there's only two moats. Hard problems, doing hard things. We want to make it as cheap as possible in both time and money, saving a ton of time to go in and spit up these things and then only paying for what you actually use when you're going and doing that. We want you to spend as little time as possible on the kind of configuration, drudge work, et cetera, so that you can actually go out and build the thing you actually wanted to go out and do, right? Like, we won't start a business to go and learn about answer or Kubernetes or any of this,

this other thing, but current generation of software, if you want to start a business that will actually kind of like scale for you, you do have to go and learn these things, right? Unless you use, you know, the tools that we were building so that you can actually spend all the time working on the actual problem that you started your business to solve. Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital.

Today's guest is Jake Cooper, founder of Railway. We make all of that stuff that you would need to

potentially retain somebody to go and manage those things. You can just do it yourself.

Jake has grown Railway to mid-eight figures in revenue, and our conversation gets into how

they solve the hardest problems in dev tools and the importance of back-end infrastructure

in AI-native software.

In the age of AI, there's a very, very material risk of being out executed by your competitors

because they are moving so quickly.

Railway has made a bunch of creative and bold product bets, like enabling

users to create templates, earning a revenue share when other people use them, and building

their own data centers and cloud service. We want to be as quick as possible, and Racking

Rones allows us to move even closer to that kind of like metal. We talked about how Railway fully

ramps new hires in four weeks. Everybody joins a startup to be told what to do.

They join a startup to work on hard problems.

Using Discord instead of Slack, what hypergrowth companies get wrong on org design?

It's really, really important to have operators be also managers.

And why you shouldn't always work on the weekend.

Horsepower gets you a lot of the way, but at a certain point, you need to refine your technique.

And if you're working all the time, you don't really have a space to figure out where you've essentially lost time.

A quick thank you to Angelo at Railway and Erica at Redpoint for helping brainstorm topics for Jake.

A reminder, I publish two episodes of The Peel every week exploring the world's greatest startup stories just like this one.

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