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Zach Lloyd

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90
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2025-10-17
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2025-10-17
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  1. “Thanks for having me. I knew this was going to be really fun and it didn't disappoint. It was awesome. Thanks for having me.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I don't know. I was being very, very honest. It's like it's really incredible technology and it's like never been a worse time to deploy it in my opinion. I hope that the sensible people kind of can get the technology deployed so that really is helpful to people.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, it's that type of thing. Just to be honest, like, I'm getting older. I think we're at this really interesting spot where we're on the precipice of amazing crazy technology that truly could help a ton with healthcare or help a ton with people's prosperity or learning or whatever. And on the flip side, I think we're at this very precarious political spot. And I feel like those two things are like racing each other. It's super unstable. We're not like a spot of equilibrium. My hope is that the technology, like the advances in technology can really, really have a big impact. I think if I had to pick one area where I'm most interested, most hopeful as well is like in health, like that would really be transformative for like, you know, me and my family and just like having some sort of real medical progress. But I'm also scared because it's like a very unstable situation right now in the world, in my opinion.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So we have a cool cap table with a combination of like operator investors. I think having someone like you, I don't know if I say you, probably you, like you seem to have like the big who can think through one of the challenges we have is like breaking through the noise. And so I think someone who has that superpower would be a great person to have. Not my best answer, but.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Is going to sound crazy, and this is not a thing I've thought through, but at some point I would like to have some kind of impact outside of technology maybe in politics. I think I would like, I don't think the world wants me in politics. I think that like the way that I think of things is probably not very appealing to most people. But I hate what's going on politically. I'll have to say in the US. And if I could have some bigger positive impact, it's not just starting a business, I would do it. But I don't really think most Americans probably want me in politics. But that's like, I would love to have some big positive impact on our country, to be honest.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, like the bowl case on these is, oh, well, wow, anyone can build something. That's cool. And then I think you naturally have to ask the question of like, okay, cool. What are they building? And I worry that what they're building is like the next gen of WordPress or Squarespace or Webflow. And like the business case for those types of apps is not that awesome to me. And so that's why it's like, I think you want to be if you're in, you know, the coding market, I think it's way cooler to be in the market for like building the really hard to build apps that have billions of users than the like, you know, someone's like Shopify store. And by the way, I think Shopify could also, you know, be big in this space eventually.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think the argument for webflow, like Webflow in particular, I don't, we used to use it, we moved off it, like they need to leverage the fact that they have this great hand interface for building websites, but I don't think you really need that. So I think Webflow is really, really in a ton of trouble. Yeah.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I know you're a lovable investor. I don't have this one I truly don't have a strong take on. I will say, again, from a selfish perspective, I think it's much better to be in the market for professional developers in the enterprise market for CoGen than I do think it's being essentially the no code code market. I don't know which of those products is the best. I don't really use them.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Said it before in this interview, I'll say it again. I'm very, very bullish on open AI because I think they have a winning consumer product. Anthropic is maybe the best AI lab, like from a research perspective and from like their models are incredible. I think it's a big problem not to have the consumer product there. And so I don't know is an API business gigantic business. So they're going to have to really win on these like enterprise vertical businesses. And maybe they will. I hope not. We're competing with them. It's a frustrating thing as someone in the coding space and or a customer of them. But I think OpenAI with ChatGPT is going to be gigantic.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I would integrate X, they approach us all the time to put out their coding models, but I need some reason that it's measurably better because every time we want to add one of these. I hope that they have a competitive thing in my space. I don't really know. I think it's great, though. I want more models out there. And so I'm pro the existence of X, although we don't use it anymore.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I've historically waited a little too long to hire people to be leaders on the team. So my default, like for instance, I like with someone else on the team basically like ran our growth function or for a few years. And I think there's value to that. Like it's better to try designing yourself as a founder first before hiring someone for it. But there's also lots of people who know how to do stuff way better than I know how to do it. And so I may probably waited a little too long on that. We hired a great growth person who's like been awesome.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “No, no, so am I. You know granola? Do you know Chris? Have you heard of that product? So he's a friend of mine. I'm a small investor in that company. The way he thinks about it, I knew him at his last company too. He's building really cool AI native stuff. So I think he's doing a great job. It's like get rid of the black box in Zoom is like a very interesting that just makes the product experience so much better. So”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I mean, it's super, super cool product. But yeah, no, I'm a small investor in the browser company, and I know Josh actually, but it's a, yeah, crazy market.