YouSaid · the spoken record

Seema Kumar

lines on the record: 68
first: 2026-07-07
most recent: 2026-07-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And we've seen that with things like IT budgeting, where IT and finance would end up with tools that ended up helping them both do forecasting. And the cloud enabled that. And so I think that that's a huge opportunity”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm positive I kicked off some sort of viral loop, not technically a viral loop, but some sort of network effect viral loop inside of her team. Because like all of a sudden, people were seeing how to make their job better and it's accessible to them and they're doing it. So I think, and to your point, Seema, like this idea of a tool that enables two functions to talk together that couldn't perform is golden. Like that's exactly, like, that's literally what Enterprise Software Integration is, except that's all manual brute floors, higher Accenture kind of stuff. And so if you have products that bridge this, then, you know, Figma did a bunch of this with design and product development. And so if you can develop software that leverages AI in order to bring together parts of an organization that don't normally communicate, that's a new category.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a person sitting there with this monstrous laptop that weighed like 12 pounds in an elevator trying to use it. I'm laughing because, of course, they were trying to not run out battery life in the elevator ride, which was invariably the case. All of a sudden, this crowded elevator of a bunch of people in these 1980s ties and 1980s aquarium glasses looking at the spreadsheet going, what are you doing? How are you doing that? And getting all excited. And fast forward to 2025, and that's exactly what happened with chat. Like, in fact, I had a friend at SAP that was writing like an SAP white paper about something. And I just asked them, tell me what questions you're trying to answer. And I did the prompt and sent them back a white paper.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of a sudden, you're seeing it's so incredible to be at this dynamic that it almost felt like the good old days, when some very motivated person, like most people who work in enterprises, it turns out, are not super interested in making their job better. They actually just want to go to work, get paid, and go home. And they don't come to work every day going, ooh, how can I make my, how can I streamline my task? They just want to not mess it up. That is a lot of the world. But there's a small set of people like those bankers at Goldman Sachs that were like, how do I do more deals, faster, better, more clever models? And so they were using Excel when the other bankers were using one, two, three. There's actually flitting around on the internet is this old commercial for Excel, this launched TV ad from the late 1990s, where the first Excel spreadsheets were being used.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, network effects outside of a company are extremely difficult for a bunch of compliance and security reasons. But the biggest network effect in enterprise software is inside of a company. And we're seeing that happen now with just chat.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software has always selled like, oh, I'm selling into just the sales team or the finance team, but then there's like these handoffs, and which is now the context, right? But on bills and deals, and like that actually also presents an interesting opportunity. So the last question I have, which is for Steven, is so network effects is this thing we always talk about on the consumer side, and it's a great source of defensibility. No enterprise software business, as far as I can tell, is successfully implemented network effects. But you could argue that is a good source of durability over time, right? And I think Salesforce has tried this in a couple ways in the past, but do you think that enterprise software will start entering the field of network effects in terms of like, okay, we're going to have both buyers and sellers on our CRM and therefore be able to mediate these transactions or I'm curious to get your take on that.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's your own question. You don't have to answer to a series of 20 year frameworks that a 20-year-old framework that got created to answer a bunch of questions that aren't even relevant anymore. And the best example of this is HTTP and HTML. Client server existed. But the reason that those took over was not because it did all the things the client server did. In fact, it did none of them. But it implemented that concept in an entirely new way. And so the web exists in spite of the fact that legacy vendors had a trillion dollars invested on how client servers should work.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just going to try to weather this technology storm by sort of power throughing it powering through it. And so your opportunity in a startup is to just look at two big players who are bolting AI onto the side and exposing some existing API as an agent or whatever and just aim for the middle and do things in the new way. And by not attacking head on, you don't show up at every single customer and have them go you know, you need to do these 8,000 things before you even enter the door. Instead you have an equally difficult question, but when you're in control of it, which is why do you even exist?”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The universal truth for enterprise software is the most difficult thing to do that happens to be the dumbest is to attempt to just compete head on with an existing category. And by head on, I mean not just the same category, but doing it the same way. The biggest opportunity right now is always, always to look at the existing sort of mental map of enterprise categories and be in between two established players. Because the thing that you know right now during a massive technology shift is the one thing that established players won't do is disturb their existing product line and go to market. So they absolutely will just be bolting AI on top of their existing product. They won't be getting rid of it. They won't stop working on it. They won't do anything to break it.