Sourcegraph strategy

  • Mission (long-term): Make it so everyone can code
  • Strategy (for , this year): Win devs’ hearts and minds by solving their Big Code pains. Get paid by their companies for sustained, business-critical usage.

Long-term

Mission

Make it so everyone can code.

A world where everyone, not just ~0.1% of the world population, can code will see faster and more broadly beneficial technological progress.

But coding is already too complex for most people to start coding, and it’s only getting worse as consumers demand more from software and code piles up. We’re making it less complex. That will make more people able to code.

Background

For thousands of years after writing was invented, most people remained illiterate. Universal literacy seemed unlikely. Is it really possible that every human would be capable of reading and writing? How would literacy benefit the average person? As we now know, every human is capable of and benefits immensely from literacy.

More recently, around 1976, just 0.2% of the world’s population used computers. Two tiny companies sought to make computing universal: Apple’s vision then was to create a “bicycle for the mind” in the form of a computer, and Microsoft wanted to put a computer “on every desk and in every home”. Though it seemed unlikely at the time, as we now know, everyone is capable of and benefits immensely from having a computer (or a phone).

Today, only about 0.1% of the world’s population can code. That tiny group has built software that runs the modern world and improves the lives of billions of people. Think of the possibilities if everyone was able to code. All around the world, more people would be able to solve problems and improve their lives by building software. We don’t know exactly what these billions of coders will create, but we know that billions of coders means faster and more broadly beneficial technological progress.

FAQ

If we want to make it so more people can code, why are we focused on professional software developers instead of people learning to code on small projects?
By starting where the complexity is greatest and the problem is biggest, we can create a solution that will scale up and down to all of coding in the future, rather than just make already relatively simple coding projects even simpler. This mission is on a timeframe of 30+ years, and we think starting here is how we will have the biggest impact in the very long term to make it so everyone can code.
Will we be creating coding classes, new version control systems, new programming languages, etc.?
No. We aren’t so arrogant to think we know how to do that best for everyone and every problem. We want to create a code intelligence platform that lets you use the best tools for the job and that makes them all work together well, so that every dev can understand and write code better–and ultimately focus on the problem they’re solving, not the millions of paper cuts along the way.

Values

Our values are the principles that help us execute on our strategy and build a high-performance team.

This year ()

Win devs’ hearts and minds by solving their Big Code pains. Get paid by their companies for sustained, business-critical usage.

  • Build the code intelligence platform
  • Become more product-led
  • Win in big companies with Big Code
  • Prefer cloud over self-hosted
  • Operate efficiently

Sourcegraph team members can view the internal Mission, Strategy, Execution, and Metrics doc. We will move the content to the handbook soon.

Admin Experience Vision

A core foundation of the plan is ensuring we provide admins with a world-class experience. Big companies with big code will only be successful if they can configure Sourcegraph. Product-led companies only work if users can effectively set up their instance. Etc! You can read more about our vision and how we plan to accomplish this in our Admin Experience vision.

Big Code

Big Code is when you have to deal with tons of code, complexity, and devs. Sourcegraph solves Big Code problems: problems that devs and engineering teams face when working in big codebases. As consumers demand more from software and code piles up, more and more devs and engineering teams face Big Code problems.

From the Big Code survey (2020):

  • 94% of respondents said they’re affected by Big Code
  • 51% have 100x more code than 10 years ago
  • 60% reported a significant increase in development complexity in the last 10 years

Market segmentation

We segment our customers into 5 tiers to help ensure we give the appropriate kind of support to each organization. Having a single market segmentation helps teams and processes across Sourcegraph stay consistent.

Our five customer tiers are:

Customer tierTier criteria
Strategic10k+ devs OR $1m+ ARR
Large Enterprise3k - 10k devs OR $500k - $1m ARR
Small Enterprise1.5k - 3k devs OR $100k - $500k ARR
Mid-Market500 - 1.5k devs AND less than $100k ARR
Tech NurturedAny customer below 500 estimated devs