Yokoli (a16z partner) (3:42)

Right.

Hanbi Lee (3:43)

It's.

Han Wang (3:43)

It's content that powers AI, it's content that trains support agents, coding agents, you name it. And I think kind of witnessing that change firsthand is not only a testament to how much the world has changed, but being front and center and having a role in something that we find particularly meaningful.

Jennifer Lee (a16z general partner) (4:03)

Obviously, nowadays, even before we invested, we see Metlify all the time. Every company we meet in the very earliest stage to enterprises, everyone is centralized on netlify. Was it always obvious to you, if you look back, what's the story that led up to this point?

Han Wang (4:21)

Yeah, a lot of pivots and a lot of failure along the way. And by the way, you know, my opinion, too many people use us, you know, we need more variants in the world. That's what I think.

Hanbi Lee (4:34)

More themes.

Han Wang (4:36)

Exactly. More customization. The honest answer, and you know, and I kind of want to speak on that, is the fact that it wasn't the first thing that Hanbi and I came up with. Right. In spite of how much we see and how obvious the problem is in.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (4:51)

Hindsight, Hanby pivoted eight times. Right. And this is the eighth time.

Han Wang (4:56)

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. So essentially the story of all the pivots, and it goes, you know, for me and Hanby, we started the company because we really know we want to build for builders. I was very fortunate to start coding when I was very young, initially 11 years old, I was given a laptop like a MacBook Pro back in the 2010, 2011 edition. And I found the joys of learning how to build products for people around me. Community, my school, my friends, you name it. And that entire journey was self taught. Like many other people who are very prominent builders, you know, in the ecosystem, I had to learn so much by myself. I had to go figure out through YouTube videos, a lot of bad docs, right? No Claude code, unfortunately. I wish. That would have been great. It kind of helped me figure out all the space. And then therefore when we start the company, we're like, that's just a thing that we can relate to so deeply. And because we know that building a company takes such a long time horizon, right? It's like the span of decades. If you want to build anything meaningful, you have to go pick a space that you can care so deeply about. For me and Hanby, it's other people, other builders like us. And so that was the start of the journey, right? It wasn't all about docs at first. It was just like, how do we go build something that can enable people to build a little bit better, a little bit faster, because then they can go and impact people. And so then we started the journey and spent about a solid year and a half of wandering in the desert while chewing glass is probably the best way I can describe that.

Jennifer Lee (a16z general partner) (6:31)

What did you run into in the desert?

Han Wang (6:33)

A lot of bad ideas. Too many to list and too bad to pitch at this point. But I think it was just a lot of things where, you know, we say like it was eight pivots, but you know, truly it really didn't feel like that because all of it was really surrounded with kind of the same kind of like idea space, if you will. It was always something for developers, it was always something about building for helping enable someone to go learn and build something faster. And so one idea after next, it went from something like, oh, using AI to auto, just describe what your code does to something like, hey, could you just connect static content to the code? And then that was a bad idea, by the way. I don't know if anyone doing that don't. But then it eventually led us to where we are today, which again, in hindsight is the most obvious thing, right? Oh, duh, should have built the docs platform. But at the time it was just about developers. And to this day and into the future, it still is. It's about enabling other people. And I, you know, now are growing beyond just developers into learning and building a little bit faster.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (7:41)

And I'm sure when you first launched Minlify, this current version of the product, there, there was a lot more mature products out there and more fully fledged, like feature rich products versus how Munify came out back then. Like, how did you approach customers in the way that converted the first customer or the second or the third or some memorable stories around that time?

