People wildly underestimate how hard it is to rebuild enterprise software like a CRM; importing fields and data is easy, but capturing the organizational logic and maintaining it over time is what makes 'vibe coding' enterprise replacements fail.
Sema recounts a dinner conversation with a revops lead tasked with rebuilding a thousand-person company's Salesforce instance, showing that importing data fields is trivial compared to capturing organizational logic and maintaining it over time. ✦ AI generated
Sema Amble · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-07 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 22:37
There's this wild underestimation about like you could vibe code your way into enterprise software. I was at a dinner last night and there was someone there who was the head of revops at... a thousand plus person company, and his task was to rebuild their Salesforce instance internally... you can vibe code a CRM. We've all vibecoded projects that have already gone stale because it's painful and it takes time and needs to adapt the business.
verbatim transcript · starts at 22:37
22:37Goldman was saying is their application of Excel is so differentiated. A and that's and that wasn't just people typing. They built add-ins. They wrote all this code. They defined their WordPress. know there's this wild underestimation about like you could vibe code your way into enterprise software. I uh was at a dinner last night and there was someone there who um was like the head of revops at a I don't
23:01know maybe growth stage startup and his task this is like a thousand plus person company was to rebuild their Salesforce instance internally and you know I think he's like oh well you know we know all the fields we can import all the data and I was like that's not really the part that's tough right it's well how are you deciding what like what gets captured how the
23:24whole organizational lines around it. Uh, and then who's going to maintain this also over time. I think that's like a piece that just gets falls off. You know, you can you can vibe code a CRM. We've all vibecoded projects that have like already gone stale and know we haven't touched again because it's painful and it's it's it takes time and needs to adapt the business. Mhm. And
23:43and Simo, you've also written about how, you know, there are there's an entire ecosystem of startups now that are just building on top of SAP and that are, you know, like sort of building around all of the kind of headacheinducing stuff and but still using SAP. So, like to both of your points earlier, like the these like legacy SAS systems are just like so deeply embedded that the newer
24:10insurgents are just coming and they're, you know, building on top and around them rather than kind of like trying to rip out and get people to migrate completely. A lot of what we're seeing AI being used today is for is how do you make it like I think the word is often used like conversational or like how do you pull the information out and actually make it more usable? How do you
24:31retrieve the information from SAP without needing to go you know run a SQL query and get all the information or like look at a bunch of screens. It's like okay well if I want to be able to connect to Steven's point around analyze like you know three different uh sets of tables and different geographies like can I quickly you know query that like a natural language way um can I get
- ·People wildly underestimate replacing enterprise software like CRMs
- ·Revops lead tasked with rebuilding Salesforce for 1,000+ person company
- ·Importing fields and data is the easy part
- ·Real difficulty: capturing organizational logic embedded in the system
- ·Vibe-coded projects go stale fast once built
- ·Maintaining logic over time is painful and slow
- ·Software must continuously adapt as the business changes
- ·Capturing logic once isn't enough — it needs upkeep