Abhi Aiyer of Mastra on raising from 120+ builders and the power of community

In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Abhi Aiyer, CTO and co-founder of Mastra, talks about the power of community and explains why they raised their seed round from 120+ founders. He also gets into how making moves beats perfect execution and his hiring process. Lastly, Abhi shares why TypeScript is winning the AI war and how education became their secret weapon. Follow us on X: https://x.com/dpl_pod Episode notes: https://evilmartians.com/events/podcast-abhi-aiyer-mastra 00:00 Introduction and birthday celebration 00:49 TypeScript AI Conf and major announcements 02:53 Education as a pillar for framework adoption 04:30 Converting open source to paid customers 06:55 Optimizing onboarding and developer experience 08:45 Handling user feedback and criticism 09:51 Moving fast in the AI wave and the pressure of getting ahead of the curve 11:56 YC experience and the agents batch 15:19 Why TypeScript for AI agents 19:40 Why Mastra decided to do a coalition from builders (120+ people) 22:23 Building culture through friendships 25:25 The toughest part of being a founder and CTO 27:54 Working in an uncertain environment and planning a roadmap 31:49 The devtools community at SF 32:48 Advice for new builders 35:31 Hardest-earned founder lessons 38:30 The YC revelation: location and community matters 40:20 Mastra in five years 41:13 Warm fuzzies: first agent in 5 minutes 41:46 Getting started with Mastra Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com Links: Mastra: https://mastra.ai Abhi Aiyer on X: https://x.com/abhiaiyer Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en