20VC: Wix's Founder on What Wall St Gets Wrong About AI and Wix | Will Base44 Win the Vibe Coding Wars | The Truth About the Economics of Vibe-Coding | The Buyback Disaster: Lessons Learned with Avishai Abrahami

You're not going to buy code Shopify. No Maria, good you are. Today we're trading on other companies' news. We're not trading on which news? I really don't care. We make about $400 million a year, okay? And in fake cash flow. So we make cash and we invest about $200 and something million into $544. We all give too much credit for AI and what it can do. If I would be in the university starting today, I would be terrified. If I'm here, I need to be fully committed to what I'm doing because I've chosen to be here. This is 20 VC with me Harry Stubbings. Now it's a tough time for some public company CEOs with the SaaS apocalypse. That is more true for this CEO than almost any other. The Wix market cap is about $2.8 billion. They are doing $2.1 billion in revenue. They have base 44, which is their vibe coding product, which is now well over 150 million an hour growing incredibly quickly. And quite frankly, the public market just won't give them a break. Whether it's justified or not, it's been pretty brutal. The buyback has been about as successful as the Titanic voyage. And poor Avishai, their CEO, is going through it. I wanted to sit down with him and hear how he thought about how base 44 makes such a big part of their business today and what that looks like moving forwards. How he reflects on the buyback, what public market investors don't see that they should see. This and so much more in what I think is probably the most franken honest conversation Avishai has had in recent years about the Wix business. But before we dive into the show today, founders face a different set of challenges at every stage of growth. For Sid's shade, co-founder and CEO of D Matrix, JP Morgan delivered the guidance and expertise to help navigate what came next. He credits JP Morgan's high touch approach with supporting D Matrix as it grew and expanded internationally. 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I have watched a lot of episodes and as I said, I lend a lot, so I'm very excited to be on the spotlights. Dude, you know, I just got to start with just a weird thing, but I like to bring people to personality and life a little bit. I spoke to Eroann at Monday before the show and he told me that you stay up insanely late. Is that true? And what does the sleep schedule look like just before we dive in? So I usually go to sleep at around 5 to 6 a.m. and I'd work up around 11, 11, 11, 30. Been my routine, been my sister, I remember myself. I think there's something good about it for a CEO. I'm surprised you can say it might sound because I have a few hours where I can actually think and work in things and plan things and do things. And it's supposed to always be, you know, in a meeting, go have to fight to get a clear schedule. So I've probably four hours where I can do a real work and not just talk to people. Do you mind what time people come in in the morning? If you're sleeping until 11, 30, you're gonna be in the office at 12, 31. Do you mind if people are the same? Actually, I don't mind. I don't mind, most people don't like that schedule, right? So most people will not agree with that and be volunteering for that. It also created the nada thing which I like is that, when you're a small company, people want the CEO to solve their problems, you know, and like, how do we mitigate between arguments? And by the time I would arrive, most of the things would be solved by themselves. So the thing that will left for me to 100 would be the more, well, the harder things to solve and between people communication skills and nada thing. So I mean, that actually, the organization be more mature. Your whip or your aura must absolutely hate you and your sleep school must be shit. - It's actually, actually, aura, did at some point, added the sleep profile where they define that, so there this theory, right, which is a very, I would say, Northern California, which is we have to go to sleep at like 9 p.m. or something. And that was the beginning. And then at some point, they added, well, that's an early sleeper, then they had a normal sleeper, which I think is 1, 12 a.m. and then they added very late sleepers, okay? So they kind of like this as well. There are different profiles. And I'm pretty, by the way, it does a genetic profile. So it's very hard to move between them. - Well, thank God, otherwise your sleep school would have been in the basement. - What time do you go to sleep? - I go to sleep at about 2 a.m. So I'm pretty late, but I'm not quite as late as you. - So, or, probably now, last year, five was a late sleeper. And that's what you're gonna get there. - I don't use it, dude. I don't need another fucking device to tell me that I'm shit. I'm sorry, like, you know what? Life is hard enough. I've got a girlfriend to tell me that I'm not doing well enough. I don't need a fucking aura. (laughing) But I wanna be dire right. You're the market cap today of like $2.8 billion. And you do 2.1 billion in air or give or take. What does the market not see Abercheye that they should see? - Well, I think that's kind of a thing now with all SaaS companies, right? Where the multiples went to shit. And I think a lot of it is, is because the market don't know how to calculate the danger for SaaS companies with AI. That's the reason, in some cases, I agree, in some cases, I disagree. But overall, I think that's what we're experiencing now. Anyhow, town will prove who's right, but we are working hard. - Yes and no. A lot of the SaaS apocalypse, many of them have come back. And then some of them haven't come back. As soon as you're doing. - What did you come back all the way up? - Well, I mean, at last, you can come up again. Crowds right never went down. Paddle out of networks is up. Obviously, box is up. - Salesforce service now is down. Figma would be down. So there's a lot that the core, okay? I think still down. At last year, if it went up, that's actually the one I'm more concerned about than ever, and a lot of shares. But I didn't know this that it went up. - Well, there you go. I've provided you with some good news for today. I'm a bringer of good news. But essentially, you know, I have mayor on the show from base 44. Base 44 is doing 150 million in revenue, lost and out. I'm sure more now. It kind of describes zero value to the core business. Design just completely nuts to you. Or are you like, yeah, I get that. In a new world, by technology creation is easier than ever. I understand that. How do you think about that? - First of all, I think it describes less than zero value to the current business, because if you look at peers, they're doing a vibe coding. And the multi-party is much higher than the one we would get for base to be a two billion, right? So basically, on eachones, we'd probably be a eight billion. - You know, I'm not trying to guess the stock market logic. You know, I think that most of the time, we follow companies for a long time, you understand that the market got them completely wrong, completely right. And there's always a mix and it's a cycle, right? And it's a cycle and the sandwich coming from, okay? I