20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI?

Maor Shlomo is the Founder and CEO of Base44, the AI building platform that Maor built from idea to $80M acquisition by Wix, in just 8 months. Today the company serves millions of users and will hit $50M ARR by the end of the year. Before Base44, Maor was the Co-Founder and CTO of Explorium. AGENDA: 00:05 – 00:10: How Vibe Coding is Going to Kill Salesforce and SaaS 00:13 – 00:15: Do Vibe Coding platforms have any defensibility? 00:22 – 00:24: I am not worried about Replit and Lovable, I am worried about Google… 00:28 – 00:29: Margins do not matter, the price of the models will go to zero 00:31 – 00:32: Speed to copy has never been lower; has the technical moat been eroded? 00:47 – 00:48: How does Base44 beat Cursor? 00:56 – 00:57: Do not pay attention to competition: focus on your business 00:57 – 00:58: How Base44 is helped, not hurt by not being in Silicon Valley? 00:58 – 00:59: What percent of code will be written by AI in 12 months? 01:01 – 01:02: OpenAI or Anthropic: Why Maor is Long Anthropic? 01:03 – 01:04: If I could have any board member in the world it would be Jack Dorsey

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  From all things in the industry, I think the margins are the least thing that I'm worried about. We're taking into consideration that the prices of model will go down towards zero. Me personally, I don't believe we'll hit a speed bump. I don't think also we'll hit like a wall with like the improvements of L L M's. Even with existing models, we're only scratching the surface of economic value that you can create. If a one-person team can get sold for eighty million dollars without people, it means that you'll be able to do a lot more stuff with very like less people.

• 0:32Harry Stebbings?

  This is twenty V C with me, Harry Stebbings and Base44. What an incredible story. Base44 is the story of one entrepreneur who in just eighteen months went from an idea to millions in revenue, an incredible customer base, and selling to Wix, the public company, for eighty million dollars. Today, Mayor, Base44's co-founder, joins me in the hot seat to discuss the truth behind the economics of vibe coding. Are the margins as bad as people think? What is the future of models? And so much more. This was an incredible discussion. Let me know your feedback, harry at twenty v c dot com. But before we dive into the show today, are you drowning in A I tools?

• 1:17Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:57Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:41Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:26Harry Stebbings?

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• 4:09Harry Stebbings?

  So if you're starting a new fund, don't be a moron. Just use AngelList, they're incredible. Head over to angelist.com/20vc to learn more. You have now arrived at your destination. Mayo, it is great to have you on the show, dude. I've been so looking forward to this one. I'm a fan of Base44. What a frickin' journey. Thank you for joining me.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. I'm a fan of 20VC.

• 4:33Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, that's very, very kind. Listen, ego flattery will get you everywhere and I'm very susceptible to it. I was chatting to Michael Eisenberg before this show and he said, dude, you've got to start with like acquired for like 80 million bucks. Why did you decide to sell before we get to anything else?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  So I started Base44 as a bootstrap business after doing a very capital heavy one. And it started honestly just for fun. I wanted to get back to coding. I felt like everything in the software industry was changing. Love the fact that like with LLM, you can do so much more. And so it started just for fun. And then the traction was insane and I started getting to like 10,000 users, 100,000 users. And then the business was very profitable. And so I stood in this junction of either I'm continuing doing this alone bootstrap thing, which I might get eaten by companies that are raising like shit ton of money. Or I should raise a lot of funds and go very aggressive and try to build this on my own.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  And the third one is like get into a company that could be like a parent company and try to find something that can harmonize with the business and actually push it forward. So I remember when I started having the conversations with Wix, I was very worried and I was like, I'm not going to sell. I remember telling Vishay, like the CEO of Wix, I was telling him, if Kersa was sold to Microsoft, probably there won't be any Kersa today. The fact that they were independent and they could build their business by themselves how they wanted without kind of like the corporate stuff has gotten them through. And then we had many late night chats where one understood that Wix, for a lot of reasons, that many who know Wix is a perfect match.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Cause we're targeting the same audience. It's the same spirit. The marketing team is the best in the market. Aggressive, they're creative, they're absolutely awesome. And if we can structure it in a way where the company itself, the product team, stays lean, small and starter be like, but all the other stuff, we can benefit from the monster that is Wix. For example, the support and customer care, the marketing stuff, the thing that you don't really want to build, like the legal and operation stuff, then this could be a lot of fun. And we structured a great deal. And I think to me, it was like, okay, we have a shot at actually

• 6:57Speaker 00

  building something that matters. And so I said, for an actual shot of taking this from this low few hundred thousand users to something that might, if we work hard throughout the years, actually move the needle for a lot of people, that might actually be a thing that people speak about as, hey, this actually made an impact on the world. It was either I raise a lot of money and a lot of funding, or I go and join Wix, that basically triples my chances at actually building something special.

• 7:26Harry Stebbings?

  Today, Base44 has like continued to thrive and is now over a hundred million in revenue. It's done so well post-acquisition. Everyone's going, God, does he regret selling now? When you look at how fast it's grown and to over a hundred million in revenue, do you regret selling so soon?

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Absolutely not, for all kinds of reasons. First, I can't comment on the revenue stuff and public company and so on. But one, we structured the deal in a way that even financially compensated for additional revenues and targets and milestones we're hitting. And second, this was the whole point. Like, I felt like, in my eyes, this is gonna be the largest category in software industry. Cause a lot of like existing categories that we're familiar with, CRM and support systems and and task management and project management and stuff like that are gonna fold into the Vibe Coding category. And there would be a time, it might be in a few months, it might be in a few years, where it will be easier to build your own Salesforce type of CRM than to actually buy a

• 8:29Speaker 00

  license to something off the shelf. And the whole point with partnering with Wix is, let's take a shot at building something that would be huge. And I think without it, my chances would be really, really small.

• 8:41Harry Stebbings?

  With the greatest of respects, that's wrong. Dude, you're not gonna have people build their own Salesforce CRMs on the whole. Maybe a tiny, tiny portion, or build your own intercoms, or Sierras, or Dakagons, and then do maintenance and updates. Are you serious?

• 9:00Speaker 00

  I honestly think so. Might be not as like the current way that we think about vibe coding where you prompt like, hey, build a CRM for me and then you get a fully fledged all features inside. It might be that software becomes more liquid. And so maybe you have a starting point, maybe you have templates, maybe you have like open source projects that people can take and then vibe code their own features and say, okay, this is great. Now I want this version in Arabic from right to left and I want on every lead to be able to add my own pictures of the lead or whatever and then basically convert and transform the software to something that's more what they want.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  But I think the current model of one size fits all doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not that everyone will move there. It's not that enterprises, it's going to take a lot of time, but it makes so much sense for the buyer. Think about it as like the software is going to be theirs, the code will be theirs, they will not need to share their data with with other software vendors and be locked in and like whatever. They could adapt it and create a leaner version that's way more customized to their needs. I'll go even one step further. I think every software company that needs implementers, right? There's like a Salesforce implementer or whatever, maybe in a decade from now is not going to make it. And again, like if you take a year back, then yeah, vibe coding wasn't even a thing.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  And building software wasn't even a thing. And maybe it was like a nice toy thing. Maybe you could build like a task management, small kind of software, or maybe you could build a nice website. In a year or two, you'll get to a place where a lot of the current organizational tools that companies are using. You could build your own version or customize your own version and it would make so much more sense to you as a buyer. The code will be yours, the data will be yours, you'll be able to adapt it to your needs. There's no one size fits all, there's no like feature bloat. When you buy today like a task management, I don't know, software, it has so many features that you don't really need.

