Lovable's Anton Osika on Revolutionizing Software Development and OpenAI Drops Deep Research | E2080

0:00All right. So a couple of weeks ago, we had the guy behind deep research from Google on the show. Great interview. Great time. You were a big fan of the product. I'm a big fan of the product. Then over the weekend, open AI, everyone's favorite closed AI shop, uh, dropped their own product. And Jason, did you know that they also called it deep research? It's fascinating that they, uh, I'm shocked that, uh, in any way, uh, we would have open AI do something like steal somebody else's. I mean, It's kind of laughable, right? They just called it the same exact thing. Okay, sure. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Lemon.io.

0:39Get access to Lemon Hire, a platform with more than 80 ,000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours. Get$2 ,000 off your first hire at Lemon.io slash hire today. Prize picks. Run your game. The best place to get real money action while watching your favorite sports. Download the app today and use code TWIST to get$50 instantly after you play your first$5 lineup. And LinkedIn ads. To redeem a$100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash thisweekinstartups. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calcanis. He's Alex Wilhelm.

1:12And we do this three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, typically around 12 Texas time. But sometimes I have a speaking gig at Stanford like I did today, where I was speaking at Jeffrey Pfeiffer's power class. So we had to push it back a little bit because I do this class every semester because they wrote a case study on me in the class, which is a very weird experience. But there is a case study literally on how I accumulated power early in my career that was written maybe 10 years ago. So that is a very surreal thing to have these students. And man, one of the students came at me during the class.

1:43It was spicy. Okay. I have a similar story. Not about me, but I was taking some classes at Booth Business School as an undergraduate. And we were doing, looking at case studies, going through, debating them as a class. And no one knew who this guy was the back of the classroom just sitting there and that it turns out he was the principal in the case study we had been going through and we'd all been ragging on the decisions he made and then he's like well that was interesting and we were all like ah okay but that's the power of you know tier one schools is that you get the actual principals to come in and do their thing and that's why i love it oh there it is here it is just a study in creating resources yeah man good job i will read that but uh yeah no it's uh been a crazy uh two weeks i guess today is monday two weeks after the inauguration so here we are on february 3rd we're two weeks into it and uh my lord the news cycle is fast and furious huh yeah we were joking about this a little bit before the show but it feels like one of those times in which enough things are happening in so many different places and in different directions that you need to be online essentially chronically to stay even fractionally up to date.

2:51Like there's just chaos is maybe the right word, but kinetic might be the right word as well. Sure. There's a lot going on. I think people forgot, you know, my nickname for Trump in his first term was Captain Chaos because he would say things and he would say things in such a colorful way. And then people would take him seriously or not take him seriously. And all of a sudden you would have protests at airports. You would have the stock market doing backflips as somebody uh i heard say recently he's the he's the uh stick in the drink that stirs it so you know if something's happening in the stock market like he's probably stirring the drink and today the stock market absolutely tanked because there was all this talk over the weekend about tariffs but as you pointed out on x this is like the third or fourth time he's brought up tariffs and done the saber rattling and it's the same thing over and over we're doing tariffs the person on the other side of the table acquiesces and sends troops to the borders or promises to fix something he doesn't like, and then the tariffs are off.

3:49So I actually recommend maybe once a day, if you're a founder, consuming news, put it into a nice tight 30 minute, 60 minute band, get all your news. You know, you'll get some of it here on the pod when you're on the treadmill or going for a hike. But man, if you try to keep up with this, it's going to rattle your brain over the next 206 weeks that are left of this. Don't say that out loud. I don't think I'm going to survive. But Jason, you pointed out over on social media that there's actually quite a lot more than just this going on. There's also been the NBA trade chaos that has been heard around the world.