disagree with it. And I disagree with it strongly on a few companies, less than other companies. For example, Salesforce, okay? Salesforce, what is the biggest value Salesforce provide? It's not the CRM. It's the fact that you trust a SaaS provider with your data. You have huge banks, huge companies that actually allow Salesforce to hold all of the customer data because they trust Salesforce. You're not going to vibe code that because the trust is massive, right? It's a massive part of the value that Salesforce gives. And yes, they have the marketplace which a lot of functionality and other things, but the CRM itself is a very small part of the value. In my mind, I don't see how you compete with that with some kind of a cloud-coded project. - If Salesforce becomes a value list database that agents are able to scrape and then provide in different interfaces, then you basically become a commodity piping provider, which would mean that you could almost just replace it. - What platform would JPMorgan trust for their customers? Data outside of the JPMorgan closed, got in DMZ, secure environment. Now, The answer is none. They don't trust anybody else with that. But they do trust Salesforce. And that's huge. That's so small thing. It's huge. It means that, you know, it's extremely hard to change that. I get that. And actually, I was thinking of the government contrast that Salesforce has and has won. Again, I would say trust your point. But is that a one of one? If we go to the other providers, the other people who've been hurt by the South Park of Ips, they're not in that same gilded trust. I mean, it depends which one. By the way, at last, and for me is actually the one way. Again, I'm a shareholder. So I want to be clear. And a lot of the company have been in shelter for a long time. And when I look at it at last and I think that the customers are the one that are more likely to build things with Cloud Code, because they're developers. So I'm always in a bit of a concern there because I'm like, somebody would replace their really the management stack of the tickets and workflow. Those will be those guys. And yet you said, this is the one that recovered. So obviously I'm missing something. And I think for weeks, look, our customers, most of our customers will be the pizza store in their house, your head dresser, or a lot of small businesses. They're not going to use Cloud Code to build their business stack. They're not going to do that for all of what they need. It's just not in the realm of possible now. Maybe in a few years, I would be able to do that. But we have very far from it. We tried it weeks. One of the first thing we did with Base 44 is that okay, should we integrate the business logic of our vertical offering into Base 44? And we make a test and said, can we build the head dresser? Just a business logic to manage a hairdresser's business in Base 44. And so we had the team, the professional developer, the tried to do it for a week. They ended up doing a little bit. And so we said, okay, we're going to bring a stronger team. Okay. I actually, the team that's for weeks and two weeks later, they're still didn't achieve that. Those things are complicated. And so I don't think you're the guy that the pizza next to your house is going to use Cloud Cloud to build this delivery scheduling, staff management system, all of those things and then build the website. Okay, to do that. Well, some yes. Okay, some yes. And we see it. Okay, do we see that some do? Okay, we see it. Cloud Code is much harder than Base 44. Base 44, give you what are coming out of the box so you can do way more with it. But we see that some do. Well, I don't think the majority will. So I think this is where Wixis, right? This is our customers. And to assume that they're going to one day just say, well, you know what? I'm going to start building all of those things. Maybe, but we don't see it yet. I totally get that. But then the count would be, okay, so it's just a tam reduction because some will. And maybe that's 20% and that means the tam that was 100% is now 80%. So it's like a smaller market. Well, yeah, maybe I, but then where are they're going to go move to vibe coding. Yeah, move to a lot of all rapid base 44. We own base 44. They might move from here to here. That's fine. If you say, hey, you know, the hairdress is not going to do it. The construction work is not going to do it. I get you. Do you not think they will in tomorrow's model or the year after this model? You know, I had Samult went on the show and he said, you have to build for the model of tomorrow or next year. Well, we are that's base 44. That's why we invest so much into base 44. Because if that will be something that happened in that way, that's what we have base 44. Essentially, the way I look at it today is that there are three different options. One, the guy that built the pizza place where that there's a place and he want to build their website and the management tools for that. He's going to be staying a wish customer because he don't want to put their foot into that. His business and life is being, he's making pizza. So that's option number one, right? So he's a lot of them will stay here. Option number three. And I'm going to say is that they're going to say, well, I'm actually really interested in that base 44 made it so easy for me to wipe code everything I need. It's custom it for me. So I'm going to use base 44 for that. And there is, of course, the middle ground, which is like some people will be here, some people will be there, which is I'm guessing the more likely scenario to happen in the next five, six years, right? Not everybody will be in this side or in that side, which is why we have options. Can I ask you when you think about like base 44's margin profile? A lot of the providers, you know, we've had lovable, we've had a lot of people that we've had mayor on the show. And, you know, their margin is one that's hidden in a lot of cases. And it leads to negativity and skepticism around whether they're actually good businesses. How does the margin profile of a base 44 compared to the margin profile of a wix? Well, wix is way more profitable. The cost of a wix generating wix website is pretty much zero in comparison. And hosting pretty much zero in comparison. So way more profitable than wix than on base 44, the margins are much better. The retention is also better because you start building something, you need to put a lot of effort to finish it. It's way more challenging, but we did get the cost to go, we continuously seeing it decline in the cost in base 44. There's a brilliant team always dating that. And we just released our own AI model. So we we find you a few more and then combine them and we're using that. And then we're actually achieving a equivalent to the top two models with that. So the cost of that is dramatically less. So I think that in two years or maybe less, this is not going to be an important question. Can you talk to me about the decisions to your own model? It's a big technological decision to choose to do that versus use open source off the shelf or front end models. Can you talk to me about the decision to do that and why you thought it was strategically right? Yeah, of course. I think that two parts of that. Number one is quality. We have a huge amount of training data that is happening for us that we're getting on base 44. And because we get, you know, we see what users are trying to do. I see what it fails. We understand better and better what they're trying to say and saying it with their own prompt. So we learn all those things. And by learning all those things, we think we can actually create a model that is better for base 44 than just, you know, the frontier models that are way more generic. We don't need the knowledge that a lot of them have on Chinese poetry because they do, you know, they've been training that. But we do need the knowledge that they have to focus and increase the knowledge. They have what does it you mean when you say I want to create a task manager for my, for me to manage my husband. Oh, to tell my boyfriend where he's wrong. Okay. So you have one. All right. So all of those things, okay. And we have a huge amount of data that we can use to create a model that is better and better. Now, it's not trying to replace the frontimals, but it's trying to be to make us better at bay 44. So it's a different target, which is why it's easier than building a fabule of meters. Right. We're not trying to build meters. The other thing is that we just did it on already on wicks. Okay. So on wicks, when you generate a website today, we are running a model that we trained and it's faster, it's cheaper, but it's also better and it makes less evils. And we keep improving it because we have continuous, right? A continuous improvement look, feel better, look, because we see when customers like something and so every week we are trying to run it again and train it again to get to a place where it's better. How much cheaper is own model versus using a frontier model? It depends, but I would say between 1% to 30%. Wow. That's not nearly as much as I thought it was. That might be surprising, but which your math came out and said that hey, when he uses open source, it's 14 to 16 acts cheaper. Me, but he's using it on a smaller task. Yes, that's absolutely true. By way, if you're using open source models and you can use them really basic ones for a lot of different things. They work great than it would cost you even less. But when you want to use a complicated model, for example, what you need for something like base 44, it's not going to get to that much of a level, but you can achieve 5% to 10%. Do you think we're in the cost optimization period for base 44 yet? Given you have a raplet who do multi-agent and multimodal modes, they are not cost-optimising at all, but they are delivering a good customer experience. We're not in the cost optimization stage for these businesses yet, are we? No, I think it's more about quality. But if you let me have 20% more quality, 20% less cost, I'll definitely go for the quality. It's in your market, it's just happening, starting. We should make it better. Why do you not publish base 44s numbers? They're amazing. Would it not be helpful to tell a story? Well, we do publish them every once in a while. We do tell Eiraris. We told you and we do publish them every once in a while. So we do publish them. I mean, none of the players in this market are actually publishing only weekly or monthly basis. I know. Only when there is money, we do quite more often. That's it. There's no need for us to start breaking the numbers because from weeks, when we do the quarterly, we tend to do things like move customers between advanced platforms to data, right? We're pushing customers in between. Do you encourage customers to try each platform? Yes, but more than that, we encourage our partners and agencies to use base 44 now. So we do that. We actually spend time on that. And you do that because you think it's the future, because you have a worse margin profile on that. It would make sense financially to push them to the core business. I think that it's part of the future. I want to be clear. I think that the future is what I said. It's going to be a combination. And I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I think that if you ever try to use any vibe coding tools and you try to be anything very complicated, it's hard when you're trying to do visual editing, it's really annoying. It's a bit more complicated than that. But and so I think the future is a combination of both. And we want our agencies to have all the tools in it for the future 100% sure that base 44 would be part of the future. But also almost as confident, if not more confident, okay, that things like weeks will also be part of the future. You're not going to vibe code Shopify. No matter how good you are, the business stack is too hard. What happens then? Stop markets just appreciate that trust is important. People want Salesforce and Wix market cap rises again. I'm genuinely being naive here. Help me out. I'm not a stock trader. So this is the truth. I do that for my my my my my fun and I'm As I said, I don't even make sense because I own a lot of a class and even that time like, "Oh my God, all the developers will replace it with their own thing," which obviously doesn't happen, right? So I was wrong on both sides except being lazy and not selling my stocks of a class and yes. Are you able to detach your happiness from the market capital, the stock price? Yes, I really don't care. Like, I wake up in the morning and have one thing that I need to do. I have to focus on my business, okay? And I can control some of it, not all of it, and I focus on that. Today, we're trading on other companies' news. We're trading mostly on what OpenAI or on Tropica are saying or Google is saying. And the reality is that I can not influence that. I can not influence what people are thinking. To be honest, I care less about it. I really don't look wake up in the morning and say, "Oh my God, I went 20% up, I'm going 20% down." Even when we went up, I was more concerned about the issues that we still have to solve, which is the same thing I did today. I completely understand that. And I think that's a right and very healthy mindset. One that very few CEOs are able to do. So I'm thrilled for you that you're able to do that. Aaron from Monday said he was not able to do that. And so. I'm all right here, you see that. He's slightly. He's got great surfer hair, I have to admit. Where it does become an actual tangible challenge is in M&A. One of the joys of being public is you have a tradable currency that you can buy companies with. And when you are priced lower, that currency is less valuable to buy other assets like a next base 44. With the price today, does it make M&A impossible? Well, we still have cash and we can get more cash if we need. I think our issue today is that the M&A of base 44, right? Well, we bought the company with one person. I want to be clear. And then we put a lot of people from wakes into that. So that's actually complicated in M&A because you have to build a company. I'm rounded, okay? We didn't get a company. Luckily, Maure is brilliant person's amazing leader. So essentially, I don't know how to do another one of those, okay? At the same time, and the same quality that we can merge the operations together. So it's very hard. And we are about to launch another product next month, okay? So that's a different product that we're