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Hanby

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2026-01-23

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2026-01-23

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1. “Two things that I'm excited about one is building more AI agents, and I'll go into that more. And then secondly, building for more people as well. So first for the AI agents, I think it's so cool to build AI agents because you build something and then it surprises you at what it could be doing or like its capabilities surprise you. And so I'm excited to continue to iterate on that process and continue to be surprised by the stuff that I'm building. And secondly, we've constantly been like, you know, honing in on the fact that we love to build people, build for people that we really empathize with. And I like to believe that over the course of three years that honanized worldview has increased and we've interacted with more people and like faced new problems from when we first started the company. And so I'm excited to continue to expand our worldview and build for more people.”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “They know it or not, right? Doesn't matter to me if they know it or not. But what it matters to me is knowing that those 20 million people, there were probably many of them that was like the Han when he was 11 years old that learn how to code for the first time, that then go ahead and use the information, let's say, on whoever's docs to go and build something that was helpful for maybe, you know, their community and their school and the sense of having that impact into the world is something that truly excites me and Hobby about our work. And I know we'll continue to for hopefully the years to come.”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I think the first thought is. I think what excites me about Mintlify is the same thing that excited us from day one. And that is that Hanby and I wanted to go embark on the journey of building for people that we care about in a space that we believe genuinely impacts the broader ecosystem and the community that we've been in our lives. So the sense of empowering builders, if you will, that God is going and got us on this journey and got us to this project today that we get to do that in scale and even broader impact in ways that we never imagined still gets me the most excited. The thing that like, you know, people are like, oh, you know, it must be great. You're growing. You're like, you know, scaling, you're working with these companies and getting all the commercials. I'm like, yes, of course, that's great. Of course, that's something that we'll continue to do. But what really gets me out of the bed in the morning is knowing that as of last month, as an example, like 20 million people came across a site that was powered by them.”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Looking to the future since you worked down MillFi for quite a while, what excites you the most about things you will build, things the community will build, how people and new customers will be using you”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Not know that was a thing. And then they were like, Oh, you should go do a two for your other customers. And then we did. And so I think just kind of getting those kind of caliber people. And it doesn't really necessarily take, I think, just working with the best to kind of get that right. I think a lot of these people too themselves are still, you know, figuring out and they kind of rely on even the startups to figure out what it means and what the next chapter is too.”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “This was again two years ago now, I want to say, like we were a pretty early customer. And I remember we just got back and like online this morning and we noticed that all of their docs were suddenly from English to 12 other languages, right? We're like, how did you guys do that? Did you guys like go and get translators for this? No, we built a pipeline that went ahead and just translated them all in real time. Again, this pretty commonplace now, and I think it'd be a pretty non-trivial thing for us to imagine how someone would build that and why someone should now. But the two years ago were like, what?”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Oh man, I mean, absolutely on the former. When you work with these great companies, they have some great ideas, right? And we've taken, we've been very grateful by kind of taking and bouncing off of these ideas, these thoughts with these companies to then go ahead and actually go and implement them and scale for others. Again, I remember when we first started working with Anthropic.”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “That's the way that these companies use the product informed you how you want to build the product at the same time? Do they use the product a little bit differently from the rest of the customers? Or it's more about sort of the working culture and speed that's been inspiring the.”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “If I recall correctly, I think I remember some of our biggest customers came in into our Slack community on Saturday. And like you would just respond just casually. And then it would end up becoming a huge customer that we had no idea the product. And so it goes to show that everybody is working. But dare I say 996.”

