# antithesis: people

> will wilson, dave scherer, and the foundationdb diaspora — who they are, what they wrote, and what they believe.

## the people

- will wilson (ceo): cofounder and ceo. yale ba in mathematics and philosophy — abstract math (representation theory, large cardinals); thought cs 'problems were already solved.' co-founded computational biodynamics right after high school — a finite-element model of the human brainstem for spinal-cord-injury diagnostics, irb-approved studies, dod grants. joined foundationdb in april 2013 (not a cofounder — a common mis-description), worked the simulation harness, led the document layer, gave the 2014 strange loop talk. apple, then google, 'then a few other places.' founded antithesis january 2018. 'i was actually a testing skeptic when i joined foundationdb.' (sources: [wilsons canonical dst talk + his fdb-era bio (biotech start, yale math/philosophy)](https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2014/testing-distributed-systems-w-slash-deterministic-simulation.html), [wilsons own cv: computational biodynamics, fdb document layer, apple/google](https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-wilson-330276112), [company timeline (2009 fdb](https://antithesis.com/company/about/), [i was actually a testing skeptic when i joined foundationdb](https://rootly.com/humans-of-reliability/will-wilson-antithesis), [s&t transcript summary: math background, hypervisor-level determinism rationale](https://newsfilter.io/interviews/why-testing-is-hard-and-how-to-fix-it-with-will-wilson-c5e308c3-d51b-5dd9-829d-6c05e774a8f3))
- dave scherer (founder): cofounder. started coding at five on a 286; won the first independent games festival with a high-school game; created vpython at cmu; co-founded visual sciences (2000) — where he first built a model-based simulation to hunt tail-latency bugs — then foundationdb (2009) as chief architect, the originator of the simulation idea. co-founded antithesis in 2018. title drift: forbes and bloomberg list him as cto, but antithesis.com lists him simply as 'co-founder' — collins holds the cto title. (sources: [scherer bio: vpython, igf win, visual sciences 2000, fdb principal architect](https://people.equilar.com/bio/person/dave-scherer-antithesis/66894169), [carl sverre (graft) customer account](https://sqlsync.dev/posts/antithesis-driven-testing/), [company timeline (2009 fdb](https://antithesis.com/company/about/), [cofounder bios/ages](https://www.forbes.com/companies/antithesis/), [lists scherer as antithesis cto (title drift noted)](https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/person/24943446))
- nick lavezzo (team): coo. foundationdb co-founder and coo; visual sciences finance and ops before that; scherer's childhood friend since first grade. on hn he personally fielded the jepsen question: 'aphyr / jepsen never tested fdb because, as he tweeted, their testing appears to be waaaay more rigorous than mine.' (sources: [company timeline (2009 fdb](https://antithesis.com/company/about/), [lavezzo profile](https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/foundationdb-how-this-startup-got-funded-by-ron-conway/), [1,179 pts / 418 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356920))
- ben collins (team): cto (previously vp engineering). foundationdb's first engineering hire — worked on flow and the deterministic simulation framework; at apple led the fdb team 'from acquisition to core cloud data store' and launched it as open source; then facebook; then 'rejoined his friends will and dave.' gatech and mitre background. (sources: [linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-collins-97843884), [collins bio: led the foundationdb team from acquisition to core cloud data store](https://people.equilar.com/bio/person/ben-collins-antithesis/66894163), [company timeline (2009 fdb](https://antithesis.com/company/about/))
- the engineering bench (team): named engineers in the public corpus: alex pshenichkin (snapshotting talk), marco primi (the nats post), david edelstein (the castlevania post), marcus hodgson (forward-deployed; the etcd kubecon talk), connor mckee (professional services), phil eaton — who asked for a foss tier in the launch thread, wrote the dst explainer that seeded the lobste.rs debate, and by august 2025 was an employee writing the metroid post — and david maciver with liam devoe, the hypothesis creator and maintainer, hired november 2025 to build hegel. (sources: [time-machine/multiverse debugging launch](https://antithesis.com/blog/multiverse_debugging/), [nats/synadia raft data-loss bug hunt (marco primi)](https://antithesis.com/blog/2025/synadia/), [sometimes_each guidance](https://antithesis.com/blog/castlevania/), [cncf-sponsored etcd collaboration](https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/keeping-cloud-afloat/), [this is actually how we figured this stuff out — nes as r&d for the explorer](https://antithesis.com/blog/2025/metroid/), [hegel launch](https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/hegel/))
- the backers (team): amplify partners, tamarack global, first in ventures led the seed; lenny pruss (amplify) joined the board and clay fisher (spark) observes. angels: michael walrath and howard lerman at seed; patrick collison, dwarkesh patel, and sholto douglas at series a — tech-culture figures, not typical testing buyers. jane street is both customer and lead investor. aggregators add potluck ventures and bluewing ventures. (sources: [launch](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/antithesis-launches-out-of-stealth-to-revolutionize-software-reliability-302060173.html), [$30m amplify+spark](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/antithesis-marks-one-year-anniversary-with-customer-growth-new-funding-company-expansion-302375489.html), [$105m series a](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jane-street-leads-antithesiss-105m-series-a-to-make-deterministic-simulation-testing-the-new-standard-302631076.html), [round history](https://www.caplight.com/company/antithesis))

