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How Ry Walker Pivoted Tembo to an AI Developer Teammate With 30 Paying Customers

Ry Walker explains why he left Astronomer after taking secondary, and how Tembo turns requests into pull requests that engineers review.

Ry Walker · Tembo

Published August 8, 2025
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What you’ll learn

Ry Walker, founder and CEO of Tembo and co-founder of Astronomer, explains why he took secondary liquidity and left Astronomer in 2022. He describes Tembo, an AI developer teammate that turns requests into pull requests for engineers to review, its pay-as-you-go pricing, and early traction of 2,000 sign ups and about 30 paying customers two months after the pivot.

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Key moments

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Taking secondary liquidity and leaving

“offered a chance to sell my shares in secondary at our series b, series c rounds. You know, that was... This was the ZERP era, and I said yes.”
Watch at 03:14

Pay-as-you-go credits over subscriptions

“We started with just pay as you go. We don't want a subscription to get in the way of, usage.”
Watch at 09:02

Aiming for Fortune 50 accounts

“We'll we'll have million dollar a year customers. We have Fortune 50 prospect right now that, you know, they have nothing like this.”
Watch at 12:06

Merged pull requests as the key metric

“one metric that matters to me is merge pull requests. You know? So, basically, when a developer accepts it, that's that's the end of the value chain.”
Watch at 15:09

Go-to-market as the new moat

“if I had a squad of, you know, 200 sellers selling our product, I don't care how good your product is. It's hard to hard to beat us”
Watch at 18:28

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About the speaker

Ry Walker

Founder & CEO · Tembo

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