The Future Belongs to Devs

and through them, all of us

As Ballmer put it so energetically in the past, it always comes down to developers. Developers are always at the forefront of technology, but they haven’t always been served directly by technology. The previous paradigm of tech unicorns built their fortune on the backs of developers by convincing them to build within their walled gardens and then taking profits off the top. These tech giants subsidized the tooling as a public good since they reaped most of the value created within their gardens. Developers had plenty free tools to build with, but the experience was always what you’d expect with a public good — sufficiently working, but never mindblowingly good. VCs also hesitated to invest into the space because it’s hard to compete with free, and the value accrued to platforms.

However, more recently, as developers began to take power back from the walled gardens, some of the most valuable tech companies have won by building directly for developers — from public giants like Atlassian, MongoDB, Splunk, Datadog, Elastic, and Twilio to private unicorns like Stripe, Auth0, HashiCorp, Elastic, Snyk, and Unity. These companies and their peers have already created hundreds of millions of dollars in enterprise value and are still growing quickly. We are seeing an acceleration in the funding and adoption of developer-serving technologies which not only gives developer more superpowers but also has huge implications for businesses and product in the next iteration of the web.

6. Process innovations accelerating as well. Increased CI/CD adoption across enterprises requires new tools and processes across the organization.

These shifting landscapes create new complexities but also new building blocks for developers, and the core value prop of the next web is developers building with powerful web functionalities at a fraction of the risk. This will undoubtedly lead to a proliferation of experimentation and innovation.

There used to be a bifurcation between technology needs and business needs, because technology was seen as efficiency tooling (thus a cost center) for the business functions, but a whole lot was lost in translation between the builders and the users, and you’d end up with systems that looked like this:

This is increasingly no longer the case. As all companies transform into technology companies, technology becomes a core part of the product. It only makes sense that the people building that technology are empowered to make the most important decisions about the products and services the companies use.

As advances in ML continues to perfect machines’ ability to synthesize what already exists, being on the forefront of what’s new will become one of the most marketable skills. Developers don’t just write code, they hang out on the bleeding edge of technology for fun. While many have enterprise day jobs, they also have nights and weekend projects which are fertile grounds for testing the newest advances in technology, essentially serving as a free R&D product pipeline for enterprises. This is also a sweet spot for many developer-facing companies to address with free or low-cost product. Whereas it may be difficult to convince a fortune 100 to shift to a completely new user authentication tool, it is much easier to convince a developer to use it for his/her nights and weekend project, until there is enough critical mass for the many superusers together to champion the adoption of these new technologies into larger enterprises.

This kind of technology adoption has two GTM motions — the bottoms up product-driven growth of a consumer-facing product with the potential of achieving virality — and the top down enterprise sales approach with the potential of achieving high ACVs and loyalty. Perfecting this growth strategy is a powerful opportunity for developer facing companies. This leads us to us to our next topic.

Some may say that the low/no-code movement one day will eliminate the need for developers, and while it is true we are already seeing a blurring of the lines between developer tools and business productivity tools, I highly doubt this will be the case. At the highest level, developer are just experts at abstracting technology tools up a level to help other users use them. The better the tools get, the less work the developer has to do each time. When a business user can leverage basic technology building blocks themselves to achieve their outcomes, the entire organization benefits. Low/no-code platforms help fill the gap in developer resources within an enterprise.

Meanwhile, the components making up these building blocks are also getting more complex and powerful, requiring more developers to abstract them up into useful business applications. For example, the level of developer experimentation we’ve already seen with extremely complex open source technologies such as ML (e.g. GPT-3) and Crypto-protocols (e.g. Ethereum) is already staggering, but it will still take a while before an average business user will touch these technologies using low/no-code tools.

Also, if you think about how much of the world is still unserved by technology, it’s easier to imagine that the no/low-code movement will only create more need for developers. Developers will be the shepherds of technology to the rest of the organization, and these no/low-code platforms will be their collaboration ground.

We have been diving deeply into this space at Northzone and are excited for what’s to come. The future looks bright for devs, and through them, all of us.

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