## writings

- 2014-09 — testing distributed systems w/ deterministic simulation (talk, wilson, strange loop): the canonical public account of foundationdb's deterministic simulation — and already honest about its two failure modes, a decade before antithesis productized them. [source](https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2014/testing-distributed-systems-w-slash-deterministic-simulation.html)
  > "the simulation is not brutal enough; we may just misunderstand the contracts of the operating systems"
- 2023 — testing a single-node, single threaded, distributed system written in 1985 (talk, wilson, systems distributed): the 'super stealth talk' at the inaugural systems distributed: antithesis's explorer autonomously beats super mario bros. — a 1985 cartridge treated as a single-node distributed system. published april 2024, after the launch. [source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3HwXlQPCEU)
- 2024-02-13 — is something bugging you? (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): the launch manifesto — foundationdb's origin story, the five-and-a-half-year stealth apology, and the claim that autonomous testing is fuzzing, pbt, network simulation, and rare-event simulation seen by different blind men. [source](https://antithesis.com/blog/is_something_bugging_you/)
  > "before we even started writing the database, we first wrote a fully-deterministic event-based network simulation that our database could plug into… even for the weirdest and rarest bugs, we got infinity 'tries' at figuring it out."
  > "there's a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk here man"
- 2024-02-28 — announcing the antithesis open source giveaway program (post, wilson, antithesis blog): the open source giveaway program — free antithesis testing for qualifying oss projects. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2024-04-17 — how antithesis finds bugs (with help from the super mario bros.) (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): publishes the stealth systems-distributed talk: how the exploration engine learned to beat super mario, and what that has to do with finding bugs. [source](https://antithesis.com/blog/sdtalk/)
- 2024-05-21 — the worst bug we faced at antithesis (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): the company's own rarest bug: a hypervisor crash at ~1 per 2,000 machine-hours — a dogfooding story where the determinism underneath still let them replay it. [source](https://antithesis.com/blog/worst_bug/)
- 2024-07-10 — at the mountains of madness (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): a lovecraft-titled essay in the launch-year cadence; 153 points, 85 comments on hn. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2024-09-10 — debugging in the multiverse (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): the multiverse-debugging launch: rewind a deterministic universe mid-failure, fork timelines, ship the time machine to every customer. [source](https://antithesis.com/blog/multiverse_debugging/)
  > "if you can perfectly simulate something, then you can also perfectly simulate it up until 5 seconds from the end. then we can crack open that universe and give you a bash terminal inside of it."
- 2025-02-13 — how to make your own luck (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): the one-year retrospective — concedes six and a half years of stealth hurt sales velocity ('yeah, there's no website, but i swear it's a real company') while defending it as the price of deep r&d. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2025-04-30 — antithesis for founders (post, wilson, antithesis blog): the founder package — an admission that they 'had to turn away some incredible people and companies who wanted to buy a small amount of testing,' and the workaround. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2025-05-22 — fix the new things first! (post, wilson, antithesis blog): triage philosophy: fix the new bugs first — the versioning argument for continuous simulation. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2025-07-02 — pre-observability (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): coins 'pre-observability' — applying post-incident observability techniques to pre-deployment simulated traces. debuted at the bugbash keynote with the etcd bug demo. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2025-12-03 — when your customer leads your series a (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): the series a essay: jane street 'had been very happy antithesis customers for a while, but we'd always honored their request not to tell the world about it.' cites the poem 'the calf-path' as company culture. [source](https://antithesis.com/blog/2025/series_a/)
  > "nobody else has a customer lead their series a because nobody else gets offers like that"
- 2025-08-22 — optimizing our way through metroid (essay, bench, antithesis blog): phil eaton's metroid post — 'this is actually how we figured this stuff out': the nes series was r&d for the exploration engine, not marketing garnish. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2026-03-06 — a fighting retreat (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): strategy-as-retreat essay in the 2026 cadence. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2026-04-16 — what are skiplists good for? (essay, wilson, antithesis blog): the data-structure essay that went bigger than the funding news — 290 points on hn. [source](https://antithesis.com/author/will-wilson/)
- 2025 — why testing is hard and how to fix it (podcast, wilson, signals and threads): jane street's own podcast, hosted by ron minsky — the customer interviewing the vendor, months before jane street led the series a. [source](https://signalsandthreads.com/why-testing-is-hard-and-how-to-fix-it/)
- 2025 — building software that survives contact with reality (podcast, wilson, complex systems): patio11's interview: dst as 'fuzzing for the world,' the aws parallel-invention concession, crowdstrike-outage framing. [source](https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/software-testing-with-will-wilson/)
- 2025-09 — will wilson on deterministic simulation testing (podcast, wilson, software engineering radio 685): the dst deep-dive episode — recounts scherer's visual-sciences simulation prehistory and the hypervisor bet. [source](https://se-radio.net/2025/09/se-radio-685-will-wilson-on-deterministic-simulation-testing/)
- 2025-09-10 — from unit tests to whole universe tests (video, wilson, developer voices): kris jenkins interview — unit tests to whole universes. [source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xJ4maWhSNU)
- 2025 — he thinks ai code may break everything (podcast, wilson, core memory ep. 59): ashlee vance's interview — 'he thinks ai code may break everything'; confirms five and a half years of stealth. [source](https://podscan.fm/podcasts/core-memory/episodes/he-thinks-ai-code-may-break-everything-ep-59-will-wilson)
- 2025 — the incident you never had (interview, wilson, rootly): the humans-of-reliability profile — the post-apple wandering and the hundred-dollar-bill retelling. [source](https://rootly.com/humans-of-reliability/will-wilson-antithesis)
  > "i was actually a testing skeptic when i joined foundationdb"
- 2024 — from google to a $47m moonshot (interview, wilson, category visionaries): the category-creation go-to-market interview — from google to a $47m moonshot. [source](https://www.frontlines.io/from-google-to-a-47m-moonshot-how-will-wilson-is-creating-the-category-of-autonomous-testing/)
- 2025-12-08 — will wilson on tbpn (interview, wilson, tbpn): tbpn interview days after the series a — the customer→investor conversion framed as 'a reasonable signal about how the product performs in high-stakes production environments.'
- 2026-04-09 — keeping the cloud afloat with deterministic simulation testing (talk, bench, kubecon): marcus hodgson and etcd's marek siarkowicz on the cncf-sponsored collaboration — deterministic simulation inside a release train. [source](https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/keeping-cloud-afloat/)