Han Wang (8:06)

Oh, man. Well, for starters, you know, the funny thing is, the reason it took so long for us to even get to the idea that we're doing now is because we actually internalized that same opinion, which was, oh, there were so many of these incumbents, these existing companies that did it. There was a solution here, a solution that, oh, you could probably go build these things in house. We just bought into that, right? And at one point and throughout the journey of these many pivots, we kept talking to people, right, talking to users, and they kept saying, oh, well, while these other options existed on the market, I didn't find the right one for me. And here's why. This is not great. And in fact, we kept hearing that again and again and just kept pushing that down because we're like, oh, no, it's actually great. You know, there's the market's already there and yada. And as we kind of start dugging into the user feedback and we start thinking about our own experiences, we're like, my goodness, like, I've tried building this so many times. Here's why all of these things were bad. So if we're going to do it right, let's at least do the one that we wish we would have wanted, right, as developers, because we believe that's who we want to build for. Let's just go figure out what we would have liked. And so the initial version of what Mintlify is today actually came out just from one weekend. It was two days. We were like. Because at the time we were like, all right, well, we just got to try everything and we'll just give it the amount of time. We kind of have confidence in this idea for two days. That's all we got. And so we forced ourselves to build like this very initial version of it. And then the next thing I knew, we built out this prototype and we just want to get validation. So at the time, my roommate who was going through the YC batch, were building and pivoting into the API space. This company called Hyper Beam, they were going from a consumer product to building an API product. So we went to them. We're like, hey guys, here's your docs that are way Better now on midlife. Fine, take a look. And that's when I realized the beauty of having failed so many times, which was in failing so many times and building so many ideas that didn't work, when something did, there was no mistaking it.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (10:24)

Right.

Han Wang (10:24)

And so there's a lot of grace in failure, in my opinion, which is that, like, you. You learn a lot of perspective on things that don't work and the reaction customers get when they don't work. So in our case, it was many, you know, a year and a half of people who are like, oh, let's talk again in next week. Let's, you know, you send them an invoice, they're not paying it. You send them a credit. Like, oh, we'd have budgets. It's 20 bucks. You know, to. To then the reaction.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (10:49)

Coffees.

Han Wang (10:49)

Yeah, exactly. To then the reaction of like, how do I get this set up right now? Like, I was like, okay, you want to find time, you know, tomorrow to chat is. No, like, how do you do it right now? And then you send them like an invoice and they're like, they're done like in a minute. Right. And then for Hyperbeam in particular, they were like, let's get going. I was like, bet, I'll set up for you right now. Give me access to your cloud for DNS configurations. I literally went in, change it over. And that was our first customer. And that first customer led us to the second and the fifth, the tenth hundredth, and now into thousands.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (11:23)

That's a great story. And that's still one of your current sales Motion is to preview the dock and share it with the customer to see what the docs will look like in Millify, which is very powerful.

Han Wang (11:33)

Yeah, it's one of those things where I remember, like, maybe we were nearing like the first hundred customers and, you know, Hanbi and I were still doing the painstaking job of like manually migrating everybody. And back then back, by the way, back then, like before any of the bells and whistles for why someone should use us, you know, one of the reasons ways we got people to give us a try was like, hey, by the way, if you switch to Millify, we'll actually go in and like, actually help review your docs. We'll fix your grammar and we'll actually structure in a better way. It's a lot of do things that don't scale. And we were doing that for a while. I remember at one point we had a, like an office hour, if you will, with Paul Graham.

Hanbi Lee (12:14)

You know, that Founder of Founders.

Han Wang (12:15)

Yes, founder of Founders. The YC guy. And we were so many migrates, like, how do you like do this? I'm sure at one point when you scale it out, you get to go do something a little bit different, a little bit better. And he's like, no, this thing that you're doing now is going to be the thing that you're going to do forever. Just live with it. I was like, okay. And then we hire a team and then build tooling and then obviously AI has helped a lot in that journey too. But yeah, it's still the small things that don't scale that really spark kind of like the customer love. And the thing that goes the extra mile, if you will, is how we think about things. Right. If you go the extra mile that in a way that people don't expect.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (12:55)

Magically, I'd love to maybe just point out a few of those going extra mile pieces because I would love to dive into more of the product intuition and also the products you have built so far because that's been a really incredible journey. Even in the short sort of lifespan of Mintlify, they were just like nonstop shipping. And with AI's change of how developers coding and how they're leveraging documentation, you have came up with a lot of really great ideas from self healing docs to sort of how to bring docs into context for agents to leverage. So I'd love to sort of unpack that in the next few questions and maybe we can start from where you start seeing these sort of areas that you can go further from the existing providers and how has AI impacted your thinking of building those functionalities?

