The incentive structures that determine how companies design apps are broken. Instead of putting user experience and innovative use cases first, they’re often driven by company goals, growth metrics and revenue streams. But, that’s about to change. We’re moving into a new era, beyond apps, where people can connect directly with the services they need in the cloud, without an app acting as a middleman. In this session, we hear how flexible app development architectures and user-driven design tools like low-code / no-code will trigger a paradigm shift where utility and user demand will guide experiences instead of the business needs of centralized platforms, as well as the massive opportunities this will create for users and markets alike.

Speakers

Peter Levine | General Partner, a16z

Peter Levine is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise investing. Peter joined Citrix in 2007 through its $500 million acquisition of XenSource where he served as CEO. Prior to XenSource, Peter was a general partner at the Mayfield Fund. Before Mayfield, he was an early employee of VERITAS Software. During his 11-year tenure with the company, he helped to grow the organization to over 5,000 employees and more than $1.5 billion in revenue. Peter holds a BS in Engineering from Boston University and attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Peter serves on the board of Alluxio Inc., Apollo, D2iQ, DigitalOcean ($DOCN), Labelbox, Mixpanel, People.ai, PlanetScale, Shield AI, and Udacity. Additionally, he led the firm’s investment in Figma and GitHub (acquired by Microsoft). He is also on the Dean’s Advisory board for the MIT School of Engineering.

Geoff Schmidt | CEO, Apollo GraphQL

Geoff Schmidt is the co-founder and CEO of Apollo GraphQL, the leader in open source and commercial GraphQL technologies. The company has raised more than $170 million to build toward its mission of helping app developers help the world. Apollo’s open-source GraphQL client, server, and gateway are downloaded more than 17 million times per month and used in production by more than 30 percent of the Fortune 500. Prior to Apollo, Geoff was the co-founder of Meteor Development Group, the company that developed Meteor.js, an open-source framework for building and deploying web, mobile, and desktop applications in Javascript or TypeScript. At the time, Meteor.js was one of the most popular open source projects in the world, and is still the easiest and fastest way to build full-stack JavaScript apps. Geoff also created Monument, an affordable live/work art event space in downtown San Francisco.