Dev Propulsion Labs Abhi Aiyer of Mastra on raising from 120+ builders and the power of community
In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Abhi Aiyer, CTO and co-founder of Mastra, talks about the power of community and explains why they raised their seed round from 120+ founders. He also gets into how making moves beats perfect execution and his hiring process. Lastly, Abhi shares why TypeScript is winning the AI war and how education became their secret weapon.
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Episode notes: https://evilmartians.com/events/podcast-abhi-aiyer-mastra
00:00 Introduction and birthday celebration
00:49 TypeScript AI Conf and major announcements
02:53 Education as a pillar for framework adoption
04:30 Converting open source to paid customers
06:55 Optimizing onboarding and developer experience
08:45 Handling user feedback and criticism
09:51 Moving fast in the AI wave and the pressure of getting ahead of the curve
11:56 YC experience and the agents batch
15:19 Why TypeScript for AI agents
19:40 Why Mastra decided to do a coalition from builders (120+ people)
22:23 Building culture through friendships
25:25 The toughest part of being a founder and CTO
27:54 Working in an uncertain environment and planning a roadmap
31:49 The devtools community at SF
32:48 Advice for new builders
35:31 Hardest-earned founder lessons
38:30 The YC revelation: location and community matters
40:20 Mastra in five years
41:13 Warm fuzzies: first agent in 5 minutes
41:46 Getting started with Mastra
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Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com
Links:
Mastra: https://mastra.ai
Abhi Aiyer on X: https://x.com/abhiaiyer
Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians
Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en