← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI?
01:11:43
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- [00:00]
Mayo Omer
From all things in the industry. I think the margins are the least thing that I'm worried about. We're taking into consideration that the prices of model will go down towards zero. Me personally, I don't believe we'll hit a speed bump. I don't think Elsa will hit like a wall with like the improvements of LLMs. Even with existing models. We're only scratching the surface of economic value that you can create. If a one person team can get sold for $80 million without people, it means that you'll be able to do a lot more stuff with less people.
- [00:33]
Harry Stebbings
This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings and Base44. What an incredible story. Base44 is the story of one entrepreneur who in just 18 months went from an idea to millions in revenue, an incredible customer base, and selling to Wix, the public company for $80 million. Today, Mayor Base44's co founder joins me in the hot seat to discuss the truth behind the economics of vibe coding. Are the margins as bad as think? What is the future of models and so much more?
- [01:08]
This was an incredible discussion.
- [01:10]
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- [04:19]
You have now arrived at your destination. Mayor. It is great to have you on the show dude.
- [04:25]
I've been so looking forward to this one.
- [04:26]
I am.
- [04:27]
I'm a fan of base 44.
- [04:28]
What a frickin journey. Thank you for joining me.
- [04:31]
Mayo Omer
Thank you for having me. I'm a fan of 20VC.
- [04:33]
Harry Stebbings
Dude that's very very kind. Listen, ego flattery will get you everywhere and I'm very, I'm very susceptible to it. I was chatting to Michael Eisenberg before this show and he said dude, you've got to start with like acquired for.
- [04:45]
Like 80 million bucks.
- [04:46]
Why did you decide to sell before we get to anything else?
- [04:50]
Mayo Omer
So I started base 44 as a bootstrap business after doing a very capital heavy one and it started honestly just for fun. I wanted to get back to coding. I felt like everything in the Software industry was changing. Love the fact that like with LLMs now you can do so much more. And so it started just for fun and then the traction was insane and I started getting to like 10,000 users, 100,000 users and the business was very profitable. And so I stood in this junction of either I'm continuing doing this alone bootstrap thing, which I might get eaten by companies that are raising like shit ton of money, or I should raise a lot of funds and go very aggressive and try to build this on my own. And the third one is like get into a company that could be like a parent company and try to find something that can harmonize with the business and actually push it forward. So I remember when I started having the conversations with wix, I was very worried and I was like, I'm not going to sell. And I remember telling Avishai, like the CEO of wix, I was telling him, if Carousel was sold to Microsoft, probably there wouldn't be any Carousel today. The fact that they were independent and they could build the business by themselves how they wanted, without kind of like the corporate stuff has gotten them through. And then we had many late night chats where one I understood that weeks for a lot of reasons that many know WIX is a perfect match because we're targeting the same audience, it's the same spirit. The marketing team is the best in the market. Aggressive, they're creative, they're absolutely awesome. And if we can structure it in a way where the company itself, the product team stays lean, small and startupy like. But all the other stuff we can benefit from. The monster that is wix, for example, the support and customer care, the marketing stuff, the thing that you don't really want to build, like the legal and operations stuff, then this could be a lot of fun. And we structured a great deal. And I think to me it was like, okay, we have a shot at actually building something that matters. And so I said for an actual shot of taking this from this low few hundred thousand users to something that might, if we work hard throughout the years, actually move the needle for a lot of people, that might actually be a thing that people speak about as, hey, this actually made an impact on the world. It was either I raised a lot of money and a lot of funding, or I go and join wix, that basically triples my chances of actually building something special.
- [07:26]
Harry Stebbings
Today, base 44 has continued to thrive and is now over 100 million in revenue. It's done so well post acquisition. Everyone's going, God, does he regret Selling now, when you look at how fast it's grown and to over 100 million in revenue, do you regret selling so soon?
- [07:46]
Mayo Omer
Absolutely not. For all kinds of reasons. First, I can comment on the revenue stuff and public company and so on, but one, we structured the deal in a way that even financially compensated for additional revenues and targets and milestones were hitting. And second, this was the whole point like I felt like in my eyes this going to be the largest category in software industry because a lot of like existing categories that we're familiar with, CRM and support systems and task management and project management, stuff like that, are going to fold into the Vibe coding category. And there would be a time, it might be in a few months, might be in a few years where it will be easier to build your own Salesforce type of CRM than to actually buy a license to something off the shelf. And the whole point with partnering with WIX is let's take a shot at building something that would be huge and I think without it my chances would be really, really small.
- [08:42]
Harry Stebbings
With the greatest of respects. That's wrong dude.
- [08:45]
You're not going to have people build.
- [08:47]
Their own Salesforce CRMs on the whole.
- [08:50]
Maybe a tiny, tiny portion or build.
- [08:53]
Your own Intercoms or Sierras or Decagons.
- [08:56]
And then do maintenance and updates.
- [08:59]
Are you serious?
- [09:00]
Mayo Omer
I honestly think so. It might be not as like the current way that we think about Vibe coding where you prompt like hey, build a CRM for me and then you get a fully fledged all features inside. It might be that software becomes more liquid and so maybe you have a starting point, maybe you have templates, maybe you have like open source projects that people can take and then Vibe code their own features and say okay, this is great now I want this version in Arabic from right to left and I want on every lead to be able to add my own pictures of the lead or whatever and then basically convert and transform the software to something that's more what they want. But I think the current model of one size fits all doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not that everyone will move there, it's not that enterprises, it's going to take a lot of time, but it makes so much sense for the buyer. Think about it as like the software is going to be theirs, the code will be those, they will not need to share their data with other software vendors and be locked in and like whatever. They could adapt it and create a leaner version that's way more customized to their needs. I'll go Even one step further. I think every software company that needs implementers, right, there's like a salesforce implementer or whatever, maybe in a decade from now is not going to make it. And again like if you take a year back then yeah, vibe coding wasn't even a thing and building software wasn't even a thing. And maybe it was like a nice toy thing. Maybe you could build like a task management small kind of software. Maybe you could build a nice website. In a year or two you'll get to a place where a lot of the current organizational tools that companies are using, you could build your own version or customize your own version and it would make so much more sense to you as a buyer. The code will be yours, the data will be yours. You'll be able to adapt it to your needs. There's no one size fits all. There's no like feature bloat when you buy today. Like a task management. I don't know software, it has so many features that you don't really need.
- [11:03]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think small businesses give a shit about that? Give a shit about actually owning their own data, Owning their own code? If you're a small coffee shop or coffee chain or restaurant chain or legal and accounting firm, if that's the bread and butter of wix's business, do they need it?
