A spotlight on Graphite

From internal tool to product now used by tens of thousands of developers

✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey.

We now receive numerous messages every week from people in the next play community who feel stuck: people who would like to make a move (either start or join a new company) but do not have confidence in any particular ideas or opportunities.

And so they feel stuck; they would like to be chasing big ideas, leveraging their skills, and working hard—but they do not know where to aim. They feel lost. Spinning in circles. Perhaps wasting their days scrolling instead of doing something they actually believe in passionately.

Hungry to escape exploration, these people often grasp for direction. But that approach of just grasping at whatever comes your way usually ends in regret—as hustling to build ideas that you know deep down (or eventually learn) do not really matter is rarely a good idea.

You probably know people in this position. You may in fact be one of these people.

Unfortunately we do not have a quick-fix. Exploration is an important piece of the journey—and so our first suggestion is to take a deep breath and find ways to enjoy yourself as you iterate.

But our second recommendation, while it may sound very simple, may be all you need. You may be amazed by the impact you could see to your life by taking this simple idea very seriously.

The idea is as follows: turn yourself (your own needs, aspirations, and preferences) into your first customer.

That’s right. Write down your problems. In your personal life. In your professional life. Open a google doc and just start writing. Catalog your day and write down all your problems. Then figure out the most pressing and potentially valuable ones – and go find (or make!) solutions.

This can be a useful lens for figuring out what to work on (either in starting a new company or figuring out the types of companies to go join)—one that seems to be more efficient than most other brainstorming techniques.

We meet so many people working on things that seem to have no product-market fit (and no direction to getting there); people building products that do not solve any real problems. This is especially true in today’s age of AI - where it is easier than ever to get started but perhaps harder than ever to choose the right set of problems to try to solve. You also see lots of people hoping to join a company that they really believe in — but struggling at least partially because they have no clarity about what it is they themselves want, and so they spend all this time talking with companies that do not actually meet their criteria.

Adopting the “solve problems for yourself” lens lets you tighten your feedback loop such that you can, so long as you are honest with yourself, identify real, valuable problems (and it also gives you the added benefit of built-in familiarity with the problem space) and measure the quality of your solutions.

You can ask yourself: “would I actually feel compelled by this vision?”

It’s this simple idea, when taken very seriously, that can lead to very strong product-market fit.

A great example of this that we found is the startup Graphite. In their words, they are building an “AI-powered code review platform that helps 25,000+ engineers at top companies ship higher quality software, faster.”

Talk to Merrill Lutsky, the CEO of Graphite, and he’ll tell you the raw details of the founding story, which went a bit like this (we’re paraphrasing here): “My co-founders and I had spent years building software at successful companies like Meta, Airbnb, and Square. When we went out to start a new company together, we were exploring building different ideas, but things were going a lot slower than expected because all of us had been accustomed to having access to a suite of internal developer tools (the types you would find at massive companies but would not reasonably expect a small startup to have developed internally). We missed those tools, and our efficiency was suffering as a result: So we built the first version of the Graphite command line tool and the dashboard just for us to use internally. They began sharing the tool they had been working on, and were pleasantly surprised by the reaction. “The response to what became Graphite was so enthusiastic and compelling that we started to think that maybe we should work on this instead.”

Those were Graphite’s early days (back in 2021 and 2022). Since then, a lot has changed: Merrill and the Graphite team have greatly expanded the product offering (now including a bunch of ai-powered features to help teams review and ship code faster), raised $20 million from investors like a16z, and scaled their in-person culture to a few dozen team members. But a lot has also not changed: the entire team is still absolutely obsessed with building useful features for themselves (and their customers), features that actually make a difference/impact to end outcomes (as opposed to just shiny demos that do not really matter).

And that’s perhaps why companies like Ramp love their product—because it’s actually built with the end user in mind (because the end users are the ones building the product, too…you get the point): Karim Atiyeh, Co-founder, CTO @ Ramp: “Graphite quickly spread through our engineering organization here at Ramp and became a part of the everyday workflow of many engineers on the team.”

We thought Graphite would be a useful company to Spotlight for a few reasons: A) they are hiring in their in-person NYC office for basically every department (designers, engineers, marketing, account executives, SDRs, executive assistant, and more) and B) They are a great example to any product-builder or job-seeker on what it really means to “make something you yourself want” and then scale that up to tens of thousands of users.

