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Dev Propulsion Labs

Evil Martians

Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San Francisco with founders behind companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale to talk about what actually makes developer-focused businesses work.

Dev Propulsion Labs is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Enjoyed by 45K+ listeners.

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  • 21 episodes
  • fortnightly
  • Avg 46 min
  • English
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • S4 · E19
    Tuesday · 46 min

    William Imoh, founder of Hackmamba: AEO is just good SEO | Evil Martians podcast

    William Imoh, founder and CEO of Hackmamba (https://hackmamba.io/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why AI search optimization is mostly just good SEO that has had time to compound, how developer-facing companies end up marketing to an audience that will never buy, and what it takes to cut content production from a month down to a week. He shares why Netlify gets 30-50K signups a day without doing anything special for AI, why Hackmamba deliberately killed its own best-performing traffic, and how they replaced seven tools with a single agent they built themselves. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ 00:00 Introduction and guest welcome 01:51 What good writing for developers actually means 05:44 AEO is just good SEO: the Netlify example 08:12 Why 2021-style content now reads as AI slop 11:39 Champion vs buyer: developers read the blog, CTOs sign the contract 15:00 Killing the traffic that came from the wrong audience 17:18 What makes a good article title 23:37 Distribution from day one for early-stage devtools 31:51 Seven tools, four posts a month, and why they built Boki

  • S4 · E18
    July 14 · 34 min

    Kate Holterhoff of RedMonk: AI slop, agent experience & the open source crisis | Evil Martians

    Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk (https://redmonk.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about what AI is doing to open source, developer tools, and the analyst business itself. She also shares her winding path to the role: painting murals in Cincinnati, a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D., a decade in academia, and frontend engineering before joining the industry's only developer-focused analyst firm. Kate explains why open source maintainers are calling this moment a crisis — code is cheap, review is the bottleneck, and projects like tldraw and Ladybird have stopped accepting external PRs entirely. She shares why agent experience is the new front door for dev tools discovery (and why your docs are now your funnel), how vibe coding is pulling non-developers into dependency decisions that keep CISOs up at night, and why she believes design will be the differentiator that separates the vibe coders from the pack.

  • S4 · E17
    May 12 · 57 min

    Matt Biilmann of Netlify: why agent experience is the new developer experience | Evil Martians

    Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify (https://www.netlify.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why agent experience (AX) is replacing developer experience in developer tools. He also shares how Netlify went from a bootstrapped two-person team to the deployment platform behind Bolt, Lovable, and ChatGPT-generated sites. Matt is excited by agentic coding and explains the addressable market for Netlify just jumped from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion people. He shares the four pillars of agent experience (access, context, tools, and orchestration), why leading with developer experience beat leading with performance or security in Netlify's early days, and why he believes everyone is about to become at least somewhat of a developer. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E16
    April 28 · 50 min

    Lingo.dev co-founder Max Prilutskiy: AI localization, AX, and having a lean team | Evil Martians

    Max Prilutskiy, CEO and co-founder of Lingo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why localization is still far from a solved problem in the age of AI, how a six-person team ships 56 pull requests a week, and what agent experience actually means for developer tools in 2026. He also shares his journey from a hackathon with zero ideas to Y Combinator, how 30 cold exploration calls taught him more about messaging than any sales book, and why he rebuilt the entire Lingo.dev platform from scratch in December and January. Plus, Max gives a candid take on what didn't work in go-to-market, why word of mouth remains the only reliable growth channel, and how source code is becoming the ultimate input for AI agents. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/devtools Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E15
    April 14 · 59 min

    Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast

    Amir Rustamzadeh, partner at Firestreak Ventures, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to spot a force-of-nature founder before anyone else does, why most developer tool ideas are no longer venture scale, and what the current state of VC really looks like for early-stage founders. He also shares his journey from interning on NASA's Curiosity Rover at Jet Propulsion Labs to sleeping in his car at SpaceX, to coining the developer experience role at Cypress, to becoming a hands-on investor backing companies like Lovable, Daytona, and Perplexity. Plus, Amir gives a rare, sober take on inflated seed valuations, why big-name firms at pre-seed can hurt more than help, and where he still sees opportunity in the race to build infrastructure for agents. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E14
    March 24 · 46 min

    Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast

    Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder and COO of TrueFoundry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to sell enterprise AI infrastructure when nobody trusts you yet, how TrueFoundry evolved from an ML deployment platform inspired by Meta's FB Learner into a full enterprise AI gateway, and why every Fortune 1000 company now can't avoid AI. He shares why trust is the only exchange currency in enterprise sales, how thought leadership and education sessions replaced cold outreach, and why voice agents are the next big niche to bet on. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E13
    March 10 · 58 min

    Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

    Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcast In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acquisition closed in 30 days with 90 lawyers. He explains why Neon skipped sharding, how Replit's agents stress-tested their infrastructure overnight, and why the current moment is a gold rush for builders who stay in the loop. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com 00:00 Intro 00:34 Who is Stas Kelvich? 01:42 From quantum physics to software engineering 05:10 How Stas became a key Postgres contributor 06:08 Early career: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Postgres 06:57 Why databases as a field keep pulling him in 09:47 The early days of Neon and the co-founder origin story 13:42 Key bets: building the cloud, separating storage and compute 16:38 Enterprise vs. product-led growth strategy 18:54 Why Neon didn't solve sharding — and why that was right 23:03 Designing for the agent era without planning for it 25:44 How Replit's agents stress-tested Neon's infrastructure 26:42 Agent experience and fraud considerations 32:00 Can you tell if a database was created by an agent? 33:06 The $1B Databricks acquisition story 38:59 Closing the deal in 30 days with 90 lawyers 40:27 Why Neon kept its brand post-acquisition 43:24 Life inside Databricks one year later 47:41 Market trends for technical founders in 2026 51:09 Using AI in day-to-day engineering work 54:15 What makes Stas feel great 54:49 Could AI accelerate theoretical physics research? 58:06 How to get started with Neon

  • S4 · E12
    February 23 · 38 min

    CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast

    In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill shares how CodeRabbit went viral in Japan before anywhere else, why AI code generation makes code review more important not less, and what it takes to run PLG and enterprise sales at the same time. He breaks down how open source became their best marketing channel, why the old startup playbooks don't work anymore, and why the next Amazon is already being founded right now. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/

  • S4 · E11
    February 10 · 49 min

    David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast

    David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast David Gomes, product engineer at Cursor, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why the world's best engineers are fully adopting AI while half of developers haven't started, why AI coding is a learnable skill that takes practice, and how he built a 50-person engineering team in Portugal from scratch. He shares what it was like going through Neon's $1B Databricks acquisition, why diverse teams outperform business-obsessed ones, and why his next company will be his own. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com 00:00 Introduction and guest welcome 01:44 Current state of AI-assisted coding and market adoption 03:33 Developer resistance to change: senior vs junior engineers 05:19 World's best engineers fully adopting AI coding 07:36 Having personalized workflows 08:19 Different engineering styles inside Cursor 10:42 AI coding as a learnable skill requiring practice 14:12 Future of agent coding and AI SREs 15:35 Growing up in Europe vs living in America 19:27 David's career path: competitive programming to SF 26:17 Building a 50-person engineering team in Portugal 29:50 Working at Neon and the $1B Databricks acquisition 32:50 Why developer tools experience is universal 39:35 Having a diverse team of engineers 42:05 Leveraging your coworkers' strengths 44:00 David's blog and writing philosophy 46:00 The engineer-manager pendulum and startup ambitions 47:23 Customer love as the only metric that matters 48:34 Try Cursor with Neon and Databricks MCP servers

  • S4 · E10
    January 26 · 46 min

    Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast

    Monica Sarbu, founder of Xata: rebuilding Xata and why diverse teams win | Evil Martians podcast Monica Sarbu, founder and CEO of Xata, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how Xata pivoted from an Airtable-style builder tool to a modern Postgres platform focused on database branching and developer velocity. She shares why they rebuilt the platform from scratch, how asking "what's your biggest problem?" instead of "what's your problem with Postgres?" changed everything, and why hiring a gender-diverse team with complementary skills leads to better products. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E9
    January 12 · 35 min

    Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev: intent signals and devtool GTM | Evil Martians podcast

    Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why go-to-market is the hardest unsolved problem in developer tools, how companies can have millions of open-source users and still not know who their customers are, and why timing beats volume when selling to developers. He shares how three months of nonstop customer conversations shaped Reo.dev, why their first product was a Google Sheet, and how intent signals turned a 2% response rate into 26%. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E8
    Dec 16, 2025 · 54 min

    David Cramer, founder of Sentry: building for the Fortune 500,000 | Evil Martians podcast

    David Cramer, founder of Sentry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built a developer tool used by 4 million+ developers without partnerships or enterprise sales — purely through bottom-up adoption and mass-market pricing. He explains why 20-year-olds should stop starting companies and go learn from other people's mistakes first, how he delegated both CEO and CTO roles while keeping immense influence without a title, and why Sentry builds for the Fortune 500,000 instead of the Fortune 500. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E7
    Dec 9, 2025 · 42 min

    Abhi Aiyer, co-founder of Mastra: TypeScript for AI agents and making moves | Evil Martians podcast

    Abhi Aiyer, CTO and co-founder of Mastra, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why TypeScript is overtaking Python for AI agents, how education-first marketing turned a free book into Mastra's biggest growth channel, and why they raised their seed round from 120+ builder-investors instead of traditional VCs. He shares why "generosity breeds luck" became a core principle, how YC convinced him to leave LA for San Francisco, and why good documentation means optimizing for not talking to people. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E6
    Nov 19, 2025 · 55 min

