David Petrou is the CEO of Continua, the company building Wheelie, which he calls an "agentic development operating system." Wheelie takes a problem, splits it across coding agents, and decides when a human actually needs to be pulled in. David has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon and spent almost 18 years at Google. He joined us in Episode 51 (September 4, 2026), our first episode back after the summer break.
At Google he worked as what he called a serial internal entrepreneur: come up with an idea, prototype it, build a team, launch, repeat. He was on the founding team of Google Glass and of Google Goggles, the mobile visual search engine that later became Google Lens. After ChatGPT came out in November 2022, he decided it was the right time to leave big tech and see how fast he could move on his own.
Continua did not start with Wheelie. Its first product was social AI: a chatbot that sat inside group chats on WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack or Telegram and knew when to respond, when to hang back and when to take notes. Around September 2025, David said, coding agents got good enough to run somewhat autonomously. The team put an API on top of every internal dashboard so agents could run business intelligence analyses overnight, and that side project turned into the bigger opportunity.
Wheelie is the result. David described the target user as a solopreneur, prosumer or CTO of a small to medium company who has already tried running two or four agent windows at once and found it exhausting. Wheelie uses foundation models underneath plus some fine-tunes, so you would not drive Claude Code or OpenAI Codex directly. He places it in the middle, between low-level coding tools and app builders like Lovable.
We are aiming for think of it like the space between a developer that wants to use the low level tools and someone who would use Lovable.
— David Petrou, Episode 51
There was no screen share. David walked us through Wheelie verbally from 12:37. You state the problem, and Wheelie decomposes it, picks the number of agents and where they run, and decides when to interrupt you with a question. It knows your habits and your coworkers' time zones, so a production issue at night can go to a teammate who is still awake. At the time of recording, Wheelie was waitlist-only, and the team was onboarding each user by hand and refining the product around what they asked for.
Token costs are continuing to go down, but what's not improving is the availability of, you know, the human attention span.
— David Petrou, Episode 51
Think about Git. Think about GitHub. If you were to design source control from scratch in an agent first world, you wouldn't do it that way.
— David Petrou, Episode 51
In the news segment, David said OpenAI has been friendlier to developers than Anthropic, because Anthropic does not let you use a subscription with a different coding tool. He also pointed to Gemini 3.8 Flash and Chinese open models as good picks on cost versus quality. For more founders building tools for engineers, see AI in developer tools and our Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex comparison.
David Petrou is the CEO of Continua. He has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon and spent almost 18 years at Google, where he was on the founding teams of Google Glass and Google Goggles, before leaving to start his own company.
Continua builds Wheelie, which David calls an agentic development operating system. It decomposes a problem, decides how many coding agents to run and where, and routes questions to the right developer at the right time.
Wheelie sits above individual coding tools: you state a problem and it allocates agents built on foundation models plus some fine-tunes. At the time of the episode it was waitlist-only, with hands-on onboarding at wheelie.dev.
David named solopreneurs, prosumers and CTOs of small to medium companies, aiming at the space between developers who use low-level tools like Claude Code and people who would use Lovable. Modernizing legacy code and greenfield projects are early fits.
