Vibe coding and the one-person start-up, with Lovable's Anton Osika

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1:38Hey there, Pioneers of AI listeners. We are just back from the Masters of Scale Summit. It's two days of nonstop learning and inspiration with visionary leaders live in San Francisco. I had so many dynamic conversations on stage and off about some of the biggest breakthroughs and challenges of our time. Today, we're bringing you my live chat with Anton Osika. He's the founder of Lovable. It's one of the fastest growing platforms for Vibe Coding, building software by just talking to AI about what you want to create. This is truly revolutionary. I believe Vibe Coding will change how the next great companies are made and help democratize who can create them.

2:24I can't wait to share my conversation with Anton Osika of Lovable. Let's jump in. I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI. a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

2:46Welcome, Anton. All right, so, Vibe Coding. Vibe Coding is rewriting the rules of creation. With nothing more than a conversation with AI, anyone, no coding skills required, can now build apps and websites in minutes. Leading this charge is Anton Asika, founder of Lovable. In less than a year, Lovable has exploded to$100 million in annual recurring revenue and a$1.8 billion valuation, all by empowering people who've never written a line of code to bring their ideas to life. It's wild. So I want to do this. If you've heard of Vibe coding, please stand up. And we're going to stand up. Cool. All right.

3:35Now, stay standing up if you've actually built something this way. Okay. All right, so look around. This is the frontier we're stepping into. And for anyone still thinking, wait, vibe what? But Vibe Coding is essentially using an AI chatbot to bring your ideas to life. It makes you more creative, helps you get stuff done faster and smarter. And we are going to dig in. So Anton, the numbers are just crazy. $100 million in annual recurring revenue in under a year. Investors are literally chasing you. My question for you is beyond the hype, is Vibe Coding a technological shift or just the next fad?

4:22Right. So, I mean, Vibrecoding is the word people use for the new way of creating software, which is you don't look at the code, you explain in plain English, and then you look at the software that the AI is building for you and you use the software, keep talking to the AI until you're happy. And it's a very natural shift where humans used to look at the zeros and ones that the computers are reading. No one is doing that anymore. and the same thing is going to happen for the next transition that we talk to the computer in the same way that we talk to other humans. It's a very natural shift. And exactly how the new interface looks like, is it just the chat and the preview of the application you're building, that's to be decided.

5:11Maybe we're going to talk about it over a video and explain like you're talking to a designer in the future. but this is the future like this is obviously the future of where you can build you vibe code much faster than you write normal software and you can take your idea to an application in what used to take people like six months can to be done in a few hours these days you're really changing the de facto human machine interface in a way which is really powerful so adam my 16 year old son literally vibe codes his way into anything. He's already built a social app called Serendip and a bunch of websites using tools like Lovable.

5:50And in preparation for this interview, I got creative and I built my own Lovable app called Hidden Gems because I love traveling. I don't know if it's going to be the next billion dollar startup, but it was really cool because I felt like I had my own personal AI engineer in a way. And so I want to - You say it's your technical co-founder if you want to build a business from this. Yeah, we're going to get to that because I think it is changing entrepreneurship. But I want to hear from you, what are some of your favorite companies that have been built on Lovable? And how many? Give us a sense of scale.

6:22Yeah, so now more than 100 ,000 new projects are created every single day. That's crazy. And many of those become very serious businesses with substantial revenue in itself. so we're seeing a lot of traffic to lovable obviously but we're seeing more than 10 times as much traffic on the applications that are being built on on top of the platform and i mean i just want to first say so lovable makes it faster to build things but the big change is the accessibility like a 16 year old being to create a social network it's just insane right so and less than 1 % have been able to create software in the past, access to the capital required to put together a full team that used to be required, well it's very very scarce, but now the 99 % are able to build, and 99 % of the good ideas are in the 99 % who were not able to before, so I think it's a complete transformation in how the software economy is going to look like, and some examples um they're coming from all around the world which is beautiful so there's this there's a founder kayo in brazil who he had built a company before the education company q group and as a part of um his him being a founder there he built out a new premium line for his for the education company he made three million dollars in 48 hours amazing on existing distribution channels but but still like huge changes um leonard recently built out a full product that he sold for as i think a six-figure deal and now he's in y combinator building this into a full business and um i mean every day there's thousands of new companies that are building out their software on lovable we'll be right back after a break

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9:03So you really are changing the face of entrepreneurship and democratizing access to entrepreneurship. With Vibe Coding, one person, as you said, can now do what an entire team used to do. And it used to be that if you were a non-technical founder, you had to find a technical co-founder. How is Vibe Coding changing all of that? And actually, are you seeing more solo founders? And do you think we're going to see a one-person unicorn soon? Yes, we want to be the platform where the first one-person unicorn is built. And helping you do everything across the entire product lifecycle. where it's building the software and publishing it and understanding your users improving in the product base and understanding your users getting paid adding payments and be confident when you're changing software that is running in production there's a lot of things to be built out for vibe coding to go from like you can build businesses to fully operating the businesses with everything being as reliable as if you had a human software engineering team.

