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

Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools

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