#624: Bringing No Code To The World with Emmanuel Straschnov

Emmanuel Straschnov is the founder of Bubble, the most powerful no-code platform, which empowers entrepreneurs to build production-ready web apps. In this conversation, we discuss the no code movement, bootstrapping, raising $100 million Series A, corporations using no code, and where the industry is going. ======================= Okcoin is one of the most popular licensed exchanges. Okcoin is the first to bring new cryptos to market, offering some of the lowest fees in the industry, an easy to use app, and Earn feature--you got to check out their brand new, beautifully designed app! And as of today, they also became the first US exchange to list NEAR. It’s easier than ever to sign up, buy and trade crypto in just 2 minutes on Okcoin with credit & debit cards or just link your bank account to the best new crypto assets. So get started, and go to okcoin.com/pomp ======================= Matrixport, Asia’s fastest growing digital asset platform with $10 billion in assets under management and custody, it offers one-stop crypto financial solutions including fixed income, DeFi in 1-click, structured products, Cactus Custody™, spot OTC as well as lending. You can earn from high single digit with fixed income to high double digit yield with their Dual Currency Product. If you hold crypto and look for yield, this is the app you don’t wanna miss out. Go download the Matrixport App and enjoy a welcome offer of 30% APY on USDC here: https://invest.matrixport.com/en ======================= Mask Network connects mainstream social media with the new, open, decentralized Web 3.0. Through browser extensions and mobile applications, users could get a glimpse of the decentralized application world, make borderless cryptocurrency transfers, display, and trade NFT collections, and participate in DeFi projects. Visit mask.io to start exploring.

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Emmanuel Strassenoff is the founder of Bubble, the most powerful no-code platform, which empowers entrepreneurs to build production-ready web apps. In this conversation, we discuss the no-code movement, bootstrapping, raising $100 million Series A, corporations using no-code, and where the industry is going. I really enjoyed this conversation with Emmanuel, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is OKCoin. They're one of the most popular licensed exchanges. OKCoin is the first to bring new cryptos to market, offering some of the lowest fees

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:07Anthony Pompliano?

  go download the Matrixport app by clicking on the link in the description, and enjoy a welcome offer that they have for listeners of the Pomp Podcast. Again, go click on the link in the description and check out the Matrixport app. Next up is Mask Network. It's the portal to the new internet that connects mainstream web 2.0 social media with the open decentralized web 3.0. Through their browser extension, users could get a glimpse of the decentralized application world. You can easily make borderless cryptocurrency transfers, decentralized file storage and sharing, display and trade NFTs, and participate in various DeFi projects, and vote on governance proposals. Do everything

• 2:46Anthony Pompliano?

  in a web three way, but on top of web two. Visit mask.io to start exploring. Again, mask.io to start exploring today. Mask Network, the portal to the new internet, connecting mainstream web 2.0 social media with the open decentralized web 3. mask.io, M-A-S-K dot I-O. Go check it out. All right, let's get into this episode with Emmanuel. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:40Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Emmanuel here with me. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. You've got this incredible story where you started Bubble, a no-code platform back in, I think it was 2012 or so, and you spent seven years without raising any capital at all, or kind of more than seven years. So walk us through just when you start the business, what's the idea as to go and start Bubble? And how do you guys get started?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  So the idea started in 2012 when Josh and I were in New York, and we saw a lot of people. It was the beginning of the startup era, you know, that's when Facebook went public. A lot of people were looking at a lot of different verticals that kind of needed to go through the web 2.0 evolution. And so there were a lot of people in New York that I would call like dumb and experts, you know, marketers, lawyers, business people, trying to find technical co-founders to build their companies, and they just couldn't because the shortage of engineers at that point was already very, very high. And so we we felt that it was wrong because we had a crowd of people here and not just in New York, but immediately around us, we saw some that were, you know, very driven, smart,

• 4:51Speaker 02

  very willing to get their hands dirty and they didn't have the ways to do that because the only alternative they had is okay, easy, just learn how to code. And we felt this was not the right way to do this. And instead, we should build a tool so that they could build that themselves. And so that was fundamentally the driver behind the idea was not to, you know, create a new way to program something like this. That's effectively what it is, but was to empower business people to build their companies without engineers. And today, I mean, nine years later, it's still very much what we do because we still see a tremendous potential in having more people being able to start companies without the burden of, you know, having to raise capital and find engineers.

