Why I'm Leading Warp's Series A

In today’s world full of inequality, the power to create digitally equals economic mobility. It’s imperative that we reduce barriers to creation so that more people can find opportunity and fulfillment. At Figma, our mission is to make design accessible to everyone — on any given day, you’ll often find us twisting ourselves in knots trying to give users more power while keeping our software simple.

Outside of Figma, I enjoy investing in early stage companies. It’s rare to find founders who authentically care about democratizing technology and have both the patience and obsession required to keep complexity at bay. As an industry, we mostly build slightly better tools for already privileged insiders because we don’t approach problems with the level of rigor necessary to create true access.

When I first met Zach in April, 2020, it was immediately clear he was a unique and special human. In addition to his very impressive background (brilliant engineer, second time founder, ex-CTO of Time, tech lead for Google Docs / Sheets), I was so impressed with Zach’s direct, no-bullshit communication style and his vision for how to make the terminal more accessible, powerful and collaborative. Like Zach, I saw the terminal as an archaic piece of technology. Unlike Zach, I always thought of the terminal as a relatively static piece of infrastructure rather than software someone should make 10x better. I left our brief conversation feeling completely inspired, my brain filled to the brim with Zach’s ideas for how to bring this key piece of technology into the modern era.

Even though we had just met, Zach kindly allowed me to participate in his seed round. Over the next 18 months, we kept in touch — he continued to ask thought provoking questions and kept me updated on the latest product thinking. Meanwhile, I watched as Warp transformed into a talent magnet, attracting a diverse and skilled team of engineers and designers.

With the early team in place, Zach turned his attention to building and quickly shipped a closed beta. His approach gave me flashbacks to the early days of Figma! There are many parallels between the two companies; like a design tool, the terminal has many “table stakes” features and people won’t take you seriously until you build some minimum set of key workflows. There’s a temptation and opportunity to reimagine many of these features — the art is figuring out when to go for a home run and when to just ship the expected.

In the early days of the closed beta, Warp was very much a toy. However, every week it grew a little better. Most importantly, the team nailed the basics with features like blocks, multi-line text editing and easy command lookup — all built in Rust with insane performance. In less than six months it had transformed into a very capable terminal with a passionate and growing user community. Depending on your workflow, Warp’s single player mode might already be the best terminal experience you’ve ever seen. (If it’s not there yet, just give it a few months — trust me!) 

Personally I’m even more excited for what’s ahead. Zach’s vision for making the terminal multiplayer and collaborative will fundamentally change the way people make software, interact with servers and work together on engineering teams. And it will enable new mentorship opportunities for the next generation of software engineers.

Most people don’t conceptualize it this way, but the terminal is the original computing platform. By building a terminal from the ground up and making it cloud connected, the possibilities for how Warp can evolve this platform are truly endless.

For all of these reasons and more, I’m ecstatic to lead Warp’s Series A round. This is my first time leading a round like this; I’m very grateful for the opportunity to support a company that I believe will open up our industry and bring more collaboration to software engineering. Oh, and it’s going to be a monster business, too ;)

Warp launched in public beta this morning. If you’re as hyped as I am, go check it out! I couldn’t be more excited for them. Enjoy!