    Michael Grinich, founder of WorkOS: the plumbing behind OpenAI and Cursor | Evil Martians podcast

    Michael Grinich, founder and CEO of WorkOS, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how WorkOS became the invisible infrastructure powering enterprise features for OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel. He explains why AI companies need enterprise readiness faster than any previous generation of SaaS, why product always beats sales methodology, and why forcing yourself to talk to users is the only algorithm that burns out bad ideas. Michael shares the moment he fired his entire marketing team, how Webflow's CTO integrated WorkOS over a weekend, and why the best product is one that disappears. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E5
    Nov 12, 2025 · 40 min

    Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona: walking from $300K ARR to build for agents | Evil Martians podcast

    Ivan Burazin, CEO and founder of Daytona, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why he walked away from $300K ARR to rebuild his company from scratch for the age of AI agents. He explains why agents will outnumber humans to the power of ten, how Daytona creates composable computers that agents can spin up on demand, and what it means to race competitors on a moving train. Ivan shares hard-won lessons from 16 years building cloud development environments — starting with Codeanywhere in 2009, a decade before the market was ready. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E4
    Nov 11, 2025 · 48 min

    Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone: scaling to 5M developers with no meetings | Evil Martians podcast

    In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone reveals why hiring ex-founders with beaten-down egos builds better products, how internal meme workshops became part of their culture, and why vibe coding isn't a bubble that will burst. He shares the accidental origin of Launch Weeks, explains why Supabase is building for a 30-year timeline, and breaks down how they scaled to 5 million developers across 40 countries with barely any meetings. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E3
    Oct 28, 2025 · 43 min

    Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale: databases that never go down | Evil Martians podcast

    Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how PlanetScale stayed up during the AWS outage that took down millions of sites, why they grew Vitess usage 61,000% in four years, and what it actually costs to build tier-zero infrastructure that never goes down. He shares the journey from a 750-user consultancy to hundreds of thousands of developers, why operational excellence beats feature velocity, and why vibe-coded databases are a completely different market from what PlanetScale builds. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E2
    Oct 23, 2025 · 55 min

    Zeno Rocha, founder of Resend: $18M Series A by obsessing over every detail | Evil Martians podcast

    Zeno Rocha, founder and CEO of Resend, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built an $18M Series A email API company by ruthlessly cutting scope to ship perfect products fast. He shares why seeking rejection accelerates growth, how building work so good your heroes want to copy it became Resend's north star, and why a 20,000-person waitlist before launch came from years of building a founder brand. Zeno also breaks down investing $3M in email security, why the hybrid work model is the worst of both worlds, and how open source became Resend's launchpad — not its business model. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

  • S4 · E1
    Oct 22, 2025 · 40 min

    Jeff Huber, co-founder of Chroma: context engineering and modern AI search | Evil Martians podcast

    Jeff Huber, co-founder and CEO of Chroma, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why RAG became industry brain rot, how context engineering replaced it as the real job to be done, and what it takes to build modern search infrastructure for AI. He shares his framework for commercializing open source — keep the engine open, monetize the car — why consensus is a death blow for great products, and how small opinionated teams with low egos build the best developer tools. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/

  • S3 · E10
    Sep 11, 2025 · 36 min

    Sarah Wooders on why LLMs are like Memento and building the infrastructure for stateful AI agents

    Join us for a conversation with Sarah Wooders, CTO & co-founder of Letta AI, as she reveals why LLMs are not there yet and how stateful agents will unlock the next generation of AI applications. From Berkeley PhD to YC alum to building the infrastructure for truly intelligent agents. Key insights from this episode. On the core problem with LLMs: "It's kind of like if you've seen the movie Memento... if you have a person that just forgets every single day or forgets every five minutes... That's basically what LLMs are." Why 2025 feels like the early Internet: "I feel like with AI, this is our version of that. There's just so much opportunity. Everything is so undefined. There's a ton of white space... so much low hanging fruit." The difference between real agents and marketing fluff: "A lot of people just added LLMs into [existing workflows] and then called them an agent... that's inherently still very different from something that's like an agent that has identity, that works autonomously, that learns." On building in the AI boom vs 2020: "Right now is a much better time to be building a startup... the amount of value that's just being created and that you can capture is so much more." What's still missing in AI infrastructure: "MCP is super early... there's a ton of differences in how people implement the protocol. Auth hasn't really been figured out. There's a big lack of standardization." Why open source matters for AI tools: "We want to do that agentic orchestration in an open way... allowing developers to have as much control as possible over their context window, being able to see what tokens are going in and out." Links: Letta AI: https://letta.com Sarah Wooders on X: https://x.com/sarahwooders Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools #AI #Agents #LLM #Startups #OpenSource #AItooling #StatefulAgents

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