• 11:02Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think small businesses give a shit about that? Give a shit about actually owning their own data, owning their own code? If you're a small coffee shop or coffee chain or restaurant. Chain or legal and accounting firm. If that's the bread and butter of which is business, do they need it?

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Not necessarily the code and data, but they need something that's simpler and more customized to their needs. You know how I started Base44, my back then girlfriend, now wife, has a small business. She needed a CRM and she needed some systems for her small business. She's a tattoo artist and she teaches like arts and stuff like that. And we tried building that with the former version of the, and I'm not going to name that software vendor or two software vendors that you tried doing that with. With like the drag and drop and the super customized, like build your own tables or CRM or whatever. And it was hell on earth and I'm like a software person, right? I should know how to do that, but like just configuring that and then

• 11:59Speaker 00

  making it so that it supports her process of how she processes leads and customers and whatever. And she's like, oh, this is insane. I was like, I know that like an L L M can code something leaner and way better for what she needs, exactly what she needs. And not going to have like this entire features and enterprise features and team management stuff and whatever settings and stuff like that, which is going to be super simple for what she needs and could adapt to her needs. And I was like, I know L L M's can do that. I just need to provide L L M's with like the right setup, right? They can write the code, but she will need a database to keep the leads and she will need some integrations with like sending emails and stuff like that. And, and that's why I started Base44 and exactly for that.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  And so I think small businesses specifically would want to build something leaner and more customized to what they need, something that they can understand, something that they can adapt. And the bloated sauce of the pre 2022 era, it's going to be harder for people to use.

• 13:01Harry Stebbings?

  Will Salesforce be bigger or smaller in 10 years' time?

• 13:05Speaker 00

  It might, and Mark Benioff is a smart person. I'm sure that also in the company is like is incredible, so they might adapt. But I think generally from this category, those companies would be smaller. Some of them would be eliminated.

• 13:19Harry Stebbings?

  Which would you say is most likely to be eliminated?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Smaller CRM companies, every software that's basically front end on top of a database with some team features and some integrations and does not have a mode. And I think Salesforce is so big and so massive that this is like, this is one of their modes. Like they can make big bets and like move a lot of stuff and go in many different directions. When we all try to adapt in this AI era, but smaller players, I think would be eliminated.

• 13:54Harry Stebbings?

  You said the word mode there. It's often a criticism of this category. You know, I've had the founders of Salesforce, Benioff, Atlassian, Mike Cannon-Brooks, Cloudflare, Matt Prince, Dylan Field from Figma. Even Carl Pei, the founder of Nothing, the phone company, has created their own Base44 equivalent. And everyone said, this is a business with no modes. And you see that in the ability for these people to spin up products in three months. How do you respond to that statement?

• 14:22Speaker 00

  I think it's relatively easy to create a vibe coding tool. It's very, very, very hard to create a platform that could help people build products they'll actually use, that are functional, that are complex enough for real world use cases. And for that, you need many layers of integrations. You need to adapt and tune the agent to handle very complex projects. I think some applications in Base44s are like millions of lines of code. And that's eventually the customers and users that you care about. Cause those are the one that will go beyond the hype of, hey, look, I've built this muddy.com clone with a single prompt. No, you didn't like, it's going to take you like hundreds or thousands of prompts

• 15:06Speaker 00

  to get to something that you're going to use day to day. And I think the mode in the category is being able to get there. And that's like layers of integrations and heavy lifting and building a compute. You're almost building like a small cloud because you want to give the LLM the ability to have access to databases and have user management and to have built in integrations.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  To run scheduled tasks because that's what real software does and you want to have the LLM can like access to many cloud services and integrations. And so you're building an entire ecosystem in this platform. But yeah, to build a vibe coding tool that can build some websites or a front end that could connect to some APIs. I think it's super easy to do nowadays. Early on, the vibe coding category was focused a lot and still is to some degree on front end and landing pages where many use cases were around like websites or e-commerce websites and stuff like that. I think this will get commoditized for the category. There's still a lot to do when you're looking like there's SEO and domain management and like if you're building an e-commerce, that's like a complex business.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  You want to integrate with like a full backend, like what Wix has or Shopify or whatever. But for the functional stuff and the complex applications, the organizational applications, the personal applications, the fully fledged SaaS platforms that people are building. I think that won't get commoditized and I think that's not the long market. Also, I think that's the more profitable use cases for tools like ours. Because at some point, okay, you're building a website, let's say a nice website for your VC firm or whatever, at some point it's like, okay, this this looks pretty, that's it. I'm not going to prompt anymore. And a lot of like the business model of this category is around like the credits for prompting. And so at some point you're like, okay, that's it, I'm done. I have this front end. It probably costs not a lot to host it somewhere.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  And I think the more profitable stuff with the higher margin and the more value would be in building the complex applications as you use day to day.

• 17:08Harry Stebbings?

  When you map out this market in like three to five years' time, can you help me understand what that looks like? Cause you've got in my mind like three different entry points. You've got the base forty fours, the lovable's and the raplets in one. You've got the figmas, the cloud flares, the atlatians, the sales forces in like the incumbent insertion point. And then you've got the canvas on the other kind of more consumer end. I put probably put Figma in there with Canva. You've also got the cognitions and the curses and the pro tools there. Do the pro tools come down and eat your business? Do you go up and eat their business? What happens there?

