How to Say No to 90% of Ideas
Railway has 40 people, no sales team until last year and close to $100 million in ARR. Founder Jake Cooper says the trick is saying no to 90% of ideas, and asking why now.
· 8 min read
Jake Cooper, founder and CEO of Railway, interviewed by Nakul Mandan (Knuckle Up with Nakul)
Jake Cooper is the founder and CEO of Railway, a cloud infrastructure company that began in 2020 as a way to provision databases and has since grown into a platform for backends, frontends and AI applications. A former Uber engineer, he started Railway as a solo founder, and it now has about 40 people, a fully remote team and close to $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Railway owns about $90 million of its own hardware and ran a free tier at a loss of about $500,000 a month before pulling it. The company is aiming for 80 to 100 people and about $500 million in revenue next year.
Summary
Jake Cooper runs a 40-person, fully remote company near $100 million in ARR by saying no to about 90% of ideas, and he filters every proposal with one line: why now. He refuses to look at how Stripe or Cursor solved a problem until he has solved it himself, and he builds systems so that every task is done by hand once and then automated. After 4 years with no onboarding, Railway now runs a 6-week plan built on trust, clarity and judgment. Cooper also expects a compute crunch within a few years, as code gets free and the jobs that run it multiply. These signals are from an interview that Nakul Mandan did with Jake Cooper on Knuckle Up with Nakul.
