Founder @Railway, the peaceful way to ship software. People, Product, Production.
SF via 🇨🇦
Joined June 2012
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When you become an engineer in Canada, you take an oath
To never cause harm/suffering/etc to humans as a result of your work
This applies equally, if not more, to business
Both can be used for good (to remove suffering) or evil (to add it)
Do good work. Don't be evil
Psychotically good marketing
Ramp remains in a league of its own
Aspirational. We need more media/culture/resonance.
If you can build real life wall hacks
You can build real life single frame aimbot
Much to think about
you don't even have to be in the same room
with the right Wi-Fi setup, someone walking behind brick walls can still leave a measurable trace at the receiver
the graph uses real Wallhack1.8k recordings: orange is walking, blue is an empty space, both on the same scale. the 3D scene illustrates the idea
if your next thought is “i'll just sit still,” watch the quoted post😁
We’re rapidly approaching “There’s no reason to use anything else” because there are no tradeoffs
I benchmarked 5 object storage providers from 6 locations around the world
I included:
- @awscloud S3
- @Cloudflare R2
- @Railway Buckets
- @Backblaze B2
- @neondatabase Storage
It used Files SDK to make it as fair as possible
Here's a summary 👇 (this is also a thread)
BTW, getting late isn't 4pm. It's 9-10pm with a 11pm bed time
Timing of your sleep matters, and getting to work as close to bed also matters for creatives. You want your subconsciousness to work while you sleep
"My favorite disagreements to have are disagreements of timing, because all disagreements are disagreements of timing"
- @dbanys
How are @JustJake and team at $100M ARR with 40 people 🤯?
1. A lot of systems building.
2. "We say no to 90% of stuff internally. But great ideas are inevitable. They will just keep coming back up... we say no, we say no and we say no. When its inevitable, we say yes."
3. All disagreements are disagreements of timing... the last line in the abstract of ideas is: why are we doing this now?
You will make horrifying mistakes this way. That’s totally fine. You’ll make bigger mistakes. Keep going
I strongly believe any company can be absurdly effective
You just have to load “no” as your default answer. No, no, no, okay fuck yes
Had a lot of fun sitting down with Nakul and spilling our secrets
Railway started the year at $20M ARR. It’s now ~$100M. Solo founder. Fully remote. Only ~40 people.
The one trait that explains why Railway is breaking all the rules:
“It’s almost like cheating on your homework when you go and look at somebody else’s solution. If this is how Stripe does this or this is how Cursor does this, I don’t want to hear about it.”
Jake Cooper (@justjake). Founder and CEO of @Railway.
Knuckle Up ↓
--
In this conversation with Jake Cooper:
00:00 Who is Jake Cooper?
02:54 How did Railway survive losing $500K a month?
06:01 What made Railway’s growth chart go vertical?
09:45 Why won’t Jake look at how other companies solve problems?
14:34 Is two the worst number of co-founders?
20:04 How does a 40-person team hit $100M in ARR?
22:41 Why does Railway say no to 90% of ideas?
28:55 How do you compete for talent against the AI labs?
32:25 What does a technical interview look like after Opus 4.5?
35:34 Trust, clarity, judgment: how does Railway’s six-week onboarding work?
44:59 What does HARD stand for, and which value costs the most?
48:49 Why does Jake go dark from Friday night to Sunday?
54:54 What breaks first in a world with 10,000x more software?
59:49 Where does Railway play in two years?
1:01:37 How has Jake had to grow as a CEO?
1:09:29 Is burnout just an input-output mismatch?
1:12:27 Why does Jake think most startup advice is overrated?