• 17:45Speaker 00

  It's a very good question. I'll start with like the what you categorize as incumbents, but I'll actually call it like. The different software categories that exist, so like, let's take a Salesforce or a Monday.com for example. I think a lot of those tools will build built-in vibe coding tools inside their platform. You can see that like with Monday Vibe, which is a tool they've built on top of like the Monday.com infrastructure of like boards and like the database behind the scenes and the the user management, souls, permissions and so on. And this is what I, what I said when I meant software is going to become more liquid. So I don't know if Salesforce is planning to do that all, but I'm assuming that at some point like you'll be able to create your own user interface for Salesforce.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  And Salesforce would become like this system of record where like you can create the UI that you want and how you want to look at a lead or contact or account or whatever. And I think a lot of tools are going to do that because this is basically taking kind of like the, instead of like configuring different things and building different features. It would allow a lot of sensibility to existing products. And so you start seeing that and you see also like Microsoft building like some vibe coding tools on top of like the, the office and whatever. And so like I can see a future where a lot of the existing SaaS tools and SaaS products have a built-in vibe coding, customized the software to your needs capability.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  I think it's an interesting take on what's going to happen with the pro players versus the very consumerish slash AI app builder or visual AI app builder. Well, I think for base forty four, for example, from day one, the objective was that you won't need to see a line of code. And that for a lot of our users, like seeing code actually like, I wouldn't say terrifies them, but like it's not what they want to do, right? You have, you're a lawyer and you wanted like create some system for your law firm or software. Like there's no need for you to see code and you, you should be able to customize and do whatever you want just by prompting it. The cursor and the windsurf or cognition of the world are doing a fantastic job with.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Focusing on the existing dev community and kind of like target audience. And there's a lot to do there because there's a lot of, it's going to take a lot of time for tools like and platforms like Base44 and the Bolton Lovables of the world. To get to a place where you can build the existing, whatever X percentage of software that we cannot build today. So I'll give an example, it's very hard to build a firewall today in Base44, right? Something that will sit on your computer will be very like in terms of performance will be very native on your computer. We'll like send logs to a centralized server that will analyze it for the organization.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  So like there's existing software products where the AI app builders like Base44 is going to take a lot of time to get to, if any. And I think that's also a lot of like how we measure internally. And one of our objectives is like, what's the percentage of software that we can build today and how we push it forward? I'll give another example, we're working now on allowing applications inside Base44 to use scheduled tasks. So maybe you want to build something and like every Monday morning, send an email to all your users with a summary of what they did inside your app or whatever. You've built a personal assistant and you've integrated WhatsApp and you want to tell the personal assistant, hey, remind me in two days to pick up the kids, whatever.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  And so this obviously doesn't exist today and building this basically pushes slightly more the type of software that you can build with Base44. And we've built like this built in capability to build AI agents and we've integrated it with WhatsApp and Slack and whatever. So now you can actually build bots, not only applications. And so we constantly measure kind of like that type of software we can build. And I think the cursor and cognition of the world are doing a terrific job with working on enormous software projects. And especially like enterprise projects and like large, very complex software that needs a lot of backend services and it's like. Very complex applications like you want to build a firewall or we internally obviously use Kerso to build our own backend.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  I don't know where the market will be headed. I'm sure that they will go a bit up market and bring in some of like the visual builder that for the less complex users. And I'm sure that the early like the the base forty four, the bold, the lovable of the world will go a bit down with like the types of software that you'll be able to build and the software that you weren't able to build like a year ago or few months ago, you'll be able to build in a few months. It's gonna be interesting, but this is a huge market. It's like a lot of it is like depends on like what's that type like you cannot build for any type of users. Either you serve the developer where they want to see the code and they want to edit it and they want to bring like terminal stuff and you want to run in on their computers.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Or you serve the the non-technical user, which is like complete fun.

• 22:46Harry Stebbings?

  Mayo, you have lovable, you have Raplet and you have Bolt. Who's the best and who's the worst?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Tough question. I think Raplet is more technical and started as a dev tool. And I think for developers, they're doing a good job. For the semi-developers, the hardcore ones will go to Kerso.

• 23:04Harry Stebbings?

  Which one do you not worry about?

• 23:06Speaker 00

  I'm not worried about those three.

• 23:08Harry Stebbings?

  Wow. Who are you worried about?

• 23:10Speaker 00

  I think more about market dynamics and how things will turn out to be with the model providers. My theory and thesis is that there's always gonna be huge advantage to the folks who are playing with multiple model providers. But if at one point, one of the model providers will just win the market by a wide margin, then the next logical thing is to conquer the vibe coding market because this, again in my not objective eyes, will be the largest software category. As long as there's like a fight and there's a race, then we're positioned to control a very large share of the market and bring in a better solution to the market.

• 23:52Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you think's more likely to do that? Codex or Claude Code?

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Google by far. They have the compute, they're moving very fast. If Gemini is Point wins the race, like literally wins the race, then they have the entire stack, including like Google Cloud and whatever, whatever they need and they have the data and then whatever and integrations and then Google Suite and so on to build an incredible empire. I'm hoping for a tough race and it looks like that right now. And it's by the way, an insane market dynamics because like we're obviously spending a lot on AI and like in a split second, like you change one string in the code and you move like millions in spend to a different provider and it's like and it bounces back to depends on like who

• 24:39Speaker 00

  provides like the best model and the best whatever cost and throughput and so on.

• 24:43Harry Stebbings?

  Can you give me an example of that?

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Let's say on the coding space, Claude comes out with like Claude four and Sonnet four. And you're like, perfect, let's use that. And before that, we were like doing a split between Sonnet and Gemini. And then OpenAI comes up with GPT five. And you try to figure out for all of those folks, by the way, it's like, it's not necessarily that of like a better model that you move your entire workload, but you see that there's like places where the model's doing better. So for the first prompt, Sonnet's like the best, like the best designer and knows how to structure it. And was really good with like writing a like a project from scratch. But then what we found is that like GPT five, and especially the the thinking and the pro version is like really good at solving hard bugs.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  And so you move a lot of workload, especially on the complex applications and very large context API calls to OpenAI. And so when doing that, like you're literally moving hundreds of thousands of spend, just like the simplest change. And if now, I don't know, but maybe Gemini three is gonna be better than anything else, which is what people is nowadays saying, then we're gonna move a lot of spend and a lot of workload overnight to a different vendor. And that's like an insane market dynamics to me.

• 25:59Harry Stebbings?

  I get you. It's an insane market dynamic because everyone compares the LLM market to the cloud market in terms of it being a commodity, but actually a mega market that will be phenomenal for the providers with a couple of core winners. But what you just said there is completely different, which is an ease of switching that you would never have in a cloud market. You do not switch your cloud provider with a line of code in seconds multiple times a month. How do you think about that analogy from LLM provider to cloud provider, given what you just said?

