YouSaid · the spoken record

Zach Lloyd

lines on the record: 90
first: 2025-10-17
most recent: 2025-10-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think it's more like a 10. I think again, the technology is going to run way ahead of the deployment of it just because the deployment of it takes a long time. You'll see the deployment go fast in industries where there's not a lot of barriers. This isn't like the most profound point in the world, but if you go to the DMV, you're still going to be dealing with some annoying old school stuff because it's just hard to deploy technology in certain areas.”
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
“I think what I mean is if you're working at, there's a few different angles there's the business angle and there's the worker angle. I think the cost to start a sort of software driven business is going to go way, way, way down. That's one thing. I think from a worker perspective, if you are working at a place like I'm going to pick a random company Salesforce and there's no real regulatory blocker for the deployment of AI and you're in like a competitive market, AI is going to be deployed really, really rapidly and what daily work looks like. I think if you're in like the healthcare industry or the government and it's like I'm still filling out paper forms when I go see my doctor right now, it's less a question of like, is the technology transformational than like are the incentives there to deploy the technology? And like I worry that it's just going to take a long time.”
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
“I think it's going to depend a bunch on what industry you're in, what the short-term impact is. I think for highly competitive, unregulated things, like if for startups, for SaaS businesses, I think it's going to change everything. For knowledge workers, if you're not in a regulated industry, I think it's a big deal.”
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
“I think it's like, do you fundamentally believe that this is transformational technology? If you do, I think, I mean, it's crazy, but it's like not crazy. I think it's, I'm a skeptical person by nature, but I am a full believer that AI is going to change every single business. So there's going to be some big losses, I put it that way, but there's also going to be some big winners.”
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
“Yeah, I do. It's like a super competitive space. Like, I think we can offer, because we're like earlier, like we can offer more equity. They can probably offer more cash. But yeah, it's like a crazy, crazy space that we're in right now. Very competitive, which again, I think reinforces the importance of senior engineers is not going down. It's never been more competitive for us to hire someone good.”
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
“Yeah, but this is like the repeated story with bigger companies who don't have the same pressure to innovate. Yeah, they were asleep at the wheel. They had co-pilots. It's not as good. It's literally, it's like a bunch of like, I know the Geiser cursors are like some smart people from MIT who are like, they were actually working on something else. And then they just kind of out executed on the autocomplete part, which again, I don't think autocomplete is the future. So I don't feel like I'm like seeding competitive ground here to cursor. The future is more like developed by prompt, but really, really good execution on their part.”
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
“I think there are fundamental products is really, really good. They're like a better version of co-pilot. And Copilot, it's actually, it's amazing. Again, I think it's a testament to what startups can do. Like Copilot had their product, and you might be like, why did Cursor win? Cursor won because their thing was better. It worked better. It provided more accurate suggestions and developers care about that. So that wedge was really good. The switching costs into it was really low. And then cursor, I think, has been really fast with enterprise. I don't think cursor is like agent product is that awesome. They've done a really good job. Everyone knows cursor.”
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
“So every time one of these model providers puts out a thing, whether it's cloud code or codecs or Gemini, you see like a temporary spike in their thing. People using it within Warp. And I think the nature of the developer market, which is kind of over underappreciated, overlooked, whatever, is like developers just want to try the newest thing. Always. It's a fragmented market. They want to try the newest thing. Again, this can work against WARP as well. But all of these other things are basically equivalent. Like they're all the same product, whereas Warp is not. And you can see the spike. You can see it settle down. I don't think the model provider is based on the data I'm seeing are winning here. I think, honestly, if I look at the space, the one that comes up the most is cursor, I think cursor's execution is really good.”
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
“I'm like 98% sure of that. Yeah. So I can tell you part of the reason I believe that is because of where we sit in the stack. I can actually see how many people are using CloudCode and Warp. And I can see the trends of all these other products, which is, again, is an interesting thing about where we are. And it's not super high volume”
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
“So there's stickiness just in like the product experience itself. It's like, okay, I've become accustomed to this thing. There's stickiness a little bit in the fact that, you know, we have a ton of users. We have way more users than cloud code, for instance, or codecs. We have 700,000 users because we've been doing this for five years. That's not stickiness, but that's like there's a great funnel.”
