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This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal <> GCP <> AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.

Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.

It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. Jake Cooper, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero. Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts.

For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor.

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Today, Railway has raised $124m and is growing very fast. A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week. Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with 70% margins funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.

From rebuilding Railway’s network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own bare metal data centers, Jake Cooper is trying to build a new cloud for an agent-native world. In this episode, Railway’s founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just “Heroku but newer,” what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, and static cloud resources may be heading for a rewrite.

We go deep on Railway’s infrastructure stack: own-metal data centers, three-month cloud payback periods, cloud bursting, data center debt, Railpack, Nixpacks, Temporal, feature flags, Central Station, content-addressable filesystems, agent-safe production forks, and why the CLI may become more important than the canvas in an agent world. Jake also shares the founder journey behind Railway, how the company survived losing $500K/month, why it now serves millions of users with only 35 people, and why he believes the pull request is dying.

We discuss:

How Railway went from a slow six-year grind to adding 100,000 users a week

How Railway thinks about agents as the next dominant software species

Why agents need version control, observability, compute, storage, and orchestration at 1000x scale

The economics of Railway’s own-metal data centers and three-month payback

How Railway uses cloud bursting while scaling its own infrastructure

Why data center debt can be a better tool than venture debt for infra startups

Central Station, Railway’s internal system for clustering customer feedback and incidents

Why responsible disclosure and over-communication matter for platforms

Why feature flags, progressive rollouts, and shadow traffic are essential for agents

Temporal’s strengths, pain points, and why workflows matter for agents

Railpack, Nixpacks, Nix, and lazy-loaded content-addressable filesystems

Why “cattle, not pets” may change if you can clone the pets

Why Railway is building a new cloud from scratch instead of copying hyperscalers

The solo founder path, focus, writing, and how Jake thinks about company building

Railway:

Website: https://railway.com/

X: https://x.com/Railway

Jake Cooper:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejakecooper/

X: https://x.com/JustJake

Timestamps

00:00:00 Introduction: What Is Railway?

00:02:07 Jake’s Path to Railway

00:06:13 Railway’s Six-Year Growth Story

00:08:52 Rebuilding the Business After the Free Tier

00:11:17 Agents as the Next Software Platform

00:13:29 Railway’s Infrastructure Philosophy

00:15:42 Bare Metal, Cloud Economics, and the Compute Crunch

00:17:22 Cloud Bursting and Five-Cloud Networking

00:20:20 Data Center Debt and Infra Financing

00:23:31 Data Centers in Space

00:25:24 What Agents Need From Infrastructure

00:28:24 CLIs, Canvas, and Agent-Native UX

00:35:15 Central Station, Incidents, and Responsible Disclosure

00:40:30 Safe Rollouts, SRE Agents, and Production Forks

00:45:00 AI SRE, Specs, Code, and Tests

00:48:24 Self-Replicating Infrastructure and the New Serverless

00:53:18 Heroku, Temporal, and Workflow Engines

01:04:07 Railpack, Nixpacks, and Lazy-Loaded Filesystems

01:06:01 Coding Agents, Token Spend, and Roadmap Acceleration

01:10:56 The Pull Request Is Dying

01:12:28 Feature Flags and the Agent-Era SDLC

01:16:15 Cattle, Pets, and Cloning Machines

01:19:29 Solo Founder Lessons

01:24:12 Focus, GPUs, and Building a New Cloud

01:28:20 Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Alessio [00:00:00]: 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 [00:00:10]: Hey, hey, hey. Today we’re in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway.

Alessio [00:00:14]: Conductor of Railway.

Swyx [00:00:15]: Conductor at Railway. Yeah.

Alessio [00:00:16]: Choo-choo.

Swyx [00:00:17]: Do you actually have that anywhere, like on your business card?

Jake [00:00:20]: We call some of our volunteer moderators conductors. 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 pretty official.”

Swyx [00:00:30]: Business cards are coming back.

