What’s Beyond GitHub Copilot? With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley

**Alex Graveley** (0:05)
The most fun stuff is people that would pop up and be like, I don't program, but I just learned how to write this 100-line script that does this thing that I need. It's like, oh my God.

**Sarah Guo** (0:17)
This is the No Priors podcast. I'm Sarah Guo.

**Elad Gil** (0:20)
I'm Elad Gil.

**Sarah Guo** (0:21)
We invest in, advise, and help start technology companies.

**Elad Gil** (0:24)
In this podcast, we're talking with the leading founders and researchers in AI about the biggest questions.

**Sarah Guo** (0:28)
Thank you.
Everyone talks about the future impact of AI, but this week on No Priors, we're talking with the architect of arguably the first AI product that has already revolutionized a profession, Github Copilot. Alex Graveley was the principal engineer and chief architect behind this product, a sort of pair programmer that autocompletes your code as you type. It's rapidly become a product that developers won't live without, and the most leaned upon analogy for every new startup. Copilot for finance, for sales, marketing, support, writing, decision-making, everything. Alex is a long-time hacker and tinkerer, open-source contributor, repeat founder, and creator of products that millions of people use, such as Dropbox Paper. I have huge respect for the range of work he's done, ranging from hardware-level security and virtualization to real-time collaborative web-native and AI-driven UI. He has a new project in stealth, Minion. Just as a heads up, we recorded this podcast episode in person, and you'll notice we don't sound as crisp as we usually do. Still, I think you'll enjoy listening to this conversation. Let's get into the interview.
Welcome to the podcast, Alex.

**Alex Graveley** (1:46)
Hi.

**Sarah Guo** (1:46)
So let's start with the background. How did you end up working in tech or AI?

**Alex Graveley** (1:50)
Tech was earlier. I started really young, and I got really into Linux when I was 14 or so. And yeah, it was right around the time when the web was like a new thing, and you had to work to kind of get on the web. I just, the idea of helping in the open and making it freely available so other people could learn from things like I was learning from things seemed great.
So I went and spent many years just working on open source stuff. Yeah, spent many hours compiling kernels and hacking on stuff. And yeah.

**Sarah Guo** (2:24)
And what was the thought process behind starting like Hack Pad?

**Alex Graveley** (2:28)
Oh, Hack Pad. Yeah, so I had just finished like four or five years at VMware and I wanted to get into startups. I knew that. And then, so I left VMware and I started working on an education startup like many of us do.
Many, many founders start with like the idea of an education startup.

**Elad Gil** (2:48)
It's like a rite of passage.

**Alex Graveley** (2:49)
Yeah, it's like a rite of passage. Yeah, so I spent, I don't know, nine months working on that. Turns out education is very hard.
So after nine months, I was like, all right, this isn't going anywhere. I don't know if there's a value prop here. I mean, that was the value is that I learned that like, you have to make something that is both achievable and that people want to pay for or spend their time on. So yeah, then I was just kind of fishing around. I was living in like a warehouse in San Francisco, a bunch of Burning Man people.
And we were having trouble organizing large scale Burning Man projects. And so I forked Etherpad and started hacking on it, recruited a friend in the community to start working on it with me. And yeah, just grew from there. Before we did YC, we had most, many of the large Burning Man camps using it to organize their builds.

**Sarah Guo** (3:37)
Can you describe the product experience?

**Alex Graveley** (3:39)
Oh yeah, it was a real time text editor, kind of like Google Docs. Google Docs is the only other one that did that at that time. It was kind of nice because it would highlight who said what, so you could go track down if somebody had a contribution, be like, oh, what did you mean? Or I heard you say something about this. So that's really useful in like large scale, anonymous, pseudo anonymous groups where you don't really know who has ownership over what, like Burning Man Camps.
And let's see, and then we did YC and then we got a bunch, almost many of those people did it.
My hack was to go do YC and try and get all the companies doing YC to use my product, which many of them did. I also took like very extensive notes of all the YC presentations using the product that everyone would then like look at and we were able to get Stripe and Stripe used us for many years actually. They built for the, I think we were their first knowledge base. They used it for a long time. A bunch of other big companies as well.