people
sobo, brunsfeld, scandurra, and the bench — who they are, what they wrote, and what the company's essays keep arguing.
the founders
- nathan sobo · ceo · @nathansobocofounder and ceo. joined github in december 2011 to build atom — previously the author of treetop, a ruby peg parsing dsl — led the atom team until 2018, co-led teletype, and drove the xray rewrite. the 2017 journaling session — 'we have to start over' — is the company's origin story. left github at the end of 2020 for ~3 months at warp, then founded zed industries in spring 2021. based in the boulder, co area (inferred from businesswire datelines).
- antonio scandurra · co-founder · @as-ciicofounder. joined the atom team in 2014 as a university student after standout open-source contributions; co-architected teletype's crdt collaboration; co-built xray; then ~two years at ditto building a crdt database in rust. primary architect of gpui and zed's async/crdt internals; co-led the zeta work.
- max brunsfeld · co-founder · @maxbrunsfeldcofounder. ex-pivotal labs; joined the atom team in 2013 and created tree-sitter that november — the parser that now underpins github.com, neovim, helix, and zed itself. drove atom 1.0; wired tree-sitter into github's semantic analysis before leaving to start zed; wrote the wasm extension architecture and the windows-port and edit-prediction-provider posts.
the writing
sobo has been narrating the editor problem in public since atom — the manifesto, the weekly journal, the crdt thesis. scandurra wrote the gpui internals; brunsfeld wrote the extension and windows posts; irwin fields the ai-skeptic argument. the essays are the company's connective tissue.
- 2014-02-26introducing atom · essay, atom blog · nathan sobothe atom beta announcement — the first version of the thesis zed still runs on, written in javascript instead of rust.
our goal is a zero-compromise combination of hackability and usability
- 2017-11-15introducing teletype for atom · post, github blog · antonio scandurrathe teletype beta announcement — encrypted peer-to-peer editing on a custom crdt, unveiled by sobo at qcon sf. the first time the team shipped the collaboration thesis in production.
- 2022-06-08introducing zed · essay, zed.dev · nathan sobothe manifesto landing page published the day atom's sunset was announced — the four assumptions (hyper-responsiveness, real-time collaboration, conversations close to code, the disappearing editor) still live on zed.dev/about.
mission-critical tools should be hyper-responsive… you should see pixels on the next refresh of your display—every time
conversations should happen close to code
your editor should disappear
waitlist reportedly reached ~12,000 - 2022-12-01how crdts make multiplayer text editing part of zed's dna · essay, zed blog · nathan sobothe first zed.dev blog post — crdts as the editor's dna, with the engelbart framing and the sixteen-year callback to sobo's original editor dream.
so 16 years ago, i decided to build one. it took a failed attempt, many hard lessons, and the help of some talented friends, but the tool i've been striving to create is finally emerging in the 135k lines of rust that constitute zed
- 2023-01-23this week at zed industries: #1 · essay, zed blog · nathan sobothe kickoff of the 'this week at zed industries' journal — the fullest first-person founding narrative: xray's death, the 2019 restart, the warp detour, the march 2022 dogfooding switch.
three months in, i realized that i couldn't let go of my dream of building the ultimate editor, so i left warp to start zed
- 2023-03-07leveraging rust and the gpu to render user interfaces at 120 fps · essay, zed blog · antonio scandurrathe gpui reveal — rendering the editor like a video game at 120 fps, per-primitive shaders on the gpu, a rust-native ui stack owned end to end.
- 2023-03-15introducing zed: a high-performance, multiplayer code editor. now in beta. · post, zed blog · nathan sobothe public-beta post — macos only, admitting the gap between the shadow shipped and the tool envisioned.
the beta release we're sharing today is a shadow of the tool we envision… it's time for our baby to leave the nest
223 points, 171 comments on hn - 2023-03-27syntax-aware editing · essay, zed blog · max brunsfeldtree-sitter's creator on tree-sitter inside zed — syntax-aware editing as the payoff of the decade-old side project.
- 2023-06-14we've decided to open source zed… on zed · post, zed blog · nathan sobo'building a platform that open sources itself' — the decision announced seven months ahead of the relicensing, staged so the community could watch it happen on zed.
- 2023-06-28introducing the assistant · post, zed blog · the benchthe assistant panel — an llm conversation as a plain editable buffer, the text-document ux that later defines the agent panel.
text is the ultimate user interface
- 2024-01-17introducing channels · post, zed blog · the benchirwin's channels launch — link-shareable collab rooms that become the company's own office and the direct ancestor of delta's shared workspaces.