Jake [00:00:32]: They’re cool. They’re hip. The conductor thing is good. We’re trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. Some people think it’s super cringe and say, “You don’t need a name for people internally.” Some people want to call each other something. We still don’t have a really good one.

Jake [00:00:55]: We’ve got New Railcrews, Trainiacs. Nothing has stuck yet.

Swyx [00:01:00]: I like Trainiac. Trainiac sounds good. Railwayians. For those who don’t know, what is Railway? Let’s give people a crisp definition up front.

Jake [00:01:09]: Railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You go to the canvas, or you talk with Claude, and you say, “Deploy a Postgres instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code,” and you’re off to the races.

Swyx [00:01:22]: You’ve got a nice animation on the landing page.

Jake [00:01:24]: Thank you. None of my work, by the way. They don’t let me touch the design stuff anymore.

Jake [00:01:25]: We want to make it trivially easy not just to deploy things, but to evolve applications over time. Most tooling right now stacks entropy on top of entropy: Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible scripts, and all these other things. If we can version all of your software and keep track of all the changes, then we can make it trivial to clone environments, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of production data, get copies of any services, make changes, validate them, and collapse them back in without reproducing everything across a staging environment.

The Railway Origin Story: From Uber Systems to a New Cloud

Swyx [00:02:07]: I was looking at your background: Bloomberg, Uber. Nothing immediately stands out as, “This guy is going to found the next great platform as a service.” What prepared you for Railway?

Jake [00:02:21]: It was curiosity to keep going deeper. I started out on front-end stuff, working on Wolfram Mathematica and porting it over. Then I briefly moved to Bloomberg, then toward Uber and distributed systems, taking the Jump Bikes systems and moving them to a distributed system built on top of Cadence, the pre-Temporal Temporal.

Swyx [00:02:44]: Which, by the way, I’m happy to talk about, pros and cons.

Jake [00:02:48]: Totally.

Swyx [00:02:51]: But let’s do the Railway story.

Jake [00:02:52]: It has been a continual step of wanting an experience. Whether it’s walking up to a bike, unlocking it, and having it work frictionlessly, or something else, the depth required to make that happen follows from the experience. A lot of the work I do, and a lot of the team does, is in service of that experience. We fundamentally don’t care how deep we have to go. We will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to get the experience.

Jake [00:03:17]: I don’t have a physics PhD. I did an EECS degree. It has always been about figuring out the next step: how do we get there? That’s what led to starting Railway for that experience and then moving all the way to bare metal data centers. I was adding patches to the kernel this week to get the experience there because I can see how much better it can be.

Swyx [00:03:49]: Other patches to the Linux kernel this week?

Jake [00:03:51]: Yeah. Not upstream. Our fork.

Swyx [00:03:52]: That’s a flex. Railpack? No, this is different. This is the OS on top of Railpack?

Jake [00:03:57]: No, this is an actual kernel patch. It’s always literally: what do we have to do to get that experience? Then figure it out. Anything is figureoutable.

Swyx [00:04:10]: Would you send the patch upstream, or does it not fit other use cases?

Jake [00:04:13]: Maybe. We have to work out the experience internally. It has to do with the storage layer we’re building for some of the agentic stuff. Maybe it’ll be useful upstream, but it’s deeply useful for us internally.

Open Source, Forks, and Non-Deterministic Versioning

Swyx [00:04:29]: You mentioned open source before. How do you think about starting from open source, and then coding agents letting you do a lot more from forks of it?

Jake [00:04:38]: GitHub’s original sin is that it’s almost a series of broken pointers. You have this thing, then you clone it, and now you’ve lost the whole upstream. How do we make it trivial for people to modify really small pieces of it?

Jake [00:04:51]: We think of Git in a discrete sense: I’ve either made a change and merged upstream, or I haven’t. What would it look like if it were percentage-based, a little more non-deterministic, or a stream of changes that users traverse as a percentage rolled out in general and then rolled all the way up?

