The majority of open roles we have right now at Firecrawl are on the go-to-market side. We're still hiring engineers and have no plans to stop. Building a great product remains the obsession, and everything on the GTM side is in service of that but the ratio has shifted in a way that would have been unthinkable a year ago for an AI infrastructure company like ours.
The reason is pretty simple. A growing amount of our code is now AI-written. We use Devin directly in Slack and even built an internal tool called Spring that's a remote Claude Code instance connected to all of our codebases. In about six months, Devin and Spring combined have become the second highest contributor of code to our web app behind my co-founder and CTO Nick, with over 500 commits.
We're not unique here. A quarter of the startups in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch shipped products where 95% of the code was written by AI. This is happening everywhere.
When AI makes every engineer dramatically more productive, you still need great engineers because the ceiling on what a small team can build is so much higher. But the ratio shifts. Now you can ship an amazing product with fewer people, and the bottleneck moves to the things that are harder to replicate like distribution, partnerships, regulation, and trust.
DocuSign is a good case study. The actual technology behind e-signatures is not particularly complex. Anyone could clone the core DocuSign experience in a weekend now, and hundreds probably already have. But DocuSign has the enterprise contracts, the brand trust, the integrations, the muscle memory of millions of people who just associate "sign a document" with that company. They still need engineers to keep the product excellent, but the moat is the relationships and brand, not the code itself.
To be clear, AI is eating go-to-market too. Vercel replaced its 10-person inbound SDR team with a single employee and an AI agent in six weeks and held their conversion rate flat. AI multiplies everything, but right now it's multiplying engineering output faster than anything else.
The moats that matter in a saturated market (distribution, brand, ecosystem partnerships, customer trust) live on the GTM side, whether you're building relationships with people or making sure your product is the one agents reach for.
We're doubling down on this at Firecrawl. We're investing heavily in brand, integrations, partnerships, and building relationships that entrench us in the ecosystem and in people's applications. The biggest problem we're solving right now isn't technical. It's making sure that humans and agents choose Firecrawl over the alternatives that could do something similar.
I don't think this is just us. The ratio of GTM and other non-engineering roles is going up across the industry. The skills that used to be secondary to engineering (selling, partnerships, regulatory strategy, positioning, getting people to actually use your product) are going to be some of the most valuable of the next decade. It's why I feel lucky to be on the GTM side at Firecrawl right now. I'm learning more about what it takes to win in a crowded market than I ever could have in a world where engineering was the bottleneck. The companies that figure this out first, the ones that invest in these roles alongside their engineering teams rather than as an afterthought, are going to have a massive advantage in a market that's about to get very, very crowded.