• 5:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you think about kind of where the platform has evolved to today, help people understand in terms of no code, what exactly does that encompass? And then how have you thought about building the platform?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  So our goal is to be the most flexible platform in the no code world, meaning it's still without code, but it's extremely powerful. It doesn't come for free and that's something I repeat a lot because a lot of the other tools, you know, after five minutes, you have a good hang of it and you can do things with them. The flexibility that we offer comes with the learning curve and depending on how fast you are, it takes, you know, five, 10, 15 hours to learn it. But our pitch is that after that, you basically have the same power than a software engineer would have. And to illustrate that, an example I use often, because people relate to it a lot is one of our users for fun and to demonstrate, it's not done by us, to demonstrate the power of the platform, clone Twitter, for instance, without writing code.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  We are the only tool in this new world that is called no code that enables you to do that. He didn't do it in five minutes, didn't do it in two hours. I think he probably spent about a week to do this. But after a week, he had like, you know, a fully functional platform that is actually working today. I mean, no one uses it because Twitter is there, but from a functional standpoint, he was able to do that over a few days. That's like one of the other values of no code compared to just enabling more people to do things. It's actually much faster to build on top of those platforms.

• 6:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So notrealtwitter.com is what you're referencing.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And that that specific platform, I think, is kind of a great example to use. So when you talk about flexibility on the bubble platform being that thing you're optimizing for, walk us through when somebody goes to build notrealtwitter.com, are they coming in and somehow submitting what they want? Are there pre-built components? So like, how exactly does it work from a user experience standpoint? And then what are you all doing on the backend that's actually empowering folks to kind of quickly build Twitter clones or any other type of no-code product?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  So it's a completely self-serve model. I mean, we have an ecosystem of agencies. So if you didn't want to do that yourself, you could hire someone else to do that. But we, as a company, as Bubble, the only thing we do is to build the engine that you use to build things. Very similarly to Microsoft built Microsoft Word, but if you want to write something, you're going to write it yourself. And the way it works is we've pre-built the different components that, as you're referring, that are pretty common on websites. The way we started was looking at a lot of the Airbnb, Etsy, Kickstarter, Twitter, Facebook, you know, all those services back in 2012. And we felt like they all had pretty much the same things and they just were combined differently. Meaning they had to wait for users to sign up. They had to wait for users to log in.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  They had to wait for users to, for these applications to send an email, for instance, to charge a credit card, to save something in the database. And so we've pre-built those different actions. And then from a visual standpoint, what they have is, you know, buttons, images, inputs, map elements. Sometimes they have a chart, but it's pretty limited actually what they have. And so, once we've created this component, we offer a very high flexibility in terms of how you can put them together, whether it's visually or whether it's in workflow. So for instance, you would say, when the user clicks on this button, sign the user up, send an email, change the page. So you're totally free to have the sequencing and the number of actions you want for each of the things. And that's how you get to the flexibility of building something like Twitter.

• 8:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start

• 9:01Speaker 02

  And our job, sorry, our job after that is to make sure it works at scale. So the value proposition, you know, we offer is you start using us, you don't need to use servers or anything like it's that's actually how we make money. We don't make money on people using our tool. We use money on, we make money on people hosting everything with us. And so our job behind the scenes is to make sure everything works at scale.

• 9:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And so is that a unique model where you basically aren't charging people for access to kind of the no code platform, but it's more so really aligning your interests with the interest of your customers saying, hey, the more valuable we are, the longer you'll use us and longer you use us, the more money we make because we're actually providing the hosting infrastructure and other types of kind of monetization opportunities?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Not really. As much as I'd like to say we could first went to figure this out, that's kind of where the web is today. So no, this is a pretty traditional business model. I would say as a company, we've been innovating on the technology side way more than on the business model side.

