I think we'll see the next hundred million software developers emerge around tools that are identic, but I still think it will be a profession to use those tools to do stuff, to build stuff for other people.
If I look at Google's products like, I now have all these Genesis buttons all over and I never use them.
They just haven't managed to productize it in a way that feels super compelling.
This is 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings.
Now, today we focus on a core new focus for product teams, how to craft an amazing agent experience.
Now, we've had an amazing developer experience for years, but as we move into a world of AI, crafting a beautiful and seamless agent experience will be the difference between winners and losers.
Joining me for this discussion is Matt Billman, co-founder and CEO at Netlify where, under his leadership, Netlify has become one of the fastest growing platforms for modern web development.
He's also coined the term agent experience.
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You have now arrived at your destination.
Matt, I'm really excited for this.
I really like your writing and I've loved your writing for a while.
So thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks.
It's great being here.
I would love to stop.
How does building for agents, not humans, change the way that we build?
Yeah.
So the first thing I would say is that when I think about building for agents, I still start by thinking about building for humans.
In essence, you could say that there's two versions of that 10-year future.
There's one where the agents just kind of escape that they're just off doing their own things and we are sort of left behind, right.
Like, I hope that's not.
There's another one where agents are tools that all of us use to do stuff with, right?
Again where agents are fundamentally always doing something, because some human is trying to accomplish something through an agent.
And now we are in the very early days of building a discipline around agent experience.
And really starting to think about, like when a user tries to get an agent to do something through your product, what happens?
Can I be direct?
I mean this in a nice way.
I don't understand.
How does building for agents change the way that we build?
Let me take some examples for stuff we've done that's been successful with agents, right?
Like.
So one thing that we built specifically to improve our agent experience was building an API flow that would allow an agent to create a site and deploy a site without any users signing up for Netlify first, and then hand over that site to a user later with a claim flow.
And again, simply from the realization that when we have a normal developer, the first creation of the site will always be triggered by that developer doing something with Netlify right.
Like they'll pick a template and start, or they'll link to a new GitHub repository or they'll deploy from their command line.
But once you have a CodeGen agent, they might just ask that agent build me a web app with a Sudoku game whatever, and now share it with people on a URL.
So we gave those agents the ability to just deploy to Netlify no sign up from the user.
Show the user the URL and say like here's what is built for you.
And then later the user can go claim it and say okay, I actually want a Netlify account, or I have a Netlify account added here.
I'll want this to stick around.
I'll put a custom domain on it and so on, right?
We've seen a lot of companies now start adopting similar flows, right?
Like in the authentication space, in the database space and so on, to make their tools available to agents without an explicit user.
Sign up and set up step first, and delaying that step to after right.
Like, so that's like one very specific example, but one that's been really impactful.
Does designing for agents in this way reduce the importance of UX, of design, of taste when building?
I don't actually think so.
And in the end, we are designing for humans.
I just don't think anyone can have a great developer experience five years from now if they don't have a great agent experience.
So that also means that a lot of the traditional UX disciplines and so on, and understanding not just the UI design but the UX design right.
Like the holistic experience of a user trying to do something with your product.
That's still really important, but obviously a lot of the details are going to change.
A lot of things we do today are going to require very different interaction flows and very different ways of displaying that UI to people.
If I'm a founder today, how do I tell my product team where they should focus, what they should build, what they should do?
If I'm setting strategy for them, what the fuck do I tell them, Matt?
You embrace agent experience as a discipline in the same way that you would do it for developer experience or for user experience, right?
Like I think we'll see that being the approach, right?
Like, rather than going from like some theory of like.
We need this spec now.
Start understanding in your space what are the agent's that humans are actually going to be using with your product.
In our space, it's on the one hand, tools like Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf.
On the other hand, tools like Bold, Lovable, CreateXYC, Refine, all of these tools one level up.
But in other spaces, that might be a different set of agents.
When I interview people today, Matt the common public company short is Salesforce for a number of different reasons.
But do agents merely turn Salesforce into a data repository?
That's definitely the big threat to Salesforce, right?
Like to just be reduced to some kind of system of record.
I'm sort of mixed on whether long-term that's a really, really bad thing for Salesforce or if it could also be a good thing for them.
If you really start becoming the main system of record that all of these tools rely on, I don't think you should underestimate just how valuable a position that is, because all those flows and apps and everything will run on top of it and sure it might change a lot of what Salesforce look like today and to what they look like in the future.
