Software Industry

“You've taken like the entire software industry and you've compressed it into this tiny bubble that the only name that people have for it is like agents, but you know that it's going to re-expand again and we're all going to find the lines that exist between th…”

“If you look at the computer revolution, people would have said that personal computers would have put a lot of secretaries out of work, but in reality, the PC revolution gave birth to the software industry, and it displays three and a half million jobs, but it…”

“I think pricing pressure is just gonna go crazy because it's like the restaurant industry. Like, you know, restaurants are not a bad business. They're bad because there's too much competition.”

“I would say that we're in a period right now where basically the market is being treated roughly as in, as the kind of indiscriminately, you know, kind of bucketed sector. And the next year, two years or whatnot, you'll start to see some separation and parsing…”

“I think it's either going to go like PR is a totally automated review, and literally there's no human in the loop, and that the tools are good enough, or the entire industry is going to get to, we need to have poor review be like a serious thing that we're not…”

“If that seven hundred billion in capex that the tech giants are spending this year on AI pays off, you're going to have this entire Hollowing out of the software industry of many, maybe other industries”

“Our products augment that, which makes it, ah, you know, augments the differentiated specific over the generalizable, and that's where literally all the value's gonna go, and it's gonna be like a waterfall, and that, that's the problem with a lot of software c…”

“There was 15 or 16 years of the bucket growing at an average of 30% valued at an average of six times revenues. Then there was two years of COVID bucket growing 40% average of 20 times revenues.”

“There's a recurring delusion throughout the history of software that firstly, people always think there's going to be a general purpose abstraction layer that will just do everything. And secondly, people always think that everyone who doesn't write code will …”

“There's this notion that the tool in the software industry is in decline. And we've replaced by AI. You could tell because there's a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure because somehow AI is going to replace them. I…”

“This, and just to put this in context, the entirety of the software industry earns about four hundred billion dollars of revenue.”

“Going to grab a lot of revenue that actually today is in services industry, which is 25 times larger than software industry. So this is, there's a lot of spend that is going to move. I mean, the spend that you see happen on AI is actually sort of, you know, th…”

“There's more software appearing. It's getting just more and more competitive. I think it's got, it's become a step change more competitive with AI.”

“We're used to in the software industry, you know, when we have a problem, there's a bag associated with that problem. We go and fix the bag, and then the problem gets solved. Well, this is not the case any longer with, when you're talking with a probabilistic …”

“Well, I think that's the median. It's the median is two.”

“I definitely think you're behind because you just inserted an insanely expensive line item into your bottom line in the form of AI. And if your CFO isn't screaming at you now, then probably either, either the AI is useless for you, which, okay, interesting. Or…”

“Before I would write a big design doc, and I would think about a problem for a long time before I would build it sometimes for some set of problems, and now I'll just ask quad code to prototype, like, three versions of it, And I'll try the feature and see whic…”

“At some point, we will be we will no longer be supply constrained in software, but we're not anywhere close to it right now, and you're taking something that has always been the scarce resource, which is software engineers, and you're making it not scarce, and…”

“I think we're going to see deflation of software prices. And so I think it's a mix of both, you know, some things we won't pay for it anymore.”

“So much of how the industry is built presupposes the idea that software is expensive to write and cheap to run. And LLMs undermine both of these.”

“And why I believe, because of software being commoditized, that first-order data companies will dominate the next 10 and 20 years in software.”

“And this is not fair because there are, there's plenty of like fun software, but a lot of the, a lot of it is the software industry is too serious. It takes itself too seriously.”

“We are certainly having at least one clear major platform shift is now underway around how we think about what generative machine learning is, just as in a sense, at a kind of a bare minimum, we also had that 10 years ago, as we thought, what is this machine l…”

“This is like, not like particularly like hard, you know, work of, you know, like, 90% of the jobs that I see.”

“This wave of AI is just becoming software. So we're going to take the one part of our economy that has been free market and relatively unregulated, which is software. It's like the last bastion of true entrepreneurial capitalism, and we're going to create a ne…”

“And you better have multiple contingency plans, and you end up emphasizing preparation more than planning, because you have to be prepared for the thing you don't see coming. And that's so applicable in the software industry, and I see so many software compani…”

“I think that it's been masked by the fact that the rest of the economy seems to be okay, but this is the worst software recession we've been in. I think since the dot-com crash”

“I actually think this is, this will be true for all of software. I think that the, because of the quality of large language models, reasoning capabilities specifically, I think we're going to see a major shift Not only away from seat-based pricing towards usag…”

“And we run a really efficient go to market motion, the most efficient go to market motion and software, which means there's not a lot of slack in the rope.”

“And now, of course, I'd be surprised if there's any company in tech that doesn't have 200 AI projects. Or that isn't based on AI. This has basically just become a universal thing throughout the whole software, the software industry, and most other big companie…”

“And the good news for us, I think it's going to continue another 30 years. And this is, I think, some battery ventures data. But it's, you know, the market's going to 10 X again.”

“You go back in that era, those two sectors were maybe 10 to 15% of the total investing that was going on at the”

“Well, it was a new industry, and because it was a new industry, there were very few, call it, operating procedures that were, how do you run a software company?”

“The way I think about it is that the software industry is extremely popular and has gotten off kind of scot-free and extremely glorified for a really long time.”

“I see it in our industry is sick with that. I think Primarily, I would guess because it's a high growth industry, first of all. So like, there's this expectation you're supposed to live up to. And when you look at all the, let's say the great companies in the …”

“And so I'll leave you with that, and next year we can revisit this. I guarantee you it will start to proliferate through the industry in the same way that some of the other things are.”

“Mobile massively increased the size of the software industry, like sort of horizontally in terms of the number of terminals. And now we're increasing in a different direction, which is sort of the number of verticals that we're going into, right? So the size o…”

“We're building lots of software, hoping it works, and we're not really thinking about the harder intellectual issues at play.”

“In the industry of software, we pay a premium for rate of change. By that I mean, and it's very different from a physical production line, is the faster the production line changes, the better off we are. That means the faster you can go to market the more fea…”