Hanbi Lee (13:46)

Yeah, well, if I were to touch on some of the previous topics as well, I feel like a lot of what kind of goes into our product intuition and how we build is living and breathing the mantra of talk to your users and also learning from our failures and being very data oriented and being very pragmatic and mvping things very quickly. That was kind of a lot more than I was expecting to say. But I think that that kind of really encompasses a lot of just how we approach product and strategy in general. And I think a lot of people who start from from an idea that they have aren't starting pragmatic enough. And it's very important to solve one problem correctly. And even right now, as we're experimenting and launching new products, we're hyper focused on getting one person who loves what we're building as opposed to a thousand people who are going to just feel meh about it. And so we're super focused on that. And then as for the future of the product, and to touch on what Han was saying about how AI has been impacting our product, the future that we envisioned a year ago is here. AI agents are the ones ingesting the content. And I'm constantly talking to founders who are talking to me about how the documentation is the source of truth for making sure that their agents are working properly. And so this up to date documentation has always been important for developers, marketers, customer support. Everybody within the org views it as a source of truth. And now there's an outsized amount of AI agents who are also relying on it. And so it's even more important now. And now AI is also here to help us solve that problem where humans like natural inclination is not to update the docs. You're shipping code and you want to say it's done when you're done, when you've shipped the last pr. But in reality now it's even more important to update the docs. And so with this increased importance, we're building tools to make the context stay up to date as well.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (15:57)

Yeah, and in a different way of VC terminology like your time expanded so dramatically. Not just because, you know, on the supply side you have a lot more to serve of, you know, people who are building tools and people who are, you know, building dev tools, agent tools. But on your demand side, you have this new Persona that's that are not just developers, but also coding agents. So the demand of docs and great documentation, accurate ones, up to date ones, is getting much, much higher.

Hanbi Lee (16:24)

Oh, I was going to say, and the vibe coders too.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (16:26)

That's right.

Hanbi Lee (16:27)

The whole new genre of developers are coming up. People who are so enthusiastic to build software. It's awesome.

Jennifer Lee (a16z general partner) (16:34)

Yeah. And you guys are at such a vantage point of Silicon Valley just because every single new AI company or established AI company use Millify today. So I guess from all the things you're seeing on the market with the customers, what surprised you? What are the things that people are now using with Minlify and the AI models that couldn't have done before.

Han Wang (16:59)

With Mintlify? There was a lot. But that pales in comparison to the number of people who are building things that are cooler than beyond our imagination. I was literally, this is a little embarrassing to admit, got my driver's license not that many years ago. That was literally two years ago. Even as an example, they started on driving, literally. And then I started driving non stop.

Jennifer Lee (a16z general partner) (17:24)

Maybe you don't need to drive. Just use Waymo.

Han Wang (17:27)

Exactly. Or the Robo taxi. I was literally preparing for the driver's test and I came across this document that was like, here's how you prepare for the written exams. And it was on Millify. And I was like, I would never in a million years have imagined that this is like a place I would just come across. And to your point, like in a lot more places than I can even imagine. And this is kind of like a common misconception I think people even have about Minimify today, which is that, you know, they're like, oh, it's Millify, they're the Docs company. And while it's not incorrect, of course, right. It's of course what we do. 25 has been a big year for us because it also dramatically expanded the surface area of what we actually cover. So there's a lot more help centers on minlify today. There's a lot of internal docs. In fact, actually we recently replaced our entire internal knowledge stack with just mintlify as well. Largely because of the automated AI tooling, the Q and A bots, everything. Just ask a question on Slack and tell it to go update things on Slack. Right. You give a natural command and it just evolves over time. Is something that been personally getting so much use out of. And for many other companies that we work with, you'd be surprised by they do use us for a public docs instance and that's kind of obviously the thing we can showcase. But deep down they have two sets of internal docs that we now work with for maybe their engineering team, for maybe even their HR team who's talking about their healthcare policies. And I think as we grow it's going to evolve from not just Docs but more knowledge management more broadly. And I think kind of seeing that shift in 25 and hopefully more into 26 as well is something that we're very excited about.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (19:07)

And why do you think the customers are using LilyFi that way? Because the original and the most prominent branding is you have this very well designed external facing docks. But the internal workflow could be pretty different. There may be more options of using Notion or confluent. Like why did people even outside of the developers are choosing Monthly5 for these use cases?

