Behind the scenes of Temporal’s explosive growth, with co-founders Max and Samar
Fri Oct 03 2025
Temporal’s co-founders join Barr Yaron and Lenny Pruss to unpack how durable execution became the backbone of modern distributed apps and why it’s a perfect fit for AI agents. Samar and Max trace the path from Amazon SWF to Uber’s Cadence to founding Temporal, dig into developer experience choices, hard lessons with Cassandra, and what “code that can’t crash” really means in practice. This episode also covers open source strategy, multi-agent orchestration, Nexus RPC, how startups and enterprises are adopting Temporal, and what scaling the company taught them as leaders.
If you ship backend systems, build AI agents, or care about reliability at scale, this one’s for you.
This episode is broken down into the following chapters:
00:00–00:06 — Origins: Samar and Max, Barr and Lenny, why this convo
00:06–00:14 — Early systems: Amazon SWF → Azure Durable Task; DX lessons
00:14–00:23 — Uber years: replacing Kafka, “Jeremy,” birthing Cadence, open-sourcing from day one
00:23–00:31 — Durable execution, explained; code-first over DSLs; SDK ergonomics (Go/Java)
00:31–00:36 — Hard tech war stories: Cassandra, queues on Cassandra, multi-region replication
00:36–00:45 — AI agents ≈ dynamic workflows; why Temporal fits agents and tools
00:45–00:59 — Roadmap: streaming, large payloads, data workflows, Nexus RPC for long-running calls
00:59–01:13 — Adoption & GTM: digital natives, fintech, startups; greenfield AI vs brownfield; “Temporal is overkill?”
01:13–01:22 — Case study: OpenAI Codex on Temporal; internal dogfooding
01:22–01:40 — Scaling the org vs. scaling the tech; remote shift, hiring; mission & next five yearsSubscribe to the Barrchives newsletter: https://www.barrchives.com/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37O8Pb0LgqpqTXo2GZiPXf
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barrchives/id1774292613
Twitter: https://x.com/barrnanas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryaron/
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Temporal’s co-founders join Barr Yaron and Lenny Pruss to unpack how durable execution became the backbone of modern distributed apps and why it’s a perfect fit for AI agents. Samar and Max trace the path from Amazon SWF to Uber’s Cadence to founding Temporal, dig into developer experience choices, hard lessons with Cassandra, and what “code that can’t crash” really means in practice. This episode also covers open source strategy, multi-agent orchestration, Nexus RPC, how startups and enterprises are adopting Temporal, and what scaling the company taught them as leaders. If you ship backend systems, build AI agents, or care about reliability at scale, this one’s for you. This episode is broken down into the following chapters: 00:00–00:06 — Origins: Samar and Max, Barr and Lenny, why this convo 00:06–00:14 — Early systems: Amazon SWF → Azure Durable Task; DX lessons 00:14–00:23 — Uber years: replacing Kafka, “Jeremy,” birthing Cadence, open-sourcing from day one 00:23–00:31 — Durable execution, explained; code-first over DSLs; SDK ergonomics (Go/Java) 00:31–00:36 — Hard tech war stories: Cassandra, queues on Cassandra, multi-region replication 00:36–00:45 — AI agents ≈ dynamic workflows; why Temporal fits agents and tools 00:45–00:59 — Roadmap: streaming, large payloads, data workflows, Nexus RPC for long-running calls 00:59–01:13 — Adoption & GTM: digital natives, fintech, startups; greenfield AI vs brownfield; “Temporal is overkill?” 01:13–01:22 — Case study: OpenAI Codex on Temporal; internal dogfooding 01:22–01:40 — Scaling the org vs. scaling the tech; remote shift, hiring; mission & next five yearsSubscribe to the Barrchives newsletter: https://www.barrchives.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37O8Pb0LgqpqTXo2GZiPXf Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barrchives/id1774292613 Twitter: https://x.com/barrnanas LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryaron/