Railway: The Agent-Native Cloud — Jake Cooper

**Alessio** (0:04)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.

**Swyx** (0:10)
Hey, hey, hey. And today we're in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway. Conductor of Railway.

**Jake Cooper** (0:15)
Conductor of Railway, yeah, yeah. Choo-choo.

**Swyx** (0:17)
Do you actually have that anywhere on your business card?

**Jake Cooper** (0:20)
Well, we roughly call people into it. Well, I don't have a business card.
We're not that big yet. At some point, I will. I got handed a nice business card from the Supermicro folks, and I was like, damn, this is actually pretty official.

**Swyx** (0:30)
They're coming back, business cards.

**Jake Cooper** (0:32)
Yeah, they're cool. They're hip, they're jiggy.
But yeah, the whole conductor thing, we call some of our volunteer moderators, conductors. It's a good one. We're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally, and there's varying levels of thought. Some people are like, oh, it's super cringe. You don't need a name for people internally. Some people are like, oh, yeah, we want to call each other this thing or whatever. I was like, we still don't have a really good one. We've got New Railcrews, we've got Trainiacs, we've got like, nothing's really stuck in.

**Swyx** (1:00)
I like Trainiacs, Trainiacs sounds good. Railwayians.
Okay, so for those who don't know what is Railway, let's give people a crisp definition up front.

**Jake Cooper** (1:09)
Yeah, Railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You just go to the canvas or you talk with Claude and you say, deploy Postgres instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code, et cetera, right? And you'll just be up and away to the races, right?

**Swyx** (1:22)
Yeah, you've got nice animation on the landing page.

**Jake Cooper** (1:24)
Oh, well, thank you. None of my work, by the way.
They don't let me touch any of the design stuff anymore. But yeah, we want to make it trivially easy for not just to deploy things, but for you to almost evolve applications over time. We believe that most of the tooling right now is kind of stacked up, you're stacking entropy on top of entropy on top of entropy, right? So you have Docker and Cube and then Ansible scripts and all of these other things, right? And if we can kind of version all of your software for you and keep track of all of the changes, then we can make it actually trivial for you to clone environments, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of production data, get copies of any of your services, make those changes, validate those changes, collapse it in without kind of having to just reproduce everything across a staging environment or all of those other things, right?

**Swyx** (2:07)
Yeah. Amazing. One thing I was looking at your background, right? Like Bloomberg, Uber, there's nothing immediately that stands out to me as like, okay, this guy's going to found the next great platform as a service.
What prepared you for real way?

**Jake Cooper** (2:21)
It's almost like a curiosity to just like ever go deeper, right? And so like, you know, started out on like front end stuff, you know, like working on the like Wolfram, like Web Mathematica, and like porting it over there. And then, you know, briefly moving to Bloomberg and then moving towards Uber and like distributed systems and kind of like taking all the jump bikes kind of systems and moving them over to a distributed system built on top of Cadence like the temporal. Yeah, the pre-temporal, temporal.

**Swyx** (2:46)
By the way, I'm happy to talk about pros and cons.

**Jake Cooper** (2:48)
Yeah, I think like, it's like, let's do the roadway story. And so like, it's just been a continual step of like, I want this experience, whether it is like walking up to like a bike and just unlocking it and like having it be like frictionless to like work or whatever. And then like necessitating the like depth required to go in and make that happen, right? Like a lot of the work that I do and a lot of the team does is like, it's all in service of that experience, right? And like, we fundamentally don't care like, how deep we have to go, whatever, like we will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to go and get the experience, right? And I think that's what a lot of, you know, kind of the trajectory was, right? And so it's not like I have a physics PhD or whatever, I did like an EECS degree, you know, it's just, it's always been about just trying to figure out that next step of like, how do we get there, right?