Freestyle's CEO Runs His Cloud From a House — Ben Swerdlow on Agent VMs

Ben Swerdlow is CEO and co-founder of Freestyle, which builds Linux VMs for AI agents. He joins Abhi Aiyer to explain why he refuses to call them sandboxes. Freestyle runs on bare metal in a house. There is duplicated internet, a battery, a backup kerosene generator, a fingerprint-protected door, and a hole cut in a wall. The move followed a $45,000 cloud bill and the discovery that an old computer outperformed the cloud version of an early prototype. Ben's advice to most of the audience is not to use his product. But he draws the line at execution time and names the case where a sandbox is simply the better tool. His path to VMs ran through two abandoned products. A database engine built at Apple in evenings and carried through an entire YC batch was killed in November 2024 after an early o3 demo. A serverless JavaScript runtime with 10ms cold starts came next, and nobody wanted it. You'll also learn why Freestyle moved off Firecracker and what rust-vmm makes possible, the destructive-snapshot problem that caused Ben real pain, and why stripped-down kernels break on Supabase.