• 9:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And what was the hardest part about building the actual tech platform itself? Is it simply just the time and energy it takes to actually build some of the kind of compartmentalization and the underlying code? Or is there something else that when you look back over the last couple of years, that's been the most difficult?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Um, well, actually, it's the last nine years, I would say, I think the hardest is even though our users are non-technical, so level of expectation they have in terms of customization, they want to reach for the application is extremely high because today our users are non-technical, but they're used to using those digital products everywhere as consumers. And so they have, our users have a very clear idea of what they want to build. And we needed to spend a lot of energy and time to create a platform that was flexible enough without being too complicated to let them build exactly what they wanted. And this is just like years of efforts. And that's why, actually, one of the reasons we didn't raise funding very early on is because this is not something you can accelerate with money at some point.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  It's just takes time gathering what our users want to do and then build it. One of the other challenges we had, and it's still a challenge today, even though not as much as, you know, four, five years ago, is the constant struggle between serving new users who want, you know, simplicity, ease of use, ease of learning, and power users that are asking for more functionality. So that's a trade-off that you have to solve pretty much every day when you make product decisions and kind of, you know, the nature of the beast of where we're going to do. Today, we've reached enough functionality that we can focus more on other aspects of the business, which is in particular unboarding and making the platform more accessible. But for a long time, it was more focusing on making sure people could build exactly what they wanted.

• 11:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to think about where this entire industry is going, I think one of the, you know, topics of interest today with folks is automation. And it feels like most people feel like the automation that we're going to see across industries tends to affect more blue collar workers, right? So they think of the warehouse worker or potentially self-driving cars replacing Uber drivers or delivery drivers, something like that. There is this element of white collar jobs being impacted as well. And no code to me, while it's not true automation, there is this element of using software to replace maybe the early stages or certain types of that job. And so how do you look

• 12:25Anthony Pompliano?

  at this as an impact on the kind of labor force? And then what are like the pros and the cons as the industry moves more and more to adopting no-code solutions?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  So I think at a very high level, every task that can be automatable, automated will be automated. And that's mostly impacting blue collars today. But what that also means is that more and more going forward, only people who are capable of creating this kind of automation will actually be creating value, right? And so that's where it affects white collar job as well. And so to be very pragmatic and practical, I think Five to 10 years from now, most white collar jobs will involve in some ways, in some shape or form, creating automation, also known as programming, also known as, you know, creating applications, whatever the medium, the platform is, whether it's a web, phone, it doesn't really matter.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  And so effectively, what we're going to start seeing, the shift we're going to start seeing in the next five to 10 years, maybe even sooner, is that a lot of white collar professionals will have to learn how to program and create automations. Otherwise, they would start becoming very difficult to hire and it would be hard for them to contribute. And by the way, this is something that has happened over the last 20 years with Microsoft Office. If you can't use Excel today, it's going to be hard to find a job as a business analyst somewhere. And we think the next iteration is just creating software. A lot of people have diagnosed that, like, I don't think I'm the first one to say that, like, a lot of people have diagnosed that. And so people have come up with the idea that we should teach everyone how to code because of the shortage of engineering.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  It was really hard in the early 2010s, you know, 2014, I think Michael Bloomberg, I remember, was tweeting about Code Academy in New York in 2013, and that was really cool and everything. I think now people have realized that it's actually not that simple because learning how to code is not for everyone. You know, I write a lot of code myself, I wrote a lot of code in my life. It is really tedious and some people love it and some people hate it. And so the approach of no code here is to change the tools instead of teaching code so that we get to that end goal where almost everyone should be able to create applications or automations. Otherwise, you know, again, it would be very hard for them to do things in the workplace.

