Factory co-founder and CEO Matan Grinberg joins Barr Yaron to talk about the future of agent-driven development, why enterprise migrations are the perfect wedge for AI adoption, and how software engineering is moving toward a world where humans orchestrate instead of implement.
They dive into Factory’s origin story, the challenges of building AI systems for large organizations, and what the world might look like when millions of “droids” (AI agents) collaborate on software. Along the way, Matan shares surprising use cases, lessons from working with enterprises, and how his personal journey—from physics to burritos to building Factory—has shaped his leadership.
This episode is broken down into the following chapters:
00:00 – Intro and welcome
01:06 – Founding Factory: from ChatGPT experiments to AI engineers in every tab
04:05 – Early vision: autonomy for software engineering
06:14 – Why focus on the enterprise vs. indie developers
08:29 – Behavior change and technical challenges in large orgs
10:25 – Using painful migrations as a wedge for adoption
12:20 – The paradigm shift to agent-driven development
15:59 – Ubiquity: making droids available across IDEs, Slack, Jira, and more
17:16 – Why droids need the same context as human engineers
20:15 – Memory, configurability, and organizational learning
23:05 – How many droids? Specialization vs. general purpose agents
25:34 – Bespoke vs. common workflows across enterprises
27:06 – The hardest droid to build: coding itself
28:26 – Testing, costs, and scaling agentic workflows
30:29 – Why observability is essential for trustworthy agents
31:28 – Surprising use cases: PM adoption and GDPR audits
34:02 – Who Factory is building for: PMs, juniors, seniors, and beyond
36:09 – Systems thinking as the core engineering skill
38:09 – Building for enterprise trust: guardrails and governance
40:35 – What’s missing at the model layer today
42:43 – Migrations as a go-to wedge in go-to-market
43:53 – The thought experiment: what if 1M engineers collaborated?
46:07 – Scaling agent orgs: structure, monitoring, and observability
48:46 – Why everything must be recorded for droids to succeed
50:11 – Recruiting people obsessed with software development
51:37 – Burritos, routines, and how Matan has changed as a leader
53:41 – From coffee to Celsius, and why team culture matters most
54:20 – Closing thoughts: the future when agents are truly ubiquitous
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