- [11:18]
Mayo Omer
Not necessarily the code and data, but they need something that's simpler and more customized to their needs. You know how I started base 44, my back then girlfriend, now wife has a small business. She needed a CRM and she needed some systems for her small business. She's a tattoo artist and she teaches like arts and stuff like that. And we tried building that with the former version of the. And I'm not going to name that software vendor or two software vendors that you tried doing that with with like the drag and drop and the super customized your own tables or CRM or whatever. And it was hell on earth. And I'm like a software person, right, I should know how to do that. But like just configuring that and then making it so that it supports her process of how she processes leads and customers and whatever. And she's like oh, this is insane. I was like, I know that like an LLM can code something leaner and way better for what she needs, exactly what she needs and not going to have like this entire features and enterprise features and team management stuff and whatever settings and stuff like that, which is going to be super simple for what she needs and could adapt to her needs. And I was Like I know LLMs can do that. I just need to provide LLMs with like the right setup. Right. They can write the code, but she will need a database to keep the leads and she will need some integrations with like sending emails and stuff like that. And that's why I started base 44 and exactly for that. And so I think small businesses specifically would want to build something leaner and more customized to what they need. Something that they can understand, something that they can Adapt. And bloated SaaS of the pre2022 era. It's going to be harder for people to use.
- [13:01]
Harry Stebbings
Will Salesforce be bigger or smaller in 10 years time?
- [13:06]
Mayo Omer
It might. And Marc Benioff is a smart person and I'm sure that also. And the company is incredible. So they might adapt. But I think generally from this category those companies would be smaller. Some of them would be eliminated.
- [13:20]
Harry Stebbings
Which would you say is most likely to be eliminated?
- [13:23]
Mayo Omer
Smaller CRM companies. Every software that's basically front end on top of a database with some team features and some integrations and does not have a moat. And I think Salesforce is so big and so massive that this is one of their moats. They can make big bets and move a lot of stuff and go in many different directions when we all try to adapt in this AI era. But smaller players I think would be eliminated.
- [13:55]
Harry Stebbings
You said the word moat there. It's often a criticism of this category. I've had the founders of Salesforce, Benioff, Atlassian, Mike Cannon, Brooks Cloudflare, Matt Prince, Dylan Field from Figma, even Carl Pei, the founder of Nothing, the phone company, has created their own base 44 equivalent. And everyone says this is a business with no moats. And you see that in the ability for these people to spin up products in three months. How do you respond to that statement?
- [14:22]
Mayo Omer
I think it's relatively easy to create a vibe coding tool. It's very, very, very hard to create a platform that could help people build products they'll actually use that are functional, that are complex enough for real world use cases. And for that you need many layers of integrations. You need to adapt and tune the agent to handle very complex projects. I think some applications in base 44 are like millions of lines of code. And that's eventually the customers and users that you care about, because those are the one that will go beyond the hype of hey, look, I've built this Monday.com clone with a single prompt. No, you didn't. It's going to take you hundreds or thousands of prompts to get to something that you're going to use day to day. And I think the mode in the category is being able to get there. And that's like layers of integrations and heavy lifting and building compute. You're almost building like a small cloud because you want to give the LLM the ability to have access to databases and have user management and to have built in integrations and the ability to run scheduled tasks because that's what real software does. And you want to have the LLM kind of like access to many cloud services and integrations. And so you're building an entire ecosystem in this platform. But yeah, to build a Vibe coding tool that can build some websites or a front end that could connect to some APIs, I think it's super easy to do nowadays. Early on the vibe coding category was focused a lot and still is to some degree on front end and landing pages where many use cases were around like websites or E commerce websites and stuff like that. I think this will get commoditized for the category. There's still a lot to do when you're looking like there's SEO and domain management and if you're building an E commerce that's like a complex business you want to integrate with a full backend like what WIX has or Shopify or whatever. But for the functional stuff and the complex applications, the organizational applications, the personal applications, the fully fledged SaaS platforms that people are building, I think they won't get commoditized and I think that's not the long market. Also I think that's the more profitable use cases for tools like ours. Because at some point, okay, you're building a website, let's say a nice website for your VC firm or whatever. At some point it's like, okay, this looks pretty, that's it, I'm not going to prompt anymore. And a lot of like the business model of this category is around like the credits for prompting. And so at some point you're like, okay, that's it, I'm done. I have this front end. It probably costs not a lot to host it somewhere. And I think the more profitable stuff with the higher margin and the more value would have been building the complex applications that still use day to day.
- [17:09]
Harry Stebbings
When you map out this market in like three to five years time, can you help me understand what that looks like? Because you've got in my mind like three different entry points. You've got the base 44s, the lovables and the ratlets in one. You've got the Figmas, the Cloudflares, the Atlassians, the Salesforces in like the incumbent insertion point and then you've got the canvas on the other kind of more consumer end. I probably put Figma in there with Canva. You've also got the cognitions and the cursors and the pro tools there. Do the pro tools come down and eat your business? Do you go up and eat their business? What happens there?
- [17:45]
Mayo Omer
It's a very good question. I'll start with what you categorize as incumbents, but I'll actually call it the different software categories that exist. So let's take a salesforce or Monday.com for example. I think a lot of those tools will build built in Vibe coding tools inside their platform. You can see that like with Monday Vibe, which is a tool they've built on top of like the Monday.com infrastructure of like boards and like the database behind the scenes and the user management roles, permissions and so on. And this is what I said when I meant software is going to become more liquid. So I don't know if Salesforce is planning to do that. But I'm assuming that at some point like you'll be able to create your own user interface for Salesforce and Salesforce would become like this system of record where you can create the UI that you want and how you want to look at a lead or contact or account or whatever. And I think a lot of tools are going to do that because this is basically taking kind of like the, instead of configuring different things and building different features, it would allow a lot of extensibility to existing products. And so you start seeing that and you see also like Microsoft building some Vibe coding tools on top of the Office and whatever and style. I can see a future where a lot of the existing SaaS tools and SaaS products have a built in. Vibe coding customizes the software to your needs capability. I think it's an interesting take on what's going to happen with the pro players versus the very consumer ish AI app builder or visual AI app builder where I think for base 44 for example from day one the objective was that you won't need to see a line of code and that for a lot of our users, like seeing code actually like I wouldn't say terrifies them but like it's not what they want to do, right? You have, you're a lawyer and you want to like create some system for your law firm or software. Like there's no need for you to see code and you, you should be able to customize and do whatever you want just by prompting it. The cursor and the wind cell for cognition of the world are doing a fantastic job with focusing on the existing dev community and kind of like target audience. And there's a lot to do there because there's a lot of it's going to take a lot of time for tools like and platforms like base44 and the Bolt and Lovables of the world to get to a place where you can build the existing whatever X percentage of software that we cannot build today. So I'll give you an example. It's very hard to build a firewall today in base 44, right? Something that will sit on your computer will be very like in terms of performance, will be very native on your computer, will like send logs to an centralized server that will analyze it for the organization. So like there's existing software products where the AI app builders like base44 is going to take a lot of time to get to, if any. And I think that's also a lot of like how we measure internally. And one of our objectives is like what's the percentage of software that we can build today and how we push it forward. I'll give another example. We're working now on allowing applications inside base 44 to use scheduled tasks. So maybe you want to build something and like every Monday morning send an email to all your users with a summary of what they did inside your app or whatever. You built a personal assistant and you've integrated WhatsApp and you want to tell the personal assistant, hey, remind me in two days to pick up the kids or whatever. And so this obviously doesn't exist today. And building this basically pushes slightly more the type of software that you can build with base 44. And we've built like this built in capability to build AI agents and we've integrated it with WhatsApp and Slack and whatever. So now you can actually build bots, not only applications. And so we constantly measure kind of like the type of software that we can build. And I think the cursor and cognition of the world are doing a terrific job with working on enormous software projects and especially like enterprise projects and like large, very complex software that needs a lot of backend services and it's like very complex applications like you want to build a firewall or we internally obviously use carousel to build our own backend. I don't know where the market will be headed. I'm sure that they will go a bit up market and bring in some of like the visual builder that for the less complex users. And I'm sure that our layer like the base 44, the ball, the lava builds of the world will go a bit down with like the types of software that you'll be able to build and the software that you weren't able to build like a year ago or a few months ago, you'll be able to build in a few months. It's going to be interesting. But this is a huge market. It's like a lot of it is like depends on like what's that type? Like you cannot build for any type of user. So either you serve the developer where they want to see the code and they want to edit it and they want to bring like terminal stuff and you want to run it on their computers, or you serve the non technical user which is like completely different.
