← All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Former Intel CEO on What Went Wrong, What's Next + Lovable CEO on the Real Promise of Vibe Coding
00:49:44
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- [00:00]
Jason
Spent a long time at intel, only 34 years. 34 years. Probably one of the greatest American companies ever. And then absolutely went off the rails and got absolutely demolished by Nvidia, TSMC and I guess Apple to a certain extent. So you had this incredible intel inside moment. We bought our computers based on, hey, the Pentium and that sound.
- [00:33]
Pat
Intel inside, baby.
- [00:35]
Host/Interviewer
Intel inside.
- [00:37]
Jason
And so let's talk about how things went wrong, what went right and then how did it. And you were there for a long time, you took a break and then you came back. But there seemed to have been some critical mistakes that we can learn from. So let's just embrace it and go right into it. Tremendous success as an American company coming back now, I think reasonably. But when we look back on it and we do our post mortem, what
- [01:06]
Host/Interviewer
were the mistakes and what would we
- [01:08]
Jason
change in terms of the direction of that company?
- [01:13]
Airwallocks Representative
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- [01:41]
Pat
Having spent so much of my life there, you know, I view it. I joined when I was 18. I went through puberty at Intel. Right. I joke. Right. You know, just like, you know, I am so early. Grove Noyce Bear Barrett. Right. And you know, they were the people I grew up at. Right. You know, so on. They were my mentors, they were the people I adored for and they were deeply technical.
- [02:08]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Andy Grove.
- [02:09]
Pat
Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, you know, co inventor. You know, these were deeply technical leaders. I remember when I joined the executive staff for the first time, there was, you know, probably 15 of the 20 people that were in the room were PhDs. Right. You know, it was just that technical. And you know, I view one of the things that went off the rail was when it started to be run by business people.
- [02:32]
Jason
Yeah.
- [02:32]
Pat
Opposed to technical.
- [02:33]
Jason
The bean counters, the finance people.
- [02:35]
Pat
Yeah. And you know, when I became CEO in 2001, that was the first technical leader in essentially 15 years. Right. You know, associated with it, you know, and if you have a business leader who does he promote business leaders and you know. Right. You know, so I think one of the fundamental things is, and you know, as you look at the great technology companies today. You know, they're deeply technical and founder led, typically, you know, and even if they're not, you know, Satya is not a founder. No, right. You know, Sundar is not a founder as well, but they're deeply technical individuals. And when you're making these hardcore technical, you know, decisions that affect billions of dollars and you don't do that through a spreadsheet, that's a lousy investment.
- [03:20]
Jason
Right.
- [03:21]
Pat
Unless the technology trends make it the right investment. And I think that's one of the fundamental things. And obviously, you know, in the five years, five, six years before I came back, you know, intel gave $100 billion to shareholders.
- [03:36]
Jason
Oh, the dividends and my stock buybacks.
- [03:40]
Pat
100. What I wouldn't have done for another hundred billion dollars on the.
- [03:47]
Jason
Well, I mean, what would you have done? You probably would have made, well, I. Chips for iPhone. Which intel passed on.
- [03:53]
Pat
Yeah, yeah. You know, but you know, it hadn't built a new factory in a decade when I got there. It's like, you know, how can you not be building, how could you not buy EUV machines? You know, there's just all of these things, you know, that you would only do as a technologist because the economics behind them by themselves were not good. So it's getting back to the core of technology. To me, that was the fundamental thing. You make good decisions, you make bad decisions as leaders. Every business does that as they go along. But fundamentally this is a technology business and you need technologists running technology that then hires technologists that are sitting at the staff, that then hire the best technologists and take big swings at, you
- [04:41]
Jason
know, categories that could matter in the future, like skating to where the puck's going. If you look at Apple, they did the same thing for the past 15 years, buying back the stock, tremendous amount of dividends. They're the largest holder of capital of any company, I believe, to this date. And what companies do they buy? They buy little tiny acquisitions on the margins. I think the largest ones was Beats because they wanted to get inroads into, you know, certain demographic segments like in the Android space that they couldn't get into. But my God, what a colossal waste of time. Like you said, they could have done so many amazing things. Tell me about Steve Jobs in 2008, 2009, deciding I think we're going to make our own silicon. And that impact because was that a covert product project? Did you guys know he was doing that? Did he inform you? Well, that seemed to be another one of those forks in the road.