## controversies

- 2015–2026 — the co-founder drift: the 'foundationdb co-founder' drift — wilson is routinely described as a foundationdb co-founder, but fdb was founded in 2009 by scherer, rosenthal, and lavezzo; wilson joined april 2013. scherer's own title drifts too: cto in forbes and bloomberg, bare 'co-founder' on antithesis.com, where collins holds cto. reaction: antithesis's own timeline is explicit and correct; the mis-attribution lives entirely in secondary coverage and press shorthand. (sources: [company timeline (2009 fdb](https://antithesis.com/company/about/), [apple acquisition](https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/apple-acquires-durable-database-company-foundationdb/), [cofounder bios/ages](https://www.forbes.com/companies/antithesis/), [lists scherer as antithesis cto (title drift noted)](https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/person/24943446))
- 2018–2024 — six years of no website: the stealth-length question — 'it's pretty weird for a startup to remain in stealth for over five years'; 'they stayed in stealth mode because they didn't have anything worth showing for 5 years.' wilson's own retrospective concedes the cost: the repeated 'yeah, there's no website, but i swear it's a real company' conversation hurt sales velocity. reaction: wilson's defense is that deep r&d was the point — the determinator couldn't be iterated in public; the launch-day customer list (mongodb, palantir, ethereum) is the counter-evidence. (sources: [1,179 pts / 418 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356920), [how to make your own luck](https://antithesis.com/blog/2025/lessons_from_launch/), [ashlee vance interview](https://podscan.fm/podcasts/core-memory/episodes/he-thinks-ai-code-may-break-everything-ep-59-will-wilson))
- 2015–2026 — the one-bug legend: the 'one user-reported bug' lore — antithesis's about page formalizes 'we only shipped one user-reported bug before apple acquired foundationdb,' repeated elsewhere as 'one or two.' it's self-reported company mythology, now load-bearing for the product claim. reaction: fans quote it back as proof the approach works ('living life surrounded by a force field'); the number itself has never been audited. (sources: [company timeline (2009 fdb](https://antithesis.com/company/about/), [investor-authored dst primer](https://www.amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/a-dst-primer-for-unit-test-maxxers), [1,179 pts / 418 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356920))

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

Canonical page: https://hraness.com/antithesis/people


Published by @ben in profile revision 1.
Original document: https://hraness.com/antithesis/people
Original credited author: Hraness
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

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````