The Birth of Software (For Dummies)

Happy Sunday from FRIGID Toronto.

I have been in New York City the last week locked down working with Stocktwits team (a Code Howie….a grumpier Code Red). The world is changing fast as AI accelerates and proliferates. I detailed it last Sunday. I believed our 2026 roadmap and budget, which we agreed on just 60 days ago, was in need of some changes.

If you are in my world of startups and venture, all anyone can talk about is AI Agents and Claude Code. For good reason. It is easy and fun to use and quite liberating as a non coder.

In 2008 my dog could qualify for a mortgage (thanks to the mortgage bubble) and in 2026 my dog can build a software company (thanks to the AI boom and Claude).

In short, Silicon Valley came for it’s own. And while it eats at software companies and businesses, it is also eating the idea of a software engineer.

Strategy, sales, go to market, customer acquisition and marketing have always mattered but in an era of software companies, the engineers called the shots. We all stood in line waiting for them as the internet blossomed and boomed. This is flipping as we speak.

While the best software engineers will have it even better in an AI era, my instinct is that the best led businesses/companies can move even faster and efficiently with much smaller product and engineering teams in this AI agentic world.

The one upside for going through all this as CEO of Stocktwits is I feel more confident as a seed investor once again.

In the meantime, software stocks in the public markets are getting trounced.

If you follow me on Stocktwits you will notice that I bought some $IGV ( ▲ 3.5% ) , the software ETF, on Thursday as the crescendo of selling and fear seems to be upon us. We will see short term if the selling is done for now. Long-term, the software companies being trounced have a lot of work to do to get analysts and investors comfortable that they are still viable growth companies in the years ahead.

In the meantime, the Dow hit 50,000 and an all-time high because the markets do not care about the feelings of software companies and engineers.

Even if the software leaders of today continue to suffer in the stock market, software will only grow in importance.

Veteran software entrepreneur and executive Steven Sinofsky had a great essay titled ‘The Death Of Software.Nah.’ Have a read.

I may not be qualified to ‘peak under the hood’ of Stocktwits or any of our portfolio companies quite yet, but I am now empowered and curious enough to launch my own software products.

This is the birth of software, not the death of software.