guy's going after it. Yeah. What have you learned about yourself in this process? Like, are there certain things that you had no idea you're actually surprisingly good at? And maybe some things where you're, you know, hadn't explored and you're like, actually, that seems to be something I'm not naturally brilliant at. I've had to adjust.

I think most things I'm bad at. And the thing that's most important is being really not shy about addressing it.

I totally don't believe you. I'm sure you do.

I think it's like, it is the most important thing. Like, there's a natural urge of like, I'm bad at this. I don't want to look at it. Like, I want to hide it away because I'm— and it's instead like, oh, this is something I'm so unfamiliar with. Let's like jump in headfirst and try and learn. Because the reality is like most people who are legends at things are not that much better than the average person. They just spend time on it. And it's like, if you're shying away and not spending time on it, you're going to stay bad at it. So there are so many things that I'm bad at right now. The thing that scares me is not discovering that I'm bad at it. It's not discovering it. It's having a blind spot, something that I'm weak at and I haven't yet found it. And so there's certainly a lot of things that I'm continuously going to find that I'm bad at, but it's always exciting because it's like, okay, great. If I just spend a ridiculous amount of time on this, I can probably get better or I can learn more. I can talk to people who are better. Or at the end of the day, the beauty of having a company is you can hire people who are way naturally more gifted at that thing and then empower them to do that.

As you've sort of thought through building a company with a beginner's mind and from these first principles, what have you found like works for your culture? Like what's the culture of Factory that you care about, the way you operate, that you have noticed really contributes to the success of the organization?

Yeah, so maybe let's start with like the leadership team at Factory, the people that kind of I work closest with. The working cadence that I love is, for me, it's really hard to trust people. But actually what's easy for me to do is to just in my mind flip a switch and just pretend, oh, like this new person that I don't know that well, I trust them now and kind of stick with that until proven otherwise. So I am able to do that. And so I think the working cadence that we set is basically, hey, look, like I'm going to completely trust you on this. I want you to run this and completely own this and like let me know how I can help you. And I'm gonna tell you if you like do something otherwise. And I think the thing that is the most rewarding thing is when you kind of fully just give someone the room to run. Like, hey, you own all of this. Take more if you want. I'll tell you if you're doing too much.

Yeah.

And having people who are naturally kind of like a gas that expands into the volume in which they're put in.

Yes.

They just do that. It is the most satisfying feeling of seeing something and being like, oh, hey, I should tell this person to go do that. And they already did it. That's like, I don't know what the equivalent of a love language is for like working in a company, but that is the thing that just makes me so happy. And so having people that are like that, that naturally want to do more as opposed to people that I have to say, hey, why don't we like raise the level of ambition? But instead people that are like kind of doing that and sometimes I have to be, okay, wait, hold on. Let's not do that just yet.

I think you described meeting your co-founder, you know, as, you know, like an intellectual love at first sight, right? How do you two balance each other? Like, you know, what's that working relationship like?

You know, it's By far the best engineer I've ever met. But I think the rare privilege is he's also an incredible manager. And so like the whole engineering team reports to him, but he also, and this makes it insanely rare, he cares and is good at go-to-market, which is so rare. There are so many companies where the CTO likes coding and is really good at it, but like wants to live in a basement and not see customers at all. Eno is like so incredibly gifted, as an engineer, as a product thinker, as an engineering leader, but also like you could put him in front of any CTO, CIO, CEO, in front of our sales team, and he will like rally the troops, rile them up, get them excited. And it is just such a privilege because maybe this actually gets into the broader thing outside of the leadership team, which is like values at the company. One of the ones that I like is we call it build together. High level doesn't sound that interesting, but the important thing is Everyone at Factory is first class. We are working on a very technical product. It is very common in Silicon Valley, and a lot of competitors do this where it's like research is the most important.

Yes.

