The Man Behind Google Docs Has A Warning For Every Founder In 2026

Zach Lloyd (0:00)

Startups are inherently about risk. Whole name of the game is like, find a like risk that you can really take, that if you hit on it, might really inflect you.

Wouter Teunissen (0:09)

Like what mistakes could you have made to not be in the outcome you are today?

Zach Lloyd (0:12)

Just wish we had like made bigger bets faster. You gotta go really hard when you see the opportunity.

Wouter Teunissen (0:17)

Zach Lloyd led engineering for Google Sheets and the entire doc suite, from a few million users to over a billion. In 2020, he started Warp alone during COVID with just a deck. Warp is a terminal where you talk to your computer in plain English and the agents do the building. Roughly a million developers use it and they're backed by Sequoia and the founder of Figma.

Zach Lloyd (0:34)

Like we're competing with Anthropic, we're competing with OpenAI, we're competing with Google. And those companies have more money than us. They have the ability to burn money on users. The app itself is a sort of obsolete concept. You don't need to go from idea to app. You just kind of need to go from idea to outcome a lot of the times.

Wouter Teunissen (0:52)

From this episode, you can expect to learn why most SaaS apps are about to become obsolete. How to know when your business model will never scale, and why you should be hiring agents and not just people, and how to do that.

Zach Lloyd (1:02)

If I were starting a company right now, I would be thinking about like...

Wouter Teunissen (1:07)

I think it might be fun to start off by talking about the previous experience you had at Google and also your previous company. So, I think let's start that. Can you tell me a little bit about what you did at Google specifically? Because you saw some insanely great products being built. And then we can talk about how that influenced your first company.

Zach Lloyd (1:25)

Yeah, I can start with Google. So, let's see, I joined Google in 2007 I joined on the Google Sheets team. About five people at the time. It was a product that I think Google was actually unsure if it was going to turn into a real product or it was going to be an experiment because it was part of Google Labs at the time. I was actually when I joined, blown away that you could even have a spreadsheet in the browser. That was a totally new thing for me.

I had a weird journey up to that point where I had been in school, and I had been working a little bit in tech, and then getting to Google was like my first real engineering job, I would say.

Yeah, I was a little bit intimidated just by the level of technology that we were working with. That's what it was like at the start. Then yeah, my journey there was, I mean, we built this product, which after about a year and a half at Google, I ended up leading the tech part of Google Sheets, and then I led that project and managed that team for a long time. Then by the time I left, I was a principal engineer leading engineering for the docs suite. Yeah, it went from something where I would say none of my friends knew that Google even had this thing, and they would refer to it as Google Excel. That's what it was like. To when I left, it was whenever I would walk around a WeWork or whatever, I would just look in people's desks and everyone would have the product open. So it was a pretty cool thing. We went from I think fewer than a million people using it to in the hundreds of millions of people using it. I think it's now over a billion people using it. So it's a wildly successful product. Pretty cool. I think more people use Google Docs Suite than use Microsoft Office at this point, which is crazy.

Wouter Teunissen (3:17)

I mean, definitely more people doing work that's better probably than just because of how shareable the work is. What sort of things broke as you started to scale this product?

Zach Lloyd (3:31)

I mean, so at the beginning, there was a lot of technical challenge around, this is going to date it, but around like supporting other browsers. So like supporting Internet Explorer was like a big challenge at the time. Like if you were in Web Dev at that time, and you're using for like Internet Explorer 6, it was like, oh God, that doesn't have any of the modern APIs or whatever in it. So that was challenge. I mean, we had all sorts of issues with scale. Like, we're running first tens and hundreds and thousands of servers. You push something that crashes one of those servers, you run into a risk all of a sudden where the crash spills over to the next server and the next server. And so we had many outages. We had security scares. I have actually a great story about a security scare that we had. Yeah, go ahead. We had, you know, so there's this very famous, like, venture capitalist, John Doar, who was a very early investor in Google. And I think he was on the board of Google, may still be on the board of Google.