Zeno Rocha

Things Zeno Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Zeno Rocha writes AI + a16z . They have also been a guest on The Changelog (5 times) , devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development , Scaling DevTools and The Bootstrapped Founder .

Recently: “Building what's next (Interview)” on The Changelog (October 2026); “When life gives you LLMs... (Friends)” on The Changelog (May 2025); “Automating Developer Email with MCP and Al Agents” on AI + a16z (March 2025); “Automating Developer Email with MCP and Al Agents” on AI + a16z (March 2025); “326: Zeno Rocha — From Bootstrapping to YCombinator” on The Bootstrapped Founder (June 2024); “Getting to Resend (Interview)” on The Changelog (April 2024).

What They Said

“It's crazy how we went through the whole journey of, okay, the bottleneck are developers. We got to hire more engineers. Then the bottleneck is now PRs. … Our repo used to have like 40 or 50 open PRs at any given time. Now it has 200. … Then the bottleneck became the review process. … And then the bottleneck became the CI. … Man, the bottleneck keeps shifting, right?” — Zeno Rocha, The Changelog

Asked whether Resend is all-in on AI coding, Rocha describes how the constraint has moved through his engineering process. He admits he misses the old flow of coding alone in an IDE.

The Changelog · 2026-10-22 Permalink → Listen →
The Changelog Around 1:45:18 into the episode
Zeno Rocha

…five different users to our linear workspace, but they are not humans. They're agents. And I have to pay for an extra seat. Like SIT-based pricing to me doesn't make any sense in this new age. I'm glad we've never did that with recent. But man, yeah. There's so many things we got to rethink.

Adam Stacoviak

…I don't know. Where are you at in terms of things? Are you 100% code generated in terms of you personally corporately as recent? Are you AI maximalists? Everyone can write whatever they want as long as it's with an agent. Not token maxing, but like, are you all for AI in every way to help resend?

Zeno Rocha

…sometimes they're good, sometimes they're pretty bad. And that's why I haven't really unleashed to the outside world yet. And I'm trying to imagine, like, what are those other mini factories that we could build, right? Like that we can close the loop. Maybe one agent is sending the PR, the other agent is reviewing. And we do that every single day or every single hour, every single minute. But it's crazy how we went through the whole journey of, okay, the bottleneck are developers. We got to hire more engineers. Then the bottleneck is now PRs. So we start sending a lot of PRs. Our repo used to have like 40 or 50 open PRs at any given time. Now it has 200. So, okay, it's a new volume of PRs that are being open every single time. Then the bottleneck became the review process. And then we are like, okay, let's put AI on the PR. So we added Cubic, Bugbot, all these bots. We tried like all of them. And then the bottleneck became the CI.…

Adam Stacoviak

Yeah, you can't fight entropy. It's going to happen. Wild stuff. Yeah. A lot to a lot to dig into. I'm sure we can go even further. I know we got a few more minutes here, but one question I like to ask, especially whenever I feel like the person's got something up their sleeve, closer to the end of…

Zeno Rocha

Yeah, it's hard to say one specific thing. And maybe what I will say is connected to that other point: like, you got to be challenging the way you work every single day now. Unfortunately, it kind of sucks in a way because you're getting used to one way of working. And now there's a whole new wave…

Adam Stacoviak

Yeah. Are you all hiring? Yes. I'm kind of hiring you doing these things. What is it like in two minutes? What is it like hiring today? Like the peaks and the valleys, and then specifically who you're trying to hire for.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“I was creating maybe a competitor analysis on Claude and OpenAI. I wanted to see what they would recommend. And then they told me, like, oh, Resend is the most expensive service. And I was like, no, I know for a fact that this is not true. … So it turns out that agents don't really like JavaScript enabled sliders. They cannot slide.” — Zeno Rocha, The Changelog

The Resend founder explains how he found that AI assistants were misreading his pricing page. He fixed it by serving a Markdown version through content negotiation, and says you only find problems like this by putting yourself in the agent's shoes.

The Changelog · 2026-10-22 Permalink → Listen →
The Changelog Around 1:18:27 into the episode
Zeno Rocha

Yeah, that was funny because as you were saying good things about that page, I'm like, Yeah, that page is good, but it's good for humans. It's not right. It's terrible for agents.

Adam Stacoviak

…might be like. How many emails do you want? How many will you send? Is it transactional only? How many per day? You know, and all that is maybe an API call, and the response is JSON. It's like, here you go. This, or maybe it's market. Maybe it's actually Markdown. I don't know. But, anyways.

Zeno Rocha

…with stuff. And then I asked, like, oh, I was creating maybe a competitor analysis on Claude and OpenAI. I wanted to see what they would recommend. And then they told me, like, oh, recent is the most expensive service. And I was like, no, I know for a fact that this is not true. Yeah. And I was like, so surprised and both of them got it wrong. And then I was like, okay, let me uncover this. So it turns out that agents don't really like JavaScript enabled sliders. They cannot slide. That's not something they're able to do. And I'm like, okay, we need a Markdown version. So I made the Markdown. I changed the alternate header. So if you were to request that with a different header, then it returns that. And then I just started to like seeing for real life. And then I just made the requests and then started to get the math right. Like all, so what I did was, okay, I'm sending…

Adam Stacoviak

What is that cadence for you? How frequently do you sit down in the place of the user? Is this something you have blocked in your calendar? How do you approach this, you know, must feel the pain, act as user advocate that you are?

Zeno Rocha

I'm always looking for excuses. So I operate on that. So I'm like, oh, okay, we have an all-hands meeting, for example, every Monday, right? So we used to use a Notion doc where every team goes in, they write their updates, and then we go through that doc together, and that's it. So, oh, okay, this…

Adam Stacoviak

That's cool, man. I feel like that's definitely the way you uncover the real potential, too, right? Not only uncovering all of your blemishes that you need to fix, and you can only discover them by using it. And what a user will do is they will get frustrated and go away. Some will complain, lots…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

Collections They Appear In