Tech Will No Longer Be The Same
Tech Will No Longer Be The Same
Beautiful Software and Deep Tech Rises.
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On to today’s piece 🤝
The future of software is shifting; here are some of my thoughts.
Tech Will No Longer Be The Same
“In short, software is eating the world.” - Marc Andressen (2011)
And so it did. We saw the rise of Google, Netflix, Amazon and the softwartization of entire industries from airlines to grocery stores. Stealth millionaires were minted and six-figure salaries vyied for by college graduates.
But now software has matured to a point where some argue that all the major problems that can be solved by software have been (“all the low hanging fruit is gone!”). Despite the plethora of SaaS companies and builders creating their online empires while sitting in their shorts, I believe this to be a localized belief. And even with the introduction of LLMs, despite worries among software engineers of being replaced by AIs, it seems that AI assistants actually make worse engineers better & have relatively little effect on senior engineers. Therefore while software engineers are sticking around longer, the mature software industry + LLMs have given rise to new phenonmenon: software is increasingly becoming commoditized.
It’s increasingly easier for an average Joe to learn software engineering and release something that works. And that’s actually a good thing. We want to live in a world where people can easily create, launch & access apps & websites. Software, after all, is automated labor.
Therefore, I predict two things will happen.
In software-dominate domains, beautiful software will win.
Building physical things will be emphasized.
Beautiful Software Will Win
Initially if you didn’t have a website and then got one, people were like “Wow! I have a website!” But now, the Overton Window has shifted; anyone can launch a website in a few clicks. And so the software space is becoming cluttered with random bits of software that really don’t impress.
With functionality being the floor, beautiful software will win.
As Stripe CEO Patrick Collison put it,
“My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things-and for kind of rational reasons because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well it tells you the person who made it really cared and you can observe superficial details but like probably they didn’t only care about those and then you know implement everything else in a very slapdash way. And so if you care about infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.”
-Do Aesthetics Matter in Tech - Collison Brothers - Million Stories
A great example of this is The Browser Company of New York’s Arc browser. Safari, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, DuckDuckGo, Opera, Brave; none of them feel like Arc.
See how the browser flows? The kinds of emotions that it invokes? The playfulness? It screams, “I care!” in your face. And from the looks of it, it seems like they do.
Building Physical Things
If software is maturing into beauty, the atoms-based industry is only just being born. Over the past two decades, people have chosen to handle manipulating bits over atoms. Bits were the easier part of the problem; a laptop and an internet connection resulted in a working company. And in some sense, it actually made sense to focus on bits first. By mastering bits, we’ve designed better ways to manufacture and sell atoms at scale. The pipelines been built; we just need the gas.
But building deeptech companies is not sexy yet. Dealing with regulations, zoning laws, logistics, high R&D costs; it’s quite messy compared to software. We’re in that weird space where it’s still not socially or financially supported to launch a deep tech company but as with any endeavor, people push the frontier simply because they want to, because they can.
And working thru these headaches in turn creates large, defensible moats against competitors. It’s much easier to recreate a email service in another framework than it is to create another electric car company. This potent combo of large moats + matured software capabilities means that tommorrow’s trillion dollar giants will be deep tech.
We’re already seeing the first steps with quadripeligic Noland Arbaugh (Neuralink’s first human patient) playing Mario Kart with his father for the first time in years and Figure’s robot identifying & handing an apple to someone. But soon it’ll be a part of life. Then we’ll want a robot to walk our dogs, check our email without lifting a finger, and be able to remotely take care of our loved ones.
And as time goes on, say another 5 years, starting a atoms-based, deep tech startup will become the thing to do. VCs, the media, college students & dropouts will be dumping money & talent into sector and the aspiration to launch a deep tech company no different than the fever for software today.
And just as it was with software, initially, the functional versions will win.
Until next time,
- Kiran
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
“To answer the question of “What should I eat for dinner?” you must first answer, “What does it mean to suffer?” (This is a joke. Answer it after you eat dinner. You’ll need brain fuel.)” Check out Asterisk Magazine Georgia Ray’s What I Won’t Eat.
“Culturally, we’ve experienced risk aversion and safetyism in almost every domain of our lives. We’re trapped in an eternal recurrence of uninspiring sequels, prequels, and reboots — without exception, the ten highest-grossing movies last year have all been sequels or reboots. Machine-learning algorithms, trained on what has come before in Netflix’s library, churn out formulaic movie scripts, pop music is stuck in an endless loop of repetition and nostalgia, and art and architecture are dominated by generic conformity — and either by a syringe of filler, which costs a few hundred dollars, or an app filter, influencer and their followers converge on the so-called “Instagram Face,” the apotheosis of averageness.” Mike Solana strikes again in Against Safetyism.
Lawrence Yeo’s Release Ratio is important read for any creator; keep the consumption & creation in balance!