• 14:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things that is fascinating to me as you kind of move into this entire industry is who's using it? And what I think surprised me as I looked at the Bubble platform was you have a number of companies that have used the no-code solutions to actually build an early version, raise venture capital and continue to use the platform. And so do you view this as something that kind of large-scale companies can be built using no-code and kind of scaled up? Is this something that's more so for the early stages of the life cycle of a business? Or how do you kind of see when people are using it and then kind of what the potential from a scalability standpoint is?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  I mean, our goal as a company is to stick with companies till, you know, they get massive. Whether it's, you know, public, acquired for like huge amounts of money. It is a hard problem to solve and of course it's easier to get people on your platform, especially when it's just two guys building things for five years because, as you said, we bootstrap for seven years, but I think even more crazy crazier is that it was only Josh and I for five years building everything. It's easier to get early stage startups because early stage startups have, you know, more freedom in the kind of technologies they can choose and then more need to take risks. And our current theme today and the reason we're currently aggressively scaling is to make sure that we can keep up with the scale of our users.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  But I don't think there is any theoretical reason why at scale people would stop using local platforms like ours. Because at the end of the day, to put what we're doing in a much less sexy terms, but that's going to talk to business people, building a local platforms is just, you know, fifty to a hundred times cheaper than writing code. Because you don't need to have the engineers and you can build faster. Back to that not real Twitter example. Had an engineer strike to do that, then we'd have taken him or her probably months. And our users were able to that in weeks. And that's something that is true for like the smallest companies starting because they don't have capital at all. And so they can do things on a very cheap way. But if you afford in one hundred company, if you can save your engineering costs by fifty to a hundred and move faster, you're going to stay on these platforms.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  So now we just need to realize that vision, which means, you know, just improve the product and keep growing with our users to keep up with the scale. So that at some point, it's just irrelevant to use code for most of the use cases.

• 16:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and what I guess is is really interesting is you said it was just the two of you for a number of years and then you didn't raise capital. Why was it just the two of you and why did you not raise capital? Like, what was the the kind of thought process there? Or was it just out of necessity? You had to to kind of bootstrap it and not grow.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  I would say, I mean, I'll answer in two ways because I think it's actually both out of necessity and something that we identified very early on, but you know, we realized it was out of necessity after the fact. What we realized, back to you know, what was hard, which is you know, just build all these pretty much, not endless, but very close to endless list of features to let people build a lot of things that it takes a very long time. And until you have all those features, it's going to be very hard to get a lot of users and to grow quickly. And so the challenge you have if you raise funding is, you know, it's gonna make you live for like eighteen months. You're gonna hire a lot of people and that's good, but then you're gonna have to go back to investors to raise the next round.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  And if you don't have, you know, very pretty charts, you know, going up like this, like exponentially with a lot of growth, it's gonna be very difficult to raise and that's usually when companies disappear. Like, you know, startups usually fail because they try to raise another round and it's not working. And we just felt that what we were building was not compatible with fast growth in the early days. And then why it's out of necessity is we've seen people who started at the same time as we did with a similar mission and similar idea, raising money very traditionally. You know, one of them raised from Y C, the other one was from Adressandor of it, so massive names from the valley. And this is exactly what happened to them. Like, you know, after eighteen months, they were out of their cash. They had to raise money again and they didn't have a lot of users.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  So did we, because for the first five years, we had users in the hundreds. It's very little, you know, by today's standards of the web. And then the one thing I would say is that when you look at the other players, not necessarily doing exactly what we do, but the other pretty horizontal tools, you know, tools today that are very popular, that you can do, where you can do a lot of things, and I'm thinking about, you know, Zapier, Webflow, Airtable, Notion. These tools were all pretty slow at the beginning, actually. Like, most of these tools bootstrap for many years, all raise a seed round, but then had to become profitable on their own before being able to raise like a large round. Because, because it has the same issue, when you build a very horizontal tool,

• 19:21Speaker 02

  it takes a long time to build and it's very difficult to expand your user base and your product at the same time. You kind of have to choose here. And so for a tool like us, you have to choose product first and then raise money to expand the user base.

• 19:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start thinking about, okay, we are ready to raise capital, you went out and you raised $100 million Series A. That's not exactly the average size Series A. So it seems like you continue to break the mold or what most people would think as quote unquote standard. Why raise so much capital? Why now? And what are you going to do with the money?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's a nine-year-old company, you know, so at some point, we have to catch up a little bit to fulfill, to, you know, realize the ambition we have because our ambition is to become one of the biggest companies in the tech world because what we're trying to do is so fundamental that it has to exist at a massive scale. Like if Bubble is done right, this will become one of the biggest companies because software is everywhere. And so to do that, as much as, you know, I would have loved to be able to do that without funding at all and do that entirely on our own, scale matters. And if your business, again, can sustain exponential growth to be able to raise money on subsequent rounds, it's a great opportunity to move faster. And so that's why we did this. How did we live on the $100 million? I mean, we had a spending plan and then, you know, the market

• 20:39Speaker 02

  dynamics gave us that money. It's a good time to be a tech founder today and there is a lot of money around. So you can do a lot of things with it.

