# Non-Engineers Are Now Shipping Code With Agents | Alli Pope

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Alli Pope says agents are changing how marketing teams work, but developer community and high-taste brands will still set AI tools apart.

- Show: MTS
- Hosts: [Sophia Dew](https://realalpha.app/people/sophia-dew/)
- Guest: [Alli Pope](https://realalpha.app/builders/alli-pope/) is VP of New Media and Startups Marketing at Factory.
- Published: Oct 29, 2026
- Length: 21 min

## The best minutes

- [3:56](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=236) [Nontraditional marketers can differentiate similar products](https://realalpha.app/s/nontraditional-marketers-can-differentiate-similar-products/) (3 min)
- [13:13](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=793) [AI automates routine marketing work, not creative judgment](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-automates-routine-marketing-work-not-creative-judgment/) (3 min)

## Also worth watching

- [6:31](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=391) [Factory's founders and team drew investors into operating roles](https://realalpha.app/s/factorys-founders-and-team-drew-investors-into-operating/) (3 min)

Skip the career-change and hiring backstory, the elementary-school reunion and Stanford anecdotes, and the closing sponsor reads.

## Full analysis: Alli Pope says her marketing team shipped PRs daily

- Pope says her whole Vercel marketing team shipped PRs daily by the time she left.
- That shows a workflow change, not measured productivity; she now markets Factory's engineering product.
- Teams should measure output and rework while keeping human judgment over creative work.

Its 7 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/#analysis), free with an account:

- [15:21](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=921) Daily PRs put technical work inside marketing
- [3:18](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=198) Factory pitches speed to startups and enterprises
- [4:53](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=293) Marketing differentiates companies as products converge
- [14:17](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=857) Agents automate routine work, not creative judgment
- [16:21](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=981) Agent recommendations do not erase brand's role
- [15:43](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=943) Dogfooding reveals workflows, not customer returns
- [6:50](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=410) Investor hires signal conviction, not customer proof

## Summary

Pope moved from venture and product roles into marketing at Vercel, where she helped build the startup program. She and her husband angel-invested in Factory before she joined the company as VP of New Media and Startups Marketing.

Pope says AI-native startups can use Factory to help small teams build faster, while Factory also serves large enterprises. She argues that marketing is becoming more strategic and technical as AI changes workflows and products converge. Agents can take on routine tasks, she says, but creative ideation remains human. She also argues that developer community, word of mouth and brand recognition will matter even when agents recommend tools.

### Minute by minute

- [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=0) **Marketing teams are shipping code.** Pope says her Vercel marketing team had begun shipping PRs daily by the time she left. At Factory, she sees people across the company using the product to streamline work, including a finance leader who is one of its top users.
- [1:20](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=80) **Pope joins a company she backed.** Pope says she moved from venture and product work into marketing at Vercel, where she learned and took on broader responsibilities. She and her husband angel-invested in Factory before she joined as VP of New Media and Startups Marketing.
- [2:50](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=170) **Factory wants to reach AI-native startups.** Pope says Factory has seen strong adoption among large enterprises and is now seeing AI-native startups and earlier-stage companies benefit too. She says the product can help smaller teams move faster and improve engineering speed, efficiency and quality.
- [3:56](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=236) **Marketing is becoming more strategic.** Pope says AI is changing marketing as well as engineering and product, creating room for people with nontraditional backgrounds to experiment. As products become more similar, she sees marketing, developer and founder affinity, and community as ways to distinguish companies. She plans to develop new content and hands-on programs for developers and founders.
- [6:22](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=382) **Investors cite founders and team.** Pope says several Factory investors have joined the company full-time, which was a positive signal as she considered her next role. She points to founders who are mission-driven, humble and supportive, and a low-ego team of ambitious people focused on the product, community and customers.
- [8:04](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=484) **Factory pursues engineering autonomy.** Pope says Factory's mission is to bring autonomy to software engineering by increasing the quality and capacity of code and engineering systems. She sees these products potentially changing how major teams and enterprises operate, without offering a market-size figure.
- [12:05](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=725) **Developer community defines success.** Pope says her focus is bringing Factory to more developers and building the product alongside them. She credits Vercel's developer and startup community with supporting the company's growth and her work on its startup program, and wants to build that kind of community at Factory.
- [13:13](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=793) **AI automates low-leverage marketing.** Pope says AI speeds up her work on documents and early versions of projects, and helps monitor social media; she uses it to automate tasks that are not high-leverage for her. She says AI still produces copy she dislikes and struggles with creative ideas and humor. At Vercel, her whole team was shipping PRs, and she sees people across Factory using its product in their workflows.
- [15:56](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=956) **Brand still shapes tool choice.** Pope says brand and word of mouth will matter even when agents make an initial tool recommendation, because community and recognition influence developers. She says people want to associate with high-taste brands and predicts Factory's brand will grow, with more developers and startups building on it.

