Software

“Rebuilding technology is actually the easiest part of this problem, right? Like software itself is fungible. It has always been fungible. Like, I don't know why people now in AI suddenly are like, oh my God, it was always fungible. It was never that hard to Bu…”

“And I think by the way, if you make some money in software, you kind of have an obligation to like put it into hard tech and help some of the bigger things that might advance society which are tend to be more capital intensive and intensive.”

“Yeah, Molly, my hottest take is I really do think that we're re-entering kind of the world of the here and the now, and what I mean by that is I think being successful in real space, doing hard tech, building real things, and manufacturing with real tangible i…”

“Really an agent is the ultimate settings screen for any software and code is the ultimate setting screen for any software.”

“We think that there's a generational kind of paradigm shift happening in the energy industry, where the last five decades of energy were defined by coal and then Natural gas as the marginal megawatt. And the next five decades will be defined by solar batteries…”

“I would start with services first, so you do the work by hand, you build the same system for five companies, 10 companies, and you notice the pain that repeats, and then that's when you turn it into software. That's all, and that's also how you avoid building …”

“Like when it is so cheap to build software, I think you're going to see more software that has Like a personality to it.”

“The long lens view to take on this is that we have a form of intelligence that can tackle any verifiable problem. Any verifiable problem means most software. It means a lot of formal, like math proofs and similar. And it could also mean scientific discovery”

“A world where Anthropik, OpenAI, and, you know, maybe even SpaceX are kind of the only model providers that dominate the model layer, that is a hard world for software.”

“We're seeing this with our own engineers now, like the amount of software that we're shipping at Kribble, I mean, we're shipping in a factor of two or three what we were a year ago. I mean amazing productivity increases.”

“Building software is so productive, especially copying software. So if I, like, if you have a feature, I can implement a version of that feature. Super easy. You point the models at it, and they make you something that looks like that, feels like that, does th…”

“We used to be building castles. Now we're building sandcastles. They're going to get washed away. And that's, if you don't think of software that way. You have to embrace it because if you were an artisan and you were like, Hey, I built these like perfect foun…”

“So it turns out that now, all of a sudden, database migration, which used to be, like, the, like, number one thing you would not do in software, is, like, kind of trivial.”

“In software, if you have, like, that kind of, like, logical block diagram of, like, why it works and everything else, you're kind of 80% of the way there, and it's a matter of, like, go-to-market execution. In hardware you're, like, two percent of the way ther…”

“Software is no longer really a moat because it can be produced instantaneously, right? Let's project out five years. That's what's going to happen. And so what moats exist? Network effects exist and data moats exist.”

“I think even once you have AGI, all our AGI agents are going to need somewhere to store work and pull information from and reason about things. So I think, you know, a certain class of SaaS companies that were solely built for people to do work might face a bi…”

“Obviously you have companies going from zero to a hundred million or five hundred million in revenue in, you know, one to two years. Like this has never happened before in software. Or kind of technology broadly.”

“In the case of software most software is going to be done agentically anyhow, so you have to be much more able to think abstractly about systems.”

“We went from a, let's call it a A software-centric world to a compute-centric world.”

“They have the highest profitability of any company in the world of the sector is chip companies. They're higher margins than software, pharmaceuticals, industrials, telecom, anything.”

“In the long run, software is going to be much better because AI is going to be paired up with humans to make it more secure and more trustworthy, but it's going to take us years to do that and to clear out the two decades of mistakes we made.”

“There are only two legitimate reasons to build your own versions of an app, like to vibe code it. One is to save money, And that's only if it's really expensive. Like, let's say something is 10,000 dollars a year, 20 grand a year, and you think you can cut tha…”

“I just think at the end of the day, like, stopping people from moving software around the world, it's the same thing as stopping them removing, like, books around the world.”

“The existing markets are getting bigger, and AI is also coming to new markets like healthcare and legal, which, let's be frank, were terrible markets for software before this.”

“What they don't mean is software dead because OpenAI and Entropic are software, and they are most definitely not dead.”

“In an era where you can build an, you know, a website and a web application with a Postgres database behind in 30 seconds, Software is just commoditized. Software is just tokens. Code is tokens.”

“In the end, we'll enter an era where we'll talk to software, and software will do work for us, and everything in the middle is a means to an end.”

