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?

29:22Educate 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 like the strongest models but what will happen and what we're kind of like looking at it internally is like building this switch or proxy where when you get a prompt from a user maybe the prompt is so simple that it doesn't even matter like what model you're getting it's like change the color of the button from blue to red i don't really need to use like the heavy sonnet maximum thinking whatever pay a lot for that right i can kind of like forward this request to a smaller, cheaper model.

30:15And this will also be like a way better experience to the user because it's going to be so much faster than bringing kind of like the heavy guns of like the frontier models. And I think doing that and the more the smaller or open source models are able to take a larger percentage of the requests and prompts, obviously margins are going to improve drastically. I don't think it's bad. Yeah, I don't think current margins are bad, but I think they're going to get way better. Today they suck. And everyone always says, oh, but we're going to have like model selection as exactly as you said there, which is we'll be able to intelligent routing on models and i'm like okay i hope so we'll do i think it depends on like the product and the flow that you're building so one of the players that you mentioned is doing a really good job with autonomy where kind of like you prompt something and then they go and they run for like 20 minutes or 30 minutes too and they have like this coding agent this is raptors agent right yeah but like first what if i can like didn't really mean what i just prompted or like okay it went and built like this fully i'm just a free user and i just burned like a lot of cash right now and like coding and testing and whatever and so i think it depends on like the level of autonomy you want to give and kind of like how fast iterations you're giving out to users i don't know the margins but like i'm saying you could burn a lot by not understanding what the user actually wants but from all things in the industry i think the margins are the least thing that I'm worried about.

31:38The 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 going to 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. 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.

32:17So I'll give you one example. The whole reason for Base44's existence is the built-in backend. The fact that we built Base44 as a fully or vertically integrated platform where for every application you already have a built-in database, user management, authentication, integrations, analytics, and so on. The thing is, is that we didn't use a third-party provider like Superbase, which is what the rest of the industry is using, Superbase on Neon. And we've built that built-in, and we've taken a very courageous 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 you if one of the competitors try to do that and i think this is a bet that we're deepening further and further and further for other stuff it's a game of velocity of delight of like taking the right ux decisions and having the right taste and just trying to be there before everyone else gets there so two weeks ago we came up with something called app suggestions very small feature which is very nice like after you prompt it gives you like the next steps like okay now add a dashboard like it gives you kind of like suggestions to what you do in your app 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 finish 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 you like battle test your agent so much to teach it how to query the database and how for every like you start categorizing the different flows and the different use cases that user prompt it and you make sure that you feed your agent with the right example.

34:16So many, many, many get to like 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 for 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 it 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 for like a minute or whatever in tandem.

35:17And 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 Sonnet 4 to Sonnet 4.5, you see a major improvement there. So this is one thing that we measure. And again, this, even the metrics change a lot with the business like Base44 because when we started, it was mostly around bugs. How many times the model messes up something and the application doesn't work or there's bugs and hard things that break your app.

35:55Nowadays, 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 do 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 again 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 coding agent says i cannot do that i don't have the right infrastructure to do scheduled tasks and so when we add scheduled tasks we should see a few numbers like a few percentages kind of like of this uh magic improves going back to the elements on on margin i had ev randall who's a new GP at Benchmark.

36:40And 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 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 Base44. And so obviously it's like growing, not necessarily the spend of every customer to as many customers as possible.

37:23The 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.

38:07And 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 aggressively every few months. When you have that change in spend, you have like a less certain revenue. As we said earlier, the transience of spend leads to an anthropic could skyrocket or could not depending on where you shift spend. Can you advise me? Honestly, dude, I'm an early stage investor. I invest in AI apps today and everyone is posting insane fucking numbers.

38:47Like, you know, you look at yours and it's like 100 million, your lovables and your replets like 200 million. 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 two million dollars in ARR I think it was like a year and a half and everybody were cheering or 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 million dollars or 20 million dollars everything changes I think it depends on like the model of the company you're investing in.

39:28For me, it's like 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 like 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. business. So here's something really cool that we're looking at right now. So Kerser came out, I think it was two weeks ago, maybe a few weeks ago with their own model, right?

