Software’s Manufacturing Revolution: Why I’m Joining Northflank
Software development today feels like an unfinished industrial revolution. During the industrial era, industrialists weren’t just inventing new products; they were inventing the machines that made them. They built factories from the ground up, designing custom machinery to produce each item and then turning around to develop the goods themselves. And while the “built here” approach catalyzed a new era of progress, it trapped industrialists in an endless loop of reinvention.
Then came the manufacturing revolution, and everything changed. Manufacturers moved away from building bespoke machinery for each process toward embracing standardized machines to produce goods at scale. Suddenly, the focus shifted from building the factory to building the product. Instead of deploying resources to build the factory and reinventing production processes, manufacturers could buy these standardized tools and focus on what mattered most: making great products. And with this revolution, the barriers to becoming a producer of goods fell, bringing in a wave of new entrants who could leverage standardized tools and processes to compete alongside established players, sparking unprecedented innovation and expansion.
Software development is still waiting for its manufacturing revolution. Engineers aren’t just building the software; they’re building the tools and platforms — the “factories” — to produce it. They’re building internal developer platforms, stitching together tools, and crafting custom delivery pipelines that don’t directly move the needle for customers. Instead of iterating the product, teams are iterating the factory. Dollars spent inventing, re-inventing, and maintaining custom platforms don’t allow software developers to charge higher prices. Instead, it drives down their margins.
Software may be eating the world, but DevOps is eating software. Building a developer platform today means drowning in YAML files, wrestling with Helm charts, and wrangling endless Terraform scripts. It’s about becoming an accidental Kubernetes expert and spending countless hours stitching together cloud-native technologies that should, in theory, just work. It’s figuring out service meshes, debugging CI/CD pipelines, managing observability, and configuring infrastructure as code until you’ve forgotten what the code was even meant to do. Instead of shipping features, developers are deep in the weeds of dependency management, network policies, and endless configuration — essentially constructing an entire factory from scratch just to ship software.
This isn’t innovation; it’s survival in a labyrinth of tooling and configuration that feels like boundless complexity. Software needs a manufacturing revolution: a shift toward standardized, purpose-built tooling that takes the heavy lifting out of creating software. This matters because, as Steve Blank said, “product is an act of discovery, not of invention.” Engineering teams can iterate more quickly by focusing resources on product development and not the underlying infrastructure platforms. A sculpture isn’t created in a single stroke; it’s gradually revealed through careful iteration.
So, why am I talking about this? I can’t unsee the manufacturing revolution that’s coming for software — and I believe Northflank is the answer. After five years as a venture capitalist, I’m joining Northflank to help make this revolution a reality. As I spoke with engineering leaders and Northflank’s customers, it became clear just how motivated these teams are for a solution to DevOps challenges — and how effectively Northflank addresses these issues with an elegant, comprehensive approach.
Northflank is a production workload platform that gives developers a self-service way to build, deploy, and scale any workload on their own cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, etc.). Engineers can focus on product iteration while leveraging the power of underlying cloud infrastructure — without the corresponding toil. Northflank helps engineering teams ship faster by automating deployments, streamlining “day 2” operations, and providing a powerful abstraction over Kubernetes without sacrificing control or flexibility. No more YAML. No more HELLm charts. No more custom code that only the authors understand. Just intuitive, powerful tooling that lets engineering teams focus on what truly matters: building great software.
I got to know the Northflank team when Vertex Ventures US led the Seed round in October 2022. Since then, I’ve seen engineering teams adopt Northflank, accelerating their product delivery and eliminating infrastructure toil. I’m joining Northflank as Chief Operating Officer, focusing on the go-to-market and administrative functions.
If you’re a software engineer keen to make workloads — microservers, databases, jobs — and not infrastructure, you can sign up at Northflank.com.