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “They're going shopping. Again, I don't totally get the strategy. I'm not plugged in on, but it's interesting. My theory there is that the founder just loves certain products, like loves the browser company's product and they're like, okay, this is available? I will buy it.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yes, but they like, I think that they kind of screwed up co pilot. I don't really know what Amazon is doing. They put out a coding thing, which people seem to like, okay. Google is not great at developer stuff just period from my time there. And Apple is always just like super duper slow. So I don't know. I guess Microsoft, if you're putting a gun in my head of like, who's I'm just talking about MySpace, who's doing the best. I don't think any of those companies are doing a great job. As I insult all of our potential acquirers, but like it's just like, I just don't. I think that it's like there's a big company thing that's a real problem.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Like, that's not a thing I'm afraid of saying. They need to get their, like, I'm saying it all the time. I have a 18-month-old son, right? And his new favorite thing is to talk to our, we have Google Home and like we'll be like, hey, you know, hey, Google, what's a, what's like a horse sound like? And it'll be like, May. And so he walks around. He's like, Google, Google, whatever. And like the thing is, like broken half the time. And I'm like, I don't get it. It's like I know the technology to do this well exists. I get better results from like speaking to Warp. And like, it's just such a thing with the company so fucking slow that I can just see myself in the meetings where the various product managers are like, how do we get Gemini into this thing? And then it's like some Gemini org. It's like some PM is coming in. And we're like, we can't put it in because it's like not translated into 70 languages. I can just imagine the conversations there, which is why I like.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “He's good. I mean, I worked with him at Google. So it's like there's just very, very long relationships here that I have with these people in terms of trust.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “That's like one of the things that I'm actually wanting. The other VCs I have are I have Greg from Box Group and Eric from GV and I trust them all to be like pretty cool.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, candidates, yes, customers not like I haven't been asking them to do that. But like, yeah, if I'm like, we have this incredible engineer who I want to join the team, can you explain to them why they should join Warp? A million percent. Do you not do that for portfolio companies?”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “He's been in all the funding rounds. I don't know. I wanted some variety. And plus, Mark's awesome, but Mark's not like sitting down with me and being like, here's how to think about your customer base. Mark's not like closing candidates for me. I just want to be clear. Whereas Andrew or even Dylan sometimes will help do that kind of thing. So Mark's awesome.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I have pictures of me and him hanging out as a kid when I was a kid and he was at USC. So I grew up in LA. And I have very distinct memory. He was always precocious as a business person. I have very distinct memories of him picking me up from my house as a kid. And he had this white BMW convertible. My parents being like, that's your cousin Mark. He's going to be really successful. Or maybe he was already like at Oracle being kind of successful. And I remember riding around with him. But yeah, he's my cousin.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I knew we were going to get along, but I'm concerned that I've been like too open, but I think it's going to be interesting for people listening. I'm very unfiltered.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So, I think it would be kind of arrogant to be like, oh, I hate this. Like, it's like, no, it's cool. People, you're running a business and people are interested in giving you money. I think that is not the default case for most people in the world. And so for me to be like, oh, I don't, that's so annoying. No, it's great. It's awesome to have the interest from how to manage it as a founder. I just basically don't take the calls right now. I'll do them once in a while to just like gauge the market and where we're at. But I have a strong feeling that when we do it, I'm not going to do it based on an inbound email. I'm going to do it based on either existing investors or they're going to introduce me to someone who I like I'm optimizing for the relationship, right? And so it's hard to get that from just like a sales pitch over an email.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Honestly, no, but I think again, I think I'm like a little lucky here in that second-time founder I had like some access to people I knew. I think we're going to have to do one of these competitive ones at some point. Well, maybe.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Salesforce of all places. I don't think you get that if you have your kind of random VZ firm. But the connections are real. It's freaking cool, right? That's like, that's a cheat code. And I was telling my wife that and she was like, oh, that is pretty cool. So that's an amazing story, my take of like, why Sequoia is awesome.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “A little. Here's what's like I'm a huge Sequoi fan. Here's what Sequoia has done well for us. So there's like a halo around the brand, right? So like from a recruiting perspective, it's good from a like customer conversation perspective, it's sometimes good. I'll give you like a really tangible example. We were getting user reports that were being blocked by CrowdStrike. So CrowdStrike's like this security software, right? Which kind of makes sense. Like we're at that layer of the stack. We do all this crazy stuff to make warp work on people's computers. So we're like, oh, fuck, we're getting blocked by CrowdStrike. That's like really, really bad. And it's like, we saw all of our uses start to go down at certain companies. And so I reached out to Andro. I was like, can you help me here? And then that day I was on the phone with the president of CrowdStrike. And he's like, I'm looking into it. I don't think that we've actually done anything. I think this is a configuration issue because we ended up being blocked.