- [05:33]
Pat
Yeah, yeah. Steve was an incredible leader. He was also a ruthless leader, very difficult. Read Walter Isaacson's book on him as well. I had many, many conversations with Steve over the years for it. But when they moved to intel in the Centrino chip, it was a big deal and they were putting extraordinary demands on Intel. Make the chip smaller, drive lower power, they're demanding customer. And when he was no longer convinced that we could continue to do that, he started the project. Right. And if you remember, was it P semi. They acquired some small companies, started to build some competency, but they did a few little chips internally. It wasn't a big deal. And then the little chips got a little bit bigger and Steve was a master of this, just starting these small efforts to build core competence inside the company. I remember when we had the first conversation with Steve about porting the operating system to the intel chip from the power chip that they were running on before they moved to Intel. And we were quite proud of the silicon software competencies that we had in compilers and operating systems. So Steve, we'll help you port the operating system to the X86. And I remember that Steve said, I've been working on that for the last four releases. He had been preparing the core technologies inside of Apple for something that might happen in the future. You know, and he was already, you know, to me, I just remember, I was just shocked. You know, I've ported the last four releases to the X86. I think we got this. Yeah, right. You know, it was that kind of thing. And that's how they got into the semiconductor, you know, doing their own semiconductor. I'm not sure I can rely on intel to be that much ahead of the industry. And I can start optimizing the system design with the silicon design as opposed to relying on one that's been somewhat optimized for a Windows environment versus an iOS environment, you know, in their operating system. And you know, it was just, you know, you know, it was never that kind of thing that he sort of said, you know, you failed as a supplier. No, I can supply myself better.
- [07:56]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [07:57]
Jason
And Jensen decides, hey, he's going to go all into making these video cards and talk about just incredible serendipity that these happen to be also very applicable for cryptocurrency and running these AI jobs. Was that luck or skill or combination of both there?
- [08:21]
Pat
Well, you know, when you think about that progression, you know, Jensen, he was just building high performance computers, you know, throughput machines, you know, when we were at the height of our strength on CPUs at Intel, we sort of scoffed at his machines. Yeah, right. So I was a graphic machine, you know, you know, there's some gamers who want to use that kind of stuff, Right. It was always the big CPU and those little GPUs. But when they started to build a real software stack.
- [08:49]
Airwallocks Representative
Yes.
- [08:50]
Pat
With it. Right. You know, sort of, okay, this CUDA thing and SMT as a technology, you know, multi threading and so on, and it just sort of kept getting a little bit better and a little bit better and it was a little bit jobs, like in that way, you know, we're just making it better every release and it's becoming more robust. And all of a sudden, you know, the crazy, you know, Japanese HPC guys said, hey, we could take those graphics cards and maybe start using them in hp. And that was sort of defining moment where it wasn't just about doing graphics anymore. This was a more computationally dense platform to start attacking some of the world's most interesting workloads. And I think Jensen would agree that was a defining moment in them. Sort of saying, oh, these aren't just graphics cards anymore. These are general purpose computing devices that can start applying to these other workloads. And you know, I was, you know, had gone through what, its fifth nuclear winter by that point, where it was like, man, you know, you know, this is never going to matter, right. We're never going to, you know, get the breakthroughs. But the community around it was continuing to develop, you know, for it. And the CUDA software kept getting better generation by generation. And, you know, I had a project at Intel, Larrabee, right, where we were trying to take the X86 and essentially do the same thing.
- [10:14]
Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [10:14]
Pat
You know, for 10, you know, in my first departure from intel, the project was killed a week after I left. And the world would have been so much different. Right.
- [10:24]
Jason
I mean, it really, I think it's illustrative. Illustrative of what? Continuous innovation, taking some risks and doing that fundamental research and the compounding power of technology. Because I think it was William Gibson who said the street finds its own use for technology like Nvidia did not predict that this Bitcoin project would take over and that this would be the best way to do those computations. Nor did they anticipate, I think, you know, that AI would take off, but
- [10:55]
Host/Interviewer
because it was the best solution, the
- [10:57]
Jason
hacker community could kind of figure that out. Well, as we wrap on the intel portion of your career, okay, Apple, Silicon, that's one. And then you have Nvidia and then you have this Taiwanese company that starts making, you know, really great at fabricating these chips. And intel missed that as well. Yeah. And maybe you talk a little bit about TSMC and they're surging and we can even get into a little bit of the politics of it now. And then we'll get into some of these AI chips and venture investing.
- [11:32]
Pat
You know, the thing with TSMC was they started with a vision of foundry, right. You know, they were going to become the factory for the industry. And again, these factories are so expensive, 20 billion, 30 billion, and the engineering and the continuous investment required to do it. And it was a stunning vision. At that point in time, intel was idm, as we called it, the integrated design and manufacturing. We never worked to make our process and our factories available for third parties, right? It was always this thing, hey, we do enough CPUs ourself, we reuse it for chipsets and some of the other things that we're doing. But it was never standardized in a way that it could be made available for a broad ecosystem using PDKs and all the design tools. We did a lot of our own EDA tools ourself. You know, one of the projects that I started early in my career was the foundations of eda, right. As well. The first place in route, you know, the first standard cells, the first high level description language, you know, it was so proprietary. And TSMC basically cut that in half and says, I don't care whose chip it is, I don't care what you're designing, I'll be your manufacturing partner. And at the time that was such a trivial piece of the business. Intel didn't even care, right? So on. And then over steady progress over a long period of time and Apple as a customer, driving them to be good, become really meaningful. Obviously the world changed. And when I came back to intel in 2001, TSMC was producing 5x the wafers of Intel.
