Kenneth Auchenberg

Kenneth Auchenberg is a partner at Innovation Endeavors, investing in artificial intelligence, developer tools, and software infrastructure. An early builder of Visual Studio Code who later helped lead Stripe’s developer platform, he focuses on how software products and infrastructure must adapt when their users include autonomous agents.

Raised in Copenhagen, Auchenberg worked with Danish startups Podio and ZYB, later acquired by Citrix and Vodafone, and co-founded the ColdFront technology conference and Prototype hacker café. After working at Citrix, he joined Microsoft in 2015, developing Edge DevTools and contributing to the early Visual Studio Code team.

His RemoteDebug iOS WebKit Adapter, released in 2017, translated between WebKit and Chrome debugging protocols, enabling developers to inspect Safari and iOS WebViews from VS Code and Chrome DevTools. His other open-source projects include browser previews for VS Code, remote-inspection utilities, and dependency-visualization tools.

Auchenberg joined Stripe in 2019, working on developer experience, platform extensibility, and APIs. His account of building Stripe’s developer platform describes API review, consistent abstractions, actionable error messages, request logs, integration builders, and editor tooling.

He moved into venture investing as an AlleyCorp partner in December 2024, then joined Innovation Endeavors in May 2026. Based in New York, he backs technical founders developing agent-first infrastructure, developer tools, and sovereign infrastructure.

• Continuously viable products. Auchenberg advocates shipping something useful immediately, then improving it with identifiable customers. His AI Engineer World’s Fair talk recommends drafting launch materials and APIs before implementation, observing integrations directly, and maintaining feedback loops fast enough to ship improvements within a day. APIs and data models demand particular caution because minor provider changes can impose lengthy customer migrations.

• AI-native founders. As AI-assisted coding makes prototypes cheaper, Auchenberg argues that product judgment, customer understanding, distribution, sales, and iteration speed become more decisive. His analysis of AI-native startups favors founders arriving with working products and customer feedback over pitch decks alone.

• Agent experience and finished outcomes. Auchenberg expects databases, browsers, search, and observability platforms to evolve around machine users with different throughput and workflow requirements. His software-infrastructure thesis with Davis Treybig treats agent experience as a counterpart to developer experience, while his case for outcome-oriented vertical agents argues that systems combining domain expertise, proprietary context, and feedback create more value than reusable instructions alone.