Heroku

The Agent-Native Cloud: 3M Users, 100K Signups/Wk, Data Centers, & Death PRs — Jake Cooper, Railway

May 20, 2026 · 1:29:54

Jake Cooper, founder of Railway, argues that the next era of software infrastructure requires an agent-native cloud built on own-metal data centers, with primitives for version control, observability, and orchestration at 1000x scale. Railway grew from a slow six-year grind to 3 million users and 100,000 weekly signups with only 35 people, after surviving a $500,000/month loss on its free tier and rebuilding the business. Cooper explains that building its own data centers yields a three-month payback period and 70% margins, while using cloud bursting (AWS, GCP, Oracle) for overflow, and that data center debt is a better tool than venture debt for infra startups. He details how agents need CLIs with many flags, safe production forks, feature flags, and incremental rollouts, and why the pull request is dying in favor of prompt requests. Railway relies on Temporal for orchestration but may build its own workflow engine, and uses an internal tool called Central Station to aggregate customer feedback and incidents. Cooper advocates using agents to generate and review code instead of writing it by hand, and says focus on primitives—not GPUs—is key for now.

How To Hire AI Engineers (ft. James Brady and Adam Wiggins of Elicit)

Jun 21, 2024 · 1:08:06

James Brady and Adam Wiggins of Elicit define the AI engineer role as a blend of conventional software engineering, deep curiosity about language models, and a defensive fault-first mindset to handle LLMs' chaotic latency and non-determinism. They explain their interview process uses coding exercises that force edge-case thinking and system design probing fault tolerance, not happy-path algorithms. For sourcing, they emphasize side projects, hackathons, and targeted communities like effective altruism. The episode explores the ML-first mindset of relinquishing control to leverage model capabilities, using techniques like retries, fallbacks, and strong typing. Elicit shares their job description template and tiered ML reading list as practical resources for hiring.

Truly Serverless Infra for AI Engineers - with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal

Feb 19, 2024 · 1:08:58

Erik Bernhardsson, creator of Annoy and Luigi, founded Modal to build a 'postmodern data stack' with a self-revisioning runtime that eliminates container cold starts and lets developers attach GPUs with a Python decorator. His serverless platform can fan out to thousands of GPUs within seconds, becoming a natural fit for GenAI workloads like Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning (e.g., RAMP fine-tuning 100 models in parallel). Modal differentiates from Replicate by targeting custom models and workflows, and from Modular by offering a managed cloud service rather than licensed software. Erik argues that buying hardware is inefficient for startups and that infrastructure founders must be willing to spend years on load balancing, page faults, and DNS. He shares how his IOI Gold Medal background shapes Modal's talent culture, hiring competitive programmers for complex scheduling and bin-packing problems.