## Transcript

MTS, hosted by Sophia Dew, with Alli Pope.

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=0) In my team at Vercel, it's not historically traditional that marketing organizations are shipping PRs on a daily basis. That was something that by the time I left, my whole team was doing. And it's the same at Factory. Actually, that's been a huge observation for me is how much everybody on the team is totally dogfooding the product and they're using it to streamline a lot of their workflows. We just had our head of finance post a long tweet about how he uses it for the finance org. And he's like one of the top users of the company, which you think would mostly be engineers. So it's really, really cool to see. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to MTS.

[0:37](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=37) Today, I am joined by the Ali Pope. She is right now going super viral on X, all because of your new career change. Can you announce a little bit about what you shared online? Yes. So I have just joined Day 3 Factory. Congratulations. Thank you. As VP of New Media and Startups Marketing. So very exciting. Brand new role. Welcome, welcome. So this has been really fun. I know a little bit of the lore, just what I've been seeing on the timeline, is this has kind of been a plan or a scheme in the making early on. I think your CEO was talking to Brexton, your husband, about how do we get Allie on. Tell me a little bit about that process. Like, what was that like? And then why did you ultimately decide to join? Yeah. You know, I think, um, so before this, I was at Vercel. Vercel is an amazing company. I had so much fun there and I learned so much on the job. It actually was the first time that I pivoted into marketing, right? I started out actually on the product side before that I was in venture. Um, and I got to see that company really grow and expand and, and, um, it take a lot more scope on. And that was really exciting.

[1:45](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=105) um and I think that on the flip side too like there's all this exciting movement that I got to see from working with so many startups across the Vercel ecosystem um and so one that I've had my eye on obviously is factory um Brexton my husband and I ended up angel investing in factory and then it was a very small world because Matan and I went to elementary school together Matan the viral post I'm like we can pull it out here like show the post I went home um for my college reunion actually and i pulled out like our old uh elementary school yearbooks and i was like are there any photos because i thought it'd be cute just to show in slack not like post on the internet but are there any photos of us together we were in different grades so there weren't but um there was that one where it's like you know oh for some reason in my head the way it was edited it looks like you guys are next to each other in the year yeah yeah i mean so the the truth is no we were not next to each other slightly different years great photoshop on my um on my side but yes I was like, you guys have different last names.

[2:44](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=164) So the fact that they just like threw you guys, they must have known something like in the stars or something. We were on pages next to each other, but not exactly on the cusp. That's exciting. Okay, so VP of Marketing, what does this mean? How are you trying to position Factory? Yeah, so I think Factory is at a really exciting time right now. The company has had so much success with some of the largest enterprises globally, and that has been so exciting. We've seen amazing adoption there. but at the same time we're now starting to see that um ai native startups and earlier stage companies are really benefiting from factory's product they're able to move faster they they're able to build more with a smaller team um and really just bring you know speed and efficiency and quality to their engineering organizations and so that's kind of why i'm here i'm really excited to build for developers build for founders and make sure that they have a really great experience with factory as well. This is exciting. Okay. I know a little bit way too much, so sorry if this is kind of off the cusp, but you're talking when you were at Vercel, you led a bunch of these programs. You led the startup program zero to one. You did a bunch of these different

[3:53](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=233) things, which maybe I would argue is untraditional for a typical VP of marketing. And so tell me a little bit just of your operational thesis, why do you do more than just the typical marketing role within your scope? Yeah, I think marketing is really interesting. And when I was making the pivot, I was like, you know, I'm a product person, like I'm not a marketer. And I had some really great mentors and managers who were like, no, you have a lot of skill sets that are actually becoming very valuable in this new wave of marketing, right? I think historically, we've had a marketing playbook and we've known how to do things.