Those are the coolest people. And then there's the engineers who are, you know, they're still pretty cool. And then there's sales and marketing, like, oh, if only we built a better product, it would sell itself. Like, let's not allow them into the same building as the engineers. That's a true story that companies do this. Let's not allow them in the same room as the engineers because they'll distract them and those silly salespeople. The reality is your product is not just the software you build. Your product is the whole journey from the very first time they hear your name till their 10th renewal after a decade of being a happy customer. That entire thing is your product. And if you only care about the software, you are gonna deliver a shitty product experience. And so, you know, at Factory we do completely mixed seating. So it's not like the engineers corner and sales corner. Oh, really? It's like, no, engineers and sales sit next to each other. And every, you know, there's always people who come in and are like, Oh, you know, actually, like for an engineering pod, it would be good if we're next to each other. So it's easier to communicate. And this is the hill that I will die. Like never, we are never going to do that because I can't tell you how many times I see like a sales rep sitting next to an engineer and then they're like, oh yo, look at this. Like, oh, go check that out or vice versa. And then like time and again, they become friends because we only hire salespeople that want to work with engineers. We only hire engineers that care about our customers. and want to see how developers are using Factory. This is another thing that makes my heart sing when I see like that, like, and not having this like split culture. And, you know, the reality is, is also despite how technical of a space this is, if you think about legendary companies, try and name a legendary company that has a bad sales or marketing

team.

Very, very difficult.

Yeah, no, I'd have to dwell on it for a little bit.

But if you think about legendary companies that have Bad product.

Yes. You can kind of figure that out.

Quite a few. Quite a few.

There was a big Workday blowup on John X the other day.

Exactly. Yeah. So, and I think that's, you know, it requires a little bit of humility as technical leaders, because a lot of the companies in space have technical leaders. It requires some humility to realize like, hey, just because someone's not an engineer, it doesn't mean they are not equally important to the product that we are building. And that's something that I think is pretty important for us.

That's really cool. Maybe as we sort of move towards the end here, what do you think looks different about AI in a year's time? And what do you think looks different about Factory?

I think AI a year from now, there will be less focus on the models in particular. I think with model routing, it'll make it such that we've been in this phase where initially the question was, can you adopt AI? That's a big question. Like the board would yell at the CEO, Mr. CEO, what are you doing about AI? They're like, I don't know, like CTO, go make sure everyone uses tokens. And then using tokens they did. And then it went up like crazy. And then what did you actually do? What was the ROI? Who knows? Who knows? I think now it's getting very clear. Okay, we actually need to have an ROI story. Having an ROI story means you don't need to use the overkill model every single time, which is going to lead us to model routing.

Yes.

And so model routing will handle that. There'll be less kind of obsession over which exact model is doing things. And instead, there's going to be a lot more focus on where do you allocate tokens? Like right now, companies haven't set their token budgets well. They'll correct and they'll figure out, okay, this is actually what we want to set our token budget to. The question will then be, we do not want to evenly distribute tokens in the org. Where do we go and allocate those to deliver what kinds of ROI?

Yes.

So that's going to be a thing that people are going to talk about a lot. How factory is going to look different. I mean, we started this year as 25 people. We're now 110, 115. Now, I don't think that the number of people is like a metric of success, but it's more just like, we need to do it because of the demand in the market. Like, we are not saturating the demand that customers have. And so that's why we are growing the team.

Yes.

So I think the team will be larger. I think the things that My hope is that we can actually feel like effectively a smaller company because of using things like AI. Like I think like small company feeling, you can have that more when you can keep communication like what it was of a 50-person company, even if you're 500. And there's certain things you can do to kind of maintain that. And I think that's something that really matters to me. Like I want to make sure that when we're a 500-person company, I still know everyone, which is going to be difficult, but I think it's pretty important. And not just like on a vanity reason, it's just like, I think everyone is so important to what we are doing. I think that like, it's not that I just want to be able to say, oh, I know everyone. It's more that I just so deeply believe that every single person is so important for what we are doing that I want to know them well and I want to help and jump on sales calls with them or jump on engineering syncs or design syncs or whatever it might be because it's so important and because I think we actually can do it. We can scale. The closeness. So. I

always like to end with a few sort of thought experiments. If you had the chance to do an experiment with no operational constraints and unlimited resources, what's an experiment you'd want to run?

How do we define experiment?

As broadly as possible.

Okay, like literally just a science experiment in the world?

Yeah, yeah, a social experiment. You know, people have come up with some truly deranged and interesting things.

Okay, so the first thing that comes to mind, and as a quick side note, I was a theoretical physicist. I was never good at labs. And actually, I think I might have been the one person to go to Princeton who didn't take experimental physics. I found a way around it with like a credit from a different class, basically, that expired and the class didn't exist anymore because I was never good with the lab.