4:25I'm still trying to sort out what the hell is going on there. I do think you make a good point that a little self-care, a little investment in ourselves, it's definitely going to be a marathon. So I think we should all breathe and try to maintain a little calm. download the calm app and uh i literally did a hike i always do a hike on the ranch every day with the daughters and uh then i was going to do my meditation and two of my three daughters did the meditation with me on calm and we had like a very nice 14 minutes together diet exercise sleep meditation focus on those four things in chaotic times in any times and you'll build a nice solid foundation luckily you can use eight sleep one of our investments you can use fitbot another one of our investments for working out eight sleep for sleep calm for meditation and for diet you can use nutrisense so i have i have a startup in each of these categories go ahead and take care of those four things however you choose um call him mr power outlet because he's always got a plug i got a plug yes i will absolutely uh have a plug for all the stuff but you know we uh we like to have founders on the show oh and then on the dallas trade just for people who are wondering since alex and i are big nba fans yes sir wtf okay so for folks who don't know luka donjic is one of the generational talent i think is the way to put it in terms of his disability to play play the game and was the only player on the mavericks that i could you know name because i'm not a mavs guy in the league 25 years old went to the finals last year maybe shows up out of shape overweight people say it's like 280 pounds or whatever so there i guess are some concerns about his fitness but lo and behold on saturday night or sunday night saturday night i think he got traded to the lakers for anthony davis who's 32 years old it would be like the equivalent of trading michael jordan or steph curry like he's that level in his prime so it makes no sense and they got a very little take for him and people in dallas it's like literally good at the franchise but i like the conspiracy theory that the family that bought the dallas mavericks from cuban care deeply about uh they made their money in gambling and wagering and that's maybe gonna happen in texas maybe not they want to build a casino with the mavericks as the anchor but maybe they are trying to sink the franchise in order to move it to vegas uh which is an interesting concept well there's a wmba team the aces play in vegas already and there's uh they have the hockey team there and they moved the, the, help me out Jason, the Oakland A's I believe are now.

6:57Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So I can see like a growing nexus of, of sports in, in Vegas, but I still really, even with that, I questioned the trade just as a sports fan. I, I, I struggle. I mean, AD is a player shout out, you know, good. But I mean, you don't give away. Top 15 player maybe. Yeah. It's, it feels, it feels like a downgrade. Anyways, we love having founders on the show and Jason, there's been a startup that I've been tracking over on X that has been consistently growing, I think, faster than basically any startup that I can recall in history. It's called Lovable. And they announced back in December, they had reached 4 million ARR.

7:32And then they announced just a couple days ago, they've hit 10 million ARR. So I wanted to get the co-founder on the show. So let's bring Anton Osaika up. He is the co-founder of lovable.dev. Anton, how are you doing? Super excited to be here. I'm a fan of the poll, Jason and Alex. Yes. So tell us, what does your startup do? Lovable is very simple. Instead of hiring a software engineer, which is costly and slow, you ask an AI system in plain English what you want. Then you get an app or a website out of that. And yeah, we just hit, as you're saying, like 20 ,000 paying users. And I'm excited to be here and spread some of my excitement about what we're doing.

8:08I'm going to show what I built using Lovable in a second. But just to be clear, are you actually adding something like a million dollars in ARR a week right now? Yeah, it's going very predictably growing 1 million per week since we launched in late November. Okay. And then Jason, because you see a lot more pitch decks than I do, how often do you see a startup that's less than a few years old growing by a million a hour a week? Yeah, I mean, that would be some viral moment. It would depend on the price of the product, right? If the product was a billion dollars to install, and that would be crazy because you would have to have this crazy pipeline of SaaS companies and seven-figure deals are rare, and they take six months to 12 months typically to close.

8:47if you had a product that was a thousand dollars getting a thousand people to spend a thousand dollars a month or a thousand dollars a year is a little bit easier but still hard so yeah hyper growth is hyper growth it's rare to show this off jason i'm going to show you what i built because you know my coding skills are absolutely you know top of the top of the pinnacle here is a game that i made this morning using lovable.dev and i'm going to show off my awesome snake game if you're on the audio version i made snake with obstacles that's my major innovation in the gaming space and as you can see it works jason it's live on the browser and uh you can crash and die and uh do pretty well but anton there's a there's a flaw in this that we wanted to talk about yeah so so you have a leaderboard on the right side but from what i understood alex this is not something you have connected to the back end with a database where the leaderboard is stored globally maybe it works just on your computer but you asked me like okay can we change this and i said sure we can do it live on the stream.