But they definitely feel it very strongly as the biggest threat to them to be reduced to that system of record and not the actual workflow platform.
And I think that's pretty likely. what would happen, right?
I think what we're seeing now is definitely the cost of building custom workflows, custom UIs, custom applications is going to dive down dramatically.
And typically that will mean that demand for doing that will go up radically and people will start building much more custom applications for everything.
Right?
And then the question is like, where does all that data live that those applications need to interact with?
And where do the rules that govern that data live, to make sure that it's also safe for these agents to do stuff to it?
Where does the authentication and permission and auditing layer live and so on?
I don't think it's as binary as that.
I think you can retain Salesforce as your system of record, but then also build applications around it.
Use other SaaS providers around it.
You said before generic SaaS and I'm quoting you here generic SaaS tools will increasingly be replaced by custom developed internal apps.
I'd love to debate this one with you because if so, I'm going to be out of a job.
Why do you think that?
I think it's a balance that will really start tipping, right?
Like where today, If you're a company and you have a specific business need hiring a development team to build deploy, operate an internal application just for you to solve that business need, the math of that very rarely makes sense.
In the build versus buy equation, the buy equation almost always makes sense.
And that balance is going to start really shifting towards like.
Building is going to be much more of a viable option.
But that's not a generic SaaS tool.
That's a specific tool that a specific company needs for a specific workflow that they have.
I agree with you that dev shops that build specialized custom solutions will be replaced by your lovables of the world.
But you said generic SaaS tools.
And we have companies like Klarna who are saying, oh, we're replacing all of our SaaS with AI.
They're not.
They're absolutely not.
And they won't.
Why do you think they will?
Again, I think it will be more and more common to start doing that.
Because if you think of generic SaaS tools, they are also solutions to a specific business problem that businesses have.
They'll just say, okay, this problem looks very similar across tens of thousands of businesses.
So we'll build like the generic version that works across all of those businesses, right?
So they don't each have to build their own.
And that comes with a set of trade-offs, right?
Like you, get some benefits from getting a generic tool that encodes some best practices and so on, right.
But you typically also have to adapt how you work as a business to the tool you just bought, right?
Like you typically sort of have to with a lot of the SaaS tools that I've bought.
Over time of building up Netlify, it's been like oh, we're kind of doing things this way now, but this tool kind of says we should do things this way.
So we're going to like start adopting to the tool, because we can't afford to just build our own stuff.
And that's where I mean that more and more things that are right now in the balance, where you would buy a generic tool that works for lots of companies.
For more and more of those problems, it'll start being a viable solution to say let's just build our own, let's just solve our specific problem, instead of leaning into a generic solution for tens of thousands of companies.
You've sold to large enterprises before.
They move slowly.
They're not always hugely educated.
Respectfully.
I think it is a very small customer segment that will be doing that in the next 15 years.
No, I honestly, I probably agreed with that like a year ago.
And then I started seeing like just how fast tools like Bold and Lovable and so on are starting to change things at sort of the other end of like indie startups, everything like that.
And now my timeline is more like five years and 15 years before it's going to be like really relevant.
It'll start by tapping into areas like everywhere where you have no code tools right now, right?
Like retool and stuff like that.
Starting to have agents that use code together with people to build there will start just giving lots more flexibility.
You'll be able to build much more, right?
And as that evolves we'll start seeing that spread into more and more.
I think like in internal tooling teams that solves, like where some budget will gradually start shifting from the SaaS spent budget into that either internal tooling team budget or to kind of like external providers, that custom build for you kind of budget.
How do you think about maintenance?
The joys of having independent providers is they're maintained, updated continuously by great teams.
When you have 200 tools across a large organization, you're not going to do maintenance security updates on all of them.
How do you think about that?
Because if you start going from buying 200 SaaS tools to running 200 internal specialized or maybe 400 internal specialized applications, you have to do that on a platform that's zero operations, first of all.
And that means that you start having this new stack where people like you can make a lot of money by investing in the right places.
It's all of the components that go into that zero operations and serverless stack of building blocks.
You definitely don't want a co-gen agent that you're using to solve one of these problems to give you a massive Kubernetes cluster and be like good luck.
You'll want it to deploy to platforms that are zero operations and serverless and with security built in, and so on.
You'll want them to use serverless API services, databases that are all sort of managed with their own security team and operations teams and so on.
As the Legos, it kind of builds on top with and composes together.