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
“Quality with some amount of like again, I don't want to say lock in it, but there's stickiness in the product, there's stickiness in features where it's 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
“So, I guess I'm not going to speak for the whole coding app industry, but for Warp, it's like a different product. So every other single product out there is either a clone of VS Code, which again is Codex or Cursor or Windsurf or whatever. They're all the same product, or they are terminal apps. And I do think like even if you believe that it's really cheap now to clone software, it's really not cheap to clone Warp. We were building this thing for five years, and it's a very, very differentiated product experience. I don't think that's enough. Maybe I feel like there's like a VC trope right now on like, well, product's not a mo. I think that that's like kind of bullshit, especially when everyone else in the market has the same product. So speaking for Warp, I actually think we can differentiate on the product quite a bit. If you believe, though, that it's all just like they're all the same thing. And it's like whoever has the most money wins, I guess I can see what you're saying, but I don't agree with that.”
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
“I know I'm not supposed to be interviewing you here, but do you think that there's some inherent lock in that they have that other companies don't have?”
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
“We're now adding a million net new ARR every week or even less, honestly, recently. It's accelerating. People love the thing. However, it's like, yeah, sir, do the accounting for it however you want, from our perspective, we want to be growing that in a sustainable way. So I think it's crazy to just be like, no, margins don't matter. At some point, you're going to run out of money if you're growing really fast. And though we could probably go raise more money, like for sure. But can I ask you, how are you thinking about that as an investor when you're seeing a company like Warp that's growing, we're growing extremely quickly? I think we're still like, I think that outlier growth, how do you think about how sustainable that growth should be?”
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
“Yeah, I think to an extent you do that. At some point, though, it's like if you're growing so fast, WARP is not growing really fast, writing like a million dollars in ARR every week”
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
“Not right now, but not like we're working on it. It's really, really costly. I mean, so. Here's the fundamental problem with pricing these AI products is consumers expect, like if you're going for the prosumers, let's say for a second, not the enterprise. The enterprise we're margin positive. But on the consumer segments, it's like, it's very, very hard. They expect something that looks like SaaS pricing. So they expect like 20 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month is a lot. More than that starts to get into like their comparing to like their gym membership or something, right? The more that they use it, the more it costs you. So the better your product market fit in a sense of like the product is getting better, the like worse your business is from like that perspective. And to some extent, I think it's actually fine to subsidize. Like if you're subsidizing users who are going to turn into enterprise leads, but I don't think it's super smart to subsidize people who are building personal websites where there's no strong economic incentive.”
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
“Do margins matter? I think yes, definitely. If only because, let's say your users cost you money, it just gets super duper expensive the faster you grow. And that's like, so you can't help that.”
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
“Yeah, so if you're like someone building in a sort of naive way, and I kind of blame vibe coding for this, like what you'll do is you'll be like, build me this thing that looks like X. And the build me this thing that looks like X doesn't tell the agent how the thing should work, at least from like the engineering side. And so if you do this on a big, complicated code base, it fails. Or like it produces something that just like wastes a bunch of your time. It might iterate and go in circles for hours and finally get you something that seems to work from a user perspective, but it won't be something that you will actually want to release. So to make it work in a production setting, it's like you need to tell it how to build it. And that means you need to understand the code. And so it's just very liable to kind of lazy usage, which doesn't work well.”
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
“Yeah, so our motion is PLG. So I think I've like overstated how these tools aren't working that well for real devs. They are working well for real devs in real. You just, you need to learn how to use them, 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
“In terms of collapsing of all the roles, if I had to design a role for the Uber person who builds with AI, it would be like a product-oriented senior engineer. We see a lot of product managers and designers who will use the tools to make prototypes, and that's actually very cool. But to get stuff to production, I think what you want is like someone who, like I said, more sophisticated than the agent. And I think there's a real cap on what a product manager or designer is able to build with this stuff right now. So I guess short answers, I don't really think so. And if there was like a role I would design, it would be a product-minded engineer.”
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
“We're going to have less. I think we're going to have fewer, more senior engineers who are managing the work of a lot of agents.”
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
“favors the higher quality, and this is counterintuitive. It actually causes a lot of problems with people who don't know what they're doing in a professional environment. So if you are a newer engineer or more junior engineer or maybe just like not that sophisticated of an engineer, it's a problem to me because you want to use these tools the most, but they end up producing code that you don't understand or that can't be shipped or they won't get through code review or that contains security bugs whereas to successfully use these tools, you need to be like more sophisticated, smarter, more experienced. And if you can do that, you can get a crazy productivity gain, but you already kind of need to know what you're doing. So I think it's a little bit counterintuitive. Like, I would much rather have senior developers using these tools. There's a little bit of a paradox in that they don't necessarily want to use these tools. Like they feel like they can do the thing themselves. But if you get a senior developer who's really”
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
“Will companies get measurable impact from it? It's gonna happen. Like it's gonna be transformational and it sometimes is transformational now, but not with every coding test and maybe not in the aggregate.”
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
“So, great question. In like the prosumer market, there's like strong product market fit, but it's not, I would say it's not a great market. I mean, like they're very high churn, price sensitive customers who are building things that don't have a ton of economic value. In the enterprise market, I actually think the thing that has most product market fit is like autocomplete, which is not the sexiest type of AI. So it's not a gentic AI. It's like cursor's original product or even co-pilot. If you're doing like hand editing of code, it's like clearly helpful to have the thing like show you the gray text and kind of read your mind. When you get into like warp or cloud code or cursor's agent or yeah, even I think cognition's its own beast, honestly. It's like it's more of like an automation thing. I think it's like really early in that market. And people, there's like a lot of like intuitive signal that it's helpful and there's a ton of willingness to pay. But in terms of”
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
“You can't just vibe code with it. I'm not a huge vibe coding person to begin with. And so there's like a way you have to use it in order to get productivity gains. And then it needs to be figured out how you're going to measure those.”
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
“In terms of whether we're seeing productivity gains, I think no one knows. Like there's a bunch of studies that show, not really. Again, I would be a little more nuanced. So if you are using lovable, then yeah, of course. Like you're going from like, I can't do anything to I've built an app. That's like insane. And so the cases where it's like zero to one, yes. I think when you go into the professional development environment, which is like where WARP is focused, there's a bunch of studies that show, not really. It's sort of like the noise that's created by people who are attempting to use like a vibe coding technique on a production code base kind of outweighs or can slow you down. And so I think that's the big problem with it right now. And this is what we see when we talk to companies. It's like they all kind of rush to deploy some sort of egentic coding solution. No one really knows if it's working. And whether it's working or not depends a ton on like how you use it. And 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
“Maybe. I mean, again, I think of it per developer is thinking of it through the productivity lens. Like you're thinking of it in terms of like, how do I multiply developers' output? I think at some point you just get into the lens of like, what's this software worth to my business, which is a lot. Like every company at this point to a greater or lesser extent is like a software company. It's the biggest lever that they have. And so it's going to be orders.”
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
“You're comparing it to developer productivity tools like a million percent yes, the budget for developer productivity tools is not that big. It's like people paying for postman or whatever. I don't know what your like your old school developer tool is. It's like a small dollar amount per seed per month and you're using it to increase the productivity of someone who you're paying like $200,000 a year.”
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
“It's funny. It sounds kind of stupid. It's like, oh, start with a prompt. The general thing is, are you starting with some expression of human intent? And like, I'm using prompt for shorthand of that. And like, it's more than just you're writing some paragraph or something. It's like, what's going to matter more and more is the total context that the model has available to it. And that context is going to come from more and more places. It's not just going to come from like a person saying to do something. But yeah, I think generally if you're doing something creative and it's not totally deterministic what needs to be done, there needs to be some expression to the computer from a builder to do the thing. It's not going to read your mind. So yeah, I think it's like even that sounds kind of stupid. I think that is the thing.”
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
“We're now fully into the coding agent space. History of the company, obviously we started as a terminal, but the terminal form factor is the preferred form factor for doing agentic work at this point, whether you're using like a terminal app like Cloud Code in Warp, you just literally use the GUI app to do it. And so every single coding task we do starts with a prompt, which is the big shift in productivity that's happening right now. We don't necessarily finish every task with a prompt. There's certain things that are too hard. It doesn't matter which tool you're using, but everything starts with a prompt. Then we try to get all the way to completion if we can with prompt.”
