Growth starts ramping up after we launch.
We're growing 1 million ARR per week at some point.
How much are you growing now a week?
2 million ARR per week.
We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention on paying customers.
The most important thing is talent and culture.
And there is more raw available talent in Europe.
The only thing that matters is execution.
So if you can outperform your execution, then I'm scared.
This is 20 vc, with me harry stebbings, and today we have anton osika, co-founder and ceo, lovable the fastest growing startup in europe.
With lovable, you can turn your idea into an app in seconds with just a prompt check out these stats.
After just three months, the company has scaled to 17 and a half million in annual recurring revenue.
They are adding 2 million in net new revenue every single week.
That's like $300,000 a day.
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Anton, fastest growing company in Europe.
What a title.
But first, thank you so much for joining me today, man.
Thank you, Harry.
It's always fun to talk to you.
That is very, very kind of you.
It's the British accent.
But I want to start actually pre-lovable.
And I spoke to a couple of your investors in your first company, Depict.
And so I just want to start there.
What are your biggest takeaways from Depict that shaped how you think about lovable?
We scaled super, super fast at the Pict as well.
And we did like moving just very fast.
Scrappy nailed that really well.
I think we did really well on this high potential talent as well.
Quite junior with high potential talent.
You can see that from all the companies coming out from the Pict.
The Pict mafia is absolutely real.
But I think what works in the beginning is to say yes onto a lot of opportunities and try out what works.
Once you become more people and you have to follow up and maintain everything that you start.
You have to be much more focused.
So we said yes to too many things at the PICT.
And we didn't like take this one thing that we could do 10 times better than anyone else.
And then, as the economics, macro wise, turned worse, we didn't continue the scaling trajectory that we were on initially.
I was just reading an article actually with Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail.
And he said, you need three great features in a product.
And it's really that simple and make them really, really great.
Do you agree with that product simplicity towards feature depth?
Yeah, I think, just on a product level, you should say no to as many things as possible and make it more of like an Apple feeling.
The things you do, you do them superbly.
And so we have, hey, don't say yes to everything.
Is there anything else which you did or didn't do that really shaped how you think about the early days of Lovable?
Moving fast and I will say talent is the most important thing.
And culture, how you work together every day, how people interact and collaborate quickly.
Those are the two most important thing for almost any company.
Let's just unpack talent, because it's been a cool.
I spoke to Frederick at Creandum before this and he said we had to chat about this too.
So you favor talent over experience, which sounds kind of obvious.
Respectfully, are you going to go for like an experienced, untalented person?
But how do you think about your hiring lessons around experience versus talent?
I think experience can be a negative thing in some cases.
You often want people who are super ambitious.
They have a lot to prove.
They are more open-minded towards how you should work together in a team.
For many roles, I think junior talent is, first of all, super easy to get them into the company.
They're not already committed to some, like many of their projects, the best people that you can hire at the young age.
They would go on and become founders and then you can't hire them anymore, right?
So that's why junior people are often quite good.
Will you hire them if they haven't done what you're hiring them to do before?
The benefits often of hiring someone.
Experience is well.
I can see they've been at X company for four years.
They can do that at my company.
Will you hire someone who hasn't done what you're asking them to do before?
In most cases, yes.
But if it's engineering, you have to...
No software engineering, of course.
And you for some roles you definitely want in that domain someone with a lot of experience, like who can coach and who can tell the more junior people what great looks like.
These are going to sound like strange questions, but you mentioned the word ambition there.
Did you always know that you would be successful when you were younger building?
Did you always think I will be successful in something that I do?
No, I don't think so.
I was always frustrated with how people around me didn't understand things as quickly as me.
And it felt like and then at some point I felt like well, sometimes it's me being too naive, i mean, that's something i learned over time.
But many of the truths about what's going to happen in the future have i have a very good track record on, and i think that's by this one of the superpowers that have made me, have made me successful.
So i i felt i had that superpower.
I didn't know it would translate into building something successfully.
How did you first make money?
What was your first entrepreneurial thing?
Oh, I think so.
I always nerded out with computers and setting up our land parties when I was a kid and so on.
