[Video] Railway Founder Jake Cooper on Building with Conviction, Not Consensus
An intimate conversation with Jake Cooper, Founder of Railway, and Schuster Tanger, Co-Founding Partner at TQ Ventures. TQ is proud to have led Railway’s $100M Series B, with Schuster joining the board.
In this conversation, Schuster sits down with Jake to trace the deep motivations behind Railway’s ambition to build a new way to simplify developers’ infrastructure stack from servers to observability with a single, scalable, easy-to-use platform.
What starts with childhood stories of hanging out in Palmer Lucky’s internet forums, hacking on games, and early experimentation quickly blossoms into a broader discussion about agency, conviction, and how personal values shape the way companies are built.
Reflecting on what first drew him to computers, Jake describes it as simply wanting “to have a sort of impact on a thing… to push it a little bit,” whether that meant writing a small program or seeing “how much you can cut up a Nintendo 64 board before it stops working.” That instinct to probe systems until you understand their limits still defines how he approaches product, teams, and risk today.
Much of the conversation centers on conviction as a prerequisite for doing truly ambitious work. Jake explains why he chose to be a solo founder despite conventional wisdom, saying, “It’s very, very difficult to make large bets if you don’t really, really believe the foundation on which you’re sitting.” Rather than borrowing playbooks, he describes building his own internal framework over time by reading widely, discarding most advice, and keeping only what holds up through real-world mistakes. “My goal has not been a successful enough company,” he says. “It’s to dent the universe.”
That same philosophy shows up in how Railway is built and run. Jake talks about designing for hyper-autonomy in a fully remote team, where “it’s okay to break shit, but it’s not okay to be guilty of inaction,” and about creating an environment where exceptional people can do the best work of their lives. Looking ahead, the conversation turns to AI, vibe coding, and the rise of what Jake calls the “10,000x engineer.” In his words, “writing code by hand is dead,” and the companies that win will be the ones that remove bottlenecks and let creation compound safely and quickly.
The conversation also touches on the emerging Railway-Claude Code loop, as Schuster coins it, and how AI-driven development lowers the barriers to entry for building and shipping software. By democratizing ideation and execution, this shift expands who gets to create and experiment, a change Jake sees as broadly positive for both builders and society at large.
At its core, this is not just a conversation about Railway as a product, but about building with intention, trusting deep conviction over consensus, and treating company-building as a long-term craft rather than a short-term outcome.
We hope you enjoy the conversation.