Why Mobile Releases Still Feel Like Chaos, with Runway CEO Gabriel Savit

In this episode, Matt Klein sits down with Gabriel Savit, former iOS engineer and now co-founder & CEO of Runway, to unpack why mobile release processes remain painfully manual and coordination-heavy, even for world-class teams. Gabriel traces his path into mobile: from a scrappy, early startup experiment, to building an iPhone-powered “flight computer” for a DIY drone air-traffic-control project, to shipping at scale at Rent the Runway. Gabriel talks about how his experience with endless release runbooks, Slack ping-pong, rotating “release captain” dread, and the haunting realization that updating the checklist doesn’t fix the underlying chaos led to the creation of Runway.Gabriel shares how Runway evolved around a plug-and-play integration model (rather than replacing your toolchain), why Apple/Google leave so many gaps for growing teams, and how the future, including AI, will increase the need for visibility and coordination, not reduce it. They close the episode with a spicy take on what Gabriel calls the 'automation paradox' which describes why teams with more automation often report wasting the same amount of time per release as teams with less, because speeding up the machine can also expand the black box.