Developer Investing with Lee Edwards

Created by Rishabh Srivastava, Founder of Loki.ai

This summary was largely done for my own note-taking, sharing it just in case it adds more value to other people.

I have no affiliation whatsoever with anyone in this note. This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors :)

Context

Source URL:

Why is it important: ...

Keywords

Startups, Dev Tools, Developer Tools, B2B, Investing

Summary

Lots of businesses are willing to pay for products that give their engineers more leverage

Thesis: Hard-tech. Things that are technically challenging that require engineers on the founding team and are things that are more roadmap-driven. Spans AI/ML to robotics to software infrastructure. Anything that has a physical hardware component also counts as technically difficult if you haven’t done it before

Highlights

Trends that you’re seeing

Modelling and simulation for agent-based modeling. Kind of like building a game engine.

Data cleaning and quality

More abstractions for coding. APIs and functions in a Pub/Sub manner. Even something like a managed Kafka could be useful

Game dev: Can use a ton of developer tools to increase productivity! A lot of GAN-based things can speed up game dev significantly

Opportunities outside of pure software

Automation and Robotics in industries that are experiencing labour shortages. Like construction tech

Offshoring and nearshoring

Industries where labour productivity is not increasing any more or is increasing slowly

Tools for creators

What is the go-to-market strategy for developer tooling?

Way back in the day, developer tools were big box software where you literally bought the tools and put the disks in the computer one by one

Now, open-source is one of the biggest ways that dev tools do distribution. The book Working in Public documents this very well

If you want to get your tools into as many hands as possible, making it free, lowering the barriers to entry, making the Hello World really great are all important things. A great README.md really matters!

Have a magic first minute or the awesome first 10 minutes for developers

Open-source is not about labour. You don’t get a lot of engineers to work on it for free. It’s about things like NPM. Source-code repositories are just amazing free distribution

Great dev tools have a consumer looking growth trajectory and spread by viral word-of-mouth

Hosting providers <> No-code applications. How do you see this spectrum?

Tend to see the Low-code/no-code concept as an evolutionary instead of revolutionary change

Software has always been about abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction. No-code is kind of similar

People who can write formulas in Excel can write code if you can simplify the process

On better abtractions

Sees no-code as more of no devops instead of no-code. We’re rarely shelling into VMs and uploading private keys anymore. There’s a lot of stuff that tooling has abstracted for us

Kubernetes has taken away so much complexity, but has replaced it with other complexity. It will likely be abstracted away much more

It’s possible that the best Kubernetes startups are not we help you abstract away kubernetes but more of we help you solve this problem and btw we’re using kubernetes to solve this problem

Things like Snowflake are interesting. It’s literally a toolkit for better devops

The crazy thing about Heroku is that it created way more value than it captured. Important to also capture value that you create

There’s a very large world beyond AWS

GCP/Azure/AWS are in a race to the bottom for commoditized services

When Amazon copies open-source projects, they can’t steal the community

AWS has a shit ton of products now. Most of them fail

The other thing is multi-cloud. There are very few enterprise people who are 100% on one cloud provider