Sourcegraph strategy

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.

Products

• Cody: Code AI that writes code and answers questions for you by reading your entire codebase and the code graph.
• Code Search: Code search, plus features such as batch changes, code insights, and code monitoring.

Notes:

• There is no longer a product called “Sourcegraph”. Sourcegraph is the company that makes Cody and Code Search.
• We no longer use the term “code intelligence platform”.
• In the future, we’re likely to introduce a product to help with the security, compliance, governance, legal, and safety problems created when a company starts heavily using AI coding tools.

Concepts

• Code graph: All your code and any context (info about your code). Both Cody and Code Search use the code graph (in various ways). Today this includes repositories from code hosts, code ownership information, code navigation data, etc. In the future this will include information from issue tracking tools, observability tools, documentation, runtime, security tools, etc.
• LLM (Large Language Model): Our products use existing best-in-class foundation models and give you the freedom to choose the best or preferred LLM for your needs.

How we package and ship these products

• Cody app: The Cody app will be the fastest way for individual developers to get Cody’s full power and accuracy on their private code.
• Editor extensions
• Sourcegraph Enterprise {Cloud, Server}: A single instance with all of our products (Cody and Code Search), built for enterprises to deploy at scale.

Principles

The principles apply to our company and products:

• Universal: Across all code, all code hosts, and all tools that know things about code. Works with all LLMs. Unlike competitors, which only works with their vendor locked-in suite.
• Powerful and accurate
• Scalable and secure: Proven on the world’s biggest codebases and trusted by the world’s most discerning companies.
• Open: At Sourcegraph, our code is public and we operate transparently. Sourcegraph is the open code AI platform, vs. competitors closed/faux-open platform.

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.

FY24 Market Segmentation

We segment our customers into 3 tiers or segments.

FY25+ Market Segmentation

As of FY25, our market segmentation will evolve to divide our customers into 4 tiers, or segments.

Beginning in FY25, our four customer segments are: