About this episode

Anurag Goel discusses his journey from being the fifth engineer at Stripe to founding Render, focusing on the evolution of AI and DevOps automation.

Before he founded Render, Anurag Goel was the fifth engineer at Stripe, where he watched roughly a fifth of the engineering team disappear into managing AWS, writing brittle, repetitive, error-prone infrastructure scripts that had nothing to do with the actual product. That experience became the seed for Render: a platform that automates away the undifferentiated DevOps work and lets application teams ship without standing up their own cloud team. Today, millions of developers build on it, and Render has raised over $260M from Bessemer and General Catalyst. In this episode, Tobi and Anurag get into what's actually changing as AI moves from hype to production. Anurag makes the case that agents are simply a new kind of application, long-running, stateful, tool-heavy, and a new kind of end user you have to design for. He explains why Render deliberately refuses the "AI cloud" label, what he's building with Workflows and sandboxes, and why the hardest part of shipping agents isn't building them but seeing inside them. The conversation also goes wide: how to hire executives when interviews lie, why short-lived keys and blast-radius thinking matter more than container escapes, how…

People in this episode

Host: Tobias Schlottke

Guest: Anurag Goel

Topics covered

• DevOps automation
• AI in production
• application development
• hiring executives
• cloud computing
• SaaS industry trends

Keywords

• Render
• Stripe
• DevOps
• AI
• application teams
• cloud team
• executive hiring
• SaaS
• infrastructure

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Stripe, Render, Bessemer, General Catalyst

Products: AWS, ChatGPT, Claude

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