Because otherwise you're right.
Otherwise, if it's just fully custom built Kubernetes, cluster stuff, all of it, the viability of that whole approach goes away, right.
Like the maintenance cost just overtakes everything.
And then you could speculate, can the agents maintain it?
But I think that then we're definitely in a 15 20 year horizon before they could be relied on for anything like that.
You're using managed databases.
Whether it becomes a super base or a neon DB or some of the big cloud providers, that wins out in that layer right.
But the agent use these building blocks that are in themselves maintained by someone, right?
Then you start being able to take on that level of building without exploding in terms of maintenance costs.
When you look at the different stages.
We mentioned that lovable and being able to create very easily.
Prototyping is now like step one.
Have an idea?
Do design tools like Figma die in the next wave of build?
They're definitely going to have to really think a lot about this full stream of how prototyping again is often going to shift from the design tool into building something.
I still think for a certain level.
Again, we talked earlier about does brand matter?
Does anything like that matter, right?
As long as that still matters, it will also matter having teams.
I think that work with tooling that operates as the visual level and the interface design level.
But if Figma doesn't manage to connect that to the full end-to-end chain of prototyping and building and so on, Then this could be a pretty existential threat to companies like that over time, or at least like a threat to their current revenue model.
Because there's no doubt that the way people start projects in general are really already starting to shift a lot.
Both from traditional templates and bootstraps and front end frameworks on the one end.
On the other end, from like design, prototypes and visual design on the other end right.
Like to prompting as one of the key ways to just start a new project.
Do you think you mentioned prompting that?
Do you think chat is the right interface for this next wave of AI?
I've had many guests on the show before that say the worst thing with chat GPT is it made chat and prompting the default interface?
Do you agree?
Yes, I don't think chat is likely to be in all of interfaces.
It's a very sort of simple transactional flow that's easy to work with, and I think Chat or conversational interfaces will be a thing right.
Like it's also a thing between humans, right?
Like we all use Slack and Messenger and WhatsApp and all of these chat tools for good reasons.
It's not like that will go away.
But I think there's a whole other set of user experiences and user interactions that we have in sort of the non-AI powered world that we haven't really yet figured out how to do in the AI powered world.
So one of the things I've been talking a lot about is this path where, right now, when we look at all this custom development and all of these apps like Bold and Lovable and so on, right now they're generally making it a lot faster to build exactly the same things on the web that we built the last 10 years right.
Like the same kind of applications, the same kind of marketing sites, the same kind of user experiences that we built through the last 10 years, right.
And we're just like driving down the price of building that.
But the next frontier for me is sort of figuring out.
What is it we can build in terms of actual user experiences when we have LLMs and AI available that we couldn't build two to three years ago.
Because I think there's a lot of interactive user experiences that we can now build that are definitely not just a chat prompt saying like type what you want to see or do, or like Talk to me right.
Like that could not be done if we didn't have the ability to one, create all kinds of assets, right?
Like from 3D modeling to sound and music and visuals and so on automatically.
And that couldn't be done at a time when the core constraint of all user interfaces is that computers are transactional deterministic machines.
Like you click a button, the UI does something that you know that button will do every time.
You type a command, the computer does something predictable, right?
Like, GenAI kind of removed that underlying constraint.
And we haven't really started building new kind of UIs that takes advantage of that.
And I really agree that like chat is not it there, right?
Like chat is part of it.
Like I definitely.
Just I wouldn't want just to have some box saying like you come up with what you want me to do, right.
Like type something, right?
Like I want those online experiences to guide me and to have some experience for me, right?
Like and to take me somewhere.
And that's never going to happen through chat style prompting.
Why?
Do you not go into a shop and ask for what you want?
Yeah, but you also have you think about how much a fancy brand spend on that shop and on the display windows and on people that don't ask first, on everything that's supposed to draw you into the point where you're ready to ask like hey, can I have a look at this thing?
That's a very expensive industry to make all of that happen and I think The more the world goes digital right.
Like, if you want to build any kind of that kind of brand affinity and like storytelling, you also got to find ways to do that.
Like, and everything looks pretty similar with some changes, right?
When the cost of building an e-commerce that looks like any of the current brands today goes down to like just ask Bolt to do it for you, ask Lovable to do it for you, and you have that.
Those brands are going to have to come up with something much more engaging if they want to keep stand out and if they keep wanting to build relations to people as more than just like a one-click shopping experience amongst any other.
