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**Eran Yahav:** You don't know what you want until you wrote it, and you've seen what it does, and say, "Oh, no, that's totally not what I wanted here." |
**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. |
**Eran Yahav:** And this is also why all this discussion of AI replacing programmers and all these things is like -- that's not going to happen exactly, because the hard part is discovering the spec, and the code is the spec, and so this is your real job. Your real job is not knowing the syntax of how to do a certain t... |
**Jerod Santo:** Or what's even more empowering is I know what I want to do, but I'm not quite sure how to do it, and it can show me, "Here's one way you can do it." Okay. Maybe I'm not sure if that's the best way, but I'll use it for now and I'll try it, and maybe I'll find out later there's a better way of writing it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You said too that you're not sure what works well. Is there a feedback loop, at least in Tabnine, where you present the user or the developer with the options, so to speak? I start to write this function and it auto-completes it for me... Is there a way you can step through the various options avail... |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's that feedback loop for you to know like, "Oh, was a good--" So you can retrain yourself, "Okay, this was a positive code sample to share with that user. They used it and it worked out." |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. There is a feedback loop. Right now, for privacy reasons, it mostly remains on your machine. It doesn't go to a central model. So Tabnine is -- we always joke that both Dror and I are developers, so it's kind of a developer company, led by developers... And so it's typical for American companies t... |
So all the feedback loop that you asked about happens locally, unless you opt-in for it to happen on the cloud. And it happens locally, unless you opt-in for it to happen on your team. And everything is very carefully designed to keep the loyalty to the developer. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[19:46\] Mm-hm. On your privacy section of your site, you talk about the custody of your code. You say that Tabnine never stores or shares any of your code. And so you give that choice to the end-user. I had a conversation with the CEO of Sourcegraph, and early on in their career they had-- I guess... |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. I think people trust Tabnine. I think we gained this trust really early in the process, because we committed to running on local host, unless you opt-in for something else, and it's easy to see that this is what's happening. And so Tabnine today is used by millions of people in their IDE daily, an... |
**Jerod Santo:** Haah! Cheering it on almost. |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you see people sharing on Twitter, like "Here's some prediction that I got", and I find it cute. |
**Break:** \[22:33\] to \[25:05\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So how long have you been working on this? |
**Eran Yahav:** I think, personally, I have been working on this probably for more than a decade now, around this area. But Dror and I, I think we started around 2014. It was just us. We played with ideas for a couple of years until we felt that it has some value, and then we went to get funding. So that was probably 2... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes. Good name, solid name. And so you've been working on this for a very long time... I'm curious how you felt... So we haven't mentioned GitHub Copilot or OpenAI Codex yet, but the 800-pound gorilla launched and made a big splash when they announced GitHub Copilot. GitHub, of course, the repository f... |
**Eran Yahav:** No, definitely not offended. Definitely more on the validated side. When we started, people were like, "You guys are crazy. This is never going to work. And if it's going to work, nobody's going to use it." So it's like, "It's not even a category. Nobody cares. There is auto-complete in Editor. We don't... |
Microsoft is great... They can have Copilot, and it's awesome; I think the product is very nice, and we like it a lot. We see a lot of the evolution that we've gone through, they're going through, obviously much faster than what we could do at the time. But it's very interesting to see how it evolves. And so there's de... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:18\] Yeah. I try to empathize. I hear what you say, but then, again, I don't know what's behind the scenes. I don't know what your user base is like, I don't know what your company growth is like... I know that you're at a series A right now, probably approaching a series B, or at least do for ... |
**Jerod Santo:** "Why do I need this?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, "Why do I need this? What is this?" |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah, definitely. A lot of the market education, let's call it, is something that Microsoft can do much more efficiently than us, and we're happy to benefit from that, just as GitLab benefited back in the day exactly from that kind of like-- |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So y'all are much more optimistic than I am. So I go straight to Shark Tank and Mr. Wonderful, and I just think to myself, "What's stopping Microsoft from squashing you like the cockroach that you are?" No offense. But that's Mr. Wonderful-- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughter\] He's quoting Mr. Wonderful directly. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's exactly what he would ask you, right? He'd say, "Why don't they just squash you like the cockroach that you are?" And so I get that you have independence and you have an existing customer base, and it's great... And you also probably don't have a massive payroll like they do. You're not at the s... |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. It's a very good question. Again, the reality is closer to what Adam said, the opportunities being opened up and the category being validated. These are transformative times for Tabnine, actually, in a positive way. And our approach is just very different than Copilot at this point. We are technic... |
So Tabnine is really-- it's not a code completion tool. It is the single source of truth for how to write code in your organization. And it's an active single source of truth in that it learns from your code, and then it helps all the developers on your team align and be better and write better code for your particular... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But don't say too much about what you're doing, because I can imagine someone from GitHub listening to this thinking, "Okay, this is what we're going to do next." \[laughter\] I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I mean, you have to-- you can't keep your secrets, right? You have to put your stuff out there. I'... |
**Eran Yahav:** \[32:04\] Yeah, putting yourself out there. And there are plenty smart people, I'm sure they don't need us to figure out... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe they do. |
**Eran Yahav:** ...potential next steps right then. So you never know. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You never know. Well, I think the couple downsides, I would say, to Copilot-- having not used it either. I've seen many people talk about it. And Jerod, I think you said you had some anecdotes to share... I think that the thing that Copilot-- where it's at is that it's GitHub, one, it's inside of Vi... |
**Jerod Santo:** Copilot, I think, is available in Vim now, according to GitHub Universe, but- |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, is it? |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah, yeah. It's going to be available on more platforms, I'm sure. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And that might just be enough. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I mean, I think that VS Code is another advantage, because they have built-in distribution, right? So it's like Slack versus Microsoft Teams. "Why are all these companies on Microsoft Teams when Slack is clearly the market leader in all this?" And it's like, "Well, because it just comes for free ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Slack's killing it. |
**Jerod Santo:** People still use Slack, and I'm sure people are still going to use Tabnine. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** There's probably a market for both. I think that we'll see that play out. I don't think you have to choose, but I do think there's an advantage, for sure. |
**Eran Yahav:** I'm sure that you're actually going to see more competitors in this space. It's not going to remain Microsoft and Tabnine forever, right? Now that the category is established, I'm sure that more people would like a slice of that pie, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's say this then... So you started in 2014, and then in 2016, you got funding. You're at series A right now, probably approaching series B. Considering just the timeline, I'm imagining, in the last year, you've got something happening in that space. You can tease it if you want to, but whatever. ... |
**Eran Yahav:** Sure. Tabnine, again, is a developer-first company, and so our growth and our also financial growth is based on bottom-up motions. So we basically have developers love us, they onboard their teams, they train their own models on their code, and get even more value from Tabnine, and stay with Tabnine, an... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you make developers happy, and they continue to showcase how it's useful to them, their team, other teams see it get adopted... |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. That's the dynamics that we're seeing, and it's all based on the developer love. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you have a lot of outreach to those developing teams? Do you have team managers or people inside Tabnine who maintain relationships? |
**Eran Yahav:** No. None. Almost none. |
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