built. I think that our challenge today is actually execution on not finance. So if you want to do an M&A, it will fall on the execution challenge, not on the finance. You said one person company there, it did break news when it happened. It was a great story. One person, $80 million. And since it's been an unbelievable acquisition, obviously, it's now probably double the revenue that you bought it for price in terms of its 160 million give or take. Oh, that's nice. Yes, maureen. Well, talk to me about like bringing that into a board meeting or bringing that into an exact meeting and being like, hey, guys, I found this one guy male or he's great. It's a one person company. We should buy it for $80 million. What did that decision-making look like? And how did the discussion go? To be fair, very easy. I actually never thought about it in the way that you describe it. So you're right. Maybe it was surprising that it was that easy. We have a really good board, really smart people, okay? And we explained the logic behind it. And they were like, yeah, it makes sense. And I was like, they kind of ask us a lot of really smart questions. But none of them was that why are willing to pay so much for one person? That was not part of the questions. They actually focus on the business, the business logic. Why are we going to do internal marketing? How are we going to build a team around it? So we got a lot of questions and then got to that also, but why we think it's better than replete all lovable. So we explained it and until now, I never thought about it like that. You said that we have a lot of cash. How much cash do you have? I should know this and it's public, but like, yeah, it's complicated. I actually don't like we have a date here, loan there. So we make cash and we invest about 200 and something million into base 44 or a bit more than that. And so overall, I think, we're okay. If I was sitting with you and we have pubs in the UK, I'm not sure if you have pubs in Israel, you probably have balls. If we were sitting in a pub, I'd say to you, average, I did. Let's take this private. Would a misprice ask that? Would you like to take it private? I think it would be pretty much illegal for me to even answer that, right? I'm focusing on the company building the company. We're doing incredible things. We have super smart talent. It's an exciting journey. So I love that. And we're going to continue to do that. And you know, I'm not applying the company that I can tell you and the bank, the stock market should replace where smart people make money. And you know, if they think like you do that, it's a misprice asset, then that's a great opportunity. If they think that AI is going to kill everything, then obviously that's a terrible opportunity. And so this is everybody has to do their own decision-making and then planning totally. In terms of like the stock market and happy people make money from it, you did do the buyback. How did you think about the buyback and any thoughts and reflections on that? Well, obviously we had terrible timing. Dude, I didn't say it. I did. I could. I was like, you know, I think that, but it's very hard to time the stock market. Very hard to time the stock market. I think we had too much float and I think we had a lot of money in the bank and that we're sitting there. We knew we're not going to do a major acquisition because we were to focus on the near product coming and on base 44. So we cannot do both things. We cannot do another acquisition. So we had a bit and a half dollars that we kind of like, okay, it doesn't make sense for us just to hold it. And then we said, okay, let's, you know, let's use that opportunity where the stock is very low, but obviously, you know, the stock market jumped like this when we did it and then jumped, we're in crashing down. All right, that's part of life. But I think the big question is no happen in the last three months, it's where it's going to be in three years. And I hope that by that time we're proving to be a smart decision. I mean, if you want real bulls, then you buy back more now. Is that conversation like, is it like, no, we would have that discussion. How do you reflect on future buybacks, given what you know now? I think that buyback are a fantastic tool for a company and companies should use that. And I think they don't use it enough. I think the concept of that companies, you know, always issue more and more the case, the delusion by issuing more shares to employees and for other things is something that should be balanced by wheat buyback when the company can. I'm really in favor of that. I think that it's another way of giving a dividend to all of your stockholders. That's what I'll pin in. Again, I'm not a professional, you know, stock market person, you know, that's not my profession. I'm a geek. I'm an engineer. I'm a bit of a marketer. I'm a potter guy. I'm worried about the level of stock based compensation that we're seeing. It seems like we're normalizing in same levels. I'll ask Snapchat that make it very difficult for me as an investor to see the same attractiveness in terms of returns that I had before. How do you think about SBC being good to employees, but also not screwing investors? Well, I think you have a choice. I think that I would say that you want to get the best talent and you want to keep maintained the best talent. Part of it is lying them to because they build the company. They should be invested in the dream. You should give stocks to employees. I think that the fact that it's only technology companies and it's not in many other companies, that's a definition. I would actually love to see that every fashion company gives a called keen stock options because I think that's way more fair. Maybe if the US government would do that or the British government would actually have better people running the country and somehow finding that their compensation is related to their achievements. I think it's a really good mechanism. I think that when comedy started making cash, you collect cash. You have essentially a few options on what to do with this cash. Number one is acquisition, but you can only do so many acquisition. I maintain the company. I mean, some people muster that and I look at them and I admire them. I would be able to do that. But the majority of the companies didn't and the majority of acquisition fail. I think that's a path that some companies should pursue. Every company probably should pursue a little bit, but this is one thing you can do with your money. The other thing you can do with your money is do a buyback, which essentially is the same as give dividends. Then you balance your stock-based compensation. I think the third thing you can do with your money is invest into hiring more engineers, maybe. But then your Ibadagga destroyed. So at this point, you give a shift to stock market. I'm one of my neighbours as a public company CEO and he's honestly dude and he's one of the companies that have been hit. We haven't mentioned them, but he's honestly dude at this point. Can't do any worse, can I? I'm sure we can, but it's hard. I have a huge amount of respect for everybody who put money in wakes and both stocks and I don't understand that my job is to do my best to create a wonderful company. I have a bigger