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11:01So we're going to try to do this live, Jason. The point is my leaderboard doesn't work because I what I'm doing. So here is the Lovable interface. Again, if you're on the audio version, there is a canvas on the right side where the AI builds stuff for you. And then on the left, I have a chat with Lovable's AI talking through what's going on. So my leaderboard doesn't work for my snake game. And I have signed up for Supabase, Anton. And now I need to know what I should do to make this work as a non-developer. Okay. So just stepping back for a second, Anton, you basically put in a text prompt and it writes code.

11:34Yeah. So that's what you can see on the left out if you zoom in alex you can see like what uh what alex has been asking the ai to do and then it's been iteratively changing the entire application that's shown on the right hand side it's slick jason like i like i actually knew how to i mean we use a lot of ai here at twist but i mean like this was something that i could pull together as a non-developer quickly and um it was fun so so we go big super base that's uh and like the standard i think half of white companies companies, they use Superbase. So here you select your project that you created with Superbase.

12:10And then you don't need to touch Superbase more after that. If you want to have low-level granular access to the data yourself, you can go into that interface. But now the AI is going to handle the setup of the backend system, which you, Alex, you own all the data that's stored in that backend system. And then every time that you ask something, of course, the AI has to think for a while. Okay, so while I'm going to stop sharing, we'll come back to this but i want to talk about how you managed to get to to where you are because the company launched three times anton and it seems the third time was the the magic moment so can you just talk us through a little bit about how you went from a couple of launches that didn't have a major impact to the one that came later last year that ended up growing to 10 million err yeah sure so so uh before i started the company around this i actually launched the fourth time or the first time which was just an oh showing off an open source project that was called gpt engineer So this isn't at all the same product, but it was the first open source project that really captured the mind space of people outside of tech, I think, in that large language models.

13:12They can start writing code. So that was back in 2022. But now we launched three times last year with a version kind of prompt to application. And it still had a completely different name. And each time we launched the first and second time, it was behind a wait list. and the product we was like good people liked it but we we wanted to only do a full full-on launch when we knew it was really good we had solved some of the big roadblocks from the second launch which is that the ai gets stuck and so on sure and then and then we launched in 21st of november and since then it's going going straight up so then i want to talk about doing this inside of europe because one thing we've talked about a lot i mean here on the show frankly is that europe does seem to be a little bit behind in the realm of AI, leading to tweets like this showing, you know, the US has open AI and XAI and China has DeepSeek, and then Europe only has these impossible to open bottles.

14:09You said that you're committed to proving this wrong. So I'm just curious, what's it like building an AI startup in Europe today with the regulatory load? And does the company's quick growth show that it's more possible than some people thought? Yeah, I sure hope so. So I think it's definitely a bit of hard mode to do it from do AI startups from Europe because you get it's much harder to break through the noise. People are generally less ambitious, like the ambition density is usually lower. And so you need, but the talent, like the raw talent is there. So you need to find the raw talent and light the fire and increase the ambition level.

14:46And I definitely think there's going to be a lot more acceleration coming out of Europe. And yeah, on your point about the regulatory problems, I think they, from where we are at now, mostly affect consumers in Europe. So like there might be a point in time where we only release something outside of Europe, which will be very sad, right? But it's not affecting our revenue in the same way, frankly. So explain to me the product a little bit more. Who is this product aimed at? And then how much are you charging for it? So this product is used by tons of different groups, entrepreneurs that want to build a company or build even a SaaS startup.