And so I noticed that all neighbors and friends of families they had computers and they had some issue and they wanted my help.
And many of them wanted to pay me afterwards.
So that became a bit of a side hustle when I was a young teenager.
Did you do gaming when you were younger?
You're like the I'm so sorry to be rude, but you're like the easiest, like archetype, because you fit like all the characteristics of like successful founders that I have on the show.
It's like number one, made money early.
Number two, excelling gaming.
Both very, very clear archetypes.
I want to move to Lovable.
So GPT Engineer starts as a side project.
Where does the idea come from?
We've left a pick.
GPT Engineer starts as a side project.
Where does the idea come from?
Hmm.
So this was the spring after ChatGPT came out, and I've been playing with the precursors of that as well.
And from a year before then, I felt there's a massive wave coming from scaling up these models with more data.
And the PICT is currently not set up for leveraging that.
I was actually traveling with my now wife, engagement trip.
And when you're traveling, I get extra creative.
I don't think there was anyone who was talking about like AI agents at the time.
But I during those, like sitting on an airplane, I started writing a lot of like okay, you should hook them up and make.
You basically put the large language model in a for loop and then you can have it do a lot of agentic things.
And then when I'm back in Sweden, I'm like, OK, where do I apply this?
Obviously on software engineering.
And I've been talking to people about this and I felt no one was really sufficiently imaginative to what I was thinking about.
And I had to prove a point in that this is already now.
With the current first versions of software chat, gpt or apis you can build an agent that writes code and then i put together that or two.
I drank a lot of coffee and then i just crammed away and i got the first version.
That really impressed people.
You write, create a snake game and then you get a running snake game on your computer.
So that was the the first version of what, what we're building now.
How long did it take you to build v1, with that caffeinated session?
I think it was like one main weekend and then a bit of polish over with a two weekends after that.
What are the biggest lessons or advice from building many different V1s for many founders that are listening?
For most first-time founders, I would really focus on the user and the user problem and say, like how can I get one person to love what I'm building in this V1?
And that's my general advice.
I didn't do that.
I just put out a video on Twitter and it got dozens of academic references and millions of people using it.
Take me to that.
So we have this weekend, we release the product.
What happens then, dude?
Yeah, so it wasn't clear to me that I would build a business on this at all.
I just thought it was fun that there was like, and this was an open source project.
So I started nourishing like a community that went on to work on this open source project.
And And while I went to my co-founder and said like, okay, so this thing is absolutely huge.
I've been thinking of doing something else, to be honest.
And here it's like pretty like.
This is a bit of a wake up call for me that it might be time to find a good replacement for me as a CTO at the PICT.
That's what happened next.
And then within a few months passed.
And so a few months passed, the community continues to grow.
What happens then?
No, but I figured out a good replacement for me.
I decided I want to have a great co-founder that I can have as my partner in crime here.
And there was a guy who is the most super efficient negotiator zero fluff and bullshit engineer and entrepreneur.
So he had sold a company previously that I wanted to work with.
And I biked to his apartment and said, hey, let's take a walk and plan the future.
I got him on board and then we started building and created the first version of what became Lovable.
So we're building the first version of Lovable.
You've got your co-founder.
Talk to me about that time.
When did we release and how did the official release go with Lovable as a product and company?
So the launch of Lovable, like the product, it was one year after we started building.
And in the meantime, we launched like waitlisted preview versions called GPT Engineer App.
I mean, that's the getting user feedback cycle.
And building, building up.
I guess some some excitement about what we were working on and employer branding as well, and the first versions i i think they were very good as well.
They were good.
They were not very good and we had some people really liking it, but aha moments didn't click for sufficiently many people like okay, this is how i get this real value from this.
When we went on to iterate over the coming year, we packaged together all of these things so that you can ask today lovable, I want to build basically a SaaS business.
And then people have built their entire SaaS companies and made money by just prompting our AI.
I just want to break down a couple of different things that you said there.
You mentioned the waitlist.
Do you have any big lessons or advice on how to do a waitlist strategy well?
Waitlists are useful in that you can control exactly how many people you want to get on board and take user interviews with them.
