Investing in Sourcegraph
If software is eating the world, code is swallowing companies whole. Whether living across multiple repositories or within a single monolith, an astonishing amount of code—and its associated languages, systems, and tools—has become a reality at not just scale tech players but at all companies. When you layer increasing expectations for rapid software development over the complexity of Big Code, investing in developer productivity has become table stakes for companies. Developer productivity and satisfaction aren’t nice-to-haves, they’re critical to a company thriving vs. simply surviving.
Enter Sourcegraph, the “Google” of code. And just like how Google’s indexed version of the internet transformed the way we search online, Sourcegraph’s universal code search has revolutionized the way developers work. Developers simply point Sourcegraph at the repositories they work with, stored in any code host, and start searching. Efficient, powerful code search enables a whole host of use cases: accelerated development cycles, making large scale code changes, onboarding to a new codebase, addressing security threats, tracing lineage and root-cause incidents, and more.
In chatting with customers about the significance of universal code search, we heard over and over from developers: “I can’t live without Sourcegraph, but I didn’t know I needed it until I tried it.” In the same way we made do with encyclopedias before Google search existed, developers settled (and too often continue to settle) on limiting search to whatever their local integrated development environments (“IDE”) could handle, relying on screenshots to share code snippets, or sitting side-by-side to walk through complex code logic. When the pandemic accelerated the shift to a new way of working, the simmering demand for a tool like Sourcegraph boiled over and necessitated a better way for developers to build and collaborate.
The ability to focus developer’s mental calories on the highest and best use of time and collaborate by sharing and tracing code quickly via Sourcegraph has led to viral growth. While many engineering orgs are already using Sourcegraph wall-to-wall, what stood out even more to us was the organic developer love. In many cases, a single developer or team became the spark that led to Sourcegraph becoming the de facto standard for development across the entire organization. In the new era of enterprise sales, product led developer advocacy combined with a well-timed, top down sale is the most powerful way to grow.
Behind Sourcegraph is exactly the right team to create the next transformational company in developer tools. Quinn and Beyang are brilliant, mission-driven, open-minded, and relentless. They have the kind of grit we can only hope for in the best founders and we’ve seen evidence of that in every single meeting we’ve had with them over the years. After all, the best dev tools aren’t built in a day—Quinn and Beyang have been at it since 2013, fueled by their conviction that they could build the tool they needed as developers and by the mission that code search should be as universal as Google Search.
Today, some of the most advanced companies in the world are Sourcegraph customers—from large scale players like Amazon, Uber, and Lyft to the fastest growing companies like TripActions, Plaid, and Toast. But Big Code is not just a Big Company problem or even a high tech company problem. In an era where software has become the company’s interface to its customer, every company is becoming a tech company, and Big Code is driving massive complexity everywhere, which means having Sourcegraph in every developer’s toolbox is more important than ever. And we’re only in the early innings of adoption, for the next chapter of its story, I’m thrilled that Andreessen Horowitz’s Growth Fund is leading Sourcegraph’s Series D with the mission of bringing universal code search to every developer.
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