happy to be here
SF
Joined March 2019
- Tweets102
- Following446
- Followers1.3K
- Likes2K
Andrei Serban retweeted
Applied Compute update:
- crossed $100M annualized revenue run rate up from zero 18 months ago
- raised $350M at $3.25B led by Elad Gil
- 40% of customers use AC for both custom model training + production inference
- inference serving 1T tokens a day after launching 12 weeks ago
- 2X enterprise customers since last raise
- 3X team since January, 85% are researchers and engineers
- Working with customers like Microsoft, Shopify, Harvey, DoorDash, Cognition, Clay, Decagon and others
To move even faster we need people who are extremely technical AND extremely practical. If this is you, please reach out.
Andrei Serban retweeted
The benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue far outside of San Fransisco.
Spent the last year writing about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power.
THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
Commanding-Heights.com
Andrei Serban retweeted
@sequoia is leading our Series C at a $1B valuation.
We started Blacksmith in 2024 to make CI faster and less painful. In January we ran 5 million CI jobs a week. Today it's over 90 million and growing, and we’re still early.
ALT Line chart of weekly CI jobs run on Blacksmith, growing from 5.4M in January to 90.5M in October 2026.
Andrei Serban retweeted
Console has joined @PaloAltoNtwks.
Read the press release here:
paloaltonetworks.com/company…
Andrei Serban retweeted
We raised a $45M Series B led by Peak XV in March, valuing @useblacksmith at $550M. We somehow never got around to announcing it until now; this year has been pretty busy.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is how we were both right and wrong about what was coming. When we raised our Series A in April 2025, we believed AI was going to lead to a lot more code being written, and that all of that code would still need to be built, tested, and validated before it could be merged. That part was right, but what we underestimated was how fast it would happen.
I have a suspicion that something changed over the holidays. Opus 4.5 came out in November; a lot of developers had time to really use Claude Code over the holidays. I think a lot of people who were still skeptical went back to work in January having fully embraced it.
Since the start of the year, the number of CI jobs running on Blacksmith has grown more than 7x. We see customers adopt coding agents, produce way more PRs, and then run into the next problem: how do you actually validate all of this code and get it merged?
There are a lot of people working on making code easier to produce. What I find strange is how little attention goes into everything that has to happen after the code is written and before it can be merged. The labs and hyperscalers are mostly focused elsewhere, yet developers and agents spend an enormous fraction of their time here.
A lot of companies touch parts of this problem. For us, it’s *the* problem. We started Blacksmith by building a much better CI cloud, but ultimately what we care about is helping developers and agents validate and merge code faster. I sometimes tell candidates that if we don’t solve the whole thing, I’m not sure who will.
I don’t think we fully appreciate yet how much more software is going to be produced. The infrastructure we have today wasn’t designed for that volume. There’s a lot we need to rethink from first principles, and I think we’re barely scratching the surface.
If you’re extremely good at what you do and this is a problem you want to spend the next several years working on, we’re hiring in SF and NYC: blacksmith.sh/careers
Andrei Serban retweeted
Introducing Assert (assert.dev): the command center for reviewing engineering work
Watch me review a new feature with Assert's product diff: a UI generated by our agent using mock data. It has completely changed how we work
Andrei Serban retweeted
life update: finally graduated college
i spent my last semester working in person at @console__ in SF while taking class every Thursday in person at Cornell in Ithaca
so for a semester, Thursdays were basically SF → DC → Syracuse, cab to Ithaca, class, then the whole thing in reverse so I could be back in office Friday
very normal plan
somewhere in there I was doing homework, studying for exams, and trying to ship useful code
objectively absurd way to finish college, but I’m really glad I did it
Cornell meant a lot to me. Console means a lot to me. grateful to @andreiserban and @ChandraNeal for letting me attempt this deeply unreasonable commute
officially done with school now, back to creating shareholder value
Andrei Serban retweeted
"I cannot tell you the level of stress that came out of my body the minute I saw that."
That's Daniel Macias, Head of IT at @cursor_ai, describing the Monday morning he woke up to find Console had already resolved five access requests before he touched his phone.
Cursor has grown from 80 to 750+ employees in under a year. Danny's team is four people.
Console handles the majority of Tier 1 and Tier 2 requests automatically. Finance uses it to route credit card approvals. Recruiting uses it to provision interview environments. Office operations is up next.
Danny's first hire after bringing Console in wasn't a support person. It was a Staff IT Systems Engineer hired to build.
"The only reason we were able to do that was because of the value Console provided on day one."
Link to the full case study here! bit.ly/49e5rF9
Andrei Serban retweeted
🔊 Proactive Playbooks are live
Instead of waiting for a user request, Console can act on events and schedules automatically:
→ Onboarding kicks off the moment a new hire appears in your HRIS
→ Offboarding runs as soon as a departure is logged
→Access gets reviewed before it becomes a problem
Agents don’t wait. Neither should your team.
Andrei Serban retweeted
Started on the internet, now played in millions of homes on TV. Thank you to everyone that makes TBPN possible.
Andrei Serban retweeted
The final chapter of Harvey Firestone’s autobiography is titled, “Why I am in Business.”
Every person considering starting a company should read this.
If it fires you up, you’re in the right place.
Andrei Serban retweeted
What a fun night, thanks for coming everyone
Water water water
Did you go to the @UWaterloo and are now living in SF?
Do you miss Lazeez? Do you miss Shawarma Plus?
Do you miss being able to eat garlic sauce without shame?
Same.
So @edenchan and I are hosting the first-ever Waterloo Wine and Shawarma Night on Thursday December 11th in San Fransisco!
About 100 spots.
All vibes.
👇 If you want an invite, leave a comment below or DM me for the event link!
Huge thank you to our wonderful partners who have backed Canadians and hired Waterloo talent: @usepylon, @datacurve, Forge, @console__, @lighthousehq_ and @infinite!
Andrei Serban retweeted
Did you go to the @UWaterloo and are now living in SF?
Do you miss Lazeez? Do you miss Shawarma Plus?
Do you miss being able to eat garlic sauce without shame?
Same.
So @edenchan and I are hosting the first-ever Waterloo Wine and Shawarma Night on Thursday December 11th in San Fransisco!
About 100 spots.
All vibes.
👇 If you want an invite, leave a comment below or DM me for the event link!
Huge thank you to our wonderful partners who have backed Canadians and hired Waterloo talent: @usepylon, @datacurve, Forge, @console__, @lighthousehq_ and @infinite!
Andrei Serban retweeted
So many lists, we might need to use our ticketing system to track them.
Console landed on @Accel’s 2025 US AI 100 Globalscape report on the companies shaping the next wave of AI & cloud.
In good company with @cursor_ai, @thinkymachines, and @periodiclabs!
See the report ↓
Andrei Serban retweeted
brought some magic to an IT conference.
that magic may or may not have been Console.
@JamfSoftware
Andrei Serban retweeted
In many ways, Thrive is helping define the current era of venture capital. @vhankes is one of the best in the business; he's behind their investments in OpenAI, SpaceX, Databricks, Stripe, and many more.
He's also an excellent board member and friend. Excited for more people to hear his thinking, hope you enjoy.