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, this type of response is most effective in these cases and in Asia, we should be using this language type of opening versus in Europe, et cetera. That sort of stuff, you're now a gentically collecting all of that. And that's an interesting data exhaust. You will have to continue to pull together things that can be kept, you know, agents have been able to operate on software, but then also what humans are doing out in the field, machines are doing out in the field and pulling that back in, so like construction manufacturing, all of that.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Touched on this. Where are we really seeing the biggest opportunities for startups right now? I think, look, a lot of this, yeah, what I was just saying, it's doing the things that the incumbents are not doing right now, which is going from a layer of collection of data and into how do we take action on top of it, right? And so take the CRM example, right? It's like, we're not just logging all the like call information, but then now I'm providing intelligence back around, okay, how do I prioritize leads? Which accounts should we work on? What has risk of churn flagging all of that, and then like sending the outbound, right? And so, and part of that is creating this a gentic loop, which is you now as the agent sends the outbound, sees the response, you're understanding, okay, A, what works, what didn't, how did people respond? And then B, you're also collecting like benchmark data too.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a reason that agents can continue to be built, the data can be sucked in and built in the background. A lot of what we're seeing right now is things that are working alongside an SAP or a layer of visibility on top that is enhancing the experience and allowing the business user to then run agents on top of the existing data they have, but also not throw out all of the logic they've had in the background. And then I think also create a new system of record, like voice agents are collecting new data, recordings are collecting new data, transcription, ingestion of documents, all of that documentation is pulling in. And maybe one day these AI startups will replace the systems of record in the back end, but they are doing so in a systematic way of observing how the business is operating. I guess to close this out, though Seema, you sort of just”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, of course, for their life. But I mean, you're like taking the engine out midflight, whatever you want to say is the analogy. That's really hard. You have to get the practical realities of permissioning and collaboration and all that, right? Then there's the third option. I think this is why we continue to do what we do in investing in AI software, is because”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of it and then treat Salesforce as kind of just the back end. I think to what we just talked about, some of that will work, but some of that will also not work because Salesforce doesn't want you to be, you know, they don't want to be just the data in the background, right? And so, you know, I think that there will be mixed results around that. And I'm not bullish on the incumbent software building great agents on top. There's option two, which is you just totally DIY it. You have the most control in that situation. However, I think to everything we just talked about, that's really hard, right? Like you have to rebuilding true enterprise software. And I think for a startup building, rebuilding a CRM much easier for rebuilding CRM for a Fortune 500 business, it's a lot of business logic to capture. And you're also trying to do open heart surgery while the patient is alive, right? Or, you know, whatever one you want to use the analogy.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think two things I'll add. So one is the practical realities, like even go back to the Salesforce example or like workday. Workday has had APIs that you could work with. But can you really actually extract all of the data out of Workday in a clean way and just operate without using Workday? No. Workday makes it extremely difficult to actually like get access to the documentation and work with the world. And they don't expose all the things about the API to use the API example is this is an analogous to what we're seeing now, which is that it makes it a dumb database, right? And so they're not incentivized to do that. So I think where we're seeing is there's three paths in front of you. One, if you were a consumer or like a business that's looking at buy software, one is, okay, I take Salesforce and I either turn on Agent Force or build all my agents on top.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies view just a tie with some competitor as a win because they'll just bundle it into their existing thing and give it away. And so it's, but this middleware layer, it's always, always very unstable. It looks great in a network hierarchy diagram of the OSI levels of networking, but it's just never that stable.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be as stable as the most unstable part of that. So if expense support company goes out of business, you're completely out of luck. So you want your expense support company to be thriving and doing more stuff, even though you in your head, you're like, I wish they would just stop. I don't want any more from them. It's getting complicated. Oh, they just did a UI reworking. That's driving me crazy. And the flip side is those companies, they're not just going to sit there and decay. And they're going to look to the left and they're going to look to the right and they're just going to do the stuff that they see people using with their product. And so SAP, the example of Sima used, we're seeing this whole ecosystem grow up. And SAP is just going to do those things. And that's the nit. Now, not all of them and most of them, they're not going to do very well. In fact, just before this, I was talking to somebody and we reminded them that in most giant enterprises.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And things like that. But the reality is that no software wants to be disintermediated by some other layer above it. Like nobody wants to just be put in a corner and said, your job is to just store this sequel format for expense reports and do nothing more. And then we're going to use you only for that. And then by the way, we're piping you through to some other tool to analyze expense reports because that's not a growing business. That's a decaying business. And so this whole notion of like everybody is going to be perfectly content to be abstracted by some, you know, benign layer in the middle. It just doesn't really work that way. And it's because customers actually do not want to assemble their scenario from a bunch of different providers because all it takes is your system will only”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's super interesting. I love seeming to opine on where she sees things going with startups in this regard as well. So I'll go quick. But the real thing with MCP is it's very much like everything we're seeing now is that so much of it is driven by an engineering view of what would make for a good software architecture. And very little of it is being driven by sort of the using seamlessly, the physical reality of the world. And so, of course, if you're an engineer and you would love to have every tool you want to use to have a very clean API, preferably like a command line interface that pipes text in and out would be perfect. But that turns out to not be how the world wants to work. There are many, many reasons why it doesn't want to work that way. Simo touched on many like security and compliance.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think before we wrap up, it might be good to visit the sort of more immediate history and then the more faraway history of kind of what headless software even is. I know Stephen, you wrote last year a piece in reaction to the rise of MCP servers. And in that piece, you also related it actually to sort of early Microsoft litigation that the Justice Department levied against them. And part of the argument was that Microsoft had a lot of products that could be categorized as middleware. And I'm just kind of curious, you know, in all of these different software waves that you've witnessed. Maybe not on the litigation side, but on the, you know.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also to your earlier point expertise exists in this cloud in an organization. And it is the untapped resource of the modern era. And Aaron Levy at Box has done the most eloquent job of explaining repeatedly the assets that exist in all of these word and Excel documents strewn throughout a company. And it's actually very, very hard to understand which documents are important, which ones to believe. And part of being in a company and having a culture is really knowing the answer to that. And it's super interesting to watch the customers at Box use to actually answer those questions. Which are the sales PowerPoint presentations that are actually working? Which are the spreadsheets and the models that people actually rely on? And I think that.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other sort of follow up to Seema's point is like it's the best case for just recording everything you do, like all, like just voice recording everything you do to like capture, if people are, you know, going and flying and closing deals in person, make sure the software or the LLM can kind of capture everything that happens at all times. Obviously not advocating for, you know, full panopticon. Exactly. Exactly. And whether it's like, you know, recording, you know, conversations or taking emails and written artifacts and ingesting them, this is all, that is the way the world is moving. So, yeah.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's actually literally the same mental model. Like there's a bunch of stuff and we're deciding when to close the books and what sales to account for what and where, it's fixing a bug. And there's a story around it, a narrative, and we have to explain it to our boss. And if something goes wrong, we need a trail that explains who did what. And so, so much of what a business really is are just the people deciding things. And all that software does is it up levels, abstracts, and changes what they decide and how and what tools they use.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think open source software development is actually a really good example of this. Because the hardest thing in software development is, you know, you have to be finished at some point so that everybody knows this is a stable release and can go build on it. And the art of finishing is this long tail of like not changing the code. And there's no API for that. Like, developers thinkers don't hesitate to think there should be no API for that. They could think of a way to automate it with voting and with a discussion that has sentiment analysis or whatever. But you still need a bunch of people to concur over a decision to fix or not fix something. And yet those same people will just say some other business process like closing the books for earnings. That should just be an API.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the other thing interesting, not to double, to spend too much time on business travel, but I think it also ties the physical and like digital worlds. Like there are always things that there will be humans doing. Maybe it's not back office TPS reports, but like salespeople will be closing deals. There will be human interaction to close deals. People will be getting on planes as a result. And maybe they aren't spending as much time entering data into Salesforce or doing things along the way, but they will, there will be these humans doing online and offline work. And I think that actually is something that there will always be a data exhaust from things to capture, optimization that needs to happen. And that isn't going away either.