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Right. That's where you want. It's not necessarily easy to get. But like if you have someone who's really confident, it's just, it's like he's in a role of supporting me, not pressuring me. And I think that training.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And that's by the way, like again from a founder perspective, getting to work with someone who's super secure and confident is a huge, huge advantage compared to working with someone who is like, you know, like the more junior person who doesn't have the wins. I feel like investors' insecurity will bleed into the relationship”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And not even a huge user base either, just to be clear. Like when they did that round, we were in the thousands of wow. And now we're like, you know, I think we'll hit a million active users, active developers this year, and now obviously we're growing our revenue super duper fast, but it was like really, really risky. And I mean, I wonder if Andrew thought he reflected on it. It was like, what am I doing? But I don't know. I think it's actually going to work.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “This product sucks and it's used by everyone, and something better should exist. And so I think that was like the bet. And then we'll figure out how to build a great business around that. And it's turned out, you know, I don't know if AI is going to be like, I think Verdict is out on Apple layer companies and AI like you're talking about, but from a, does this thing really help people do their job better standpoint? It's like it proved to be right.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “We talked about it for a long time. Again, I'm like, I'm probably unusually transparent for founder here, but we were a terminal company, which is not a real market, just to be clear. And so it was very much like we're displacing a free product. The thesis of Warp was like, hey, there's this tool that every developer uses every single day that kind of sucks. And I still believe this. There's a much better version of this that could exist. It's actually very hard to build. It's going to take a bunch of capital to build, to get people to work on it. There's a non-obvious business model. Like the business model that we started with was like collaboration, which makes sense from my background on Google Docs and Figma. To some extent, we got lucky that AI came along because that's like a way, it like took us from being like a really, really nice user interface product to something that's truly transformative for people's work. But the general initial thesis was kind of right in that like.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “We were not monetizing at the B. This is so this was another frothy, crazy period, right? So this was like pre AI. And I don't know if I speak for Andrew, but I think Andrew, again, was like, there's some amount of pattern matching. And then I think he liked me. And I think he liked that we were building a really hard app in a big market. And so they invested very early.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Well, so Dylan introduced me to Andrew because you know Andrew's on Figma's board and Andrew and I really hit it off. And again, we didn't need the money at that time. It was just a totally different time in the company. We were like, you know, it was a free product at that point with good user growth, but not really like a good business model or not a business, like we weren't even monetizing.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “We raise like this was in 2021, it was like a $17 million ray. Things have changed, by the way. We started it back in the dinosaur era, we're like a five year old company.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “So Dylan was a small angel investor at the seed. And then from the get-go, he was just super excited by what we were doing. I think some extent of pattern matching with like, you know, our thesis was like reinvent like a horrible tool that developers spend all their day in. So I think that that resonated with him. And then we were doing well, but still very early. And he came and was like, I'd like to lead your A. And I was like, okay. And then Andrew wasn't that different. We were still really early.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So, I have done the formal processing before. I didn't do it with WARP. I did it with the company before Warp, where we went out to raise a series A, we like, you know, flew out to Silicon Valley and pitched like 20 firms in like a week or whatever, kind of took the best term sheet and then got in bed with investor. And I did not think that process led to an amazing result. And so with Warp, I really tried not to replicate that. The way I did it with Warp was As I was developing the idea I was talking to a few war investors I knew who I'd known for a really long time who just when I was like I'm ready to do this idea were like we love the idea we want to invest so not every founder is going to have that opportunity but if you have that opportunity I think that's way preferable and then for the subsequent rounds of warp which were Dylan Field led the A in Sequoia led the B, that was all preemptive.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I'm glad I'm a founder. I mean, I haven't gotten the VC transfer of wealth to me yet. It's not exactly why I'm in it, but yeah, let's see.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I'm very bullish on open AI. For no good reason. Other than I think that they have the magic consumer product, the next generation of it. And it's worth so much.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, I mean, it's not how I frame it. I would frame it as like coding may literally be solved, which is a crazy thing to say. But like at the model layer, it might just be the level of intelligent token is good enough that if you feed it a code base and a prompt and a bunch of context, it can make the right coding change. And you don't need this year's model to use a Elvis Costello reference to actually get the good result. So I would look at it more like that. And then, yeah, if there's competition or you could do model routing, like if you're like squeezing margins like that, I think it's a more precarious place to be. But I think that, you know, the price per intelligence for any fixed level of intelligence is definitely falling.