Part 1: Hello World! Charting the Course for Vertical Bar
Jan 27, 2025
Background
After guiding UIflow through its acquisition by Workday in late 2023, I took some time off to reflect on my next steps and spend quality time with my family. Through that period of introspection, it became clear that I wasn’t finished building. The ERP market, despite its long history dating back to SAP’s founding in 1972, presented a compelling new frontier. While many questioned the wisdom of entering such a mature space, I saw an industry poised for another leap forward—one that could harness the momentum of AI to bring about a new wave of enterprise transformation.
What Would the World Look Like in 10 Years?
One of my guiding principles when starting any new project is to imagine what the world might look like a decade down the road. As I sat in a cabin in Lake Tahoe last December, I found myself envisioning a future dominated by AI—from large language models that can write entire novels to specialized agents managing countless routine tasks. The more I considered the possibilities, the more convinced I became that enterprises would soon rely on AI not just as an add-on, but as a core driver of autonomous operations. This belief in a future filled with “Autonomous Enterprises” informed my direction for Vertical Bar: build something that could empower these AI-driven organizations from the ground up.
Autonomous Enterprise
Generative AI, popularized by tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has already disrupted our perception of what’s possible—from rapid content creation to self-directed problem-solving. Yet what comes next, sometimes called “AgenticAI,” could be even more transformative. Imagine software agents not just responding to human prompts but taking initiative, executing tasks across finance, marketing, and operations with minimal oversight. In my original investor memo, I labeled this shift “Autonomous Enterprise,” predicting that within five to ten years, much of an organization’s digital workload could be handled autonomously. Humans would shift from performing the majority of tasks to supervising and governing high-level decisions. That future vision, I believe, will be built on a new kind of system—an evolution of the ERP model that we know today.