← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens
01:08:48
Anton Osika is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Lovable, the fastest growing company on the planet. In just 7 months, they have scaled from $0 to $120M in ARR. They have raised over $200M in funding from some of the best including Accel, Creandum and 20VC....
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- [00:00]
Anton Osika
University is not the best place to learn. It doesn't matter what you're studying. I'd invest in GROK and probably short Anthropic because no, I was short OpenAI.
- [00:11]
Harry Stebbings
Why would you buy that Grok and short OpenAI?
- [00:13]
Anton Osika
I think it's more the slope on the GROK team. They're doing something which I respect a lot, which is to hire missionaries for the data curation part. The morale is super high. OpenAI has gone through all this mess, right?
- [00:26]
Harry Stebbings
There will be a leading model that has not been created yet.
- [00:29]
Anton Osika
Yes, from China.
- [00:31]
Harry Stebbings
Do you worry about China?
- [00:33]
Anton Osika
I do think there's like a 50, 50 chance they will have the best model. We'll be using a Chinese model at some point and that makes me a bit concerned.
- [00:39]
20VC Host
This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now. The show today is with the fastest growing company on the planet. We traveled to Stockholm for this interview. It's with a dear friend, Anton Osika, co founder and CEO at Lovable. Now, Lovable has scaled from 0 to 120 million in annual recurring revenue in just seven months. Incredible to see. They've also raised over $200 million from some of the best Excel, Creandom and of course 20 VC. And I've heard every show that Anton's done, he answers questions here that he's never answered before. This is a very different style of show and it was such a joy to make happen. But before we dive into the show today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tool tools. That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution, the intelligence of Coder Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or if you're an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools, including Salesforce, Jira, Asana and Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster. Head over to Coda iO20VC right now and get six months off the team plan for startups for free. That's Coda C O D A IO, 20 VC and get six months off the team plan for free. Coda IO 20 VC and while Coda keeps our team sharp, Angellist keeps our fund sharper. If you're listening to 20 VC, you know we have a really freaking high bar. Well, Angellist is the modern platform used by the best in class venture funds where over 40% of top endowments and banks are LPs. Their customers include a top five venture firm, 20 VC and they now have, check this out, 171 billion of assets on the platform. They combine an all in one software platform with a dedicated service team that moves as fast as you do. One manager said this awesome quote, angellist feels like an extension of my fund. Another said, Angellist gives me total peace of mind. The attention to detail, lightning fast response time and just real sense of ownership from the team are exactly what I need to stop worrying about back office ops. So if you're starting a new fund, don't be a moron. Just use Angellist. They're incredible. Head over to angellist.com tuzi0vc to learn more. And once you've set up your fund the right way, it's time to make sure your startup's brand looks just as sharp. This one's for all you tech founders out there. You finally come up with the perfect name for your startup. Then you check the.com and damn, it's taken, parked, unused or priced like rent in Palo Alto. So you settle with extra letters, weird spellings, whatever it takes. But hey, you don't have to compromise because now there's finally a domain for tech founders like you. Tech domains get the startup name you actually want on tech. No compromises. What's more, when you use tech, you signal to your customers and investors that you're building tech with just your domain name. Isn't that cool? So if you've got a name in mind, search for it now. With tech on a trusted platform like GoDaddy or Visit, get Tech20VC to grab it. You have now arrived at your destination. Anton Dude, I'm so excited to be.
- [04:35]
Harry Stebbings
Here with you in person.
- [04:36]
20VC Host
Thank you so much for joining me on the show.
- [04:38]
Anton Osika
It's great to see you and thanks for coming to Stockholm, dude.
- [04:41]
20VC Host
It's great to be in Stockholm. I want to start.
- [04:43]
Harry Stebbings
You just recently raised a great round. We're seeing a lot of money going to the space and I just wanted to start with is it a Capital arms race, A case of who has the most money wins or is it something else?
- [04:57]
Anton Osika
I think it's an arms race to build the best team and then it's an arm race to build the best brand and trust from your users and I mean capital can help. For us, it's not a constraint at all. If you're building something like the best foundation model, it might be a constraint just because the compute for training and so on is so large. But for us it's all about moving extremely fast and collecting the best talent.
- [05:18]
Harry Stebbings
So if we think about talent as the number one there, we've seen Zuck pay NFL style contract mega, mega sums for the best people. How do you think about and analyze that and how difficult it will be to get the best talent moving forwards?
- [05:34]
Anton Osika
I think for me it's actually more difficult than for Zuck to know which engineers are going to really thrive, push the culture forward, push the ways of working in the products forward. For Zuck it's like there's these 10 people that know everything about how to train foundation models and he's more paying for that knowledge than for these people. The talent itself is so good, it's probably, it's pretty good as well.
- [05:54]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think you do not need the same caliber of engineering talent if you're working in the application layer?
- [06:01]
Anton Osika
You just did very different. I think like one of those people, Zak is hiring, they wouldn't perform as well as the engineers in my team doing what we're doing. So it's a very different type of talent. And if I knew who was like the perfect engineers to hire, I could maybe step up our conversation bands to get exactly those. But I don't know who are the best people. So I need to just like figure out are these really, really good people to work with? Are they multiple? Are they going to work well together in this team and then and give like the compensation that you give on the top of market compensation rates for.
- [06:33]
Harry Stebbings
That you've built an incredible team. Also like a less obvious talent in the early days and then you hire amazing rock stars like Elena Werner. When you look at your hiring process, your talent assessment process, is there anything that's non obvious? So like for us I look for people who have either extreme trauma or. Or extreme masochism.
- [06:53]
Anton Osika
Yes, I'm being serious.
- [06:54]
Harry Stebbings
I think not enough people are opinionated. You said brand is important. Great brands are opinionated. People love them or hate them. Lovable. Good example. But what is yours that is non obvious about hiring or talent assessment?
- [07:06]
Anton Osika
I like to think a little about slope. If I talk to someone and I learn a lot of things talking from them and I notice that my conversation is like very dynamic and exciting, that is usually feels like a very good indicator that they're going to adapt to the organization and their slope will be very high. Otherwise there are good ways to just understand how did they perform. Like if I could be there with a video camera when they worked in the past, that gives me a lot of signals. That's usually what I spend a lot of time when I'm talking to new candidates.
- [07:35]
Harry Stebbings
When you think about slope, it's noticeable with you, dude. Like we haven't known each other for a huge amount of time, but when I compare when I first met you to when I meet you today, it.
- [07:43]
20VC Host
Is still very different.
- [07:44]
Harry Stebbings
In terms of your leadership, where have you not progressed where you would like to?
- [07:49]
Anton Osika
Still I still operate lovable in a very scrappy startup y way. Even though we're at the later growth stage right now. Adding a bit more structure in a few key areas is somewhere I'm looking to progress or start. Being an excellent operator in the joys.
- [08:05]
Harry Stebbings
Of this show and being friends is we can have a discussion, not like a one back and forth interview. Do you think you actually need that? We've had founder mode be so propagated and praised and being close to the metal Janssen having 52 direct reports, I would say structure and that middle layer is where slowness and apathy comes. Do you think you need that?
- [08:26]
Anton Osika
That's a good question. I'm going to always operate with this with most of my impact coming from like founder modes. But I do need, given that there's so many things thrown at me and coming in from all the different directions to have kind of a protective layer that introduces a lot of order in like how do we prioritize all these incoming things. And that comes down to a well running organization. And then you. For a well running organization you need a very organized manager somewhere at the top. And I'm not planning to be that manager myself, but surround myself with great leaders who do more of the organization.
- [08:59]
Harry Stebbings
Do you have a protective layer today? Because I get probably 25 insurer requests for your week and I probably make one a month. You have someone who does filter?