- [13:18]
Host/Interviewer
Wow.
- [13:19]
Pat
Right? Not 10% more 5x. And all of a sudden that model of Foundry became the model of the semiconductor industry. With two exceptions, intel and memory. You know, memory Di's design and manufacture, right. For, you know, that is uniquely different. And obviously, you know, we're seeing them, you know, $3 trillion memory companies, just extraordinary, you know, and you know, trillion dollar foundry company in tsmc, you know, the industry has said I want a lot of wafers, I want a lot of innovation of different designs, I have a layer of standardization and EDA tools. And the world changed. And obviously as I came back To Intel. That was one of the core thesis of the new strategy. Yeah, we must become a foundry as well. Five to one. And now it's more like seven to one in terms of wafers, you know, to tsmc, to Intel.
- [14:11]
Jason
Are we going to be able to onshore that Obviously we had the CHIPS act and just give us broad strokes what you think is going to happen here in terms of obviously Taiwan is in play. Some people in the administration believe it's going to happen the year after Trump's out unless he takes his third term. Other people believe, like it was going to happen as early as 27 or maybe going into 28. So are we going to be able to replicate that here in America in a reasonable amount of time? Or is this like, truly could be a cataclysmic event if, you know, God forbid, China decides, hey, we're going to blockade Taiwan. And the Taiwanese decide, yeah, we're going to burn the fabs and we're going to fly out all of the engineers and ship them to America.
- [15:01]
Pat
Well, there's a lot in that question. Do we have an hour to talk about this question?
- [15:05]
Host/Interviewer
Well, I mean, we have six minutes, but.
- [15:07]
Pat
Oh, okay.
- [15:08]
Jason
Yeah, do the best you can.
- [15:09]
Pat
Okay.
- [15:11]
Host/Interviewer
I want to talk also about the AI bubble.
- [15:13]
Pat
So super three things about this super quick. One is the CHIPS act is having benefit. Yeah, right. You know, when we started the chips act and you know, when 2001, when I came back, the US was building about 12% of leading edge. Today that number is more like 18%.
- [15:29]
Jason
Okay.
- [15:30]
Pat
You know, we're making progress. It's not 50%. We have a long way to go. Right. You know, intel is starting to be a real foundry. Okay, that's real progress. And TSMC factories are up and operating at scale. Right. We have Samsung and you know, as well. But you know, I'd say the intel and the TSMC progress, okay, that's meaningful. Now let's make it ugly for a second. The island of Taiwan has less than three weeks. A big article in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago on this. Less than three weeks of energy reserves. Wow. Okay. That should just put a chill in everybody's spine. Right? Because the blockade, after three weeks, the island browns out. When you turn off a fab, it doesn't come back on for 90 days. Right. The economic impact of a brownout of Taiwan is greater than the Great Depression in the world. Never do you need to do anything. A shot to be fired. You just need to say, great, no energy for three weeks.
- [16:34]
Jason
No oil.
- [16:34]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yes.
- [16:35]
Pat
Right. No, lng. Right. That's how the island run. That is scary to me. We need more resilient supply chains associated with it. And I don't think this is an alternative for the world because if it really does become a risk, you know, and I'm, you know, I, you know, I don't sit in the situation room and get all the data and so on, but let's remind each other that I think China has blockaded the Taiwan Straits seven times over the last four years.
- [17:02]
Jason
Yeah.
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Pat
This isn't a theory.
- [17:04]
Jason
No, no. They're running exercises. They're being pernicious and.
- [17:08]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Right.
- [17:09]
Jason
Pretty provocative in terms of.
- [17:10]
Pat
Is that 2027? Is that 2030, is that 2035? Their intentions have been clear over a sustained period of time. We need more resilient supply chains for it. So something I put a lot of my time and energy into. And we're making progress, but we need to go faster, need to go more meaningful.
- [17:28]
Jason
Yeah. And let's talk a little bit about the AI build out. I mean, you watched the PC revolution, servers, the Internet. These were all extraordinary build outs. And then this is the build out to end all build outs. The amount of data centers, the amount of chips, the amount of inference needed. Do you think it's a bubble? I think I've heard you say, like it's, it's obviously a bubble, but what's the risk factor here? That we build too much or that the technology doesn't solve enough problems and we are swimming in tokens. What worries you about what you're seeing now? The valuations of these companies has gotten quite extraordinary. And, you know, if they build too much and they spend too much money and they don't make enough money. Well, based on your experience with running a company, a public one, that's a lot of tension on it. When you don't make as much money as you're spending, people tend to fall out of love with these stocks.
