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

“They all, you know, putting aside EV versus gas or whatever, they all just make cars, which is a lot of known technology with assembly lines and workers. Like, what differentiates the companies and what differentiates them is how they operate and the internal processes to decide what car to make, how many more materials to buy, what currencies to hedge, how many people to hire, when to introduce a new product line. All of that is enterprise resource management and planning. And how is all of that done? It's all in SAP. So those companies are effectively run by people sitting in conference rooms looking at SAP screens.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That way. And you can't replace it back in the late 1990s, who now is sort of the godfather of enterprise software, Larry Ellison at Oracle. Back then, they were only a database company and entering the world of NetSuite, ERP, and all this. But he went on a rant, a multi-year rant about how enterprise software was so stupid because everybody customized it. And he had this saying that just said, businesses should just stick with the 80% solution and they should just use whatever works like 80% of the time. And most enterprise people were like, well, A, you're just talking your brook because your software only does 80% of what I need. But B, like that's just not how it works. If you take the auto industry and you just take the top 10 companies in autos.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just so important because this is one of the things where startups look at enterprise software and they think about it in terms of startup scale. And so they take something like mundane like expense reporting. And like, okay, well, we have 40 people and one person can figure out expense reports for 40 people. Like you could hire a human and be done with it. Like literally come back from a trip, you dump the receipts in a bucket and one human rifles through them and the expense reporting problem goes away. Or you say, oh, forget the human. We'll just all take pictures of our receipts and OCR it and categorize it and the whole thing will go away. And that's fine until you have 100,000 people in 20 countries with different national laws and policies about business expense and all of this. And then you overlay corporate policies. And the whole thing just caught.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a good point to double click on because I think a misconception right now is that SAP, okay, well, you can just have a Postgres database and APIs and then bam, like you can replace SAP. And that's absolutely not true. I think partly, I mean, Steve, I don't know if you want to elaborate on it. I'm happy to, but I think that piece around the logic and everything else that is encaptured in SAP is way, way more important than the fact that like, oh, this data just happens to be in this database. There's a reason why also SAP takes multiple years to implement and get, it's not because like, oh, you know, yes, the system integrators are slow and part of it, but it's customized to the way that business actually operates. And I think that's like an important part about why you can't just obscure away the software completely from and turn it into a database.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not going anywhere. And that's because these examples are ones that codified an external force. And that external force was the regulatory body that they embraced. Siemens examples of SAP, it just codified a company. And so if you take SAP out of a large automobile manufacturer, there's no automobile manufacturer left or Walmart. Like the company just evaporates because the company is defined not just by purchasing the software, not even by just using it, but by how they codified the business rules into that product.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has been somebody actually went in and for the first time in two generations coded up the software to collect money from people, which itself had previously been an unsolved problem on the scale of insurance. Because nobody put together the tax laws for every country, every jurisdiction, every locality, every border crossing, every currency exchange, it's mind-blowing. And so now that is the most sticky, like that is not going anywhere, ever. Like it'll be like we'll be doing this podcast with great grandchildren 100 years from now talking about how sticky that experience was, just like I told like, oh, you didn't know this, but the software that runs all state is older than me.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seemed like co wrote a post on SAP, which is sort of the ultimate, ultimate example of sticky software. I mean, there is nothing, the only software that's stickier than SAP is behind the scenes, and it's the software that insurance companies wrote. And they wrote all this software. In fact, whatever jokes come up about businesses that are looking for COBOL programmers, it's to go and work on the insurance software that exists in every state of the union. And in many ways, what you're seeing, like with one of the biggest successes to date in Stripe,”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a really good point there in two things. Inertia is a really powerful force. And then I think the other thing is, yeah, nobody when they're building the software, they're at thinking about this rubric we put together and like tick, tick, tick. We got all these features that are going to do all these things. But I think the practical reality is also as software extends its tentacles across an organization and it gets ingrained in people using it and they've been paying for it for a long time. It just seeps into how people are doing things. And that's hard to rip out. Yeah. Yeah. You even talk about this in your PC mode where there's sort of all of these like invisible tacit sort of understandings about how to use different products or things that are embedded both within the software but also within the people using them where it's just like it does become hard after a while to extricate yourself from whatever ecosystem you happen to be. And in fact, Stephen, I think you've even”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As email very quickly learned about delegate access and having meet calendars owned by multiple people and all of this crazy stuff. And I can tell you there was no meeting where we said, okay, let's figure out how to make the calendar the sticky part of Outlook and make sure we handle recurring meeting, exception handling well. And then you go and you find out General Motors isn't going to displace like 600,000 seats because of the calendar or some crazy thing like that. And so it's really amazing in enterprise software what causes sticky and how you can actually capitalize it on it when somebody threatens to take you out of the enterprise.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whatever. And so you really want to get the software sold and that's your fastest path to sticky. And after that, it sort of, you know, a winner's tail over what caused it to be sticky. And in fact, the best thing about sticky is if you're the rep for a company that you've sold something to and the company is threatening you like, hey, we're going to replace you. You're just going to listen to them and you're going to find what's sticky. And if that works like three or four times across different accounts, then you've just told the tale as to what made the product sticky. It doesn't matter what the PMs or what anybody else thought of. It could be some crazy arcane thing. You know, I have stories of lots of sticky software and lots of arcane things, but anyone who's ever tried to displace Microsoft Outlook.