Why You Should (Still) Join Warp
Why You Should (Still) Join Warp
On Warp’s 50 million dollar Series B from Sequoia Capital.
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Why You Should (Still) Join Warp
(Click the link to read online).
About a year ago, we launched this newsletter by picking Warp as our first company to feature.
Last month, they announced their 50 million dollar Series B led by Sequoia Capital. Besides Sequoia, other new investors included Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Tobi Lutke (Shopify). Prior investors Dylan Field, GV, Neo, Contrary, BoxGroup, Jeff Weiner, and Marc Benioff also participated in the round.
We wanted to take this chance to reflect on the original piece while exploring how Warp has progressed in the year since. How are they doing? Where are they now?
Let’s get into why you should (still) join Warp.
Background
The terminal is the most foundational developer tool.
Without it, developers wouldn’t be able to run, test, or deploy their software. It’s the interface allowing programmers to talk to their computers.
Every startup ever launched, every program ever written, every budget 80s hacker scene — they all started with a command from the terminal.
But if the terminal looks like a Cold War-era relic, it’s because it is. While other developer tools have become more collaborative and user-friendly, the terminal remains a siloed eyesore:
The terminal hasn’t changed since 1978, when the VT100 was introduced.
Modern software teams are far more collaborative and agile than teams 40 years ago. Every other tool they use reflects that. Modern project management (Jira, Asana), development (Github, VSCode), deployment (AWS, CircleCI), and monitoring (Datadog, Sentry) tools were all designed with collaboration and speed in mind.
When we found Warp last year, they were trying to change that.
They were building a modern, cloud-native terminal for teams. Out of the box, Warp included features like
AI-powered command search and autocomplete.
Blocks that naturally grouped commands and their outputs.
Modern input editing (i.e. you can click to position your cursor).
It was a terminal for the 21st century — as fast and capable as the original, but re-imagined for modern users.
Most of Warp’s private Beta users were using it five days a week. Mike Krieger (Co-Founder of Instagram) was using it daily while building Artifact, his new startup. As devs ourselves, we used Warp every day and found it incredibly polished.
People really liked the product:
But could Warp be a great business?
We thought they had a shot:
The terminal occupies a unique position at the bottom of every developer’s stack. There’s a multi-billion dollar opportunity in making the most important of developer tools as agile and collaborative as modern software development processes demand it to be.
Our chain of reasoning was roughly as follows.
A Large Market
Every developer uses the terminal. By building a better terminal, Warp’s TAM was effectively every developer on earth. We thought this was a large, growing, and important market:
Every company hires software engineers. As of 2021, there were roughly 1.8 million software developers in North America working in industries ranging from technology to healthcare to financial services.
Every company is interested in maximizing the productivity of their software engineers. Software engineers are expensive, both to recruit and retain. Companies will pay top dollar to maximize the productivity of their developers, either through SaaS tools (Jira, CircleCI, IntelliJ) or other means (pallets of RedBull, 8pm dinner service, free bananas at Amazon).
Global spend on software R&D is increasing. “Digital Engineering spend” will constitute over 50% of overall global engineering R&D spend by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 19% to reach over 1 Trillion USD.
A Valuable Product
The terminal hasn’t meaningfully changed in 40 years. By adding modern features like cursor positioning, autocompletion menus, and an easy way to copy outputs, Warp could easily 10x the user experience and capture a sizable part of that market.
At a high level, we thought Warp could leverage the modern UX, cloud connectivity, and data-rich environment unique to their product to build powerful features driving productivity.
For instance, to drive productivity for individual developers:
AI command search and autocomplete would make it so any individual could be productive on terminal-related tasks, not just CLI gods who know every command and flag by heart.
A terminal-based app store would allow individuals to leverage the creativity of the Warp community. Similar to Chrome extensions, developers could write GUI-based extensions for Warp around individual tasks like source control, debugging, port scanning, cluster management, or certificate/key management.
Native integrations developed by the Warp team with common tools like Slack, Github, or Postman would help de-silo Terminal-related work.
And to drive productivity for teams of developers:
Shared workflows, notebooks, environments, sessions, secrets, credentials and other terminal-native primitives would allow teams to centralize, share, and iterate on knowledge and processes more easily.
Block sharing, search, and notebooks would allow teams to collaborate asynchronously on tasks (i.e. getting feedback on output, working out kinks during setup, or running experiments and tests with command line tools).
Multiplayer would allow teams to collaborate synchronously out of the same terminal session, speeding up debugging or incident-related tasks.
Infinite history would offer teams valuable insights around anything from incident resolution (i.e. play-by-play reconstructions for debriefs after an uptime firefight) to general activities (i.e. which tasks are most commonly run, which bugs/warnings are most frequently encountered).
Crucially, these value propositions were uniquely accessible to Warp and not other devtool companies because:
Terminals are that foundational and used by everyone for everything.
Warp had done the hard work of building a performant, extensible terminal from scratch.
What did we mean by this?
A company building a simple autocomplete plugin for a terminal, for instance, would fundamentally be limited to changes that sit on top of existing terminal UX rather than things that live natively in the terminal. They wouldn’t be able to offer the same quality of UX (i.e. built-in menus and buttons) or depth of functionality (i.e. shared terminal environments or sessions).
Here, the second point was particularly important — supporting all these features without sacrificing performance was a real feat of engineering. Warp’s first version was actually a simple Electron app, but it was scrapped for performance reasons.
The system was entirely re-written in ✨Rust✨ with a custom-built UX framework interfacing directly with the GPU. It’s very fast as a result:
An Open Landscape
The terminal hadn’t changed in 40 years, and no one else was really trying.
Besides Warp, the only other terminals were open-source emulators like Alacritty, Hyper, Kitty, iTerm2, or Wezterm. While many shipped with a similar set of “offline” improvements (i.e. autocomplete, split panes, hotkey windows, etc.), their open-source nature meant they’d never have the cloud-based value propositions (AI assistants, shared workflows/notebooks/environments) Warp would have.
They [Alacrity, Hyper, iTerm] didn’t have companies behind them paying for the development of such features or the server bills required to support them and won’t be able to access the unique cloud-based value propositions described above as a result. They don’t pose a competitive risk to Warp, like how Pencil Project never posed a threat to Figma.
There were smaller companies (i.e. Fig, Charm) who were building extensions and add-ons for terminals, but no one else doing the hard work of re-imagining the terminal from the ground up.
The landscape was completely open.
A Strong Team
Beyond universally having impressive backgrounds and experiences (rare for an early-stage company), there were two things we really liked about the people at Warp:
They had an extremely strong engineering team, which gave them the insight and intuition needed to build for developers.
They had lots of experience applying cloud concepts to legacy tools (i.e. through Google Docs/Sheets), which was relevant to Warp’s vision.
For instance:
Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd was a Principal Engineer at Google, where he earned 10 patents and was tech lead on Google Docs and overall head of Google Sheets.
Design lead Shikhiu Ing previously led a team of 30 at Google as the design lead for Google Docs.
Software engineers David Stern, Chuck Pierce, and Aloke Desai were previously Staff Software Engineer/Tech Lead at Youtube, Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn, and Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead at Google, respectively.
Growth lead Michelle Lim previously worked at Robinhood, Facebook, and Slack as a KPCB Fellow while also co-founding a startup focused on doctor-patient communications.
We were also impressed by the amount of thought Zach put into company design/culture, even at their early stage. Warp maintained a detailed public wiki on company practices and culture, which we encourage checking out if you’re a founder yourself.
In essence, we saw a large and growing market, a foundational but legacy product in that market, and a stacked team building a highly technical, significantly improved version of that product.
With no real competitors.
What wasn’t to like?
For the full analysis, read the original piece here.
Growth
So how Warp has progressed in the year since?
They certainly haven’t stood still. Let’s look at how both the product and the company have grown.
The Product
Warp isn’t publicly sharing numbers, but we’ve had a peek and can confirm that their user base has grown dramatically in the past year. Both engagement and retention metrics are high and growing also.
Much of this has been driven by two major new features Warp has launched:
Warp AI is an embedded Copilot for the terminal. It allows users to get explanations for errors and outputs, ask for help on complicated workflows and scripts, and easily execute the suggested commands, all without leaving the command line. Shipped 3/16/2023.
Warp Drive is a space in the terminal where teams can securely save, annotate, and share commands as workflows. In the future, Warp Drive will also include shared notebooks, environments, secrets, sessions, and other terminal-native primitives. Shipped 6/21/2023.
In addition, Warp has shipped a large number of “quality-of-life” features, improving the base product while adding support for edge cases.
Some notable ones we’ve pulled from their changelog include:
Support for subshells in zsh, bash, and fish for a better experience with Docker, GCP, Poetry, etc. You can configure which commands you’d like to “Warpify”, which makes all of Warp’s IDE features available in that subshell. Shipped 5/18/2023.
Command corrections - automatic command suggestions to correct errors in prior console commands. Shipped 11/10/2022.
Syntax highlighting and error underlining in the input, available out-of-the-box. Shipped 10/13/2022.
Opt-out of telemetry or use the network log to view all of Warp’s network activity. Shipped 12/6/2022.
Drag and drop re-ordering of Tabs (12/15/2022), renaming tabs (3/20/2023), color-customized tabs (9/8/2022), dimming inactive terminal panes (1/26/2023).
Again, it’s worth emphasizing how none of Warp’s major features would be possible if the product wasn’t built the way it was.
If Warp wasn’t an entirely new terminal but rather a simple plugin or extension, it wouldn’t have the accounts, cloud connectivity, or modern UX primitives (i.e. buttons, inputs, menus) required to enable something like Warp Drive or Warp AI. And if Warp wasn’t a performant ✨Rust✨ app, it wouldn’t be able to support those features without seriously hindering performance.
All those features (and more in the future) were only possible because Warp solved the technical challenges of building a performant, modern, and extensible terminal experience from scratch.