- [18:27]
Pat
Yeah, well, I do think they're, you know, there is a silver lining here that guarantees we don't get too far ahead of ourself in terms of bubble. And that is energy capacity.
- [18:41]
Airwallocks Representative
Right, right.
- [18:42]
Pat
You know, energy capacity in the world is expanding 4, 5%. You know, in the U.S. we had a decade at 1%. Right. You know, I mean, it was just hideous what we did to our energy grid, you know, over about a decade and a half. But now that's getting built out. But essentially nobody's going to build and buy GPUs and build data centers if they don't have energy. So essentially you have an upper bound on how aggressive and how hyped and bubbled that we get. So I take a lot of solace in that for it. Because what then is the incremental value of a token? And if it's a measure of intelligence, it's somewhat infinite in the sense if I have more intelligence, I will do better supply chain, I will do better finance, I will do more efficient logistics, all of those things. So to me, the potential value that we unleash in a token economic world is somewhat infinite. Right. And particularly with labor shortages and so on that we see. Right. In developed countries. I am an optimist that we are in a couple of decade build out.
- [19:50]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Wow.
- [19:51]
Pat
Right? Not a couple of years, a couple of decades. One of the big objectives I've said is that I have to make AI 10,000x better. Right. You know, it's way too expensive today. You know, we want to drop, you know, by five orders of magnitude the cost per token, you know, the energy, you know, per token, so that we really do have Jevons Law, that we just explode the access to AI Right. In much more economic ways.
- [20:17]
Jason
Which it does seem like Jevons paradox has been at play over the last year. Like, oh my Lord, these tokens are so cheap and the tools are getting so good. Yeah, I'm just going to start using these tools all day long until the bill comes in and you're like, okay, yeah, maybe I need to get some ROI out of this. But you do have these incredible companies, Cerebras, Rock, et cetera, making inference D
- [20:38]
Pat
matrix, silicon and so on. And if we accomplish these orders of magnitude, improving in token economics, availability, reduction in energy costs associated with it, we just have a fantastic couple of decades in front of us. There has not been a time in human history where it's been better to be a technologist than the one we're in right now. We will solve chemistry, we will solve language, we will invent new materials, new forms of interaction, killing cancer, lifting people out of poverty. There is not a better time to be alive than the one that we're in right now. And as technologists, we get to sit in the driver's seat of it.
- [21:21]
Jason
Pretty amazing. And you're investing and that's your passion. Now, what do you think of these valuations? It's quite seems, you know, if you live through the dot com bubble, we did see a disconnect there. These companies, slightly different. We just had 11 labs up 600 million in revenue.
- [21:40]
Host/Interviewer
Lovable.
- [21:41]
Jason
I think they're at 5 or 600 million. So that's quite different than the dot com speculation.
- [21:45]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:46]
Pat
Well, fundamentally we have real revenues, you know, real margins coming out of these businesses as well. You know, that said, anytime the multiples get too high, okay, some corrections, you know, and to me, periodic corrections that keep the multiple, you know, earnings multiples and, you know, so on, in reasonable things is good because this will not be a smooth curve. You know, I'm predicting two decades of goodness and there's going to be lots of disruptions along the way. It's not going to be a smooth curve. And every time we have one of those corrections, say thank you. Right. We're not letting the bubble get ahead of itself. Right. You know, hey, we have the SAS apocalypse. There's going to be other apocalypses on that journey when, when industries get impacted by the capabilities that will be unleashed. And that's even before it gets exciting. And what I call the trinity of computing, classical computing, AI computing and quantum computing. And when those three come together, okay, that's what things get really exciting.
- [22:41]
Jason
Quantum's been about five years away for 25 years. When is it actually going to do anything?
- [22:48]
Pat
This decade.
- [22:50]
Jason
This decade. So by 2030. Yep, it'll be meaningful. What should we expect in terms of its impact in 2030?
- [22:57]
Pat
Like, you know, you're going to be able to start doing things that cannot be computed today. You know, chemistry, you know, biology. There will be things that can't be computed today. You know, some of the easy things will be some of, like the logistics where I will compute the best answer to get this thing to you. Right.
- [23:14]
Jason
Traveling salesman problem.
- [23:15]
Pat
Right. You know, all of a sudden all of those problems. Obviously it's probably going to be, you know, 20, 20, 2032, 2033 when we solve, you know, things like encryption. Right. You know, where, you know, you'll have the fundamental Q day, you know, kind of implications. But this decade we will see quantum supremacy results across multiple industries. You know, we know how to build qubits, we know how to error correct qubits. We now have algorithmics, right, against quantum. And, you know, now it's just about engineering scale.
- [23:46]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Who's going to win.
