Companies founded by a group of engineers often have a deep-seated mistrust of sales -- or more precisely, salespeople. That was the case at GitHub, says CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath: It wasn't until their customers started asking for a sales organization to help guide them that Wanstrath and the GitHub team realized sales wasn't necessarily filled with the fast-talking stereotypes they were used to seeing on TV. Wanstrath joins a16z General Partner Peter Levine to discuss how GitHub finally embraced sales, why good salespeople are like good teachers, and what it takes to sell to developers.
There are over 20 million programmers out there -- and double that, if you count everyone else coding in other ways -- but where are the next 100 million developers? How do we get to a billion developers? The answer, observes a16z general partner Peter Levine in conversation with GitHub co-founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath (based on a Q&A recorded at our last a16z Summit event) lies in changing the very definition of a "programmer" and "programming". It might even mean the end of code, argues Levine (who apparently loves arguing the end of things!), and the beginning of a future where data isn't just "the new oil", but one where we all become our own "oil wells". With everyone is manipulating data -- the new programming, in a sense -- expertise can be scaled (especially with new tools) so everyone gets the answers and solutions they need. So what does this mean for open source developers? CIOs and organizations that have lots of different data streams, as well as domain experts? This episode of the a16z Podcast covers all this and more, including touching briefly on what's ahead...
The old constraint when it came to technology was hardware -- how many CPUs can I get my hands on. Today, spinning 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.