obligation right to my customers. That's not a big obligation that I have. I don't think they are one against the other. I think I should balance both. And then two for my employees, but I think that like there's no stock market you can talk to. It's millions of people with different opinions. I don't know how to take that into consideration. I don't know how to even listen to that. I am friends with many of these and-to-process company CEOs. We've mentioned some of them. And when I chat to them all of them, they're like, oh my god, my talent is leaving. And you know, their stocks is not worth what it was. And it's very different. Moral is down. How do you advise them on how to retain talent when you are in an environment as you are? I think it's a huge challenge. First of all, I often just get a magical solution. There's no magic here. Everybody going to lose talent. We are losing talent. Everybody lost talent. Everybody will lose talent. And I think a lot of time it's a healthy for a company. As long as you don't compromise on who you keep and you make sure that the people that you allow to stay, okay, are really great people. You're going to find you have a lot of talent that you never noticed before. Okay. And that's going to refresh a lot of the organization. So it's not about how do you prevent people from living. And it's more of a thing about how you make sure the organization keep being organization where the vast majority are top talents. And the fact that a lot of us just very, well, used to very spoiled by saying, well, you know, we have people here working for 15 years that are always top talent, nobody ever leaves because our stock is it, whatever. That kind of made us spoiled to the fact that that's not a natural thing. Now I do highly appreciate it. There's a lot of super smart people around me that I would be extremely sad if they leave and worried. But saying that, it's still, I mean, that we got a bit spoiled on that. And I think we need to remember that when we got those people, they didn't have 15 years of experience working on our problems and they became the reason that they are here later and they are super hardcore talent to begin with. And so we need to find a new generation actually bring a lot of those in. So I think that's for me the challenge. And saying all of that, just to be clear, I'm working extremely hard to keep the top talent in the company, right? But that's life. How many people are in Wix today? And how many are in base 44? So best 44 is around 400 people. Wow. Wix in total is about, including about 3500. And you have to remember, we have a lot of small businesses. We need to support them. 3,500. Yes. Well, no Jeff Bezos. What, I'm so sorry. What is 3,500 people? That, where's the majority of them and customer support in? That's the most important. That biggest department. Wow. Are you using AI? That must get taken to like zero pretty soon. Well, I don't think ever it would be zero. Not quite zero, but maybe 10. Well, 10 customer support, the ability to name. Yeah. Well, we have a, we're offering our services in the 192 countries. It's a bit tricky to speak for 10 people to do that. Hey, we just have to remember, it's a ticking scale of operation when it comes to that. Did you build your own customer support AI? Or do you use off-the-shelf providers? We're built on. It doesn't work. Average, this is what I don't get. You see all these hyped customer support companies and I'm going to get in trouble here, but I'm too old to give a shit to you. So who cares? And everyone who I speak to, whether it's AirWallix or Clona or Nevan or Wix, you build your own. We actually tried not to build on. We tried it. It tested many different things. It doesn't work. I didn't get this market. All right, to be fair, you know, we're looking at young companies that built AI agents, right? And they've proved something very quickly and hired a bunch of salespeople and trying to sell it. And then they're going to one of those companies mentioned where they have super smart engineers that are really focused on that. They have more engineers supporting their support, right? And all of the HR on those companies that are trying to sell them, okay? And better engineers than a lot of times. So yes, it's not so. I think in five years it's going to be different. It's going to be different in five years. Again, dude, I'm a freaking popcornster. No, I'm not sure. I like to be fair. I don't know. By the way, we tried. It didn't work. You tried again. It didn't work. We tried again. It didn't work. We kept working on our solution on the side. The template was like, okay, that's enough. In three years time, how big will the Wix team be then? Well, it's very hard to say, you know? I would love to say, well, Wix team, you know, three years will be a thousand people in best 44 and a thousand people in Wix and everything else would be AI agents. I'm not so sure it is possible. And then when you start looking at the details, it's not really doing that well for a lot of the things. It's amazing. It's incredible. It's super powerful, but and the bat is pretty big. You need to be more American, okay? All right. Right. But let me get it on board. It's going to change everything. Everyone's going to go up in and whatever. Well, I'm going to be one myself in the office. Me and my boss are going to play PlayStation. And this is-- Now you're like Sam Altman, dude. You sell the dream. It's much-- I've learned this. It's much easier in life to be Walt Disney. Tell me a story than it is Jerry McGuire show me the money. And the trouble with Israeli entrepreneurs, I find, is you're all like show me the money. You're generally not that excited. Well, you're very realistic. You're very direct. Well, I could tell you what I dream about here, but it's not about AI replacing my customer support. That's a nice thing to have. I think that we're going to be able to have a way for AI to do so with AI and with technology. Small businesses will be able to achieve so much more than they do today. That will be more efficient, grow faster, and way more profitable. And I mean, that is something that I'm sure will happen. So if you're an Iranian gym, all right, or your personal trainer, you'll ability to utilize AI to manage your business better, to sell additional products, and to reach out for new customers would be massively enhanced. And not in 10 years, not in five years, next year. And that would really have a massive effect on how you do things. It's a small business. But dude, is that not a little bit paradoxical? And you're like, it'll have a massive effect next year. Great, I'm a venture capitalist. That means massive revenue growth and my company's very fast, cool. But you just said AI is not that great, and it doesn't actually do that much, and like the questionability of values there. I don't know, I actually said, well, I it's really doing a lot of amazing things. But, and the bat is very big, OK? Because we all tend to-- how many times you go to church at the end? You said, I want to know what this thing in medicine is. Oh, I want to know what that is. Or what is the chance? And I can tell you, like, I needed to test something, and I wanted church at the end to write me the safety protocol. I actually used cloth, not church