You've mentioned Bolt and Lovable.
And when we think about these Gen AI services that are scaling revenues Matt, like we've never seen revenue scaling before.
It's wild.
Wild.
Everyone says these Gen AI tools, they're sugar high revenues.
You can't rely on them.
How do you distinguish between sugar high revenues that lack sustainability and meaningful, durable revenues that can be relied upon?
When I look at tools like Bold and Lovable, the category itself has something where it seems obvious that there will be a lot of money spent there.
Just because when you see some of the examples of what people can do with those tools that they just couldn't do before, it seems obvious that that's worth something.
When you see how fast someone can build a typical website or typical app or dashboard, right?
It's so funny.
This is the promise of Webflow and Squarespace for years.
Anyone can build it.
The truth is Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, me and you both know, my mother can't build on them.
It's still too tough.
She can use Lovable.
Yeah.
But even then, I don't know.
I've liked this example of this UX designer from Niantic that are building these things on Bolt.
That just seems I don't know, it's just mind blowing right.
Like he built this whole 3D object editor, like this actual like tool where you can build like 3D objects in the browser with AI-based prompting and everything.
Everything like running in the browser and you built that entirely with Bolt just by prompting.
And that's so mind blowing.
But it's also an example, like I'm sure, like your mom probably couldn't do that with Bolt right.
Like, because I don't think I could do that.
I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that with Bolt, right?
Like that takes like... real skill, having built that skill set to work with these tools.
So I'm sure we'll see the same, that not everybody is going to use these tools to make their self stuff in the end.
Even if you can potentially, as a small restaurant owner or whatever go to Squarespace today and build yourself the website for your restaurant, you're probably busy enough that what Squarespace will do for you is making sure that the cost of getting some freelancer to build your website is much lower than it would be if you had to get that freelancer to program the whole site from scratch, right?
And I think we'll see the same with tools like Bold and Lovable.
I think we'll see the next 100 million Software developers emerge around tools that are agentic.
But I still think it will be a profession to use those tools to do stuff, to build stuff for other people, because there'll still be a skillset involved in knowing what the agent should actually build for someone and what works and how to get there fastest and how to push the limits of these tools.
But it will lower the cost of each project built with those tools dramatically from what it would cost to do.
So there are devs using Cursor, there are devs using Lovable and Bolt, and then there are non-devs using your Lovables and your Bolts.
When you look across that stack, how many do you think remain in the devs using Cursor and your alternatives?
Because i've been in this space of building tools for web developers like for for way too long, i guess.
Right like i've kind of seen the same discussion forever.
Right like because early on when i was cg of a company in spain, we were like mass producing websites for small to medium businesses in europe and so on, right like, and i was a cgo building the whole platform that that our freelance designers would use to do that work on, and everything right like and tools like Squarespace, Weebly and so on started coming on and everybody was saying oh, but that's going to be the end of all web development.
People are just going to use those tools.
That didn't happen.
It just lowered the barrier to entry.
It meant that every little corner store could have a website, but it also just pushed up what you needed to show up with if you're somewhat more professional.
And then I started this whole GAMSTACK movement around decoupling the actual web front end from the backend and starting to build it at that level.
We saw, probably in the years since 2016 17, 18 we started seeing all these bootcamps just starting to spit out React developers.
There was this sentiment that they're not real developers and they don't know the whole stack, and so on.
It turned out that they were really valuable and that working at that layer of the stack was important.
Now we might have like an additional like 14 million developers in the world from that layer.
But the interesting thing is that the layer below of, like Ruby and Rails developers and Java developers and NET developers is probably still at least as large as it was before that.
The new layer just got added on top.
And my prediction is that something pretty similar will happen, right?
Like we'll probably add, And you in this case, I think more like a hundred million new software developers that mainly operate at this like very authentic stack.
And some of them will go a couple of layers just like now, right?
Like you'll have some that are more full stack than others.
That'll go a few layers below that level of the stack.
We'll have that happen.
And then you'll probably have more or less the same amount of developers that are actually fully understand the layers below and are working on that and are doing work on that.
And those are probably the ones that are going to be thinking a lot about the agent experience of what they're building, but they're probably still going to be really, really necessary.
I totally get you.
When you look forward to that future, open versus closed is a very big question.
How do you think about which approach dominates in an agent-first world and why?
Yeah, I mean, I think every time there is a platform change, we see this battle between open versus closed.