- [09:09]
Anton Osika
I do, yeah. And it's a kind of a wonderful chaotic protective layer that works together as a close team. I don't really have like a name for it, it's just the people working close with me. So the team is made up of previous founder Type generalists that work closely with me and I work in terms of like quick feedback. This is not what you should be doing. This is what you should be doing. Works okay. Now I think we can do even better.
- [09:32]
Harry Stebbings
You said talent was number one and brand was number two. If we think about great brand, what does great brand mean to you?
- [09:40]
Anton Osika
Super concrete example is the Apple ecosystem where they obsess about details, maybe too much so they move slowly, but that's what builds up trust and is a very strong brand. That's what we're aiming for as well. In every interaction. Like every time we update the product, how do we make sure we roll it out so that we really understand the users and how their reactions to all the things were changing very rapidly in the product, in the company.
- [10:02]
Harry Stebbings
There's a couple of questions which everyone has where they will kind of throw them as a critique at lovable or at anyone in the space. One is protection. Defensibility. When you think about defensibility today, is brand the core element of defensibility or is there something that people do not see?
- [10:21]
Anton Osika
No, I think you need to build a product if you want to maximally be defensive where if you are on this product and the platform that the product is, you don't want to live because you have so much value that you've created on the the platform that you're getting automatically every day. So that's what lovable is becoming in this product building platform where you lovable today is your technical co founder. We want it to be your co founder in general that handles all the admins setting up your finance operations. If you're on a platform like that, you probably don't want to live.
- [10:52]
Harry Stebbings
Would you say to all founders building an AI today from day one, don't worry about defensibility, it comes over time.
- [10:58]
Anton Osika
Yes, great question. I have a friend who has this fun analog in terms of an AI startup, which is that AI startups are like chickens shot out of a cannon up in the sky. If you kind of start getting traction and then it's all about flapping fast as a chicken because there are new chickens shot out from cannons every day and if you keep flapping faster than the other chickens, then you're going to do great. And I think that's a good first level of analysis in how you should operate.
- [11:24]
Harry Stebbings
I'm just going to say for any vegans that are listening, no chickens were shot out of cannons. And that is the most extremely Swedish way of. It's the Reid Hoffman who says it's about Kind of running off the cliff or whatever with a paraglider and just kind of flapping. That works too.
- [11:39]
Anton Osika
I think that's my recommendation to just be like, execute fast, grow faster. When you're starting to get up there, you can maybe start thinking a bit about the defensibility.
- [11:49]
Harry Stebbings
That's the one criticism. Another is actually when you look at these businesses and a lot of people are criticizing this with your ratlets, your bolts, your lovables, they're not actually very good businesses in terms of union economics. And so much is passed through. So, like bluntly, if I give you a dollar, how much is passed straight through to anthropic and OpenAI?
- [12:07]
Anton Osika
I don't give you the exact numbers, but if you look at the paid usage majority, it's not everything.
- [12:14]
Harry Stebbings
How does that change over time?
- [12:15]
Anton Osika
So as our business develops, we're looking to get most of our revenue. Once you as a user are like, I love this platform, I'm never leaving. But today it's only like in the beginning. You're paying to build pretty much. So over time, we just want to create so much value. You stay on the subscription and a small part of the cost goes to their AI.
- [12:36]
Harry Stebbings
Compute, will you be able to make money through not optimizing models? And what I mean by that is, in the future, you may not need the very best, very latest model to do the simple About Me website and so you can root users.
- [12:52]
Anton Osika
As all applications develop, the AI is going to be adapted to those applications. And for most things, it's super simple to do it. It's like you're driving a car and you're not thinking about what you're doing. When you're in a new situation driving a car, then you're like, your brain really goes on fire. We're not there. We're not close to being there yet. I think for us it's too early to optimize for that because the AI is every month is like doing new, completely different things. So we just want to be able to iterate really fast on what the AI is able to do and not optimize the models for what it's doing.
- [13:23]
Harry Stebbings
That's really interesting. So you build for what tomorrow's model can do, not what we have today.
- [13:28]
Anton Osika
Yeah, to quite large extent, yes. And generally when I think about models, they're the models that are very thoughtful and deep thinking. And now we put as much work on those models in the future, it's going to be a mix in terms of when it's obvious what you should do. Then it doesn't cost any money, it's super fast. But when it's a new situation, which building a software product often results in, then it has to think much more.
- [13:53]
Harry Stebbings
One other area where you can see real margin expansion is also in token selling. When you think about how you price tokens given prosumers and consumers don't fundamentally often know the price of tokens, you can actually have quite a considerable markup on token usage. Do you think that is a place of real elasticity to gain margin or not?
- [14:12]
Anton Osika
Yeah. So this was a few months ago, but we looked at how much revenue is flowing through the AI from lovable applications, okay. And it was more than $10 million in ARR. And now all of that revenue needs the user to go through this bit complex process of setting up the connection to the model providers. We're looking at simplifying. So stay tuned for how we enable more simplicity first of all for our users with that. And then if we can reduce the underlying cost, maybe we can take a margin there as well.
- [14:42]
Harry Stebbings
How do you think about mental plasticity to delay margin optimization? So the willingness to wait for margins to come? And what I mean by that is if you look at Deliveroo, its margins are shit in the early days and over time they get better and better as you have more and more people use it and more density, more orders in small areas. You've got to be patient. Same with OpenAI, same with lovable. How long does one think before you're thinking margin optimization?
- [15:13]
Anton Osika
I have these two conflicting pieces of perspectives on it. One is I speak to Nick who built Revolut and he just tells me, Anton, you need to compute the payback time and then you need to do super hard performance optimization on acquiring new users. And then you of course need to have a good payback times in terms of profit per user, which makes sense if you can do small changes on margins. It actually affects a lot on how fast you can grow. But the other perspective which I index a bit more on right, right now is you just want to have as much mind share and as many users who just love the brand as possible right now and then you can think about that later. So exactly how I trade those two perspectives off is you need to look at the weights in my neural network, but it's some combination of the two.
- [15:56]
Harry Stebbings
It's so funny, I think it's absolutely number two and then it's number three. What is that which is next? Which is incredible Performance optimization, really understanding funnel metrics from CAC to ltv how you drive efficiency through the channels and then do you know what's ironic? You kind of then go back after that stage to an art, which is where Nick is now, which is we've done that so well. We have to sponsor race cars because brand again becomes the most important thing. It's so interesting, you know that kind of bell curve where you see it up and then it comes down again. It's kind of like that on Brand, but you have it at both ends of the spectrum.
- [16:31]
Anton Osika
I think if you can do everything at once, the company benefits a lot, but you usually can't. You should be focused.
- [16:37]
Harry Stebbings
What would you most like to do now that you're not doing or can't do?
- [16:41]
Anton Osika
So I would like to rethink how the applications are built. Like, what is the best way to build an application? What Lovable does now is it takes all the best practices from decades of how great software products we built. But that's not how the future is going to look like. All software applications are going to have some type of AI. They're going to have extremely seamless payment and checkout flows. That's something I'd love for us to spend time on figuring out and making it possible for our users not to just have superhuman AI engineer, but to have an AI engineer that builds the future of applications.
- [17:16]
Harry Stebbings
We mentioned margin optimization there. When we look at the model providers, we said that it's one where you also have to have that mental plasticity. We saw OpenAI suggest or proffer lovable style competitors. To what extent do you feel OpenAI and Anthropic will come after Lovable in the way that Claude code comes after cursor?
- [17:35]
Anton Osika
In the long term, it just comes down to execution of a team and many people are going to offer what we're offering today. We just need to offer much more when that time comes. Give a better user experience, give a better value proposition to our customers.