- [23:48]
Pat
Well, obviously I'm a psi quantum guy, right, since that's one of our portfolio companies. But the thing that you're seeing is that you now have like 4, 5, 6 modalities of quantum that are demonstrating pretty good results, right. You know, across trapped ions, across, you know, photonic approaches, spin approaches. So you now say modality is not an issue. Error correction's been proven across them and, you know, I think the race will be on. And my prediction is meaningful results before 2030. Wow.
- [24:21]
Jason
You realize that's about 40 months from now. Yeah. Okay. Meaningful results. Thanks so much, Pat, for sharing all
- [24:27]
Host/Interviewer
this incredible information and knowledge. Great to see you.
- [24:30]
Pat
Very good.
- [24:31]
Host/Interviewer
I'm going all in.
- [24:34]
Airwallocks Representative
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- [24:38]
Jason
The hallway sink.
- [24:39]
Airwallocks Representative
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- [25:01]
Host/Interviewer
Osika is one of my favorite founders. He's the founder of Lovable. Why do I love this founder? Well, he's built a product that people are addicted to, primarily Anton, the people who work for me. And I love talking to you because as the founder you have at North Star, you're incredibly laser focused on enabling anyone to build great software. Yeah, it's the mission of the company. I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially that's the
- [25:29]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
mission of Lovable Mission. I talk about empowering humans.
- [25:33]
Host/Interviewer
Empowering humans.
- [25:33]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
And the first gap is to build a product. The second gap is to build a business around the products.
- [25:39]
Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [25:39]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
And now everyone at Lovable, we're working on both of these two gaps. The first one, we've gotten very far. We're seeing a million new projects built every single week on the platform.
- [25:49]
Host/Interviewer
Incredible.
- [25:50]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
And on the second one, we're investing a lot in making it easier to run your business and to get people to care, people to discover what you build and the entire business of whatever you're doing as a small business, as if you're a large business. We're also getting a lot of traction and we're actually seeing as a proof of that more than 700 million visits to the applications every month. So every month there's extreme growth in the surface area of the entire more than 50 million apps built on the platform today.
- [26:24]
Host/Interviewer
How many years has Lovable been in market or how many months now?
- [26:28]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
20 months.
- [26:29]
Host/Interviewer
20 months.
- [26:31]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
And again, we're seeing people who are first time founders, we're seeing enterprise leaders move much faster together with their teams on this platform that has a lot of opinionated pieces in how you should create software and how to operate that software and how the different applications in your company connect to each other over time. So that's why we're seeing so much growth also on the enterprise side, which were we actually growing fastest right now?
- [26:58]
Host/Interviewer
This is really interesting because 10 years ago people were doing WYSIWYG software. What was the name for it before? Vive Code? No code. Low code. Yes. And when I saw that 10 years ago in my incubator, every 20th company somebody would come in who was an MBA or not a developer and they had Vibe coded something and not Vibe coded, they had no coded and they were using these different software platforms and the software didn't look good, it didn't work perfectly well, it was slow. But the promise was there. And I guess it took LLMs and this new intelligence to make actually good software. So maybe you could talk a little bit about who is the customer because developers. Do developers use Lovable or is it the other 95% of society that are your customers? How do you think about who your ideal customer profile is?
- [28:00]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
We're seeing people use Lovable both with a technical background. About 20% are technical or some type of engineer and they love that. We're quite opinionated. We put all the best practices into how the software is architected and we make it seamless to with one prompt, get payments set up in a very secure way and do things like run security scans after every change. Even now in the background monitoring the projects. So it's actually quite appreciated by the engineers and the technical community also because it's a great bridge from the non technical people, which is 4 out of 5 are non technical and they're building often first to figure out what is the right thing to build, which is where Lovable has always been exceptionally good. And now what we're seeing is that people are running businesses making more than million dollars of revenue on this platform. So we're building for everyone. It's this entire spectrum. And what's exciting to see is often that if someone who discovers Lovable from their colleagues at a large company, they go out and then run a side hustle. And some of those side hustles really work. They make hundreds of thousands of dollars and. And then they become a founder after that. So there's this cross pollination from both.
- [29:17]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, and this is like the really interesting thing about Vibe coding. If we were sitting here last year, people would look at it and say it's a great way to make a mock up like you said, a great way to think about product and maybe create wireframes or a workable prototype. All of that's out the window now. The whole concept of building wireframes and building a mock up, well, you can just go right to building the product in a day or two days. And what people I think don't appreciate about what you're doing at Lovable is after you've made a product that you're proud of and that has some product market fit, there are many more steps that are required. You mentioned payments, you mentioned security, making sure that the data isn't lost or that it's not leaked. That's changed dramatically over the last 12 months.