- [22:47]
Harry Stebbings
Mayo, you have Lovable, you have Replit and you have Bolt. Who's the best and who's the worst?
- [22:52]
Mayo Omer
Tough question. I think Replit is more technical and started as a dev tool and I think for developers they're doing a good job. For the semi developers the hardcore ones will go to Kelso.
- [23:04]
Harry Stebbings
Which one do you not worry about?
- [23:06]
Mayo Omer
I'm not worried about those three.
- [23:08]
Harry Stebbings
Wow. Who are you worried about?
- [23:10]
Mayo Omer
I think more about market dynamics and how things will turn out to be with with the model providers. My theory and thesis is that there's always going to be huge advantage to the folks who are playing with multiple model providers. But if at one point one of the model providers will just win the market by a wide margin, then the next logical thing is to conquer the vibe coding market. Because this again in my non objective eyes will be the largest software category. As long as there's like a fight and there's a race, then we're positioned to control a very large share of the market and bring in a better solution to the market.
- [23:52]
Harry Stebbings
Who do you think is more likely to do that? Codex or Claude Code?
- [23:56]
Mayo Omer
Google by far. They have the compute, they're moving very fast. If Gemini at some point wins the race, like literally wins the race, then they have the entire stack including like Google Cloud and whatever and whatever they need and they have the data and whatever and integrations and, and Google Suite and so on to build an incredible empire. I'm hoping for a tough race and it looks like that right now. And it's by the way an insane market dynamics because we're obviously spending a lot on AI and in a split second you change one string in the code and you move millions in spend to a different provider and it bounces back. Depends on who provides the best model and the best, whatever cost and throughput and so on.
- [24:44]
Harry Stebbings
Can you give me an example of that?
- [24:46]
Mayo Omer
Let's say on the coding space, Claude comes out with like Claude 4 and Sonnet 4 and you're like perfect, let's use that. And before that we were like doing a split between Sonnet and gemini. And then OpenAI comes up with GPT5 and you try to figure out for all of those folks. By the way, it's not necessarily that of like a better model that you move your entire workload, but you see that there's like places where the model's doing better. So for the first prompt, Sonnet's like the best, like the best designer and knows how to structure it and was really good with writing a project from scratch. But then what we found is that GPT5 and especially the thinking and the Pro version is really good at solving hard bugs. And so you move a lot of workload, especially on the complex applications and very large context API calls to OpenAI. And so when doing that you're literally moving hundreds of thousands of spend, just like the simplest change. And if now I don't know, but maybe Gemini 3 is going to be better than anything else, which is what people is nowadays saying, then we're going to move a lot of spend and a lot of workload overnight to a different vendor. And that's like an insane market dynamics to me.
- [25:59]
Harry Stebbings
I get you. It's an insane market dynamic because everyone compares the LLM market to the cloud market in terms of it being a commodity, but actually a mega market that will be phenomenal for the providers with a couple of core winners. But what you just said there is completely different, which is an ease of switching that you would never have in a cloud market. You do not switch your cloud provider with a line of code in seconds multiple times a month. How do you think about that analogy from LLM provider to cloud provider? Given what you just said, you do.
- [26:29]
Mayo Omer
Not switch a cloud provider. That's very hard to do, right? My previous company, we tried doing that. It was so painful. If I've known how tough it's going to be when we started that for like a year long process probably wouldn't do it for the LLMs. It's insane how easy it is. What we see for the model providers is that they're building multiple tools for multiple levels in the value chain. So you see all of them having this CLI coding tool and all of them having this very high end or end user focused chat product like Gemini and ChatGPT and so on. You start seeing them bringing in. So Gemini is now everywhere in my Gmail, in a lot of workflows and building automation. And so you start seeing them go up the market of software and bringing their tools and their model basically to drive consumption all across the stack. Or if you look like a year ago it was mostly like you could consume it either in an API or you could consume it in this end user type of chat. I don't know. It's going to be super interesting to me. It's crazy. Let's say one of them kind of like storms ahead for like six months, right? Something that haven't happened before, but it's like literally the best model for like six months ahead. So let's say someone comes out now with a better, stronger and cheaper model than Sonnet 4.5 and it stays like that for Anthropic for like the next six months. What happens to Anthropic's revenue? Right? It's like overnight. Okay, switch from all the cursors and the cloud codes. Let's say you switch to Gemini or whatever, GPT 5.5 or whatever. This is like such a fast decline but also they had such a fast ascend. I don't know, it's going to be crazy but I don't think I have the right answer as to what's going to how this market is going to play out. Obviously we're all hoping that this is going to stay a very competitive market where prices will go down. I think also when we're making like strategic bets on what we're going to optimize and what's not. And it's very strange to manage a business like base44 because in some places there's like you see things that you need to either optimize or build but you're taking a decision not to do that because you know that future versions of the models are going to take care of that. So one of like the thing that Vishai and I are speaking of when we're speaking strategy is like we're taking into consideration that the prices of model will go down towards zero at least for platforms like base44. And so this is like a strategic decision where you're saying okay, I could optimize some and we're doing that. But like are we investing a lot of people right now to optimize the costs or we take into consideration just the pricing, the prices of the models are just going down and down and down.
