Kiran Kodithala is the founder and CEO of N2N Services, Inc.
Five years ago, if you wanted to build a powerful enterprise application, you had to hire a powerful team. You needed the best of the best, with years of experience in UI/UX, Java, Python and middleware. The list went on and on. Most startup companies couldn’t afford that kind of talent.
Now, with the advent of AI, it’s possible for anyone to build their dream application—no dream team required. Software has become so commoditized that creating the next big CRM or social media platform doesn’t feel like a huge leap. Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a recent interview, “This is absolutely the single greatest time to start a company.”
I believe that for the first time in human history, dreamers can truly start dreaming and building big without technical limitations. You need a dream that you want to realize. You need perseverance to truly commit to this dream. And you need resilience to keep building and improving on your dream, aligning your core capabilities with your customer priorities.
I’m convinced that this is the most valuable role a CEO can play today. To run a successful software development company, you have to move away from the traditional high-level focus on P&L statements and balance sheets and become a hands-on builder, someone who can roll up their sleeves and create real products for real customers.
Develop A Discipline Around Building And Experimentation
Until this January, I was more of a traditional CEO. I launched my company 15 years ago to address the common tech integration issues that higher education organizations face. Their data is often siloed in different systems—student information, learning management, parking, housing—that don’t talk to each other. My goal was to enable full integration of their data, and I saw the technology evolve rapidly, first via APIs and SaaS products, then AI applications and agents.
My leadership team and I assigned priorities to skill-specific teams, such as UI/UX engineers, middleware and database developers and QA and support specialists. I aimed to meet software development roadmaps, KPIs, OKRs—all the standard benchmarks that CEOs are supposed to care about.
Then we were approaching a critical moment at the end of February. We wanted to show our customers working prototypes of an AI-powered chatbot, data analysis engine and document ingestion engine—live, on a 100-foot screen. And we weren’t ready for prime time.
I knew we needed to do something. So, for the first time in 15 years, I connected to my GitHub account. I set up an AI developer license with one of the popular coding tools and got to work. It was very humbling at first. I felt exposed. I was the CEO, and I was asking one of my junior developers to explain the basics of my own software.
But pretty quickly, I realized that I could prompt AI to build any software I could dream up. I started to enjoy the building and experimentation process. By our February 24 deadline, my team and I had built working prototypes of our new products and started consolidating all of our existing platform assets into one development repository.
It had taken dozens of developers a decade to build our integration platform, but it was now becoming outdated because of AI. I decided to gut it completely and build it for the AI-first generation. By the end of March, we released an AI-powered version of the platform and shipped over 5 million lines of code.
Now my focus is on developing a discipline around this process. Yes, AI can write millions of lines of code, but how do you know it’s not building software that creates a security vulnerability or violates ADA accessibility standards? At this velocity, you no longer have a code or design review. You can build anything with AI, but if you don’t put up guardrails, you could open your business up to serious security and scalability risks.
Build Guardrails Based On Your Customers
Think about the guardrails you need in terms of your customer, technology and strategy expectations. What is important to the customers you serve? How can you keep your core software elements consistent while still meeting these deliverables?
My company’s goal was to build a highly secure, enterprise-grade platform that meets both FERPA and HIPAA guidelines for higher education and healthcare organizations. Your business may need to ensure that your monthly GCP or AWS bills are under a certain threshold or that you stay within GDPR compliance.
Don’t Lose Sight Of Your Objectives
A “builder CEO” runs the risk of trying to do too much at once. You can get caught up in the excitement of wanting to build everything possible. It can become an obsession, like a chef who is fixated on making the best steak or the best pastry possible, regardless of whether his restaurant patrons are actually ordering those items.
Keep checking in on what you are trying to accomplish and how you want to allocate your precious time and money. You can build anything in theory, but you still have the same finite box of building blocks: a limited addressable market, a limited set of financial and technological resources. Dedicate your time to building software that has true customer value and experience.
Do More Human Tasks
Whether we like it or not, software development itself is commoditized. There is no doubt in my mind that the number of software developers will drop dramatically in the next two to three years. Google recently reported that 75% of its code is AI-created. Employment in “AI-vulnerable occupations,” such as software development, is declining faster among early-career employees.
As AI models become bigger and more powerful, I predict that the role of the software developer will fundamentally change. There will no longer be a need for a nerdy developer with no people skills. If you can’t interact with customers or negotiate with stakeholders about the product, I don’t think you have a role in the modern IT shop. You are never too busy or too good to talk to your customers.
Great CEOs are ultimately great mentors, coaches and teachers. Our job is to lead by example and help our people cultivate the skills they will need in the future. If AI takes over most of the tech-focused parts of our jobs, we need to level up our human-to-human skills. Let’s become better communicators and customer advocates, bigger dreamers and builders.
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