Building the Anti-Agile Company: Bloomfilter’s Bet Against Software Development Conventional Wisdom

What if everything we believe about software development best practices is making the problem worse? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andrew Wolfe revealed Bloomfilter’s contrarian mission to challenge the “agile industrial complex.”

The Crisis The numbers are staggering: “$208,000,000,000 is going to be spent this year on software development. Next year, that number will go up 30% globally,” Andrew explains. Yet 78% of software projects are late, over budget, or never ship at all.

More troubling? This failure rate has increased from 68% in recent years, despite widespread adoption of agile methodologies. The conventional wisdom isn’t just failing – it’s making things worse.

The Industry’s Blind Spot “We joke around internally that we’re fighting the agile industrial complex,” Andrew shares. This term captures a crucial insight: the software industry’s response to failure is often to double down on current practices rather than questioning fundamental assumptions.

This mindset creates a vicious cycle. When projects fail, teams often blame insufficient adoption of agile practices. The solution? More agile. More ceremonies. More processes. Yet the failure rate keeps climbing.

The Data-Driven Alternative Bloomfilter’s approach is radically different. Instead of prescribing more process, they provide transparency. Their process mining platform sits atop existing tools like Jira and GitHub, revealing where actual bottlenecks and inefficiencies occur.

“We believe that software is a whole process and it has upstream problems and downstream problems,” Andrew explains. “Engineering certainly can be a problem, but tends not to be the biggest problem that most organizations.”

The Vision Success, in Andrew’s view, will come when “people can start to say and look at data and say, ‘Hey, what we’re doing isn’t working.'” This vision extends beyond just fixing individual projects – it’s about transforming how the industry thinks about software development.

“We want to bring that number down,” Andrew emphasizes, “providing an example of how the industry can think, can act differently.” The goal isn’t to replace agile with another methodology, but to help organizations understand and optimize their actual development processes.

The Broader Truth For technical founders, Bloomfilter’s stance highlights a crucial truth: sometimes the biggest opportunities lie in challenging industry orthodoxy. When conventional wisdom produces a 78% failure rate, perhaps it’s time to question the wisdom.

This doesn’t mean rejecting agile entirely. Rather, it’s about recognizing that no methodology is a silver bullet. Real improvement requires understanding actual processes, backed by data, rather than following prescribed best practices.

In three to five years, Andrew hopes to see Bloomfilter “eyeing probably within a couple of year forecast to saying, yeah, we’re going to take the company public.” But the real measure of success will be whether that 78% failure rate starts to decline.

For founders taking on established industries, Bloomfilter’s journey shows that sometimes the most valuable companies aren’t built by doing things better within existing frameworks, but by questioning whether those frameworks are solving the right problems at all.