• 20:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you think about kind of the environment in which you work today, is there any kind of, I don't know, like dissonance between you're building no-code tools, but you need engineers that actually write software, right? And so you almost kind of have two things here. Do you find that most of the folks that you end up hiring, do they use no-code tools? Do they just enjoy writing software and this is what they're focused on? Like, talk to me a little bit about the types of folks that you end up hiring.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it depends a little bit on who we're talking about, you know, for people who join the growth team or the success team at Bubble, they are by definition non-engineers. And so, yes, I'm very much users. And if you're the success team, you're going to use Bubble all the time because you're going to help users. You might even build internal tools on Bubble. So we don't use one of these CRMs that exist on the market like Salesforce. We built our own on Bubble and it's a non-engineers who built it. It's one of our success professional who did this. The growth team, the same. Like for a lot of things, we can move faster than a lot of other companies because we do use engineers. By the way, this is also true for our users. With engineers, it's interesting. It's a good question.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Um, I think now we look fairly good place, but at the beginning of hiring people, we started hiring engineers about four years ago. We had some issues with some engineers that didn't know the platform very well. And so sometime, you know, maybe after a year, they would come and say, hey, I had this great idea for a feature. And we were like, wait, we actually have that. And it was not their fault because they're really not part of the segment we're currently targeting, right, as a company. And so what we're doing now is whenever someone starts on Bubble, they have, um, they have to learn the platform. And it's actually, we book like a week, they're onboarding to do that basically full time. They go on success rotation for two weeks to help users with their own problems when they build things on the platform.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  So it's a very intense way to learn how to use Bubble. And even more, we have a Bubble test that is part of our onboarding curriculum to validate your Bubble skill set. The point of that not being like a cutthroat exercise, it's more making sure that you've been exposed as an employee and in particular as an engineer to not all the features we have, but to a fair amount of them. And if you don't know, you can ask your help from the team. So it's something, and it's something we need to keep refreshing, by the way, because it's very important for us that everyone, in particular as a people writing code behind the tool, knows the tool well. And so we, we constantly try to find ways to expose engineers to some of the new things that their colleagues have built, but they might not be using on a daily basis, so that everyone knows the product very well.

• 23:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And when you start to think about kind of the landscape, uh, COVID obviously was this huge thing. Remote uh, working became a, a really big trend. Did that have any impact or accelerate the adoption of no code or, or anything that you've seen in terms of uh, a changing working environment with actually these no code products?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, very much so. I wouldn't necessarily put that on the remote work aspect of COVID. I think it was more a combination of two things that at the beginning of COVID, a lot of people started to look into ways to reinvent themselves a little bit because their jobs had been impacted by COVID. And so they wanted to upskill themselves and learn new things that could be useful. And that was a time when local tools in general and Bubble in particular started getting quite some recognition. And so we were one of the things where people were like, okay, I'm gonna learn something new. I'm gonna learn how to build web apps without code. And then they had time, you know, to do that. So that worked pretty well. The other thing also is people started being worrying about cash a little bit more, I think, especially at the beginning. And so people were looking at ways, how can I create things?

• 24:28Speaker 02

  How maybe have a side hustle for a very cheap cost because I don't know where the world is going. And no code for that is very good because this is different. Again, it's a very cheap way to build things. And it's true for Bubble, but not just Bubble. Like, most of these tools are very affordable at the beginning. When you get that skill, it's different. But for most side projects, you can run something, you know, for $29 a month and start making money that way.

