DigitalOcean (DOCN) Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026 summary

Sequenced growth by building software first, then scaling infrastructure. Added significant talent and prioritized direct customer feedback to guide platform development. Shifted cloud architecture to support agent-driven applications, coining the term "AI-native cloud." Built a holistic, integrated platform primarily in-house, emphasizing the importance of native integration over bolt-on acquisitions. Chose to focus on AI inference rather than training, leveraging strengths in developer platforms and global-scale infrastructure. Coding remains a major use case, but generative media and personal productivity agents are rapidly emerging. Customers initially use closed-source models to find product-market fit, then shift to open-weight models for cost and control. The gap between frontier and near-frontier models is narrowing, driving more agentic workflows.