- [29:01]
Harry Stebbings
One of my core questions that I want to understand is the margin structure. And when you look at today, every dollar that comes in, what percent of that dollar goes back to an LLM provider?
- [29:13]
Mayo Omer
Depends on the timing. The exact number I cannot say because we're a public company, even though I miss that a lot, to kind of.
- [29:20]
Harry Stebbings
Like share the nicest way. Dude, no one shares that. Educate me. Does no one share it because it's so bad?
- [29:25]
Mayo Omer
No. It's also very decision dependent. So you can change it from like a low margin to a very high margin in just one decision is just deciding on how great of a service you want to give your users. I think what will happen eventually with all coding agents is that that the cheaper open source models are getting way better. You always want to play with like the strongest models. But what will happen and what we're kind of like looking at it internally is like building this switch or proxy where when you get a prompt from a user, maybe the prompt is so simple that it doesn't even matter like what model you're getting. It's like change the color of the button from blue to red. I don't really need to use like the heavy sonnet. Maximum thinking, whatever. Pay a lot for that. Right. I can kind of forward this request to a smaller, cheaper model and this will also be a way better experience to the user because it's going to be so much faster than bringing kind of the heavy guns of the frontier models. And I think doing that and the more the smaller or open source models are able to take a larger percentage of their requests and prompts, obviously margin is going to improve drastically. I don't think it's bad. Yeah, I don't think current margins are bad, but I think they're going to get way better today.
- [30:37]
Harry Stebbings
They suck. And everyone always says, oh, but we're going to have like model selection exactly as you said there, which is we'll be able to do intelligent routing on models. And I'm like, okay, I hope so.
- [30:50]
Mayo Omer
We all do. I think it depends on the product and the flow that you're building. So one of the players that you mentioned is doing a really good job with autonomy where kind of like you prompt something and then they go and they run for like 20 minutes or 30 minutes too and they have like this coding agent.
- [31:05]
Harry Stebbings
This is ratless agent, right?
- [31:07]
Mayo Omer
Yeah. But first, what if I didn't really mean what I just prompted or like, okay, it went and built this fully. I'm just a free user and I just burned a lot of cash right now on coding and testing and whatever. So I think it depends on the level of autonomy you want to give and kind of how fast iterations you're giving out to users. I don't know the margins, but I'm saying you could burn a lot by not understanding what the user actually wants. But from all things in the industry, I think the margins are the least thing that I'm worried about.
- [31:38]
Harry Stebbings
The most thing you're worried about is Google coming in?
- [31:41]
Mayo Omer
Not really, but like the competitive landscape, the pace is insane. Like for us, every feature that we put out, we know that's going to take either a few weeks or a few months for a competitor to copy and we see that a lot.
- [31:55]
Harry Stebbings
How does that change what you build? It's really interesting. I had the founder of Fiverr Misha on the show and he said the time to copy is the single biggest difference in the last two years of software. Where it used to be years, now it's weeks.
- [32:07]
Mayo Omer
Yeah.
- [32:07]
Harry Stebbings
How does that change what you build or how you think?
- [32:10]
Mayo Omer
You take big bets on things that are, if you can find those that are substantial to your users and will be really hard to copy. So I'll give you one example. The whole reasons for base 44's existence is the built in backend. The fact that we built base 44 as a fully or vertically integrated platform where for every application you already have a built in database, user management, authentication, integrations, analytics and so on. The thing is that we didn't use a third party provider like Supabase, which is what the rest of the industry is using Supabase on Neon. And we've built that built in and we've taken a very courageous step there and there's still a lot more to build there. This is going to be very hard to replicate and very hard to migrate, whatever, millions of users from Supabase to a homegrown solution if one of the competitors tried to do that. And I think this is a bet that we're deepening further and further and further for other stuff. It's a game of velocity, of delight, of taking the right UX decisions and having the right taste and just trying to be there before everyone else gets there. So two weeks ago we came up with something called App Suggestions. Very small feature which is very nice. Like after you prompt it gives you the next steps, like okay, now add a dashboard, it gives you kind of suggestions to what to do in your app. It took Maybe a few days for other competitors to copy that. That's the game that we're playing now.
- [33:40]
Harry Stebbings
What percent of starting users finish the project?
- [33:44]
Mayo Omer
It's a good question of what finishing means, and I don't think I have.
- [33:47]
Harry Stebbings
The answer for that deployed application that works.
- [33:51]
Mayo Omer
That's many. But that's not the right question. The right question is how many get to actual usage? So many publish their apps and their apps are fully functioning. At some point you battle test your agent so much to teach it how to query the database and how for every, you start categorizing the different flows and the different use cases that user prompted and you make sure that you feed your agent with the right example. So many, many, many get to like functioning applications. So this is like a saturated benchmark. The question is how many get to actual usage day to day? I don't have the right answer to that.
- [34:28]
Harry Stebbings
What metric is user success for you then? If there is this nuance and complexity with regards to success of a user internally, what is your metric for user success?
- [34:38]
Mayo Omer
There's a couple. First, we measure the sentiment of the messages they send in the chat, which was also weird to me, but it turns out many people are like speaking with the chat as they would to a human. They either tell it, okay, fantastic job, this is exactly what I wanted when I was asking for this feature, or they kills a lot. This is not what I wanted. Oh, you deleted this button. And I wanted this and I wanted that. And so we have this metric that we literally measure on a minute to minute, minute basis of like how many of the prompts, because nowadays we get like tens of thousands of prompts, like a minute or whatever in tandem. And so we measure the sentiment and that's how we know our coding agent does what it's being asked to. And you see kind of like how if we release an upgrade, you see kind of like the negativity metric kind of goes down. Or if when we jump from Sonnet 4 to Sonnet 4.5, you see a major improvement there. So this is one thing that we measure. And again, this, even the metrics change a lot with the business, like base 44, because when we started it was mostly around bugs, right? How many times like the model messes up something and the application doesn't work, or there's like bugs and like hard things that like break your app. Nowadays it's not easy to create bugs in your app. The LLMs are really smart. The infrastructure is battle tested. So it's more about does the agent actually does what the user is asking of it, does it make the right change without making additional changes or messing up other features? And you can see for example, that again. So even if I give the example of scheduled tasks, so maybe the user asks, hey, I want you to send me a daily email with reminders. And then the coding agent says, I cannot do that. I don't have the right infrastructure to do scheduled tasks. And so when we add scheduled tasks we should to see few numbers, like a few percentages, kind of like of this metric improves.