- [17:50]
Harry Stebbings
Who do you worry more about, OpenAI doing it or Anthropic doing it?
- [17:53]
Anton Osika
What we're betting on is to be the gateway for humans and be the best user experience for AI. And so far OpenAI is doing that better than Anthropic. So I see them as a more serious competitor in 12 months.
- [18:06]
Harry Stebbings
How did you analyze GPT5? And when you look at performance post, are you more or less bullish on OpenAI?
- [18:13]
Anton Osika
We looked at a lot of how GPT5 would impact our users before we decided, okay, let's put this into the product. And we looked at how long time it took to get responses. We looked at our quantitative evals and then we just vibe checked it in many different ways and what we concluded was that it's oftentimes too ambitious for our users. And that's why we decided, hey, this is very smart. So let's give it to all our users and see what they tell us in terms of what's good and what's bad. What we found was that for the use cases, when you have to solve a really, really hard problem, it's great in terms of is OpenAI doing a great job. I think this was a really smart obvious choice for them to say like we have these five different models that you have to select in ChatGPT. Let's just bring it down into one model, GPT5. So they definitely should have done that, but it comes with a lot of trade offs and so far I'd say they executed pretty well on it. The model is still too ambitious.
- [19:10]
Harry Stebbings
There's also a question of when you set the bar at AGI and then you get model optimization and model routing really essentially, which is what it is. That's it. Capability wise. It hasn't been a step function improvement in what we had before.
- [19:23]
Anton Osika
The biggest part of GPT5 that's disappointing is that now they have to optimize all these different things into one model. Before it was like different models and they had to do it really fast. So it's inevitably going to fall short in some dimensions. I mean it just is a disappointment that you can't improve in all the directions at the same time.
- [19:40]
Harry Stebbings
How do you use OpenAI versus anthropic within lovable?
- [19:42]
Anton Osika
Today we have this very complex agentic chain where we pass the user's response, the application information through many different models and we take really fast and small ones and then we use for code writing we usually use anthropic. And right now you can say like I want to use GPT5 and that's better when you're solving a really hard debugging problem.
- [20:03]
Harry Stebbings
Super interesting and you've seen it be better than anthropic when it comes to a hard debugging problem. What do models not do today? That would be a step function change in what lovable can do.
- [20:13]
Anton Osika
Something I'm super excited about is that the AI has more context about who they're talking to and how they should be answering to guide them through our specific application. Solving that problem is something that we have to do and we have to do it both with how we build this agentic chain and over time in Building absolutely world class. Paying $100 million for getting the people that train the models. So, so that's on the, on the horizon for us to, to get it to be hyper personalized for you specifically.
- [20:41]
Harry Stebbings
When you think about hyper personalized for you specifically and the users that you have, you recently announced 100 Millionaire or Amazing Milestone to hit in seven months. For years, dude, it was like zero to 10 million in two years was like the gold standard. Yeah, that's what I was brought up on, which makes me feel really old. My question to you is when you look at revenue breakdown of the 100 million, just kind of guesstimate what is split between hobbyists, pro devs, kind of normal people, how does it fit between the different segments?
- [21:11]
Anton Osika
You're right. So people do everything with lovable. They come with their idea to build a software business and product and then there's a lot of people in large companies that use it as like okay, now I can prove show what I actually think we should build in the business and they build a working product that then they can decide are we going to give it to our engineering team and they actually implement it. And then it's everyone else who build their personal website, their small business websites in a few minutes. 80% of people are in the first category. They're building real complex applications. In terms of revenue. In terms of revenue, 80%. And then the second segment is actually growing very fast because enterprises are slowing to wake up. But you might have seen this product leader from Google who says we're never again writing a document about a product. We have to use lovable or something too build out a fully working demo. That use case is also growing very fast. And in terms of the third use case, a lot of people have been burned trying to build nice websites in this no code website builders with squarespace and so on. And if you can just always do everything lovable and with a UX that I think is more sophisticated in moving fast, that's also growing. But I think the first two are the ones who are really game changers.
- [22:21]
20VC Host
Okay, so we go back to 80%.
- [22:23]
Harry Stebbings
Sorry, is actually building complex apps and then 10% is enterprise and 10% is hobby. Is that what you want it to be?
- [22:30]
Anton Osika
We want to build for the new generation of AI native founders that build maybe one person unicorns soon. The funny thing is that those people also have jobs maybe in large successful companies and they want to help their friends and their family to build simple websites. So I think this is a good split.
- [22:50]
Harry Stebbings
Is that an optimal market to go after. If you're thinking I got. I sound like such a vc but like value extraction which is like an AI founder building a mega business on lovable. Great. You one have to have a lot of mechanisms for value extraction and be it payment solutions or you name it but if they're single seat, just like tough to get true value extraction from that. Is it not much better to be hobbyist for everyone for mom and pop to build the About Me website where it's 7 billion people.
- [23:17]
Anton Osika
Our mission is to enable a lot of people that have the opportunity to build businesses but they have been held back by not being able to write code and have access to capital to hire engineers. So it's obvious to start with the people who are going to build businesses and then it naturally trickles down to everyone else as well. As a function of that I think those are the best people to start building for where you can extract value. I think less about that. I think about our mission.
- [23:43]
Harry Stebbings
We should have like a lovable holiday fund which is like every year we pay the most talented people within large enterprises for a week's holiday.
- [23:53]
Anton Osika
They build their business and then they.
- [23:55]
Harry Stebbings
Just use lovable for the week and after the week they quit their job. Yeah, I think it'd be the funnest thing.
- [24:01]
Anton Osika
I think sounds good.
- [24:01]
Harry Stebbings
Yeah.
- [24:02]
Anton Osika
But I could just expand a bit on like on the business thinking there as well. So I think many of the largest businesses they haven't been started yet today. Now with AI you can move so fast, you can iterate much faster close to your customers, you can drive prices down. We want to be the enabling tool for that movement. I think over time that's going to result in a lot of revenue. If we can do all of these use cases that you're asking about at the same time what our use case percentage of adoption or revenue is going to converge towards is just what's the spend from enterprises? What's the end game spend from enterprises? What's the end game spend for consumers on tools like this? If we continues to dominate this completely.
- [24:43]
Harry Stebbings
New category, Obviously I'm super grateful for you for taking my money but the reason, the number one reason why I would invest in lovable latam expansion is actually incomprehensible. Very much like Uber. You could never have foreseen the market expansion that would take place very much like lovable. Saying website builders is an X market is completely the wrong analogy to understand how big lovable could be moving forwards and that's a common thing of the best venture investment Ever made.
- [25:09]
Anton Osika
Yeah, I think also just want to say on the enterprise use case. So if I was a CEO or like the CTO of a large enterprise company, I wouldn't think in terms of, oh, how can we make our engineers more productive? I would think in terms of how can we get the most information about what we should build as quickly as possible into new products or into existing products. That requires everyone in the company to be able to work in one place to change and edit their products and propose new changes to it. It's hard for us or for anyone in that matter to build a product that does that tomorrow. It's better for us to start with the founders who are building it from the ground up and then move it into the enterprise. The same experience into the enterprise.
- [25:50]
Harry Stebbings
It also allows for this incredible democratization of ideas within companies. I interviewed the CPO at duolingo for 20 product and he actually said how two designers, not traditionally ones who actually come up with obviously building products from day one, created Chess in Duolingo and they did it with, I can't remember what the tool was, I hope it was lovable. And that was actually their first iteration of it, which I thought was an amazing instantiation of this. Does that mean then that we lose the design process and the brainstorming process? Do we skip that and go straight to prototyping?