[4:27](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=267) And as AI has kind of proliferated across the ecosystem, it's changed many things on the engineering and the product side, but it's also changed a lot of things on the marketing side. And so I think more and more folks, not only me, but several folks with like non quote unquote traditional backgrounds are coming over to marketing and they're able to find success and kind of test out new things and be creative. And it's kind of becoming like close to like strategy,

[4:53](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=293) **Alli Pope:** I would say, because as we continue to move forward, a lot of what will actually differentiate companies as we all kind of, you know, merge towards building a lot of similar products is the marketing and is the developer love and the founder love and things along those

[5:08](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=308) lines, the community. And so, yeah, I'm excited to build that. It's pretty interesting because, you know, the role of marketing has evolved so much. I mean, some people argue that it's almost a CFO in a trench coat because you have to decide. Don't put me in charge of the marketing. But there's a lot of things in this role. It's almost like ecosystem awareness and growth, especially when it's a developer-first product, right? So anything you can hint towards about what you think the next few months might look like for you? I mean, I'm very excited. Obviously, part of the role is new media, which you are very familiar with.

[5:46](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=346) Yes, shout out A16Z New Media. So I'm excited to just kind of run with a lot of creative ideas around new forms of content that we can do, new programs that we can create for developers. I think we did an event last night for women in AI that my colleague Ashley ran, and it was phenomenal. We had a great turnout, and we did a hands-on workshop as part of that. And so everyone can be on the lookout for many more events that are targeting developers, that are targeting founders, to really show them how to get hands-on with Factory's product and make sure that they can really see the true value of how it can help them.

[6:21](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=381) Very exciting. Okay, one thing I wanted to ask about it too. I know Francesca also started on the venture side. And then this is one of the early deals. And then all of a sudden, now she's running the company. And so there's clearly something when you start from the investor side and you're just looking at the opportunity here that made people want to jump ship and leave their jobs and then join factory. What is it? Well, I mean, there's many such cases, Right. And that actually, when I was figuring out what I wanted to do next, that was a very positive signal for me. We've had several investors in factory actually join full time.

[6:55](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=415) And that's not typical. That's not exactly. So I was like, OK, there's something going on here. And I mean, I'm three days in, but throughout the whole interview process and even just in these three days, honestly, I think it's twofold. I think the founders, you know, are incredible. They are so, you know, anchored to the mission and they have been since day one. and they're also extremely humble and just extremely supportive of everybody on the team and I think the second thing is the team. Matan talks about this a lot. There's a ton of poly

[7:25](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=445) **Alli Pope:** mass at factory is what he says and I think that it is a group of some of the most ambitious people that I've ever worked with. There's very low ego. Everybody just wants to build the best product,

[7:36](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=456) the best you know community, the best thing for our customers possible and that's just really inspiring and motivating to be in every single day. What about the market size? obviously factory is doing well i mean we just um raised recently and we announced that and so that's very exciting and attractive as well um but i think for us right like our mission is really just to build the best product for our customers And so everything that we do every day is really kind of tailored towards that. Okay, but a little bit more. I'm sorry to keep pushing on the market size. You don't have to give me any concrete numbers.

[8:09](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=489) But one of the big things we're talking, I think, I forget his exact name, but he was on Factory, I think head of product. And we're talking about Factory is a product-first company. You guys are launching specific products. And when you think about products, it's an entity. It has a customer behind it. Why are those products maybe, how is that shaping towards a market size that could be this multi-billion, potentially IPO company down the line? Like, what is this opportunity here? Yeah, I mean, I think Factory's mission, right, is to bring autonomy to software engineering. And we are trying to do that by helping engineering organizations increase the quality and the capacity of their code and of their engineering systems.

[8:54](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=534) And so I think as you think about that, we are in certain ways moving towards a world where these products are kind of redefining how major teams and major enterprises operate. And so it's shifting some of the ways in which companies have traditionally operated. And so I think that's a piece of where that kind of comes from. I want to shout out our sponsor, Lovable. You know, the app you've been meaning to build, the internal tool, side project or product you'd otherwise lose a weekend to? With Lovable, you get software you can ship today. That includes an editable code base you can inspect and change, plus two-way GitHub sync.

[9:29](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=569) Lovable also handles the backend and infrastructure, including managed Postgres, auth, storage, hosting, payments, and more, so you don't have to wire it all up yourself. And through Lovable's MCP server, you can create and deploy your project directly from the agents you already use. Turn ideas into software people love with Lovable. Lovable.dev. Now, on to the episode. All right. I do want to ask the other viral post. I know you and Matan went to the same elementary school, different years, talked about it. Did you know early on, and then also Stanford too, did you know eventually you wanted to work together or is this something new?