So I think just get sufficiently many people on the wait list.
Find a good way to qualify who you want to talk to.
You probably have a different hypothesis on who you should talk to, who you're going to sell into, who has the most value from your product.
And then qualify only those and talk to them.
When you do the user interviews and user feedback sessions, what are your big lessons or piece of advice on how to do them well?
What questions are good?
What questions are bad?
Any lessons?
Yeah, for us there are two different type of user interviews.
We have this, this type, where we just see them use the product and see, like where do they, do they understand the product, and so that's more of a user experience interview.
And the other one is to understand if they have just tried the product a bit, we ask them okay, so you try the product a bit, why are you even interested in this?
And ask them like what problems they're facing in their business.
Try to identify what's the biggest pain point they're actually looking to solve.
It might be.
Oh, I want to get more customers and I think I can get more customers if I can show to my customers that I can get the first version out with AI more quickly.
Those are the questions.
How does it change the structure of teams?
When you look at teams today, you have obviously software engineers, you have designers, you have developers.
You have front-end, you have back-end.
How does it change the structure of teams themselves?
Harry, if you want to create a personal website for you, it's super productive.
You can do it.
You don't have a team.
It's just you.
You just create it with AI.
It's not a team.
Like, a team just slows you down.
Maybe you get some input from a designer.
Like, how do you think it should look?
And so on.
But once you have existing software with users and then you want to iterate and change that software, ai might absolutely bring down, mess up your entire code base.
I might mess up your code base.
So then you would want to work with a software engineer that knows how to bring have quality and consistently keep quality in the product.
You mentioned like people took a bit of time to find that aha moment.
How important is the time to aha moment?
I think it's very important and it's funny because you, You ask me this question and I think we are very bad at making the time to aha moment super short.
I think we could double our conversion rates if we become better at speed to aha moment.
But I can say something we're doing.
Let me take credit for something.
When you come to Lovable, you just see a prompt box.
It's very inviting.
Instead of getting to a landing page, you see a prompt box.
And then, for the ones that do enter a prompt box, you get a quite a quick aha, or the first aha moment.
And there has to be many aha moments in Lovable.
It's quite a complex, a software engineer is a very complex feature that we are doing well.
And that's what I would recommend.
Just give the user something interactive with instant reward.
You mentioned that the prompt box itself.
I've had many guests on the show say before that almost the biggest sin that chat GPT did was make chat the default UI for a future of AI.
Do you think that chat and the prompting that we have today in lovable and many other products is the right default UI for an age of AI?
I think, yes, prompting, you can do almost anything with prompting and explaining your thoughts in written form.
It's also easy to implement and iterate on, but it's going to get more advanced over time, with not just prompting.
I love the way you took a deep breath there.
It's like, this is a weighty question.
I'm thinking about it a lot.
I mean, we're building the interface for creating software and no one knows what that interface is going to look like.
But prompting, yes, I think it remains important.
I'm kind of going chronologically through the story because it's an amazing story.
You rejected YC.
Why did you reject YC?
We felt that at best YC would be a lot of dilution and some acceleration, but a lot of dilution and some acceleration.
And at worst it would be a distraction to go to SF and go through all of these fun things that happen when you go to YC.
And we just took some funding instead and focused on talent.
The seed round, when does the seed round come?
Does that come post-launch or pre-launch?
So that comes before we launch the first wait list of our product.
How did that seed round go?
So before you've launched the wait list of the product, how did that round go?
Yeah, so I have this advice that I've always gone by, which is to work with investors that you like.
And I had some people that I know from before that I just think are amazing people that I want to have by my side if things go sour, if things go well.
And I spoke to a few, I kept it very brief.
I got a preemptive offer and I said, yeah, let's do it.
How big was this round?
So we took $3 million and then we added on.
I got the advice to say like yeah, just to get a lot of cash, because you never know what happens in the markets.
So we raised quite a large pre-seed round, almost $8 million.
Would you advise founders to raise quite large pre-seed rounds if they can?
If the money's on the table, do you say take it?
Depends on how you want to operate.
Like, if you like, talking to investors, which at the time I was like no, I just want to build the technology.
