The App That Changed How Engineers Ship Code

1. AEAaron Epstein0:00

   [upbeat music] Today I'm excited to welcome Charlie and Jackson, co-founders of Conductor, fresh off of a $22 million Series A co-led by Spark and Matrix. Guys, thanks so much for joining.

2. CHCharlie0:17

   Thanks for having us.

3. JAJackson0:18

   Thank you, Aaron.

4. AEAaron Epstein0:18

   Yeah. Tell us a little bit more. What is Conductor?

5. CHCharlie0:21

   So Conductor is a Mac app that lets you run a bunch of coding agents all at the same time. So instead of being in your IDE editing files or w- in your terminal, uh, running Claude Code or Codex, Conductor consolidates all your coding agents and in one click you can create an isolated copy of your codebase, tell Claude or Codex to go work for you, and then you can review and merge its work.

6. AEAaron Epstein0:45

   Very cool. And you guys were the first to build kind of this new way of, of, uh, shipping code with multiple agents at the same time within one interface, and it seems like it's really working. Like, what's the state of the business right now? Tell, tell us more about h- um, how it's been growing.

7. CHCharlie1:01

   Yeah. So we're, we're a small, scrappy team, but we are growing really fast. So we've grown about 10 times since January and, uh, uh, now we have everyone from, like, scrappy indie hackers to, uh, engineers at big public companies using us every day. Um, but there's a lot to build and, uh, uh, a lot to, uh, figure out, and so we're excited to grow the team.

8. AEAaron Epstein1:24

   Yeah. Very cool.

9. CHCharlie1:25

   Yeah.

10. AEAaron Epstein1:25

    And you have some new announcements of things that you're launching today. Tell us more about that.

11. CHCharlie1:29

    So we're very excited to launch Conductor Cloud today. Uh, up until today, Conductor all runs locally on your Mac. So if you shut your laptop, Claude Code or Codex or whatever agent you're using will stop working. Um, but as of today, you can create a workspace that is backed by a cloud environment. So you can shut your laptop and the agent will keep working for you.

12. AEAaron Epstein1:50

    Uh, it seems like a lot of people that are using Conductor are maxing out how many, uh, different instances, how many different worktrees they can be running at a, at a single time. Is this the big unlock that's gonna let people get past the bottlenecks that they've been hitting so far?

13. CHCharlie2:06

    For me, I think, like, I can only really manage in my head, like, three to five agents at once, and I think this is part, like, partly an interface problem, and s- one thing we're really excited to solve next. Um, I think we, we, we've proven that you can run more than one coding agent at a time and it will still be productive, but I think to get to, like, the next level, where you run, like, more than three to five, like, we'll need ... It's an interface challenge, and, like, I think we'll need to, like, go up a, a higher level of abstraction to, to make that work.

14. AEAaron Epstein2:36

    Very cool.

15. JAJackson2:37

    Yeah.

16. AEAaron Epstein2:37

    Um-

17. JAJackson2:37

    When, when we started Conductor, like, we were try, trying to do this manually ourselves and just running into a lot of friction that made it hard to get past one or two agents, and that's, like, why we built the app in the first place.

18. CHCharlie2:52

    Yeah.

19. JAJackson2:52

    I think even before that we were trying to build stuff like Conductor and, um, like, the, our very first attempts, it was just, like, too, much too early to be able to move away from your IDE.

20. CHCharlie3:04

    Yeah.

21. JAJackson3:05

    So ...

22. CHCharlie3:06

    Yeah. Yeah, the agents had to, like, re- reach a, like, sweet spot. There was kind of a tipping point where you didn't have to pay attention to everything they were doing, um, but you had to pay attention to enough of it where that made orchestration and, like, running multiple at once possible. Um, but yeah, in our, in our, like, early experiments with this, we were, like, we had, like, five clones of our repo and, like, we were running a Claude in each one. And then, then we discovered worktrees and we were like, "Oh, we should probably be using worktrees." And, like, step by step we, like, started building the primitives, like, for Conductor, like, to solve a problem for ourselves.

23. AEAaron Epstein3:41

    Yeah. That's very cool. And, um, m- maybe let's go back to the beginning and, and kind of-

24. CHCharlie3:45

    Yeah, yeah

25. AEAaron Epstein3:45

    ... tell the story of how you guys got there. H- how did you guys first meet?

26. JAJackson3:48

    Yeah. We met in college. I was a freshman and Charlie was, uh, fifth year.

27. CHCharlie3:54

    Yep, yep.

28. JAJackson3:55

    He was-

29. CHCharlie3:55

    Which at the time was, like, is, like, the biggest age gap possible.

30. JAJackson3:58

    [laughs]

Episode duration: 29:22