   2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Yeah, exactly. But I think it speaks to kind of like the expectations that exist now. And my point is having now worked with some of these really great logos and especially the larger ones, we have been so surprised by the pace of which these companies and like teams are moving, just to shout out Microsoft. My goodness, for a company that's as large as they are, they are moving lightning fast over there. Like, you know, the stereotype of what large companies was just a few years ago is not really the case anymore, right? And that should be an inspiration for everybody, in my opinion.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “What's your social security number? We need to confirm. But if you kind of see those companies and you kind of seeing and observing the kind of cutting edge, you get inspired by what you could be as well, right? And that's like a big source of inspiration for us. Like if these companies at this scale even are working at this kind of pace that they are, then there's no excuse for startups, for ourselves not to hold ourselves to that standard too. And so we hold ourselves to that bar with not just these logos, but everybody, right? Someone responds, look, you got to respond right back very quickly. I remember it got to a point where anthropic in particular, they like sent a message and then we respond within a few seconds and then their response was like, do you guys have get on call whenever we send a message? And that was like a big compliment for me for sure. We don't.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Yeah, well, I'll start by saying that we're very fortunate to work with these companies, right? It's not lost on me that it's a privilege, not a right and not something that we can take for granted. And so being able to serve, I mean, not just anybody, but a lot of the best in the field and kind of the work that they're doing is like truly inspiring for me and Hanby and especially to the mission that we're on. As far as what it's like to work with these very demanding companies and fast moving, well, you just got to be demanding and fast moving right back, you know, for sure. And that's really one thing. I remember like as an example, some of these AI labs, right? When we were working with them, we were just shell shocked by how quick they respond to everything and how quickly they were able to do things. So you would send a Slack message to them about anything. You would consistently, depending, doesn't matter what time. It could be like five in the afternoon to 2 a.m. in the morning, someone's going to respond within 10 seconds.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I think Guillermo Rauch said something along the lines of Waymos are driving within the infrastructure that already exists of our roads. Like we still are very much operating within the world that we have today. So it's kind of like a weird balance of building on top of what we already have and also like this new hot technology that's coming out that's like adapting to our world that we have today. And so I still think that there is a lot of leveraging what's already out there. But of course, I would say that it's not like the AI is just building things that are net already there. I definitely think there's like new innovation happening on top. But I think that a lot It's still being built using the current technology built by humans. Yeah”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, I would say that the first thought is like even today we're seeing use cases of, you know, for instance, auto-generated docs and change logs, that then is then becoming fed for other agents, right? And I think in the world of really kind of going and building into that, like just really reimagining the role of not only the viewers, but also the authors of who's going to be editing the content is kind of paramount. I'm not sure if I have any more unique things or insights on that particular front because I think that this is something that's still going to unfold very quickly in front of our eyes, right? What is the role of context? How are humans still going to be able to communicate their facts to the world? What is that interface going to look like? Is stuff that we're kind of asking ourselves day in and day out. And then always trying to figure out how to build that into a way that solves problem for customers today, right?”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Related to what we kind of talk about earlier, it feels like there's two sides of the market. There's one side of its agents or humans producing software, like software people can use. I mean, agents, although they're writing code, they're still using all the NPM packages and NPM packages, it turns out you need a lot of context to know how to use them. And then there's the other side, which is agents and humans continue to use already built software to produce new software, right? This cycle just never ends. So to some extent, from our observation recently, it felt like there's like a new layer of abstraction between models and models, right? There's the production side, there's a consumption side. How have you seen the usage pattern or like interesting use cases that evolve like maybe what's different audience, maybe with different ways of using Malifi? Like since we're just producing software so differently now.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “And to that, I would say, yes, definitely, in the same reason why books are still exist today, right? There is still going to be an element of a human who needs to go read something, right? Front to back, a need of someone who needs to like actually go and know what they don't know, or just for humans still trying to understand the world too, right? This world will still be, we'll still have us in it, hopefully, you know, and building for that experience is still going to be paramount. It's just going to be like, let's say, you know, now if we're thinking docs are 50% for humans, 50% for AI, it'll maybe be like 10% for humans, 90% for AI by the end of the year. But that's not necessarily because a lot less people are going to it, but because there's just going to be much more prevalence of AI agents, right, that is going to just be the massive majority of the workforce. But still, you still have to have the human element into it. And so these things.