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?

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 models will go down towards zero. Me personally, I don't believe we'll hit a speed bump. I don't think Elsa will hit like a wall with like the improvements of LLMs. 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 $80,000,000 without people, it means that you'll be able to do a lot more stuff with very, like, less people.

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and Base forty four. What an incredible story. Base forty four 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 $80,000,000. Today, Mayor, Base forty four's cofounder, 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@20vc.com.

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They're incredible. Head over to angellist.com/20vc to learn more. You have now arrived at your destination. Nayul, it is great to have you on the show, dude. I've been so looking forward to this one.

I am I'm a fan of base forty four. What a freaking journey. Thank you for joining me.

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

Dude, that's very, very kind. Listen. Ego flattery will get you everywhere, and I'm very I'm very susceptible to it. I was chatting to Michael Eisenberg before this show, and he said, dude, you've gotta start with, like, acquired for, like, $80,000,000. Why did you decide to sell before we get to anything else?

So I started Base forty four 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. Loved the fact that like with LLM's now we can do so much more.

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. 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 a shit ton of money.

Or I should raise a lot of funds and go very aggressive and try to build this on my own. 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. And I remember telling Avishai, like the CEO of Wix, I was telling him, yeah, if Kaleslaw was sold to Microsoft, probably there won't be any Kelsall today. The fact that they were independent and they could build the business by themselves how they wanted without kind of like the corporate stuff has gotten them full.

And then we had many late night chats where one, I understood that Wix, for a lot of reasons, that many know Wix, is a perfect match. Because 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 Stardaby 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 operations 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 building something that matters. And so I said, for an actual shot of taking this from this low few 100,000 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.

Today, Base forty four has, like, continued to thrive and is now over 100,000,000 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 100,000,000 in revenue, do you regret selling so soon?

Absolutely not, for all kinds of reasons. First, I can comment on the revenue stuff and public company and 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. I felt like in my eyes, this is going to be the largest category in the software industry.

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 Sierra's or Decagons and then do maintenance and updates. Are you serious?

I honestly think so. It 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 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. 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 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 will 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 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. Maybe you can 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.

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 Wix's business, do they need it?

Not necessarily the code and data, but they need something that's simpler and more customized to their needs. You know how I started Base forty four? 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 I'm not going to name that software vendor or two software vendors that we 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 making it so that it supports her process of how she processes leads and customers and whatever.

She's like, oh, this is insane. I was like, I know that like an LLM can code something leaner and way better for what she needs, exactly what she needs. And you're not going to have like this entire features and enterprise features and team management stuff and whatever settings and stuff like that. But it's going to be super simple for what she needs and could adapt to her needs. And I was like, know LLMs can do that.

I just need to provide LLMs 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 that's why I started Base44 and exactly for that. 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 SaaS of the pre 2022 era, it's gonna be harder for people to use.

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

It might. And Marc Benioff is a smart person, and I'm sure that they're also and 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.

Which would you say is most likely to be eliminated?

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 moat. And I think Salesforce is so big and so massive that this is, like, this is one of their moats. 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, will be eliminated.

You said the word moat there. It's often a criticism of this category. You know, I've had the founders of Salesforce, Benioff, Atlassian, Mike Cannonbrooks, Cloudflare, Matt Prince, Dylan Field from Figma. Even Carl Pei, the founder of Nothing, the phone company, has created their own base 44 equivalent. And everyone said this is a business with no moats, and you see that in the ability for these people to spin up products in three months.

How do you respond to that statement?

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 Base44 are like millions of lines of code.

And that's eventually the customers and users that you care about because those are the ones that will go beyond the hype of, Hey, look, I've built this muddy.com clone with a single prompt. No, it didn't. It's going to take you hundreds or thousands of prompts 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 layers of integrations and heavy lifting and building 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 and the ability to run scheduled tasks because that's what real software does. And you want to have the LLM kind 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 on like, websites or ecommerce 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. 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, personal applications, the fully fledged SaaS platforms that people are building, I think they won't get commoditized.