• 26:28Speaker 00

  You do not switch a cloud provider. That's very hard to do, right? My previous company will try doing that. It was so painful. If I've known how tough it's gonna be when we started that for like a year-long process, probably wouldn't do it. For the L L M's, it's insane how easy it is. What we see for the model providers is that they're building multiple tools for multiple levels in the value chain. So you see all of them having this CLI coding tool and all of them having this very high-end or end-user focused chat product like Gemini and ChatGPT and so on. We start seeing them bringing in, so Gemini is now everywhere in my Gmail and like a lot of like workflows

• 27:09Speaker 00

  and like building automation. And so you start seeing them go up the market of software and bringing their tools and their model basically to drive consumption all across the stack. Or if you'd look like a year ago, it was mostly like you could consume it either in an API or you could consume it in like this end-user type of chat. I don't know. It's gonna be super interesting. To me, it's crazy. Let's say one of them kind of like storms ahead for like six months, right? Something that haven't happened before. But it's like literally the best model for like six months ahead. So let's say if someone comes out now with a better, stronger and cheaper model than Sonnet 4.5. And it stays like that for Anthropic for like the next six months. What happens to Anthropic's revenue, right? Like overnight, okay, you switch from all the cursors and the cloud codes.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Let's say you switch to Gemini or whatever, GPT 5.5 or whatever. This is like such a fast decline, but also they had such a fast, fast ascend. I don't know. It's gonna be crazy. But I don't think I have the right answers to what's gonna, how this market's gonna play out. Obviously, we're all hoping that this is gonna stay a very competitive market where prices will go down. I think also when we're making like strategic bets on what we're going to optimize and what's not. And it's very strange to manage a business like Base44 because in some places there's like, you see things that you need to either optimize or build, but you're taking a decision not to do that because you know that future versions of the models are gonna take care of that. So one of like the thing that Vishay and I are speaking of when we

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Speaking strategy is like we're taking into consideration that the prices of model will go down towards zero. At least for for platforms like base forty four. And so this is like a strategic decision where you're saying, okay, I could optimize some. And we're doing that, but like I were investing a lot of people right now to optimize the costs. Or we're taking into consideration just the pricing, the prices of the models are just going down and down and down.

• 29:01Harry Stebbings?

  One of my core questions that I want to understand is the margin structure. And when you look at today, every dollar that comes in, what percent of that dollar goes back to an L L M provider?

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Depends on the timing, the exact number I cannot say because we're a public company. Even though I miss that a lot to kind of like share.

• 29:19Harry Stebbings?

  In the nicest way, dude, no one shares that. Educate me. Does no one share it because it's so bad?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  No, it's also very decision dependent. So you can change it from like a low margin to a very high margin. And just one decision is just deciding on how great of a service you want to give your users. I think what will happen eventually with all coding agents is that the cheaper open source models are getting way better. You always want to play with like the the strongest models. But what will happen and what we're kind of like looking at it internally is like building this switch or proxy. Where when you get a prompt from a user, maybe the prompt is so simple that it doesn't even matter like what model you're getting. It's like change the color of the button from blue to red.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  I don't really need to use like the heavy sonnet maximum thinking, whatever pay a lot for that, right? I can kind of like forward this request to a smaller, cheaper model. And this will also be like a way better experience to the user because it's going to be so much faster than bringing kind of like the heavy guns of like the frontier models. And I think doing that and the more the smaller or open source models are able to take a larger percentage of the request and prompts. Obviously, margins going to improve drastically. I don't think it's bad. Yeah, I don't think current margins are bad, but I think they're going to get way better.

• 30:37Harry Stebbings?

  Today, they suck. And everyone always says, oh, but we're going to have like model selection as exactly as you said there. Which is we'll be able to do intelligent routing on models. And I'm like, okay. I hope so.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  We all do. I think it depends on like the product and the flow that you're building. So one of the players that you mentioned is doing a really good job with autonomy. Where kind of like you prompt something and then they go and they run for like 20 minutes or 30 minutes too. And they have like this coding agent.

• 31:05Harry Stebbings?

  It's this rapid agent, right?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, but like first, what if I can like didn't really mean what I just prompted? Or like, okay, it went and built like this fully, I'm just a free user and I just burnt like a lot of cash right now. And like coding and testing and whatever. And so I think it depends on like the level of autonomy you want to give and kind of like how fast iterations you're giving out to users. I don't know the margins, but like I'm saying, you could burn a lot by not understanding what the user actually wants. But from all things in the industry, I think the margins are the least thing that I'm worried about.

• 31:38Harry Stebbings?

  The most thing you're worried about is Google coming in?

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Not really, but like the competitive landscape, the pace is insane. Like for us, every feature that we put out, we know that's going to take either a few weeks or a few months for a competitor to copy. And we see that a lot.

• 31:55Harry Stebbings?

  How does that change what you build? It's really interesting. I had, you know, the founder of Fiverr, Misha, on the show. And he said the time to copy is the single biggest difference in the last two years of software. Where it used to be years, now it's weeks.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:07Harry Stebbings?

  How does that change what you build or how you think?

• 32:10Speaker 00

  You take big bets on things that are, if you can find those, that are substantial to your users and will be really hard to copy. So I'll give you one example. The whole reasons for Base44's existence is the built-in backend. The fact that we built Base44 as a fully or vertically integrated platform, where for every application, you already have a built-in database, user management, authentication, integrations, analytics and so on. The thing is, is that we didn't use a third-party provider like Superbase, which is what the rest of the industry is using, Superbase and Neon. And we've built that like built in and we've taken a very courageous kind of like step there. And there's still a lot more to build there.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  This is going to be very hard to replicate and very hard to migrate whatever millions of users from one, from Superbase to a homegrown solution if one of the competitors tried to do that. And I think this is a bet that we're deepening further and further and further. For other stuff, it's a game of velocity, of delight, of like taking the right UX decisions and having the right taste and just trying to be there before everyone else gets there. So two weeks ago, we came up with something called app suggestions. Very small feature, which is very nice. Like after you prompt, it gives you like the next steps. Like, okay, now add a dashboard. Like it gives you kind of like suggestions to what you do in your app.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  It took maybe a few days for other competitors to to copy that. That's the game that we're playing now.

• 33:39Harry Stebbings?

  What percent of starting users finish the project?

• 33:43Speaker 00

  It's a good question of what finishing means. And I don't think I have the answer for that.

• 33:48Harry Stebbings?

  Deployed application that works?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  That's many, but that's not the right question. The right question is how many get to actual usage. So many publish their apps and the apps are fully functioning. At some point, you like battle test your agent so much to teach it how to query the database and how for every, like you start categorizing the different flows and the different use cases that users prompted. And you make sure that you feed your agent with the right examples. So many, many, many get to like functioning applications. So this is like their saturated benchmark. The question is how many get to actual usage day to day? I don't have the right answer to that.

• 34:27Harry Stebbings?

  What metric is user success for you then? If there is this nuance and complexity with regards to like success for a user, internally, what is your metric for user success?

• 34:37Speaker 00

  There's a couple. First, we measure the sentiment of the messages they send in the chat, which was also weird to me, but it turns out many people are like speaking with the chat as they would to a human. They either tell it, okay, fantastic job. This is exactly what I wanted when I was asking for this feature. Or they cancel it. This is not what I wanted. Oh, you deleted this button and I wanted this and I wanted that. And so we have this metric that we literally measure on a minute to minute basis of like how many of the prompts, because nowadays we get like tens of thousands. Thousands of months, like a minute or whatever in tandem. And so we measure the sentiment.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  And that's how we know our coding agent does what it's being asked to. And you see kind of like how if we release an upgrade, you see kind of like this, this, the negativity metric kind of goes down or if when we jump from Sonnet four to Sonnet four point five, you see a major improvement there. So this is one thing that we measure. And again, this, even the metrics changed a lot with the business like Base forty four, because when we started, it was mostly around bugs, right? How many times like the model messes up something and the application doesn't work or does like bugs and like hard things that like break your app? Nowadays, it's not easy to create bugs in your app. The L M's are really smart. The infrastructure is battle tested. So it's more about

• 36:03Speaker 00

  does the agent actually does what the user is asking of it? Does it make the right change without making additional changes or messing up other features? And you can see, for example, that again, so even if I give the example of like schedule tasks, so maybe the user asks, hey, I want you to send me a daily email with like reminders. And then the coding agent says, I cannot do that. I don't have the right infrastructure to do scheduled tasks. And so when we add scheduled tasks, we should see a few numbers, like a few percentages kind of like of this metric improves.