- [30:09]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah, very much so. I would say many engineers, they don't look at the code, they don't write code anymore. And that means that you don't need to be an engineer to create software. But the thing that Lovable does for anyone also the non technical people, is that it creates a structure for the architecture of the software that you build and it makes sure that you don't go off a cliff and that things like setting up payments, emails, things like getting discovered by other AI chat engines and by Google Search, those things are taken care of. You don't have to know how all these things work in the details. You can trust the platform to take care of data security, connecting to other tools that you might be using in a secure way. And that's really where us being opinionated from day one and being focused on making this for the 99%, it's a vast market right from day one is what made us very successful.
- [31:12]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, and I can tell you internally, I gave my team all the different tools they could possibly want to use and somebody had started with Lovable. I think I told you this story when you were on this week in startups a year ago like and they made some interesting websites and they were trying to make an intranet, they couldn't quite get it done. Then I had some people who started using Cursor or Claude code, they started Vibe coding stuff but they couldn't finish the product. And then people tried to solve some problems with cowork. I really like Perplexity Computer and then my team came to me and for one of our projects I was talking to you about Foundry University, our pre accelerator, they wanted to make it intranet. Now this is something I would have never okayed because it would have cost $500,000 ten years ago to make it and we don't have that kind of budget. You know, we would rather put that towards the founders in the program and getting more people into the program. And in four to eight hours they made the whole intranet and they made a bunch of Things I hadn't asked for. And it was the person running this founder university who made it. And she did it on her own, without permission. In Lovable. I said, whoa, how did you build this? She said, lovable. I was like, oh, we still have lovable. And they're like. She's like, I just put it on my corporate card. To your point, she made it. Now, that software is driving the program. And the reason people do the
- [32:49]
Jason
program
- [32:49]
Host/Interviewer
in their country, we have it in Saudi and in Japan, is because it has economic impact. So I said, hey, I have an idea. Can you make for me an economic impact of the 50 companies that are in the program? She asked Lovable to do it. I gave her some prompting. Human prompting, boss. Now, it has the economic impact in there. And it considered, with our prompting, well, how many people work at each company? What are they paying taxes? How much do they rent their home for? What is their average salary? And it built something that I would have never been able to afford to build. And lovable is 50 bucks a month, I think. I don't know how much you charge, but it's far too little. Like $50 a month, I think.
- [33:33]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah, that's if you're on a business plan. It starts at 25.
- [33:38]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah. So the economic impact of what you're building is. I would equate for what you built to us. It would have cost me $500,000 two years ago. It was built in four hours by an employee, which, if you just put employees at 50, 60, whatever, $70, plus the cost of your software got made for less than $2,000 in a year. It's extraordinary.
- [34:03]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
I'd love to hear more about the progress of the Internet. Anything that you ask for that you want to forward directed to me.
- [34:11]
Host/Interviewer
Well, right now, my concern was security and making sure that data didn't leak. And they talked to your team and they went through it, and it's secure, so we feel good about it.
- [34:23]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Look, I'm now asking people who do penetration testing to say, I want you to compare all the tools and make sure that there's all the work that we're doing that's not visible. On security and trust, there's a lot of things where we invest and spend money on that. Also free users get a lot of security scanning running in the background. That that actually translates to something that security experts can see.
- [34:54]
Host/Interviewer
A year ago, we were at mockups. Now we're at functionality and secure and super viable for deployment. Where will you be in a year?
- [35:04]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah, so what we're Seeing is that there's a gap in being able to build the product right. And you built an entire intranet on the platform. That's great. What we've done since then is to have a new product line, basically the hosting part, which is both the AI and all the normal hosting. And that's product line has been going faster than the building thing.
- [35:25]
Host/Interviewer
AWS competitor coexist.
- [35:29]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
It lets you run all your software and then we're working with companies like AWS under the hood as well. But what you also want to have is to use Lovable. We're seeing by our customers as an AI co founder, a partner that you talk to about everything in your business and if you're running your apps, your tools are on the platform, then just talking to Lovable has access to all the data that you might want to know about your company, how it's doing. So we're working with some of our customers in pre release to give them access to a co founder that works for you even when you're sleeping and comes back to you in the morning and says here are some strategic directions you could go, here's some optimizations you can go in terms of growing your business faster, serving your customers better, faster, and that evolution towards operation and intelligence driving towards outcome for your business.
- [36:29]
Host/Interviewer
You can't build the software, but you stay to build the business.
- [36:34]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yes, to operate your business. And what we're already doing, I've been doing for a very long time, is to compound from everything we're learning, every time Lovable makes a mistake, it goes through a gentic system with our engineers in it improving it. That compounding intelligence is of course applicable to our customers, our users running their business on our platform as well.
- [36:57]
Host/Interviewer
Is software going to become 100% bespoke even like the internal tools? I was looking at Slack and our bill for Slack, even on the highest version is maybe $10,000 a year. It's not a lot of money, it's well worth it. But I was starting to think, well, maybe I should vibe code my own Slack so it's integrated into everything we do at a deeper level. So how do you think the, what do you think the future will look like in terms of some of these foundational pieces of software that every startup, every enterprise uses? Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, the Google Suite, Microsoft Office will bespoke software start to replace those. Do you believe?