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always, but the analysis then drives new processes and new behaviors that themselves differentiate companies. Like business travel is to stick with that example, is a huge sink in most companies. It's just a giant expense hole that they wish they could shrink. Once they can tie it to how things perform in their company, then it's more than just expense moderation. It's actually figuring out performance optimization and figuring that whole thing out becomes like a different kind of job than just booking travel and analyzing expenses. It just becomes this whole remote work optimization tool. And then it's a different thing.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's route our channel requests to the best prices we could get at any given moment rather than just default to one carrier. Let's use a specific credit card for business travel that buys us a bunch of different added benefits that we know matter to our patterns of travel. And so suddenly there was a bigger job called business travel analysis that takes way more people than just booking the flights, which everybody can just do on their own.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Look, there's now apocryphal, semi apocalypse, famous example of radiology, which is a correlation, not a causation, but radiologists all love AI. And now we are having a radiology shortage. There's a lot of reasons it's complicated, but it just shows that the innovation wasn't static. And the market for the demand wasn't static. And so I think that a lot of what happens just in the micro at the enterprise level is the minute you automate the most mundane thing and think you have it all squared away, whole new things appear. Like actually like expense reporting is a really good example. You know, first there's nothing. Then people figure out how to like do spreadsheets. And then people figure out like, oh, now we have a whole system we can analyze it. And now all of a sudden business travel, you get ahead of the curve. And you're like, well, now let's just use miles for business travel.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A new set of tools, and the long tail got no shorter. It just got longer in a different way. And I think people forget that that's how innovation is this constant reinvention and it's a growing pie, not a static pie. And all the negativity around AI comes from just thinking that the work to be done is this fixed thing that takes N people and M amount of salt. And then we're done. There's no jobs anymore. There's just an agent running. And that just never going to happen. Like, legal is a great example of this. Like where people do contracts and they think that the law is going to help contracts get done quicker without lawyers. Except I can assure you contracts will get longer and more sophisticated and encompass way more sets of scenarios than a person ever could.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With language models, well, then we're going to dream up a whole bunch of new stuff to do. Like, I just mentioned this loop that Amazon must be in on customer service. Well, though he got rid of all the phone people and the phone experience that would be miserable to do a return and the challenge response and the fighting and like, can I return this? Do I have to package it up or will you just ignore like toothpaste? They don't want it back. Like that's a pioneering invention by Amazon is like, you know, if somebody gets the wrong consumable, we just don't want it. Like they're poisoning it. They use part of it. It's cheaper to just have them throw it away. Well, that never happened before. Like you used to have to actually bring spoiled food to the supermarket and show it to them. And so they've fixed that level of productivity. But now there's this back end that's just out there constantly figuring out how to have it not happen again. And now they need a new level of analysis.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that happens in technology shifts is everybody knows the thing about nobody understands exponential when it's happening. So you have to be very careful to extrapolate and end up extrapolating linear when something exponential is happening. But the same thing happens with productivity or an analogous thing happens with productivity, which is people look at the existing body of work that happens today and they say, okay, how do we make that easier? And then all of a sudden there's all this fear that we're going to automate everything away, that everything is just going to become an API which developers and engineers say, oh, that will be easy. And then we'll be in this nirvana world where everything is automated and easy and predictable. But they forget that productivity drives new scenarios. And so the minute that you can get something easier with automation and you can actually automate it, which I do think is happening right now with agents and with.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or give it API access, it's like, okay, so in which cases can people extract data? When can they write versus read? That all needs to be figured out over time as well. And like interactions also between agents, right? And I think if you go back to the idea of a system of record, right, it's one ideally, one set of one central repository of data that is the source of truth. Now if you have multiple people accessing and writing to it, like who gets to access when? And I think that's a, anyways, these are additional problems that I think need to be solved solvable, but we'll take time.