Startups on Rails in Past, Present and Future–Irina Nazarova, RailsConf 2025

Transcript

1. RAIL NF IRINA NAZAROVA STARTUPS ON RAILS IN PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
2. 2 ON THE NEWS
3. 3 Ryan King Co-founder&CTO San Francisco IPO
4. 4 Ryan King Co-founder&CTO San Francisco plans an IPO March 3, 2025 June 12, 2025
5. 5 Stack: Ruby, Sinatra, Active Record, WebAssembly, Go, Rust filed for IPO Dylan Field San Francisco June, 2025
6. Albert Pai and Eric Simmons Co-founders San Francisco 6 Stack: Remix, Wasm, Anthtopic, Rails $ 40M ARR in 5 months May, 2025
7. 7 Albert Pai and Eric Simmons Co-founders San Francisco ran world’s largest hackathon June, 2025
8. 8 Jack Sharkey Co-founder, CTO New York Stack: Rails, Next.js reached $ 1.4B transaction volume June, 2025 400000000 800000000 1200000000 1600000000 April 2021 April 2022 April 2023 April 2024 April 2025
9. Nikita Savrov co-founder&CTO Maryland, US 9 Feb, 2025 raised $ 150M🤯
10. Front page of HN Carmine Paolino Author, founder Chatwithwork Berlin 10 March, 2025
11. 11 YC partner pitches Rails March, 2025
12. 12 SO, WHERE ARE WE? Startups on Rails are growing Ruby open source is getting popular Investors support Rails
13. 13 Peak of in fl ated expectations Visibility of Technology Trough of disillusionment Slope of enlightenm ent Plateau of productivity Pragmatic adoption Gartner Hype Cycle Time
14. 14 Peak of in fl ated expectations Visibility of Technology Trough of disillusionment Slope of enlightenm ent Plateau of productivity Pragmatic adoption Gartner Hype Cycle Time PAST FUTURE ✨ PRESENT
15. 15 Hi! I’m Irina (Ira) Nazarova CEO at Evil Martians Co-founder at AnyCable Org of SF Ruby meetup and…
17. 17 LET’S TALK!
19. 19 ➡ Ruby on Rails startup ➡ YC S08 ⚡ ➡ WebSockets powered by Brad Gessler Co-founder San Francisco 🔌 Terminalwire beautifulruby.com
23. 23 PLEASURE TO MEET YOU!
24. 24 STARTUPS ON RUBY/RAILS AND THEIR TECH FOUNDERS
26. 26 LET’S GO BACK IN TIME!
27. Rails 1.0 15-min blog by DHH goes viral Capistrano RailsConf Rails 2 Rspec Devise Resque Rails 3, merged w Merb Bundler, Factory Bot Y Combinator Shopify Meraki Twitter Heroku Zendesk Nitro (Powerhome) Github Airbnb Twitter starts migrating o f Stripe Doximity Heroku acq by Salesforce 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 27 90% of YC batches are on Rails–hype
28. Sprockets Sidekiq Rails 4. Turbolinks Gitlab Intercom Chime Figma Gusto Instacart Coinbase Meraki acq by CIsco Twitter IPO Zendesk IPO Shopify IPO Uscreen 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 28 Astrologists: start a Rails company!
29. Rails 5. Action Cable, Stimulus AnyCable Falcon TestProf Sorbet Rails 6 Packwerk Stackblitz (future bolt.new) 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 29 De fl ated expectations and visibility Companies start investing in the ecosystem
30. Rails 7, Hotwire YJIT Neighbor Rails 8 Hotwire Native Gitlab IPO Coinbase IPO Doximity IPO Whop GIthub acq by Microsoft Instacart IPO Chime IPO Figma fi led for IPO 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 30 Growing adoption and visibility
31. 31 BACK TO THE PRESENT
35. 35 Startup Jobs
36. 36 WHY RUBY AND RAILS?