And so, in this essay, we try to understand: What’s it like to work at Graphite? What are the behind-the-scenes details (which never make it to press releases) that you may find interesting or useful?

[And major thanks to many people from the Graphite team for sharing this information and supporting next play!]

When you talk to the Graphite team, and dig a bit into their culture, you will quickly see how ~nearly everything they do is oriented around answering the question: “How can we solve _real_ problems that make an impact to our users as quickly as possible?” Note the emphasis on real problems.

This manifests in several ways. We’ll cover a few of the more interesting/unique pieces.

The first is recruiting people who are either intimately familiar with the problems Graphite aims to solve (or are willing and happy to quickly become intimately familiar with the nuances of this domain):

• “Before Graphite, I had only worked at Google, so I was accustomed to using a PR inbox and stacked PRs in my everyday workflow. It was only when I started exploring opportunities outside of Google that I realized these tools aren't the norm in the GitHub workflow. This realization made me excited to join Graphite and work on tools I love.”

• “Prior to joining, I also validated the product's viability and was pleasantly surprised to find that many in my engineering network were satisfied customers.”

• “Something I always look for is companies building products they initially developed to solve an internal problem. This proves that the product is actually solving a real-world problem, demonstrates that there is an audience out there that will use it, and it isn't just a pipe dream. Graphite started as an internal tool and every engineer still uses it everyday.”

• “Now I work with our largest enterprise customers to ensure what we are building continues to scale and solve problems for larger teams and company-wide deployments. My goal is for us to be to our customers what Meta's developer tooling teams were for me.”

• “My advice? 1. Understand our users. 2. Understand the existing platforms that we layer on top of/improve on. That's pretty much it. All the technologies, tools we use, and any processes can be learned. But the people who use our product and the constraints we work within are the most important foundations that the rest of our work follows from.”

The next is prioritizing directness (and precision in language). You’ll notice people at Graphite are very honest about the reality of working at a startup (which is sometimes messy!). This is very unique from some other companies where people share stories like everything is perfect all of the time. The Graphite team prefers to take the direct, radically honest (but still kind!) route:

• “Any startup of our stage is a poor fit for people looking for predictability, comfort, and a laid-back environment, but – at the risk of sounding like a pirate – it’s the place to be if you’re looking for an adventure.”

• “Who is a good fit? Probably someone who is very self-actualizing and can deal with sometimes ambiguous tasks. No matter what the blog posts and twitter threads say, building a startup is not a straightforward A-B-C-D-IPO journey. There's a lot of twists and turns. The good thing is at a company like Graphite, your impact has an almost unlimited ceiling. It provides you with the opportunity to take ownership of projects and tasks across the company that otherwise you may have been siloed away from. Graphite is a very flat company meaning your voice has a lot of room to be heard.”

• “As we developed the core product and began selling it for the first time, there were countless adjustments that helped us learn and refine our understanding of our customers and our vision for the company. We confronted our assumptions and took risks--many of which were wrong, but a few that were right--and ultimately learned that you never get anything right the first time. Pushing harder forced us to think in new patterns and often revealed great opportunities.”

• “Someone that would not be a very good fit is someone that needs a lot of manager oversight, someone that is afraid to swim in the deep-end. Graphite requires a lot of independence and self-actualization that can be scary for someone that is used to an extremely rigid and structured working environment. Graphite offers a lot of support and resources, but you need to be able to activate them yourself.”

• “One thing that I've learned countless times over at Graphite is that you need to be almost irrationally fearless to build a successful product and company. Leaping head first into new challenges is necessary to grow your own skills as an individual, and helps the company chart a course through uncertainty.”

• “Graphite is for people who are hungry, crave impact, and crazy enough to re-imagine software engineering as we know it.”

Aligned to a self-starter mentality, they encourage people on the team to be curious and run new experiments. (Again you’ll notice how honest they are about this attribute - not a lot of sugar-coating going on here)

• “Graphite is a place where you should feel stretched. If what you're doing isn't hard, you can probably do it better.”

• “Number one: ask questions, constantly. Don't be afraid to ask questions, people are always willing to explain things and teach you something new. I've learned more in my time at Graphite than I have the last 5 years of working elsewhere.”

• “I would say: don’t limit yourself by your job description! Everyone at Graphite is open to new ideas, and if you have a great one, the team is ready to give it a shot. There are so many projects that just need someone willing to jump in.”