Han Wang (19:27)

Yeah, that's a really good question. So there's a lot of different things about this. The first and foremost is that you have to actually go build for obviously a great editing experience beyond just the developers. Right. So when Hanbi and I started, we took the opinion that it should just be developers. And so we really optimized for that flow. But of course, as we kind of grow in more use cases, larger companies, when you're talking like Fortune 10s, they're not just all developers, there's a lot of stakeholders. And so you just have to build a better editing experience. So there's a point about product and features on their side. But the larger one that actually I think has been shifting in this is that a lot more of the world is also on the other side getting more technical, right? To Hambi's point earlier, a lot more people who are vibe coding now, a lot more people who can understand Markdown now because the language of LLMs, right? So the syntax that might be somewhat foreign for most people is now commonplace. A lot more people outside of just developers are using cloud code and these tooling, right? Like the cursors to go ahead and do creative work writing blogs. I remember Yoko, you mentioned you wrote a blog, right, using it as well. And all of that's done in like this developery way. And so especially now where AI agents are also powering so many different workflows, the engineers themselves too get also very involved in the process. So back then, if you want to go sell a support product, right, you're selling to the support teams. If you want to sell help centers, you're selling to the support teams. But now if you're basically like the support Strategy is like 80% of the tickets are built and managed by AI agents. The engineering team gets involved, right? And so then they have a say in terms of how you want to go build the platform, how do you want to maintain it? And so this kind of the early bet that we took, which is being for developers, also kind of became this tailwind for us as we saw. I wish it was more intentional than it was is my honest answer too, I guess.

Jennifer Lee (a16z general partner) (21:24)

What was it like building it? We had this async discussion on Slack just very recently. There's just so many. Net new things that you can ship into the product like when the coding models are getting better. So for example, workflow, automation, self updating docs, like the extra things that non developers or like newly technical users can now do. Mintlify, how did you all wrap your head around all these new trends in AI and how did you build it?

Han Wang (21:52)

Still trying to. Honestly, I wish I have a better answer for that. I think this is going to. You know what? Hampi mentioned the pragmatic side about all of this, right? Which is on one hand we can sit here and talk about the theory of it all, the general macro trends that enable products like this. Whereas from the battle scars that me and Hanbi had in this going back into the pivot days is, we also learned that it's so important to figure out how to bring that to the actual problems that people care about. Yes, self updating docs, very great thing to have. It's been asked for about 25 years now and now there are a bunch of reasons why it can and should exist, but at the same time there's about a thousand product decisions that need to be made from now until then. What is the actual way people do that? What is the actual experience of how those updates should happen? What sources should they connect? How are those connected? What is the actual flow of it all? Those are the things that you still have to get right. And so tying it back to it all, it's. There's of course this big element that we want to pursue, but then it's going to come down to the day in and day out, the users and the problems they face and how they would like to see it. And that's kind of like this, kind of the messy middle, if you will, of products.

