Harnessing a new superpower: Chris Kindt speaks to Guido Appenzeller Part 2
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What fundamental shift does Guido say AI will bring to every software component?
In part one of our conversation between HG's Chris Kint and Guido Apizella of A sixteen Z, my
current gaps we've created a fourth component here, which in the future will also be in every software that we build, that we make. And if that is true, that's a very major disruption, right? If you look at the last couple of ones when they built CPUs, they created Microsoft, created Intel, and when we created databases, they created Oracle, when we created networking, created the Cisco's and Googles of the world. And so we probably have something of that scale ahead of us, right? Something that'll create trillion dollar companies.
You are now listening to part two. Harnessing a new superpower.
Which part of your software business use a database? Well all of them do, right? Which of them will use a model? All of them will do. Which one? That gets a lot more complicated and how and there's so many things you can do well or badly. But This is a new fundamental building block which will be ubiquitous and therefore you need to really enable everybody to adopt this across
the organization. So Gida, certainly in our in our H portfolio we're seeing a lot of companies experiment with different use cases, trying different ways of getting impact and value impact from this new tool, from this new technology. Where are you seeing some of the biggest gains and wins in a typical kind of software company?
If I have to roughly bucket into three areas, there's sort of the internal your own productivity incre increases. So this is not about making your product better, it's just getting getting your folks more productive. And then sort of the I think we talked about that before, like this short term and long term impact on on change of your product. When it comes to productivity, the first thing with software is use coding assistance. GitHub Copilot is amazing. There's a gaggle of startups that are all trying to catch up or, you know, t surpass a copilot. And some of them at this point are possibly better than than copilot, right? So some really amazing technology out there. Mm-hmm. From what we've seen Using this coding assistant can give you anywhere from a thirty percent to a hundred percent gain in developer productivity.
That's massive. For you know, a couple of hundred bucks a year, I can make somebody who gets, you know, I don't know, fifty or hundred thousand dollars a year or in some cases more.
How are companies currently capturing productivity gains from AI coding assistants?
make them thirty K more productive, that's not a particularly hard math problem to work out whether that's worth it or not, right? So I think this is a big enough advantage that it's mandatory, right? If if you are thirty percent less productive than your competitor, you have a strategic issue, right? That's no longer about getting a little bit more less profitable. It's like you have to use these things and they will only get
better over time. I guess just kinda building on that or kind of like a follow-up question that that we certainly hear is that kind of nervousness around yes, making team members undoubtedly much more productive. But how does a company really capture the value of that and turn that into kind of value impact and see that kind of crystallize into value creation?
I think the initial one is just by having more developer productivity. Does it allow you to reduce teams? Maybe, maybe not. But you're probably in a growth phase, most software is still growing, right? So y you know, i you may be able to to slow down hiring a little bit or just bring products to market more quickly. It's very hard to predict if you reduce the marginal cost of a good, how consumption reacts depends on your elasticity curve, right? If in in many cases actually it can mean that the overall spend becomes larger, right? So I think there's a very realistic chance that we actually see even more software developers because now there's some adding suddenly we can we can address Exactly. Yeah. And and so we can address whole new use cases that previously were are just not effective.
What interesting kind of build on that is what we are seeing in our portfolio companies is just the level of engagement and employee engagement and retention that we're seeing from our developers step up.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What fundamental shift does Guido say AI will bring to every software component?
0:01–1:58
2
How are companies currently capturing productivity gains from AI coding assistants?
1:58–3:53
3
Why is developer productivity now a strategic competitive advantage?
3:53–6:14
4
What bottom‑up adoption model does Guido recommend for enterprise AI rollout?
6:14–8:26
5
How can CEOs empower employees while removing legal and security barriers to AI use?
8:26–11:25
6
What role will software engineers play as AI tools become more capable?
11:25–13:28
7
How should organizations prepare their data and infrastructure for AI scalability?
13:28–15:21
8
What long‑term vision does Guido have for AI‑driven software development?
15:21–16:26
Speakers
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