• 36:35Harry Stebbings?

  Going back to the elements on on margin, I had Ev Randall, who's the new G P at Benchmark, and he said, Harry, Harry, you're thinking about this wrong. We need less of a focus on margin and we need more of a focus on gross dollars per customer. In other words, expanding the spend of the customer, not the actual margin on a lower spend. Do you agree with that? Or do you actually think, no, we'll revert back to a margin optimized world where we have open source models as we discussed?

• 37:03Speaker 00

  I think a hundred percent right now, the game for our category is growth and capturing as much of this insanely big market. There's almost no person that shouldn't be a user for a platform like Base forty four. And so obviously it's like growing, not necessarily the spend of every customer to as many customers as possible. The spend's going to come. Down as models would be cheaper. So like, I don't think it's like, let's try and grab as many dollars from the customer as possible. So I'd say margins are always important. There's one thing I learned in base forty four is like, when you lean and you were saying business, that does really good to all other aspects of the business.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  And it's not something that I understood in my previous company, which wasn't like, it wasn't like I made fatal mistakes, but it's like, we were very capital heavy. And there's something by creating a, a business that makes sense and is healthy in margins and retention and the spend and whatever. That allows you to grow later on in a sustainable way without at some point hitting the brakes and saying, oh, well, nothing makes sense in our margins or whatever. And so I'd say margins is something you should constantly look at while knowing or while planning ahead and taking into consideration that the model related stuff, which is like ninety nine percent of the spend or ninety percent of the spend

• 38:22Speaker 00

  is changing drastically and aggressively every few months.

• 38:27Harry Stebbings?

  When you have that change in spend, you have like a less certain revenue. As we said earlier, the transience of spend leads to an anthropic could skyrocket or could not depending on where you shift spend. Can you advise me, honestly dude, I'm an early stage investor. I invest in AI apps today and everyone is posting insane fucking numbers. Like, you know, you look at yours and it's like a hundred million, your lover balls and your rap, it's like two hundred million. How much weight should I as an early stage investor place on revenue today?

• 38:57Speaker 00

  That's a very good question, which also me as myself as an investor, like I'm asking myself. So obviously like the metrics today is like different, right? When I started my previous company, we got to like two million dollars in ARR. I think it was like a year and a half. And everybody were cheering and was saying like, this is insane and like whatever. Nowadays, it's like if you can show the harky stick of how fast you got to ten million dollars or twenty million dollars, everything changes. I think it depends on like the model of the company you're investing in. For me, it's like smaller checks into very healthy businesses. So the thing that I look at the most, okay, it's fast revenue growth. Obviously, that's what you want to see. This is like the most exciting, but there are two things.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  One, healthy business is like, how likely is this business to get eaten by other players, the model providers or whatever? And the second, which is very much related, is a vertically integrated business. So here's something really cool that we're looking at right now. So Kerser came out, I think it was two weeks ago, or maybe a few weeks ago, with their own model, right, Composer? And this is like a nice way to like think about strategy of those types of businesses. So think about Kerser, right? Let's take the kind of like the not optimistic approach of saying margins were bad, right? They were paying so much to the other model providers or whatever. So this is like an insane strategy. It's like grow as fast as you can, get to like insane distribution.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Like every developer that reads through Twitter like probably installs Kerser. And then at some point, bring in your very efficient model that you trained, that is now fast, and start moving people from the very expensive, low-margin models into your own model, which is likely to be a high margin. And then again, overnight, your margins get tremendously better. But you've grown fast as hell. And now you have the distribution, now you can optimize margins. Because again, the margins for the models, it's very doable to change drastically overnight. And I think this is a really interesting strategy that we're also thinking internally. It's like, go as fast as you can with the frontier models. At some point, open source becomes really a viable option to maybe fine tune

• 41:07Speaker 00

  on like the billions, almost trillions lines of code that we have inside Base44. And then have this like very interesting margin take where for some of the prompts, you forward like to the fast, high-margin, great model. Users really enjoy it because those models are going to be way faster than like the Sonnet 4.4 heavy. Heavy models. So this is like an interesting take when you think about vertically integrated applications. There are some applications today that I think are growing very, very fast that are going to have a harder time keeping it this way. I remember, I don't remember the name of the company. There was like this company that was like very one of the earliest practical use cases for L L M. There was like a, a marketing, they were generating content and they grew super fast. You probably remember.

• 41:51Harry Stebbings?

  Jasper A I.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, grew super fast and the mode was just like, it was absolutely hard to create mode over there. Cause it was like clearly that was like, okay, you're like, you're only using L L Ms. For base, what it was like an entire infrastructure, you build like a mini cloud that allows applications to send emails, generate images, use other L L Ms to like deploy, to manage users and whatever. So you have something around L L Ms that makes sense to have like enough of a business. When I'm investing nowadays, I'm thinking, can this business, if not today, be at some point in the future, vertically integrated, self-sustainable, like maybe what Kersa will turn out to be at some point.

• 42:31Harry Stebbings?

  Can we just go through it in a helpful way? You said three elements there, revenue growth. What revenue growth is exciting then? Is it just the highest? Is it, I need to see one to 10 in the first year?

• 42:43Speaker 00

  If you're building a SaaS, yeah, it's going to be zero to 10. That's going to be exciting.

• 42:48Harry Stebbings?

  Zero to 10 in a year for you meets the goal.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  I think this is insane. Zero to 10 is an insane goal for any SaaS business.

• 42:54Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I mean, honestly, now that's, it, it's good, but there's quite a lot that do zero to 10.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  It's insane. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's going to be there on the exciting piece. And I'm looking to invest. I'm not necessarily going to say, okay, the company has to do zero to 10.

• 43:06Harry Stebbings?

  How do you determine if they're going to be eaten by models? Like, what is the question or criteria that will help you get comfortable with that?

