Intelligence, everywhere.
Intelligence, everywhere.
“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth.” – Archimedes
Technology is the lever with which humanity moves the world, and AI might be our biggest lever yet. It has the potential to change everything.
But there’s one huge challenge facing the next Bezos, Page, Andreessen, or Zuckerberg of the AI era: intelligence is too slow, too expensive, and too difficult to build with. These limitations are holding them – and by extension, the world – back.
We started 8080 to empower developers to create the next world-moving companies of the AI era. We are building a new AI inference cloud, built exclusively for next-generation chips. Our mission is to make intelligence as fast, cheap, and as easy to use as possible. The faster, cheaper, and easier we can make AI, the more potential applications we can make possible.
Fast: We’re building our hardware and software infrastructure exclusively for next-generation chips – chips designed to run LLMs faster and cheaper by multiple orders of magnitude. And we are bringing those chips, along with other forms of compute and storage, to the edge. We are building the first high-performance inference cloud.
Easy: We’re building an API platform that abstracts and automates away all the complexity of building intelligence into software: from prompt management to chaining, logging, metering, etc. Incorporating intelligence should be as easy as hitting a REST API. Adding inference-time compute or memory should require a simple flag and nothing more.
Cheap: We want intelligence to be too cheap to meter. Too cheap for any developer hacking on an idea to worry about. We’re structuring the entire company to minimize operational expenses, allowing us to charge as little as possible. We are capping employee headcount at 10 people.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Sir Isaac Newton
We envision a world where intelligence is everywhere, incorporated into every object, making human life easier and better every second of every day. Intelligence that is too cheap to meter and too fast to notice.
The Googles and Amazons of the AI era haven’t been built yet. They will be built on 8080, and because of 8080. We’ll be the shoulders upon which they stand.
We talk of companies being “AI-native,” but no one has really scratched the surface yet. AI can do so much more. When model inference and the infrastructure surrounding it are fast and cheap enough, intelligence can be present in every layer of the stack and even in every function.
We want to support the most ambitious and perhaps crazy applications that will redefine “AI-native.” Somewhere, a dev is dreaming about adding AI into every frontend page render like some sort of intelligent CDN, another is dreaming about building a new Salesforce or Amazon that uses AI to do everything from search to generation to database operations, and a third is dreaming of something completely new that will change everything.
There’s a whole new world of possibilities in front of us. Imagine what you could build.
We are not building a normal company. We’ve done that before, and believe that in the AI era there must be a better way. We are designing 8080 to accomplish our mission and are capping headcount at 10 until we reach $100M in revenue. That might not be possible, but we are going to try. In order to do that:
We don’t hire employees, we hire partners. As partners, we are self-directed, self-managed, have equal control over the company’s strategic direction, and total control over our specific areas of focus. Partners solve problems without being asked.
We hire seldomly, carefully, with unanimous consent, and only people who are proven top performers and great colleagues (with references to match). No managers. Just builders. A company of ten 10X builders, with 10X automation, should be as productive as 1,000 people.
Human time is precious, so we don’t waste a minute on anything not worthwhile. We use AI – built on our own platform – to automate everything we possibly can to save us and our customers’ time. Meetings are only held when vitally important because any minute wasted is a tragedy, whether it’s for our users or partners. We are default remote, but gather in person when it’s worth the time.
As partners, everyone is compensated highly and equally. As the company succeeds, partners will be able to participate in that success in various ways, most notably via profit sharing. We demand excellence and compensate accordingly.
If you’re interested in joining us, send us an email at join[at]8080[dot]io.
We’re looking for partners who want to build for building’s sake. Every partner is a full-stack builder, first, but also has, either by experience or passion, expertise that augments the rest of the team. We are looking for partners with expertise in the following areas:
North Star: API performance. Building high-performance APIs and applications for developers, from web applications to account provisioning, management, and billing, to API design. Leveraging extensive experience with Python, Django, FastAPI, Postgres, AWS, React, and familiarity with systems languages like Rust, C, or C++ to design for builders and consistently enhance the user experience by working backwards from the customer.
North Star: server utilization and latency. Constructing state-of-the-art LLM inference infrastructure from scratch that handles millions of requests per second, maximizes hardware utilization, and intelligently routes each request to the optimal edge PoP for the lowest possible latency. This includes designing and implementing the global routing engine that decides—in microseconds—where every request should execute. Leveraging expertise in high-performance, concurrent, and distributed systems; proficiency in system programming languages like Rust, C++, or Zig; and experience with Postgres, AWS, Redis, Kafka, Zipkin, or Jaeger to architect a robust, scalable backend that integrates seamlessly with novel hardware, edge datacenters, and API services.
North Star: uptime and p99 latency. Ensuring the reliability, security, and observability of our production systems through automated monitoring, deployment, and incident response. Building and maintaining robust service discovery, configuration management, and control plane systems. Creating comprehensive documentation and run-books while implementing secure access management protocols.
North Star: cost per token and revenue capacity. Managing the operations and finances of a company that is rapidly scaling hardware infrastructure and obsessed with keeping customer costs as low as possible. Controlling the end-to-end flow of capital, from equity financing to debt leverage to capex to opex to pricing strategies and customer contracts. Building automated systems to scale to hundreds of millions in revenue with very few people.
North Star: time to value. Crafting and enhancing all aspects of developer tooling and experience—from CLIs, documentation, and libraries to demos and community engagement. Building automation to support millions of developers, leveraging a passion for improving the ease with which they can build, thereby fostering a vibrant developer community.
| Metric | Est. |
|---|---|
| Input Tokens Per Second | 300,000 |
| Output Tokens Per Second | 30,000 |
| Time to First Token (Metal) | 50 µs |
| Time to First Token (Cloud) | 20 ms |
Our goal is to make intelligence too cheap to meter. As of now, we’re targeting to charge less than $0.05 per million tokens, regardless of input or output, fine-tuned or not.
Our favorite local dev port is :8080, especially for side projects.
The Intel 8080 was the processor that ushered in the PC revolution.
Our mission is to put AI in every software loop. 8080 has a lot of loops.
Minimal characters for devs to type.
Symmetry. Visually appealing.
Ever since reading Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, we’ve always wanted to name a company with a number (like Corporation 9592).
It’s best practice to have a name that is easy to say and spell. This is not. It forces us to make the product so good that that won’t be an issue.
We’ll be adding more detail here as we get closer to launch. Until then, you can add your email here to stay in touch, and follow us on X.