Home / Founders / Benjamin Swerdlow
Swerdlow went from coding in elementary school to a consulting job at Apple to Freestyle, which gives coding agents full Linux virtual machines they can fork with their memory intact.
Benjamin Swerdlow is founder and CEO of Freestyle, a San Francisco, California, company from Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch that runs full Linux virtual machines for AI coding agents.
Learning to Code in Elementary School
Swerdlow says on his Y Combinator profile that he learned to code in elementary school. In high school he served as a code owner and technical lead on the World Health Organization's COVID-19 App Collective team.
Consulting for Apple
He did a year of college and then took a job as a consultant for Apple, where he says he became a senior within three months. He left Apple to start Freestyle with Jacob Zwang, who had become a senior full-stack engineer at Apple at 19.
Moving Freestyle onto Bare Metal
Freestyle first launched as an open-source framework and cloud for full-stack TypeScript apps. On Hacker News, Swerdlow and Zwang later described their shift to sandboxes for coding agents: full Debian machines that can be forked, memory included, with a pause of no more than 400 milliseconds. To make that work they moved onto their own bare-metal racks, after finding that renting bare-metal nodes from Google Cloud and AWS cost about as much each month as buying the hardware outright.