Hanbi Lee (23:09)

Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of buzz going around in AI nowadays and even people are scared because it's moving so quickly and they don't know what's going to come next and AGI doomsday sci fi esque scares going on. But the way that Han and I view it is that AI is really just another tool in the toolbox and it's just so powerful and useful and valuable and we just now have this extra tool in the toolbox and we should feel very open and embrace it in terms of utilizing it to help others and provide value for others. And I feel like we could abstract away, don't think about all the scary media around it and just view it as a helpful tool to help us get to point A to B, to help people understand products better, to help learn how to code faster. All of these. That's what AI is here for.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (24:05)

Yeah, I kind of agree more with that. I think there's certainly a lot of things that coding agents and AI has surprised us of. What's its capability? But at the same time, you know, there's still the limitations that we need great tooling to work around it with and that's why context and documentation is so important to, you know, continue to feed the right pieces into context and for the agents to perform. And that also Goes to sort of the maintenance piece Hanyu mentioned earlier. It's always been the case where authoring is like a big chunk of documentation. It's an important part, but it's sort of one time. But the maintenance side of the maintaining docs and keeping it fresh has been the biggest burden for organizations to make decisions on. If this is the right version, this is right version. What's the source of truth? What's the UI that's actually showing in the product today and is it the right one showing the docs like there's just a lot of thousand paper cuts that's making it so time consuming and cumbersome where now we can probably have a really capable assistant to help us do that a lot easier. And I think that's sort of with your self healing dogs you're trying to solve now and maybe not just for dogs, but for a lot of knowledge work overall. So I'm curious and want to hear about what are some of the, I guess bigger chunks of content you want to go into Also how you're solving that problem to reconciliate and come back to the source of truth, that kind of decisions you're trying to make now?

Han Wang (25:29)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we first want to unpack that by breaking down I think a few different elements. The first and foremost is like why quote unquote, docs have been historically out of date and difficult managed. And make no mistake, this is a problem that I'm sure everyone who is listening or understands this. This is something everyone feels. No one ever feels good and has gone to bed and be like, oh, I have great docs. If they think about it all.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (25:53)

Let's say it's like your closet that you always like every season.

Han Wang (25:56)

Can I help you? Yeah, it's like you just throw some skeletons in there every now and then. You don't look at it. And I think there's a few different reasons for that. Number first and foremost is like there's a lot of organizational dynamics or team dynamics that prevents that from being the case. Let's even break it down from example of a software company, right? Like the people who somehow have the most context for how things work, let's say you're documenting a product or specific features or infrastructure, you name it, are the people who probably wrote it themselves, which are often the engineers, the people who are not often themselves maintaining the docs or content in general. They're the ones who have most context, most know how on how to go and write the docs. They're not the Ones who want to or incentivized to, and they're not the ones who are paid to. Now I have to be the one responsible for writing. Well, that's just not my job.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (26:45)

Right.

Han Wang (26:45)

And at the same time it's like there's an aspect of organizational dynamics and aspect of human nature and part of this too, if people just don't really want to. Right. Seems like a weird drudge of a job. But now, right where you're feeling real time, the consequences of out of date docs. Because let's imagine you're building a support agent and it's trained on your company's source of truth. Let's say the docs or the knowledge base, you name it. And there's a question and some. And there's a section of the content that's fundamentally incorrect. Right. Let's say it's just mispricing information. That source of truth becomes the enabler for the agents to go ahead and, and give answers. And if that's incorrect and you're talking about thousands, if not tens of thousands of agents across the board, the consequences are real where it wasn't back then. And so the need of this problem in solving that is very much there now. And so people are really scratching their head in terms of how they solve it. And then number two is I think a big part of what's kind of like enabling the convergence of self updating, self healing docs you mentioned, Jennifer, is like also the capacity of the models. So there's a need. The models are smart enough now. I think Opus 4 or 5 was actually a big unlock for us because we've iterated and tried this idea of self opening docs for many months. In 25, at one point it became clear that the model is reliable and consistent enough it can actually go do it. And then lastly, and I think this is the most important part of I think why this problem is going to get solved is it's also because the convergence of trust and the environment that allows it to do so. A lot more companies, especially enterprises, are a lot more comfortable suddenly giving away a lot of their context for LLM agents. Right. That was not the case two years ago, I can assure you of that. We tried very hard, but now they are. And so you're kind of seeing this need happening. You're kind of seeing the capabilities and then you're also kind of getting this environment of this kind of. And then therefore it kind of is like the first time I think in about 20, maybe 30 years where there's A long held problem of content knowledge going on a date is going to get solved. And I think this is also one thing that excites a lot of developers. Because you know, I'm not going to lie, as someone who day in and days out builds a knowledge and docs products, I don't always love updating the docs either.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (29:06)

Totally. It's also the time where the knowledge and docs gets updated the most frequent.