Then I answer, sure, raise a big budget so you can get time to figure things out.
If you like talking to investors, which I think you should, I would go raise more intuitively smaller rents.
We're seeing a lot of founders today be immensely dilution sensitive from day one in a way that they haven't been before.
Like 10% is like the max they're willing to give up on a round.
How did you think about dilution sensitivity?
It's a good question.
I think here again, I have a very wise person who was like, no, dilution doesn't matter so much.
It's all about the size of the pie.
Yeah.
I was both affected by that advice as well as my like, no, minimize dilution.
This is my life's work.
So that's mainly how I think about it now.
So we now raise this round.
We have the wait list.
We're skipping a little bit.
Take me to go live day.
When does that happen?
And how does go live go?
We go live with Lovable the 21st of November last year.
That was only four months ago.
Yes, four months ago.
Isn't it nuts how much life changes in four months?
It's true.
It can change really fast.
Yes.
Yeah.
So November 2024, you launch.
From day one, is it just nuts?
How does it go?
I mean, we had users, paying users on like an earlier version that was called something else.
And then our launch, I think it wasn't one of these like wow launches.
We could have...
We've gotten like 10 times more press on the launch, 100%.
But people start noticing like, whoa, this is really good.
And we continue to quickly improve things in the products, chip things very rapidly.
So it ramps, like growth starts ramping up after we launch.
And we were like, wow, we're growing 1 million ARR per week at some point.
And that just keeps going, accelerating.
That was in December and it just keeps accelerating.
It was a bit on the technical side.
It was a bit frustrating because we have a lot of scaling issues that we run into.
And the team is like okay, we can continue to patch this.
But they say like we let's rewrite everything while we're seeing this explosive growth and there's so many quick fixes that we want to do on the product side.
So you rewrote it asap and stabilized it.
Then yeah, so it took a bit more than eight weeks i mean it's not completely done to date, but that we took eight weeks and then now we're shipping faster.
Can I ask you?
You mentioned that like a millionaire a week.
How much are you growing now a week?
Two million a week.
Two million a week now?
Yeah.
It's so funny for me dude, because when you live in a world of venture you don't kind of get this.
I don't think.
And I don't mean that rudely to you.
But like your companies go from like one to four in a year.
And that's like four acts in a year.
Amazing.
That would be good.
And then you're like growing two million an hour in a week.
Does that sink in?
Do you know how nuts that is?
No, I guess no.
I mean, a lot of things the last few weeks have just blunted me.
And I'm just focused on all the things that we have to fix and improve.
And that's all I think about.
What do you think are the most common ways or methods that companies' development process slows down?
For founders listening, what should they watch out for that often happens?
What makes product development slower is usually that you have a complex product and you have a lot of requirements.
You said earlier, Harry, that you have three things that are good in your product.
I think that's generally a very wise thing to do.
Simplicity leads to product direction, knowing where you're going and what you're working on.
When you look back since the start of Lovable where, from a product perspective, did you invest and spend time where, with the benefit of hindsight, you shouldn't have done?
At Lovable, we thought a lot about community and community features inside of the product.
I think that could have made a lot of sense if we had seen slower growth.
But now that growth is not a concern, you don't need community features to power growth.
So I think that was pretty much a waste of effort.
Do you agree with the sentiment, build it and they will come?
The growth has been amazing.
From day one.
It feels like since GPT Engineer, even People just kind of come for the product because it's been amazing and different.
Do you believe build it and they will come actually does stand true today?
If you have a very strong vision of how that, where there is untapped potential, if you really know that deep down and you have track record of showing that, then build it and they will come is going to work.
And you also have the runway, your personal, like energy runway and so on, to truly make it work and make them come.
But for in most cases, yeah, that is too risky.
It's too risky to just build it and they will come.
And you can build it and make them come or try to make them come at the same time.
And that's much lower risk.
You said there about energy.
And it reminded me of a statement that Nick at Revolut said to me in a show when he was talking about his investing.
And he said the most successful founders that he invests in are between 30 and 35.
They don't have the naivety of the incredibly young founders, but they don't have the bluntly tiredness in some ways or the you know you have more energy when you're younger of older founders.
