a16z Podcast: What Software Developers (and Therefore Every Company) Need

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Michael Copeland** (0:19)
Welcome to the a16z Podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. The old constraint when it came to technology was hardware. How many CPUs can I get my hands on? Today, spitting up compute can be done from any smartphone with an AWS account or something similar. The current constraint is software. And since software is written and operated by people, tackling that constraint comes down to making people as informed, enabled, and efficient as possible. Three CEOs and co-founders of three companies that serve software developers, Chris Wanstrath from GitHub, Jeff Lawson from Twilio, and Ben Uretsky of Digital Ocean, take part in a conversation with a16z's Peter Levine about the needs of software developers. What are the emerging platforms, ecosystems, and tools that help developers succeed at what is increasingly the most important job in any company? Writing and running software. Peter Levine begins the conversation.

**Peter Levine** (1:19)
We wanted to hold this panel on the sort of future of software development. And one of the interesting sort of rationales behind the panel was I, I often look back and software development has, software development prior to let's say five years ago, there's always been software development as long as there's been computers. But it feels to me like over the past five years, software development has become a market in and of itself. Like there are many companies that get built to serve software developers. And if you look at a number of early stage and mid stage companies, they often start out selling to the developer. And that's a very unique phenomena in sort of the industry today as different from several years ago.
And what we wanted to do is bring up companies, GitHub, Twilio and Digital Ocean, companies that have that particular focus. So maybe I'll start out with Chris on that end. You know, Chris, what do you think, you know, software development has been around forever? Why is this, you know, what's so new and exciting about now?

**Chris Wanstrath** (2:38)
I think software, I mean, Andreessen a couple of years ago had the software is eating the world piece. I don't think that even begins to touch the transformation that we're seeing. I think you can make the case that the 1900s were all about hardware. And so when you wanted more processors, when you wanted more bandwidth, you just built bigger factories and more assembly lines. Now we're getting to a place where you can on your phone go get CPUs and bandwidth. And the real constraint is software. And really, you can't order more software. What you have to do is get more people to create software because it's all powered by humans. So I think that's what's really interesting about our businesses and a lot of the transformation right now, is we're going from a world where we're trying to create more physical goods to widen the amount of processing we can do to, we need to figure out a way to get more people involved and make the people that are currently involved more productive because ultimately the world is thirsty and hungry for software. And the only way you can get more of it is by creating more developers.

**Peter Levine** (3:29)
Yeah. So, Ben, you guys at Digital Ocean focus on the developer. What's unique about building a company? You guys have deliberately focused on, you know, sort of serving the developer. What's unique about what you do versus others and how do you sort of, how do you service them?

**Ben Uretsky** (3:50)
Well, just to kind of piggyback on Chris' point, the social aspect is very important to note here.
So, building communities of software developers turns out as a very good way to engage a much broader audience. And one of the things that we've done is not only focus on software developers, but build a community at the heart of Digital Ocean. So, to date, we've published 1,500 tutorials that talk about how to leverage open source software. We're educating developers worldwide on how to write code, how to deploy applications. And we're drawing in 4 million unique visitors a month to this community. And it's growing month over month. And I think it just speaks to the excitement that people have over the ability to create. You know, from the ground up, you can literally take a vision and deliver it. That's the power of software. And that's why it's attracting so many people. Obviously, it's a great job market to be in. And it's also very much a level playing field with the Internet. So a software developer, somewhere in Asia Pacific, is technically as capable and as powerful as a software developer in the US. So one of the things that we realize is this intersection of the developer, the software that they're creating. And then ultimately, what we do is provide the infrastructure that it runs on. And bringing very much a social aspect to what we're deeming in the near future collaborative infrastructure and really empowering software developers to figure out the best way to run infrastructure in the cloud. Because at the end of the day, what they actually care about is the application and not the resources that are behind it. So we're trying to make it as transparent as possible.