at the end. Sorry, I got six gates, OK? And you said, those are the gates. You have to make sure to test every one of them. So I started to ask why this one? And we started to analyze, and we worked on it from six, it became one. All of the other ones say, oh, okay, question. You know what? You really caught me here. I might have overstep-- move and emphasize that. And then it writes, well, I'm removing it from something you must test to something that you might need in the future to take a look at. And we all tend to do that, right? We all tend to do this massive trust into AI models. And I think that's one of the things where the bat is, OK? But when you take an AI model and make it work really well for something, it can be incredible. I'll give you an example. The most basic thing we all take for granted now, you can actually have a conversation with AI model, right? You can actually have-- talk to you on the phone, talk to you on your computer. We couldn't do that five years ago, four years ago. I actually did it. I did it when I drive. I can actually think I want to do it. I click on it, and I love the way it works in chat. So there's a big difference between if you take AI and try to do customer support for it, very complicated company, or to help you run your customers older, your schedule. And if you build the right skills, the right tools for it, then it can become super efficient. And it can also call your customer and talk to them and do things. So yes, you can have that massive extra layer. Do you find SMBs are excited or terrified by AI, both in the product and when you speak to them? There's a lot of skepticism. It's not always welcomed. Well, I didn't see that with SMBs, actually. I think that we see it more with everybody else. I think SMBs, when they wake up in the morning, they arrive so many issues of the running their business. So they really want something to help them run their business better. As opposed to, if I would be in the university starting today, I would be terrified. That's the truth of AI, because I like why I'm unlearning this would even exist in a year, OK? Do you want to hear something wild? To change the university curriculum in the UK, let's say, so forgive me. I'm sure it's pretty similar around the world, but it takes three years to change the material that goes on or goes through a yearly program. Three years to change it. Imagine the changes that happened in court. If you're doing computer science, it's pre-chatty BT almost. I think that, actually, I don't know how long it takes here, but it takes time. It's challenging, I think. So if you were genuinely advising at 22-year-old, imagine 20-year-old son of yours, and you've got a newborn, so just skip a few years, what would you say to him genuinely? Well, I would not be that concerned with LLAMS replacing every kind of a white color jobs. That's not going to happen. It's not that smart. It keeps making silly mistakes. It's not very good. Actually, it's not very good at reasoning. It's very good at collecting data and re-framing it. I would be less afraid of that. However, if we get another two or three jumps in algorithms, then we all become a bit like monkeys, right? The core question for me actually is that we're an ambassador in Nagora, which is an AI Legal Service. And the core question for me is, do we see the same rate of improvement in adjacent functions to coding that we saw in coding? Andre Kapati went from doing 20% of his coding work with coding tools to 80% in six months. Do we see that same jump in amount of legal work done by AI? I think it depends on a few things, right? And law might be a very good example for it, but I do believe that when it comes to laws, because laws a bit like code are mostly about textual context, and there's a tremendous amount, a huge amount, endless amount, way too much amount of legal written documents, right? And cases. And so I think that this is one of the perfect places for it to be useful. But every time I see a doctor trying to do research by using LLAMs, OK, I get horrified, because that's the wrong tool. It will probably read, we will answer you, what's up, it's read somewhere on Reddit, OK, that somebody wrote, and for the LLAMic perspective, it's equivalent to the best research done on nature, right? There's no difference. It holds them all in this giant thing that it is. I'll try to verify it somewhat. Most of the time it doesn't read the research, when it actually answers you, even if you use the highest level of it. So for legal stuff, I think that's really good. For a lot of other things, I really think that it's not the right algorithm. To buy that for the health, I'm just being honest here. I think open AI and chat GBT is a lot better than the majority of doctors at this point, actually. and on top of that, you know, health is now the second. biggest usage of chat GP. Well, I'm invested in a company called K Health, I don't know if you're familiar with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Alan. Yeah, Alan. And they've proven that they diagnosed better than most of them doctors. All right, that's not the same as doing research, right? No, it's very different to doing research. And for that, absolutely, having that if you have, because most of the time you go to a doctor, the diagnosis, you have a flu, go home and give you some pill when they tell you, you don't take the pill and you get healthy in five days and you would get healthy without a pill in five days. So nobody knows, you know, and so when it comes to the specific cases, yeah, I think that it makes sense that AI, when it comes to understanding the natural scenarios that you go through, then yes, absolutely. So legal, the legal system will have a lot of those, but there's no research in legal. Well, what is research? And but you do have research in medicine. I think when it comes to research, it's not a good tool. So it's a bit different. Do you think frontier models will really only be used for a very small use case or kind of small amount of use cases like science research, molecular biology, astrophysics, very, very difficult complex. I really cannot do those things. You can have the research on astrophysics with with the I'm they don't have the capacity for that. It's not what they do. You're going to, they might answer you, but they don't run the models simulation, the background. You want to have the simulation and background you have to move the deep, the deep minds, right? They do some of that, but not chatripy team. Find the like model providers. You don't think they will do that in three years time. Maybe, but then they have to connect different kind of worlds and different kind of architecture to their own names. It's not that trivial. I don't think it is, but I do think your isomorphic labs and your latent labs and your child discovery who specializes in very, very complex reasoning around. But that's not I agree, but that's not just then probably not just in a lame, unless they just try. No, I totally agree with that. Yes, 100%. So that's completely the most. Are you absolutely? Yes, you can. Obviously you do the protein folding, right? Deep mind did that. Amazing. Amazing achievement. Of course. You come across as quite chilled in a nice way, like composed, calm. Have