- [36:36]
Harry Stebbings
Going back to the elements on margin, I had EV Randall, who's the new.
- [36:40]
GP at Benchmark and he said, harry.
- [36:41]
Harry, you're thinking about this wrong. We need less of a focus on margin and we need more of a focus on gross dollars per customer. In other words, expanding the spend of the customer, not the actual margin on a lower spend. Do you agree with that or do you actually think, no, we'll revert back to a margin optimized world where we have open source models as we discussed.
- [37:03]
Mayo Omer
I think 100%. Right now the game for our category is growth and capturing as much of this insanely big market. There's almost no person that shouldn't be a user for a platform like base44. And so obviously it's like growing not necessarily the spend of every customer or to as many customers as possible. The spend is going to come down as models would be cheaper. So like I don't think it's like let's try and grab as many dollars from the customer as possible. So I'd say margins are always important. There's one thing I learned in base 44 is like when you lean and you are saying business that does really good to all other aspects of the business. And it's not something that I understood in my previous company which wasn't like, it wasn't like I made fatal mistakes, but we were very capital heavy. And there's something by creating a business that makes sense and is healthy in margins and retention and the spend and whatever that allows you to grow later on in a sustainable way without at some point hitting the brakes and saying, oh well, nothing makes sense in our margins or whatever. And so I'd say margins is something you should constantly look at while knowing or while planning ahead and taking into consideration that the model related stuff, which is like 99% of the spend or 90% of the spend spend is changing drastically and aggressively every few months.
- [38:28]
Harry Stebbings
When you have that change in spend, you have like a less certain revenue as we said earlier the transience of spend leads to an anthropic could skyrocket or could not depending on where you shift spend. Can you advise me? Honestly, dude, I'm an early stage investor. I invest in AI apps today and everyone is posting insane numbers. Like, you know, you look at yours and it's like 100 million, your lovables and your rapids, like 200 million.
- [38:52]
How much weight should I as an.
- [38:55]
Early stage investor place on revenue today?
- [38:58]
Mayo Omer
That's a very good question which also me as myself as an investor, like I'm asking myself. So obviously like the metrics today is like different, right? When I started my previous company, we got to like $2 million in ARR. I think it was like a year and a half and everybody was, were cheering or saying like this is insane. Like whatever. Nowadays it's like if you, if you can show the hockey stick of how fast you got to $10 million or $20 million, everything changes. I think it depends on like the model of the company you're investing in. For me it's like smaller checks into very healthy businesses. So the thing that I look at the most, okay, fast revenue growth, obviously that's what you want to see. This is like the most exciting. But there are two things. One, healthy business is like how likely is this business to get eaten by other players, the model providers or whatever. And the second, which is very much related, is a vertically integrated business. So here's something really cool that we're looking at right now. So Keraso came out, I think it was two weeks ago or maybe a few weeks ago with their own model. Right, Composer. And this is like a nice way to think about strategy of those types of businesses. So think about Kercel. Let's take the not optimistic approach of saying margins were bad, they were paying so much to the other model providers or whatever. So this is like an insane strategy. It's like grow as fast as you can get to insane distribution. Every developer that reads through Twitter probably installs Kelsier and then at some point bring in your very efficient model that you trained that is now fast and start moving people from the very expensive low margin models into your own model which is likely to be high margin. And then again overnight your margins get tremendously better. But you've grown fast as hell and now you have the distribution. Now you can optimize margins because again the margins for the models, it's very doable to change drastically overnight. I think this is a really interesting strategy that we're also thinking internally is like Go as fast as you can with the frontier models. At some point open source becomes really a viable option to maybe fine tune on like the billions, almost trillions lines of code that we have inside base 44 and then have this very interesting margin take where for some of the prompts you forward to the fast high margin. Great model. Users really enjoy it because those models are going to be way faster than the Sonnet 4.4 heavy models. So this is an interesting take. When you think about vertically integrated applications, there are some applications today that I think are growing very, very fast that are going to have a harder time keeping it this way. I don't remember the name of the company. There was this company that was very. One of the earliest practical use cases for LLM. There was like a marketing. They were generating content and they grew super fast. You probably remember Jasper AI. Yeah, yeah, grew super fast. And the moat was just like. It was absolutely hard to create moat over there because it was like clearly that there's like okay, you only using LLMs for baseball. It was like an entire infrastructure you built like a mini cloud that allows applications to send emails, generate Images, use other LLMs to deploy to manage users and whatever. So you have something around LLMs that makes sense to have enough of a business. When I'm investing nowadays, I'm thinking can this business, if not today, be at some point in the future vertically integrated, self sustainable? Maybe what Kercel will turn out to be at some point.
- [42:32]
Harry Stebbings
Can we just go through it in a helpful way? You said three elements there. Revenue growth. What revenue growth is exciting then? Is it just the highest? Is it? I need to see 1 to 10 in the first year.
- [42:44]
Mayo Omer
If you're building a SaaS. Yeah, it's going to be 0 to 10. That's going to be exciting.
- [42:48]
Harry Stebbings
0 to 10 in a year for you meets the.
- [42:50]
Mayo Omer
I think this is insane. 0 to 10 is an insane goal for any SaaS business.
- [42:54]
Harry Stebbings
Well, I mean honestly now that's. It's good but there's quite a lot that do 0 to 10.
- [42:59]
Mayo Omer
Insane. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's going to be there on the exciting piece and I'm looking to invest. I'm not necessarily going to say, okay, the company has to do 0 to 10.
- [43:07]
Harry Stebbings
How do you determine if they're going to be eaten by models? What is the question or criteria that will help you get comfortable with that?
- [43:14]
Mayo Omer
Most of the value is on the way. They prompt the application for a certain thing they've built. Let's say A photo editor. And so there's not a lot of features in a photo edit like an AI based like you feed a picture and say, okay, make me, I don't know, pretty or whatever. And if a lot of that's going to be like the UX and the prompt, I don't think that's going to be a healthy business for the next deck. I don't think there's like a lot of moat if you're building a lot of infrastructure or the company itself is vertically integrated. I think that's a very interesting take. So you could nowadays build a competitor to Harvey and Spellbook that would kind of like teach some LLM better way on how to do law or whatever. Or you could build a law firm. And I think building a law firm is going to be very, very, very interesting because this is not something that a model provider would do or any other sane software entrepreneur that wants to do just software. And I think there's like an opportunity today to build very healthy new age vertically integrated businesses. And it could be again a law firm. It could be buying a hospital, basically optimizing everything on every layer and making it AI native and maybe in a few first ones to introduce robots as surgeons or whatever. And I think nowadays there's like opportunities all across the fund, like in different categories, software, not soft or whatever, to build vertically integrated companies. And I think if your company is just about how you're prompting an LLM and maybe you're doing a better job with tuning it to whatever legal needs or finance need or whatever, and the infrastructure that you have below it is not very complex. It's going to be hard to have a moat.