This is another kind of platform change.
I think open will win again, in part because I think the ones that were best positioned initially to become fully vertical lockdown platforms was really like the large language model makers.
And I think there was a moment where it really looked like we would just have very few of those that would be incredibly important and like would be able to sort of build a whole stack around them, and that was it.
And then suddenly model training costs kind of went down and like these open model came around and deep seek came around and so on, right.
Like now.
It seems a bit the opposite, that like there'll be a lot more to do to build agents that can then swap out whatever model is best and combine the models together and so on.
And it'll actually be an advantage for the agent builders to not be tied to a specific model and be able to just jump around between whichever model is best.
And I think once that start is happening, that's going to mean a much broader competing ecosystem of agents.
And that's going to make the benefits of an open model, where people can bring their own agent, win out over a closed model where everything is fully verticalized.
I'm not sure, because I think the most underestimated is Google because of the endpoints they have with consumers, being so broad and having so many consumer touch points.
And then they also own the chip layer.
They also own their own compute.
And it's a very strong walled garden if they keep it within all of their G Suite products.
Yeah.
And so I'm not sure.
And then you look at Microsoft and you look at Suite and Copilot and everything that they can build within enterprises, and the security provisions within enterprises being non-trivial, to say the least.
I'm not so sure.
I think closed has so much value.
Again, am I wrong?
I don't think you're wrong in the sense that today I said like the web really managed to fight back and it's fully relevant today and there are still a lot of closed Waldorf gardens, right.
Like I think we'll see the same, but I will say that when I just look at where we are right now, If I look at like Google's products, like I now have all these Genesis buttons all over and I never use them.
They just haven't managed to productize it in a way that feels super compelling compared to just going.
Is that not just a Google product strategy?
So I would say that Facebook is the same.
Like Llama and the productization around Llama has been bluntly very, very poor.
At the moment, it's just an integration into WhatsApp.
And I think most of the and that's what I mean I think most of the tools I use that are identic sits outside of any of those walled gardens, right.
Like, and we're starting to see things like, you'll see that there's, for example, a Chrome extension to use ChatTPT within Google Docs instead of Gemini.
Just because people want it, right?
Like, because like, Hey, I have like, I used to activity all the time.
It has my history.
It knows me now and so on, right?
Like I want to bring it there, right?
Like you start seeing those things emerge as like pressures to do stuff with, with these products, with other agents, because the vertical strategy, at least right now, is producing, I think, more planned and worse result than than the myriad of companies, just like in building adjunct experiences, right.
Like.
So right now, my signal is that, like the open world, will probably create more compelling innovation that people will want to bring into the product they otherwise use.
And if they really can't, they might start using other products.
Do you think we'll see a specialization of LLM?
You see, Anthropic really excel on developer tooling in particular and code, but then honestly, OpenAI has just wiped the floor with them on consumer touchpoints, consumer brand.
Yeah, I mean, I think you just answered it in a way, right?
Like I said, I think we're already starting to see models get a brand as being good at different things, right.
Like and you start building affinity to okay, if I'm doing this thing, I'm probably going to go to this type of model and this company seems to like really, really served me there, right?
And it thinks, again, it's so early that who knows, right?
But the sign right now is that yes, we will start seeing large language models sort of have different strengths and weaknesses and you will go to some of them for specific use cases.
And Trophic definitely has really stood out in their ability to solve programming and coding style tasks in a way that I think is like I'm very bullish on Anthropic for that reason, because I think that's such a groundbreaking part of what makes LLMs multiply what they can do by a lot right.
Like.
The better they are at programming other computers to do stuff, the further the reach of what they can actually do.
You can invest in Anthropic at 60, OpenAI at 300, or Grok at 50.
Which would you buy and which would you sell and why?
I would probably go for Anthropic.
It's a really interesting thing from the outside, where a lot of their motivation started around these safety concerns and how do we allow the models to not take over the world, and so on.
I think after an initial panic, now that seems pretty like okay, LLMs right now are probably not going to escape and take over the world.
I think it turned out that a lot of the mechanisms you needed to build to make sure that the model's output was safe applies also to making sure that the model's output is usable for a practical purpose.
And I think that's where Anthropic have really built strength, right?
Like in terms of actually being able to guide their models to do things that work in production, or to write the right code or to Like, not break the syntax, and stuff like that.
And I think if they can keep on that, it makes their models really real world applicable.
