Nearly every company has become a software company — and as a result, developers have become more critical to their businesses than ever before.
And yet despite the explosion of developer tools in the last five years, the process of writing software is still mostly tied to local machines. This creates a variety of problems, ranging from “works on my machine” syndrome to a labor-intensive setup for any new device.
This is in part due to the complexity of writing code. Today, there’s no easy way to immediately turn on a new machine, have your development environment of choice ready to go, and immediately deploy new code to your backend. More to the point, there’s no easy way to do this at scale. Making these tools seamless — a movement called Continuous Dev Environments — has the potential to improve every element of a developer’s day.
When we first met the Gitpod team, we were stunned at how sympatico their thinking was to ours on this issue. And more to the point, how sympatico their product vision was. Gitpod founders Sven, Johannes, Moritz, and Jan were building the future we had been looking for. Their key insight: writing developer environments as code, unlocking new productivity gains for developers around the world.
Gitpod’s true benefits stem from automation gains inherent in writing developer environments as code. This turns them into disposable resources that are always and immediately available when developers want to work. Spinning up zero-configuration, ephemeral developer environments enables massive productivity gains by letting developers spend more time on code and less time on configuration.
Clearly developers agree: it’s why over 350,000 of them use Gitpod globally. As we spoke to users, it became clear that there was groundswell of enthusiasm for Gitpod. We’ve seen a similar groundswell around Gitpod’s upcoming conference, DevX — a conference completely focused on the developer experience. The fully-virtual conference will take place April 28-29, 2021, with an incredible line-up of speakers. To register, visit https://devxconf.org/
On behalf of General Catalyst, we couldn’t be more excited to lead Gitpod’s Series A and work together to reinvent the developer experience. Please join us in welcoming them to the General Catalyst family!