How do you think about that given your age today?
I think energy is super important.
And I think the naivete is a benefit.
But I made a mistake, a lot of mistakes.
I was the first time manager as well.
What was the biggest mistake you made?
Thinking that we should change the culture and become more of a scale up, something slow moving or like more management layers when we became 40 people.
That was the biggest mistake I did.
Why did you think that?
I mean my co-founder and other senior people we spoke to said like oh, now you have to hire executives, and so on.
And that was a bad idea.
Okay.
And so did you start hiring executives?
Pretty much, yeah.
And then they don't work?
One person I hired didn't work out, which slowed me down and then kind of set us back a lot.
And so when you think about that, what would your advice be to other founders?
Don't believe the bullshit you can scale way longer without execs?
Many founders hire mercenary style, maybe like skilled people, but they are running in their lane.
I hire generalists and I try to empower them as much as possible.
If you have a lot of super, super smart generalists that you're doing a lot of smart like new initiatives and so on, adding executives on top of them is high risk and like reward is questionable.
Does culture break at any point?
When you're scaling user base so fast, you're scaling revenue so fast.
I mean, usually I think it does.
Yes.
Or it changes.
It changes.
It evolves.
This is something I'm very mindful about and why I'm so scared of adding too many heads.
What are you worried about?
The most important thing for everyone at our company which I talk about is to role model.
How much you care about the product, the users, the team, how well the team works.
Then role model and ensure other people care as much as you.
That comes from a feeling of ownership of the culture and the team.
If you're a lot of people, that gets diluted typically.
So that's what breaks or that's what's harder.
So we have the team scaling, we have user base, we have revenue scaling.
We're making actually a lot of money at this point.
Why raise a Series A?
I just had some scheduled check-ins with investors.
There was this one guy and his team that I had obsessed about Lovable for the last few months.
Fredrik, he's here in Stockholm at Klientum.
He just gives an amazing impression on me.
And I'm like okay, I can wait, because I know it's very clear to me that this is just the beginning and I could raise it later.
But we can accelerate by adding an investor that is a partner, helping to find more amazing people as a sounding board.
Fredrik helped to grow Spotify from nothing.
And we decided to raise a small round.
Okay, so you decided to raise a small round.
I have to ask this.
You have many well-funded competitors in the US.
I think it was Neil Murray that said you put like we're Devon, that actually works from like very early on.
Yeah.
Which I thought was bold.
When a competitor has a lot of money, do you have to raise too?
I don't think so, no.
I mean, you can just, we could bootstrap.
Like you don't, you can bootstrap most things.
So you never have to raise.
But they can outspend you on talent, on customers, on marketing.
I'm not afraid of any of those.
The only thing that matters is execution.
So if you can outperform me on execution, then I'm scared.
Where could you improve your execution today?
We spoke about speed of shipping, amazing, culture's great.
Where would you say execution-wise you could improve?
I think you can always improve on how the decision loop, on how fast you take decisions and communicate those decisions so that everyone is really on the same page.
How do you make them today?
How could it be improved?
I think it's about doing fewer.
I think we could do fewer things as well at Lovable.
There's a lot of people with great ideas that each idea is great, but you can only have so much.
You should only execute on so many at the same time.
We mentioned the team and the culture, and we mentioned Frederick there.
You've been pretty ardent around building in Europe, keeping the team in Europe, being a European company.
A lot of people say to me by staying in Europe, you are deliberately not doing what is best for your career.
If you were in the Valley, you would be more successful.
What is your response to them?
The most important thing is talent and culture.
And there is more raw available talent in Europe.
The culture isn't on the like, the US has more culture that fits succeeding as a startup.
I have to say, per default.
What specifically do you think it is about that culture?
So it's about the default of thinking big and being super ambitious and being very committed to making things work.
In Europe, people are more like living a balanced life and taught that we should.
In Sweden, we talk about the law of Jante, which is that you should be better than others.
Oh my God.
Okay.
Yes.
So this concerns me.
So how do you respond to people who say you would be more successful if you're in the Valley?
So if you're a founder, you have more free entropy of like talent to use a channel into something successful.
But there are, of course, many benefits from being in the Valley.
I think it's a bit of playing on the hard mode here from Europe.
And I get excited about playing on hard mode and showing that you can create the category defining company, which is lovable, in our case, from Europe.
Are you positive about Europe moving forwards?
We are in a doom loop around Europe, which we both disagree with and hate.
Are you positive and what guides your thinking?
Yeah, I'm super positive.
I think there is a strong underdog mentality among all of us founders now, which is usually a winning concept to feel like the underdog and wanting to prove others wrong.
I totally agree with you.
I also think there's incredible superpowers in using the arbitrage pricing strategy of incredible engineers in Europe and selling into the US.
You can build huge companies selling into the US from Europe.
Doesn't mean you can't sell into the US just because you're a European company.
True.
No, it's a very global market.
I've got some questions which are a little bit spicier.
A spicier one is if one were to criticize lovable, they would say, amazing.
God, look at the revenue growth.
Look at the user growth.
But is this like AI sugar revenue?
In other words, it's not sustainable and it will churn very quickly.
How do you respond to it's not really real sustainable revenue and it's not sticky?
We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention on paying customers.
So it's about 85%.
That is just going up.
Of course, there is a lot of things to be desired when you're working with an AI system.
There's a fraction of people, some people that come in and they just flip up their credit card because they want to try, they want to learn, which is a rational thing to do.
And then they know that they are going to stop using it almost.
They almost know.
So we have a fraction of users who are like those people.
85% month one.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's great because you're also too early to have month six.
What could you do today to increase retention most significantly?
The easiest thing we can do is to give more of the important aha moments to ensure that all of our users get more of the important aha moments on how to use the product.
I don't really respectfully agree or get you, because you give prompts under the prompt box so you say, like build me a sass app or build me a dog website, or whatever.
The prompt is dude, all you need to do is click it and you see the code being written and then you see it being created.
The aha moment is pretty obvious.
No, so there are many aha moments for or like the moments to get the most value, get the full value out of using it.
The most important of those are with regards to when you feel like you're getting stuck and the AI doesn't understand you.
And there are many things in how to get around that that you can pick up as a user.
It is about how you prompt.
It's about how to understand what doesn't work and explain clearly what the problems.
You're seeing, what you find could be the problem when you're building a more complex feature.
And it's about that you can actually onboard an engineer to do small changes to the code base.
Those are things our users should know and not everyone knows them.
What's your North Star metric today?
If you have one metric on the TV for the whole team to focus on, what is it?
It's the number of users that go all the way to getting users on what they built, getting something hosted with users on what they built.
That's what we focus on.
What's the amount today?
So we have almost 40,000 paying users, and then that's the proxy for that.
40,000 paying users, shit.
Do you care about the time it takes to go from start to website created or not?
We care, but I have to say Harry, these things about the onboarding and how much we can improve is not something that we have had to focus on.
We were just making the core AI parts better, better, better.
That's what we focus on.
Okay, so you say about making the core AI parts better, better, better.
People also say wrappers on top of other people's models.
Why are they wrong with that assumption?
I mean, it's very easy to create a cool demo with just a wrapper.
It's super easy to make a cool demo with just a wrapper.
The hard part is to get close to 100%.
You get what you're asking for.
And there's a lot of small details in making that work.
There's a lot of small details.
And there's a chain of large language model API calls and algorithms that run.
And that chain is like you can continue to optimize that for years without reaching perfection.
Whose models do you sit on top of today?
We use all of OpenAI's models Google Gemini, and the main workhorse is Anthropix Cloud model for writing the code.
I was going to have this in a quickfire, but I have to ask it now.
You've got Anthropic at $60 billion, you've got OpenAI at $300, or you've got Grok at $50.
Which do you buy and which do you sell?
Okay, so I care about the best talent here, and I feel like Elon is very good at talent.
So I would buy Grok.
I think they're also very ruthless in finding business opportunities.
We'll see about that, but I feel like they could be good at that.
Even though Anthropic is my favorite, I love the culture and I love the leadership there.
And I will short open AI because they have been very good in the scrappy phase but they haven't proven that they can have a clear product direction and focus now.