So would you sell OpenAI or Grok then?
I would probably sell Grok.
I still think like it sits a little more in a middle space where, as you said OpenAI, on the other thing, has just like really captured.
I think it is just when you, as a consumer, think about going and asking an AI for something, it is still just the brand you go to right.
Like it is the first one you think of.
And I think that carries very, very real value.
And it's very hard to build with the scale of users they have.
And with like, just like the ingrainedness of chat TPT into the language, as like what you would call like what a normal person would talk about if they talked about going and talking to an AI right.
And speaking of like carrying value and going full circle, we spoke a lot about the agent experience.
How does value accrue in an agent economy?
If like an agent builder has to pay you and Bolt or Lovable and OpenAI, how much margin is left?
Every layer will shift spend from somewhere else in a way, right?
Like that whole layer of bolt unlovable and also cursor and windsurf and all of these toolings right.
Like they will shift budget that would normally go into more hours of developer time to build anything.
And there's a lot of that budget that can shift into building more things instead, right?
Tools like ours will shift budget from maintenance operations.
DevOps like the actual cost of running a thing after you build it.
There's a lot of budget there to shift into being a platform that works.
And then, if that's true, you'll kind of still have the same amount of budget available for anyone buying your thing or getting value out of your thing, right?
But the pieces of budget that will move is like the hours you would have to pay developers before to build something.
Do you think we'll see companies be willing to shift labor spend to agent spend?
And what I mean by that is that you're seeing like trucker cooling, you know cooling up brokers for truckers, happy trucker or whatever it's called, the Andreessen one.
Are we willing to move labor costs to agent spend cost?
I think so.
I think companies will be willing to do that and I think it will be disruptive in some areas.
Like they do say, if we can't shift call center hours to just LLMs, that's going to be more predictable and more likely.
And we don't see a perceived pricing on those usage cases.
We see a resolution pricing, which I think is probably much more reasonable.
Precisely.
We start seeing real changes in those kinds of pricings, right?
And I think that just is a very concrete example of a willingness to shift around labor.
And part of what my theory is is that that will mean that a lot of the labor again will shift into building agentic digital workflows products, applications and so on.
Back to my thesis of like another hundred million new developers, at least.
I think Stripe will be massively more valuable in a world that we now enter, because I think there will be so many people who are enabled to create stores, entrepreneurial endeavors, and will inevitably use the default of Stripe as their payments mechanism.
That would never have been entrepreneurs making money on the internet.
And the GDP of the internet will increase seismically as a result of that.
I think there's a ton of opportunities in that space.
Stripe, as you mentioned, has all of those characteristics I mentioned.
It's zero operations.
It can be a building block in any custom built system.
It's not like.
It's a little more abstract than any of the end-to-end e-commerce shops that you buy right out of the box.
It's just a building block for all the underlying transactions and it's zero operations.
You really don't have to operate it or secure it if an agent builds some of it.
All of those sets of tools have huge opportunity for being really valuable as we start custom building more and more solutions.
And then anything that sits in the space where you have like predictable business processes.
That's just still pretty manual.
That's just an area where we'll accelerate the level of how much of those can be just programmed that way.
Final one, and then we'll do a quick fire.
What behavior or action in the wave of AI that we've seen has been most what to you?
I mean, I think it was probably the panic over AI safety when Jet TPT came around, right?
It was like oh, they're immediately going to kill us all and take control of nuclear missiles and out-compete humans and so on, where it was like wait, when you actually go and look at these LLMs, they're very, very far from any kind of internal agency outside of still.
Give me a text that says this and I'll try to predict it right.
Like that was probably like the most surprising to me, that like extreme panic around that for a moment, with like all kinds of attempts of really, really strict regulation way too early.
I'm like, it doesn't even do a Twitter thread.
It's not exactly going to do globalization.
Exactly, exactly.
I feel safe for the time being.
Listen, Matt, I want to do a quick fire round.
So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts.
What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?
One thing is probably the sense that we'll still actually be building UIs and applications and websites and so on, where I think there's a lot of people that think that once we have agents, everything will be disintermediated, then the agents will just do stuff with each other and so on.
So that's probably one thing where I sometimes see a lot of people thinking that all of that is going to go completely away, and I don't think so at all.
You can buy and hold one public stock for the next 10 years.
Which do you buy and hold?
It's a hard one, but I would probably say Microsoft.
I think, again, if you can only buy one, you probably want it to be a pretty safe one.