- [45:00]
Harry Stebbings
Are you angel investing today?
- [45:02]
Mayo Omer
Yeah.
- [45:02]
Harry Stebbings
Do you enjoy it?
- [45:03]
Mayo Omer
Very much. Was scary at first, but nowadays it's so much fun. Elseilk is kind of like you have a chance to work with incredible founders and become like this huge platform shift, probably the biggest ones that we're facing. To think with them, what the hell are we going to do? But also to think with them is like what are the new opportunities that are going to open up up? Coming back to this crazy idea I said earlier, like building a law firm like five years ago would seem like the most bad idea that you can think of. Building a law firm, buying a hospital and optimizing it with AI or whatever, building a new bank. I think today is like you have this huge platform shift. There's so many exciting discussions when you look at different industries of like thinking in two years from now, four years from now, what's the craziest thing that we can think of? Like what should we aim for that's barely possible today or not possible today and should be possible in two to four years. This is like an incredible way to think about angel investing and so much fun doing so. Very risky but very, very fun.
- [46:08]
Harry Stebbings
Where do you think no one is investing today that everyone should be investing today? And where do you think everyone is investing today where they should not be investing?
- [46:16]
Mayo Omer
Investing. Oh wow, that's a good question. The not sexy industries, the finance, the restaurants, the whatever, the HMOs, the like actually having like entrepreneurs building that end to end is where people should be more like investing more into. I think a lot of people investing nowadays to very fast going, kind of like a hockey stick revenue plotting startups. Unless you know a business or an industry very very well, I think it's very hard for investors outside to understand if this is going to be with the moat or not. So a good example for that. I had the opportunity to invest in like this agent companies, right? Like the Manus, those folks. I felt like I don't know the industry good enough to understand if at some point this would get commoditized by the model companies. And so this is like an area that I wouldn't invest in because I was like okay, this is obviously dangerous. Like obviously the more that the capabilities that OpenAI built into ChatGPT and Google into Gemini, whatever, they're gonna have like serious and incredible agents. And I'm not sure this category, even if you get to like insane growth, like you can see the Manus and the other players, like they have these graphs that I think are even like go even more aggressive than the, than our industry. I'm not sure that there was a lot behind it. Rather than prompting and giving it tools that are for sure going to be part of ChatGPT or the Gemini interface or whatever.
- [47:48]
Harry Stebbings
Michael Eisenberg said I had to ask you make the case for how you beat cursor.
- [47:54]
Mayo Omer
When I started base 44 I said okay, I'm going to do this really for the non technical people because at that point and still do most of the industry, if you wanted to like most of the players in the market, if you wanted to build something really functional, you should have prompted like hey, connect the backend and then it will tell you okay, bring the API key from Supabase and whatever else things like your mom and my mom wouldn't be able to do, right? And so I said okay, let's build for the very Non technical folks. And then when doing so obviously and base 44 started getting a lot of traction and obviously like we also got some developers and some technical people that said give me the code and like you should invest in like a GitHub integration, allow me to edit files and whatever. And at some point we also implemented that. But the more time passed and the more the models got better and the more like faster and whatever, there were less bugs, nobody wanted to see the code and it was less important for people to actually be able to manually edit and change and whatever. And I think the direction and again that we're going to is like more and more types of software you'll be able to build inside base 44 that nobody wants to see code. Other thing is like if you'll get to like this flow state where you're prompting with AI and it's going to be super fast and it's going to be almost immediate. Every prompt like you'll see that and it's going to change. I don't think you'll want to see the code and I don't think you want to start saying okay, you should look at these files and those models and like run those tests and whatever. And I think nowadays for some and a growing part of software, even the most technical users would prefer building a site based 44 than to do that in cursor. And they don't want to now set up servers and databases and see the code and write tests and kind of navigate through the files and whatever. My guess is that this portion of software that you can build inside base 44 is going to grow. And I think obviously nowadays the experience, if you can build it inside base 44, you probably prefer to do it inside base 44 than in Kelso.
- [49:50]
Harry Stebbings
You can invest in cursor at 29.3 billion or you can invest in cognition at 12. Which one would you do?
- [49:57]
Mayo Omer
Probably cognition. I think the notion of software building as a category is going to grow insanely fast. Our notion from the previous age of venture capital where a winner takes it all is wrong. And I think this category is going to be so big that everybody will take a niche at some point. And so I think cognition is going to have more room to grow. I also know that throughout time they'll be able to either replicate the most successful features inside, I think they have more room to grow. Where betting on cursor is like betting that it's a winner takes it all market.
- [50:34]
Harry Stebbings
Why don't you think it's a winner take all. And if it's not a winner take all, does that still work for a venture model? Our business is predicated on winner take all.
- [50:44]
Mayo Omer
Not necessarily. The venture capital business is predicated on huge returns. If you look at all of my competitors and on base 44 we're all growing insanely fast and I think at least I can say about base 44. But maybe the other players like healthy businesses. Those are going to generate huge returns. They're all like fast growing businesses and it's not a winner takes it all market. Which is also by the way why I got into this market in the first place. Because like when I started there was like Bolt and Lovable were very viral on social media and I was like this is going to be such a big market. I feel like I have a very interesting take on this market with the backend built in, focusing on function on complex apps where most of the other players were focusing back then like frontend and maybe could connect the front end to Supabase. But it was very hard. We're at a different ball game where AI is going to generate so much value that markets are going to grow very, very fast. Obviously some will get cannibalized, but markets are going to grow very, very fast. And the VC model is not necessarily a winner takes it all, but it's huge returns type of market.
- [51:53]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think we will hit a speed bump? Everyone is very concerned about the AI bubble and not delivering on the revenue that we promise. Do you think that we will have a speed bump where there is a sign that we don't deliver the revenue that we promised?
- [52:06]
Mayo Omer
I think the question is whether it's going to turn out to be a platform play which means that when building better models the entire ecosystem and the market benefits from or whether what will happen is like model companies are going to fight. Their margins will get worse and worse because they will need to lower prices. Maybe at some point we'll need to figure out or crack something better in the LLMs because maybe we'll hit a wall. So this will be the bigger question, like is the value that nowadays GPT5 to GPT 5.1 adding is only to OpenAI for the rest of the industry or the rest of like the market. If it's for the rest of the market, I don't think we'll hit a speed bump. Me personally, I don't believe we'll hit a speed bump. I don't think Elsa will hit like a wall with like the improvements of LLMs. But I think even with existing models. We're only scratching the surface of economic value that you can create. If a one person team can get sold for $80 million and building a viable business and healthy business and profitable business without people, it means that you'll be able to do a lot more stuff with very like less people and that companies will become more efficient. And as a result of that, every product that we buy is going to be better, is going to be cheaper. There's so much more to do. And this was like with the previous version of LLMs. I've seen what it takes to build a company that needed to raise or was very capital heavy, $130 million and like over 100 people. And I've seen now in the age of LLM how much better it is or easier to build a very lean company. I was one person. This value is going to trickle down from enterprises becoming more efficient, many more startups because there's no technical barrier anymore to eventually the consumer benefiting from all of those, from all this economic value that's going to be created.