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, those are all exactly right. I think it's important to also consider that the most sticky thing you could do is actually collect money from a customer. And if you're collecting money, it turns out it's really, really hard for them to stop sending you money. And it's really hard for them to figure out what to do if they stop sending you money. And it sounds really trite, but the stickiest software is software that's getting used somewhere. Then when you dig in and try to come up with reasons, well, it just depends on who you talk to in a company. You know, you talk to the HIPAA compliance people in some company and they're going to tell you, this is the software you have to use because it's like the most bestest HIPAA compliant software. If you talk to the administrators, you're going to hear about onboarding new users. If you talk to the users, you're going to hear about muscle memory and keystrokes or labor unions.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're like, they mandate that Salesforce is there because they're used to using it, their teams are used to using it. And then there's, you know, finance may rely on the Salesforce output for billing and upstream marketing is going to rely on it as well. And so there's these dependencies. And these all are driving stickiness. But I think the other piece, too, is you need one single set of truth, right? You need to know an account is closed and who is working on it. And all of that needs to be logged in one place. And I think if you go from CRM to say an ERP or payroll, that absolutely has even legal reasons and a compliance reasons why you can't have numbers that are not being tracked as cleanly and correctly as an auditor might like, for example. So anyways, this all drove stickiness and durability because you were used to using Salesforce.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this is actually a good lead up into a follow up question, which is historically what has made software sticky and how are agents starting to disrupt that? And I leave that to either of you to answer. Maybe you guys can both kind of debate about that. Yeah, I'd say there are many things that made software sticky, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that it was built around the way a human interacts, right? The UI was sticky because, you know, the number of times you had to read and write the frequency of access, the downstream workflows, all of the undocumented what we call SOPs or standard operating procedures, all the stuff that happened around the software that got ingrained in muscle memory and process and then external parties, et cetera. So a CRM may be sticky because a sales rep needs to go in and out of it all the time. They're used to interacting with Salesforce a lot of times when like new VPs of sales come into our companies.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, like in definitional hell right now. Is part of a new wave of technology is you make up a lot of new words for things that you kind of did before. And that's just a natural part of technology evolution. But I actually think it's super important. Like first you have this agent, which is, as far as I can tell right now, is also a new word for program that takes a very long time to run and might not finish. That's the best branding ever is to call a program that takes a really long time, which we used to call a bug. It's now like the coolest new feature ever. And it's just now an agent. But in seriousness, the most interesting way I think to think up what you're really talking about doing differently between an agent and an API is really what are you actually doing? What is the agent itself doing? Is it looking something up? Because that's actually a pretty lightweight thing that”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, it's essentially, again, all these are agentic ways of accessing it versus the human needing to go in, log the data, or from a read perspective, go back and see, okay, here's this opportunity, here's what happened, and look at themselves. And so that interface is less relevant. And Stephen, do you have anything to add here just on the kind of definitional territory that we're covering right now or kind of this discussion?”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As builders, and I think notion is one of many other companies that is also trying to figure out okay, what is it that I offer and what APIs do I expose? I think Stephen will talk more about MCP. And again, I think a lot of this is also getting caught up a little bit in nomenclature and like, okay, what are we calling things? And I think that's one thing, but I think the broader trend around how agents access systems of record, I think, is the bigger point. Yeah, yeah. And from my understanding, it's also, I mean, it could also apply to something as simple as a chatbot. It's not necessarily just an API or an MCP server. You could be Salesforce acquired Slack a couple of years ago, and it could be something as simple as you sort of interacting with the CRM via chatbot. Totally. And I think I read somewhere that there has been like a 300% increase in Slack bot, Slack agent usage, which is essentially saying that you don't need to log into the Salesforce interface to get the data or whatever data it is.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the broader trend here is Salesforce, among others, are thinking about how they build themselves for the authentic world. And so if an agent needs to access the data in a CRM like Salesforce, what are they doing it? Are they doing it via the UI or are they using the API? And that's the Salesforce is saying, okay, hey, we know what is changing, that there are agents who are needing to access the data. Let's offer a headless version for them to interact with the data versus going via the UI. That said, again, I don't think any actually changed in the Salesforce context, but Salesforce isn't the old one. Another example is Notion has a head list product. And actually, I think that makes even more sense because it's much harder. I think many users of Salesforce are probably less technically adept, less likely to be building their own agents, although there are many, many more people who are doing that Salesforce. Notion users, all things being equal, are more, I'd say, tech savvy and more authentic.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So headless software has not a new term, but I think has really risen in the public domain of interest in a topic that people are talking about. One of the interesting newspoints has been Salesforce making this announcement. They were launching Headless 360, which was really in classic Salesforce history, a marketing announcement more than anything else, but it does capture, it's an acknowledgement of what's happening, which is traditional software had been built around humans accessing it. And it was workflow to capture data, and we could talk more about what that meant in an agenda world, do you actually need that? The UI doesn't matter because the agent isn't accessing the software via the UI. We could unpack whether the UI matters or not, but in the idea of it being headless is the data, the logic, everything stored below it is really where the value is, not just the workflow software that's being tracked at the top. And this was announced a couple months ago.”
2026-07-07 · a16z Podcast · Is Software Losing Its Head? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source