What Will Harvard Business School Write?

On the Prof G podcast, our CEO Varun Mohan, made an observation that reflects the ethos of our company:

If you are unable to watch the clip, the gist is simple. Business history, often reflected upon in Harvard Business School (HBS) case studies, is written with the benefit of hindsight. If Codeium becomes successful, HBS will have a case on how small startups were able to cement themselves against the big tech companies of the day because of their nimbleness in a rapidly evolving AI industry. And if Codeium does not become successful, HBS will have a case study on how the big tech companies had all of the resources in the world to box out any startup that dared to directly challenge during such an obviously critical technological revolution. In both cases, there will be a takeaway. Some sort of learning.

But at this moment, we do not have the benefit of such hindsight. On paper, history suggests that the odds are not great that the case study ends up well for us. Most startups fail. If we used history as a prior, the rational conclusion would be that we should pack it up and move on with our lives. In order to not be paralyzed about the “rational” reality of the future, we must have irrational optimism.

We can always play devil’s advocate to anything we do. Why put effort in building a particular feature when one of our big tech competitors could simply reallocate 10x the number of engineers to build that particular feature better? We could say that about anything we decided to build. It is an objectively correct statement that is simultaneously not constructive. Believing that we can become a foundational company in this AI revolution is a perspective we have out of necessity.

This is why irrational optimism fits in with our cultural principle of having healthy realism. We should not mistake being optimistic with being deluded, operating under an assumption that our competitors will not iterate and improve. The one constant of the AI space is that it moves incredibly fast, because everyone recognizes the potential of this technology.

Being irrationally optimistic also forces us to seek unconventional advantages. By seeking unconventional advantages, we do things that our competitors don’t, which immediately become reasons for why we could eventually be successful and reasons that HBS would cite. If all we are doing are the same things that our big tech competitors are doing, then we won’t have any observable reason to believe that we will be successful. They have more money, resources, and distribution.

This is why we made our individual plan free. Unconventional, but the speed at which we have been able to grow our user base (to now over 700K developers) gives us reason to be irrationally optimistic. This is why we lean on our ML infrastructure background. A truly unconventional background in the AI product space, but it gives us the ability to build a uniquely complete product, giving us reason to be irrationally optimistic.

We are always dreaming bigger with dedication and irrational optimism to match. Time will tell what HBS writes.