• “Take initiative — At our startup scale, there's plenty to be done. When you spot something that needs attention, don't hesitate to roll up your sleeves and tackle it yourself.”

• “Challenge yourself to be better than you thought was possible. That means listening to the nagging voice in the back of your mind, telling you to tweak your pricing+packaging for the third, fourth, and fifth time because it's still not quite right. It also means building your own library for local browser caching and optimistic UI updates, because users are unsatisfied with page loads and interactions that are anything less than instantaneous. And it means iterating on a marketing page for three months, painstakingly ironing out every detail, like gradient mixing in different blend modes and animation performance on mobile browsers so every user who lands there is blown away.”

A lot of the commitment towards quality comes from Merrill (their CEO) himself. When you ask people about what it’s like to work with Merrill, you get a pretty consistent answer: “He has an extreme eye for details and is committed to helping the team deliver high quality work.” It is obvious that he is very in-tune with the needs of the customer — our guess is that’s at least partially because in many ways, he and his cofounders were/are the customers, which is a benefit of solving your own problem:

• “Merrill lifts everyone at Graphite, including himself, to an incredibly high standard. He's particular about consistency and pays attention to the little things -- like communicating transparently with customers, making micro-interactions in the product delightful, furnishing the office in a polished yet functional way, and designing our merch to exude "tech-wear" and not "tech". He's laser focused on what will take our product and team to the next level”

• “One of the things I most appreciate about Merrill is that, despite his CEO and founder responsibilities, he still stays in touch with user feedback and maintains a strong focus on product quality and user experience.”

• “Both Merrill and Tomas have an extreme eye to detail. Merrill especially tries to foster this attention to the little things in all that we do. While "shipped is better than perfect" is a common axiom in tech, our founding team maintains the quality bar that "if we wouldn't use it why would anyone else". They work extremely hard but they are also very transparent and direct, always available to chat. Many Friday happy hours end in passionate discussions about product and company strategy, and I've had quite a few very candid conversations with both of them around how they feel about Graphite, their plans for the future, and the reasons behind why we do things the way they do. Reciprocally they also often ask for feedback and input on their decision making. It really feels like we're building the company together.”

• “Merrill is the best boss I've ever had, hands down. He has a keen eye for quality and experience that has shaped the product direction and company values we have today. He’s incredibly supportive and trusts each of us to own our domains and projects. His leadership has played a huge role in getting us where we are today!”

He and the rest of the leadership team have managed to build a culture of trust. Trust is perhaps the only way startups can scale high quality while still moving very quickly.

• “The biggest thing is that there's just so much trust felt between people on the team, constantly, and that's the thing that feels the same when I'm in the office now with 30 teammates vs. 3 years ago with 5. There's a sense that everyone around you is aligned on the goals, and we're just getting the work we need to get done over the line to progress toward that as fast as possible, while ensuring we're leaving ourselves room to enjoy the moment. The day-to-day could be coding, having an intense debate about how to prioritize some work, hanging out on the office soft seating and joking around, chatting with our customers about how to help them hit their goals, etc. It's a blast.”

• “You can trust each other. That's the biggest thing. If someone tells you they'll do something you can expect that it will be done to the best possible quality that it can be, and be delivered on time. There is a flipside that you will be held to the same degree of trust, and it comes with a great deal of responsibility but if you aren't afraid of taking ownership, you can work with some of the most talented people in the industry today. PLUS we actually have a real product that works and people love haha.”

• “We foster a culture of trust and ownership by giving people both responsibility and the resources they need to achieve their goals. We celebrate everyone's wins through our #thanks channel in Slack and have Friday show-and-tell sessions where people share what they’ve been working on. The design team has their own book club and does occasional field trips to cultural institutions around the city—most recently visiting the Poster House in Chelsea.”

• “My favorite meeting at the company, though, is our weekly show-and-tell meeting that we started around when I first joined. It's a Friday afternoon, casual race-to-grab-the-screenshare meeting that captures a lot about our social team culture: everyone sees what everyone else is working on.”

If this sounds like the type of company and trusted culture you’d like to be a part of, Graphite is hiring in nearly every department: sales, engineering, design, executive assistant, and more. You can view all of their open roles here.

And if you’re looking to see more from next play, you can head over here where you’ll find lots of under-the-radar content and opportunities. Also feel free to email us: hi@nextplay.so if there’s anything we can do to be helpful.