Investing in Trunk

Peter Levine

Posted November 30, 2021

For software companies, the velocity of the business is directly correlated to the velocity of the developers, making developers one of, if not the most, valuable asset on the balance sheet. In our software-led world, it’s imperative that every forward-looking business leader prioritize processes and tooling that improves the productivity of their developers. 

Years ago I had the privilege of seeing how GitHub transformed the world of source code management by turning it into a collaborative, social community. The follow-on effects of that laid the foundation for many essential behaviors and asynchronous workflows we use today. They unlocked a massive wave of productivity for developers.

However, GitHub and related tools only solve part of the productivity problem. Today’s developer workflows still require a large amount of asynchronous, local work before code is pushed on to the main branch. Unfortunately, much of that local workflow remains inefficient and redundant as a result of either async conflicts or new failures due to the macro trend of shift-left strategy (think Secops, infra-as-code, cost savings, etc). As a former developer myself, it’s incredibly tedious and frustrating to waste time rerunning pull requests due to merge failures and broken builds on local workflows.  

We believe the modern dev productivity stack should include a combination of “top-down,” GitHub-style, global collaboration framework combined with efficient, “bottom-up,” local-workflow tooling. It should give continuous feedback to developers, eliminating several tiny and redundant workflows. It should help developers eliminate context switching and preserve their flow time, thereby unlocking the next wave of developer productivity.

As we began searching for this kind of local workflow tooling, we met David and Eli, co-founders of Trunk.io, who previously built similar tooling at Uber. In previous jobs they experienced the painful failures of the developer workflow and set out to rebuild systems from scratch, creating an all-in-one solution for scalably checking, testing, merging, and monitoring code. Their ultimate goal is to empower engineers to stay focused on shipping code faster. We were immediately drawn to their vision, which deeply resonates with our developer productivity thesis.

David and Eli have also assembled an exemplary team to tackle this problem, attracting some of the greatest engineering talent from high-growth tech companies. At a16z, we love to back deeply technical founders building generational products that will improve the lives of millions of developers worldwide and are thrilled to join Trunk on their journey.

Every engineering leader who wants to unblock developers to improve their productivity should look at Trunk’s upcoming suite of tools.

 

***

 

Contributor

  • Peter Levine is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise investing. 

More From this Contributor

The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.

This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.

Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

Explore similar Investments
go to top
By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy.