The Story of Graphite: Building the Future of Code Review for Fast-Moving Teams

The Story of Graphite: Building the Future of Code Review for Fast-Moving Teams

Some of the most successful products start as solutions to internal problems. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tomas Reimers shared how Graphite emerged from the team’s own need for better code review tools, eventually growing into a platform that’s reshaping how fast-moving teams handle software development.

An Unexpected Beginning March 2020 wasn’t an obvious time to leave a stable job at Facebook to start a company. As Tomas recalls, “I remember very vividly that week, my manager was like, you know, there’s like, some very strange things happening in the world. You sure you want to leave the company?” But Tomas was determined: “You can’t retain me. I’m going to go start this company.”

The original plan wasn’t even focused on code review. Fresh from Facebook’s mobile infrastructure team, Tomas and his co-founders – two close friends from college – initially aimed to build mobile infrastructure tools for startups. As Tomas explains, “I left, I was like, there’s a lot of space to do this out in the world for other startups.”

The Pivot That Changed Everything While working on their original idea, the team built internal code review tools to improve their own development process. Then came a pivotal moment in summer 2021: Fabricator, a popular code review platform, announced its shutdown. The team noticed something interesting in Facebook alumni chats – developers were desperately seeking alternatives.

“At the time, we’re working on something else entirely,” Tomas shares. “And we’re like, ‘hey, we have this tooling. Does anyone want it?'” The response surprised them. Instead of wanting an open-source solution, large companies were specifically requesting a hosted version.

From Experiment to Enterprise What started as a 20-user experiment quickly grew beyond expectations. “We ended up with 38 users because we had 38 people write into us and be like, I absolutely need this tool,” Tomas recalls. By November 2021, before their official waitlist launch, they had 68 users through word of mouth alone.

The waitlist launch brought another surprise. “We were expecting 500 sign ups. We ended up with 3500,” Tomas shares. All from a single Hacker News post, demonstrating the pent-up demand for better code review tools.

Building with the Community Rather than rushing to scale, Graphite took an unusual approach – maintaining their waitlist to ensure quality. Their users became active participants in product development. “We have users who have written Chrome extensions to edit our site to be exactly what they want, and then they send us that Chrome extension,” Tomas explains. This level of engagement helped validate their approach while improving the product.

The Vision Ahead Today, with around 2,000 weekly active users, Graphite’s ambitions extend far beyond code review. They aim to democratize the development practices of tech giants. As Tomas describes their mission: “What we really want to do is we want to bring the speed that these big companies can iterate and develop with and the safety and quality that they get from that too… and provide that to everyone.”

Looking ahead, Graphite sees code review as just the beginning of a larger platform play. “Code Review is most interesting to us because I think Code Review is almost this gateway into the rest of the developer platform,” Tomas explains. Their goal is to bring the sophisticated development tools previously only available at major tech companies to teams of all sizes, helping them move faster while maintaining quality.

This vision of democratizing enterprise-grade development tools positions Graphite at the forefront of a shifting software development landscape – one where teams of any size can develop with the speed and confidence of tech giants.