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Yeah, I think the days in which the battle for the developer experience being and like how nice it is and how the experience is just way past us. That was a 2010s really to the frontier now is about how good the content is, right? Whereas if you have the nicest developer experience in the world, but the content is just absolute crap, then it doesn't even matter. It's just a window dressing at the end of the day. So the frontier is truly about how great and up to date the content is going to be. And I think that just moving forward because when an agent goes to your docs, it could not care less about how it looks. Right. If it's just reading raw HTML or Markdown, it doesn't care, you know, and the caveat that I would say to this is, you know, people also go, oh, well, like his docs are even going to exist in a few years, right?”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Equally, if not more important. And also, one thing, though, on the human side, I would say is that a lot of people are expecting a chat interface where they're expecting to put in an error message or be able to just find exactly where it's supposed to be in the docs by just typing a couple words as opposed to like manually looking at it themselves. I think like I personally expect that too. It's just so much easier.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “We're realizing that. I think Andrew Carparthy tweeted English language is the next hottest new programming language. And so I feel like a broken record we're constantly saying how important. And a lot of as opposed to like looking at the look and feel we're kind of just like putting it into cloud code and seeing whether that works well and using that as an interface as opposed to Just like the way that humans are reading it. And of course, the human interface is still important too, but definitely the other ways, the other entry points in which people are accessing the docs are”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “That was not the case two years ago. I can assure you of that. We tried very hard. But now they are. And so you're kind of seeing this need happening. You're kind of seeing the capabilities. And then you're also kind of getting this environment. And then therefore. It kind of is like the first time I think in about 20, maybe 30 years where this long held problem of content, knowledge going on a date is going to get solved. And I think this is also one thing that excites a lot of developers because I'm not going to lie, as someone who day in and days out builds a knowledge and docs products, I don't always love updating the docs either.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Like also, the capacity of the models. So there's a need. The models are smart enough now, right? I think Opus 4.5 was actually a big unlock for us because we've iterated and tried this idea of self-love being docs for many months in 25. At one point, it became clear that the model is reliable and consistent enough and can actually go do it. And then lastly, and I think this is the most important part of, I think why this problem is going to get solved, is it's also because the convergence of trust and the environment that allows it to do so, a lot more companies, especially enterprises, are a lot more comfortable suddenly giving away a lot of their context for LLM agents, right?”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Really, want to. That seems like a weird drudge of a job. But now, right, where you're feeling real time the consequences of out-of-day docs. Because let's imagine you're building a support agent and it's trained on your company's source of truth. Let's say the docs or the knowledge base, you name it. And there's a question, and there's a section of the content that's fundamentally incorrect, right? Let's say it's just mispricing information. That source of truth becomes the enabler for the agents to go ahead and give answers. And if that's incorrect and you're talking about thousands, if not tens of thousands of agents across the board, the consequences are real, right? Where it wasn't back then. And so the need of this problem, like in solving that, is very much there now. And so people are really scratching their head in terms of how they solve it. And then number two is I think a big part of what's kind of like enabling the convergence of self-updating, self-healing docs you mentioned, Jennifer.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Every season can I have to. Yeah, it's like you just throw some skeletons in there and then you don't look at it. And I think there's a few different reasons for that. Number first and foremost is like there's a lot of organizational dynamics or team dynamics that prevents that from being the case. I even break it down from example of a software company. The people who somehow have the most context for how things work. Let's say you're documenting a product or specific features or infrastructure, you name it, are the people who probably roll it themselves, which are often the engineers, the people who are not often themselves maintaining the docs or content in general. They're the ones who have most content, most know-how on how to go and write the docs. They're not the ones who want to or incentivized to, and they're not the ones you are paid to. Now, I have to be the one responsible for writing. Well, that's just not my job, right? And at the same time, it's like there's an aspect of organizational dynamics and an aspect of human nature and part of this too.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Yeah, absolutely. Well, I first want to unpack that by breaking down, I think, a few different elements. The first and foremost is like why quote unquote docs have been historically out of date and difficult manage. And make no mistake. This is a problem that I'm sure everyone who is listening or understands this, you know, this is something everyone feels. No one ever feels good and has gone to bed and be like, oh, I have great docs. If they think about it all, let's say.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Right now we can probably have already capable assistant to help us do that a lot easier. And I think that's sort of with your self-heating dogs you're trying to solve now and maybe not just for dogs, but for a lot of knowledge work overall. So I'm curious and want to hear about what are some of the, I guess, bigger chunks of content you want to go into also how you're solving that problem to reconciliate and come back to the source of truth, that kind of decisions you're trying to make now.