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

**Matan Grinberg** (0:00)
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 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.

**Pat Grady** (0:58)
We're here in the studio with Matan from Factory. This is our second time with Matan.

**Matan Grinberg** (1:04)
Thanks for having me.

**Pat Grady** (1:04)
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.

**Matan Grinberg** (1:17)
Yes, indeed.

**Pat Grady** (1:18)
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. 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.

**Matan Grinberg** (1:36)
It's been a wild ride. We started Factory three and a half years ago now. So in April of 2023, when the world and the enterprise in particular was barely ready for GitHub Copilot, let alone fully autonomous agents. And so I think the first two years, it was kind of our journey in the desert is how I like to refer to it. Because we were focused on fully autonomous agents, but engineers weren't ready, procurement teams at the enterprise weren't ready. And so I think retrospectively, we really like honed our craft and learned a lot about how to build for developers in the enterprise. But it took a lot of time to actually come around to when they were ready to receive it. And so we're kind of now emerging much more and some of these other players like Anthropic or OpenAI who have a ton of distribution are going in and bringing their incredible tools like Cloud Code or Codex. The thing that enterprises are really caring about that we have learned through those two years is they do not want anyone to kind of be their single point of failure. They do not want anyone to kind of control their fate and so something that really matters is model independence.
Everyone learned from Cloud where, you know, back in the Cloud days, it was like AWS or Azure being like, hey, you know, come on in, sign this three-year contract. It's going to be so cheap. We're going to subsidize it. It'll be great. And then a couple years later, when it came time to renewal, they would 10x the contract.

**Pat Grady** (3:08)
Haha, data gravity. We got you now.

**Matan Grinberg** (3:10)
Yeah, we got you. What are you going to do a two-year migration to go to someone else? Like no way.
Everyone has scars from that now. And so everyone knows, look, Cloud code is fantastic. Codex from OpenAI is fantastic. We cannot put our fate in any one of these model providers' hands. Also, like, you just look at the risk profiles of the Model Labs versus the Cloud providers. What's the last piece of drama that came out of one of the Cloud providers versus like the Model Labs? It seems like there's kind of always some sort of chaos of internal fighting or getting in spats with the government or any other entities. And so if you're going to build this very important part of your business, you want to make sure that you're robust to any of these changes.
And that's something that we've learned over those kind of initial two years is like, developers really care about things being modular. They want to know that they can customize it to what they want. They want to know that if there's a new model that comes out, that's faster or cheaper or more performant, they can kind of hot swap it in. And that's, I think, one of the biggest reasons why a lot of the largest enterprises are taking the momentum that they had from a Codex or a Cloud Code and then are carrying that into Factory because they get that performance from these fantastic models, but they do it without the vendor lock-in that the Model Labs direct them.