you always been like that? No, I'm half Italian. I'm so happy with it, I know. Does money make you more chilled? Well, I think that is a loving wife. What makes you more chilled? Yeah, and it makes you more resilient. What does it take to have a success for marriage? I'll tell you a story about my wife, which is one of the things that I think this is where I understood it's something different. I came home and she looks at me and she was like, listen, I have a terrible mood. You did nothing wrong. I'm going to the room to relax. You go play PlayStation and I was like, well, what? You have a terrible mood and it's not my fault. And she's like, yeah, you did nothing. It's not you. I need to relax a bit. You go play PlayStation. I was like, oh my god. So I think that is the number one quality that I learned that for me, it works, right? So what's the number one quality distance? No, no, no, it's the fact that she is able to know that you don't load your emotion on somebody else. And for cement, the number one thing you have to learn is to say, yes, I agree. Whatever. It doesn't matter what happened. Yes, you're right. How did making money change you as a leader? So I have a theory and the reason for this is I think richer investors and richer founders make better decisions. You're not operating from fear. You're not operating from losing homes, losing school fees, losing core pillars of life. I actually make much more rational decisions now. I'm not doing it for the money wholly. I tend to agree. I think that you know, overall, when you're less afraid of things, you're more original. But you're also a bit more lazy, right? I think a really interesting question is, what does no one tell you about making money that you wish someone had told you? The way I look at it, okay, and that's my personal opinion is that money gives you one thing beyond everything else. And that's freedom, okay? Freedom from fear that you want to have food tomorrow. And then freedom also to know that you are here because you've chosen to be here because I can always, and you can always say, you know what? I want to be in Costa Rica on the beach. I want to be in Brazil, you know, dancing the carnival. Or I can change completely what I'm doing and you have the ability to do it. You don't have to wake up every day in the morning, go to work, work, that you don't like, and be just to maintain any food. I mean, that is the number one value you get from having enough money or a lot of money. Is that freedom and that knowledge that I'm here because I've chosen to be here. There's no other reason except that. And I think that's for me at least, is freedom to understand that if I'm here, I need to be fully committed to what I'm doing because I've chosen to be here. Nobody made me. There's nobody, no reason except me choosing to be the CEO of Wix, either stock crushing like that. See, I don't think happening. You know, all those things, I've chosen to be the middle of that. And that's, I think, is tremendously amount of power. What would you say to someone who wants to build resilience for a shit storm that's about to come? Like you said that, dude, I mean, the pressure, the fucking headlines, the stock crashing, this, this, it's just like, hit, hit, hit. What would you advise me or someone listening? He wants to learn how to be resilient for the hits that are going to come. I think that the first thing to accept is that it will happen because we tend to think that, you know, if yesterday was easy, that day before that was easy, then tomorrow would be easy. That's not how life works, right? You never know when the next time's coming from. You never know COVID arrives. You never know, you know, war arrives. Or you never know when the stock market crashed. You never know. And it will happen. For sure, 100%. And it will happen. We tend to believe, you know, reality is going like like this. If you're here, it's going to go slowly up, it's going to go slowly down, but it doesn't. It goes in an extreme speed at some places, right? So it will go like this and then boom, and then boom. And this is how reality is. The worst thing that happened is probably going to some random thing that happened on some random Wednesday. It's not something that you get a lot of warning for. In these sense, I think AI is the exception because it was an extreme thing that we've seen happening in slow motion, right? It took a few years. It didn't happen. Boom. The first thing is to accept that. It will happen. And the second thing, and this is something I remember from Babylon 5, the remember that TV series? Yeah. And there was this time of flying to this conflict somewhere and then the lady on the captain on that ship was very nervous and the guy that thought, "Why are you nervous?" And she's like, "You know, we're going there. I want to make sure I said listen, we're going to get there when we get there." And the weapons that we have are the weapons that we have. And this is the most you can do. So you just have to think about it, that this is how it is. And this actually run in my mind. It's not very smart. I know not like a very inspiring sentence, but for me, it's like, "Am I doing the best that I can?" Right? That's a huge question, right? And I always try to make sure that my answer for that is yes. Everything else is, "What can I control? I cannot control more than what I can." So I try to do the best with what I can control. I know it's not a deep answer, but I think there is a deep answer here. The big question is, "Are you doing the best that you can in this situation that you are in?" And if you are able to be honest with yourself and say, "I think I am." Then that's a lot of the pressure going away. The other thing is that I believe in meditation, I believe in normal and linguistic programming, and it'll pee, and I did a lot of those, and that's really helpful. I totally ate one of the things I always think to as a man who says to me, "You're never wrong to do the right thing." And the right thing is often the hard thing. Oh, I agree with that 100%. Then the last thing I always remind myself is that, go around and see how people, right? A lot of the places in there are not necessarily correlated with how much money they have or where they are or whatever. So I always remind myself, the happiest people I ever seen on the planet are in Brazil. I can always move to Brazil. Are you surprised? It's not England. Obviously, after 5pm people in England become more happy, but they would go to the pub, right? Did you have been to England in a while? We go to the pub at 3pm. Two hours more happy. Yeah, yeah. Finland is actually the happiest country in the world, which is astonishing to me when you look at the hours of light in Finland, but they are. I'm guessing the one who wrote that never been to Brazil. But for me, that's my experience. So I always say, "What's the saying?" I can actually, all of these things might have to some degree. And then of the day, I can always go to Brazil. Do you find it difficult to contact switching your relationship? My biggest problem now in my relationship is like, I come home and I'm stressed. I've been bashed all day by whatever's happening. And then you come home and it's like, they want to talk about life. And just like, normal things. And