Behind the scenes of Temporal’s explosive growth, with co-founders Max and Samar
Temporal’s co-founders join Barr Yaron and Lenny Pruss to unpack how durable execution became the backbone of modern distributed apps and why it’s a perfect fit for AI agents. Samar and Max trace the path from Amazon SWF to Uber’s Cadence to founding Temporal, dig into developer experience choices, hard lessons with Cassandra, and what “code that can’t crash” really means in practice. This episode also covers open source strategy, multi-agent orchestration, Nexus RPC, how startups and enterprises are adopting Temporal, and what scaling the company taught them as leaders.
If you ship backend systems, build AI agents, or care about reliability at scale, this one’s for you.
This episode is broken down into the following chapters:
- 00:00–00:06 — Origins: Samar and Max, Barr and Lenny, why this convo
- 00:06–00:14 — Early systems: Amazon SWF → Azure Durable Task; DX lessons
- 00:14–00:23 — Uber years: replacing Kafka, “Jeremy,” birthing Cadence, open-sourcing from day one
- 00:23–00:31 — Durable execution, explained; code-first over DSLs; SDK ergonomics (Go/Java)
- 00:31–00:36 — Hard tech war stories: Cassandra, queues on Cassandra, multi-region replication
- 00:36–00:45 — AI agents ≈ dynamic workflows; why Temporal fits agents and tools
- 00:45–00:59 — Roadmap: streaming, large payloads, data workflows, Nexus RPC for long-running calls
- 00:59–01:13 — Adoption & GTM: digital natives, fintech, startups; greenfield AI vs brownfield; “Temporal is overkill?”
- 01:13–01:22 — Case study: OpenAI Codex on Temporal; internal dogfooding
- 01:22–01:40 — Scaling the org vs. scaling the tech; remote shift, hiring; mission & next five years
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