40:01Composer. And this is like a nice way to like think about strategy of those types of businesses. So think about Kerser, right? Let's take the kind of like the not optimistic approach of saying margins were bad, right? They were paying so much to the other model providers and whatever. So this is like an insane strategies like grow as fast as you can get to like insane distribution like every developer that reads through twitter like probably installs uh carcer 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.

40:44But 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 Base44 and then have this very interesting margin take where for some of the prompts you forward 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.

41:27So 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 remember, I don't remember the name of the company. There was like this company that was like very one of the earliest practical use cases for LLM. There was like a 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.

42:04For Base44, 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 cursor will turn out to be at some point can we just go through it in a helpful way you said three elements that revenue growth what revenue growth is exciting then is it just the highest is it i need to see one to ten in the first year if you're building a class yeah it's going to be a zero to ten that's going to be exciting zero to ten in a year for you i think this is insane zero to ten is an insane goal for any sas well i mean honestly now that's it's good but there's quite a lot that do zero to ten insane yeah that's what i'm saying It's going to be there on the exciting piece.

43:02When I'm looking to invest, I'm not necessarily going to say, okay, the company has to do zero to ten. How do you determine if they're going to be eaten by models? 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 gonna 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 mode 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 LLM better way on like how you how to do law or whatever, or you could build a law firm.

44:01And 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 the AI native and maybe in a few years being the first ones to introduce robots as surgeons or whatever and I think nowadays there's like opportunities all across the fun like different categories softer not softer whatever to build vertically integrated companies and I think if your company is just about like how you're prompting an LLM and maybe you're doing a better job with tuning it to whatever legal needs or finance need or whatever and the infrastructure that you have below it is not very complex it's going to be hard to to have a 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 it's kind of like you like you have a chance to work with incredible founders and become like at 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?

45:24Coming 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 is like you have this huge platform shift. There's so much, 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?

46:00This 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 the hmos the like actually having like entrepreneurs building that end to end is where people should be more like investing more into i think a lot of people investing nowadays to very fast-growing, like a hockey stick, revenue-plotting startups.

46:45Unless 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 Manus, those folks. I felt like I don't know the industry good enough to understand if at some point this would get commoditized by the model companies. And so this is like an area that I wouldn't invest in because I was like, okay, this is obviously dangerous. Like, obviously, the more that the capabilities that OpenAI builds into ChatGPT and Google into Gemini, whatever, they're going to have like serious and incredible agents.

47:25And I'm not sure this category, even if you get to like insane growth, like you can see the Manus and the other players, like they have this graph that I think are even, like go even more aggressive than the than our industry i'm not sure that there's a lot behind it rather than like prompting and giving it tools that are for sure going to be part of like chat gpt 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 non-technical people because at that point and still do most of the industry if you wanted to like most of the players in the market if you wanted to build something really functional you should have prompted like hey connect the back end and then it will tell you okay bring the api key from superbase and whatever things like your mom and my mom wouldn't be able to do right and so i said okay let's build for the very non-technical folks and then when doing so obviously and base 44 started getting a lot of traction and obviously like we also got some developers and some technical people that said give me the code and and like you should invest in like a GitHub integration allow me to edit files and whatever and at some point we also implemented that but the more time passed and the more the models got better and the more like faster and whatever there were less bugs nobody wanted to see the code and it was less important for people to actually be able to manually edit and change and whatever and I think the direction and again that we're going to is like more and more types of software you'll be able to build inside Base44 that nobody wants to see code.

49:03I don't think it's like if you'll get to like this flow state where you're prompting with the AI and it's going to be super fast and it's going to be almost immediate. Every prompt, like you'll see that and it's going to change. I don't think you want to see the code and I don't think you want to start saying, okay, you should look at these files and those models and like run those tests and whatever. And I think nowadays for some and a growing part of software, even the most technical users would prefer building a SiteBase44 than to do that in Cursor. and they don't want to like now set up servers and databases and see the code and write tests and kind of like navigate through the files and whatever.