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yeah, I kind of agree more with that. I think there's certainly a lot of things that coding agents and AI has surprised us of its capability. But at the same time, there are still the limitations that we need great tooling to work around it with. And that's why contact and documentation is so important to continue to feed the right pieces into context and for the agents to perform. And that also goes to sort of the mitness piece, Hanya mentioned earlier. It's always been the case where authoring is like a big chunk of documentation. It's an important part, but it's sort of one time. But the maintenance side of maintaining dogs and keeping it fresh has been the biggest burden for organizations to make decisions on if this is the right version, this is the right virgin, what's the source of truth, what's the UI that's actually showing in the product today, and is it the right one showing in the docs? There's just a lot of thousand paper cuts that's making it so time consuming and cumbersome.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “I feel like there's a lot of buzz going around in AI nowadays. And even like people are scared because it's moving so quickly and they don't know what's going to come next and like AGI like Doomsday sci-fi-esque scares going on. But the way that Hannah and I view it is that AI is really just another tool in the toolbox and it's just so powerful and useful and valuable. And we're just, we just now have this extra tool in the toolbox and we should feel very open and embrace it in terms of utilizing it to help others and provide value for others. And I feel like we could abstract away, don't think about all the scary media around it and just view it as a helpful tool to help us get to point A to B to help people understand products better, to help learn how to code faster. All of these, that's what AI is here for.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “I think this is going to be mentioned, the pragmatic side about all this, right? Which is on one hand, we can sit here and talk about the theory of it all, right? The general macro trends that enable products like this. Whereas from the battle scars that me and Hanby had in this going back into the pivot days is we also learn that it's so important to figure out how to bring that to the actual problems that people care about, right? Yes, self-updating docs, very great thing to have, right? It's been asked for about 25 years now. And now there are a bunch of reasons why it can and should exist. But at the same time, there's about a thousand product decisions that need to be made from now until then. What is the actual way people do that? What is the actual experience of how those updates should happen? What sources should they connect? How are those connected? What is the actual like flow of it all, right? Those are the things.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Outside of just developers are using Cloud Code and these tooling, right? Like the cursors to go ahead and do creative work, writing blogs. I remember Yoko, you mentioned you wrote a blog, right? Using it as well. And all of that's done in like this developery way. And so especially now where AI agents are also powering so many different workflows, the engineers themselves too get also very involved in the process. Back then, if you want to go sell a support product, right? You're selling to the support teams. If you want to sell help centers, you're selling to the support teams. But now if you're basically like the support strategy is like 80% of the tickets are built and managed by AI agents, the engineering team gets involved, right? And so then they have a say in terms of how you want to go build a platform, how you want to maintain it. And so this kind of the early bet that we took, which is being for developers, also kind of became this tailwind.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yeah, that's a really good question. So there's a lot of different things about this. The first and foremost is that you have to actually go build for, you know, obviously a great editing experience beyond just the developers, right? So when Hambi and I started, we took the opinion that it should just be developers. And so we really optimize for that flow. But of course, as we kind of grow in more use cases, larger companies, when you're talking like Fortune 10s, they're not just all developers. There's a lot of stakeholders. And so you just had to build a better editing sprain. So there's a point about product and features in their side. But the larger one that I actually think has been shifting in this is that a lot more of the world is also on the other side getting more technical, right? To Hambi's point earlier, a lot more people who are vibe coding now, a lot more people who can understand markdown now because the language about LLMs, right? So the syntax that might be somewhat foreign for most people is now commonplace. A lot more people.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “AI tooling, the QA bots. So everything, just ask a question on Slack and tell it to go update things on Slack, right? Give a natural command and it just evolves over time is something that even personally getting so much use out of. And for many other companies that we work with, you'd be surprised by they do use us for a public docs instance, and that's kind of obviously the thing we can showcase. But deep down, they have two sets of internal docs that we now work with. For maybe their engineering team, for maybe even their HR team who's talking about like their healthcare policies. And I think as we grow, it's going to evolve from not just quote-unquote docs, but like more knowledge management more broadly. I think kind of seeing that shift in 25 and hopefully more into 26 as well is something that we're very excited about.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Exactly. The Robo Taxi. I was like literally preparing for the driver's test and I came across like this document that was like, here's how you prepare for the written exams. And it was on Minify. And I was like, I would never in a million years have imagined that this is like a place I would just come across. And to your point, like in a lot more places than I can even imagine. This is kind of like a common misconception I think people even have about Milify today, which is that, you know, they're like, oh, it's Milify. They're the docs company. And while it's not incorrect, of course, right? Of course, what we do, 25 has been a big year for us because it also dramatically expanded the surface area of what we actually cover. So there's a lot more help centers on Millify today. There's a lot of internal docs. In fact, actually, we recently replaced our entire internal knowledge stack with just MINLIFIR as well, largely because of the automated”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “With Mintlify, there was a lot. But that pales in comparison to the number of people who are building things that are cooler than our imagination, I was literally, this is a little embarrassing to admit, got my driver's license not that many years ago. That was literally two years ago even as an example.