Hanbi Lee (29:10)

Yes, things are changing all the time.

Han Wang (29:12)

Exactly. But the new workflows that are not coming out, it's not possible in similar fashion to coding has just made the job so much easier and we're very excited about it.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (29:23)

Definitely. And maybe I'll add on to that question with one more is now knowing that you're not just designing for the authoring experience, the human authors, the developers that are contributing to the docs, but also the agents are reading and benefiting from the product. Like how has it changed your design decisions in what kind of functionalities to focus on? Whether it's more end user facing UI level versus the infrastructure component. You mentioned that this becomes the fundamental tooling that powers how coding agents function. How have you changed your thinking around that?

Hanbi Lee (29:59)

Definitely a lot less of an emphasis on the way it looks. This was honestly something that Han and I did focus a lot on in the very beginning. And then over time, maybe because we were able to focus so much on it in the beginning, we were able to take our focus off of it and focus more on the markdown, on the content itself. We're realizing that, I think Andrew Karpathy tweeted English language is the next hottest new programming language. And so I feel like a broken record. We're constantly saying how important the content is, but that's genuinely how we have been focusing more on that as a company as well. And a lot of as opposed to looking at the look and feel, we're kind of just putting it into cloud code and seeing whether that works well and using that as the interface as opposed to just the way the humans are reading it. And of course the human interface is still important too, but definitely the other ways. The other entry points in which people are accessing the docs are equally if not more important. And also one thing though, on the human side I would say, is that a lot of people are expecting a chat interface where they're expecting to put in an error message or be able to just find exactly where it's supposed to be in the docs by just typing a couple words as opposed to manually looking at it themselves. I think I personally expect that too. It's just so much easier.

Han Wang (31:23)

Yeah, I think the days in which the battle for the developer experience being in how nice it is and how the experience is just way past us. That was a 2010, really. The frontier now is about how good the content is. Where it's. If you have the nicest developer experience in the world, but the content is just absolute crap, then it doesn't even matter. It's just a window dressing at the end of the day. So the frontier is truly about how great and up to date the content is going to be. And I think that's moving forward because when an agent goes to your docs, it could not care less about how nice it looks. If it's just reading raw HTML or markdown, it doesn't care, you know, and the caveat that I would say to this is, you know, people also go, oh well, like his docs are even going to exist in a few years, right. And to that I would say, yes, definitely. In the same reason why books are still exist today. Right. There is still going to be an element of a human who needs to go read something right front to back, a need of someone who needs to like actually go and know what they don't know. Or just for humans, still trying to understand the world too, right? This world will still have us in it, hopefully, and building for that experience is still going to be paramount. It's just going to be, let's say now, if we're thinking docs are 50% for humans, 50% for AI, it'll maybe be 10% for humans, 90% for AI by the end of the year. But that's not necessarily because a lot less people are going to it, but because there's just going to be much more prevalence of AI agents. That is going to just be the massive majority of the workforce. But still, you still have to have a human element into it. And so these things are never going to go away. If suddenly you're like, oh, next year all docs are just going to be just straight up markdown files. I would not be happy about that too.

Jennifer Lee (a16z general partner) (33:14)

Kind of related to what we talked about earlier. It feels like there's two sides of the market. There's one side of the it's agents or humans producing software, like software people can use. I mean, agents, although they're writing code, they're still using all the NPM packages and NPM packages. It turns out you need a lot of context to know how to use them. And then there's the other side, which is agents and humans continue to use already built software to produce new software. Right. This cycle just never ends. So to some extent from our observation recently, it felt like there's like a new layer abstraction between models and models. Right. There's the production side, there's a consumption side. How have you seen the usage pattern or interesting use cases that evolve maybe with different audience, maybe with different ways of using minlify since we're just producing software so differently now?