49:37My guess is that this portion of software that you can build inside Base44 is going to grow. And I think obviously now there's the experience. If you can build it inside Base44, you'd probably prefer to do it inside Base44 than in Cursor. You can invest in Cursor at$29.3 billion or you can invest in Cognition at$12 billion. 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.

50:27I think they have more room to grow, where betting on Kerser 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? Are 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 44 we're all growing insanely fast and I think at least I can say about base 44 but maybe the other players like healthy businesses those are going to generate huge returns they're all like fast growing businesses and it's not a winner takes it all market which is also by the way why I got into this market in the first place it's like when I started there was like Bolt and Lovable were like very viral on on social media and I was like this is going to be such a big market.

51:19I feel like I have a very interesting take on this market with the back-end built-in focusing on functional complex apps where most of the other players were focusing back then on front-ends and maybe could connect the front-end to Superbase but it was very hard. We're at a different ballgame where AI is going to generate so much value that markets are going to grow very, very fast. Obviously some will get cannibalized but markets are going to grow 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?

51:55Everyone 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 a wall.

52:32So this will be the bigger question. like is the value that nowadays GPT-5 to GPT-5.1 adding is only to open AI out for the rest of the industry or the rest of like the market. If it's for the rest of the market, I don't think we'll hit a speed bump. Me personally, I don't believe we'll hit a speed bump. I don't think also we'll 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 million. And building a viable business and healthy business and profitable business without people, it means that you'll be able to do a lot more stuff with very like less people and that companies will become more efficient.

53:17And 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, $130 million 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 all of those, from all this economic value that's going to be created.

54:00How many people are in base 44 today? I cannot say. Five minutes before 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.

54:34I don't think that the stock behaves the same way that you see inside the business. If you look at a lovable, a reported$6 billion price on the latest round, or a rat-pletted at$3 to$4, and I'm sure they'll raise it$6 soon because they're kind of a monadic in that way. Either they are grossly overvalued or Wix is grossly undervalued. undervalued you have to take one of those views which one of those views is right my very not objective opinion is that vix 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 a lovable or replete is overvalued i think to be able to say that i need to look at like the internals and the economics of those businesses.

55:27I 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 is something that Wix taught me. Wix for many wheels was like the underdog of like other players. When I came into Wix and I was like hey and those guys are doing this and those guys are doing that and then and they're publishing here they're viral here and they're like they're copying our features and whatever and like Wix's mindset is just like build a great product find the right way to market it doesn't matter what others do it's just like you see that purely in the business in the metrics you can see like we've released like the new agent like the the version of our agent and like you can see the conversion goes up and you can see that like the marketing team tests different things some of them didn't make any sense to me beforehand and you can see kind of like the unit economics getting getting better so one thing that Wix taught me is like focus on your business focus on a great product it's like there's so much noise out there i remember like my first time my first company 40 of my mind was occupied with what competitors are doing and oh no and for me as well it was like hard to grasp that the market is so big right it's like nobody cares it's like as a category you're currently capturing like 10 15 20 like it takes years and ages until you actually go to like There's so many people that could use Base44.

56:50There's also so many people that could use Replit and Lovable. It's like, focus on your business. Obviously, grow 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. Replit, 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 going to do that ever again i don't think in any way our business is hurting if anything i think the war on talent is really tough in silicon valley if you're playing the game of get funded as much as you can so that you can build for a lot of cash and that's your way of like conquering most of the market awesome like this is what where it should be i think for us also weeks is a is a month of like giving us their backs and like that they have like this 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 want to do a quick fire with you so i say a short statement you give me your immediate thoughts I had Mark Benioff, I had Vlad Tenev from Robinhood on the show.

58:11They said 50 % of their code is written with AI. What will that be in two years? 95 % or 100 % for sure. You'll be prompting agents. For us, Base44 was built in the age of LLMs. And so I structured the repository in a way that's going to be very easy for LLMs to navigate through and to read the code. I think for us, it's already closer to 90%. Mostly it's like prompting agents. single biggest advice for someone non-technical wanting to build with these tools i listen to you stay genuinely dude and i'm like wow i really want to build a tool that allows me to go through all my linkedin followers find everyone who has a certain title that would suggest they're an lp 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.

59:05So 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 I want to go back into doing something that's like for you for a customer that I interview a and understand the pain points is it was so much fun building base 44 and so much easier when they had a use case in mind i was like i'm gonna build for my partner i'm gonna build her a crm and i'm i'm gonna kind of like iterate on this software and whatever until it uh it hits the mark for people starting out with tools like base 44 there's like a mindset that you have so one tip that i constantly give out is like there's a mindset that you have to get into which is base 44 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 like build the 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 it's 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 forms or thousands of forms so iterations is everything is like it's not anymore about like planning ahead so that you'll save developer time and very easily hitting the revert button when one feature you wanted and you played with is like not something and you get to a point where you say okay this is now 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 LLM does because it will have ideas that it will implement inside application and some of those ideas will say oh this is interesting I didn't really thought about this like the fact that you can maybe generate, I don't know, 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.

1:01:29One of the features that I really like is this and that, and then build around that. And so 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 million bucks 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 amounts of time. Or other stuff that I can pay instead of like doing or wasting my time on.

1:02:05And this is a lot of help in like personal stuff, especially if you're like busy people, you're entrepreneurs, and you want to be with your wife or family or whatever so this is a huge benefit second is helping people you care about and helping causes that you care about which is big 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 uh 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 is 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 open AI at 500 billion or anthropic at 360 billion which one would you rather be investing every day why moving faster they correct something in coding they're very focused on delivering value to B2B customers.

1:03:07They don't have the first mover advantage, but I think they have better models. And when I look at their trajectory, they're better positioned for growth. You can add one person to the base 44 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 like some of like his latest pet projects like this messaging protocol and like stuff like that and I think this is a person that consistently like building twitter building square building other projects like that's just a mindset of a builder that I think can add tremendous futuristic strategic thinking while also I think that our DNA and the thing that we're trying to build in Base44 is like a builder mindset and I think this is like the ultimate for me the ultimate guy.

1:04:07What 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 20s and I think for the first few years I sacrificed a lot of time with the family and friends missing on many different occasions and different memories and I was so inexperienced that I was trying to compensate for my inexperience with overworking which is fine like got me to a good place eventually but I sacrificed many things and many friends. What thing are Frontier Labs completely delusional about? Maybe the moat that they have.

1:04:51They don't have what they think they have. I don't know how they're thinking about this, but it's like, what's the end game for the race? It's not going to be one winner takes it all. There's going to be like more and more companies getting into this market. It's going to be like the Chinese players that are now like changing the entire market dynamics. I think eventually it's like it takes one better model or lower price to drastically reduce your revenue then I think or at least they used to be delusional about this I don't know if they used to be delusional about this maybe they always like they were always planning to build kind of up the stack I think nowadays they're doing smart things for example Anthropic building cloud code SDK or cloud code and like even if now Gemini 3 comes out and it's a better model than Claude and Sonnet, then still there's going to be a huge number of people staying with Claude Claude because they're used to it and they build some things up the stack.

1:05:45Penultimate 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 is like you have to have sympathy for the person that's like missing day and night and is constantly working and you have to understand deeply why they're doing that and that's like part of them as a person, same as it's a part of me as a person.

1:06:32So I think having the same mindset is crucial. It's very, very hard to date a founder that's like deep into like building the company zero to one. And I think having a person and a partner that's like having the same mindset that they're building something or they 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 I built didn't didn't hold up and so we had like this week or two or three that they had like four incidents where the platform would go down and people were like screaming and shouting at me as like uh I trusted you and whatever and I took it very very hard and it was like emotional very very hard and I wish I could have told myself like this is just going to be a bump in the road community is going to recover from that and eventually you'll be like this is going to be sustainable this is going to be great don't take like don't take the bumps in the road also consumer or the consumer market is so much difference like the the emotional spectrum of the feedback that you get is so much wider than building a b2b sass that you get like some uh very uh 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 um 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 uh rooting requests thank you so much for being so good dude i've loved this this has been so much fun thank you for having me harry but before we leave you today are you drowning in ai tools chat gpt for writing notion for docs Gmail for email, Slack for comms, and you're constantly copy-pasting between them all, losing context and losing time.

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