10:09And that's what we're seeing now with many of the world's largest, 30 % of Fortune 1000 companies are using Lovable today as well. Yeah, that was surprising to me. It's not just kind of entrepreneurs that are building something from scratch. It's all these big companies as well embracing Lovable. Give us an example. i was at meta's office here in the bay yesterday and they're there it's used for many different things naturally that when you have a software engineer you want to use do many things in in companies the finance team built tools where they would have hired want to hire had an engineer but they're all super busy and they're very constrained yeah backlog backlogged months out on on the tool for headcount planning and product managers and design and designers who were previously could only create like static wireframes of what should be built they often wrote long documents that no one wanted to read they they have this mantra now saying demo don't memo because i love that demo because if you actually show the real thing even a new a new feature of you in your product with AI functionality.

11:24In one problem, you can build an AI product in Lovable. Then it conveys so much more information than a wireframe or a long document. And you can much more rapidly validate what you should actually build and where you should spend those engineering resources that are doing some of the heavy lifting. If you're putting it into an existing system at Facebook, there's still engineers doing a lot of the plumbing. So the 60 % of the work in the product lifecycle is compressed to a large extent in there. So you're not just disrupting tech. You are really shaping entire economic structures. And in this world, I'm curious who wins and who loses.

12:07And I'll just give an example. Like what industries will be upended by Vibe coding in the same way that social media upended publishing, for instance? So consumers win. There are more choices. they're high quality products and you don't have to pay as much for software and i think human creativity flourishes when more people have access to creating and that's why we're building lovable but who i do think that some fast companies that are relying on hefty margins today are going to naturally see a decline in the revenue when there's more choice. There's more, I mean, some single people, startups where the founder has great product taste and they can work tightly with AI to create a superior product that consumers prefer and that is being sold at a lower price.

13:07Yeah. And I know you're very passionate about Lovable not just changing who gets to build, but where innovation happens. basically anywhere with an internet connection can essentially become an innovation hub. I'm originally from Cairo, so I'm thinking back in Egypt. Are you already seeing that? And I guess, what are the second order effects when that becomes the case? Yeah, it's very interesting in how our tools is much broader adoption compared to other SaaS across the globe. So South America is enormous, Asia, Africa, like all countries I think we looked at a map like we couldn't see anyone from North Korea but this is because they use VPNs in North Korea apparently and we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs building real businesses from all of these places where it was very hard to find people who are really good at creating software that wanted to get employed in their local currencies to a large extent And now, with a superior technical co-founder that works extremely fast, this is clearly an example of AI actually empowering people, which I'm very excited about.

14:23More to come after a quick break.

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15:02It became overwhelming and we were like, we need home, but not in our actual home. We realized that there was also a need in our community for something bigger in our neighborhood. So we had to find a place. Moving from a home operation into a storefront was a huge next step. But Nicole and Mike were able to take it on with the help of Capital One Business. It's not for the weak. As a small business, finding resources is super important because that's the way you'll be able to manage and scale. We would have never done that without having Capital One to be able to help us along the way. The cashback rewards are very helpful.

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15:55All right, I have a confession to make. I've spent a lot of years learning how to code. I did four years of undergrad as a computer scientist, two years of a master's degree, and then another five years of a PhD. So that's more than a decade of my life. So I want you to be honest. Will there be a need for software engineers and computer scientists? So if you take... Yeah, I know. Yeah, so if you take software development, right what is happening is that everyone is becoming a developer a software developer and what that means is that if you're great at understanding the technical details you're also going to be a great software development developer in the future to really shine i encourage everyone to become more of a generalist and learn it all and that's easier than ever before these days um and we're seeing the best engineers they are learning more of the product manager and the designer skill sets um but if you if you're like have a technical background then you you're often times have a stronger ability to translate real world problems to technical solutions independent of which tools you're using so i'm sure you have an edge you're a better vibe coder than most people out there because of your background well let's talk about that because traditional coding is very structured it's rigid it's logical but vibe coding feels i don't know a little bit more intuitive fluid even conversational emotional um for everybody here in the audience what makes an exceptional vibe coder so we all need to be that true so um it still requires like a lot of structured analytical critical thinking i would say um so if you if you take a product manager as an example they're really really good product managers and then they're product managers that just add more features into the product until it's bloated and unintuitive to use and the same is true for when you're vibe coding you you should break down the problem of and who who is going to use this product what are the most important features and figuring out what's the right flow for them to solve their job to be done and be able to dig into some of the more complex features only when they need to.