- [54:01]
Harry Stebbings
How many people are in base 44 today?
- [54:03]
Mayo Omer
No, I cannot say. Five minutes before the conversation they told me I cannot say numbers or number of people or whatever really.
- [54:11]
Harry Stebbings
Why is that? Just number of people.
- [54:13]
Mayo Omer
I think they're waiting for the investors updates.
- [54:16]
Harry Stebbings
I don't know if it's a good.
- [54:17]
Thing to have more or less.
- [54:18]
If I was a public company I'd want to say more because it feels more secure to a less educated investor base that doesn't think about AI efficiency within dev teams.
- [54:27]
Mayo Omer
I think the public markets nowadays are so fluctuating and it's very hard like you have to see consistent results. I don't think the stock kind of behaves the same way that you see inside the business.
- [54:40]
Harry Stebbings
If you look at a lovable at a reported $6 billion price on the latest round or a rat plated at three to four and I'm sure they'll raise it six soon because they can't of a memetic in that way. Either they are grossly overvalued or WIX is grossly undervalued. You have to take one of those views. Which one of those views is right?
- [55:01]
Mayo Omer
My very not objective opinion is that WIX is very much undervalued today. If we've already spoken about this, there's also put aside the fact of like product assets and moat. There's like a moat in being big and there's a moat in having a marketing team, an organization with experience like ours. I'M not sure if lovable or uplit is overvalued. I think to be able to say that, I need to look at the internals and the economics of those businesses. I don't really know those.
- [55:28]
Harry Stebbings
Do you not track them?
- [55:29]
Mayo Omer
I track the revenue and the things they publish. But we're focusing on just building a very. And this is something that WIX taught me. Wix for many wigs, was like the underdog of other players. When I came into Wix and I was like, hey, and those guys are doing this and those guys are doing that and they're publishing here, they're viral here and they're copying our features and whatever. And wix's mindset is just like, build a great product, find the right way to market. It doesn't matter what others do. It's just like you see that purely in the business, in the metrics. You can see we've released the new agent, like the version of our agent, and like, you can see the conversion goes up and you can see that like the marketing team test different things. Some of them didn't make any sense to me beforehand. And you can see kind of like the unit economics getting, getting better. So one thing that WIX taught me is like, focus on your business, focus on a great product. It's like there's so much noise out there. I remember like my first time, my first company, 40% of my mind was occupied with what competitors are doing and oh no, the anxiety. And for me it was hard to grasp that the market is so big, nobody cares. As a category, you're currently capturing 10%, 15%, 20%. It takes years and ages until you actually go to. There's so many people that could use base 44. There's also so many people that could use Replit. And lovable is like, focus on your business, obviously grow as fast as you can. But I don't think it's like I'm trying to sniff around what's the unit, economic economics and margins and whatever.
- [57:01]
Harry Stebbings
Final one before we do a quick fire, rat, plit, cursor, cognition, all very Silicon Valley businesses. Are you helped or are you hurt by not being in Silicon Valley?
- [57:12]
Mayo Omer
I think the world is changing. With my previous company, I used to fly out every two weeks to Silicon Valley because this is where things would happen tough. I'm not going to do that ever again. I don't think in any way our business is hurting. If anything, I think the war on talent is really tough in Silicon Valley. If you're playing the game of get funded as much as you can so that you can burn for a lot of cash. And that's your way of like conquering most of the market. Awesome. Like, this is where you should be. I think for us also weeks is a month of like giving us their backs and like that they have like this deep pockets and they know what to do and they like, like, that's my Silicon Valley. Right. That's the backup that they need. And also you start to see and I have a lot of great things to say about lovable building it from Europe. I think the world's changing.
- [58:02]
Harry Stebbings
Listen, I want to do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts.
- [58:08]
I had Mark Benioff, I had Vlad.
- [58:10]
Tenev from Robin Hood on the show. They said 50% of their code is written with AI. What will that be in two years?
- [58:18]
Mayo Omer
95%. Oh, 100% for sure. You'll be prompting agents. For us, base 44 was built in the age of LLMs. And so I structured the repository in a way that's going to be very easy for LLMs to navigate through and to read the code. I think for us it's already closer to 90%. Like mostly it's like prompting agents.
- [58:37]
Harry Stebbings
Single biggest advice for someone non technical wanting to build with these tools.
- [58:42]
I listen to you.
- [58:43]
Stay genuinely, dude.
- [58:44]
And I'm like, wow.
- [58:45]
I really want to build a tool that allows me to go through all my LinkedIn followers, find everyone who has a certain title that would suggest they're an lp, an investor in funds, categorize them and show them to me because they clearly have an interest in me already. I could outbound them and turn them into an LP in my funds. I don't know where to start. I'm intimidated.
- [59:05]
Mayo Omer
So first I'll say Step zero is like the biggest hack is like how you actually build something that later on you'll use or maybe be successful, which is exactly what you mentioned, is like build something for your own problems. This is the biggest hack that I learned. This is the easiest way to get a software that's actually usable. And this is not something I want to go back into doing something that's like, for a customer that I interview a lot and understand the pain points. It was so much fun building base 44 and so much easier. When I had a use case in mind, I was like, I'm going to build for my partner, I'm going to build her a CRM and I'm going to kind of like iterate on this software and whatever until it hits the mark. For people starting out with tools like base 44, there's like a mindset that you have. So one tip that I constantly give out is like, there's a mindset that you have to get into, which is base 44 is not really a person that's like walking for a week and getting back to you with like, hey, this is what I built. And so you have to get into a mindset that's like very easy. It's very easy to revert or start from scratch. And so instead of going into building a PLD and then fitting it into base 44, build a first version that you know you're going to throw out. And for some people it's like emotionally hard to understand. Like they're going to throw out like tens of thousands of lines of code. It's going to be, okay, fine, but like, all you need is like, figure out the product stuff. Because once you have the product stuff, it's like with a few prompts, you get to where you got to with like hundreds of prompts or thousands of prompts. So iterations is everything. It's not anymore about like planning ahead so that you'll save developer time. And very easily hitting the revert button when one feature you wanted and you played with is like not something. And then you get to a point where saying, okay, this wasn't really a good idea. It's like iterate very fast and understand that you're not working with a human, therefore it's fine to try out different directions or to just give it like a high level idea and see what it comes up with and then form the reiterate. And so you can start with the highest level of prompt, like build something that will help me, I don't know, engage my audience in LinkedIn and see what LLM does because it will have ideas that it will implement inside application. And some of those ideas will say, oh, this is interesting, I didn't really thought about this. Like the fact that you can maybe generate, I don't know, reach out or that you can whatever, and see the things that you didn't like, throw those away, take it again and then prompt it back and say, okay, build something that will engage my LinkedIn features. One of the features that I really like is this and that and then build around that. And so the idea that you can throw away things that you don't like and start from scratch or revert or go back is very hard for people to grasp.
