Zach Lloyd

Lloyd became interested in computer science in college, pulling his first all-nighter building a program that could find every word on a Boggle board. He also kept running into developer software that was hard to learn or unintuitive.⁠[1]

After college he worked at NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry’s Jet Propulsion Lab, earned a master’s in philosophy and did a year of law school at YaleYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry. In law school he realized he missed building technology and returned to engineering.⁠[1]

In 2007 Lloyd was hired by Google to work on a new product, Google Sheets, whose team set out to recreate a desktop spreadsheet experience in the cloud with real-time collaboration while supporting users’ existing Microsoft Office files.⁠[1]

At Google he was principal engineer for Google Sheets and the Google Docs suite, managing a team that grew from five people to more than 100. When he left Google in 2014, Sheets had hundreds of millions of users.⁠[2][1]

In 2016 Lloyd co-founded SelfMade, a startup that helps businesses succeed on social media; in 2019 he stepped down as its CTO.⁠[1]

He later said SelfMade was not the right company for him: he did not really use social media, and its product was people’s labor, whereas he wanted to work where the software was the product. He also concluded that SelfMade had spent on expansion before achieving high engagement and retention, so he would put product-market fit ahead of growth at his next company.⁠[1]

In June 2020 Lloyd founded Warp (Warp.devWarp (developer terminal)Warp is a New York-based developer tools company founded in June 2020 by former Google engineer Zach Lloyd. It began by rebuilding the command-line terminal in Rust, repositioned its product as an agentic development environment (ADE) in 2025, and in 2026 launched Oz and Warp Factories for orchestrating cloud coding agents.Open the full entry) to reinvent the command-line terminal, a tool essentially unchanged since it first shipped in 1969. “The terminal is truly archaic,” he said.⁠[1]

He first persuaded his former Google colleague Shikhiu Ing to join as founding designer, then hired engineers Michelle Lim and Aloke Desai. The team spent six months during the pandemic on a version they were happy with, at one point scrapping the system and rewriting it from scratch in Rust to match terminal speeds.⁠[1]

In July 2021 he announced Warp’s beta on Hacker News under the title “Warp: Fast, Rust-based terminal.” Commenters raised concerns about logins, data privacy and security, and paying for a terminal; within 24 hours more than 10,000 developers had signed up.⁠[1]

In April 2022 Warp, originally for macOS, became available to the public.⁠[1]

In 2023 Warp introduced Warp AI, an LLM-powered sidebar where users can ask for help remembering a command or fixing an error.⁠[1]

On June 21, 2023 Lloyd announced Warp Drive, a team collaboration feature for saving, annotating and sharing terminal workflows, together with a $50 million Series B for Warp led by Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, with Andrew Reed joining the board. Existing investors including Dylan Field, GV, Neo, BoxGroup, Jeff Weiner and Marc Benioff participated, and new angels included Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry and Tobi LutkeTobias LütkeTobias Lütke, who also goes by Tobi Lütke, is a programmer, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Shopify, and a startup investor. He took part in the Ruby on Rails open-source community, has served as Shopify’s CEO since April 2008, and joined the board of Coinbase in 2022.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

In February 2024 Warp was officially released for Linux, and in June 2024 it released “Agent Mode,” which lets users ask AI to accomplish tasks directly in the terminal.⁠[1]

On March 22, 2026 Warp announced that it had passed one million active developers and unveiled Oz, a platform for running, managing and auditing AI coding agents in the cloud.⁠[4]

On April 28, 2026 Warp open-sourced its core product, an agentic development environment (ADE), with OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry as flagship sponsor of its open source repository. Speaking as founder and CEO, Lloyd said a diverse set of contributors combined with Oz agents running structured workflows and continuous feedback loops “will produce a better product than we could build with our internal team alone.” Warp was then based in New York.⁠[2]

Lloyd’s view is that “Large language models are essentially command-line interfaces,” and that the terminal is an ideal way to interface with them. His model pairs bottom-up user growth with revenue from companies paying for collaboration and intelligence features.⁠[1]

Warp: Official website: https://www.warp.dev/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]