And I think that's not the long market. Also, 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 VCFirm or whatever. At some point, it's like, okay, this looks pretty. That's it.

I'm not going to prompt anymore. And a lot of 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. And I think the more profitable stuff with the higher margin and the more value would have been building the complex applications that you'll use day to day.

When you map out this market in, like, three to five years' time, can you help me understand what that looks like? Because you've got, in my mind, like, three different entry points. You've got the base 40 fours, the lovables, and the replets in one. You've got the Figma's, the Cloudflares, the Atlassians, the Salesforce's 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 cursors 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?

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 let's take Salesforce or 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 with Monday Vibe, which is a tool they've built on top of the monday.com infrastructure of boards and the database behind the scenes and the user management, roles, permissions, so on.

And this is 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 at all, but I'm assuming that at some point, you'll be able to create your own user interface for Salesforce. And Salesforce will become like this system of record where 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 extensibility to existing products. And so you start seeing that and you see also Microsoft building some vibe coding tools on top of the Office and whatever.

Can see a future where a lot of the existing SaaS tools and SaaS products have a built in vibe coding customizing the software to your needs capability. I think it's an interesting take on what's going to happen with the pro players versus the very consumerish AI app builder or visual AI app builder where think for Base 44, 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, seeing code actually, I wouldn't say terrifies them, but it's not what they want to do. You're a lawyer and you want to create some system for your law firm or software. There's no need for you to see code and you should be able to customize and do whatever you want just by prompting it.

The Kelser and the Windser for Cognition of the world are doing a fantastic job with focusing on the existing dev community and kind of like target audience. And there's a lot to do It's going to take a lot of time for tools and platforms like Base44 and the Bolton Lovables of the world to get to a place where you can build the existing whatever expo centers of software that we cannot build today. So I'll give you an example. It's very hard to build a firewall today in Base44, right? Something that will sit on your computer, will be very, terms of performance, will be very native on your computer, will send logs to a centralized server that will analyze it for the organization.

So like there's existing software products where the AI app builders like Base 44 is going to take a lot of time to get to, if any. And I think that's also a lot of how we measure internally. And one of our objectives is 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 Base 44 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 or whatever. 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 that we can build. And I think that Kelser 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 we want to build a firewall or we internally obviously use Keraser to build our own backend. I don't know where the market will be headed.

I'm sure that they will go a bit upmarket and bring in some of like the visual builder for the less complex users. And I'm sure that other layer like the Base 44, the Bold, the Lovables of the World will go a bit down with the types of software that you'll be able to build and the software that you weren't able to build a year ago or a few months ago, you'll be able to build in a few months. It's going to be interesting. But this is a huge market. A lot of it depends on what's that type.

Like, you cannot build for any type of users. So either you serve the developer where they wanna see the code and they wanna edit it and they want to bring like terminal stuff and you wanna run it on their computers. Or you serve the the nontechnical user, which is like completely fine.

Mayo, you have Lovable, you have Rapplet, and you have Bolt. Who's the best and who's the worst?

Tough question. I think Rapplet 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 Kelso.

Which one do you not worry about?

I'm not worried about those three.

Wow. Who are you worried about?

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 going to be huge advantage to the folks who are playing with multiple model providers. But if at 1.1 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 nonobjective 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.

Who do you think is more likely to do that? Codecs or ClawCode?

Google, by far. They have the compute. They're moving very fast. If Gemini at some point wins the race, like literally wins the race, then they have the entire stack, including like Google Cloud and whatever and whatever they need, and they have the data and whatever and integrations and 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 we're obviously spending a lot on AI. And in a split second, you change one string in the code and you move millions in spend to a different provider. And it's like and and it bounces back. It depends on like who provides like the best model and the best whatever cost and throughput and so on.

Can you give me an example of that?