- [26:23]
Anton Osika
Look, to date what you've done is that you taken an idea and then you went through many, many, many steps until it's like a fully fast growing product. I call that the product lifecycle. One part of it is writing the code which is like where AI now has made it much faster. There are many steps after that, there are steps before that which is to like mock it up, validate it internally, validate it with your users. What we've done so far is to take all the first step until like this is validated. This is what we need to ship and even we have even external users on it into one few minutes or a few hours of building. So that's where we've seen the most maturity on our product. The steps that come after is something we have to build out as fast as possible so that you don't need a product design engineering organization. It's all one tool where anyone with the best ideas spend the most time.
- [27:11]
Harry Stebbings
The steps after or the steps before. And what I mean by the steps before is you see at the other end of the spectrum, figma doing figma make, where they're like, hey, we'll always have the design process and Then we'll move with you into the second phase of that product lifecycle, into the build or prototype phase. From design to prototype. To what extent do you worry about entry from that earlier standpoint?
- [27:33]
Anton Osika
Entry from figma or entry from figma.
- [27:36]
Harry Stebbings
Given the fact that they own the design phase just then move into prototyping?
- [27:40]
Anton Osika
I think humans are sometimes too obsessed with small details being perfect which makes you move much slower. And the way of doing it right now with the design where like one person does all the design very slowly, very detailed is going to be replaced by AI doing. You talk much more high level and you talk about your design philosophy and then the AI does the implementation of design and then you as a human go out and get all the context from do other people think this looks good? And give it all as feedback into the AI. And then there's a very seamless, opinionated way of taking it all the way to a product with all the marketing and growth functions built in AI behind it as well as all the tooling you need to evolve high quality software product which comes like testing, quality assurance and so on. And that's a new way of doing it and thinking you should be doing design with make and like the Figma tools, it will slow you down too much.
- [28:32]
Harry Stebbings
What happens to Figma then?
- [28:34]
Anton Osika
For some pixel perfect things it's going to be amazing to continue to use figma. I don't know how the distribution will look like in terms of doing it with a more opinionated way, which is what our platform is becoming versus how many companies want to continue to do it like you do it now in a tool like figma.
- [28:50]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think you're opinionated enough?
- [28:52]
Anton Osika
Our tool enables a lot of flexibility at the cost of some velocity on our product development. But I think it's a pretty good sweet spot. You can build with lovable and then any engineer can come in and edit and take over if they want to. I think yes, we would be moving faster if we were more, even more opinionated about how things should be done.
- [29:12]
Harry Stebbings
What are you not opinionated on? That you would like to be in a dream world?
- [29:16]
Anton Osika
In a dream world we would be even more opinionated about how you build an application and we would know what's the future of building applications with AI being such a core part of it. I don't think it's possible because how AI works and like what's the best UX with AI for the products that are built with lovable changes so rapidly at some point in the future I'd love to be there. And what happens if we can be more opinionated is that you get the right level of detailed adjustments on how the AI works for your product or back end flows and workflows, automations work for your product. And now we have, we support a lot of different things. So it's more. You need to be really good at prompting right now.
- [29:57]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think we will prompt in five years time?
- [30:01]
Anton Osika
Yes, I think so. But maybe it will evolve in terms of how you do it. Like hyper personalization takes care of a lot of detailed prompting that we have to do today.
- [30:11]
Harry Stebbings
What does that mean?
- [30:12]
Anton Osika
Prompting is basically providing context to an AI of what your goals are and how you wanted to do something. When you have great employees for you, they know everything about how you want it to work. So you just have to say let's go to Stockholm and do a hackathon and then it just magically becomes what you want it to be.
- [30:29]
Harry Stebbings
It pretty much does. Honestly. I sent a picture to my mother beforehand and she's like you had nothing to do with that. And I'm like no I did not. She's like, I know, right?
- [30:40]
Anton Osika
And you can't just say tell ChatGPT or something, let's go to soccer window. Hackathon is going to come up with something else than what you had in mind, right? And so you can either prompt it very, very detailed or you can make sure it knows how you think and that's what we'll be evolving towards.
- [30:56]
Harry Stebbings
We said the word opinionated and we spoke about it with regards to the company. Dude, I love your social media presence because you're also opinionated in your social media presence and I think it's respectively also just quite blunt. And you've been opinionated in how you talk about competition specifically like a replet of the world. How do you think about whether or not to engage in an opinionated stance against competition or not?
- [31:20]
Anton Osika
I don't think so much about competition. The only thing that matters is that we make our product the best product and we continue to deliver on our value promises to our customers. If there is something that happens. There was a competitor that found a lot of apps that have been poorly made and they said, oh, this is a vulnerability. And I spoke to a lot of security companies, professionals that wasn't really like how you would normally announce vulnerability. So then I went in and bashed them as an outcome of that. I think that was a very reactive thing and I think it was like something I'd be happy to share in person to that competitor. Like face to face.
- [31:57]
Harry Stebbings
Well, I mean it was, it was interesting because Jason Lemkin, who's a friend of mine, I don't know if you saw it, but he was using Replit and then I can't remember exactly what happened, but they basically had a massive security breach or they deleted all his database or something bad happened and it was like code red for them. And the takeaway for him was like just security on all of them is just nowhere near where it needs to be. And it's wrong for Replit to bash lovable. It's wrong for Lovable to bash Replit. All of you guys suck at security. Is that true?
- [32:26]
Anton Osika
Yes, I think they. So let me say it a different way. First of all, we talk about security company wide every week. Every day I hear something about security because we take it so seriously. There's so many different fronts to make it much more secure than if a human would do the application development. And that's why it's so important for us to be the best in the world at security.
- [32:48]
Harry Stebbings
So you're saying it's more secure than humans?
- [32:50]
Anton Osika
Not yet. If you take your average developer who normally works in a large team where they have a lot of support and then that human goes out and builds an application, they are going to create software that has security holes. On average. When you build an application with lovable, it's going to tell you to go through a bunch of security reviews and the AI is going to do a bunch of security reviews and finally it's going to give you green light. Like we haven't found any security vulnerabilities. If you compare those two truly average developer with Lovable, Lovable is going to have a lower chance of having a vulnerability. And so we want that to put that to zero percent. We need to put that at zero percent chance of vulnerability.
- [33:29]
Harry Stebbings
It reminds me of self driving for the world's best driver. I'm sure you are better than self driving but for the majority and for the majority who are tired, humans have the potential to be hungover, high, malfunctioning in some way, actually wildly dangerous and much, much better.
- [33:44]
Anton Osika
Very much so. Yeah. I'm very proud of what the team done so far with the security. And there's more to come.
- [33:49]
Harry Stebbings
We've spoken about many different competitors in different ways from your Figmas to your rattlers. If you move forward three years, what does the space look like then I.
- [33:59]
Anton Osika
Focus on what our product does and how we serve our customers best. And I don't really predict that if we get all the majority of the profit share in this market that's missing this is spread out across different companies. That's also fine as long as we build a product that lasts for generations. And I do that by building the best product for our customers.
- [34:18]
Harry Stebbings
And this is why brand is so important for you.
- [34:20]
Anton Osika
That's how I think about it.
- [34:21]
Harry Stebbings
Do you mind if devs go to lovable? Get 60% of the code from there and then fine tune it.
- [34:27]
Anton Osika
I don't like from the get go. Two years ago I decided that I'm going to build Lovable for a world where humans don't write code anymore. And we're quickly moving there. We're very, very quickly moving there today. I don't mind at all. It should be flexible. Some humans have their way of doing things and I think it's good if you have ecosystem where you can use many, many different tools on on the product over time I think it will converge towards the very opinionated platform like the ones we're building towards. And everyone's just look at what's the cost benefit of doing it with some other tool as well. Only using lava wall is going to be the obvious most the high velocity and high quality driving Choice today.
- [35:07]
Harry Stebbings
Does AI make 1x engineers 10x or does it make the 10x engineers 100x?
- [35:14]
Anton Osika
It does both. It really does both.
- [35:16]
Harry Stebbings
I have to force you to 1.
- [35:20]
Anton Osika
For the junior engineers, 1x engineers, they often are bad at something, right? If the AI can bridge that gap, it takes them from 0 to 1 and to be able to do something they were not able to do before, it's like a 10x, they go to 10x or even more. So if that's the case then it's more valuable for them. If it's a 10x engineer working on something where you need a lot of many years of experience to work on a system that a junior engineer completely doesn't understand, the 1x engineer doesn't understand the system, then the 1x engineer is useless. So no AI is going to increase their velocity while the 10x engineer is going to maybe go to 100x engineer.
- [36:00]
Harry Stebbings
How will the size of engineering teams change in the next five years?
- [36:05]
Anton Osika
For the best companies, engineers will react as this translation layer. They will need to be more thinking more in terms of product. Being a product manager, I think there's a higher elasticity on such engineers. So you might see many companies being like oh, more engineers, we can do even more even faster. They're out talking to the customers and changing things with AI super Fast.
- [36:27]
Harry Stebbings
Do the skills required to be a good engineer then change with time?
- [36:31]
Anton Osika
Yes, definitely. I think being a generalist becomes more and more important in everything with AI so that you can understand how things will come together as a larger whole. And then you use AI for the deep expertise that you don't need in the future as much.
- [36:48]
Harry Stebbings
When you think about skills required too, there's a lot of people who are asking today, should I bother studying computer science if we're going to see Lovable be the last software that we ever need? How would you advise your little brother questioning whether to do CS at university?
- [37:06]
Anton Osika
University is not the best place to learn. It doesn't matter what you're studying, you should be out there and really understand how the world works in terms of how work translates to value creation. And you don't learn that at university. So university is a way to train your brain to learn new things and meet a lot of interesting people.
- [37:25]
Harry Stebbings
Would you encourage your children to go to university?
- [37:27]
Anton Osika
So this is now 20 years in the future? Pretty much. So it's hard to say something about 20 years in the future. I think it's a great experience that I've had in life. Why not? But it depends on what outcome you want to reach. If you want to have a job where you make the most money, no, they shouldn't go to university.
- [37:45]
Harry Stebbings
I think the opportunity cost of those years is very high. In the UK in particular, we just get very drunk for three years and that's generally how it is. And we generally study generalist subjects like geography and history. Honestly, it is a little bit of a waste of time, in which case you can utilize those years so much better given your stamina, your energy, the plasticity of your brain at that age. Which is why I highly advocate against it.
- [38:08]
Anton Osika
Agreed. If you just do a very, very specialized job for those years, maybe you'll become less of a generalist. So there's a trade off there. Of course, while as university you're exposed to many different concepts which can be useful.
- [38:21]
Harry Stebbings
We mentioned earlier AI and enterprise. When you look at the biggest enterprises today, they're not able for data, for permissioning, for security, to use AI. Are we going to see the biggest shift in incumbent power in the next 10 years?
- [38:38]
Anton Osika
So if they're not enabled, there's someone else that will come in and be enabled. I think you see this in banking, like for example, where bank is a software company. Right. It's all about software systems. The old banks are moving much slower. Yes, there is going to be some companies that are like build ground up for an AI to change their systems. And anyone who's exposed to customers, understanding the legal requirements and so on can move much, much faster in creating a good customer experience. So yes, I imagine there are also some benefits of having been around for a long time in the enterprise. In banking there's a certain element of trust and so on. So I don't know how large this shift is going to be across different segments of the enterprise market. Many companies will get disrupted by cheaper, much, much better alternatives.
- [39:25]
Harry Stebbings
You said there about trust. How loyal do you think lovable users and customers are? Do you think there's a high propensity to switch and an ease to switch? Or do you think people fundamentally are loyal?
- [39:35]
Anton Osika
It's 50 50. Like some people are just super, super loyal to a brand. Many people, I mean if you do something that hurts your brand, they will switch and they're just out there looking for maximizing some kind of cost versus capabilities objective. You can think about both of those groups simultaneously. If you have the best product with the best value, you're going to get everyone.
- [39:57]
Harry Stebbings
We spoke about people being threatened, large incumbents. What questions should large CEOs, business leaders be asking today about the future of AI and their companies and how they use it that they're not asking?
- [40:10]
Anton Osika
Do you think one of the biggest bottlenecks for these companies is going to be some kind of change management for the humans in the organization? And I think they should be asking how have similar companies to ours changed management very, very, very rapidly and get that conversation into the leadership room and then maybe across the entire organization to study those examples of where change management has been very successful and then look at specifically which AI tools should we be using? Should we be building our product on top of lovable 100% because then everyone can collaborate there. Should we hire some new type of people that come in and upskill everyone?
- [40:45]
Harry Stebbings
You said about speed. You said about talent earlier bluntly. Dude, I get really fed up with everyone saying that Europeans are about espresso and take in the summer and it's August and July, we're not going to work. And I advocate for a very aggressive work culture which you know is996. How do you feel about the importance of unwavering hard work, overbalance in the desire to win?
- [41:12]
Anton Osika
I think over a 10 year period I would advocate for some balance. But over a two year period if you really care about something, then you should make sure that you have like, you get your exercise, you sleep in really, really well. Maybe something that, you know, relaxes you and then just work your ass off. That's what you should be doing.
- [41:32]
Harry Stebbings
Do you agree then with Scott from Cognition, who clearly said to all Windsurf employees, after hiring them or buying the company, it's six days a week. It's unwaveringly relentless. And if you don't want to sign up for that, you can leave in.
- [41:47]
Anton Osika
How we think about it is that you are here to have 10x impact over the other people at other companies if you don't have 10x impact. So you do that by being very talented, being good at your job, and being very focused. For some people, you need to put in a shit ton of hours, but not for everyone. Am I seeing the impact? Am I seeing that? If you would tell me you're leaving tomorrow, I would be like, no, you are such an important part of this company, you have to stay. And that's how I push performance and impact.
- [42:15]
Harry Stebbings
Do you do the keeper's test?
- [42:16]
Anton Osika
Yeah.
- [42:17]
Harry Stebbings
Has it made you change how you construct teams?
- [42:20]
Anton Osika
Yeah, I think it always makes it clear to people that I need to always figure out, am I like, how can I have more impact? And then I think in terms of what does this organization look like in Is it optimally set up to succeed Right now, culture is such an important part. If you just like throwing people around too much, it hurts the culture and the ways of working. But doing this business exercise of saying, who is this organization set up perfectly to win definitely shapes how I build the organization.
- [42:47]
Harry Stebbings
You mentioned Nick earlier at Revolut. He gave me the best answer, I think, ever on culture. You know, I've done 3,000 shows and when culture comes up, it's like first principles thinking. I'm like, fuck it, we'll edit this bit out always. But he said the best thing ever. He said, I don't think about culture, I think about winning. The single biggest determinant of human happiness is growth and development. And when you are winning, you are most optimally positioned to grow and develop. And so if I create the conditions to win, you will grow and develop and then supporting that. The other thing that people like to do is accumulate wealth as well as development. And you will accumulate that by winning because of your share price increase.
- [43:23]
Anton Osika
That's a good quote.
- [43:24]
Harry Stebbings
It's a really good way to think about it. And I think it's the same, which is like, if we win, everyone will be happy.
- [43:31]
20VC Host
There's very few places where they're losing.
- [43:33]
Harry Stebbings
Every day, day in, day out, and blissfully happy. It doesn't happen. What's not great about your culture today, if you could change it?
