Teamday
← People
Zeno Rocha

Zeno Rocha

Founder & CEO at Resend

@zenorochaLinkedIn
agentsmcpstartupresend

About Zeno Rocha

Zeno Rocha is the founder and CEO of Resend, the email API for developers that went through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch. He started it with co-founder Bu Kinoshita on the premise that the incumbents (Mailgun, Mailchimp, SendGrid) had stopped caring about developers. In November 2026 he said Resend had 4.3 million users and 120,000 paid customers, including Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO and Mistral.

Rocha is Brazilian and came up as a front-end developer and open-source author. He created the Dracula editor theme and clipboard.js, worked at Liferay, and was VP of Developer Experience at WorkOS before Resend. Resend's open-source project, React Email, lets developers write email templates as React components and feeds users into the paid sending platform.

Career Highlights

  • Founder and CEO of Resend (YC W23), which he says grew from 1 million users in December 2025 to 4.3 million by November 2026
  • Creator of the Dracula theme and clipboard.js
  • Former VP of Developer Experience at WorkOS
  • Maintainer of React Email, Resend's open-source template framework

Notable Positions

On Being the Answer Models Give

Rocha set out early for Resend to be the tool a model names when someone asks how to send email. His method is plain: long-tail docs, an FAQ on almost every page, llms.txt, and a markdown version of every marketing page. When a model misquoted Resend's pricing because the numbers sat inside a JavaScript calculator, he wrote them out in text and the answer corrected within days. See Answer Engine Optimization.

On MCP Coverage

Resend's MCP server grew from about 20 tools at launch to more than 80, and he aims for everything the dashboard can do. As a buyer he requires a vendor-maintained MCP server: he moved from Plausible to PostHog for that reason.

On Trusting Users by Default

Resend has no signup form or review queue. It trusts new senders, watches bounce and complaint rates and domain signals, and blocks fast when something is off. Rocha says most blocked accounts are misuse, not abuse.

On Support as Documentation

An early Resend rule required every support ticket to be answered with a link, so that each answer became a doc first.

Key Quotes

  • "Now we have like 80 something tools." (on Resend's MCP server)
  • "If it's not there, I don't use it." (on software without an official MCP connector)
  • "You can only respond to a ticket with a link." (on Resend's early support policy)
  • "You need to do exactly what an abuser wouldn't do." (on email deliverability)

Related People

swyx