Jake [00:05:13]: We have the open-source kickback program and let you deploy templates because we want to make it trivial for people to version these shards over time. It solves a large problem around authentication, authorization, and security. NPM has a way to define, “Don’t take any new packages.” The ideal end state is that you roll out progressively to users with the minimum impact zone and continue rolling up. JPMorgan should probably be the last one on the patch line, for all our sakes, because our money and livelihoods are there.

Jake [00:05:53]: It’s okay if Johnny Vibe Coder gets a broken patch because there’s so much entropy in the system that the rubber has to meet the road at some point. You have to test at varying levels.

The Long Grind: First Users, Free Tier, and Making the Business Work

Swyx [00:06:13]: I wanted to pull up this glorious chart, which is your usage or number of daily signups?

Jake [00:06:22]: Daily signups, I think.

Swyx [00:06:24]: You started six years ago. It was a slow grind, and now you’re on a rocket ship. You say, “Don’t doubt your fight and don’t quit.” Maybe pick out certain points that were key inflections for the company.

Jake [00:06:40]: At the start, it’s about getting your first 100 users, hell or high water. We had a website and a support link. The support link was the Discord channel. I had notifications on with two monitors: the monitor I was working on and the other monitor with Discord. If anybody came in, I was immediately like, “Hey, how’s it going?” It was rare, so getting those first 100 users to come back was the start.

Jake [00:07:14]: Then you build a consultancy factory because users want all these things. You have to go back to the board and ask, “What is the actual product offering I want to build on top of this?”

Jake [00:07:28]: VCs want charts that always go up and to the right, but in reality you don’t necessarily want charts that look like that. For us, there have been periods of expansion where we add features to test use cases, and periods of compaction where we ask, “If the experience we have is good, how do we make it significantly better?” Maybe we strip out features that don’t fit our ICP anymore.

Jake [00:07:57]: The boom from 2022 to 2023 came from the free tier. Everybody under the sun was using it.

Swyx [00:08:09]: A lot of Reddit bots and Discord bots.

Jake [00:08:12]: And crypto miners. When you build an open product on the internet where anybody can sign up, the internet is a horrible place with so many things. You go through periods of asking, “How do I reach as many people as possible?” Then, “How do I fit the exact use case for the people who really matter and are really excited about this specific thing?”

Jake [00:08:39]: Then there was a two-year period of making the actual business work. During the free-tier era, we were losing about half a million dollars a month.

Swyx [00:08:59]: On a $20 million bank account.

Jake [00:09:02]: On a $20 million bank account with maybe $50,000 a month in revenue. That’s a horrible business. I don’t know how anybody invested. But you have to go through it and say, “We have an experience people love, but the business has to work.”

Jake [00:09:17]: There are two schools of thought. You can run the horrible business all the way up with bad margins, or you can go back and make it work. We’ve always wanted a super lean team. We’re 35 people right now. It’s very small.

Swyx [00:09:36]: Supporting three million already?

Jake [00:09:38]: Yeah. We’re adding 100,000 users a week right now, so it’s growing fast. We don’t want to add headcount for the sake of headcount or throw bodies at problems. We want to build systems. It’s hard to build systems during expansion because you’re adding things to the system because people are asking for them or things are breaking.

Jake [00:10:00]: We had to cut off the free users for a little while, rebuild the business, and make sure it worked. We want to reach as many people as possible because software is important. It’s become difficult to create things in the physical world, so it’s important to make it easy for people to build in the virtual world and have access to creation. But there are legs to that journey.

Jake [00:10:30]: You can see divots in the charts. If you follow between 2025 and 2026, it’s either summer or winter. People go on holiday with family.

Swyx [00:10:50]: It affects that much?

Jake [00:10:51]: Yeah. It’s kind of B2C and kind of B2B. People are shipping constantly, then they stop. Our activation curve now shows more people activating on weekdays because we have more business users, so it smooths out over time.

Agents as the New Interface to Deployment

Swyx [00:11:17]: Was there a point where you started prioritizing AI development or agent development?