- [61:42]
Harry Stebbings
You made 80 million bucks with the sale. Well done. Does money make you happy?
- [61:47]
Mayo Omer
I don't think money makes you happy. I think there's two things that money becomes really valuable. Three things. One is your time. I don't like fancy cars, so I didn't buy a car. But like, like nowadays I'm going with a taxi everywhere and saves tremendous amounts of time. Oh, other stuff that I can pay instead of doing or wasting my time on. And this is a lot of help in personal stuff, especially if you're like busy people, you're entrepreneurs and you want to be with your wife or family or whatever. So this is a huge benefit. Second is helping people you care about and helping causes that you care about. Which is big. Is at some points, like, there's not a big difference between doing x million dollars and 10x million dollars. It's more about like, okay, you can maybe with your family and stuff like that you can support. And the third, and I'm assuming you can use the money later on to build the bigger stuff, you have this wall chest that you can say, okay, next thing I'm going to do, or when I'm thinking about what I'm going to do in a decade from now, and it's like, okay, let's go to space, solve cancer, build robots or something like that. That because you can do that, you can take a riskier bet.
- [62:54]
Harry Stebbings
OpenAI at 500 billion or anthropic at 360 billion? Which one would you rather be investing?
- [62:59]
Mayo Omer
Anthropic every day.
- [63:01]
Harry Stebbings
Why?
- [63:01]
Mayo Omer
Moving faster. They correct something in coding. They're very focused on delivering value to B2B customers. They don't have the first mover advantage, but I think they have better models and when I look at their trajectory, they're better positioned for growth.
- [63:17]
Harry Stebbings
You can add one person to the base 44 board. Who would you add and what would you like to learn from them?
- [63:23]
Mayo Omer
Wow, that's a good question. Jack Dorsey.
- [63:26]
Harry Stebbings
Why?
- [63:26]
Mayo Omer
I think he's one of the most brilliant minds and founders and you can see that consistently he builds things sometimes for just the sake of building. So you can see some of his latest pet projects, like this messaging protocol and stuff like that. That, and I think this is a person that consistently like building Twitter, building square building, other projects. Like that's just a mindset of a builder that I think can add tremendous futuristic strategic thinking. While also I think that our DNA and the thing that we're trying to build in base 44 is like a builder mindset. And I think this is like the ultimate for me, the ultimate guide.
- [64:07]
Harry Stebbings
What thing or event did you sacrifice for work that with the benefit of hindsight, you regret?
- [64:14]
Mayo Omer
Not necessarily this time around, but in my previous company, I think I missed a lot of my 20s and I think for the first few years I sacrificed a lot of time with the family and friends missing on many different occasions and different memories. And I was so inexperienced that I was trying to compensate for my inexperience with overworking, which is fine, like, got me to a good place eventually, but I sacrificed many things and many friends.
- [64:46]
Harry Stebbings
What thing are Frontier Labs completely delusional about?
- [64:50]
Mayo Omer
Maybe the moat that they have.
- [64:52]
Harry Stebbings
They don't have what they think they have.
- [64:53]
Mayo Omer
I don't know how they're thinking about this, but it's like, what's the end game for the race? There's not going to be one winner who takes it all. There's going to be like more and more companies getting into this market. It's going to be like the Chinese players that are now, like, changing the entire market dynamics. I think eventually it's like it takes one better model or lower price to drastically reduce your revenue. Then I think, or at least they used to be delusional about this. I don't know if they used to be delusional about this. Maybe they always, like, they were always planning to build kind of like up the stack. I think nowadays they're doing smart things, for example, antopic building cloud code, SDK or cloud code. And even if now Gemini 3 comes out and it's a better model than Claude Sonet, then still there's going to be a huge number of people staying with Claude code because they're used to it and they build some things up the stack.
- [65:46]
Harry Stebbings
Penultimate one, you got married very recently. What's your biggest advice on partner selection?
- [65:52]
Mayo Omer
It shouldn't be like, this person completes me, it should be someone I'm enjoying this at least so much that is identical to you. You, my partner is in their own kind of like, field. Entrepreneur. She likes the same thing that I like. She's messy, she has ADHD like me. She likes to paint like me. This is so much fun picking someone that's like you. Because as an entrepreneur, like, you have to have sympathy for the person that's like missing day and night and is constantly walking. And you have to understand deeply why they're doing that. And that's like part of them as a person, same as it's a part of me as a person. So I think having the same mindset is crucial. It's very, very hard to date a founder that's like deep into like building the company 0 to 1. And I think having a person and a partner that's like having the same mindset that they're building something or they build something is making it so much easier to add.
- [66:52]
Harry Stebbings
Emphasize with final one for you my friend. You can go back to the night before you start base 44 and you can say, ah Mayor, you should know this future self has learned this. What do you go back and tell yourself that you wish you'd known when you started?
- [67:07]
Mayo Omer
When I was by myself it was scary as hell. I used to wake up every two hours at night just to check that the platform is up. And at some point base 44 started going really fast and I was still by myself and people started building businesses and applications on top and there was like, I remember this week when it started like really going up and the infrastructure and the thing that they built didn't hold up. And so we had like this week or two or three that they had like four incidents where the platform would go down and people were like screaming and shouting at me as like I trusted you and whatever and I took it very, very hard and it was like emotional very hard. And I wish I could have told myself like this is just going to be a bump in the road. Community is going to recover from that and eventually it'll be like I said, like this is going to be sustainable, this is going to be great. Don't take the bumps in the road. Also, consumer market is so much different. Like the emotional spectrum of the feedback that you get is so much wider than building a B2B SaaS that you get like some very nice, not, not too positive, not too negative comments. Handling it better emotionally is important. I didn't know that.
- [68:18]
Harry Stebbings
Dude. I've so enjoyed this. It's a very free flowing discussion. You've been amazingly receptive to put up with my romantic advice request as well as my LLM routing requests. Thank you so much for being so good. Dude, I've loved this.
- [68:32]
Mayo Omer
This has been so much fun. Thank you for having me Harry.
- [68:37]
Harry Stebbings
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