- 2024-01-24zed is now open source · essay, zed blog · nathan sobothe relicensing post — copyleft for the editor and server, permissive apache-2 for gpui, proprietary code meant to stay 'a tiny fraction.' sell services, not the editor.
we're never going to show you a banner ad in your code editor, and if we do, you can always build zed from source
1,576 points, 601 comments on hn - 2024-01-25ownership and data flow in gpui · essay, zed blog · nathan sobothe gpui internals pair — ownership and data flow, then the metal-pipeline post with scandurra on holding 120 fps. the 'zed decoded' register applied to the company's own framework.
- 2024-04-18extensible language support in zed — part 1 · essay, zed blog · max brunsfeldthe wasm/wit extension architecture with marshall bowers — sandboxed, tree-sitter-grammar-carrying, deliberately narrower than atom's anything-goes packages: 'a more conservative approach with our apis to preserve our core values.'
- 2025-02-13zed now predicts your next edit with zeta · post, zed blog · the benchedit prediction on zeta — open weights and an open dataset on hugging face, opt-in training telemetry. the open-model answer to copilot-style prediction.516 points, 290 comments on hn
- 2025-06-12the case for software craftsmanship in the era of vibes · essay, zed blog · nathan sobo'the case for software craftsmanship in the era of vibes' — sobo's defense of the hand-built stack while the industry pivots to generated code.
- 2025-07-23you can now disable all ai features in zed · post, zed blog · the bench`disable_ai: true` — the setting that answers a year of requests for a global ai kill switch, covered as a concession to a real constituency.577 points, 269 comments on hn
- 2025-08-20sequoia backs zed's vision for collaborative coding · post, zed blog · nathan sobothe series b post that doubles as deltadb's first public description — the memo idea from xray, resurfaced as the company's stated reason to exist.
a new kind of operation-based version control that incrementally tracks the evolution of your code with edit-level granularity
450 points, 325 comments on hn - 2025-08-27bring your own agent to zed — featuring gemini cli · essay, zed blog · nathan sobothe acp launch — an open json-rpc protocol so external agents plug into any editor the way lsp plugged in language intelligence; google's gemini cli as reference agent.
just as the language server protocol unbundled language intelligence from monolithic ides
175 points on hn - 2025-10-15windows when? windows now · post, zed blog · max brunsfeld'windows when? windows now' — the ga post that closes the two-year question, on a hand-built directx 11 backend after the vulkan attempt failed.548 points, 365 comments on hn
- 2025-11-13zed is our office · essay, zed blog · the benchthe dogfooding essay — the whole remote company runs all-hands inside zed channels, the collaboration thesis lived rather than marketed.627 points, 331 comments on hn
- 2026-04-29zed is 1.0 · essay, zed blog · nathan sobothe 1.0 essay — over a million lines of code, 'hundreds of thousands of developers' daily (self-reported), acp agents from claude to cursor, and zed for business announced alongside.
1.0 doesn't mean 'done'. it also doesn't mean 'perfect'. it means we've reached a tipping point where most developers can quickly feel at home in zed
2,153 points, 690 comments on hn — the largest zed thread ever - 2026-05-05we're not building ai features for the money · essay, zed blog · the benchirwin's direct response to 'zed's focus is on ai because that's where the money's going' — the economics disclosed, the long-term bet named: monetize the collaborative workspace, not the editor.
we were selling tokens at a loss to most paying ai users until we switched to token-based billing
skeptical hn reception - 2026-06-11software is made between commits · essay, zed blog · nathan sobo'software is made between commits' — the deltadb thesis: every operation addressable, worktree and conversation versioned together, git-compatible. the 2018 memo idea, grown up.
so in 2021, we founded zed to move beyond the constraints of commits
529 points, 314 comments on hn - 2026-08-12introducing delta · post, zed blog · nathan sobothe delta private-beta post — the multiplayer agent-review environment as a separate app, not a zed feature, so the editor's hundred-thousands of daily users aren't disrupted.
delta keeps code and conversations connected
- 2026-09-01xanadu was waiting for agents · essay, zed blog · nathan sobo'xanadu was waiting for agents' — sobo's ted nelson essay framing delta's threads inside the docuverse lineage: transclusion-era ideas whose moment arrived with agents.