So I would push, sorry, it's a Sunday, we're allowed to be a little bit more casual.
I would push back on you and go.
The two biggest things that matter in this next wave is brand recognition on the consumer side and it's consumer facing front end products.
And when you look at brand, everyone's mother knows ChatGPT.
They don't even know OpenAI, but they know ChatGPT.
And then on the consumer product side, respectfully, they're way ahead of anyone else.
Am I wrong?
I just think we're still early in the days of AI.
And if you look at the enterprise revenue, Anthropic is almost caught up to OpenAI from nothing, from being absolutely dominated.
I don't know what Grok is going to do here, but I expect them to be having, like OpenAI, lost all their best talent to Anthropic.
I think Grok might be able to pull something off here.
I spoke to a very wise friend of mine before this and they said that the biggest concern that I have is that open source, or megacorps of the world with massive distribution advantages, come in and win the market.
How do you think about that?
And is that a concern?
The big megacorps, they move very slowly in many domains.
So they're never going to, in many years, they're not going to have the best product on the market.
There are distribution advantages for some of these megacorps and that's like the marketing and distribution is what I'm more concerned about.
But overall it's going to be a growing market where you can easily, as a startup, be best positioned for some parts of the market.
One thing that's going to be a real shift, I imagine, that you have to face is the shift from PLG and kind of prosumer to enterprise.
How do you think about that shift?
And is that just not a concern given the speed of revenue ramp?
How do you think about that?
If we would do enterprise, I would want to do that really well.
So we're holding off with doing enterprise for now.
We're holding off.
Our goal, you may ask about the North Star metric.
What we want to have is we want to be the best place for builders to create products and get a million of the most talented builders on Lovable.
And if we succeed in that, that's a great segue into many other areas, including enterprise.
When you look at Shopify...
What do you learn from them blazing a trial in the way they have done, as efficiently as they have done?
I'd love to hear from you, Harry.
What are you most impressed by with Shopify?
Honestly, I would say it's a narrative around everyone being an entrepreneur.
I think Harley's a phenomenal communicator and storyteller at bringing very real businesses to life and how Shopify has changed their processes, their sales really made an impact.
And I love Toby and I think he's obviously a brilliant technologist.
But I think without Harley's storytelling narrative, entrepreneurial vibes to life, it would be a different company.
So I would learn from that a lot in terms of how to tell your customers stories.
I think Shopify has been able to execute on many things and they just created a good package.
They've iterated fast.
That's my impression.
They've iterated fast on serving all the needs for building your e-commerce and I think this velocity was the most important thing for building the best product.
When we look forward dude, what would you most like to build in the product, but for whatever reason, you cannot.
What would that reason be?
I think I can build anything into the product.
Really like team would block you prioritization, not the right time.
Okay, so something that we have to say no to right now yeah, yeah.
So i'd love to build in a way for founders to get everything you get out the y combinator into lovable so that includes, like some marketing infrastructure.
Y combinator has that all the entire playbook.
And going above that and even saying like oh, here's your incorporated Delaware C company, your Stripe setup.
You just have to focus on the product and talking to users and creating content for marketing.
When you look at partnerships today APIs that we have to say into the different providers that's quite a real impossible product.
Yes, it's on the roadmap.
Good.
Okay.
Well, YC are going to love you after this show.
A final one.
When we look forward, what concerns you most if you had to choose?
Would it be regulatory challenges, competition, or hype cycles?
I think if someone, some competitor is super, super good at marketing, that would concern me.
How important is brand?
Brand is mainly the outcome of your product.
There's other factors too.
Product is the important thing.
And then good product plus awareness just creates brand.
That's, I think, what's sufficient.
So it's more of a downstream effect of something else.
When you're doing 2 million a week in additional ARR, you're going to have more and more investors want to give you money.
How do you think about that and what makes it worth it to take versus?
This is a distraction.
Get out of my face.
Currently, it's a distraction.
I think it will make it worth it when we know exactly how we want to spend the money, or it's a partner we really want to work with and terms where we would never regret saying yes to them.
What if done, would be a massive needle mover for the company.