- [37:47]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
I like this question. Let me answer it. But I'll just give you a story about someone I recently heard who's going on this journey they're quite advanced. So Nenad, he works at a pretty large company in the US narsa. And he came to our platform because he wanted to build out the new product lines, nurse study for educating more nurses. And he built out all the admin tools for the program, the scheduling for the nurses, getting their licenses and their certification, management. And he was able to build that into a product and to take it to market because they have had all that access to nurses wanting their certification. What he also did was he took it into the back office internally, and they've now replaced more than 10 tools that they had, which is bespoke applications. And in terms of your question, you can do that for multiple reasons. In their case, they're saving more than a million dollars per year.
- [38:44]
Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [38:45]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
So that's huge. Right. But it's also the case that in some cases you have specific requirements where the tools that you've been using to date, they aren't suited for those requirements. Exactly. And in those cases, I think, yes, you will have more bespoke solutions. But I also expect us to see that Lovable continues to interoperate with all of those tools. And I'm not sure if you tried this. If you ask for connecting to anything in the Google Suite, or now anything in the Microsoft Suite or Slack, Lovable guides you through all the steps to do that in a way where you can get a very good overview of exactly how the data flows, which is, of course, very important that you don't give access to the wrong person to the wrong data. And you can continue to use Salesforce, HubSpot and all the tools that you like to use under the hood, but with a bespoke interface on top of it.
- [39:41]
Host/Interviewer
How have these New Frontier models, they're in some ways competitive, but in some ways you can use them to power Lovable. So how do you think about the competition with them, open source, and the future of Lovable? Because people have announced that lovable's dead every six months since you started. And then every six months you go from 100 to 200 to 300. I think you're at 400 million in revenue. Something crazy.
- [40:10]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
We reached 500 in May.
- [40:12]
Host/Interviewer
Okay.
- [40:13]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Growth is a phenomenon.
- [40:14]
Host/Interviewer
So you're dying again by another 100 million in annual revenue. But underneath the hood, you're using some of these.
- [40:22]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah. Let me explain. So we've always had this strategy that we do whatever is best for our customers. And in terms of the intelligence, that means that we're using multiple models. And so if you ask Lovable now it's actually routed to the model that's both suitable to whatever you want to do and that's both the commercial frontier models from multiple vendors and increasingly it's open weight models where our team, whenever it gets routed to our own model, that model becomes more intelligent for our agent harness, especially on the mistakes that it might be making in some cases on which tool to call, which integration to create and how to guide you through success for your business.
- [41:09]
Host/Interviewer
Right. So you're all in on open source. You believe that's the future of lovable. I'm reading into it.
- [41:17]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
So we have multiple partnerships and we're investing heavily to be close with those partners and it's the big labs and it's also to make sure that we get the fastest performance at the lowest cost for our customers when we know that we can do that with our own models.
- [41:34]
Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [41:34]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
And we have a really, really strong research team up in Stockholm who is working on what's called post training. And we're applying all the best practices to do that and scaling up that team quite significantly since we also believe it's a part of the European ecosystem to have that capability.
- [41:52]
Host/Interviewer
In Europe specifically, are you doing or are you using any of the data labeling data training companies to help you understand the most common businesses and build that proprietary data?
- [42:05]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
So what we're doing is that we're looking at the mistakes that any of the models do right now and then we prioritize them by what drives most impact for our customers. And then we make the models, we create data sets. We did something called reinforcement learning specifically for the problems where the frontier models are making mistakes for us right now. And we have this enormous token distribution right from a million new projects being built every single week.
- [42:35]
Host/Interviewer
You're burning a lot of tokens.
- [42:37]
Pat
We are, yes.
- [42:38]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
And that's a lot of signals for making the system both agent harness and what we've been refining over the last two years, which is the skills we have this internal type of skills that the agent knows when to remember the facts from our software engineers that know how to build really, really good software. We're modifying both of those on every, every single week.
- [43:01]
Host/Interviewer
It makes total sense. And somebody told me some companies are doing token dumping. They're, you know, selling $100 worth of tokens for $50. You know, basically they become token resellers in some ways and they're money losing businesses. You have to, you're profitable, I believe now or close to it.
- [43:23]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
We always monitor our margins, but again, we're doing what's best for our customers, and that often means more intelligence. So we're not looking at, oh, let's use it. We've never had the decision to say, let's use a cheaper model here if it's measurably worse for our customers. And we can measure that. What's best for our customers?
- [43:42]
Host/Interviewer
Is it unlimited for the 50 or you have caps now?
- [43:45]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
We have caps, yes.
- [43:46]
Host/Interviewer
You have to have overjisting caps. Are people starting to hit them?