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Most of the value is on the way they prompt the application for a certain thing. They've built, let's say a photo editor. And so there's not a lot of features in a photo editor, like an A I based. Like you feed a picture and you say, okay, make me, I don't know, prettier or whatever. And if a lot of that's going to be like the UX and the prompt, I don't think that's going to be a healthy business for the next decade. I don't think there's like a lot of mode. If you're building a lot of infrastructure or the company itself is vertically integrated, I think that's a very interesting take.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  So you could nowadays build a competitor to Harvey and Spellbook that would kind of like teach some LLM better way on like how you how to do law or whatever. Or you could build a law firm. And I think building a law firm is going to be very, very, very interesting. Because this is not something that a model provider would do. Or any other same software entrepreneur that wants to do just software. And I think there's like an opportunity today to build very healthy new age vertically integrated businesses. And it could be again, a law firm. It could be buying a hospital, basically optimizing everything on every layer and making it AI native.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  And maybe in a few years, being the first ones to introduce robots as surgeons or whatever. And I think nowadays there's like opportunities all across the fund, like in different categories, software or not software, whatever, to build vertically integrated companies. And I think if your company is just about like how you're prompting an LLM and maybe you're doing a better job with tuning it to whatever legal needs or finance need or whatever. And the infrastructure that you have below it is not very complex. It's going to be hard to to have a mode.

• 44:59Harry Stebbings?

  Are you angel investing today?

• 45:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:02Harry Stebbings?

  Do you enjoy it?

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Very much. Was scary at first, but nowadays it's so much fun. Also, it's kind of like you like you have a chance to work with incredible founders and become like this huge platform shift, probably the biggest ones that we're facing, to think with them, what the hell are we going to do? But also to think with them is like, what are the new opportunities that are going to open up? Coming back to to this crazy idea I said earlier, like building a law firm like five years ago would seem like the most bad idea that you can think of. Building a law firm, buying a hospital and optimizing it with AI or whatever, building a new bank. I think today is like you have this huge platform shift. There's so much, so many exciting discussions when you look at different industries

• 45:46Speaker 00

  of like thinking in two years from now, four years from now. What's the craziest thing that we can think of? Like, what should we aim for that's barely possible today or not possible today? And should be possible in two to four years? This is like an incredible way to think about angel investing and so much fun doing so. Very risky, but very, very fun.

• 46:08Harry Stebbings?

  Where do you think no one is investing today? That everyone should be investing today? And why do you think everyone is investing today where they should not be investing?

• 46:16Speaker 00

  Oh wow, that's a good question. The not sexy industries, the finance, the restaurants, the whatever, the AGMOs, the like, actually having like entrepreneurs building that end to end is what people should be more like investing more into. I think a lot of people investing nowadays to very fast growing like a hockey stick revenue plotting startups. Unless you know a business or an industry very, very well, I think it's very hard for investors outside to understand if this is gonna be with a moat or not. So a good example for that, I had the opportunity to invest in like this agent companies, right?

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Like the Manus, the, the, those folks. I felt like I don't know the industry good enough to understand if at some point this would get commoditized by the model companies. And so this is like an area that I wouldn't invest in because I was like, okay, this is obviously dangerous. Like the, obviously the more that, that the capabilities that OpenAI built into ChatGPT and then Google into Gemini, whatever, they're gonna have like serious and incredible agents. And I'm not sure this category, even if you get to like insane growth, like you can see the Manus and the other players, like they have this, this graphs that I think are even like go even more aggressive than the, than, than our industry. I'm not sure that there was a lot behind it, rather than like prompting and giving it tools

• 47:43Speaker 00

  that are for sure gonna be part of like ChatGPT or the Gemini interface or whatever.

• 47:48Harry Stebbings?

  Michael Eisenberg said I had to ask you, make the case for how you beat Cursor.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  When I started Base44, I said, okay, I'm gonna do this really for the non-technical people because at that point, and still do, most of the industry, if you wanted to, like most of the players in the market, if you wanted to build something really functional. You should have prompted like, hey, connect the backend and then it will tell you, okay, bring the API key from Superbase and whatever. Things like your mom and my mom wouldn't be able to do, right? And so I said, okay, let's build for the very non-technical folks. And then when doing so, obviously, and Base44 started getting a lot of traction and obviously, like, we also got some developers and some technical people that said, give me the code and, and like, you should invest in like a GitHub integration, allow me to edit files and whatever. And, and at some point, we also implemented that.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  But the more time passed and the more the models got better and the more like faster and whatever, there were less bugs, nobody wanted to see the code. And it was less important for people to actually be able to manually edit and change and whatever. And I think the direction, and again, that we're going to is like more and more types of software you'll be able to build inside Base44 that nobody wants to see code. I don't think it's like if you get to like this flow state where you're prompting with AI and it's going to be super fast and it's going to be almost immediate, every prompt like you'll see that and it's going to change. I don't think you want to see the code. And I don't think you want to start saying, okay, you should look at these files and those models and like run those tests and whatever.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  And I think nowadays, for some and a growing part of software, even the most technical users would prefer building a side base 44 than to do that in Cursor. And they would don't want to like now set up servers and databases and see the code and write tests and kind of like navigate through the files and whatever. My guess is that this portion of software that you can build inside Base44 is going to grow. And I think obviously nowadays, the experience, if you can build it inside Base44, you'd probably prefer to do it inside Base44 than in Cursor.

• 49:49Harry Stebbings?

  You can invest in Cursor at 29.3 billion, or you can invest in Cognition at 12. Which one would you do?

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Probably Cognition. I think the notion of software building as a category is going to grow insanely fast. Our notion from the previous age of venture capital where a winner takes it all is wrong. And I think this category is going to be so big that everybody will take a niche at some point. And so I think Cognition is going to have like more room to grow. I also know that like throughout time, they'll be able to either replicate the most successful features inside. I think they have more room to grow, where betting on Cursor is like betting that it's a winner takes it all market.

• 50:33Harry Stebbings?

  Why don't you think it's a winner take all? And if it's not a winner take all, does that still work for a venture model? Our business is predicated on winner take all.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Not necessarily. The venture capital business is predicated on huge returns. If you look at all of my competitors and on Base44, we're all growing insanely fast. And I think, at least I can say about Base44, but maybe the other players, like healthy businesses. Those are going to generate huge returns. They're all like fast growing businesses and it's not a winner takes it all market. Which is also, by the way, why I got into this market in the first place. It's like when I started, there was like Bolton, Lovable were like very viral on on social media. And I was like, this is going to be such a big market. I feel like I have a very interesting take on this market with the backend built in and like focusing on function on complex apps.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Where most of the other players were focusing back then like frontends and maybe could connect the frontend to Superbase, but it was very hard. We're at a different ballgame where AI is going to generate so much value that markets are going to grow very, very fast. Obviously some will get cannibalized, but market is going to go very, very fast. And the VC model is not necessarily a winner takes it all, but it's a huge returns type of market.

• 51:53Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think we will hit a speed bump? Everyone is very concerned about the AI bubble and not delivering on the revenue that we promise. Do you think that we will have a speed bump where there is a sign that we don't deliver the revenue that we promise?