15:27They don't have to find a great developer, which is super hard. They can just start building the product all the way to the first version with our tool. And then they can onboard engineers to the co-base with their tool of choice. So anyone who's an entrepreneur and hustler loves this tool. we also see designers and product managers they who've been using figma instead going straight to building the real thing by just prompting and they're getting a beautiful user interface and finally agencies and freelancers that usually took days to deliver projects or weeks they can ship ship things in in less than a day and that's uh those are like all different big big user groups that uh and how much does it cost so it starts at 20 dollars per month and then it goes up based on the ai consumption which is like extremely expensive for from our side i think you just tried a screenshot on that alex uh to 900 per month and so the concept is somebody who wants to prototype or build an app they want to build a fitness app a sleeping app a small game instead of hiring a developer team they can go in there build it themselves and then maybe hand it off to a developer team if they want to finalize it i guess that's the piece that i'm always wondering because in a native language model whether using gemini or chat gpt or even a code uh like replit you know these features have existed you can uh have it build prototypes but then what where when does it move from being a toy where you can build like you know interesting little projects and be like wow it made it to hey this is production quality and it can go there has that sort of final piece been crossed yet and or does it still require you to have a developer and a dev team in your mind no so there's like hundred thousand k dollar projects that are shipped with our with our tool completely and i could share my screen just to showcase a few of the commercial applications that people have built so here's just an example from our christmas hackathon here and i'm showing a screen sharing uh a application that is a hackathon website built with lovable of course where hundreds of people built pretty interesting things and just bringing out a few of those someone built a fully commercial uh venture fundraise crm here with with lovable sending letters online where you just describe the ad postal address and then you get it shipped by connecting to existing apis was built and like learning languages and social media tone of voice guideline generators with AI.

18:05So these are some examples of commercial products that have been built all the way with the lovable. Jason, I couldn't have told you that some of those were actually made with an AI problem versus a designer. And that makes me kind of fret for my friends who currently make their money designing websites. I must add that in some cases, you need a lot of devotion, if you're not a technical, to go through all the hurdles and maybe read up on how to get around some types of problems that the AI runs into. But with sufficient patience, you're going to get through it. Well, I mean, if you think about startups writ large, you know, 20 years ago, getting a team of developers, making wireframes and building some basic functionality was, you know, the first three to six months of the journey and then connecting with some consumers.

18:52And of course here now with AI, you can compress that to three or four hours and then maybe even let some people play with it and get some feedback. but you still have to do all the other pieces of the puzzle marketing the product customer support selling it and i guess supporting it so this is um the beginning of the end of you know what i'll call commodity software and we knew that was coming you know if you want to create an app or a timer you can go find a timer online but here you could just make a timer and that's kind of interesting because in the early days of the internet, if you think about it, Alex, you could go make a landing page on MySpace or GeoCities, one of these hosted ones.

19:36And then all of a sudden, Squarespace gave you the ability to have your own domain name, pop it up and have a gorgeous looking website that previously would have cost a couple of million dollars. So why wouldn't the applications get built this quickly? Makes total sense to me. All right. The big game is almost here and it's now or never. Don't miss out on the Super Bowl with prize picks. It's the best place to win cash while watching the big game. I can't wait. Okay, sports fans, let's talk about prize picks. If you don't know what it is, it's really, really fun. It is the best way to get real money action while watching your favorite games.

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21:25Download the app today and use the code TWIST to get$50 instantly after you play your first$5 lineup. That's right. $50 guaranteed. You don't even have to win. PricePix, run your game. anton do you think that in the future people are going to just roll their own software for everything like you showed the the venture fundraising crm i mean am i going to eventually just have a suite of applications that are just alex's tools that are all kind of built by myself hosted by myself and hold all my own data i can't decide if that's an exciting feature or one that sounds like a lot of work yeah i mean i i let me get get to that i just want to echo what you said Jason with software and SaaS is just going to be absolutely disrupted the amount of software great software much better software is going to explode but the prices are going to absolutely collapse I think there is a case for people customizing kind of building almost their own software but one of the pieces even though the engineering time is kind of almost reduced to zero thanks to AI there's a cost of building good software which is to test it with a human us humans we were kind of the bottleneck for the for software and that's typically what the product manager does and now now i think it's more like an ai builder or that is really good at understanding and testing with users so that's going to remain and we're like a lovable we're very bullish on finding who are the best people building with our tools so tomorrow we're launching something where we can easier where we can launch your lovable apps and get feedback from users and then i i think what you're going to see is that single people companies are with great where the founder has a great product taste like single person SaaS companies and being able to launch and market them just thanks to the wisdom of the crowds figuring out where the best high value SaaS products are.

