For this month’s founder spotlight, we spent the day at Greptile’s HQ in San Francisco with CEO Daksh Gupta. Greptile is an AI expert on any codebase that reviews pull requests, answers hard questions about complex codebases, writes Linear ticket descriptions, and more, all with full codebase context.

Here’s a slightly edited version of the conversation:

Q: Describe Greptile in one sentence.

A: We build AI that understands your entire codebase and integrates into your dev tooling via a simple API. Software teams use it to review code changes in GitHub, diagnose the root cause of outages, generate documentation, and more.

Q: What sparked the inspiration for this company?

A: We were working on a different startup during college with another friend who wrote the frontend. He didn’t join full-time after college, so we inherited his codebase, which was written at startup pace and hard to work with. We figured it would be useful to have AI that could learn the codebase, answer questions about it, and help with things like debugging and quality assurance.

Q: What’s a Greptile? How did you come up with the company name?

A: It’s a pun with “grep,” a command-line search tool. We were at our office late at night coming up with a name and started typing puns on “grep” into Namecheap.com. Since what we do is a modern, AI version of “grepping,” when we saw greptile.com was available, we literally started jumping up and down in excitement.

Q: Tell me a little about your founder journey. How did you become the CEO of Greptile?

A: I met my cofounders in college at Georgia Tech. We were hacking on projects together with last-gen LLMs. By senior year, we pretty much knew we didn’t want to go back to our internship companies after school, so we took a one-way flight to San Francisco. We wanted something that would explain terrible code to us, which led us down the path we’re on now. That transition is what brought us here.

Q: What challenges are you currently facing, and what differentiates your company? Why hasn’t this been done before?

A: The strange thing about being a startup founder is unlearning a lot of common knowledge. For example, if you only consume startup news from TechCrunch, you’d think fundraising is central to a startup’s experience. But in reality, the ideal company wouldn’t need to fundraise—it would fund itself with product sales.

The first mindset shift is realizing that fundraising is just a means to an end. The second is understanding that you’re not Google—you can’t spend a year perfecting something and expect people to use it. Google can do that because half the world uses its products, but no one cares about your startup. You have to ship fast, recruit users manually, and adapt quickly.

Every six months, the job changes. Once you get good at one stage, you move on to something else. It never really gets easier, it just gets harder in new ways. Why hasn’t this been done before? Large language models have only existed for a few years, and they’ve only recently become good enough for these tasks. There are things we want to build that we can’t yet because the technology isn’t ready, but I’m optimistic about what we’ll be able to do as the tech advances.

Q: What does Greptile mean to you and the team? How do you embody being an employee at Greptile?

A: Greptile is a combination of very high standards and urgency. We’re developers ourselves, so we hold our products to high standards. We want to build beautiful things that inspire us. The urgency comes from knowing we’re not the only ones trying to solve this problem, so we need to arrive at the best solutions faster than anyone else.

From the beginning, we built Greptile with urgency. The first version came together during a weekend hackathon. We put it out immediately and started getting feedback from users, iterating as fast as possible. That sense of urgency, almost to the point of impatience, is core to how we operate.

Q: Can you tell me a little about company culture and why you established a headquarters in San Francisco? I noticed your team works in person.

A: In-person work creates higher accountability. When you’re physically with your team, you care more about building great things because you’re all in it together. The conversations happen faster—you can roll over to someone’s desk instead of waiting for a Slack message or Zoom call. It’s about speed and collaboration.

Being in San Francisco matters because you’re surrounded by other ambitious people. It pushes you to be better. In San Francisco, being a startup founder isn’t special—you have to be really good at it. The standards are higher here, which helps push us to keep improving.

“Sense of urgency, almost to the point of impatience, is core to how we operate.“

Q: What is your vision for the future of Greptile?

A: In the last year and a half, it’s been an incredibly optimistic time to be alive. Things that were once science fiction are now real, improving human life. If we can make developers twice as productive, we’ll solve problems faster and push humanity forward.

We play a small part in that by building tools for developers. I recently read an interview with a NASA janitor during Apollo 13, who said, “I’m putting a man on the moon.” That’s the ethos we have. We may play a small role, but it’s important. If we do our jobs well, we’ll fundamentally change how software gets built and help make developers more productive.

Q: I’m curious about your personal content strategy. Why do you spend time developing your own content channels?

A: Initially, I didn’t think content would bring in customers. We focus on efficiency, and everything we do has to logically connect to business outcomes—improving the product or getting more customers. But eventually, I realized that content is part of the funnel. At the top of the funnel is everyone who’s heard of you, and content is a memorable way to reach them

Content is more memorable than a billboard or ad. For example, when we released a documentary about our refactor, fewer people saw it than would have seen an ad, but a much larger percentage of them remembered it. Authentic, unique content gets people’s attention, and once you have that, your target customers will find you.

We’re consuming more content now than ever before, which presents a huge opportunity to connect with the right people.