Railway Series A

00:00:00 Erica Brescia: Not everybody's brain works at your speed.

Jordan Siegel: I don't think anyone's brain works at your speed.

Jake Cooper: Once in a while. I'll get into a conversation with somebody I'm like, oh, cool. High bandwidth conversation. Hi, bandwidth is an understatement. It's one of the many things I'm on. Like, hi, I'm Erica Brescia.

Jordan: And I'm Jordan Siegel.

Erica Brescia: And we are here today with Jake Cooper, the founder and CEO of Railway. Jake to kick things off, tell us what you're building at Railway.

00:00:20 Jake: We are trying to make it really, really easy for software engineers to just deploy infrastructure. It's something that should be trivial, such as going into the AWS dashboard, spinning up Postgres, spinning up whatever is orders of magnitude. More simple with Railway. You can think of it as kind of an infinite canvas for shipping you type in. I want Postgres and we return to you in active Postgres. You type in, I have this skid hub repository I'd like to deploy. We figure out intelligently how to deploy it. Um, and your way to the races, your API’s spun up and you can just work from there.

Erica: One of my favorite questions to ask founders and honestly, something I look for as an investor is the why, like, why did you decide to build railway? This is kind of a force multiplier on top of building anything. If I wanted to go out and build pretty much anything, I would generally have to go as a software engineer and reach for kind of this tooling.

Jake: I'd have to interact with things like AWS and Kubernetes and kind of all of these things. For me, it was a matter. What can I build and what can we kind of bring into the world that would make it a, a 10 to a hundred X multiplier on doesn't really matter what you're shipping. And so that's kind of how we generally end our, that building Railway.

00:01:17 Erica: One of the things that really stood out to me in our conversations was just your dedication to solving this problem. Like you've lived the pain yourself. You'd felt it. You feel like there has to be a better way. And I remember you saying, like, if I get it wrong this time, I'm gonna do it again. This is my life's mission. I think that's really important when you're trying to build something that's ambitious.

Jordan: You know, when we were talking with users, a railway, something that got Eric and I really excited was just the term that came up time and time again from engineers was it was a magical experience, the word magical service, and almost every conversation no engineer wants to, or even knows how to dig into thousands of lines of YAML, stitch up services together. And it's just too hard. Frankly, we went out and looked, uh, across the landscape for companies that are set out to solve. And Railway was by far the best solution we came across. We just fell in love with Jake and the team. He's just a founder that I knew I wanted to back. And I, the red point team as a whole felt similarly when they got to know him. And so it was a combination of the team, the problem space out there, and this being a massive opportunity and just the solution and the magic experience that they'd build with Railway got us really excited about partnering with them.