Han Wang (34:06)

Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, I would say that the first thought is even today we're seeing use cases of for instance auto generated docs and change logs that then is then becoming fed for other agents. Right. And I think in the world of, you know, like really kind of going and building into that, like just really reimagining the role of not only the viewers but also the authors of who's gonna be editing the content is kind of paramount. I'm not sure if I have any more unique things or insights on that particular front because I think that this is something that's still gonna unfold very quickly in front of our eyes. Right. What is the role of context? How are humans still gonna be able to communicate their facts to the world? What is that interface going to look like? Is stuff that we're kind of asking ourselves day in and day out and then obviously trying to figure out how to build that into a way that solves problem for customers today.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (34:58)

Right.

Hanbi Lee (34:59)

So I think Guillermo Rauch said something along the lines of like Waymos are driving within like the infrastructure that already exists of our roads. Like we still are very much operating within the world that we have today. So it's kind of like a weird balance of building on top of what we already have and also this new hot technology that's coming out that's adapting to the world that we have today. And so I still think that there is a lot of leveraging what's already out there. But of course I would say that it's not like the AI is just building things that are net already there. I definitely think there's new innovation happening on top, but I think that a lot it's still being built using the current technology built by humans.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (35:47)

Yeah. Maybe just pivoting more towards the go to market side. Minlify is a relatively young company, have some of the best logos on the website and in the market that includes anthropic Microsoft Coinbase, just to name a few. What is like to serve some of the most demanding Customers today is the first question. Second is more informative maybe for the founder listeners. How are you able to get some of these really demanding logos as a young company?

Han Wang (36:15)

Yeah, well, I'll start by saying that we're very fortunate to work with these companies. Right. It's not lost on me that it's a privilege, not a right, and not something that we can take for granted. And so being able to serve, I mean not just anybody, but a lot of the best in the field and kind of the work that they're doing is like truly inspiring for me and Hanby and especially to the mission that we're on as far as what it's like to work with these very demanding companies and fast moving. Well, you just gotta be demanding and fast moving right back, you know, for sure. And that's really one thing I remember like as an example, some of these AI labs, right when we were working with them, we were just shell shocked by how quick they respond to everything and how quickly they're able to do things. So you would send a slack message to them about anything. You would consistently, depending, it doesn't matter what time. Could be like 5 in the afternoon till 2am in the morning, someone's going to respond within 2 like 10 seconds.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (37:09)

And you check it's not a bot on the other side.

Han Wang (37:12)

There were many times I was so convinced there was one, I was so convinced there was one. And I just dig a little bit. Where do you live? Yeah, because that's what we ask. What's your Social Security number? We need to confirm. But if you kind of see those companies and you kind of seeing and observing the kind of cutting edge, you get inspired by what you could be as well. Right. And that's like a big source of inspiration for us. Look, if these companies at this scale even are working at this kind of pace that they are, then there's no excuse for startups, for ourselves not to hold ourselves to that standard too. And so we hold ourselves that far with, you know, with not just, you know, these logos, but everybody, right? Someone responds, look, you got to respond right back very quickly. I remember it got to a point where anthropic in particular, they like sent a message and then we respond within a few seconds and then their response was like, do you guys get on call whenever we send a message? And that was like a big compliment for me for sure. We don't. I need to figure out everyone is.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (38:14)

On call all the time.

Han Wang (38:15)

Exactly. But, but I think it speaks to kind of like the expectations that exist now and my point is like having now worked with some of these really great logos and especially the larger ones, we have been so surprised by the pace of which these companies are like teams are moving, you know, just to shout out Microsoft, my goodness, for a company that's as large as they are, they are moving lightning fast over there. And if like, you know, the stereotype of what large companies was just a few years ago is not really the case anymore. Right. And that should be an inspiration for everybody in my opinion for sure.

