Let's go!

Welcome to Collabo Labs.

We're not far from a one person billion dollar company.
- Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI

If you're a developer haven't yet integrated GPT4o, Claude, or Copilot in your workflow yet, full stop. Leave and start. Nothing here will mean anything if you haven't used the tools.

From a high level, Altman's quote has interesting implications. Having spent any time in any of these tools, you're already feeling their effects. Questions plaguing you for hours on StackOverflow are solved in minutes. Configurations for NGINX that needed a support ticket are now solved and explained more thoroughly than any paid consultant could.

You can already feel development changing. This is where I think we're headed:

1. Startup headcount will consolidate even further: Need incorporation help? Stripe Atlas. Need HR and Payroll? Gusto. Need development help? Copilot. SRE? OneGrep. Sales Team? Taskade. Digital assets and logos? DALL-E. A single engineer can already accomplish way more today than they could in 2014. Imagine what 2 software engineers could accomplish.
2. Engineering costs will get cheaper: Along with headcount, the most meaningful commodity in software development (time) will also get conserved. Search? Use Trieve. Site SRE? Use OneGrep. Need a dashboard? Use Upsolve. Need an IT team? Get Risotto. Ask anyone who's been working in a startup for any measurable time and they'll know that time is often time the thing you're trying to optimize.
3. There will be more startups: As a consequence of #1 and #2, we'll simply see more companies. Things that were either too hard, or too complex to solve before will now be addressable. Things that required a bunch of people will be way more attainable earlier on.
4. The metrics for funding will be higher than before: This is huge, and I tend to filter for this now when meeting people. Unless you're a repeat founder with a track record, there's little reason for there to not be a demo. Even less of a reason to not have tested your idea, and maybe picked up some customers along the way. You know why? Cause all the damn tools are there, right now.
5. The rate limiting step for will be trust and awareness: So many tools. So many agents. Companies. Solutions. Platforms. And on top of it, no one's sure where liability lives right now. The ecosystem is changing so rapidly that it's better to be a late adopter than to jump in early if you can afford to wait. The truth is, this is the latest in a long chain of transformations since the early cloud compute revolution. Enterprises, ultimately, are way wiser and way more caution than they've ever been.

And #5 is really the focus of this publication. Collabo Labs is a publication dedicated to promoting trust. Trust in who? It really comes down to the people, services, platforms, and methodologies to realize this new era of companies we're creating. Here's what we/I want to do:

1. Connect with new companies in the dev tech / AI space explore the implementation and impact of new tech to foster trust and adoption of these tools.
2. Explore the ways in which the latest tools can be used to rapidly develop and launch a software product in the market.
3. Share reflections on my journeys as a venture partner from the perspective of a software engineer to help those who are looking to start something on their own.
4. Develop tools and open source them for the community of entrepreneurs, engineers, and other builders trying to make a change in the world.

Still with me? Great. Let's get started.