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny to think that maybe customer service gets worse in the short term because things stop getting default decided in favor of the customer suddenly you actually have to defend your case again instead of like you being you know reshipped the uh the sensitive and toothpaste like you you feel like you were owed um but uh i think i i think maybe then more generally it sounds like you're both saying that automating the long tail is still kind of the hardest thing about all of this is is that true or would you say that there are other hard things uh that that developers and founders also need to think about i think that's that's part of it um i think there are a lot of other things around like permissioning and this is this is all i think i could you could probably lump it into the hard tail but oh sorry long tail but like permissioning is part of this right and like you know as you give people”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that that's so interesting compared to sort of old school exception handling. And then they use the data to go and improve the internal shipping and handling and warehouse process. Maybe it's the product description, a zillion other things or reviews. And so I find that's what I find so interesting about the capabilities of AI is that it's driving a different definition and different behavior at companies about how to handle exceptions. And I think when we get through sort of the 1.0 version of this, we're going to get to a new version where people are like comfortable letting AI do or decide things because they realize it's adding a level of predictability and repeatability to their enterprise.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best way to automate something, and it's their religion, it's their core principle, which is you just decide it in favor of the customer. Oh, they sent the wrong thing. So you go to the chatbot, you tell them, the chatbot understands that you've got the wrong thing, and it just sends you a new one.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me just add, building on that, because I think it helps us to go back to this notion of headless and what are both the challenges and the opportunities. Because, of course, if you're an engineer, which almost everyone talking about what's going on in the world in AI today is, you think headless and API, agent API, just interchange them. And so you think, oh, well, it's code. I can write the business process down. And the problem that you hit right at the beginning is that if you're not an engineer, you can't even explain the process that you use to resolve a customer issue. And in fact, it's sort of very interesting to watch Amazon really do some of the best work on this because they really, really don't want to have humans. You can't call Amazon for anything. Like it's just hopeless. And so what they're doing is they're learning with everybody.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you have to feel comfortable, you have to get to that point where you're like, okay, we've observed enough interactions to actually capture, to understand the exceptions. And then on the sales side, the buyer trusts that this piece of software can actually has captured all the context to handle it.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And that's exactly right. So these exceptions, they're not captured anywhere right now. Now I think if you say if there is a voice agent that is doing, let's say compliance check calls for freight is one of our portfolio companies does, they're now collecting the exceptions through their voice agent and getting some of that context. Or if we can talk about computer using agents, if you're observing humans and how they are clicking through software or how they are responding to things, and now we have this ability now to not only record data or like record interactions, but then process it via LLMs, then you're able to start collecting some of this context. But it's a lot there, I mean, as Stephen was saying, all the interesting work is around the exception. So it's not like, okay, you know, three days later, we've got it all. We've got all the context because also like sales cycles take a long time. Each exception isn't handled with the frequency that you get the data immediately.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like all the people are about exception handling. You know, it's basically like. And then go watch what they really want. And they're like, well, I wanted a McFlurry, but I wanted two flavors and mix them together. And that's not in the, and it's always the exceptions. And everything about automation and enterprise is handling exceptions. It just is. It's the strangest thing. But, you know, enterprise pricing is a great example. Like how much is it for seat? Well, you have to call us. Well, you call, then you talk, and then it's still an exception.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, for Salesforce in particular, that's incredibly important because I've never met a salesperson, an account manager, an account executive who thinks that the default is the right answer for anything with their account. And, like, no, even if they get the Japanese language right, you know, oh, it's spring, and the birds are chirping, but you're overdue on your payment, your license count is wrong. Even if you do that correctly, the rep is going to want to handle it in their specific way. And I think that this notion of exception handling is just the root of the challenge with agents, which is almost everything interesting in an enterprise is an exception.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has talked a lot about context graphs over the last six months. But what is that? That's all the exceptions. What do you do? How do you handle certain cases? It's the edge cases and the permissioning and all that stuff that needs to be and all the policies that are not necessarily in the field of Salesforce. And so for the agent to then go back to this 80-20 thing, the agent can extract all the information, send an outbound email based on the information that's in the CRM around the person and their persona and what they do and all that. But then like, okay, how do you deal with a case, one case versus another and how they respond? And it's like, oh, well, normally if it's a person who's in Asia, we respond this way. But if it's a person in the US, we respond this other way. That's not captured in Salesforce. But that was in someone's head. And so that's the context that I think is really important now for agents to be able to act on behalf of this data.