- 2026-09-16replace prs with delta — now in public beta · post, zed blog · nathan sobothe public-beta post — prs disabled on delta's own repo, '33 of us have landed 570 changes to main' (self-reported), threads as 'the new fundamental unit of software development.'
it seems like everyone is in a race to replace github right now
the team
- the bench~40 people on the september 2026 roster, remote across ~12 countries: mikayla maki (summer-2022 intern who built the terminal emulator, now the agent-era voice), conrad irwin (joined 2023; created ruby's pry; ex-cto of superhuman; the ai-skeptic essayist leading deltadb), richard feldman (roc creator, 'elm in action,' software unscripted), rust-analyzer's kirill bulatov and team lead lukas wirth, ex-zig linker author jakub konka, piotr osiewicz, marshall bowers (extensions), anthony eid (community debugger lead turned hire), ben kunkle, agus zubiaga, cole miller, smit barmase, ben brandt, eric holk (early rust team alum), martin ye (ex-sweep), oleksiy syvokon, tom houlé, and windows platform lead '@localcc'. leadership: andrew mitchell (head of engineering, ex-hashicorp/tailscale vp eng), lena (open source), john swanson (security, ~a decade at github), morgan krey (ops), esther trapadoux (community), franciska dethlefsen (marketing), danilo leal (design), maría craig (pm).
- the alumnireconstructed from linkedin and blog bylines — completeness not guaranteed. thorsten ball (swe jan 2024–jan 2025) ran the zed decoded interview series and the canonical 'we have to start over' founder postmortem; returned to sourcegraph and co-founded amp. nate butler (lead designer jul 2021–aug 2025) designed the first zed.dev site; now at github next. julia risley held community/ops bylines on the early weekly posts.
- the backersroot ventures, matchstick ventures, and v1.vc at the ~$2.5m seed (no public lead); redpoint ventures (patrick chase, erica brescia) led the $10m series a with angels dylan field, tom preston-werner, spencer kimball, rahul vohra, and todd goldberg; sequoia (sonya huang, james flynn) led the $32m series b citing '150k active developers each month' (self-reported).
interviews and talks
- 2024-02-12we have to start over: from atom to zed · zed blogthorsten ball's three-founder postmortem — the canonical atom→zed account: sobo's 2017 journaling revelation, the pathfinder/sdf rendering detours, raph levien's rust writing as the nudge.
- 2024-01-23why the big rewrite? · zed blogball × founders on why a rewrite at all — the companion piece to the february postmortem.
- 2023-03-15goodbye atom. hello zed. · the changelog #531'goodbye atom. hello zed.' — the first long-form founder interview, on beta day: mission, gpui, business model, multiplayer.
- 2024-03-01zed's secret sauce · changelog & friends #33'zed's secret sauce' — the post-open-source check-in: extensions roadmap, community response, the 'embracing ai' segment.
- 2024-05-04native uis without electron · software unscripted #90'native uis without electron' — richard feldman interviews sobo on software unscripted, a year before feldman joined the company.
- 2024-06-05building the zed text editor · developer voiceskris jenkins interviews sobo on building zed — the mid-2024 state of the stack.
- 2025-05-07building zed's agentic editing · the changelog #640'building zed's agentic editing' — sobo on the agent panel, 'open source, the hard way,' and the business model, published on launch day.
- 2026the workflow of the future with zed · syntax #1029'the workflow of the future with zed' — sobo on rust, gpui, and what happens to editors once agents write most of the code; the deltadb/delta pitch on the mainstream dev-podcast circuit.
- 2026zed 1.0: gpui, rust, and the future of native apps · podrocketmikayla maki on 'zed 1.0: gpui, rust, and the future of native apps' — the 2022 intern who built the terminal now carrying the agent-era story.
- 2022-05-05collaborative coding at the speed of light · youtube'zed: collaborative coding at the speed of light' — the first public demo, promising a private alpha in the coming weeks.
- 2017-12-11tree-sitter: a new parsing system for programming tools · galois tech talk'tree-sitter: a new parsing system for programming tools' — the galois talk given while github wired tree-sitter into github.com and atom.
the philosophy
themes tracked across the writing: ai as a collaboration problem, collaboration close to code, beyond commits, open source as strategy, own the whole stack, speed as a moral obligation, the atom reckoning.
- 2020–2021the undocumented ip separationthe warp ip question — sobo took the in-progress zed codebase into warp when he joined at the end of 2020, then left ~three months later to found zed industries. how the ip was separated is not documented in any public source.treated here as a known gap, not a resolved fact — the only account is sobo's own founding narrative.
- 2023–the contributor-to-employee pipelinehiring through github — the 'hired through github' program turned contributors into employees (fenner, evers, eid, barmase, and others), which cuts both ways: it rewards real contributors, and it deepens the argument that the cla consolidates community work into company control.zed frames it as the open-source flywheel; critics read it beside the cla as community labor the company can relicense. both readings are on the record; the ledger keeps them separate.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.