- [43:41]
Anton Osika
There's a certain personality type that takes a lot of initiative. They're very excited about new ideas and doing novel things. And as your company matures, that is still an important ingredient. But you need the first priority to make what you have high quality, to continue to be high quality and improve the quality across everything you're doing. And I want us to be even more memeifying. Let's improve the quality. Let's improve how we do things, move slow so that we can move really, really fast.
- [44:14]
Harry Stebbings
You want to be more thoughtful around where you spend time and where you don't.
- [44:17]
Anton Osika
Yeah. So there's this cowboy versus farmer analog where a farmer is like optimizing things for the long term. And I think we can do a bit more of that optimizing things for the long term. But we always strike the balance of doing innovation.
- [44:31]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think you're in that phase of company build yet? I actually prefer the optimize for the short term. I don't know if you spent much time in China or with Chinese development teams, but they are unbelievable in their psychology around build. They optimize for the short term incessantly and then just sticky tape the shit, sticky tape the shit, sticky tape the shit. And that is often how they're able to do so much so fast.
- [44:53]
Anton Osika
If you have super clear product market fit, you have a brand to defend, you cannot stick issues. You can do that in sprints to move fast, to innovate. But you really need to focus on are these pieces put well together. Spend a lot of time on moving things around in the organization, in your product so that it has high quality, maintains high quality and you can build faster upon that foundation.
- [45:19]
Harry Stebbings
Can you imagine if Apple were like, oh fuck, we deleted your cloud. Sorry.
- [45:23]
Anton Osika
Yeah.
- [45:26]
Harry Stebbings
I said earlier about Europe and summer and not moving fast enough. You said before that it is better to build in Europe and I don't want this to be like an advert for Europe. But why do you think it's better to build in Europe?
- [45:38]
Anton Osika
There are many good things about Europe. There are also good things, things that are better in the US for example. I want to prove that you can build a generational product, a generational company team from Europe and part of it is on hard mode.
- [45:54]
Harry Stebbings
What parts are on hard mode?
- [45:55]
Anton Osika
The hard mode is where the network isn't as great. In how many individuals and companies that have worked on and have context for all the different stages of building an amazing multinational company completely Agree.
- [46:10]
Harry Stebbings
There are no Elena Werners in Europe.
- [46:12]
Anton Osika
Yeah. Maybe we'll get here here soon. That's hard mode. I think access to capital people that will quickly give you a lot of distribution, help you with distribution and brand.
- [46:23]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think access to capital is a genuine problem? I think there's so much money in Europe that actually it's a problem for.
- [46:28]
Anton Osika
As I said, it's not the bottleneck for us. No, it's not.
- [46:30]
Harry Stebbings
And you're going to start to see very soon. I'm sure you're probably already seeing it. But lovable spin outs, where anyone who leaves lovable will get a term sheet straight away.
- [46:36]
Anton Osika
100%. I think it's easier to get distribution to be on the center world stage in San Francisco, New York. But we've been able to pull that off from Stockholm, which is good proof that you can do it from here.
- [46:47]
Harry Stebbings
Why do you think you've been able to do it? I have my theory on why I think you've been successful.
- [46:52]
Anton Osika
I think it's about storytelling and sharing everything we're doing at the company and empowering other people who are using lovable, telling their stories. A bit of that. That's how we broke Bimbo breaking through. We understand that you should be building in public and share what you're doing.
- [47:07]
Harry Stebbings
Transparency is everything and people like to follow people. And you've combined the two very well, which is you're incredibly transparent around your ARR growth. Easy to be when it's as good as it is, but you're incredibly transparent in a way that most people aren't. And then it's led by you and your voice and the two combinations of cult of personality. You and Anton and then you and Aeros is what really drives the success in that way. So that's kind of what's harder, what's better. Why should everyone build their company in Europe?
- [47:36]
Anton Osika
I mean, we are the biggest talent magnet in Stockholm right now, which is amazing. It's much, much more difficult to be that in San Francisco or New York. We can really pick up all the underutilized talent and 10x their performance by being in a 10x better culture or ways of working and with amazing colleagues. So being able to be that top one is I think, the biggest one. There's a culture of humility and low ego and working really well together as a team that I think is stronger in Europe. And this way of thinking in terms of efficiency and doing much more with.
- [48:14]
Harry Stebbings
Less, you have inherently higher churn in the valley when you have a bad day. OpenAI offer you a bigger package and it's like I'll even do OpenAI. And that prevents the compounding of knowledge within teams, which I think is so valuable. Would Lovable be less successful if it were in the Valley?
- [48:30]
Anton Osika
I honestly don't know. I think it would be very successful regardless.
- [48:34]
Harry Stebbings
Did you ever think about moving?
- [48:35]
Anton Osika
Yes. When I was about to start the company, everyone was of course telling me I should go to sf. But we just kept building and we found some great people in Stockholm. So we kept building it from here. I'm happy how it turned out.
- [48:49]
Harry Stebbings
That was a decision which you made and it worked out very well. What did you do in the lovable journey that with the benefit of hindsight and some experience you wish you hadn't done.
- [49:01]
Anton Osika
Look, when we started we had this idea. The vision was very clear. The sequencing was not so clear in what we should be doing. We had this open source community that was kind of excited about a tool I made a few months before we started the company. GPT Engineer. I think we shouldn't just like scrap that completely and be 100% focused on what's the future look like in terms of building, opening your browser, just building your product there, which is lovable.
- [49:26]
Harry Stebbings
Why should you have scrapped that?
- [49:27]
Anton Osika
You should be very, very focused on doing that.
- [49:29]
Harry Stebbings
Was it not crucial for customer development, customer feedback?
- [49:32]
Anton Osika
No, I don't think so. There was of course a plan for how to incorporate it to and get more value together. Open source can be very useful for many businesses with the perspective of maximal focus. It was just a bad idea to do things that were a bit too tangentially related. So that's definitely one thing and we talk a lot about doing one thing. Finding the bottleneck for the company. Solving for that bottleneck is the best way to move really, really fast.
- [49:59]
Harry Stebbings
What is the bottleneck that you'll be discussing in the board tomorrow?
- [50:02]
Anton Osika
I think the bottleneck for our long term future is how we identify the technical product so engineers that will take the product to its next phase and innovate on many, many fronts at the same time. That's on the long term. If you think about the product today, it's giving our AI more capabilities that are really like make it really polished user experience and give it more of those capabilities so that you can build out your full company, grow your business on top of lovable. Then a bottleneck is for how we serve all this extreme amount of enterprise customers love and pull from them at the same time as we focus prior one is for the four Founders building on Lovable.
- [50:44]
Harry Stebbings
Will Lovable have an enterprise sales team?
- [50:47]
Anton Osika
Yes.
- [50:47]
Harry Stebbings
And become an enterprise company?
- [50:49]
Anton Osika
It will not become an enterprise company, but he will have his enterprise sales team. What is that? Yes, I'm not so nervous about it. That is just about talking and understanding your customers making making sure they have the tools to get value from the products. That is how I see that part. And there are of course many enterprises like top down enterprise sales team that hustle themselves to wine and dine CEOs. That's not what we're going to do.
- [51:15]
Harry Stebbings
What is the hardest role to hire for you?
- [51:18]
Anton Osika
So I think hiring engineering leaders is very difficult because it's so hard to predict how their past performance will translate to our organization.
- [51:26]
Harry Stebbings
Have you made mistakes on hiring?
- [51:28]
Anton Osika
Yes, I've made so many mistakes.
- [51:29]
Harry Stebbings
What did you do that you wish you hadn't done on hiring?