“Ideally maybe 10 years down the line or perhaps five to 10 years down the line if we can build a system which is completely headless, where you just start kind of going back to Iron Man, right? Where you just talk to the walls and they answer you and they get …”

“Earlier when we started the fund in 2011, we did invest in a few hardware plays, but over the years we realized to invest in a hardware play, A, you need a longer term perspective, B, you need a lot of capital, and C the sales cycle and adoption takes a lot lo…”

“I just think that the interfaces for how you interact with models will evolve so much. And to the degree that models are part of software, we will see a ton of exploration there.”

“Software, which if you look at software, right? Alternatives are not a problem in software. So then what will people anchor on? They'll anchor on brand, right? Because product is, is commoditized.”

“Software was an incredible business for the last 20 years. Building SaaS, and there's still opportunities in, in building SaaS, building consumer mobile apps, enterprise apps, but the mode is, is moving to hardware”

“The logistics is a much bigger market than software. If you, for example, like a typical, like a medium sized company will spend, call it five percent of their revenue, companies spend about five, if they're physical goods companies, they'll spend like five pe…”

“Internet's down 16%. Software's down eight percent on the year. You know, SPY and NASDAQ are up, but really up because of their components that are related to AI and compute.”

“That will, in many cases, either deliver instant ROI or really replace humans, and it is so jaw-droppingly valuable that you can charge two to 10 times more than your software.”

“In last month, we put almost ten billion dollars to work in software.”

“Look at software today. We feel that it's a very intriguing area. These established businesses, but 10, 12 times earnings and folks feel they're completely going out of business. There's no sign of that. Not only that, they're growing 20% in some cases, and yo…”

“For me, software today is generally in this, in the too hard basket.”

“You had a significant shift in the value proposition. Where was the value coming from? It went from software back to hardware.”

“Apple's always been an incredible hardware company, and I think, ah, this is, you know, an era where hardware will matter even more because software is gonna face waves of commoditization pressure.”

“Now I just think software is free. Anyone can make it. Anyone can rip it off.”

“All I can say is software is a worse business now than it was five years ago.”

“I suspect that software will go more back into the nineties of general tools, word processor, spreadsheet, FileMaker Pro that kind of thing, but those will still be as a service. And then you'll still have specialized tools around security and so on”

“There's all this stuff about there being less software engineers, and I think we just build more software. I think we just build a ton more software”

“These models don't integrate well with software. Actually, I think it turns out and what we're learning as an industry is if you view them more like humans and you draft on the mechanisms we put in place for humans, they are much easier to integrate.”

“We don't do software. We don't do AI. Like we're in the business of the physical world. So steel in the ground, that's who we are.”

“If, and if you get, Curious enough about software, you ultimately end up in hardware, right?”

“That is one thing I love about hardware. It's way easier to protect our innovations and our ideas compared to software, especially today in the age of AI.”

“Software is almost useless. It's almost worthless now because anybody can create it.”

“There's a limit to, again, the number of software you need to build that looks like an app on your phone. There's an unlimited amount of software you need to build That looks like a background system process that's connecting different data sources, automating…”

“I think software is just now maturing to a state where it's gonna have the same dynamic, and there's a one-time massive reset that's gonna happen because the amount of leverage in the system, and there's a lot of leverage coming due in these P-back companies i…”

“People that run businesses understand that people make mistakes. They never will forgive software for making a mistake.”

“The exciting thing about that is sort of your agent can sort of bootstrap its own software and capabilities and actually debug and maintain them.”

“Tech is no longer a competitive advantage. It is an enabler of other advantages. And so to me, the biggest You know, what it's all about is demand generation. So the next generation of great companies will be those who turn attention into demand at scale. And …”

“The thing that's happened with the LLM powered models is you can now go from, I have an inkling in my head to I'm going to build a prototype to I'm going to not always, not necessarily always on your own, but with a bunch of co-conspirators to build something …”

“You know, you look at the last 15 years, we learned very, very early on that there's no moat in software, which was an incredibly powerful lesson, right? All of our ideas, the things that we invent, people just try to copy right away, and it's easy to do that …”

“These models are definitely, like, really gonna break pretty much all software out there. Maybe already we don't know if we sit here and speak.”

“And so this thing that was this incredibly scarce resource of high quality software is just going to become a completely fungible thing that you're just going to have as much as you want.”

“If you think about economic, 80% gross margins, they're not going to last forever. Someone's going to try to figure out how to attack them.”

“We're going to enter this like hyper deflationary cycle of software where it's so easy to build. It's so abundant. That doesn't mean that people are going to, you know, stop producing software. They're actually going to produce thousands of times more software…”