Short answer: David Petrou says he spent almost 18 years at Google after a Carnegie Mellon PhD, on the founding teams of Google Glass and Google Goggles, and left about three years ago after ChatGPT launched to see how fast he could run.
Watch this answer from Episode 51 (starts at 1:41) · Episode 51 notes and transcript
From Episode 51: It Ships While You Sleep. The AI Agent OS a Former Google Engineer Built After Leaving Google., starting at 1:41.
David Petrou [1:40]: Sounds great. Good to meet you guys, Jordan and Sam, and happy to be helping you kick off your fall season. Yeah. My name is David Petrou. I run Continua. We're working right now on building an agentic development operating system, and I'll talk through all about that stuff. But just briefly, my life's been around computers. I, got my PhD from Carnegie Mellon, and then I went to Google. I was there for almost eighteen years and got to see Google through a number of different phases and sort of had a front row seat to technology. Decided, maybe about three or three and a half years ago that, boy, this is just the perfect time to leave big tech and start my own company. We can go through the reasons why on the timing later if you like. But, in any case, we went through several iterations of different products, and we really landed on something that it I just can't tell you how excited we are every day to be working on this problem and what an incredible time it is right now in computing history. And that's all around how can we get this incredible power of agentic coding to work better for you, to work more cheaply, to get things done in a more measurable fashion. And we decided to call that product Wheelie.
David Petrou [2:59]: Sort of a play on words. Everybody talks about agentic loops, and so we think about the bicycle, and we think about the wheels turning, and also having a lot of fun in the process.
Sam Nadler [3:10]: Very cool. I would just love to hear about, one, as founders ourselves, we love the founder journey. You mentioned, leaving Big Tech to starting something. What was the inspiring moment you had, to jump all in? And then let's I would love to hear about your product.
David Petrou [3:25]: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So, my whole life and I was really inspired by my dad in this. He was an inventor, and he had, many patents. And he always, taught me the importance of coming up with new ideas and combining things in new ways and doing things more efficiently. And so my career at Google was always one of serial entrepreneurship. I would come up with an idea. I would create the prototype. I'd evangelize it. I'd get a team together. We'd prototype it. We'd take it to production. We'd launch and then repeat. And I had a lot of fortune in meeting a lot of great engineers at Google and having a lot of great managers. I was on the founding team of Google Glass, the wearable computer with trackpad on the side. I was also on the founding team of Google Goggles, which was the world's first universal mobile visual search engine. You now think of that as a Google Lens, in the latest incarnation, and a bunch of other projects. And around, I guess, it was, in the early twenty twenties, around the COVID time, it was just amazing what we were starting to see internally at Google. And then the whole world saw externally from OpenAI, I think, in around November 2022 when ChatGPT came out.
David Petrou [4:54]: And, boy, it felt to me like the timing would be right to see how fast I could run on my own. Coming from Google, a company with near infinite resources to a place where, boy, you're just, like, staring down the abyss of, like, oh my god. There's so many things that can go wrong. But at the same time, you have a completely clear calendar. You can partner with whomever you want. You can make decisions immediately. There's no overhead. And that's really what the last few years for me have been.