23:11And that's launching tomorrow. Yeah, that's launching tomorrow. Well, I broke a little news here on the show, Jason. Yeah, it's a really interesting concept to be able to use text prompts to build code bases and then deploy them to the wild and things like, you know, Replit and Supbase or Supabase and all these things are just abstracting it. And it's apparent that, or at least to me, it's apparent that the future programming language is going to be English. Yes. And you're going to be able to just describe what you want and get it. Now, of course, you will have features and refinement that humans will do in the last stages, but just like people used to be able to create mock-ups and hand them to developers or, you know, designs and hand them to developers to be built this is um going to speed that whole process up and instead of needing a 12 person team to build a modern app company which is kind of what you need about 12 people you're going to need two yeah that's going to unlock what we talked about last week uh alex which is all those little nooks and crannies the long tail the the skiing app the cross-country skiing app the cross-country skiing app for this specific mountain in france you know for this group of people and retirees at this retirement community they're going to have their own dedicated app for them and it will just be this long tail of apps and products and services like you're saying that could be bespoke or that could be for you know just pickleball just in austin or just in northern austin etc so uh very cool stuff and uh great job uh to the team thanks yeah can i just ask is there any app that you want built now that's so cheap and easy to do an app for me to be built um i am i don't have one off the top of my head no okay i just did a landing page for founder university and i looked at it and i was like huh that landing page would be you know last year or two years ago if i asked some average member of our team to make a landing page what they would have built so i do think you know the refinement of design is the piece i'm kind of interested in and i also did a a quick one where i said make me a fasting app And it used Xero as its inspiration, but it didn't have great design.

25:23And so the design piece, I think, will be really interesting, whether it happens in Adobe or Canva or inside of Lovable or some combination. The ability to make world-class design is the other big unlock as opposed to, let's call it, six, seven out of ten level design. And that takes taste, right? and we'll see if the machine can have taste eventually. Anton, just before we let you go, two things. One, that worked and now my leaderboard functions. So thank you. And two, there's been a lot of conversation about the potential for churn amongst fast growing AI startups. And you guys are one of the fastest growing out there.

26:03So just before you go, what's churn like amongst your customer base today? And is it changing, getting better or getting worse as time goes on? Yeah, so we're seeing this smiling retention curves. are not that much smiling but they're flattened and there's a lot of people that come in and they're like oh there's a new ai tool i want to try it but for us which is uncommon there's a at 45 percent of the users uh they that's where the retention line completely flattens out so that's that's that's how it looks right now and the reason for people the 60 or the 55 percent leaving is currently that there are places where as a non-technical person it's very hard to kind of build you out your entire dream but but this this is absolutely changing super fast so in a few weeks or so like more and more non-technical people are going to be able to build out full full size companies that's gonna be awesome uh congratulations on the early success and uh we'll look forward to following your progress well done thanks anton all right jason You, my friend, wanted to talk about sovereign wealth funds and I am all here for it.

27:14So for folks who need to catch up today at the Oval Office, the president announced the creation of a sovereign wealth fund here in the US. Jason, you had ideas on how to fund this thing, natural resources, crypto. Yeah. You seem bullish. First, we should start with what is a sovereign wealth fund and what's the purpose of it? So if your country isn't in 36, 37, 38 trillion dollars in debt and you have some natural resource, let's say Norway with their oil reserves or Australia with their mining reserves. They have rare earth minerals there. It's a pretty big landmass. Those are owned by the country.

27:53So what do we have in America? Well, I think our oil is mostly privately owned, but we do have land that we own. A large percentage of land in the United States is owned. Or you could take some amount of taxpayer dollars and put that into a sovereign wealth fund. So what is the point of a sovereign wealth fund? Typically, you have a sovereign wealth fund because you have excess capital and you need to do something with it. We do not have excess capital. We have massive debt. So this is very strange to be bringing up right now because what are we going to do? Go into debt, create a sovereign wealth fund.

28:26Saudi has a massive sovereign wealth fund because they're sitting on top of oil same with the UAE same with Qatar Qatar those places then want to deploy with their sovereign wealth fund intelligently the people's share of that in order to get a return or to achieve strategic interest so the reason you have it is because you have excess capital and the reason you deploy it is to grow it for your people to end or create some sustainable future. Hey, founders, I want to share with you an experience that I love. And that's when I get ads that are relevant to me, not some nonsense that is not targeted.