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 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 there's like a better model that you move your entire workload, but you see that there's like places where the model is doing better. So for the first prompt, Sonnet's like the best designer and knows how to structure it and is really good with writing a project from scratch. But then what we found is that GPT-five and especially the thinking and the pro version is really good at solving hard bugs. 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 going to be better than anything else, which is what people is nowadays saying, then we're going to 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.

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?

You do not switch a cloud provider. That's very hard to do, right? My previous company, we tried 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 LLMs, 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 shared product like Gemini and JGPT and so on. We start seeing them bringing in. So Gemini is now everywhere in my Gmail and like a lot of like workflows 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 look like a year ago, it was mostly like you could consume it either in an API or you could consume it in this end user type of chat. I don't know. It's going 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 someone comes out now with a better, stronger and cheaper model than Sonnet 4.5.

And it stays like that for Entropic for like the next six months. What happens to Entropic's revenue? Right? It's like overnight, okay, Switch from all the cursors and the cloud codes. 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 ascend. I don't know. It's going to be crazy. But I don't think I have the right answers to how this market is going to play out.

Obviously, we're all hoping that this is going to stay a very competitive market where prices will go down. I think also when we're making 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 going to take care of that. So, one of the things that Vishay and I are speaking of when we're speaking strategy is we're taking into consideration that the prices of models will go down towards zero, at least for platforms like Base 44. And so, this is a strategic decision where you're saying, Okay, I could optimize some.

And we're doing that. But, like, are we 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? 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 LLM provider?

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

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

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 the strongest models. But what will happen and what will 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 what model you're getting. It's like change the color of the button from blue to red. I don't really need to use the heavy Sonnet maximum thinking, whatever, pay a lot for that. Right?

I can follow this request to a smaller, cheaper model. And this will also be like a way better experience to the user because it's going 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 open source models are able to take a larger percentage of the request and prompts, obviously, gonna improve drastically. I don't think it's bad. Yeah.

I don't think current margins are bad, but I think they're gonna get way better.

Today, they suck. And everyone always says, oh, but we're gonna 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.

Will do. I think it depends on kinda, 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 kinda like you prompt something and then they go and they run for, like, twenty minutes or thirty minutes too. And they have, like, this coding agent.

It's rat player's agent. Right?

Yeah. But, like, first, what if I kinda, like, didn't really mean what I just wanted or, like, okay, it went and built, like, this fully I'm just a free user, and I just built, 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 wanna give and kinda, like, how fast iterations you're giving out to users. I don't know the margins, but like what I'm saying, you can 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.

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

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

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. Yeah.

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

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 Base 40 four's existence is the built in back end. 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 or 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. This is going to be very hard to replicate and very hard to migrate whatever millions of users from one from super base 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 like suggestions to what to do in your app. It took maybe a few days for other competitors to to copy that.

That's the game that we're playing now.

What percent of starting users finished the project?

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

Deployed application that works.

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 their apps are fully functioning. At some point, like bottle 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 user prompt and you make sure that you feed your agent with the right example.

So many, many, many get to functioning applications. So this is like a saturated benchmark. The question is how many get to actual usage day to day? I don't have the right answer to that.

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

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 in, okay, fantastic job. This is exactly what I wanted when I was asking for this feature.

Or they curse a lot. 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 of prompts like a minute or whatever in tandem. And so we measure the sentiment 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, the negativity metric kind of goes down. Or when we jump from SONET four to SONET 4.5, you see a major improvement there. So this is one thing that we measure. And again, this, even the metrics, changed a lot with a business like Base44 because when we started, it was mostly around bugs, right? How many times the model messes up something and the application doesn't work or there's like bugs and like how things that like, break your app.

Nowadays, it's not easy to create bugs in your app. The LLMs are really smart. The infrastructure is battle tested. So it's more about 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 scheduled tasks. So maybe the user asks, hey. I want you to send me a daily email with, like, reminders. And then the 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 a few percentages kind of, like, this metric improves.

