I am building a cloud

2026-04-22

Today is fundraising announcement day. As is the nature of writing for a larger audience, it is a formal, safe announcement. As it should be. Writing must necessarily become impersonal at scale. But I would like to write something personal about why I am doing this. What is the goal of building exe.dev? I am already the co-founder of one startup that is doing very well, selling a product I love as much as when I first helped design and build it.

What could possess me to go through all the pain of starting another company? Some fellow founders have looked at me with incredulity and shock that I would throw myself back into the frying pan. (Worse yet, experience tells me that most of the pain is still in my future.) It has been a genuinely hard question to answer because I start searching for a “big” reason, a principle or a social need, a reason or motivation beyond challenge. But I believe the truth is far simpler, and to some I am sure almost equally incredulous.

I like computers.

In some tech circles, that is an unusual statement. (“In this house, we curse computers!”) I get it, computers can be really frustrating. But I like computers. I always have. It is really fun getting computers to do things. Painful, sure, but the results are worth it. Small microcontrollers are fun, desktops are fun, phones are fun, and servers are fun, whether racked in your basement or in a data center across the world. I like them all.

So it is no small thing for me when I admit: I do not like the cloud today.

I want to. Computers are great, whether it is a BSD installed directly on a PC or a Linux VM. I can enjoy Windows, BeOS, Novell NetWare, I even installed OS/2 Warp back in the day and had a great time with it. Linux is particularly powerful today and a source of endless potential. And for all the pages of products, the cloud is just Linux VMs. Better, they are API driven Linux VMs. I should be in heaven.

But every cloud product I try is wrong. Some are better than others, but I am constantly constrained by the choices cloud vendors make in ways that make it hard to get computers to do the things I want them to do.

These issues go beyond UX or bad API design. Some of the fundamental building blocks of today’s clouds are the wrong shape. VMs are the wrong shape because they are tied to CPU/memory resources. I want to buy some CPUs, memory, and disk, and then run VMs on it. A Linux VM is a process running in another Linux’s cgroup, I should be able to run as many as I like on the computer I have. The only way to do that easily on today’s clouds is to take isolation into my own hands, with gVisor or nested virtualization on a single cloud VM, paying the nesting performance penalty, and then I am left with the job of running and managing, at a minimum, a reverse proxy onto my VMs. All because the cloud abstraction is the wrong shape.

Clouds have tried to solve this with “PaaS” systems. Abstractions that are inherently less powerful than a computer, bespoke to a particular provider. Learn a new way to write software for each compute vendor, only to find half way into your project that something that is easy on a normal computer is nearly impossible because of some obscure limit of the platform system buried so deep you cannot find it until you are deeply committed to a project. Time and again I have said “this is the one” only to be betrayed by some half-assed, half-implemented, or half-thought-through abstraction. No thank you.

Consider disk. Cloud providers want you to use remote block devices (or something even more limited and slow, like S3). When remote block devices were introduced they made sense, because computers used hard drives. Remote does not hurt sequential read/write performance, if the buffering implementation is good. Random seeks on a hard drive take 10ms, so 1ms RTT for the Ethernet connection to remote storage is a fine price to pay. It is a good product for hard drives and makes the cloud vendor’s life a lot easier because it removes an entire dimension from their standard instance types.

But then we all switched to SSD. Seek time went from 10 milliseconds to 20 microseconds. Heroic efforts have cut the network RTT a bit for really good remote block systems, but the IOPS overhead of remote systems went from 10% with hard drives to more than 10x with SSDs. It is a lot of work to configure an EC2 VM to have 200k IOPS, and you will pay $10k/month for the privilege. My MacBook has 500k IOPS. Why are we hobbling our cloud infrastructure with slow disk?

Finally networking. Hyperscalers have great networks. They charge you the earth for them and make it miserable to do deals with other vendors. The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center. At moderate volume the multiplier is even worse. Sure, if you spend $XXm/month with a cloud the prices get much better, but most of my projects want to spend $XX/month, without the little m. The fundamental technology here is fine, but this is where limits are placed on you to make sure whatever you build cannot be affordable.

Finally, clouds have painful APIs. This is where projects like K8S come in, papering over the pain so engineers suffer a bit less from using the cloud. But VMs are hard with Kubernetes because the cloud makes you do it all yourself with lumpy nested virtualization. Disk is hard because back when they were designing K8S Google didn’t really even do usable remote block devices, and even if you can find a common pattern among clouds today to paper over, it will be slow. Networking is hard because if it were easy you would private link in a few systems from a neighboring open DC and drop a zero from your cloud spend. It is tempting to dismiss Kubernetes as a scam, artificial make work designed to avoid doing real product work, but the truth is worse: it is a product attempting to solve an impossible problem: make clouds portable and usable. It cannot be done.

You cannot solve the fundamental problems with cloud abstractions by building new abstractions on top. Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig.

We have been muddying along with these miserable clouds for 15 years now. We make do, in the way we do with all the unpleasant parts of our software stack, holding our nose whenever we have to deal with and trying to minimize how often that happens.

This however, is the moment to fix it.

This is the moment because something has changed: we have agents now. (Indeed my co-founder Josh and I started tinkering because we wanted to use LLMs in programming. It turns out what needs building for LLMs are better traditional abstractions.) Agents, by making it easiest to write code, means there will be a lot more software. Economists would call this an instance of Jevons paradox. Each of us will write more programs, for fun and for work. We need private places to run them, easy sharing with friends and colleagues, minimal overhead.

With more total software in our lives the cloud, which was an annoying pain, becomes a much bigger pain. We need a lot more compute, we need it to be easier to manage. Agents help to some degree. If you trust them with your credentials they will do a great job driving the AWS API for you (though occasionally it will delete your production DB). But agents struggle with the fundamental limits of the abstractions as much as we do. You need more tokens than you should and you get a worse result than you should. Every percent of context window the agent spends thinking about how to contort classic clouds into working is context window is not using to solve your problem.

So we are going to fix it. What we have launched on exe.dev today addresses the VM resource isolation problem: instead of provisioning individual VMs, you get CPU and memory and run the VMs you want. We took care of a TLS proxy and an authentication proxy, because I do not actually want my fresh VMs dumped directly on the internet. Your disk is local NVMe with blocks replicated off machine asynchronously. We have regions around the world for your machines, because you want your machines close. Your machines are behind an anycast network to give all your global users a low latency entrypoint to your product (and so we can build some new exciting things soon).

There is a lot more to build here, from obvious things like static IPs to UX challenges like how to give you access to our automatic historical disk snapshots. Those will get built. And at the same time we are going right back to the beginning, racking computers in data centers, thinking through every layer of the software stack, exploring all the options for how we wire up networks.

So, I am building a cloud. One I actually want to use. I hope it is useful to you.