18:21That requires a lot of thinking and building many applications is the best way to do so. So VibeCoding is much easier to learn, but it still takes a lot of patience to understand understand like some of the technicalities i think patience is interesting as we start collaborating more and more with these ais i i think patience is a is an interesting skill 100 and i think we aren't as good as it as we used to be as humans this decade like what i tell all my friends who are like oh but is he going to take my job i just don't know look sit down for one full day or like a few days even better with a new ai tools and if you just do that you're going to be better than almost everyone else and probably everyone in your company uh at using this new tool and that's going to give you give you such an edge and such a superpower and i mean with with tools like lovable you can just try to build something when you get confused which you will get the first time as you do it just ask the ai like tell it what you're thinking like why isn't this doing what I'm thinking it should do.

19:29And you just learn so rapidly. And if you have that patience and determination to become really good at an AI tool, it's extremely rapid advance in your productivity. Amazing. We just heard from Brene Brown, you know, she talked about empathy. So I want to kind of dig into that. If AI can write the code, does empathy become our superpower as humans? Yes. I mean, at some point, maybe the computers have more empathy than us but so far i spent like 25 years trying to build empathy into machines so i we're working on it i think completely true what you're saying um the biggest bottlenecks for building good software products is some kind of product judgment and just empathy for what your customers want and translating that user requirements user needs to the machines to do the execution for you Incredible.

20:25Looking ahead, say, I don't know, five years from now, what percent of software do you think will be engineered versus vibed? Five years. Okay. Is that too long? That's too long? Okay. Yeah, no, I think in five years, all the new software that gets built is going to be built explaining in plain English what you want to build. And there's probably going to be a bit of like whiteboarding together with AI of how you want the software to work as well when it gets more detailed, more technical. But I think there will be handwritten code in the same sense that there's like handmade clothes. This is probably not handmade in five years, but otherwise, no.

21:09Fascinating. Okay, so if then patents, capital, headcount, no longer guarantee an edge, what does? And I guess in this world, where will competitive advantages come from? Is it like the brand, trust, community? scale yeah so i i believe in trust being the most important thing for almost any company to focus on and the way you build that is by really focusing on your customers and building and rapidly improving a product that they they trust and that trust and brand brings people back to you it creates a community of people helping each other succeed with your product and then like if you want to think about modes which is often too like everything is happening so rapidly right now so most aren't most aren't so important to think about but um there are like other network effects where you build um you you have exit barriers based on that you have a platform where you build out all your existing assets system of records is of course something to think about Your tagline is build anything.

22:19And it's clear that this is already unfolding. But I can't help but wonder what happens to human ambition, collaboration, struggling, like all of these qualities that are so important to personal growth, right? Are we unlocking human potential? Or are we accidentally engineering ourselves away from what makes us truly human? look so i it's important to me that as ai becomes more powerful and it gets to do less more things human creativity is still the driver of what we put out there in the world and that empowers us to feel self-actualized and that's a big part of the that's the mission of why we're building lovable last question when we look back you know a decade or a century from now vibe coding may be remembered as the kind of turning point around creation so i've heard you say that you wrote something down recently about what you want lovable to mean for the future and for future generations can you share that with everyone i mean we focus on building a very very good product a generational product that i can tell my grandchildren how we built it and they're still using it and that's what we want to achieve and empower the 99 % to be part of this the creation economy I love that very inspiring thank you thank you for this awesome conversation and I will give you a hug because I'm a hugger

24:01Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our producer is Rachel Ishikawa. And our associate producer is Jordan Smart. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Ryan Pugh. Original music by Ryan Holiday. And our head of podcasts is Lital Moulad. Special thanks to the Masters of Scale Summit team, including Jodine Dorsey, Dan Milan, and Jay Punjabi, as well as the creative agency Up and Up. You can join the conversation on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X. Just search for at Pioneers of AI. Thanks so much for listening.