Measure Engineering Like You Measure Sales (w/ Dan Bender & Kirby Montgomery, Code & Co.)
Jim Milbery hosts Dan Bender and Kirby Montgomery from Code & Co. to explore how private equity investors can measure software engineering with the same rigor as sales and finance. The conversation covers the evolution of technical due diligence shifting left before LOI, the risks of 'dark factories' and vibe coding, why classic metrics like lines of code and story points fail, and how investors can evaluate AI resilience, DORA metrics, and unit economics during the hold period.
- Dan Bender and Kirby Montgomery at Code & Co. track the rise of dark factories, where automated AI agents generate software without human oversight or verified test suites. Read →
- Dan Bender of Code & Co. points out that middle-market software targets often rely on Delphi fat clients where presentation and business logic layers intertwine, making standard continuous deployment impossible without a complete rewrite. Read →
- Less than 30% of enterprise production tokens (roughly 28%) now run through proprietary frontier models, with open-weight models absorbing the rest. Read →
- Raw volume metrics punish efficient developers: Dan Bender notes that strong engineers routinely delete code to refactor systems, making gross code output an inverse signal of software health. Read →
- Technical diligence shifted from a confirmatory check three weeks before signing to a pre-LOI gating item focused on software durability. Read →