Video Of The Week: Jeff Lawson on Software People

Jeff Lawson is the founder and CEO of our portfolio company Twilio.

We had the pleasure of watching him present at a USV event yesterday. Jeff has this notion of “software people” that is a big part of what his vision is for Twilio and it was a big part of his talk yesterday.

So I thought I’d share a video from last summer where Jeff talks a lot about this notion of “software people”. It’s good.

#entrepreneurship

Comments (Archived):

  1. Rob Underwood

    The guy at 0:49 doesn’t really look like you, Fred.I love how Twilio contributes to fostering a hacking and hacker culture. I’m thinking of folks like Jon Gottfried, who recently left Twilio, and who is so committed to building communities of hackers and developers.I was re-reading one my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, last night and saw highlighted this passage, https://kindle.amazon.com/p…, which I sent to Jon, who is kicking off a weekend hackathon. Seems apropos here, in part because I think part of being a “software person” is a commitment to Quality, the central concept of Pirsig’s magnus opus.This quote, https://kindle.amazon.com/p…, and the idea of “value rigidity” (born of underlying dualism) is also why I think companies like Cisco produce devices like that pictured in 15:31.Finally the story about United Airlines and the guitar reminds me of a passage early in ZAMM that talks about a mechanic hammering away at motorcycle without purpose. The mechanic is separated from the machine (Pirsig uses the story to set up the dangers of dualism between romantic and classical quality), and not invested in his work and the job immediately at hand, much as the baggage handler may not have been caring much about the work s/he was doing when the guitar was damaged. I think what many of us love about technology is when we’re really in the moment, creating something of Quality, where the separation between us and what we’re creating breaks down. When we stay separate from the job at hand, when we are not fully invested in our labor (“phoning it in” literately), we tend to break guitars and produce crappy phones with too many buttons. Essentially, this – https://kindle.amazon.com/p…. The folks at Twilio impress me for being invested in creating something of quality from software.

  2. Richard

    Twillio : the hackathon team’s Swiss Army knife.Inspiring talk. And think of all the environmental benefits. How many outdated cash registers, thermostats, phone terminals etc. are sitting in a landfill in Staten Island and elsewhere.

  3. Rob Underwood

    The guy at 0:49 doesn’t really look like you, Fred.I like this video because I spend a lot of my day thinking about how software can improve higher-education. In a sense our actuators are the public school teachers we (Relay) send out into the world. If they’re prepared to teach and teach well, then the software we’ve written to help them learn, which augments their in-person instruction/coaching, has done its job.I love how Twilio contributes to fostering a hacking and hacker culture. I’m thinking of folks like Jon Gottfried, who recently left Twilio, and who is so committed to building communities of hackers and developers.I was re-reading one my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, last night and saw highlighted this passage, https://kindle.amazon.com/p…, which I sent to Jon, who is kicking off a weekend hackathon. Seems apropos here, in part because I think part of being a “software person” is a commitment to Quality, the central concept of Pirsig’s magnus opus.This quote, https://kindle.amazon.com/p…, and the idea of “value rigidity” (born of underlying dualism) is also why I think companies like Cisco produce devices like that pictured in 15:31 of the video.Finally the story about United Airlines and the guitar at the end of the video reminds me of a passage early in ZAMM that talks about a mechanic hammering away at motorcycle without purpose. The mechanic is separated from the machine (Pirsig uses the story to set up the dangers of dualism between romantic and classical quality), and not invested in his work and the job immediately at hand, much as the baggage handler may not have been caring much about the work s/he was doing when the guitar was damaged. I think what many of us love about technology, and software in particular, is when we’re really in the moment, creating something of Quality, where the separation between us and what we’re creating breaks down. When we stay separate from the job at hand, when we are not fully invested in our labor (“phoning it in” literately), we tend to break guitars and produce crappy phones with too many buttons. The folks at Twilio impress me for being invested in creating something of Quality from software.

    1. Anne Libby

      ZAMM is one of those books I keep resolving to read. Thank you for this reason to jump it to the top of that list.

  4. kenberger

    Jeff gave a short but amazing rallying speech for us at a small Twilio dev partners session a couple months back at Twilio HQ (my group works closely with Twilio and their clients on integration work for startups and enterprises). The guy has a gift at really connecting with and inspiring geeks.Dave McClure (also seen in the video) once had a similar developer evangelist job for paypal, btw.

  5. Kirsten Lambertsen

    I’m gonna watch this every time I’m stuck and need to brainstorm. Thanks for sharing!