• 24:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so as you start thinking about kind of the ultimate vision for Bubble, what do you want to build, right? You just raised $100 million. We've talked about what you're gonna do with the money, who you're hiring, kind of how the platform works today, what the tailwinds are from a growth standpoint. 10 years, 20 years from now, what does this business look like and kind of what's the ultimate goal?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  The ultimate goal is to be the platform that people are using to build things. For computers, phones, whatever, you know, the computer hardware is. So basically, we place JavaScript, C++, all these kind of languages that people are using today to build things and for any kind of organization. So we want to be the big creative platform where Business people, or I would call them non-engineers, non-coders, can build products. And engineers are still part of the future because they're not going away, don't worry. Code is still a valuable skill to develop. We'll be expanding the platform by building plugins. You know, well, that's how you cut it, you call it. So it's a very, um, much more efficient way to build things because instead of having engineers

• 25:56Speaker 02

  rebuild the same thing again and again and again, like there is a lot of reinventing the wheel today in software. Non-engineers can build the product they want, and when something is missing, an engineer comes in to build it. That's a very aggressive goal, like it's a big shift because there is a lot of legacy software everywhere. A lot of organizations, you know, small companies, 400, 500 companies, even governments, you know, are still running on old technologies and so it's gonna take probably 10 to 20 years to prove that it makes sense for all these organizations to shift to something more modern like, uh, building software with a graphic user interface, so Bubble. But I think that's where we're going. I think this is personally, like, when, sometime I think, you know, do I have a job that I like? I think this is one of the most exciting things that could be working on because

• 26:40Speaker 02

  this can have like a tremendous impact, uh, everywhere. Because if you think about it, the challenge that we're starting to see is, except if you're in the tech world, it's really difficult to hire good engineers to create good experiences for your users. So to be very practical, you know, if you're government and you build a web app to solve something, well, usually people will complain the website is not working well, right? Remember healthcare.gov, for instance, you know, when the website crashed, when people, uh, started looking for, uh, health insurance with Obamacare. The reason that happens is because more and more, except if you're a tech company or a startup, you can't hire good engineers. And so you're gonna have crappy experience that, uh, people will not enjoy. And that's only gonna get worse and worse, right?

• 27:22Speaker 02

  We need to change the tools so that we can start having good experiences for these very important parts of, uh, our lives that are not just, you know, tech companies, uh, built by tech companies. Otherwise, at some point, we're gonna live in a world where only tech companies will create things that are enjoyable to use. They will be created by, you know, 1, 0.1% of the world population, and everybody else will either have bad experiences or important things of their lives, or just be consumer of those products. And I think that's a very dangerous place to be.

• 27:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How do you think about kind of the way that this changes building in general, right? So we talked a lot about tech companies. Do we think that the companies that are non-tech, rather than kind of get left behind, is no code kind of the life raft for them? Where instead of going and trying to hire hundreds of engineers and really kind of beef up their actual technical capabilities, does no code serve as the more kind of realistic option for them to be able to have some of the same capabilities? Or do we feel like they're going to have to do both, have to hire technical talent and also hire those who can leverage these no-code platforms to build?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  I think it's a phased question. It would start entirely without engineers, and that's what we see on our platform all the time. Like, we see one or two non-technical founders funding to build a company on Bubble, starting building a team of mostly non-technical people building on Bubble. We've seen companies with like 30, 40 people and no engineer whatsoever. And then at some point, if their business requires some code, and I can get in a minute into why you would require some code, then they start hiring coders. One thing I would say that if Bubble succeeds at scale, the number of lines of code that will need to be written in the world will probably be reduced by a factor of like, you know, 50 to 100. And therefore, the shortage of engineers will be much less problematic.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  And so it will be easier to find them because each company will have less engineers. The reason you could want to hire engineers is, for instance, like, let me take like a simple example. Imagine you're building a dating application, you know, like another Tinder, where your secret sauce is to match people better. That's very much, so the actual experience of building the app on your phone where people can swipe is very much something that no-code tools like Bubble empower you to do. Because there's nothing really new here, like, most of these apps look the same. But your unique sauce, which is how to match people, is probably going to rely on some algorithms that you're going to build in-house that will not be easy to express in a visual way. And that's where you would need some coders to build them,

• 29:55Speaker 02

  which is a much more efficient way, because again, then instead of having a coder build the whole thing, the coder would just build that particular thing, and non-technical people would build the entire product. So that's where the ratio will change a lot.

• 30:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And when you start to think through

• 30:11Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of why code is potentially needed in some of these situations, talk about the interaction between no code and maybe a little bit of code or supporting code. How do you think through that?