Going back to the elements on on margin, I had Ev Randall, who's the new GP 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?

I think a 100% 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 44. And so obviously, it's like growing, not necessarily the spend of every customer, but to as many customers as possible. The spend is 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 Base44 is like when you lean and you're a sane business, that does really good to all other aspects of the business. And it's not something that I understood in my previous company, which wasn't like I made fatal mistakes, but it's like we were very capital heavy. And there's something by creating 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, 99% of the spend or 90% of the spend, is changing drastically and and aggressively every few months.

When you have that change in spend, you have, like, a less certain revenue. As we said earlier, the transients 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 100,000,000. Your lovables and your rapper, it's like, 200,000,000. How much weight should I, as an early stage investor, place on revenue today?

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, $2,000,000 in ARR. I think it was, like, a year and a half, and everybody was cheering and was saying, like, this is insane.

Like, whatever. Nowadays, it's like if you if you can show the hockey stick of how fast you got to $10,000,000 or $20,000,000, everything changes. I think it depends on like the model of the company you're investing in. For me, it's smaller checks into very healthy businesses. So the thing that I look at the most, okay, fast revenue growth, obviously, that's what you want to see.

This is the most exciting. But there are two things. 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, Kelser 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 think about strategy of those types of businesses. So, think about Kelser, 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. Like every developer that reads through Twitter probably installs Kelsier. 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 is 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 on like the billions, almost trillions lines of code that we have inside Base 44 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 the Sonnet 4.4 heavy models. So this is 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 don't remember the name of the company. There was like this company that was like one of the earliest practical use cases for LLM.

There was like in marketing, they were generating content and they grew super fast. You probably remember that. Jasper AI. Yeah. Grew super fast and the moat was just like it was absolutely hard to create moat over there because it was like clearly that there's like, okay, you're only using LLMs.

So Baseball, it was like an entire infrastructure. You build like a mini cloud that allows applications to send emails, generate images, use other LLMs to like deploy to manage users and whatever. So you have something around LLMs 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 KRSA will turn out to be at some point.

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?

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

Zero to 10 in a year for you meets

the brightest. This is insane. Zero to 10 is an insane goal for any SaaS business.

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

It's insane. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. It's gonna be there on the exciting piece. When I'm looking to invest, I'm not necessarily gonna say, okay.

The company has to do zero to 10.

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

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 AI based, like you feed a picture and 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 day.

I don't think there's like a lot of moat. If you're building a lot of infrastructure or the company itself is vertically integrated, I think that's a very interesting take. So you could nowadays build a competitor to Harvey and Spellbook that would kind of like teach some of them better way on like 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 sane 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 and maybe in a few years being the first ones to introduce robots as surgeons or whatever. I think nowadays there's like opportunities all across the funnel, like in different categories, software, 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 gonna be hard to to have a moat.

Are you angel investing today? Yeah. Do you enjoy it?

Very much. Was scary at first, but nowadays it's so much fun. Also, kids come 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 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 it's like you have this huge platform shift. There's so many exciting discussions when you look at different industries 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.

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

Oh, wow. That's a good question. The not sexy industries, the finance, the the restaurants, the whatever, the HMOs, the, like, actually having entrepreneurs building that end to end is what people should be investing more into. I think a lot of people are investing nowadays to very fast growing,

kind

of like 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 going to be with a moat or not. So a good example for that, I had the opportunity to invest in like this agent companies, right? Like the Manos, 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 motor companies.

And so this is like an area that I wouldn't invest in because I was like, okay, this is obviously dangerous. Like obviously the more that the capabilities that OpenAI built into Charge GPT and then Google into Gemini, whatever, they're going to have like serious and incredible agents. And I'm not sure this category, even if you get to insane growth, like you can see the menace and the other players, they have this graph that I think are even more aggressive than our industry. I'm not sure that there was a lot behind it rather than, like, prompting and giving it tools that are for sure gonna be part of, like, Chechipee or the Gemini interface or whatever.