- [43:49]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah, our customers definitely hit gaps. And then you can top up. You can have a. We have multiple subscription tiers.
- [43:56]
Host/Interviewer
What number. I'm just curious, like, what percentage of people need to top up? They're so addicted to it that they're blowing past the.
- [44:03]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
So from the lowest subscription tier. Yeah, I. I think it's something like 60% of our customers.
- [44:13]
Host/Interviewer
I'm hearing that more and more often that people are willing to pay the overages because they're getting so much value. And I think that's the future of the businesses. People are looking at it going like I am. Well, if I'm paying $600 and if you token max to 6,000 a year. But this is a $500,000 piece of software, I don't care. I'm still paying somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of what I would have paid three years ago. Who cares?
- [44:43]
Jason
Go for it.
- [44:46]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah. What we're seeing is everything is about moving fast and more. AI usually lets you move much faster, so the spend is usually worth it.
- [44:55]
Host/Interviewer
Do your customers. A final question for you, because I'm starting to see this now, where multiple people in the organization try to solve the same software problem, and they're competing with each other. So, like this intranet I'm talking about, we built one for Japan.
- [45:11]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah.
- [45:12]
Host/Interviewer
But somebody built the US One. So now I have two pieces of software. So I said to the two different
- [45:16]
Jason
people,
- [45:19]
Host/Interviewer
do we have. Did you guys fork each other's code? Or they're like, no, we just built two different lovable projects. And I'm like, is that the right thing to do? Because you went faster. And I had two swings at bat. Two different intelligent, brilliant people making their version of the software. But you would never have done that in the previous way of building software. You would have one track of software, and you would be building Franken software, where you would be trying to get all the needs into it from the two different groups.
- [45:50]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah. I'm actually a huge fan of very rapid experimentation. And I have a story where for a while I worked At a place called CERN where they do particle physics. It's pretty here in South Europe. Right. And that's where I was introduced to this concept of coopetition, where they have two actually quite isolated teams working on the same particle accelerator, but different places on it. And then they don't share the results until they publish. And that way they can kind of over time learn what's working best in the different organizations. But you don't get stuck in a local minimum. And it's, you know, free markets work extremely well because of competition, and they do that in academia as well. And now, since the engineering is less of the bottleneck, it's more the question of what is the right thing to build. I think it's a great thing to have if you have sufficiently many humans. Right. To do to try to attempt solving the same problem in different ways. And then if you do that on Lovable, what I like to do is I bring up a new project or one of the projects and I say, hey, can you go and check out this other one and take these three things that I really like and bring them over here and maybe even run a split test run an experiment to see if it's improving the metrics for our customers we're trying to serve.
- [47:08]
Host/Interviewer
Did you see somebody used Fable to build Fortnite?
- [47:13]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
I've seen some of the 3D games. Yeah.
- [47:16]
Host/Interviewer
What is your take on this latest version from Anthropic Fable? I know they're a part or I assume they're a partner. I don't know that.
- [47:23]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah, we use Fable as well. It's one of the models.
- [47:26]
Host/Interviewer
What do you think of it in terms of compared to the last generation? Faster, better? Both.
- [47:32]
Jason
Yeah.
- [47:33]
Host/Interviewer
Is it a massive step function?
- [47:35]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Yeah. What I've seen is that it can, in the first attempt, create very sophisticated things that look really good. Then as you're evolving. Right. It's still the same thing where you, as a human, you have to think, you often should be planning together with your agent about what is the right thing to do. And that's again, more of the bottleneck. Whereas more intelligence is on some tasks. It's great. It creates really beautiful things, 3D games, for example. But on figuring what to build, figuring out what are the right strategic directions or experiments you should run to improve the outcomes for your business, that's not changing as fast. It's the humans knowing how to use the tool to get and to plug in all the right data to be able to take the right decisions for taking your product forward and to take your business forward.
- [48:27]
Host/Interviewer
Listen, I love the product. But even more than I love the product and you as a founder, I love the outcome. The outcome for business is extraordinary. So anybody who's listening Lovable is absolutely worth your time. Don't wait. Just put it on your corporate card and start building. That's my message. Just start building with Lovable. It's an incredible product. And congratulations on being reborn six times. Because every six months you add 100 million in revenue, it seems. And then everybody says lovable is dead because the new foundation model is so good. But you keep studying your customer and you keep somehow surviving and thriving. So congratulations as an entrepreneur.
- [49:10]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
Thank you so much, Jason. I enjoyed the chat. I hope you enjoyed the rest of your stay here in Paris.
- [49:15]
Host/Interviewer
It's pretty great. And the palace of Versailles is so impressive, huh? Someday we'll be building this with lovable and optimist robots.
- [49:22]
Osika (Founder of Lovable)
I'm looking forward to it.
- [49:36]
Host/Interviewer
You? I'm doing all it.