Dear reader, Mandeep here. I moved to the Bay Area about 2 years ago to start building what became Pump Up. We’ve spent those years navigating pivots and keeping our heads down building.
This was probably the right default initially, but creating a company requires more than just coding and shipping. You have to be out there, talking to people - potential users, other founders, and interesting folks in the “scene” to keep abreast of events. We’ve started doing that, “looking up” both in person and online, and have started writing as part of that.
My background - I’ve been working in the dev-tools space for over 15 years or so now, including both in academia and in the (startup) industry. In my DPhil, I undertook research into building programming languages and implementations for computational biologists to run high performance numerical simulations (Ode). From there, I founded NStack, where we built a cloud-first data streaming system in Haskell for data analysts. Then, at Datapane, we built an open-source Python library for data scientists to rapidly build, share and host reports and data applications direct from Jupyter.
At Pump Up, we are building something similar for the AI era - allowing companies to build and host agents that run repeatable, trusted, business processes across their org without being an AI expert.
I hope to cover a couple of themes in this blog:
Building with agents. What we are seeing from the front-lines of building modern agentic systems and factories.
Modern Java at an AI startup. We’re an AI company in SF choosing to build in modern Java in 2026.
Tales from the past. I’ve been building dev tools for well over a decade and have a tonne of lessons learned and stories to share, from Haskell in production to OSS licensing politics, and many more.
I’ll try to write a longer piece once a month, with many random thoughts and hot-takes in between. Happy to chat, you can email me at mg@mandeepgill.net or find me on X (LinkedIn too sometimes, but not regularly). If you’re in SF, always up for a coffee.