  6. sigmaalgebra

    Good talk and in this thread a good introduction to his idea of ‘software people’.He had several good points, especially replacing some single-purpose, manufactured, physical products with some mechanically simple, more generic products and some software for the user interface and to connect the data inputs and outputs and to process the data to create the outputs. As powerful as current computing hardware, say, from Moore’s law and related laws, and software are, it is too easy to miss some of the power, e.g., what he made clear with telephones.In my office it’s possible to see that he is correct: Some years ago I bought a fancy AT&T telephone with lots of buttons and features. For it’s time, it was terrific. But the hardware was low quality, and now the special features are dead and the thing is just an old dumb phone.But, due to software, I no longer care: So, for receiving phone messages, that is handled in the ‘cloud’ at my ISP. My copy of the phone message comes to me as a WAV file via e-mail, and RealPlayer plays it. The message is stored with the rest of my e-mail, and I have good means of indexing the message so that I can find it. The message gets saved with the rest of my computer backup.For anything having to do with phone numbers, I use my computer, and what I do is much more powerful than that AT&T phone at its best. E.g., I have powerful software means to find phone numbers on my computer. E.g., to dial a number, I use a little software, an editor macro of just a few lines, that sends the old AT (attention) command with the phone number to my FAX modem card.So, a FAX modem as some simple, now generic, hardware and some software, heavily from just a text editor. Yup, the software worked.But, the video missed some, in my view for the future, missed nearly everything important: The video made clear that the software between the inputs and the outputs manipulates data to convert the inputs to the outputs. At one point the video seemed to claim that software could do the data manipulations for “any” business problem. Alas, such manipulations can be very much, and very significantly, challenging or even not possible at least now.Here we go, guys: The manipulations, whatever they are, are necessarily, no escape, can’t run, can’t hide, mathematically something, understood or not, powerful or not. Then for more powerful manipulations, the main tools are, and the nominees are (1) the C programming language, (2) the C++ programming language, (3) the Python programming language, (4) libraries of functions, (5) libraries of communications interfaces and APIs, and (6) mathematics. And the winner is (drum roll, please) (6) mathematics. The mathematicians of the world want to thank everyone who lost! :-)!For that mathematics, there is a major fraction of the budgets of the NSF and DARPA because long before “software is eating the world” nearly all fields of science and engineering were ‘eaten’ by mathematics, that is, ‘mathematized’. The associated data manipulations from the mathematics constitute some of the most intricate and powerful work in all of civilization and should not be overlooked or trivialized; software alone is not nearly sufficient. Indeed, the software just does the grunt work specified by its much more powerful superior, mathematics.Yes, for now it’s possible to write valuable software that really just does a routine job already well understood from manual work of humans or work that easily enough could be done in principle routinely by humans. For much more value, however, exploiting relevant math is too valuable to be long ignored.

    1. LE

      But the hardware was low quality, and now the special features are dead and the thing is just an old dumb phone.However in order for software to work it needs hardware. And even if that hardware is general purpose hardware it also becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced.The “dedicated hardware” phone on my desk is still useful after many years. So is the alarm system at my house and at the office.Otoh every time Apple updates their operating system my laptop and desktops get slower and I need to consider replacing them (this is really a variation of planned obsolescence).Even software that runs in the cloud runs on servers that get outdated and needs to be replace. Do a search on ebay and you will see tons of only perhaps 2 or 3 year old rack servers that need to be replaced.My point is that there are definitely cases where dedicated hardware for a purpose makes sense and if built cheaply enough can just be disposable when something better comes along (as opposed to having to get rid of a much larger machine because the soho phone system software that you run on it needs some hardware feature that your 3 years old CPU can’t handle).

  7. bobmonsour

    My favorite line from Jeff is: “We get no points for using servers. We only get brownie points for serving users.”I loved the talk and it’s a great rallying cry for “software people” everywhere. However, I’d be careful to avoid thinking that only people who write software can be the kind of “software people” that Jeff describes. I’ve come across a lot of people in various roles, other than software, that have the necessary imagination to think about what’s possible with software. They’ve got the right kinds of experience, instincts and have learned a lot about how software development works that they become the kind of “software people” that Jeff talks about.

  8. vruz

    That was one good presentation. Thanks for posting it, worked great as validation for me.

  9. Martin De Saulles

    A great presenter and a great presentation. He points out a direction of travel for many industries and gives a warning to companies which don’t understand where the value in their sector may be heading. However, I take issue with his rather naive and technologically deterministic view that software people can solve so many of the world’s problems by writing code. No doubt, software has an important role in helping solve many global social and commercial problems but other factors such as finance, physical resources, tacit knowledge and the desire for change will be equally or more important.

  10. samwallace

    I agree with the rest of the comments. This was an interesting and dare I say it, important talk. Thanks for posting. But was I the only person who saw and was disturbed by another trend that was demonstrated in the video? The end of common courtesy is here…during the entire presentation, almost the entire audience was listening with one ear. the other ear and their eyes and their hands were occupied with cell phones and laptops. The room vibrated with indifference.

  11. Chris Phenner

    I think this thesis and the talk’s content is more ambitious than Andreessen’s ‘Software is Eating the World’ Op-Ed. Its framing is about people and problem-solving (not ‘markets that will be disrupted’) and its range is farther-reaching.One wish I had is that if Jeff is going to use ‘Software People’ as a term so frequently, perhaps some day his talk (or someone building on it) will tell the story of people’s decisions, instead of describing ‘decisions’ as ‘sensors and actuators.’I know those things are involved, but Jeff comes so much closer (than Andreessen) to humanizing the problem-solving approach that ‘Software People’ can have, and then he uses devices (not people) to show examples of ‘Software People’ work.I loved the video, I loved Jeff’s talk and I love the hope it provides. I’m also grateful Jeff allowed non-tech folks into the big tent of whom he defined as ‘Software People.’Can’t wait.

  12. M. Allan

    great video…too bad no one attending seemed to be paying much attention (-;

  13. thebigmix

    Cool vid – Love the sensor/actuator clarity. Big issue I see is the marketing/permission to use these sensors on someone’s (still very personal) phones/houses/bank accounts etc. etc.