Fresh Ink: Hello, Poolside! At the intersection of AI and Software comes the system that will build all future systems

By: Erica Brescia and Jacob Effron

The Ink: Jason Warner incubates new AI company, Poolside, at Redpoint

Increasing output to date: Software has already revolutionized the way we communicate, collaborate, transact, discover and learn. And while very early innings, AI has recently improved the way we create software. Large language models like those behind ChatGPT have shown early abilities at assisting developers, generating code and documentation. But these models and their capabilities are still in their infancy. While today they provide additional productivity to engineers, they haven’t yet ushered in a true step change in the way we create software as a society.

Enter Poolside:

Poolside aims to unlock humanity’s potential by pursuing AGI for software creation, with the fundamental belief that the transitional path for humanity to AGI is by building for specific capabilities instead of a general purpose approach. For Poolside, that starts with unlocking the power of software creation and understanding and building the systems that will create all future systems.

It will take an exceptionally special team to execute on this ambitious vision. Poolside co-founders Jason Warner and Eiso Kant have lived at the forefront of the first generation of AI on code systems and have spent their careers leading companies devoted to improving the lives of developers. Eiso built some of the first AI on code models and the infrastructure to train them, and Jason incubated Copilot and Code Search while CTO at GitHub, along with GitHub Actions. Jason also led engineering at two other seminal developer companies: Heroku and Canonical. We’ve also had the privilege of working with Jason for the past few years as an investor at Redpoint. Knowing Jason and Eiso, we could not imagine more perfect founders and leaders for Poolside; both are extremely passionate about the potential of AI to transform our world for the better, and both are deeply committed to and focused on the safety and ethics in their approach to building Poolside and AI in general, which we believe is paramount.

Why we’re excited: As investors, there is nothing more exciting than partnering with a team with a vision that could truly change the world who also has the experience, network and conviction to go and do it. Poolside is building powerful, next-gen foundation models and infrastructure that will reimagine our relationship with creating software. The democratization of who can create software — where the only practical limit is their own creativity and the safety features built into the systems — will have a monumental impact on the global economy and, ultimately, our quality of life. At Poolside’s full potential, an artist could dream up a video game, a doctor a specific app for a patient, a genomics researcher a data pipeline for advanced analysis, an educator a tailored product for a child’s specific learning style, and then those visions can be made into reality — 1,000+ times faster than is possible today. Software creation will be accessible to everyone, everywhere, for virtually any purpose.

In Practice: Poolside’s unique approach to training and reinforcement learning will ultimately create the foundational AI systems that understand more of the fundamentals of code, with deep and advanced understanding of all aspects of software development, moving the state of the art from simple code generation to systems capable of allowing anyone to create whatever their imagination dreams up.

It’s hard not to get excited about the impact of Poolside’s vision when realized at its full potential — to be the company that builds the primitive on which all future software will be built — while transitioning to a world with AGI at your fingertips. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be incubating Poolside at Redpoint, to be leading the seed and having Erica — who was fortunate to have also worked side-by-side with Jason at GitHub before both joined Redpoint — joining the board, and partnering with Jason and Eiso as they embark on this ambitious and important mission!