• 52:06Speaker 00

  I think the question is whether it's going to turn out to be a platform play. Which means that when building better models, the entire ecosystem and the market benefits from. Or whether what what will happen is like model companies are going to fight. Their margins would get worse and worse because they will need to lower prices. Maybe at some point we'll need to figure out or crack something better in the L L M's. Because maybe we'll hit a wall. So this will be the bigger question, like is the value that nowadays GPT five to GPT five point one adding is only to open AI out for the rest of the industry? Or the rest of like the market? Market, if it's for the rest of the market, I don't think we'll hit a speed bump. Me personally, I don't believe we'll hit a speed bump.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  I don't think also we'll hit like a wall with like the improvements of L L Ms. But I think even with existing models, we're only scratching the surface of economic value that you can create. If a one person team can get sold for eighty million dollars and building a viable business and healthy business and profitable business. Without people, it means that you'll be able to do a lot more stuff with very like less people. And that companies will become more efficient. And as a result of that, every product that we buy is gonna be better, is gonna be cheaper. There's so much more to do. And this was like with the previous version of L L Ms.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  I've seen what it takes to build a company that needed to raise or was very capital heavy, hundred and thirty million dollars and like over a hundred people. And I've seen now in the age of L L M, how much better it is or easier to build a very lean company. I was one person. This value is gonna trickle down from enterprises becoming more efficient, many more startups, because there's no technical there anymore. To eventually the consumer benefiting from from all of those, from all this economic value is gonna be created.

• 54:00Harry Stebbings?

  How many people are in base forty four today?

• 54:02Speaker 00

  No, I cannot say. Five minutes before the the conversation, they told me I cannot say numbers or number of people or whatever.

• 54:09Harry Stebbings?

  Really? Well, why is that? Like just number of people?

• 54:13Speaker 00

  I think they're waiting for like the investor's updates.

• 54:15Harry Stebbings?

  I don't know if it's a good thing to have more or less. If I was a public company, I'd want to say more because it feels more secure to a less educated investor base that doesn't think about A I efficiency within dev teams.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  I think the public markets nowadays are so fracturing and it's very hard. Like you have to see consistent results. I don't think the the stock kind of behaves the same way that like you see inside the business.

• 54:40Harry Stebbings?

  If you look at a lovable at a reported $6 billion price on the latest round, or a rap led at three to four, and I'm sure they'll raise at six soon because they're kind of a fanatic in that way. Either they are grossly overvalued, or Wix is grossly undervalued. You have to take one of those views. Which one of those views is right?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  My very not objective opinion is that Wix is very much undervalued today. If we've already spoken about this, there's also, put aside the fact of like product assets and moat. There's like a moat in being big, and there's a moat in having a marketing team and organization with experience like ours. I'm not sure if lovable or replit is overvalued. I think to be able to say that, I need to look at the like the internals and the economics of those businesses. I don't really know those.

• 55:28Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not track them?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  I track the revenue and the things they publish, but we're focusing on just building a very like, and this is something that Wix taught me. Wix for many years was like the underdog of like other players. When I came into Wix and I was like, hey, and those guys are doing this and those guys are doing that. And then, and they're publishing here, they're viral here, and they're like, they're copying our features or whatever. And like, Wix's mindset is just like, build a great product, find the right way to market it. Doesn't matter what others do. It's just like you see that purely in the business, in the metrics. You can see like we've released like the new agent, like the, the version of our agent. And like you can see the conversion goes up and you can see that like the marketing team tests different things.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Some of them didn't make any sense to me beforehand, and you can see kind of like the unit economics getting, getting better. So one thing that Wix taught me is like, focus on your business, focus on a great product. It's like, there's so much noise out there. I remember like my first time, my first company, 40% of my mind was occupied with what competitors are doing and oh no. And for me as well was like hard to grasp that the market is so big, right? It's like, nobody cares. It's like, as a category, you're currently capturing like 10%, 15%, 20%. Like it takes years and ages until you actually go to like, there's so many people that could use base 44. There's so many, also so many people that could use replit and lovable. It's like, focus on your business, obviously grow as fast as you can.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  But I don't think it's like I'm trying to sniff around what's the unit economics and margins and whatever.

• 57:00Harry Stebbings?

  Final one before we do a quick fire. Replit, Cursor, Cognition, all very Silicon Valley businesses. Are you helped or are you hurt by not being in Silicon Valley?

• 57:11Speaker 00

  I think the world is changing. With my previous company, I used to fly out every two weeks to Silicon Valley. Because this is where things would happen tough. I'm not going to do that ever again. I don't think in any way our business is hurting. If anything, I think the war on talent is really tough in Silicon Valley. If you're playing the game of get funded as much as you can so that you can build for a lot of cash. And that's your way of like conquering most of the market. Awesome. Like this is what where you should be. I think for us also weeks is a is a month of like you've been giving us their backs and like that. They have like this deep pockets and they know what to do and they like, that's my Silicon Valley, right?

• 57:54Speaker 00

  That's the backup that they need. And also you start to see, and I have a lot of great things to say about Lovable building it from Europe. I think the world's changing.

• 58:02Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I want to do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. I had Mark Benioff, I had Vlad Tenev from Robinhood on the show. They said 50% of their code is written with AI. What will that be in two years?

• 58:17Speaker 00

  95% or 100% for sure. You'll be prompting agents. For us, Base44 was built in the age of LLMs and so I structured the repository in a way that's going to be very easy for LLMs to navigate through. And to read the code, I think for us, it's already closer to 90%, like mostly it's like prompting agents.

• 58:36Harry Stebbings?

  Single biggest advice for someone non-technical wanting to build with these tools. I listened to you today genuinely, dude, and I'm like, wow, I really want to build a tool that allows me to go through all my LinkedIn followers. Find everyone who has a certain title that would suggest they're an LP in investor in funds. Categorize them and show them to me because they clearly have an interest in me already. I could outbound them and turn them into an LP in my funds. I don't know where to start. I'm intimidated.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  So first I'll say step zero is like the biggest hack is like how you actually build something that later on. You'll use or maybe be successful, which is exactly what you mentioned is like build something for your own problems. This is the biggest hack that I learned. This is the easiest way to get a software that's actually usable. And this is not something I wanna, I wanna go back into doing something that's like for you, for a customer that I interview a lot and understand the pain points is was so much fun. Building base forty four and so much easier when I had a use case in mind. I was like, I'm gonna build for my partner. I'm gonna build her a CRM. And I'm, I'm gonna kind of like iterate on this software and whatever until it, it hits the mark.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  For people starting out with tools like base forty four, there's like a mindset that you have. So one tip that I constantly give out is like, there's a mindset that you have to get into, which is. Base forty four is not really a person that's like working for a week and getting back to you with like, hey, this is what I built. And so you have to get into a mindset that's like very easy. It's very easy to revert or start from scratch. And so instead of like going into like building a PRD and then feeding it into base forty four as well as like. Build a first version that you know you're gonna throw out. And for some people, it's like emotionally hard to understand like they're gonna throw out like tens of thousands of lines of code.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  It's gonna be okay, fine. But like, all you need is like figure out the product stuff because once you have the product stuff, it's like with a few prompts, you get to where you like, you got to with like hundreds of prompts or thousands of prompts. So iterations is everything is like, it's not anymore about like planning ahead so that you save developer time. And very easily hitting the revert button when one feature you wanted and you played with is like not something that I nearly get to a point where saying, okay, this is not, wasn't really a good idea. It's like iterate very fast and understand that you're not working with a human. Therefore, it's fine to try out different directions. Or to just give it like a high level idea and see what it comes up with and then form the iterate. And so you can start with.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  The highest level of prompt, like build something that will help me, I don't know, engage my audience in LinkedIn. And see what L L M does because it will have ideas that it will implement inside application. And some of those ideas will say, oh, this is interesting. I didn't really thought about this. Like the fact that you can maybe generate, I don't know. Or reach out or that you can whatever and see the things that you didn't like, throw those away, take it again and then prompt it back and say, okay, build something that will engage my LinkedIn feature. One of the features that I didn't like is this and that, and then build around that. And so the the idea that you can throw away things that you don't like and start from scratch or revert or go back is very hard for people to grasp.