you're like, you're still in your zone. Do you struggle with that? I used to, I used to, it was horrible. That was very hard for me. Now, it's very, very hard for me. I remember that. I would come home and I have these massive list of things in my mind. And then I would be either not patient for my partner or not really attentive or whatever. And that would be, it was very hard for me. I learned with time, which I got older, that I stop most of it now. And then I'll do it later, the thinking. And that's why I go to step at five, right? You time-bound your thinking and it allows you to turn off for the time being with your wife. Yes. So I'm just going that and then I'm turning it back on. And at some time, I write myself things that they need to think about in two hours. That's perfection because I cannot do that at all. Final one and then we'll do a quick fire. I care very much about being a great parent. I don't have kids yet, but I very much want to. You do have kids. And you're a public company CEO and under a fuckload of pressure. That's just be honest. What advice would you have for me on how to be the best father that I can be? Well, kids don't care so much for the amount of time that you're with them as much as they care for the quality in that time. So if you find yourself, and give yourself, let's say, oh, no, I can be with them for a few hours every day or a few days, okay? Make sure that you are there and happy when you're there and may find with them when you're there and not when and not coming there because you're first and then you're on your phone and then you're finding with everybody. Remember, it's more about how you're there than how often you're there. or how long you're there. - 'Cause back to what we said about being like, "Present not stuck in your own head." - Is it to say, I'm not sure it's easy to do, but yes. - Impossible to do. It's like the tying happiness to stock price. I honestly, I remember entering Vlad from Robinhood, okay? And I interviewed him when it was worth like 20 billion and interviewed him when it was worth 120 billion. I can tell you, he was legitimately six times happier when it was worth 120 billion compared when it was 20. It was a different fucking person. - He looked different. He sounded different. He was different. - Why? - I got it. Okay, we're gonna do a quick fire. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? - Actually, I beat on the eye. I'll say like that. I was very concerned. Very concerned, but how quickly we're gonna find humans being in a place, be the eye. And I think I'm now looking at the same thing. I think it's gonna take much longer than I anticipated. - Why? - Because you know, I remember that. You know, a year ago, we would hear a lot more speaking about is wedding for AGI because AGI can have a conversation with it about how to solve big problem in physics and how to do a lot of things and everything. And how everybody's talking about, well, you know, we kind of achieve AGI, but it still cannot do those big questions, right? So we kind of changed the definition to fit something that doesn't do the critical things. And the more I know about the eye, the more I see the front you more, the more I see things. I think that tremendous, as I said, but I don't think they're gonna replace us that quickly. - I think you're being 49. So I had a picture of me and my mother on the beach from the whole day last week. And I said, like, remove the people from the background to let Gemini, dude, they changed my mother's face. They put a different woman in there. How is I? (laughing) - I mean, solving that might have been faster than you think. - Which competitor do you most respect? And why them? - So it's not direct. I think that the one company that I really appreciate, Figma, I think they're brilliant product, understanding of their market. And when I look at it, I'm just like, I really admire some of the thing the quality they can bring into that. So I really like them. Like really intense of not just respect, it's almost admiration and some of the thing you can do. People are almost religious about Figma, right? I know very little product that I like that. My designers, they love it, they go crazy about it. They'll do their grow series list on Figma, okay? They'll do everything they can on Figma, just because they love using it so much. And that takes massive skill from Figma to do it. - What's your single biggest concern today? - I'd say the same, I've been in that execution. I think we have good plans and good ideas. And I think the biggest challenge is always from the execution. - How do you get the team to be super efficient? How do you get them to be more ambitious? I think that it's to go for a bigger goal, I think those kind of things. - You said that base 44 is 400 people today. How many people is it in two years' time? - All right, it doesn't want to the thing that it's very hard to predict because it depends how well AI does and how many moles they've got. I mean, you'd believe it in base 44, okay? I mean, you'd believe it in base 44. You'd believe it in what weeks does. I hope that base 44 and I see the way it scales. I would imagine probably 800 to 1000. And the majority of them would actually be engineers. So I'm saying that is another thing. - Final one for you, my friend. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? - I think there's a lot of really kind things that people did for me. And when I started, I see how often people that were way ahead of me in this business, right? With tech time to sit with me and to talk to me about things that mistakes they made and to give me advice and fit with me about other things. And then that's extremely kind because this is not about giving you money, it's about giving you the most precious currency those people had, right? Which is time. And when I see that, I think, and advice, it's amazing that they did. - 12 months time, he'll have a higher market cap, your Monday. - It's kind of like asking me to compete between which kind of money I like more? - You're eldest. (laughing) - And so my eldest weeks, right? But you know, I've been lucky to be involved in a few amazing products, right? Wakes, Monday and the base 44. And I mean, I got this very opportunity to see that happening, to see this thing happening three times. And I think that's an amazing experience. And I do believe that all three companies, all three products, right? They've tremendous market potential and potential to be helpful for many different people. And so hard for me to choose. I think you're running a really incredible CEO. It's probably better than me. So maybe I'll bet on them or me. No, actually, but then more is a great CEO. It's very complicated. - Aversha, it's been fantastic to have you on the show. - Thank you so much for being so open for being so wise in your love, family, parental CEO advice. It's been fantastic, man. - No, cheers, man. - Thank you so much for having me. Love what you're doing. (bells chiming) - But before we leave you today, founders face a different set of challenges at every stage of growth. For Sid's Shate, co-founder and CEO of D Matrix, JP Morgan delivered the guidance and expertise to help navigate what came next. 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