I never thought of software as a typically philosophical topic until I read - or at least, got halfway through - Venkatash Rao’s 30,000-word essay expansion on Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen’s hotly-contested quote: “Software is eating the world.”

Rao discussed this again at length at a recent talk at Google Campus - he went into how technologists were blindsided in the early 2000s by the transition to a software-driven future. How social and economic values are transformed by the effects of unicorn companies like Airbnb and Tinder, which had once been dismissed by traditionalists as silly, silly ideas that would never be able to hold a stable customer base.

Wait Your Turn

Ambitious entrepreneurs are pretty much pitching all software all of the time and as a result, entire industries can be reshaped. Take Uber for example, who have almost completely cornered the taxi industry in 2015. As a 23-year-old woman who has never bothered to learn to drive, it’s somewhat of a relief to know I can simply summon a person to drive me somewhere by just pressing a button on my phone.

People learn to adapt in interesting ways; some simply accept their fate. Some develop shortcuts. And thus: the hacker ethos was born, one of pragmatism and solving problems. They’re the ones refusing to “wait their turn” and disrupting the social order of things: in other words, they break smart.

Rao pitches the idea of a messy, ambiguous, even chaotic workflow as the way to conduct a major product. Controversial? Maybe to some. The people creating these companies, especially if they’re technically-minded, are constantly tinkering away at their ideas using and abusing the trial-and-error method. It’s impossible to plan in this industry.

Two Pizzas with Extra Sauce

In my experience, success comes from a small, communicative and passionate team. The whole eco-system seems wholly more accepting of this system as well now, with companies like Cisco setting up tech hubs to interact and collaborate with tiny startups.

Which is kind of great, when you think about it. As Rao said, “The best kind of software is being made by teams that can be sufficiently fed by two pizzas.”

Photo courtesy of Grace Witherall, breakingsmart.com.