37. 37 “I LOVE RUBY” Dylan Field Ruby
38. 38 “SOMETHING I SPENT HALF A YEAR BUILDING WITH JAVA, I BUILT IN ONLY 2 MONTHS… WHEN LEARNING RAILS” Thiago Diniz Time to Market
39. 39 “AFTER TRYING SCALA AND OTHER FRAMEWORKS, RAILS ALLOWED ME TO FOCUS ON BUSINESS LOGIC RATHER THAN CONFIGURATION” Bjarke Vad Andersen Convention over configuration
40. 40 “RAILS SERVED US THE BEST WHEN WE WERE MAKING A LOT OF TWISTS AND TURNS, FIGURING OUT OUR PRODUCT.” Ryan King Perfect for rapid iterations
41. 41 “RAILS IS THE GROWN - UP IN THE ROOM: IT IS BATTLE - TESTED WITH YEARS AND YEARS OF CARE PUT INTO IT” Trent Kocurek Battle-Tested Reliability
42. 42 “RAILS DEVS TEND TO TAKE ON PM TASKS AND UNDERSTAND THE BUSINESS NEEDS” Aaron Snyder Entrepreneurial culture
43. 43 “RUBY IS OVER - REPRESENTED IN THE STARTUPS THAT GOT SUCCESSFUL” Kelly Sutton Startup Success Correlation
44. 44 “EVENTUALLY PEOPLE WILL REALIZE THAT THESE SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES HAVE BEEN BUILDING ON RAILS ALL ALONG” Glenn Espinosa Rails is a secret superpower
45. 45 WHAT’S MISSING?
46. 46 WHAT’S IN THE FUTURE?
47. 47 What’s missing ➡ Comprehensive Frontend story–beyond 101 ➡ Rerformance: path to 100ms response time for every Rails app ➡ Ability to hire Ruby engineers ➡ Advocacy for SDKs, etc.
48. 48 TOP-1 MISSING
49. 49 AI Tooling THIS IS STILL EARLY FOR US NO, THIS IS SOOOOO LATE! ⚡ github.com/crmne/ ruby_llm ⚡ github.com/patterns-ai- core/langchainrb ⚡ Anthropic official Ruby SDK ⚡ OpenAI official Ruby SDK Both released in April 2025
50. 50 Code generation for Ruby and Rails AI Tooling ➡ Is the lack of static typing going to be a slowdown? ➡ Quality/maintainability concerns: do we have enough open source code to learn from? ➡ Rails vibe coding story Spoiler: wait for the Martian talk on Wednesday! ⚡ github.com/obie/ claude-on-rails ⚡ github.com/ tidewave-ai/ tidewave_rails
51. 51 MCP tooling How many of the first MCPs are built for Ruby backends? MCP is a “self-documented API” protocol that an LLM-operated system can use to interact with your app Stripe, GitHub, Gitlab, Block! ⚡ github.com/yjacquin/fast-mcp ⚡ github.com/funwarioisii/mcp-rb AI Tooling ➡ Ruby SDK to build an MCP server ➡ MCP generator from Swagger ➡ MCP proxy
52. 52 Integration with AI pipelines AI Tooling Connectivity between Rails monolith and Python services built by data engineers “AI middleware” Data engineering & Data Science Product engineering
53. 53 ⚡ activeagents.ai ⚡ github.com/ fractaledmind/acidic_job ⚡ github.com/ kieranklaassen/leva AI Tooling ➡ Abstractions (What Is An Agent in MVC?) ➡ Infrastructure: long-running, durable, resumable, testable, performant work fl ows with state/memory ➡ Observability as central part of product engineering (Langfuse) ➡ Quality evaluation (evals) ➡ Browser agents Agent tooling
54. 54 Ruby&AI Books ⚡ rubyai.beehiiv.com
55. 55 ⚡ rubyevents.org Last 12 months Ruby conferences: 35 Ruby meetups: 800 Ruby community is on 🔥 today
56. 56 Visibility of Technology PAST FUTURE ✨ Tons of fun Up to us💪 Never Been Better PRESENT
57. 57 “RAILS HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER FOR STARTUPS THAN TODAY!” Irina Nazarova
58. 58 Join… ➡ When: November 19 - 20 ➡ CFP is open till July 13 ➡ Early bird tickets are sold out ➡ Supporter tickets are on sale ➡ General Admission opens on July 21 sfruby.com
60. Thank you! ➡ lu.ma/sfruby Jul 19 Hackathon, Jul 22 Meetup at Figma! ➡ sfruby.com ➡ evilmartians.com ➡ anycable.io ➡ in@evilmartians.com ➡ @inazarova ➡ inazarova.bsky.social