A decade of building developer tools taught him where the real friction hides. With Attune, he's chasing it down one command at a time - starting with a single word: hurry.
Every engineer knows the small death of the progress bar. You type the build command, hit enter, and then you wait. You check a message. You refill the coffee. The clean, sharp idea you had a minute ago starts to go soft around the edges. Multiply that by a team, by a day, by a year, and you get one of the quiet, expensive facts of modern software: a lot of the job is waiting on the machine to catch up. Xin Ding spent a decade watching this happen from the inside, and he decided it was worth building a company to fix.
That company is Attune, a San Francisco startup in Y Combinator's X25 batch where Xin is cofounder and CEO. The pitch fits on a bumper sticker: faster builds, zero effort. The product experience fits in a single word. You keep the exact command you already use and put "hurry" in front of it.
There is no migration, no rewrite, no ripping out your build system to adopt something heavier. Under that friendly little verb sits the unglamorous machinery that actually moves the needle: distributed caching, remote execution, incremental builds, and compiler-native optimizations. The design philosophy is the whole point. Meet developers exactly where they already are, and just make the slow part fast.
Xin's timing argument is simple and hard to shrug off. Writing code used to be the slow, human part of the loop. Now AI can generate a working function in seconds. When the typing gets faster, whatever is left over becomes the new ceiling. For a lot of teams, that ceiling is the build.
It is the kind of problem that never trends. Nobody gives a keynote about compile times. But it touches essentially every engineering team on earth, every single day, and the cost is paid in the most valuable currency a developer has: focus and momentum. Xin built a company on that quiet, universal tax.
Xin did not arrive at this problem by accident. He has spent his career inside the tools developers live in. He joined FOSSA at the seed stage as Head of Product and helped grow it from zero to eight figures in annual recurring revenue. Then he moved to Teleport, the YC S15 infrastructure company, as VP of Product, where he built out product and design teams and helped scale a brand-new SaaS offering from nothing to eight figures - part of the run that carried the company to unicorn status.
That pattern matters. Twice, before ever starting his own thing, Xin took an early product and helped turn it into real, durable revenue. Most founders would call that a career. He seems to have treated it as training. There is a straight line running through all of it - FOSSA, Teleport, and now Attune - and the line is developer velocity: shorter feedback loops, less waiting, faster from idea to shipped.
Attune did not begin with a stranger found on a cofounder-matching site. Xin started it with Eliza Zhang, who was Head of Engineering at FOSSA while he ran product there. The two worked side by side for three years before leaving to build something of their own. She brings deep expertise in programming languages and build systems, previously at Google. He brings the product instinct and the go-to-market scars. It is a small team - it started as just the two of them - taking on an infrastructure-sized problem, with Diana Hu as their YC partner.
There is something clarifying about that setup. Two people who already know how the other thinks, who already trust each other under pressure, pointing a decade of shared frustration at a single target. The first product speaks Rust. Xin has said Docker and more languages are on the way.
Before any of the startups, there was an electrical engineering degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - not computer science, which is a small and fitting wrinkle for someone who has spent his career in software tooling. The route from there ran through early roles and into a decade of product work, and it landed in San Francisco, where Attune is based.
The most interesting thing about Xin's choice is what he chose. Not a flashy consumer app. Not the newest, loudest category. He picked a problem that is almost aggressively unglamorous - the plumbing that nobody photographs but everybody depends on. That is a specific kind of conviction. It says the best companies often come from problems so universal that people have simply stopped noticing them.
His stated aspiration is to make instant, easy-to-adopt build solutions with no migration hassle - to take slow builds off the table as a bottleneck entirely, one language at a time. If he pulls it off, the win will be invisible in the best way. No one will notice the minutes they are not losing. They will just stay in the idea a little longer before it goes soft. For a founder who has spent his whole career on the waiting-less side of the equation, that would be exactly the point.