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Yeah. And in a different way of VC terminology, like your TAM expand is so dramatically not just because on the supply side, you have a lot more to serve of people who are building tools and people who are building DevTools agent tools. But on your demand side, you have this new persona that are not just developers, but also coding agents. the demand of docs and great documentation, accurate ones, up-to-date ones is getting much, much higher.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Up to date documentation has always been important for developers, marketers, customer support, everybody within the org views it as a source of truth. And now there's an outsized amount of AI agents who are also relying on it. And so Even more important now. Where humans like natural inclination is not to update the docs. You know, you're shipping code and you want to say it's done when you've shipped the last PR. But in reality, you need to, now it's even more important to update the docs. And so with this increased importance, we're building tools to make the context stay up to date as well.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “And I think a lot of people who start from an idea that they have aren't starting pragmatic enough. And it's very important to solve one problem correctly. And even right now, as we're experimenting and launching new products, we're hyper-focused on getting one person who loves what we're building as opposed to a thousand people who are going to just feel meh about it. And so we're. We're super focused on that. Then as for the future of the product and to touch on what Helen was saying about how AI has been impacting our product, like The future that we envisioned a year ago is here. AI agents are the ones ingesting the content And I'm constantly talking to founders who are talking to me about how the documentation is the source of truth for making sure that their agents are working properly. And so.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Well, if I were to touch on some of the previous topics as well, I feel like a lot of what kind of goes into our product intuition and how we build is like living and breathing like the mantra of talk to your users. And so and also learning from our failures and being very data oriented and being very pragmatic and MVPing things very quickly. That was kind of a lot more than I was expecting to say. But I think that that kind of really encompasses a lot of just how we approach product and strategy in general.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Of founders, the YC guy. And we were so many of my greats. Like, how do you do this? I'm sure at one point when you scale it out, you get to go do something a little bit different, a little bit better. He's like, no. This thing that you're doing now is going to be the thing that you're going to do forever. I was like, okay. And then we hired a team and then build tooling. And then, you know, obviously it's, you know, AI has helped a lot in that journey too. But yeah, it's still the small things that don't scale that really spark kind of like the customer love and the thing that goes the extra mile, if you will, is how we think about things, right? If you go the extra mile that in a way that people don't expect, you know, magic.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Job of manually migrating everybody. And back, by the way, back then, like before any of the bells and whistles for why someone should use us, one of the reasons ways we got people to give us a try was like, hey, by the way, if you switch to Milify, we'll actually go in and actually help review your docs. We'll fix your grammar and we'll actually structure in a better way. A lot of do things that don't scale. And we were doing that for a while. I remember at one point we had an office hour, if you will, with Paul Graham.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Exactly. To then the reaction of like, how do we get this set up right now? Like I was like, oh, yeah, do you want to find time tomorrow to chat? No, like, how do you do it right now? And then you send them like an invoice and they're like, they're done in a minute, right? And then for Hyperbeam in particular, they were like, let's get going. I was like, bet, I'll set up for you right now. Give me access to your cloud for DNS configurations. I literally went and changed it over. And that was our first customer. And that first customer led us to the second and the fifth, the tenth, a hundredth, and now into thousands.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Realized the beauty of having failed so many times, which was in failing so many times and building so many ideas that didn't work when something did There was no mistaking it, right? And so there's a lot of grace and failure, in my opinion, which is that like you learn a lot of perspective on things that don't work and the reaction customers give when they don't work. So in our case, it was many, you know, a year and a half of people who are like, oh, let's talk again next week. You send them an invoice. They're not paying it. Send them a crime. They're like, oh, we don't have budget. It's 20 bucks to then the react”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Because at the time, we were like, all right, well, we just got to try everything and we'll just give it the amount of time we kind of have confidence in this idea for two days. That's all we got. And so we forced ourselves to build like this very initial version of it. And then The next thing I knew, like we built out this prototype. And we just want to get validation. So at the time my roommate who was going through the YC batch, you know, were building and pivoting into the API space. This company called Hyperbeam. They were going from a consumer product to building an API product. So we went to them, we're like, hey guys. Here's your docs that are way better now on Mylify. Take a look That's when I”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “We kept hearing that again and again, and just kept pushing that down because we're like, oh no, it's actually great. The market's already there and yada. And as we kind of start dugging into the user feedback and we start thinking about our own experiences, we're like, My goodness I've tried building this so many times. Here's why all of these things were bad. So if we're going to do it right, let's at least do the one that we wish we would have wanted, right? As developers, because we believe that's who we want to build for, let's just go figure out what we would have liked. And so the initial version of what MintLify is today actually came out just from one weekend. It was two days.