You want it to be one that benefits from all of the disruption AI is going to bring to the field, rather than like, falls from it.
And then I think of all of those, I think right now, Satya is the strongest CEO in that space.
And I think we'll make great decisions.
What happens to WordPress?
Yeah, I mean, I think WordPress is in a challenging position where they're kind of like in the end of their innovation cycle.
And I don't think they're in a great position to respond to all of this disruption.
So I think like it'll be seen more and more as a bit of legacy software.
What happens in that situation?
Like PE, buy it and eke it out for cash?
Potentially, yeah.
It depends.
Maybe there's enough community and pressure that it just keeps sticking around for a long time, right?
But I have a hard time seeing the venture scale acceleration of it ever happening.
So either it kind of ossifies or it got to have some kind of PE exit.
What have you changed your mind on over the last 12 months?
One big piece has just been the timeline for when companies would start writing real software entirely through agents, right.
Like I think when, for me, the combo of bold and lovable coming out was really the like, I thought it was going to be 10, 15 years.
And now it's more like the next five years are going to be really interesting, right?
Like, because they pushed the frontier so fast.
What was the hardest fundraise for Netlify?
Why that one?
It was the first one.
It was, I was, I was seed round was, was, was like lots of rejections.
And how many, how many meetings did you have?
I don't know, like a hundred or something.
I don't know.
Like maybe, maybe, maybe I don't really know.
Right.
Like, because it was all the angels and individuals that then led to fonts and so on.
Right.
Like, and then it was all the fonts and like different meetings with like, several meetings with each font, and so on.
Right.
Like it was a long process and, uh, How much was your first fundraiser and what was the price?
It was just over 2 million, 2.135 million at an $8 million post.
What's the latest price for Natlify?
I mean, the last round was a 2 billion valuation, right?
Like, so come a long way.
And back then, one of the key questions was actually why the web, right?
Like why are you building this whole thing for the web when everything is obviously like mobile and social media?
When did you raise it 2 billion?
End of 21.
Was that a really toppy round?
Yeah.
That time the climate was also very different than it is both now and in 2016, right?
Like.
Do you regret raising it such a high price?
Or actually was it a joy because you've got a lot on the balance sheet and you're in a really comfortable position?
I will say a mixture of the two.
I think everything was priced too high there and it wasn't probably entirely healthy.
On the other hand, it's also, as a founder, pretty good to take advantage of that and get cash into the business before hard times comes.
As a founder, you should always raise it the best price you can and capitalize the company as much as you can, because you want to be able to weather harder periods.
What's your biggest short in the public markets?
We mentioned Salesforce earlier as a common one with a lot of people.
If you were taking them aside, who would be yours?
I'm so bad at thinking in that sense of like betting against things rather than betting on like what's going to be really big.
If I had to pick one, maybe I would just pick something like X and mobile, because if they go down it's probably a good thing.
Final one for you.
When you look forward 10 years at the most exciting things that happen.
What excites you most in the next 10 years of AI?
The capabilities it can give for human creativity and for building amazing shared experiences right.
What it can do for builders seems really amazing, right?
I always collect examples of people that are starting to build things as one person or something like that, that are just like wow right, like this illustrator that's making these like tick tock sci-fi epos with like, ai generated video.
That's just like wow, one person can just sit and come up with with something like that, right.
Like, as i mentioned, this ux designer from the antique that can build like a full 3d editor in the browser just by now.
If you'd like to watch that episode, you can, of course, find it on spotify by searching for 20 vc.
That's 20 vc on spotify.
And I keep thinking like, if we do things right and we make sure that open platforms keep being really accessible and readily available, we really invest in tooling for people to build stuff and own it themselves and be creative.
AI just has so many exciting abilities to let humans be more creative and do more interesting things.
That's what excites me the most, right?
Like that's why I built tools for builders in the first place.
Matt, listen, I so appreciate you joining me today.
I so appreciate the directness.
I apologize for my debating at times.
I hope SaaS continues in a meaningful way, but I so appreciate your time today and thank you for joining me.
Thank you so much.
This was a lot of fun.
Now, if you'd like to see that episode, you can watch it on Spotify by searching for 20VC.
That's 20VC on Spotify.
Don't forget to leave a rating or a review.
It makes such a difference.
And I really do so appreciate that.
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As always, I so appreciate your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday with Elias Torres, former founder of Drift and now founder of Agency.