• 30:22Speaker 02

  This is very platform specific, like each platform has chosen its own approach. We are on the spectrum of how open ended we are with code, probably is the most open in a sense that that's going to be a little bit technical, but every bubble application exposes an API. So if you're an engineer, you can basically use bubble as a backend and fetch data or write to the database to API calls. So what we've seen people is build, for instance, an iPhone application with code because it's not bubble does very well. Something that bubble does very well today, we move for web applications. And then they use bubble as a backend. You can expand the platform with code with plugins. So if if an element, for instance, I mentioned, you know, at the beginning, you have buttons, inputs, a map element.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  If you wanted to build something new that we don't have in our core library, you can use it as a plugin. And so you're going to write that with code and even distribute it to through our marketplace. So there are plenty of ways you can expand the platform. We all the tools tend to be a little bit stricter with what you can do with code. I think it comes down very much to our market focus. Since our goal is to enable people to create pretty much any product they need for their companies on bubble. We didn't want them to hit any dead end. So we're much more open ended and that is that at some point you need to open the gate to custom code because it's impossible to create something that we offer every functionality out there. All the tools tend to be more upfront with the fact that there's going to be limitations with the tool and that's part of their offering and you have to work around them.

• 31:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And when you think about kind of moving forward for the entire industry of no code, what's the biggest obstacle? Or is there one milestone you're looking forward to or something that you think will really kind of be an inflection point?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  So I think there were two of them. The first one was functionality. And that's a pushback we were hearing for the first five or six years. Oh, yeah, no way you can build Twitter without code. That's first thing, I think, in Bubble in particular, because again, we're pretty extreme on the spectrum of how flexible the tool is. We've proven that you can do things without code that people used to think was impossible. Then the next phase is going to be scale and performance and reliability. And that's something that, you know, we're fine if you're building like a seed or series S startup on Bubble, like an MVP that works, that works great. If you start scaling, there are situations where you could get yourself in a place where Bubble is not performing extremely well. And that's where we're going to put a lot of the recent round we've raised money to work by hiring engineers.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Today, we only have like 15 engineers, which is comically little compared to how deep the product is. We should have at least 50 to 100 people. And so that's why we're going to start hiring a lot to make sure we can scale with that. Once we can prove that, you know, you can have a company that scales to, you know, millions of daily active users, maybe get acquired or go public and several billion dollars of valuation. Then, you know, the pushback we're hearing that, you know, oh, yes, that can scale. Sometimes you will go have to go back to code. I think would be very easy to push back on. And this is nothing that would prevent us because again, the fundamental thing about no code is that it's much, much, much cheaper than code. So we need to make the transition for existing player companies less risky.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  So by solving those two things, functionality and then scale. But then, once we have that, I mean, there is no reason why not to save money here and switch.

• 33:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. When you start thinking about how folks, you know, evaluate the various platforms, what's your pitch to users for the Bubble platform in terms of why should they come use Bubble versus any other platform? And kind of what do you think the things you guys do really well is?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Because Bubble is the only platform where they'll be able to build pretty much exactly what they want for the web, meaning that we don't make strong assumptions about what they want to build, but instead give them all the tools they need that they can combine in ways to be able to build, you know, Twitter, Airbnb, Facebook, these kind of platforms, all the other tools. I mean, there's no other tool on the market where you can build Airbnb without code, and that's that's how it pitched. So that's why it works very well with entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurs usually have a very clear view of a very specific thing they want to build. If you're a dentist, for instance, if you want a website for your service, a lot of those are tools out there would be sufficient for you.

• 34:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a pretty good pitch. I could see why people would easily want to use the Bubble platform. Before I let you go, I ask everyone the same three questions, and then you'll get to ask me one at the end. The first one is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  So it's going to be very specific and most, I mean, it's a book that I don't think has been translated in English. So as you can hear, I'm from France. It's a novel about the story of someone, I mean, talking about his father. So it's autobiographic, but about the life of his father, but the real story of someone basically keeping, pursuing the goals that his family has put on him, but not doing his true, what he really wanted to be doing. And then when he's about to die and get sick, he realizes that. And it's not a unique story. I think a lot of people have have told that story. But I happened to read that at the point where it was during college, kind of that situation, or do I follow what's, you know, ahead of me with a college I've chosen, or do I try to actually

• 35:39Speaker 02

  really find what I'm excited about, even though it might take some time to find? And had I not read that book, I can guarantee you that I would not be doing Bubble today, like Bubble would not exist. And instead, I would be doing something in France that I would probably be very unhappy in my life, professional life. And the way it was written really kind of like put me depressed a little bit when I was reading it. But then I was like, okay, I need to figure out what I want to be doing. It took me years, by the way, to figure this out, you know, we didn't talk about what I did before Bubble, but you know, I was consulting in Asia for a few years, like, then I went to business school. I had to try a whole bunch of things to figure out what I eventually wanted to be doing. But that journey started with that book when I was 21.