[10:06](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=606) Well, no, certainly not in elementary school. On the playground, like this one day. I mean, I always knew he was very smart and obviously have kind of, well, we didn't actually really keep in touch. And then we connected actually over Twitter. How funny. Yes. It always brings people back. I was like, oh, okay. And I made some joke around like, oh, we're making our elementary school proud because we're both working in tech. We can come back and do a famous second graders that now made it. Yes, alumni. And there's a couple actually like of folks who are working in the Valley who are. Wow. Whatever they're feeding you guys in that cafeteria must be some good brain juice I mean yeah my husband is like we're sending our kids to that I know I'm like okay um but no yeah we uh we reconnected over x and then through the whole um you know an angel investing situation and it's been great um and it was so funny posting that because I had so many uh other people that we went to elementary school with reach out and we're like oh my god like this is crazy like some parents of old classmates and stuff like that so it just has been a really fun uh moment to kind of reconnect with folks oh that's really cool but then at stanford too

[11:18](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=678) like earlier on what made you want to make the leap to tech to sorry to to work with maton oh okay um well so maton didn't go to stanford he went to princeton so we didn't overlap in undergrad but my bad that was brexit yes i get all the names confused there's multiple parties involved yes um but no actually at stanford i i um i mean i i knew you briefly um but i actually didn't study tech at all I kind of actually avoided like all the computer science classes because I was like I'm gonna be different I'm gonna do something else and so I studied education and psych and I actually pivoted into tech during the pandemic and made my x account and that's how I've gotten every job in tech I mean kind of including this one, right, with some support and some mutuals. But yeah, it's been been a long journey.

[12:05](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=725) So what does success in your role look like for you? Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the main thing that I am focusing on is how do we bring this product to more developers and really build it alongside them, right? I think the best products that grow, they grow because they have a really strong developer community and startup community and developer love around it. And so that was definitely the case at Vercel. And I attribute a lot of the success that I had there in building out the startup program to the amazing developer community that Vercel has been able to build around it. And so I'm really excited to get to build that for Factory. Oh my gosh, Vercel's developer community, crazy. And we were just at SHIP.

[12:47](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=767) Yes. And oh my gosh, we had, I was talking to Guillermo and then all of these people, all the developers, they were all super fans of G. They were all like, oh my gosh, like he's here in the room I was like whatever you guys are doing like clearly you guys got like a cult following it's like a Korean like k-pop yeah I mean a lot of it is G right he's incredible he's like an insanely smart founder um and so I think you know he did a lot of that work really early on to build out the developer love and um yeah it was awesome being on the inside they've done a great job to maintain that I want to get your take to how AI is changing the game for marketing. Because I, a little bit before coming into media, now being a host, I was in developer relations, which especially for a really technical product, it's like that hybrid role between like a forward deployed engineer and also a bit of marketing. And what I found is like things I would do with like technical docs or writing because of AI kind of became obsolete.

[13:41](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=821) You now have agents that go and find what software to use and then recommend things on your behalf instead of having that brand awareness amongst people and developers. How are you navigating that? I think for me, AI has definitely changed a lot of my day-to-day workflows. To your point, right? Like creating a lot of documents or kind of getting to like an MVP happens much faster. And I really appreciate that. I also enjoy using it for monitoring like things like social media and things like that. that like basically I think about it of like what is the day-to-day that I don't necessarily it's not high leverage for me to be doing and how can I automate that with AI there are things that I think AI still is not the best at when it comes to marketing we see a lot of slop copy on the timeline in general and it's like one of my pet peeves and so actually with all my agents I've like trained them to not use like quote-unquote LLM speech but I think you know there's still some work to do there when it comes to marketing. I also think a lot of the like creative ideation is something that's still very human. I tested this out actually a little bit with my tweets because I was like, oh, can AI be funny? Yeah, can AI be funny? Can it like read

[14:55](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=895) through my tweets? Can it write a banger? Yeah, exactly. Like, can it make a banger meme? And it's really cringe. I know, I figured. So I think that that kind of like creativity will remain innately human. At least I hope so. Like that's something that I have so much fun with. And so I don't think that that is something that's being automated away, but definitely

[15:14](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=914) **Alli Pope:** it's transforming how marketing organizations are operating as well. In my team at Vercel, you know, it's not historically traditional that marketing organizations are shipping PRs on a daily basis. That was something that, you know, by the time I left, my whole team was doing.