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

When I started Base 44, I said, okay, I'm gonna do this really for the nontechnical 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 or 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 Base 44 started getting a lot of traction.

And obviously, also got some developers and some technical people that said, give me the code and you should invest in a GitHub integration. Allow me to edit files and whatever. At some point we also implemented that. But the more time passed and the more the models got better and the more 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 Base 44 that nobody wants to see code. I don't think it's like if you'll get to 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, you'll see that and it's going to change. I don't think you'll 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 run those tests and whatever. And I think nowadays for some and a growing part of software, even the most technical users would prefer building a SiteBase 44 than to do that in Kelser.

And they don't want to now set up servers and databases and see the code and write tests and navigate through the files and whatever. My guess is that this portion of software that you can build in SiteBase 44 is going to grow. I think, obviously, nowadays, the experience if you can build it inside Base 44, you'll probably prefer to do it inside Base 44 than in Kelsor.

You can invest in Cursor at 29,300,000,000.0, or you can invest in Cognition at 12. Which one would you do?

Probably Cognition. I think the notion of software building as a category is gonna 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, while betting on Kelser is like betting that it's a winner takes it all market.

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.

Not necessarily. The venture capital business is predicated on huge returns. If you look at all of my competitors and on Base forty four, we're all growing insanely fast. And I think, at least I can say about Base forty four, 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. Because like when I started, there was like, Bold and Lovable were like very viral 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 and complex apps, where most of the other players were focusing back then on like frontends and maybe could connect the frontend to super base, but it was very hard.

We're at a different ballgame where AI is going to generate so much value that markets are gonna grow very, very fast. Obviously, some will get cannibalized, but markets are gonna 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.

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?

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 will happen is, like, model companies are going to fight. Their margins will 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 LLMs because maybe we'll hit the wall. So this will be the bigger question. Like is the value that nowadays GPT-five to GPT-5.1 adding is only to open AIOs for the rest of the industry or the rest of the 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. I don't think Elsa will hit like a wall with like the improvements of LLMs. 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 $80,000,000 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, less people and that companies will become more efficient. And as a result of that, every product that we buy is going to be better, is going to be cheaper.

There's so much more to do. And this was like with the previous version of LLMs. I've seen what it takes to build a company that needed to raise or was very capital heavy, dollars 130,000,000 and like over 100 people. And I've seen now in the age of LLM how much better it is or easier to build a very lean company. I was one person.

This value is going to trickle down from enterprises becoming more efficient, many more startups because there's no technical barrier anymore, to eventually the consumer benefiting from from all of those, from all this economic value that's going to be created.

How many people are on base 44 today?

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

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

I think they're waiting for, like, the investors' updates.

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 AI efficiency within dev teams.

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

If you look at a Lovable at a reported $6,000,000,000 price on the latest round or a rat played at a three to four, and I'm sure they'll raise at 6 soon because they kind of are manatic 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?

My very nonobjective 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. 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.

Do you not track them?

I track the revenue and the things they publish, but we're focusing on just building a very, like, and this 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, they're like, they're copying our features and whatever. 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 version of our agent. And you can see the conversion goes up. And you can see that the marketing team tests different things.

Some of them didn't make any sense to me beforehand. And you can see the unit economics getting better. So one thing that Wix taught me is 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 for me, was like hard to grasp that the market is so big. 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, go as fast as you can, but I don't think it's like I'm trying to sniff around what's the unit economics and margins and whatever.

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

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 gonna 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 bail for a lot of cash and that's your way of like conquering most of the market, awesome. Like this is where you should be. I think for us also, weeks is a is a month of, like, giving us their their backs and, like, they they have, like, these deep pockets and they know what to do and they're like, that's my Silicon Valley. Right?

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.

Listen. I wanna do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. I have Marc Benioff.

I have Vlad Tenev from Robinhood on the show. They said 50% of their code is written with AI. What will that be in two years?