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Well, for starters, you know, the funny thing is the reason it took so long for us to even get to the idea that we're doing now is because we actually internalized that same opinion, which was, oh, there were so many of these incumbents, these existing companies that did it. There was a solution here, a solution that, oh, you could probably go build these things in-house. We just bought into that, right? And at one point and throughout the journey of these many pivots, we kept talking to people, right? Talking to users. And they kept saying, oh, well, while these other options existed on the market, I didn't find the right one for me. And here's why this is not great. And in fact,”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Lot of bad Too many to list and too bad to pitch at this point. But I think it was just a lot of things where we say like it was eight pivots, but truly it really didn't feel like that because all of it was really surrounded with kind of the same kind of like idea space, if you will. It was always something for developers. It was always something about building for helping enable someone to go learn and build something faster. And so one idea after next, it went from something like, oh, using AI to auto just describe what your code does to something like, hey, could you just connect static content to the code? And then that was a bad idea, by the way. I don't know if anyone's doing that, don't, but then it eventually led us to where we are today, which again, in hindsight is the most obvious thing, right? Oh, duh should have built the docs platform. But at the time, it was just about developers.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “And because we know that building a company takes such a long time horizon, right? It's like the span of decades if you want to build anything meaningful, you have to go pick a space that you can care so deeply about. And for me and Hambi, it's other people, other builders like us. And so that was the start of the journey, right? It wasn't all about docs at first. It was just like, how do we go build something that can enable people to build a little bit better, a little bit faster because then they can go and impact people. And so then, you know, we started the journey and spent about a solid year and a half of wandering in the desert while chewing glass is probably the best way I can describe that.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Yeah, oh my goodness, so essentially the story of all the pivots and it goes, you know, for me and Hanbi, we start the company because we really know we want to build for builders, right? I was very fortunate to like started coding when I was very young, initially 11 years old. I was given a laptop, like a MacBook Pro back in the 2010, 2011 edition. And I found the joys of learning how to build products for people around me, community, my school, my friends, you name it. And that entire journey was self-taught like many other people who are very prominent builders, you know, in the ecosystem. I had to learn so much by myself. I had to go figure out through YouTube videos, a lot of bad docs, right? No cloud code, unfortunately. I wish that would have been great. You kind of helped me figure out all the space. And then therefore, when we start the company, we're like, that's just a thing that we can relate to so deeply.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Yeah, yeah. A lot of pivots and a lot of failure along the way. And by the way, you know, in my opinion, too many people use us. You know, we need more variants in the world. That's what I think. Exactly. The honest answer, you know, and I kind of want to be very speak on that is the fact that it wasn't the first thing that Hambi and I came up with in spite of how much we see and how obvious the problem is in hindsight.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Developer expectations, changing the way people build entirely. So, what initially started was just like a very simple platform for people to build, write, maintain better docs, read for other humans, really start to transition to being something for humans and AI. And what eventually now it went from being an application to it really feels like an infrastructure product. It's content that powers AI. It's content that trains support agents, coding agents, you name it. And I think kind of witnessing that change firsthand is not only a testament to how much the world has changed, but being front and center and having a role in something that we find particularly meaningful.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Means so different now, right? I think, and it speaks a lot to even how much has changed in such a short amount of time. I remember when Hanbi and I decided we kind of wanted to embark the journey of wanting to go build something that helps developers. The first thing that came to our mind, this was like to paint the picture, like early 24, late 23, early 24, we were just like, let's go build something that could impact developers, help their journey as kind of like the impetus for why we want to start the company. And then landed on building like just better developer docs because we were like, let's go solve problems that, you know, like we can relate to, right? And as people who've been building our entire lives and careers for like, we know that there's so many bad docs out there. There's an audience we can, you know, relate to. It's a problem that we deeply understand and care about. Let's just go build that. And then obviously what changed from then till now was this tsunami.”

    2026-01-23 · a16z Podcast · How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source