[15:30](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=930) I know I was talking to the COO saying everyone is doing shipping PRs and building agents for agent apps for whatever they're doing like the head of people ops is doing that and yeah and it's the same at factory like actually that's been a huge observation for me is like how much everybody on the team is totally dogfooding the product and they're using it um to kind of streamline a lot of their workflows we just had um our head of finance post a long tweet about how he uses it for the finance org and he's like one of the top users of the company which you think would mostly be engineers. So. It's really, really cool to see.

[16:01](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=961) That's fun. I love companies that dog food their own products. But what is the role of a brand now in this agent-first world? So say every developer does know a factory or hears a factory. It has this really cool high aura brand. Does it matter when agents are the main folks deciding what to build and what tools to use? I think it does matter. I mean, obviously, right, like sometimes agents are kind of like doing a first pass and like telling a developer what tool to use. but I think that word of mouth still matters. I think that brand still matters because of that community and that love that is like built around it. That's much stronger, I think, than a lot of people think. And I think that there's an importance in recognition of a brand just in general, right? Like people are going to be like, oh yeah, like I use factory and hopefully that's like a cool factor, right? Which I think it is. And I think, you know, we'll continue to grow that even more. But, um, I think brands are, you know, high, high taste brands are something that people really want to be associated with. And so that matters. Very cool. Well, Allie really wanted to thank you for joining us before we go. What can people expect to see from you on the

[17:10](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=1030) timeline over the next few months? Um, lots of posts about factory. No way. Banger tweets coming you're gonna laugh yes some bangers for sure hopefully um and you know just just my normal observational uh comedy about the life I'm living and the people surrounding me I can't wait that's going to be so much fun okay last question I'll have maybe mini prediction for what's going to be true in a year from now that's not true today hmm that's a good question um I mean I'll say like like, factory's brand will be bigger. Everyone's going to know about it. I think more developers and startups are going to be building and, you know, accelerating their growth on factory.

[17:57](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=1077) That's going to be really cool. So we'll get to see it. We'll have you back exactly in a year from now. We'll get to talk through the numbers and see how it goes. But Ali, really wanted to thank you for joining us today on MTS. Big congratulations to you, to your team. Big congratulations to Matan. Like, good job. That was a good scheme in the making and it actually worked. A big sign of a good CEO is someone who can hire well. So clearly they're doing something right. But thank you so much for joining us today on MTS. A huge thanks to MTS sponsors. 11 Labs, AI that communicates at human level across every channel and modality.

[18:30](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=1110) 11labs.io slash MTS. Scale your startup on Neon. Millions of developers and startups have already chosen Neon for their backend. Start on the free plan or get up to $100,000 in credits for your startup at neon.com slash MTS. Special thanks to our sponsor Kong, the AI connectivity platform. Connect APIs, LLMs, agents, and systems with serious security and governance. KongHQ.com. Finally prove what your AI investment is worth with Lairdyn. Head to Lairdyn.com today to start measuring your AI's bottom line. MongoDB, trusted to run critical applications by 75% of the Fortune 100, the intelligent data platform for the era. Apply today for access to up to $15,000 in Atlas credits dedicated technical support and exclusive events and go-to-market opportunities mongodb.com charge b billing and monetization infrastructure for the ai era chargeb.com blitzy autonomous software development for enterprise code bases ship 5x faster blitzy.com adquick make your brand a billboard out-of-home advertising as easy to scale as digital adquick.com arena measuring ai performance in the real world. Arena.ai. Support for the show comes from VCX, the public ticker for private tech. The U.S. stock market started history's greatest wave of wealth creation.

[19:56](https://realalpha.app/v/WGmjmPtJTOo/?t=1196) From factory workers in Detroit to farmers in Omaha, anyone could own a piece of the great American companies. But today, our most innovative companies are staying private longer, which means everyday Americans are missing out. Until now. Introducing VCX, a public ticker for private tech. visit getvcx.com for more info that's getvcx.com carefully consider the investment material before investing including objectives risk charges and expenses this and other information can be found in the innovations fund prospectus at getvcx.com this is a paid sponsorship