Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:23:52 · Dan Lorenc
[00:23:52] S0: Yeah. We... We've been trying some things, internally. You know, we haven't gone full Jack Dorsey flip over the company and for everything mode. But, yeah, I think, you know, one of the obvious ones, the industry standard wisdom for running engineering teams for, you know, the last twenty years. So it comes out of the mythical man month. This book that was written back in the eighties. It kinda settles in on two pizza teams like Amazon has done it. Right? Every team is somewhere around eight people, and, instead of growing a team, you add more eight person teams under a manager and set things up that way. One of the formulas in mythical man month kinda shows that whole diminishing returns as teams and orgs scale. You know, there's communication overhead. The bigger an organization is, the more people you have to talk to, the more communication that's at, and then that goes up, you know, exponentially with the the amount of people in the org. And so that's sort of where that eight person sweet spot comes in. But with these new tools, if every engineer gets, know, say, just just say 25% more productive, which I think is an underestimate, That team of eight now shrinks to a team of four. You know, half of it is because people are growing faster, and then half of that is because there's fewer people I have to talk to and coordinate with. You then start to run into other issues, like people take vacations. You need on calls and everything. So I I don't know how much below four you can really shrink things to before other, people issues start to come up. But we started doing that yet. Instead of a team of eight, as we build new things, we start with a team of four. But then, you know, how do you organize those teams of four to make sure they're not all doing the same thing or doing opposite things and everything? So you start to get different problems as you try to figure out the right way to ship quickly in this new world.
00:25:24 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:25:24] S1: That's awesome. Where do you think Chainguard sits in this future in five years? Are you the safety store that becomes literally a layer of the entire Internet as we built?
00:25:40 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:25:40] S0: Yeah. I hope that... You know, in that time, I hope we have every type of open source software out there, And I hope we are the place everyone comes to get that open source software. We we sit in this critical gap between the people writing it in that source code form and the way enterprises actually build and rely and run on it. And there's a lot of work there that, you know, that these people just aren't going to do. You're not paying them to do it. They don't want to do it. And they especially don't want to do it in the way the enterprises want them to do it. And as we keep getting bigger and faster, I hope that, you know, we start to cover all of it. You know, today, we probably only cover somewhere between 56% of all of the open source software out there when you look at all the different form factors and ways that it's built and ways that it's consumed. I hope we're a one stop shop for all open source software, every programming language, every form factor. And there's new ones too all the time. Right? You mentioned some of the new AI stuff we're doing. There's agent skills. There's new frameworks. There's new, orchestration systems, and that's gonna keep changing very quickly. Everyone always wonders when we're gonna have the first programming language just designed for agents. You know, I hope we're there and building all that stuff as quickly as people are trying to use it. [00:26:45] S1: That's, well said. As we think a little bit about your contrarian view on this future, what do you maybe believe that others don't, right, you know?
00:26:45 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:26:45] S1: That's, well said. As we think a little bit about your contrarian view on this future, what do you maybe believe that others don't, right, you know? [00:26:57] S0: I... You know, everyone has a lot of different opinions, so it's hard to come up with one that everyone disagrees with. But, yeah, I think I think the models are already good enough to do the work of most engineering teams, and I think not everyone has realized that that piece yet. Some have. So I don't know if this is something that everyone disagrees with me on, but I posted a while ago, like, cloud opus 4.6. I don't know if I would call it AGI, but it also kind of is at the same time. Like, I don't know that we can tell anymore. We don't need to wait for another wave of models out there to really put these things in their production and get work done safely and, ship correctly. A year ago, that wasn't true. And I think a lot of people, if they're not actually trying this and at the forefront every day, every week, every month, you can kind of get, fatigued. And, you know, six months ago, it wasn't that good. You might have some brilliant moments and then a bunch of terrible ones. But in the last three months, things have changed dramatically, and I don't think we actually need them to get any better to do everything we we need to be doing in the software industry. And they are gonna get better, and that's the crazy part.
00:26:57 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:26:57] S0: I... You know, everyone has a lot of different opinions, so it's hard to come up with one that everyone disagrees with. But, yeah, I think I think the models are already good enough to do the work of most engineering teams, and I think not everyone has realized that that piece yet. Some have. So I don't know if this is something that everyone disagrees with me on, but I posted a while ago, like, cloud opus 4.6. I don't know if I would call it AGI, but it also kind of is at the same time. Like, I don't know that we can tell anymore. We don't need to wait for another wave of models out there to really put these things in their production and get work done safely and, ship correctly. A year ago, that wasn't true. And I think a lot of people, if they're not actually trying this and at the forefront every day, every week, every month, you can kind of get, fatigued. And, you know, six months ago, it wasn't that good. You might have some brilliant moments and then a bunch of terrible ones. But in the last three months, things have changed dramatically, and I don't think we actually need them to get any better to do everything we we need to be doing in the software industry. And they are gonna get better, and that's the crazy part. [00:27:57] S1: I'm gonna just play that back. Effectively, what you're saying is, like, we are near AGI already, and, actually, you can't even necessarily fathom things that we are currently not capable of doing. [00:28:07] S0: Yeah. For, in the software space, the models are... Yeah. They're there.
00:28:07 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:07] S0: Yeah. For, in the software space, the models are... Yeah. They're there. [00:28:11] S1: That's incredible. That's a... That's like a a real moment just to to to soak that in. Yeah. I mean, that... Dan, that's really well said. [00:28:23] S0: Win five point o or whatever comes out, I'm sure I'll use it, but I don't know that I I need it. [00:28:28] S1: Let's shift a little bit to security because there is actually I sit here as someone running a venture fund, and just every day worrying about the exponential number of ways that security is getting worse. And actually, so that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you, which is, what do most companies fundamentally misunderstand about software security today? So if you were talking to all your customers today, and we've had many CSOs say to us, this agentic software is happening, and it's happening in our in our orbit right now, and we actually don't have our arms around it. Just give a sense of, like, what what worries you that you would wanna say to everybody.