Paul and Dave sit down with tech veteran and quality pioneer Elisabeth Hendrickson (former VP of R&D for Data Products at Pivotal). Together, they shatter one of the most common metrics used in private equity boardrooms: the bug count. Elisabeth explains why tracking and graphing bugs is actually just a statistical illusion—doing "math on human opinions" rather than measuring actual technical quality.

The team discusses how quality directly impacts EBITDA through customer churn and outages, why your executive leadership team is your real "head of quality," and how automated testing serves as the ultimate guardrail to keep expensive AI agents from wrecking your codebase.

Key Takeaways:

The "Opinion Math" Trap: Why counting and graphing bugs to measure stability isn't science. Elisabeth reveals why these charts have zero impact on actual business outcomes and how they are easily manipulated.

Quality is EBITDA: Quality is simply "value". If your portfolio company is suffering from high customer churn and frequent outages, they have a technical quality problem that is actively eroding your investment margins.

The Executive Head of Quality: Real quality is determined by the systems designed by executive leadership (CTOs and VPs of Engineering), not by an isolated QA department manual-testing finished code.

Keeping AI Agents Honest: AI agents have no real memory and will take shortcuts that break yesterday’s features. Robust, automated tests are the only way to keep agents honest and protect your codebase.