95% or a 100% for sure. You'll be prompting agents. For us, Base 44 was built in the age of LLMs, and so I structured the repository in a way that's gonna be very easy for LLMs to navigate through and to read the code. I think for us, it's already closer to 90%. It's, like, mostly, it's, like, prompting agents.

Single biggest advice for someone nontechnical wanting to build with these tools? I listen to you today genuinely, dude, and I'm like, wow. I really wanna 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, an 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.

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 want to go back into doing something that's like for a customer that I interview a lot and understand the pain points. It was so much fun building Base44 and so much easier when I had a use case in mind.

I was like, I'm going to build for my partner. I'm going to build her a CRM and I'm going to kind of like iterate on this software and whatever until it hits the mark. For people starting out with tools like Base 44, there's like a mindset that you have. So, one tip I constantly give out is like there's a mindset that you have to get into, which is Base44 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 fitting it into base 44, build a first version that you know you're going to throw out. And for some people, it's like emotionally hard to understand. Like they're going to throw out like tens of thousands of lines of code. Going to 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. It's 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 want it and you played with is like not something that you get to a point where you say, okay, this is not wasn't really a good idea. And 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 the highest level of point, like build something that will help me, I don't know, engage my audience in LinkedIn and see what the LLM does. Because it will have ideas that it will implement inside application. 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, reach out so 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 really 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.

You made $80,000,000 with the sale. Well done. Does money make you happy?

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 amount of time. All other stuff that I can pay instead 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. This is a huge benefit. Second is helping people you care about and helping causes that you care about, which is big because at some points, like, there's not a big difference between doing X million dollars and 10X million dollars.

It's more about like, okay, you can maybe with your family and stuff like that you can support. 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 going to do, or when I'm thinking about what I'm going to do in a decade from now, And 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 riskier bet.

OpenAI at 500,000,000,000 or Anthropic at 360,000,000,000, which one would you rather do?

Anthropic. Every day. Why? Moving faster. They collect something in coding.

They're very focused on delivering value to b to b customers. They don't have the first mover advantage, but I think they have better models. And when they look at their trajectory, they're better positioned for growth.

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

Wow. That's a good question. Jack Dorsey.

Why?

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 some of his latest pet projects, this messaging protocol and stuff like that. And I think this is a person that consistently like building Twitter, building Square, building other projects, that's just the mindset of a builder that I think can add tremendous futuristic strategic thinking. While also I think that our DNA and the the thing that we're trying to build in Base 44 is like a builder mindset.

And I think this is the, like, the ultimate, for me, the ultimate guy.

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

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, 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, it's like got me to a good place eventually. But I sacrificed many things and many friends.

What thing are Frontier Labs completely delusional about? Maybe the moat that they have. They don't have what they think they have.

I don't know if how they're thinking about this, but it's like, what's the endgame for the race? There's not gonna be one winner takes the door. There's gonna be, like, more and more companies getting into this market. There's gonna 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 than 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 up the stack. I think nowadays they're doing small things. For example, on topic building Cloud Code SDK or Cloud Code. And even if now Gemini three comes out and it's a better model than Cloud and Sonnet, then still, there's gonna be a huge number of people staying with Claude Claude because they're used to it and they build some things off the stack.

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

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, you have to have sympathy for the person that's missing day and night and is constantly working. And you have to understand deeply why they're doing that.

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

Final one for you my friend. You can go back to the night before you start base 44 and you can say, ah, Mayo, you should know this. Future self has learned this. What do you go back and tell yourself that you wish you'd known when you started?

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, Base 44 started going 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 they built 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, I trusted you or 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 going to be a bump in the road.

Community is going to recover from that. And eventually it'll be like, is going to be sustainable. This is going to be great. Don't take the bumps in the road. Also, market is so much different.

The emotional spectrum of the feedback that you get is so much wider than building a B2B 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.

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.

Dude, this has been so much fun. Thank you for having me,

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