Jake [00:11:24]: We’ve prioritized agentic as a top-of-funnel thing. Over the last six months, we’ve deeply prioritized agentic as a mechanism to build and deploy things because we believe the curve is so steep and that is how people will build and deploy software.

Jake [00:11:42]: It almost fundamentally doesn’t matter whether this is dot-com or not because we’re all on the internet anyway. If agents are going to deploy a bunch of things and we hit an inference wall at some point, we’ll fix those problems. The dominant species over the next 10 years is that we’ve moved from assembly to C to C++ to JavaScript to words. You’re going to need to close that loop.

Swyx [00:12:13]: When you say this is dot-com, did you mean buying the domain, or the general case?

Jake [00:12:17]: I mean the dot-com era, when companies had a huge run-up because people understood the internet was important. Then they hit bottlenecks, fundamental laws of physics, math didn’t work, and everybody came back down to earth. But it didn’t matter because the internet became so impactful. If you operate on a long enough time horizon, you should build these things anyway because you can see where it’s going.

Jake [00:12:45]: That’s where I think a lot of agent stuff is. You get to a point where you’re running thousands of agents in parallel. What is the inference cost? What is the compute cost? How do you make that efficient? How do you coordinate all this? We have issues coordinating humans; we don’t even have good tooling for that. Now we have to figure out how to get agents to coordinate, safely version changes, and know when to raise their hand for someone to intervene. Otherwise it becomes an interrupt factory.

Railway’s Infrastructure Thesis: Network, Compute, Storage, and Metal

Swyx [00:13:19]: Let’s go right into the technical side. What are the core infrastructure or architectural beliefs of Railway that allow you to do what you do?

Jake [00:13:29]: The primitives matter a lot for us. We need network, compute, storage, and orchestration around it. You need control over a lot of those things. We’ve talked a lot about how we don’t really use Kubernetes because we want higher-order control to place workloads in very specific places.

Jake [00:13:48]: The reason is that you have to be very efficient with agents: memory reuse and all these other things, or you’re going to massively blow up your cost structure. Being able to rack and stack your own servers and build your own metal unlocks performance and cost. Experiences where you’re running 1,000 agents in parallel are not massively cost prohibitive.

Jake [00:14:13]: Token use and compute use are blowing up. Over time, those things have to get a lot more efficient. You can get a lot of margin to make those experiences solid by building your own metal. That’s all in service of offering a differentiated experience to as many people as humanly possible.

Swyx [00:14:51]: You have a data center in Singapore.

Jake [00:14:53]: Yeah. We have two in every other region now. In Singapore, we’re adding a second one in Q3.

Swyx [00:14:58]: What’s it like? I’ve never built a data center. Do you go to Equinix and say, “I want some slots?”

Jake [00:15:05]: Yeah. Equinix. You basically go and say, “I want power and I want a cage.” They say, “Great, here’s what it’s going to be.” You rent the cage for a period of time, fill it with racks and servers, and hook up internet to it. That’s all the pieces.

Swyx [00:15:36]: Then you handle everything else.

Jake [00:15:37]: You handle everything else.

Swyx [00:15:39]: What’s the math versus clouds doing it for you?

Jake [00:15:43]: If we rented in the cloud, our payback period when we go to metal is about three months.

Swyx [00:15:50]: Which is crazy.

Jake [00:15:51]: It’s nuts. That’s four years of depreciated hardware. You’re going to see a lot of this compute crunch because hyperscalers are buying up a lot of stuff. We’re working directly with OEMs, resellers, and people building these machines: Supermicro, Dell, and others.

Jake [00:16:11]: Upstream, there’s a bunch of supply pressure. When we raised our last round, between deploying capital for servers and now, the amount of money we’ve raised is less than the amount of money we have in the bank plus the value of the servers because the servers have appreciated as RAM has gone up. It’s nuts how valuable hardware has become.

Jake [00:16:50]: If you look at hyperscalers, they deployed around $80 billion of capital expenditures this year, and next year will be more. That’s a massive infrastructure build-out.