- [51:32]
Anton Osika
I wish I was in the details when I not delegate too much and I wish I was more proactive about does this person want to reach the outcomes? Are they excited? Inherently motivated by the outcomes?
- [51:45]
Harry Stebbings
I think something that's really interesting when you say about leaders. There is. I thought of your co founder who was in the video for the OpenAI release and what struck me with that is respectfully, it was one of the first times I've seen him front and center, not you. How do you think about exposure between the two of you? Given you are very much the face of Lovable?
- [52:04]
Anton Osika
I'd love for Fabian to have more exposure, but I also want him to be focused on building the product. That's what he focused on. It's much easier for people to relate to Lovable if they see one person and keep seeing that one person. Today that is me and I think it will continue to be me.
- [52:21]
Harry Stebbings
What do you think is the biggest secret to a successful co founding pair? Scaling at the speed of Lovable Scaling?
- [52:29]
Anton Osika
The most important thing is just the raw horsepower and adaptability of the founders. If those are maxed out or those are high, you must be able to work together. If you have sufficiently low ego, it's going to work. But if you really want to work extremely well together, I'll take an example which is Fabian and me. He's not very big on doing some weird new way of doing things. He's just like simplify it as much as possible. He's quite introvert and quiet until he has really shaped an opinion about what's the most important thing. And I'm on the polar side of the spectrum and saying fabi, we should use this new crazy thing. And that polarity is actually very productive for both of us.
- [53:12]
Harry Stebbings
When you think about that and then you think about you're married and very happily married. When you think about successful marriages, what makes the marriage so successful?
- [53:23]
Anton Osika
Me and Fabian, we can talk about anything and that's extremely productive. And we can talk about turning every stone and challenging each other around anything. And we have a lot of humility. I think that's very valuable and very important. And the same is true in my marriage. Humility? Humility, yes, a lot of humility.
- [53:41]
Harry Stebbings
Does success make marriage harder or easier?
- [53:44]
Anton Osika
I mean, if you have zero hours to spend time with your partner, it makes it more difficult.
- [53:48]
Harry Stebbings
I also look at 90% of relationships often struggle and a lot of arguments is based on money, which is an inevitable thing that's very hard, especially as cost of living goes up. And for a lot of people, that then doesn't become a problem. Has it changed your marriage?
- [54:02]
Anton Osika
Not so much now.
- [54:03]
Harry Stebbings
Very humble Swedes, aren't you?
- [54:04]
Anton Osika
Yes, we. I haven't changed my lifestyle since lovable success.
- [54:09]
Harry Stebbings
Have you not?
- [54:10]
Anton Osika
Maybe I think less about monetary decisions, but no, lifestyle is pretty much the same.
- [54:15]
Harry Stebbings
What does the lovable product look like at the end of 2026?
- [54:18]
Anton Osika
I mean, it's your perfect co founder that you go to with your idea from the idea stage, but also all the way up to growing your business once you have customers and taking care of what Ileana is doing. Optimizing the product for growth. Optimizing the product and optimizing your communication with your customers, be it through email or through different marketing channels.
- [54:41]
Harry Stebbings
So you eat the whole stack then?
- [54:43]
Anton Osika
Yeah, it's one opportunity way to do the entire product lifecycle.
- [54:46]
Harry Stebbings
So you do everything from email marketing to SMS marketing and everything in between?
- [54:50]
Anton Osika
Yes. And obviously this is what an enterprise also wants to build their products on. In the interim, they're using it for individuals like people in teams building out ideas that the enterprise companies should be doing and that you're doing that very productively.
- [55:03]
Harry Stebbings
Is benchmarking for models bullshit and evaluation is bullshit. I had Edwin from Serge on the show. Do you know Serge? It's like the scale AI competitor, but it's actually phenomenally successful. It's never raised a dollar and it's a billion two in revenue. That's unbelievable. And he was like, benchmark evaluations are bullshit.
- [55:23]
Anton Osika
I mean they turn more and more bullshit over time. There's something called Goodhart's lua. So when you start optimizing for a number, that number stops being a Good measure for success, even if it was a great number for a measure of success previously. So that happens with all benchmarks over time in some sense.
- [55:40]
Harry Stebbings
What metric within lovable means less over time?
- [55:44]
Anton Osika
So it means less if we start optimizing for it. Right. And as one example where it means less, I guess is how many people click the thumbs up button or hot messages because then we can, I don't know, say fun jokes or whatever that for some reason just triggers people to be more. Just asking the human click the bottom button if you want to do it and then we're hacking the metric. Right? So that's just one example.
- [56:11]
Harry Stebbings
Dude, we're going to do a quick firearound. I'm going to hit you with some incredibly unfair questions and you can give me your thoughts. Okay. What wildly held belief about AI do you think is just very wrong?
- [56:22]
Anton Osika
I think AI is smarter than humans and most people don't agree. And the reason is that oftentimes it's very, very stupid. But if you give it all the context or you build a purposeful system for what they are stupid at, it's smarter than humans.
- [56:36]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think we will see a plateauing or do you think we will see a continuous exponential progression curve?
- [56:44]
Anton Osika
I think we'll see plateauing on the things that we care about, which is a lot of nuance and being good at all the different things at once in the same model.
- [56:56]
Harry Stebbings
But people are looking at GPT5 now and saying we're hitting a stage where actually improvements are much more incremental.
- [57:02]
Anton Osika
What you've seen so far is the sigmoid curves across many different dimensions at the same time. And yeah, we're going to see a plateauing. There's some sigmoid curves where I think we're still in this exponential phase of the sigmoid curve. And those could be something like science and engineering and bioengineering where AI is just going to continue to exponentially become extremely powerful and generate a lot of new medicines and new ways of treating health.
- [57:30]
Harry Stebbings
Grok anthropic OpenAI. You can invest in OpenAI at 380, anthropic at 180 and grok at I think it's 100. Which one do you invest in and which one do you short?
- [57:42]
Anton Osika
I'd invest in GROK and probably short anthropic because no, I was short OpenAI, let's say.
- [57:49]
Harry Stebbings
Why would you buy that GROK and short OpenAI?
- [57:52]
Anton Osika
I think it's more the slope on the GROK team. They're doing something which I respect a lot, which is to hire missionaries for the data curation part and they call it AI tutoring. I think the morale is much, much better in that team than both of the other teams. The morale is super high. OpenAI is gone through all this mess, right? Anthropic has good morale as well and they're growing faster on the enterprise side from what I'm hearing.
- [58:15]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think OpenAI wins the consumer in terms of next generation Google and Anthropic wins the developer and the enterprise?
- [58:23]
Anton Osika
No, I think it's going to be unknown. There's going to be something else happening that we don't know what is going on.
- [58:27]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think there will be a leading model that has not been created yet?
- [58:31]
Anton Osika
Yes, from China.
- [58:33]
Harry Stebbings
Do you worry about China?
- [58:35]
Anton Osika
Chinese companies are not as good as. I really understand your users, so not very worried. I do think there's like a 50, 50 chance they will have the best model. We'll be using a Chinese model at some point and that makes me a bit concerned because I have Chinese models that lovable. If we would and I would have to look into the details and see what's bad about that. Do we give them data? We don't want to give them, but I mean, we just want to do what's best for our customers. If that's going for a Chinese model and there's no negatives.
- [59:02]
Harry Stebbings
Yes, I completely agree. I think also just like the multitude of models coming out of China, it's just terrifying. When you look at every week there's like four new ones and they're all as good as the last one. And the speed of distillation is just fucking insane. Are the models of the future open or closed? Which model wins?
- [59:19]
Anton Osika
The best ones will always be closed, but if you want maximal flexibility and some kind of open ecosystem around it, it might be that the open ones are the ones that most people choose.