So you're saying this isn't your strong suit? Yes, this is not necessarily my strong suit.

However, that paper that I wrote with Juan, the key to string theory is where the things that are very large, like galaxies, and the things that are very small, like particles, like atoms, come together. Now, where do you have things that are so massive, like galaxies, and small, like particles? You have it in a black hole, because it's very massive, like very heavy, but infinitely small at the singularity. And that's like kind of the crux of physics. That's what we all want to understand. Problem is, none of us can go into a black hole and survive. And so if I could run any experiment, it would be to put some probe in the black hole and get some data out of there. And basically this paper that I wrote with Juan found that there is one piece of data that you can measure outside the black hole about the singularity. And that piece of data is called the TTS or time to singularity. So there's a way you can measure from the outside how long it would take to fall from the event horizon into the singularity. And so getting a little bit more data, honestly, it's kind of like the plot of Interstellar, another great movie.

Yeah, that is kind of like Interstellar.

They needed to get the data from inside the black hole. Um, although I don't think love will be the answer in this case.

I was gonna say, my big beef with Interstellar is the end. I loved it right until that part, and then I was, you know, ready to leave. Um, okay, that's a great one. Wow, yeah, that would be fascinating. Um,

what about you? What's your experiment?

Oh gosh, no one's ever turned it back on me. This is, uh, this is tough. I mean, I would be really interested in being able to know the personality traits of all the humans that have come before me. to see, like, of people I know or of myself, who was I most similar to in previous eras?

Interesting.

And what life did they live? And what could I learn from them? Like, you know, did they have these sort of failure modes or did they do something very different to me? And it turns out they were really good at it or they did something similar to me and actually, you know, it wasn't so great. Like, you always sort of want to Monte Carlo your own life, but I'd be fascinated to know if you could you know, really map someone's personality like in a video game, you know, traits.

That is such— you, I love the way you think about these problems. These are such interesting angles on— okay, that is, that is fascinating.

I would like to see that. And I'd like to know, you know, it would be so interesting to know you with your best friends. Like, actually, there was a, you know, uh, a Mongolian peasant woman who was exactly like your best buddy, and you would have gotten on so well with

her.

Um,

that's crazy.

So that I would be really interested in that. We sort of already talked about books, but I always have to end with the question of Uh, if, if you could assign a book to everyone on earth to read and understand, what would you want to give to people?

I'm literally going on my Goodreads right now because like, I don't want to fuck this up. This is how seriously I take this.

This is great. I love this. This is someone recognizing the responsibility they've been given.

Literature is so important. I think it's so important. I think, first of all, anyone reading any books, by the way, more often, like there's not a lot of time these days. And I think there's something so good about just like slowing down your pace. And like following, um, someone's thoughts. Okay, hold on. What are you, what were your—

Well, I would really recommend everyone read at some point Invisible Cities by, um, Italo Calvino, which I think is a beautiful book. It's like, I've, it's the sort of book that's maybe 150 pages, but takes a really long time to read in a way because you just stop after every page and you're like, oh, that's interesting to think about. It's written from the perspective of Marco Polo telling, uh, the tales of his travels to Kublai Khan about the different cities he's gone to, but they're all imagined cities. You know, it's cities where everything is perfectly mirror inverted or a city of string or all these sorts of magical things. And you just end up thinking about those dynamics. So that's one where I think it, uh, definitely changed how I— yeah, it just takes your brain to magical places that I think is good for you.

Yeah.

You have an answer?

Okay. I don't have an answer because I, Can't find my login. So this was the one that, yeah, so this is the answer that first came to me is probably the collected short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, because they're such a fun, like, upending of any way you might normally think about short stories. And there's just, I think the reason why I say short stories also is because one book typically has one kind of message or, you know, overall thrust. Yeah. With his short stories, you get a couple different angles on things. And he is one of the most polymathic thinkers, I think, that are out there. Like, he's a writer, but he writes almost as if he's a mathematician.

Yes.

And so I think that, that like perspective, he is one of those unique souls that have existed that are like, you know, in your example of, you know, I don't think there's anyone that has been like him that has existed there. I don't know if he has a kindred spirit. Because he was so idiosyncratic.

I love that. Yes, he's the writer who probably best captures infinity. That is a great choice. Matan, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much.

It's been so much fun. Thank you.

That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions, so if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.