Factory started building fully autonomous coding agents in April 2023, two years before enterprises were ready. Matan Grinberg now says this is indistinguishable from being wrong. The Factory co-founder and CEO explains how the company survived its &quot;journey in the desert,&quot; including the decision to hand nearly all of its revenue back to customers when the product wasn&#x27;t making developers obsessed. Matan makes the contrarian technical case that a model-agnostic harness beats the model-and-harness co-design that labs like OpenAI and Anthropic favor, because exposing a harness to many models keeps it from overfitting to any single one. He argues open-weight models like GLM will capture the majority of tokens by staying one generation behind the frontier at a fraction of the cost, and that CIOs will soon justify every incremental token the way they justify headcount. Looking ahead, he predicts 90% of coding tokens will run asynchronously—the &quot;dark factory&quot; where software builds itself.<br><br>Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself

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[SPEAKER_01] Bezos at Amazon, it's customer obsession. But in our mind, that's an input metric. You don't want to measure input metrics. It doesn't matter if you're customer obsessed. You could be customer obsessed and they file a restraining order against you because they don't like what it is that you're doing. Our job is to build something so good that our customers themselves become obsessed with us. That is our job. The analogy is, if you're a coach of a basketball team, you don't want to tell your players before they come out there like, hey guys, make sure to sweat. It's like, what? No, score points. We need to know that.

[SPEAKER_01] You need to score points. And in doing so, yeah, you're probably going to sweat. And I think similarly, to create obsessed customers, you probably need to be really obsessed yourself with the customers. But the output is what matters.

[SPEAKER_02] We're here in the studio with Matan from Factory. This is our second time with Matan. Yes, indeed. Thanks for having me. You're in the small and elite group of second time training data attendees. So thank you. Matan is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, which makes droids, which are autonomous agents, for the art of software development. Yes, indeed. And Matan, we're going to jump right in because I think you guys are a little bit of a dark horse candidate in this world of software development.

[SPEAKER_02] It is a market that has absolutely taken off. There are folks like Cloud Code and Cognition and others who have a lead, but you guys are coming up strong. Talk about the competitive dynamics and what makes Factory special.

Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.