Today I walk with Zach Lloyd (@zachlloydtweets), founder and CEO of Warp (@warpdotdev). Zach is a former Principal Engineer at Google (@Google), where he led the Google Sheets team, scaled his first startup, SelfMade, to 150 employees before it fell apart, and raised over $73 million for Warp from Sequoia (@sequoia) and Google Ventures (@GVteam), and now he's betting the whole company on AI. He gets into the AI feature Warp built before Claude Code (@claudeai) and ChatGPT (@ChatGPT) existed, why not going harder at it is one of his biggest regrets as a founder, and what it's like having Marc Benioff (@Benioff) as his cousin. We get into: -The AI feature Warp shipped before ChatGPT even existed, and why building something like Claude Code six months early still turned into one of his biggest regrets -His first startup, SelfMade, scaling to 150 employees and multiple millions in revenue without ever finding real product-market fit -Why he calls hiring "just sales," and why he'd rather hand over equity than compete on salary -Growing up with Marc Benioff as his cousin, and watching a family member build one of software's biggest companies -Why he barely opens a spreadsheet anymore, and which AI-era tools he thinks actually survive So much more! Timestamps (00:00) Trailer (00:59) Zach Lloyd, Founder & CEO, Warp (01:03) Grandfather Lloyd K Lloyd, San Francisco's original salesman (04:42) Marc Benioff is his cousin (21:33) The humility lesson from Google Sheets' original creator (27:07) SelfMade: 150 employees, still not a real business (34:04) Why hiring is really just sales (39:32) Nearing a million terminal users (41:18) Building AI before Claude Code and Codex existed (42:52) Only going halfway in on AI (1:03:09) Why he barely opens a spreadsheet anymore (1:10:10) Warp is automating 30% of its own engineering work (1:11:12) Building automated cloud factories (1:14:49) Almost naming the company Cursor (1:15:48) Never living on Saint Mark's again