- [59:30]
Harry Stebbings
You can have dinner with anyone, dead or alive. Who do you have dinner with and what do you ask them?
- [59:35]
Anton Osika
I think I would have dinner with Newton because he was like religious and super smart and just talk about how he was in his age and why he's religious. He invented so many different things and it's a bit of a role model. And he's dead, so I can't meet him unless I say him.
- [59:51]
Harry Stebbings
No, sorry, I can't help with that one. There's no intro there that would work. Fucking, that's amazing. What AI company do not enough people pay attention to? Like I said, Surge for me is one which is like scale AI but fundamentally a much better business. Barely anyone knows it and it's ridiculous. Which company does no one pay attention to that everyone should pay attention to.
- [60:12]
Anton Osika
I think the browser companies are interesting. So there's Strawberry, here's.com, there's Dia and Perplexity. Now I'm very excited to see what happens for other companies.
- [60:22]
Harry Stebbings
What do you think happens to Perplexity?
- [60:23]
Anton Osika
So they want to create their phone, I think and I think that's a good bet.
- [60:27]
Harry Stebbings
Would you invest in them at 18 billion?
- [60:29]
Anton Osika
18 billion? It depends on what options I have.
- [60:34]
Harry Stebbings
That's amazing. Your laugh there just kind of said it all. That's very funny. Who's been the single most instrumental person for Lovable not in the company?
- [60:44]
Anton Osika
It's Jen Ya Taxel Zhenya. He ran sales and CEO at Miro and he was Dropbox at end segment and I get a lot of input and help from him.
- [60:55]
Harry Stebbings
What's been the biggest?
- [60:56]
Anton Osika
He's just my coach and I talk about how I think about things and then he asks me questions and tells me then you have to step up in this, build structure in this area.
- [61:05]
Harry Stebbings
I love him. I had him on 20 sales and he was fantastic. What have you changed your mind on?
- [61:09]
Anton Osika
Most penultimate one in the context of Lovable, I thought we should be building an agent before the models were ready for it and because the models were starting to get optimized for an Agentix system. What I realized is that no, no, no, you need to have a product that as many people as possible are using today so that you can optimize not necessarily the AI, but optimize the entire user experience for those users and get that's, that's your data flywheel that you want to use.
- [61:36]
Harry Stebbings
Do you worry about job displacement at scale in a 10 year time period?
- [61:39]
Anton Osika
I worry about us humans globally not even understanding what we want to achieve on this planet. And if there's a lot of rapid change with white collar workers being out of a job and humans, we get super worried and concerned and scared all hell is going to break loose. So that's what I'm worried about. But if we're a bit more thoughtful in terms of like, okay, if there would be insane amount of job displacement, this is kind of what we think we should do and this is what we want to achieve. This is how we make sure people can make some made up job in the interim, then we would 100% solve that.
- [62:13]
Harry Stebbings
Eight out of the top 10 paying jobs today did not exist 15 years ago. I always think that's an interesting stat. And we always overestimate job displacement with new technologies.
- [62:23]
Anton Osika
I think we're going to have maybe a shift away from some very glamorous jobs which people will get depressed by, similarly to how being an artist was so fucking cool. But clearly you can't make any money as an artist. We're going to see that again now for a lot of knowledge work and that's going to be fun.
- [62:40]
Harry Stebbings
My kids brain surgeons. Brain surgeons. No AI is going to come for brain surgeons for years.
- [62:46]
Anton Osika
Have you seen the robots though? The surgeon robots? They're pretty good.
- [62:49]
Harry Stebbings
I'm going to be honest. You're not having people be like, I'm going to choose the robot version of that. Is there anything else that concerns you with AI when you look forward?
- [62:57]
Anton Osika
Humans, we're very, very good at competing and in many cases that's amazing. That's how you get all the best companies. Also you get great technology. But in some cases we're competing and then we go to war with each other. We start preparing for wars. And I think if we can be better at thinking big picture across superpowers, that would prevent the scenario where you have an AI that can kill all people in the other nation in an instant and that being triggered without us actually wanting that to happen. Yeah. I'm concerned that us being so competitive in a world where things happen much faster is going to lead to some unexpected results that no one really wants.
- [63:42]
Harry Stebbings
Which competitor do you most Respect?
- [63:45]
Anton Osika
I think OpenAI is pretty good at building products. I think there's other foundation model labs that will be even better at building products. And those are the ones we should think about for the future. But mainly focus on just what do our users want, how do we make better products.
- [63:57]
Harry Stebbings
But you must look across your figmas, your bolts, your wraplets. Who do you respect most?
- [64:02]
Anton Osika
I respect figma.
- [64:03]
Harry Stebbings
Figma. Why?
- [64:05]
Anton Osika
Because they're good at listening to their users and building a good product. And if they can translate that to the full product lifecycle, they're a very formidable competitor.
- [64:15]
Harry Stebbings
Everything goes to plan, we hit all of our numbers and everything works. If that is the case, where then is lovable in 20, 35 years time.
- [64:25]
Anton Osika
We'Re the mostly used interface for humans to AI. That's a very huge market, dude.
- [64:32]
Harry Stebbings
It's so much better doing it in person. I've so enjoyed this. Thank you so much for agreeing to do it in person. And I've loved it, man.
- [64:39]
Anton Osika
It was fun.
- [64:40]
Harry Stebbings
You're a hero, dude.
- [64:43]
20VC Host
Yes. I'm incredibly grateful to be a lovable investor, but I'm also really grateful to have found a fantastic new friend in Anton beyond on the conversation today, he's been a phenomenal buddy to me. I'm so thrilled to be able to share this journey with him. What a fantastic entrepreneur and incredible to see the lovable effect and how it has inspired a generation of young founders across Europe. If you want to watch the show, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tools. That's why we use Coda, the All In One collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity and their turnkey AI solution. The intelligence of Coda Brain is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools including Salesforce, Jira, Asana and Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster. Head over to Coda iO20VC right now and get six months off the team plan for startups for free. That's Codacoda iO20VC and get six months off the team plan for free. Coda iO20VC and while Coda keeps our team aligned, Acuity scheduling ensures our time stays on track. This show is brought to you by Acuity Scheduling, the flexible scheduling software that helps you focus on what matters most. Growing your business. With Acuity, you can manage your calendar. You can accept secure payments, offer clients a seamless booking experience that reflects your brand. I've been using my complimentary subscription and it's been a game changer for staying organized and saving time. I especially love online books booking clients can book, reschedule or cancel anytime, and the booking page looks fully branded with my logo and colors. The calendar management tools let me set buffer times and sync with other calendars so I never feel overbooked. And with secure payments, I can collect deposits or full payments upfront through Stripe or PayPal, making the process smooth and professional. Head over to acuityscheduling.com 20VC for a free trial trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code 20VC20 to save 20% off your first Acuity Scheduling subscription. And speaking of incredible companies, don't forget what really keeps those customers coming back. Trust is the ultimate currency in business and today customers expect it faster than ever. And that's why over 10,000 global companies trust Vanta. Vanta automates up to 90% of the work for in demand compliance standards like SoC2, ISO 27001 and more, using smart AI to centralize workflows, manage risk and get you audit ready in weeks, not months so you can stop chasing paperwork and start closing deals. And a new IDC report found that Vanta customers achieve $535,000 per year in benefits. That's insane. And the platform pays for itself in three months. I had no idea about these Whether you're growing fast or just getting started, Vanta connects you with trusted auditors and experts support to help you build trust with customers. Get a thousand dollars off your first year at vanta.com forward/20vc that's vanta.com 20vc as always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode where I'm recording from Greece. So this will be a fun one from Holiday. Jason Lamkin, Rory o' Driscoll, the favorite show of the week. It's gonna be a special one.