Hanbi Lee (38:50)

If I recall correctly, I think I remember some of our biggest customers came in into our slack community on like a Saturday and like you would just respond just casually and then it would end up becoming a huge customer that like we, we had no idea like they were evaluating the product. So it goes to show that everybody is working but dare I say996.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (39:14)

All the time. And has the way that these companies use the product informed you how you want to build the product? At the same time, do they use the product a little bit differently from the rest of the customers or it's more about sort of the working culture and speed that's been inspiring the.

Han Wang (39:32)

Oh man. I mean absolutely on the former. When you work with these great companies, they have some great ideas, right? And we've been very grateful by kind of taking and bouncing off of these ideas, these thoughts with these companies to then go ahead and actually go implement them and scale for others again. I remember when we first started working with Anthropic, this was again two years ago. Now I want to say like we're pretty early customer and I remember we just got back and like online this morning and we noticed that all of their docs were suddenly from English to 12 other languages.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (40:08)

Right.

Han Wang (40:09)

We're like how did you guys do that? Did you guys like go and get translators for this? No, we built a pipeline that went ahead and just translated them all in real time. Again this pretty commonplace now and I think it'd be a pretty non trivial thing for us to imagine how someone would build that and why someone should now. But the two years ago we're like what? You can do that now? I did not know that was a thing. And then they were like, oh you should go do it too for your other customers. And then we did. And so I think just kind of beating those kind of caliber people and it doesn't really necessarily take, I think just working with the best to kind of get that right. I think a lot of these people too themselves are still figuring out and they Kind of rely on even the startups to figure out what it means and what the next chapter is too.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (40:52)

Definitely.

Jennifer Lee (a16z general partner) (40:54)

I guess, looking to the future, since you've worked on Metlify for quite a while, what excites you the most about things you will build, things the community will build, how people and new customers will be using you?

Han Wang (41:06)

I think the first thought is, you know, I think what excites me about mintlify is the same thing that excited us from day one, and that is that Hanbi and I wanted to go embark on the journey of building for people that we care about in a space that we believe genuinely impacts, you know, the broader ecosystem and the community that we've been in entire lives. So the sense of empowering builders, if you will, that got us going and got us on this journey and got us this product today, that we get to do that in scale and even broader impact in ways that we never imagined still gets me the most excited. The thing that people are like, oh, it must be great. You're growing, you're scaling, you're working with these companies and getting all the commercials. I'm like, yes, of course, that's great, of course that's something that we'll continue to do. But what really gets me out of the bed in the morning is knowing that as of last month as an example, 20 million people came across a site that was powered by whether they know it or not.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (42:07)

Right.

Han Wang (42:07)

Doesn't matter to me if they know it or not. But what matters to me is knowing that those 20 million people, there were probably many of them that was like the Han when he was 11 years old, that learn how to code for the first time, that then go ahead and use the information, let's say, on whoever's docs, to go and build something that was helpful for maybe their community and their school. And the sense of having that impact into the world is something that truly excites me and Habi about our work and I know will continue to for hopefully the years to come.

Hanbi Lee (42:39)

There's two things that I'm excited about. One is building more AI agents and I'll go into that more and then secondly, building for more people as well. So first for the AI agents, I think it's so cool to build AI agents because you build something and then it surprises you at what it could be doing or like its capabilities surprise you. And so I'm excited to continue to iterate on that process and continue to be surprised by the stuff that I'm building. And secondly, we've constantly been like, you know, honing in on the fact that we love to build people, build for people that we really empathize with. And I like to believe that over the course of three years that Han and I's worldview has increased and we've interacted with more people and faced new problems from when we first started the company. I'm excited to continue to expand our worldview and build for more people as our worldview changes. For example, we have customer support now as well and we have new problems at the stage of the company that we're at today. And that's more people to help.

Yokoli (a16z partner) (43:46)

Awesome. I'll conclude the podcast by saying, may everyone that's a builder in 2026 being able to build more, encounter with more fresh minty dogs and run into less dead ends. And thank you so much, Han and Hamby for coming and joining us today.

Jennifer Lee (a16z general partner) (44:01)

Thank you.

Han Wang (44:02)

Thank you so much for having us.

Podcast Narrator (44:09)

Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at Rate this Podcast.com a16z We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.