• 36:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It uh, uh, sounds like a book that they should translate to English because a lot of Americans could uh, could do uh, do pretty well read that.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm, I'm pretty sure there is an equivalent in American, in American literature about this. Um, yeah.

• 36:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe not the exact one. Second question is a little bit more personal, sleep schedule. So I, uh, used to sleep not well at all. I used to be like five, six hours of sleep. Then I started sleeping on the eight sleep mattress, game changer. I could turn it super cold, knocked out, get my eight hours of sleep and feel, feel much better. What's your sleep schedule and how has that changed? Maybe pre hundred million dollar series A and post hundred million dollar series A?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  I'm a pretty terrible sleeper. Uh, I have like insomnia issues. Um, and I, I'm, I'm in the same camp. I, I sleep like five or six hours a month, a day, uh, usually on the earlier side. And then I start waking up at four or five and it's hard for me to fall asleep again. Has it changed with the hundred million dollar round? No, but I have a six months old. So that happens like three months before closing the round. Uh, that has changed my sleep schedule even more. That said, uh, I'm, I'm working on it actually. Uh, I don't know if it's about, you know, having a cooling mattress or something like that, but I'm trying to look into ways to relax a little bit better, to sleep better because I can see my efficiency going down otherwise at the end of the day.

• 37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  That, uh, it's pretty good. Uh, you're heading in the right direction, which is the important part. Uh, third question's more fun. Aliens, are you a believer or a non-believer?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Probably a believer. I don't see any reason why we would be the only one in the universe. Like that's a very pretty interesting. We're very lucky to be here, I think. Uh, but are we the only one to have that luck? It sounds hard for me to imagine that.

• 38:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I tend to agree. I don't know if we're going to run into anyone else or any other kind of species out there, but I, I tend to think we're probably not the only one. So that makes sense. What, uh, what one question you have for me?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  How do you get started on doing these podcasts? And what are you looking forward to for the next, you know, five years doing this? What's the long-term game for you?

• 38:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I get to learn. You were kind enough to come on here and tell me all about no code. So I get to learn like that's, that's the most fun part about it. Frankly, and obviously the fact that there's an audience and they want to listen kind of right alongside with me. It makes it valuable to folks that they want to come on and I can help them kind of spread the message that they want to spread. But really that's, you know, why I started and what has kept me going. And we've done, I think we've done over 600 podcast episodes at this point. So quite, quite a lot. And it's just I get to learn. So again, meet awesome people and they really want to spend the time to educate me on what they're doing, their industry, kind of their insights. It's just a very, very valuable experience for me.

• 39:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And how I got started is like the classic way, which was somebody said, Hey, you should start a podcast. I said, what's a podcast? They said, well, we'll help you do it. You just got to show up. And so I literally started recording a couple and I liked it and I did a couple more and then a couple more. And next thing you know, you've done 600 of them. Right? So it was never any sort of master plan, which usually ends up being the best way to do things.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Yep, I very much agree with that.

• 39:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Bubble?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  So bubble.io, if you Google Bubble, we usually is the first thing that comes out. I'm on Twitter, not as active as I should be. I'm pretty busy, but Easter trash note on Twitter, or if you just type Emmanuel Bubble on Twitter, I'm there. LinkedIn, and if people want to be in touch, the simplest is probably to reach out to our team and mention this podcast. And then usually those emails will come to me directly and that would be support at bubble.io.

• 39:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I'm a huge fan of what you guys are building. No code is kind of a no brainer at this point, I think. And you all obviously have a very, very flexible platform that I think a lot of people could benefit from. So I appreciate taking the time to come on the podcast and we'll definitely have to do it again in the future.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. That was fun.