David Greenstein

Building at Prior lives at Palantir and Intuitive Surgical. Opinions are my own.

[Max Tynan @MaxTynan]

BISSELL is one of our earliest 8090 customers. We've learned so much about manufacturing, how leadership teams underwrite investments in technology/AI, and about how much opportunity there is in streamlining 'unsexy' workflows. The company is celebrating their 150th this year!

[Naval @naval]

Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t want your children to buy.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Here is the first case study of what 8090 can do.

Working with CMS, our Enterprise team decoded a 50yr, 18M repo of COBOL and Assembly that governs billions in healthcare payments. We documented 100,000+ business rules in plain English using Software Factory, each traced to its exact source line.

The people who own Medicare policy can now read how their systems behave and change as they see fit.

Full story in the thread below.

We can do this for any large enterprise who have big, legacy codebases.

[Max Tynan @MaxTynan]

I feel incredibly fortunate to be a part of such a high-agency, smart team, and to work with so many interesting customers on challenging problems & opportunities. Some learnings from a year and a half in at 8090...

1\ There is an immense amount of technical debt in the enterprise and Gov't. These are legacy systems, written in COBOL, Assembly, etc. Everyone knows this, but folks are just starting to come around to the fact that Agents/frontier models can't effectively reverse-engineer and accurately capture requirements for those systems, which means transformation/modernization programs often stall out in the early innings. We've built unique ways to extract accurate business rules at high speed (days/weeks) across many systems. This builds early confidence in the fun part: forward-engineering the new systems, because we're not missing anything the old systems need to do, and dragging timelines out trying to get to ground truth. Ford having to bring back hundreds of engineers with legacy system knowledge is a proof point here...

2\ Time and Materials (T&M) is a fundamentally broken model for legacy modernization. We do our modernization work on a deliverables basis, and deliver outcomes. People want system maps, rules extraction, future architectures and engineering plans, tests & certifications for new systems. They don't want hourly bills for missed milestones and powerpoint slides.

3\ Enterprises have done organizational gymnastics around COTS for too long. They add people, process, and layers to compensate for the functionality gaps from the software they've bought over the years. They want a roadmap of one and are ready to bet on their domain expertise and ideas for how to grow & improve their businesses. We free our customers of the unsexy but important jobs to be done of capturing/writing detailed requirements, building engineering plans, and building/hosting custom software for them. Levie is spot on when he calls out that the idiosyncrasies of business workflows are the hardest part of building custom software. We've made good progress at cracking that (with much more to go).

4\ No one wants to give away their domain expertise to closed-source model providers, and no C-level executives believe the agreements they have with frontier labs will truly protect their knowledge from leaking to these firms and ultimately making its way into models for others to benefit from. The way we build at 8090 keeps IP safe.

5\ We are not cheap (our Custom Software and Modernization work all starts at 7 figures/yr), but customers are willing to make meaningful investments in replacing the key software that powers their business when you show up with a different model, iterate quickly and with quality, listen intently to their needs, and are generally fun to work with.

6\ We are so early. It is very much still Day 1.

[8090 @8090_Factory]

Excited for what's ahead!

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

On 8090's go to market:

We could have sold into easier, forgiving customers and posted a nice logo wall. Instead, we did the opposite.

We went straight at the hardest, most regulated buyers we could find: healthcare, insurance, life sciences, aerospace, energy, manufacturing, financial services, and the United States government.

The logic was simple. If AI can be trusted to do mission-critical work inside the industries with the least tolerance for error and the most oversight, it can be trusted with serious work anywhere.

Some recent 8090 wins:

- A publicly traded insurer ran a workflow its existing systems could never accommodate and took years of cost out of their system.
- A life sciences customer cut its authoring-to-approval cycle by more than half, so the team spends its time on the science instead of the paperwork.
- A manufacturer brought tens of thousands of parts under automated handling, and the people who used to do manual intake now work the exceptions that actually need a human.

Overwhelmingly all of our customers create negative churn for our business: a small customer quickly becomes medium, a medium customer becomes large. Our large customers are becoming extra-large.

And every engagement makes the platform smarter, because of how have engineered our Software Factory. A network effect in Enterprise Software is quite novel and we may be onto one.

[David Greenstein @davidgreenstn]

Well said KAT

[SNY Knicks @sny_knicks]

"The greatest currency you can earn in New York City is not money, but it's respect. To have the respect of the fans in the city, we are rich beyond belief here in the city."

- Karl-Anthony Towns

[David Greenstein @davidgreenstn]

More griddle action

[ESPN @espn]

NEW YORK STAND UP 🔥

THE KNICKS ARE BACK IN THE NBA FINALS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE '99 ‼️

[David Greenstein @davidgreenstn]

Grilled some chicken

[8090 @8090_Factory]

Most engineering leaders are past the honeymoon with AI coding IDEs.

They see how many tokens their agents burn.

The reason is rework.

The agent gets a vague prompt and a "make no mistakes" instruction, guesses at an architecture that isn't the one you run, and ships the wrong thing.

Then engineers spend round after round correcting it. Rework is what the token bill actually measures.

An agent builds correct code when it knows two things: what to build, and what to build it against.

Software Factory's modules captures the full business intent and engineering architecture for all operators to reference in a unified multi-player environment, so everyone shares the same context.

Then, we pass off the coding tasks to your IDE agent of choice execute against them (Claude, Cursor, Copilot - whatever you prefer).

Today, your agents write the code well. The question is what they're writing it against.

What is the unified system to reference context your teams are using today?

[NEW YORK KNICKS @nyknicks]

someone asked for a wallpaper??

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Spoke at the AI club at Stanford last night. 1000 people tried to attend. Seating was capped at 250.

It was pandemonium at the end! If you’re a resilient, gritty engineer, PM, designer or GTM person, please consider working with us:

- We have no org chart - everyone reports to me. We do this to minimize politics, titles and force natural leaders to self organize.
- We are severely under manned for the work we have (by design) so you are forced to engineer your way out. Build solutions not orgs.
- We will book nine figures this year and are growing very quickly. Our customers span all major parts of the US Economy.

[email protected]

[8090 @8090_Factory]

Welcome to the Factory Floor. Our Head of Engineering @melbourneandrew for Software Factory talks to our VP Sales & BD @MaxTynan about the principles behind the product.

[NASA @NASA]

We see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere. That's us, together, watching as our astronauts make their journey to the Moon.