One or two more of the perfect technical product hires.
Dude, I could talk to you all day.
I want to move into a quick fire round.
So I say a short statement, you give me your thoughts.
What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?
We have models today that are really smart.
I think that's where people don't agree with me.
They're smarter than humans, but they don't have memory in the same extent as we do.
They don't have context.
How fast will we ramp context and memory given scaling today?
What you need to ramp is to decide the process for storing memory, I think is what you have to ramp.
And it has to store all of these things.
Like my conversation with Harry has to be stored somehow into the AI system.
And my childhood almost has to be stored as well.
I don't know.
It's going to take years.
You can buy and hold one public stock for the next 10 years.
Which one do you buy and hold?
Some talent play.
What comes to mind is Tesla.
They're also interestingly positioned outside of software.
What's the most important trait in a founder that no one talks about?
I think great judgment people probably talk about.
But I like people who hire, like see potential in people.
It's like, okay, this person can become amazing.
And the judgment in picking talent like that.
What's your biggest weakness as CEO today?
I'm not as good at multitasking as I would like to be.
If Lovable failed tomorrow, what would be the reason?
Like investors write a pre-mortem, which is like a reason why something doesn't work.
What is that?
The one I can think of is just we lose momentum and excitement.
And that's what fuels us today, right?
No. all the excitement and momentum.
What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
You don't need to be attached to one foundation model provider.
They're all going to be amazing.
There's not going to be one winner here.
Are we seeing foundation models be completely commoditized?
Yes.
We won't see specializations like we do today.
I know Claude is better for code and engineering.
Do you think that will really equalize?
Yeah.
I love the Swedes.
Fucking one word answers.
Yeah.
What's your favorite failure?
I know that sounds weird.
So when I was 17, I failed my exams at school, Anton.
I failed them badly.
Yeah, like Ds across the board.
I looked at myself and I was like I'm either going to work behind a bar or I can make something of my life.
And I chose to work harder than ever and make something of my life.
That is my favorite failure.
I love that.
My favorite failure that I didn't, the pick didn't work out so I could do more things.
What concerns you most in the world today?
I'd love all leadership to be true idealists and not a function of circumstances and people to please, and be much more open-minded to people who disagree with them, and super intelligent as well.
But leadership in the world today are usually a bit corrupted and narrow-minded.
And that's what concerns me.
Do you think they would say you're naive?
Yes, I want to be naive, so yes.
To the challenges of leadership, to the challenges of having a voter population, you sometimes have to be certain ways.
I think we used to have better presidents and leaderships throughout the last century.
So no, I don't think I'm too naive, but I'm definitely always a bit naive.
I totally agree with you.
I think the state of leadership stays woeful.
Penultimate one, what's your biggest short in the public markets?
It would be like a SaaS company that has a per seat pricing, where their ICP is going to be replaced by AI SaaS that just replaces the employees.
What's the future of pricing in an AI world?
I think it depends on how defensible your business is.
If you're selling to enterprises that never change SaaS software, you should try to make some value-based pricing.
I don't know how you get to good value-based pricing, but I would do something like that.
Otherwise, I think you should don't innovate too much on pricing.
Do whatever works today.
I love the facial expressions.
Final one.
I like optimism and I think we need more of it in the world.
I'm incredibly excited for the next decade because I think we'll find cures to my mother's got multiple cirrhosis, which is a horrible disease.
I think we'll find cures to diseases that we really didn't think possible before.
What excites you most about the next decade that we have coming?
That ai is hopefully going to make us humans understand each other better and be better at doing win-win playing win-win and that would be awesome.
I'm excited about that, so like our leadership actually being enhanced by super intelligent ai anton listen, dude.
I've so enjoyed doing this.
Thank you so much for joining me and thank you for inspiring a generation of european entrepreneurs that they can build unbelievable businesses in europe.
Thank you harry, it was super fun.
2 million in ARR added every week.
Is he kidding me?
He's making every other investment look terrible right now.
Listen, I love doing that show.
It was so much fun.
Oh my god, what a rocket ship lovable is.
If you haven't tried it yet, try it.
It is incredible.
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