29:07The other day, I got an ad for a fund management platform. And it was a new one that I hadn't heard of. And I manage a fund. So I was able to schedule a call with them. That's amazing. It's not rocket science. It's just targeting. And how did that happen? It happened on LinkedIn. If your business is marketing to other businesses, doing B2B advertising, LinkedIn ads is amazing because it guarantees that you reach the right audience. I don't need an ad for HR tools as an example, right? There are other people who work in HR. I work in venture. So you want the HR people to get the HR ads. You want the venture capitalists to get the fund management software and services ads.

29:44Makes total sense. And LinkedIn's advertising tools will connect you to decision makers based on their firma graphics. So you may never have heard that term before. That's your job title, your industry, your company size, and more. LinkedIn has two things that you need to grow this year. First, reach. LinkedIn has over a billion members, 130 million of them are decision makers, and of course, 10 million are C-level executives. And number two, LinkedIn has impact. B2B marketers report two to five times higher return on ad spend compared to other social platforms so you don't waste your money. Plus, 79 % of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the best platform for paid media.

30:26LinkedIn allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers. So start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today. We'll even give you a$100 credit on your next campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash thisweekinstartups to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash this week in startups terms and conditions do apply and alaska has this right so alaska gives a dividend i think to uh you can look it up what it is but there is a universal basic payment in alaska because of i guess some of the mineral rights that are there that are owned by the state um and the state of texas actually owned some uh land with oil in it and they put it into a trust for university of texas so there are local state level sovereign wealth funds essentially trusts, I guess, it might be how they're described.

31:14But this makes no sense for the United States right now, because we have debt. If we had excess money, like let's say we own a bunch of prime real estate in major cities for the government, and we don't need that office space because we've downsized the government, and some number of people are working from home, if we sell that, well, we should take that cash, not invest it in venture capital funds like the one I run or private equity funds or real estate funds. We should just pay down the debt so we have less interest payments. That makes more sense. So this seems like a bit of a boondoggle.

31:49However, here's why it's coming up. TikTok. Ah, good. Yes. The president says, we'll give you a license for TikTok. We get half of TikTok shares when it goes public. So it goes public. It's worth, He says a trillion dollars. People privately say a hundred billion. Let's pick 200 billion as a number. United States has a hundred billion dollar sovereign wealth fund now. And we give a billion dollars to each of a hundred venture capitalists, private equity, real estate investors to invest it with the hopes that the interest on that is greater than the interest we're paying on our loans for our debt.

32:29If not, we should just take the shares of TikTok, sell them on the open market take the 100 billion and pay down our debt so we pay less so this has terrible um ramifications and downstream effects um that we should also consider why would we have the government doing the job that we as a nation have an elite practice in private right we want smaller government in private companies doing this so It's not like there's a lack of venture capitalist, private equity folks that our sovereign wealth fund needs to exist. It doesn't need to exist, and so it makes no sense. Well, one, agreed. I don't think this is what we should be doing with our time and money right now.

33:14But if you are the president and you do want to have more influence on the market, more leverage to enact change and to kind of push things around the way you want to, having a personal piggy bank, which is sovereign wealth fund writ large, I can kind of see it. But I really struggled to see how we're going to find the money to finance this thing. My question that I'm struggling with a little bit is, does this play into the whole idea of national, you know, Bitcoin or crypto trust? Could those be melded together? Should we pursue that? To me, it seems a little risky for the national bank, but.

33:46Yeah, I mean, we own a certain number of Bitcoins because of like Silk Road and other seizures. So there's an argument, if you think it's going to appreciate and it's strategic to own it, that we take that strategic reserve and put it into this and then have somebody who's super intelligent manage it. So you would hire somebody from the private sector or a couple of people from the private sector to make an investment committee like the one that exists for CalPERS, California's retirement fund, or one that exists Mubadala for the UAE and Abu Dhabi and their sovereign wealth fund. So you hire really smart capital allocators to make the right decision of when to sell an asset or when to hold an asset.