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “It's crazy to me that the frontier model would be open, but it's not crazy to me that there's a good enough model that is open.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Think open either. If I'm being honest, the reason I don't think open is that it's just so damn expensive to build these things. And so what's the economic incentive? It's not like open source software. People like make the analogy like, oh, open. I'll take the word open and apply it to open models. Open source software works because it's a bunch of like hobbyist developers who are giving their time to build something really hard. Open models, somebody's got to spend all the money to like make the thing competitive. But here's the flip side. Here's the way it could work is like it could get to a point where just like for coding, let's say our domain, it's basically solved, meaning like models that are good enough and you don't need the frontier model. And what actually starts to matter is like, how good are you getting context in from a company? How good is your interface? How good is your automation like an orchestration stuff? And that's not crazy to me.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “End state's not obvious because it totally depends what happens in the model market. Somewhere there's going to be a margin, right? Like anthropic has big margin on their API business right now, but I've heard it's 60% margin on anthropics API. I've heard 50% on OpenAIs. Again, I've heard this. I don't know if it's exactly right or not. But if there were no margin anywhere in this stack, I think it's really bad. But there's margin. The question then is like, well, who's going to capturing that? And I think it depends if the model providers are really competitive. Even better would be like some open source model that's good enough. I think the app layer is going to get a lot of value. If you think that it's going to be like one model provider runs away with it, then that's like horrible for us. I don't think that's going to happen. I think that's there's too many smart people who are working on building these models. So our bet is like there's competition. It might look like GCLoud AWS, Azure level competition, or it might look like...”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think if we had to prioritize, we would say don't screw up the revenue growth, but there's nuance. And like, I think it's very easy to go on a podcast and be like, revenue growth, revenue growth, whatever. It's like, no, we have to also make some progress on the margins because if you're a smart investor, you're going to want to leak. And the way to think about the margins at least is there's an immediate concern with Burn, which probably we can get more money. I think the bigger long-term concern is like, are you a below market reseller of intelligent tokens? That's not a good business to be in. And so we don't want to be in that business. But I don't believe that. And so it's like, do what you need to do right now to like get the thing to a good enough spot without screwing up growth is kind of the main point.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “So, okay, to give Andrew more credit, now I feel like I'm going to piss Andrew off in this interview. Andrew's very, very smart. He's an awesome investor”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Indifferent as possible. Try to get the enterprise motion going as much as we can because those are better customer segments. Don't mess up the growth. Be sensible with the margin so that we're not just like incinerating VC capital willy-nilly. But like we're in a very cool spot.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Basically, Andrew's not in there being like, well, what? We could change the number of requests we offer on this plan by why. He's like, you know, he's like, we're doing awesome. We have a thing people love. Don't fuck that up, first of all, like don't fuck that up. Make the product even more compelling. Because I will say, we're not competing on price. So here's where I would be worried about margins if I were in this space. If we were reselling Claude for 75 cents on the dollar or whatever, it's like, what's the point of being in that business? We're not perceived as inexpensive. We're like a premium product for people who are doing serious coding and it's still very expensive because we're somewhat inefficient in terms of how we do it. If we were competing on price, I would say like let's just find a different business or you have to you have got to be really strategic and find the right cohorts that are paying that are like super profitable and so Andrew's like just try to make the product is awesome”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Andrew says we are in an awesome spot and should like get the margins a little bit better and then raise more capital, basically.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “But let's not say they get a lot of it. And so what we're doing, again, because it's growing so fast, which I think is good, I think it makes sense to be like, how do we make the usage of these models more efficient? How do we change our pricing so that it's like more aligned with customer value so we make more money as users use word more, not less money as users use war more? It's a big focus for us right now. The trick is like can we do it without harm and growth? You know, that's like where this question of like maybe the smarter thing for us to do is to like just take it to a certain point, keep growing, raise more capital.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I don't know if I want to explicitly say that right now, but they get a lot of, let's say they get a dollar. Let's just say, let's say that for a second. And so I don't know if I'm going to get in trouble with investors or whatever for people.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Doing it now. Maybe you could tell me as a VC is stupid, but we send a big check to Anthropic, we send a big check to OpenAI.”

    2025-10-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source