Day 11 - Hummer Winblad VC

 We had a couple of meetings today, our first of which was with a venture capital firm called Hummer Winblad Venture Capital where we met with their cofounder Ann Winblad.  She walked us through what her company did, what she did for the company, and some of her insights on the technology industry.  One thing in particular that Ann said that made me think was her idea of how programs and code will be written in the future.  Ann was of the opinion that someday in the near future code will not be so much written as it will be assembled from fragments and components hosted on various websites.  I would agree with her in the sense that this is happening more and more with websites like Github readily available to distribute helpful segments of code, and also with the rapid pace of software innovation code assembly rather than writing will become more important. However, I do have a couple of problems with her statements.  Firstly, one of the companies that her VC firm has backed is one of these code segment hosting sites so she is probably a bit biased in telling us that this is where the market is going because that is where her money is.  Secondly if Ann is correct and only 10% of code is written rather than assembled I feel like A, a lot of people have to be writing code given the ever changing nature of programming languages and algorithms, and B, we are going to lose a lot of creativity and innovation if she is correct.  If no one is writing their own code than less and less people will be thinking about how to solve problem their problems and about how they can solve them in even better ways.  However I do agree that code segments will be used more and more as time goes on.

Another thing that Ann talked about that got me thinking and also tied into some things that I had been thinking about before was when she talked about the abundance of ideas and innovations happening right now.  As she said it, there has only been one other time in history when this many different fields of technology (mobile, social, cloud, and big data) had been developing as rapidly as they are now.  This reminded me of the seemingly over abundance of talent that there is in the world to fuel this innovation, however Ann assured us that there was still a need for programmers and developers to help push these technologies on.  Still, it’s a bit daunting to think about the sheer number and difficulty of some of the problems that today’s programmers are taking on.

Our second and last meeting of the day was with a serial entrepreneur and all around inspiring guy named Phillip.  Phillip had started and sold multiple startup companies, worked in various roles in the schooling system, and had also worked for NASA for some time.  The greatest thing that I took away from that meeting was how important passion is in a career and deciding what to do with your life.  Even though I didn’t understand the majority of things that he was talking about, the way Phillip talked about his endeavors made me interested in them and made me realize how important his passion was.