Software is changing. Today, most people experience software through pre-built "features", meant to deliver value while concealing complexity. But when expertise stops being the bottleneck, the primitive shifts from software back to something simpler: the human-computer interaction.
Work is changing. If you boil down what a modern company is, it's code, compute, collective intelligence, and agents that act. The future is about enabling individuals to work at the scale of a company. This is the original dream of personal computing, but on a much grander scale. It's the evolution from personal computing to Personal Civilization-Building.
Zo is intelligent personal infrastructure. It's cloud computing (think AWS), re-imagined for the next generation of builders (everyone on earth). Our mission is to build the best human-computer abstractions for working with compute and AI. So simple that anyone can use them (even our parents). So well-designed that they last for decades.
Co-founders Rob & Ben met in 2013 on the early Venmo team.
Rob went on to become the founding engineer at Substack, and Ben worked at Stripe for nearly a decade.
They decided to start a company together in 2023 – creating an agentic inference platform called Substrate. Over time, Substrate evolved from a developer-focused platform into a consumer-friendly workspace that let anyone build with AI.
We're a small team based in Brooklyn, NY. These are our core values:
Communicate with clarity and care.
We're operating heavy machinery. Real users depend on us for real work. As a team, we're always communicating with each other with clarity and care, in order to better serve our users.
Our users are building with us.
We communicate externally with the same care and clarity we hold ourselves to internally. Though our users are "consumers", we see them as the next generation of developers. We believe the art of abstraction design extends beyond code, to concepts, and visual interfaces. We're building a generational developer platform, and we're obsessed with building abstractions that last for decades.
Thoughtful AI.
Automation is good - efficiency is leverage. AI can and should be used as a tool for words and code. As a group, we try to live on the bleeding edge of doing things with AI. But we also understand that careless use of AI creates fatigue, erodes trust, and comes with real risks.
A love for the craft of software engineering.
Even as software industrializes and the craft evolves, we remain obsessed with the art and science of software engineering. We're deeply curious and always seeking true mastery and insight. Software is a stack of abstractions designed for humans and machines. Machines don't care - so we must take extra care.