• 1:01:42Harry Stebbings?

  You made eighty million bucks with the sale. Well done. Does money make you happy?

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  I don't think money makes you happy. I think there's two things that money becomes really valuable. Three things. One is your time. I don't like fancy cars, so I didn't buy a car. But like nowadays, I'm going with a taxi everywhere and saves tremendous amounts of time. Or other stuff that I can pay instead of of like doing or wasting my time on. And this is a lot of help in like personal stuff, especially if you're like busy people, you're entrepreneurs and you want to be with your wife or family or whatever. So this is a huge benefit. Second is helping people you care about and helping causes that you care about, which is big. Is it some points like there's not a big difference between doing X million dollars and ten X million dollars. It's more about like, okay, you can maybe with your family and stuff like that you can support.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  And the third, and I'm assuming you can use the money later on to build the bigger stuff. You have this war chest that you can say, okay, next thing I'm gonna do. Or when I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do in a decade from now. It's like, okay, let's go to space, solve cancer, build robots or something like that. Because you can do that. You can take a risky bet.

• 1:02:53Harry Stebbings?

  OpenAI at five hundred billion or Anthropic at three hundred and sixty billion, which one would you rather be invested in?

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Everyday.

• 1:03:00Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Moving faster, they create something in coding, they're very focused on delivering value to B two B customers. They don't have the first mover advantage, but I think they have better models. And when I look at their trajectory, they're better positioned for growth.

• 1:03:16Harry Stebbings?

  You can add one person to the Base44 board. Who would you add and what would you like to learn from them?

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  Wow, that's a good question. Jack Dorsey.

• 1:03:25Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  I think he's one of the most brilliant minds and founders. And you can see that consistently, he builds things sometimes for just the sake of building. So you can see like some of like his latest pet projects, like this messaging protocol and like stuff like that. And I think this is a person that consistently like building Twitter, building Square, building other projects, like that's just a mindset of a builder that I think can add tremendous futuristic strategic thinking. While also, I think that our DNA and the thing that we're trying to build in Base44 is like a builder mindset. And I think this is the like the ultimate, for me, the ultimate guy.

• 1:04:06Harry Stebbings?

  What thing or event did you sacrifice for work that with the benefit of hindsight, you regret?

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  Not necessarily this time around, but in my previous company, I think I missed a lot of my twenties. And I think for the first few years, I sacrificed a lot of time with the family and friends, missing on many different occasions and different memories. And I was so inexperienced that I was trying to compensate for my inexperience with overworking, which is fine, like got me to a good place eventually, but I sacrificed many things and many friends.

• 1:04:45Harry Stebbings?

  What thing are Frontier Labs completely delusional about?

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Maybe the moat that they have.

• 1:04:51Harry Stebbings?

  They don't have what they think they have?

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  I don't know if how they're thinking about this, but it's like, what's the end game for the race? It's not going to be one winner takes it all. There's going to be like more and more companies getting into this market. It's going to be like the Chinese players that are now like changing the entire market dynamics. I think eventually it's like, it takes one better model or lower price to drastically reduce your revenue. Then I think, or at least they used to be delusional about this. I don't know if they used to be delusional about this. Maybe they always like, they were always planning to build kind of like up the stack. I think nowadays they're doing smart things. For example, on Tropic, building Claude Code SDK or Claude Code. And like even if now Gemini 3 comes out and it's a better model than Claude and Sonnet,

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  then still there's going to be a huge number of people staying with Claude Code because they're used to it and they build some things up the stack.

• 1:05:45Harry Stebbings?

  Penultimate one, you got married very recently. What's your biggest advice on partner selection?

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  It shouldn't be like this person completes me. It should be someone I'm enjoying this at least so much that is identical to you. My partner is in their own kind of like field entrepreneur. She likes the same thing that I like. She's messy, she has ADHD like me. She likes to paint like me. This is so much fun picking someone that's like you because as an entrepreneur is like, you have to have sympathy for the person that's like missing day and night and is constantly working and you have to understand deeply why they're doing that. And that's like a part of them as a person, same as it's a part of of me as a person. So I think having the same mindset is crucial.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  It's very, very hard to date a founder that's like deep into like building the company zero to one. And I think having a person and a partner that's like having the same mindset that they're building something or they built something is making it so much easier to empathize with.

• 1:06:52Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for you, my friend. You can go back to the night before you start Base44 and you can say, ah, Mayo, you should know this, future self has learnt this. What do you go back and tell yourself that you wish you'd known when you started?

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  When I was by myself, it was scary as hell. I used to wake up every two hours at night just to check that the platform is up. And at some point, Base44 started growing really fast and I was still by myself and people started building like businesses and applications on top. And there was like, I remember this week when it started like really going up and the infrastructure and the thing that I built didn't didn't hold up. And so we had like this week or two or three that they had like four incidents where the platform would go down and people were like screaming and shouting at me as like, ah, I trusted you and whatever. And I took it very, very hard. And it was like emotional, very, very hard. And I wish I could have told myself like, this is just gonna be a bump in the road.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Community is gonna recover from that and eventually it'll be like, like this is gonna be sustainable, this is gonna. Be great. Don't take, don't take the bumps in the road. Also, consumer, the consumer market is so much difference like the the emotional spectrum of the feedback that you get is so much wider than building a B two B SaaS. That you get like some very, not, not too positive, not too negative comments. Handling it better emotionally is important. I didn't know that.

• 1:08:18Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I've so enjoyed this. It's a very free flowing discussion. You've been amazingly receptive to put up with my romantic advice request. As well as my LLM routing requests. Thank you so much for being so good, dude. I've loved this.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  This has been so much fun. Thank you for having me, Harry.

• 1:08:36Harry Stebbings?

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