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
“Yeah, so just in the development space, I think the market is going to be, there's going to be two pieces to it. So there's going to be like a set of interactive productivity tools. So think of like things that developers literally are using. You're sitting there, you're telling an agent what to do. You're like, hey, write this code for me. Help me understand this production problem. And then there's going to be a set of automation tools. That's going to be more like, okay, crash came in, what was the root cause of it? Is there a PR that can fix it? And it's going to do it automatically and you'll have some developer who's reviewing it. Those are going to be the two classes of things. I think over time the automation is clearly a better market, the more valuable thing. Companies are going to want to like just pay for stuff that automatically creates software. It's a huge market. It goes into the labor span a little bit. But I think the productivity piece is also, I don't see it being, I'm just guessing a time frames here. Five years is a long time with these AI models, just to be clear, but in the next few years is what I see happen.”
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
“I think developers is open. I'm biased here because the situation that I want actually is competitive dynamic at the model layer for all the coding models. I don't know that anyone has like a super strong moat at the API layer, just to be totally clear.”
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
“The two leaders are GPT five and the cloud models. And so we measure them. First of all, it's like it's not so much gut. It's like we literally have a whole bunch of benchmarks. We run SweetBench. We run Terminal Bench. Claude and GPT-5 are the two best. Claude, they have like different personalities, which is kind of interesting. Like when you're using them for coding, like Claude's a little friendlier, GPT-5 is like a little bit more, let me do a whole bunch of thinking. It takes a long time is my biggest issue with it, but then it tends to come back with something that's really good. And at the moment, Gemini, which is on 2.5, and I'm sure they're working on Gemini 3, is not as good.”
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
“Yeah, but they have like a, I think the culture is super slow. And so I don't think a super duper slow culture, they're going against very, very aggressive, fast-moving companies. I think OpenAI is execution on ChatGPT is really good. But maybe the inertia of just being so big and having such distribution is enough. I don't know.”
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
“By the way, have you been in a Waymo? Waymo is crazy. Waymo is very, very cool. Waymo is the coolest product I've been in it a long time. I really like Waymo.”
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
“So here's the bowl case on Google. They have crazy distribution. They have a crazy brand. They have amazing infrastructure. So it's like, I don't think Google's like beyond hope. But 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
“I think Google's a risk. Like, I would never have said that five, ten years ago. I find myself using ChatGPT more and more, and so I think they have big innovators dilemma problem. This isn't directly answering your talent question, but I think it's more of like incentives where it seems like they're really slow on AI is like my take.”
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
“I guess if you literally have no one, fine. But my take is in Startup Land speeds everything. And the anti-pattern that I'm looking out for is like, okay, I was a Google engineer building for tons of scale and then go to a found a company. And like it's very easy to get like, Anchored on sort of the beauty of the engineering and trying to eat the engineering perfect. And if you don't have a product that anyone cares about, I think that's a crazy place to be spending your time at the beginning of a company. It should all be around like, can I build something that people want to use? And there's an engineering mindset mistake, I think, that people will make where it's like, well, they don't want to use it because the performance isn't like 30% better. That's not a good place to spend time”
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
“So for the startup people out there, I think try to pick the right thing to start is like a little bit better advice. So one lesson I did take for this is for warp, for instance, we built it the hard way to start, meaning like, you know, I could kind of see around the corner, like if we built it on sort of web tech or whatever, we're going to run into a bunch of performance problems, which is a lot of what we were trying to fix with the sheets rewrite, like good engineering matters, but I think it's highly dependent on where you're at in the stage of building the thing. And so, yeah, rewrite if you have like crazy product market fit in 100 million plus users, it needs to be perfect. If you're really early, I think rewrite is a little scary.”
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
“First thing from rewriting Google Sheets is I would say don't rewrite things. We rewrote Google Sheets because it's a crazy scale and so if you have something that has a hundred million plus users, which is what it had at the time, I think it's now like a billion users. It really matters if the thing is awesome. And so it's worth the effort of like 30 to 40 engineers for a couple years to get it right, right? But I would say for the audience, for this show, which I assume is more founders, like rewriting is like a horrible idea. It's like pausing time.”
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