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think we also forget that Salesforce is like really an enforcement mechanism for the go-to-market team, which is like, okay, are you collecting all of the information that you need to? And of course, we can talk about Salesforce hygiene, et cetera, as a separate point. But if you have all, you know, is the human doing the getting the data to then have to then capture the state of the business, which, okay, but I think if we now switch to the agenda world, we can talk about what agent means, but imagine there's an agent that needs to do outbound calling or outground messaging. They want to be able to retrieve that information. They don't really care about how the fields are organized or how many clicks it takes, but they do want to be, they still need to access that information. But then the second piece they need is this contact thing. So we've talked a lot. I think I feel like the internet.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then a company got started to do that. It wasn't Salesforce first. It was the predecessor called Sebel. And then people like, oh, we should make a whole company that does this. And that's what some of these apps are that you're seeing using language models and interfaces that are chat to SAP or to Salesforce. They are just trying to take advantage of what the LMs are really good at, which is synthesizing and orchestrating unstructured information”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And something that Sima wrote about these sort of, I don't remember the word you used, but these ad hoc business processes are the ones that really become the most interesting because they're interesting because that's how a business runs, but they're also interesting because those are the next products. Like those are the next companies that people start. You know, CRM used to just be a spreadsheet. If you are in a business and you were an account manager and you kept track of your accounts, you just kept track of it in Excel”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because then you know you have an escape valve to do the thing that you couldn't do before on analysis. And so what's so cool about where we are today is that now with the language models, you have this incredible way to actually consume those in much easier than you could before. If you think about PDF, like the old way used to be like, okay, I want to figure out like exception handling some report that my system emits declined expense reports or whatever. But I want to do it over some weird time period or across different currencies that it doesn't handle or some weirdness that you can't figure out the UI. So now you can export them all and take this 20 PDFs and put them in a model and do a bunch of analysis that you couldn't do before. Or if you did, it was all copy and paste in this mundane thing.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an incredibly important point for folks to take away, which is that the biggest thing about enterprise software is it almost always does what somebody wants it to do. They just don't know how to make it do that. There's no report that SAP can't generate, no graph, no chart, no analysis or whatever. You just can't figure it out. Or maybe it's configured so you don't have permissions or something. So the way to think of it is in enterprise software, the two most frequently used features exist in no enterprise software natively. Export to Excel and export as CSV. Or PDF, you pick. And so all enterprise software, the first thing they have to do that's missing when they show up and they do that first demo is the customers say, does it do export to Excel or does it do export to CSV or PDF?”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indicative of what's happening out with software in general, which is accessing the UI is optional. And like going back to the Slack bots point, like you want the information delivered to you versus needing to go to the UI. But the data and the business logic inside either it's SAP or something else that's being replacing it that's building it, but that all still needs to exist one way or another”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was at a dinner last night, and there was someone there who was like the head of Revs at a, I don't know, maybe growth stage startup. And his task, this is like a thousand plus person company, was to rebuild their Salesforce instance internally. And I think he's like, oh, well, you know, we know all the fields. We can import all the data. And I was like, that's not really the part that's tough, right? How are you deciding what gets captured, how the whole organizational lines around it? And then who's”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trust me, yes. It's old. And the guy at Goldman looked at us and said, I don't think you understand. We make more money from Excel than you do. And we're just sitting there like, what is he talking about? Like, it made no sense to us. And then we started thinking about it. And it's like, well, we sell Excel to Morgan Stanley and JP and Chase and everybody else. And the Golden was saying is their application of Excel is so differentiated. And that wasn't just people typing. They built add-ins. They wrote all this code. They defined their WordPress. There's this wild underestimation about like you could vibe code your way into enterprise software.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the difference between Ford and Toyota and General Motors and Daimler are not just that they're looking at the same screen. It's that they chose which screens to look at, which customizations to make in those screens. And then they go and they buy steel and aluminum and wire and dashboards and radios from all the same places. And so I just think that people wildly underestimate the level of sophistication that customers apply to this software. Back when we were first starting to get Excel used in companies, you'll laugh at this. We used to do these little visits and we go visit bankers. And so we're sitting in Goldman Sachs and we're telling him about Excel is better than Lotus 123, blah, blah, blah. That's super old. You don't even know what 123.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source