The Company
The company itself has also grown in the past year. Warp has maintained a high hiring bar and has managed to recruit some impressive new people:
John Rector - Head of Engineering
John was previously Co-Founder & VP Engineering at Dialpad (last valued at 1.2 billion). He was also a Sr Director of Engineering at Reddit and a Software Engineer at Google and Microsoft. He holds an MS in CS from Stanford.
Noah Zweben - Product Manager
Noah was previously a Product Manager at Google. Before that, he was a Software Engineer at Bowery Farming (last valued at $2.3 billion). He holds an MBA from Harvard, an MS in CS from Harvard, and a BS in CS from Columbia, where he was Valedictorian of his class.
Rob Jones - Senior Product Designer
Rob was previously a Senior Product Designer at Meta. Before that, he was a Staff Product Designer at Compass (last valued at $6.4 billion), a Senior Product Designer at VMware, and a Product Designer at Microsoft.
Advait Maybhate - Software Engineer
Advait was previously a Software Engineering Intern at Ramp, Instabase, Google, Octant, and Riot Games. He holds a BS in CS from the University of Waterloo.
Zach Bai - Software Engineer
Zach was previously a Software Engineer at Youtube. Before that, he held software engineering roles with Google and IMC Trading. He holds a BS in CS from Harvard.
Catherine Yeo - Software Engineer
Catherine was previously a Software Engineering Intern at Apple and an AI Research Intern at IBM and Disney. She holds a BS and MS in CS from Harvard, where she was also Lead Venture Partner for Contrary.
David Melvin - Software Engineer
David was previously a Software Engineer at The New York Times. Before that, he held software engineering roles with SeatGeek and Instagram. He holds a BS in CS from Princeton.
Andrew Carlson - Software Engineer
Andrew was previously a Machine Learning Engineer at Instagram. He holds an MS in Data Science from UC Berkeley.
Daniel Peng - Software Engineer
Daniel was previously a Software Engineer at Gem (last valued at $1.2 billion). Before that, he was a Software Engineering Intern at Amazon and Tableau. He holds a BS in CS from the University of Waterloo.
Jack Nichols - Software Engineer
Jack was previously a Software Engineering Intern at Apple. He holds an MS in CS from Stanford, where he TA’ed our operating systems and parallel computing courses.
Benjamin Navetta - Software Engineer
Benjamin was previously a Senior Software Engineer at Twitter. He holds a BS in CS from Brown.
Abhishek Pandya - Software Engineer
Abhishek was previously a Software Engineering Intern at Amazon. He holds an MS in Data Science and BS in CS from the University of Pennsylvania.
Melanie Crissey - Product Marketing Manager
Melanie was previously a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Netlify (last valued at $2 billion). Before that, she was a Product Marketing Manager at FullStory (last valued at $1.8 billion).
Audrey Koh - Talent Lead
Audrey was previously a Recruiting Lead at Recurrent. Before that, she was a Recruiter at Airtable, Anki, and NetSource. She holds a B.A. in Urban Studies from UC Berkeley.
The strength of Warp’s engineering team means they have strong expertise both on what to build and how to build it.
Zach told us how engineers at Warp are actually responsible for the entire product development process: they write the PRD, develop the feature, manage its launch, and iterate afterwards. This is possible because of the company’s focus on hiring product-first engineers, something unique to their culture.
The Future
As far as they’ve come, Warp still has a long way to go. There are three basic axes Warp should continue executing along:
Building out tablestakes functionality. Warp still needs to build a version for Windows, Linux, and the web. They need to add enterprise features focused on security, privacy, and access management to win users at larger organizations.
Going deeper on existing features. Warp Drive and Warp AI are today just starting points for the teams and AI-related functionality Warp can build. Warp Drive, for instance, might add support for shared notebooks, terminal environments, terminal sessions, secrets, credentials and other terminal-native primitives. Warp AI, for instance, might add support for generative agents, where in addition to generating the commands Warp could also run them for you. This alone could revolutionize DevOps (i.e. imagine just telling your terminal to provision certain resources or to troubleshoot and fix a downed service).
Adding entirely new features. Since the base terminal is so… basic, there are endless additional directions to keep building in. Like we suggested above, Warp might build an App Store for the terminal. They might ship purpose-built firefighting or team analytics features. They might release a suite of integrations with existing, popular devtools. They might make it so you can order pizzas from the command line. Who knows?
Conclusion
The terminal is the most foundational developer tool, but it’s also the oldest and hardest to master. If Warp succeeds, future developers and teams will be significantly more productive.
You’ll never have to look up how to exit vim again.
They’re (still) hiring.
We’ll be releasing similar follow-up pieces as other companies we’ve covered raise subsequent rounds (i.e. Pinecone). If you haven’t read through our prior releases, please check them out here. Stay tuned!
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Finally, if you’re a founder or investor with a company you think we should cover please reach out to us at ericzhou27@gmail.com and uhanif@stanford.edu - we’d love to hear about it :)
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