AI Startup Growth: Lovable CEO on Retention & User Acquisition Strategies

[00:00:00]we have month one retention that's better than chat gpt's month one retention Anton Osa he is the co-founder of lovable. Dev fastest growing company in Europe what a title growth starts ramping up after we launch growing 1 million AR per week at some point and that just keeps accelerating the most important thing is talent and culture and there's more raw available talent in Europe when a competitor has a lot of money do you have to raise too ready to go [Music] Anton fastest growing company in Europe what a title but first thank you so much for joining me today man thank you Harry it's it's always fun to talk to you that is very very kind of you it's the British accent but I want to start actually pre- lovable and I spoke to a couple of your investors in your first company depict and so I just want to start there what are your big takeaways from depict that shaped how you think about lovable we scaled super super fast at depict as well and and we like moving just very fast Scrappy we did that we nailed that really well I think we did really well on this high potential Talent as well quite Junior with high potential Talent you can see that from all the uh companies coming out from the picted the the pict Mafia is is absolutely real um but what I think we what works in the beginning is to say yes onto a lot of opportunities and try out what works once you be become more people and you have to follow up and maintain everything that you start you you have to be much more focused so we said yes to too many things at at the pick and uh we didn't like take this one thing that we could do 10 times better than anyone else uh and then at as the economics uh macro wise turned worse we we didn't continue the scaling trajectory that we were on initially I was just reading an article actually with Paul book heite the founder of Gmail and he said you need three great features in a product and it's really that simple and make them really really great do you agree with that product Simplicity towards feature depth yeah I I think just on a produ product level you should say no to as many things as possible and make it more of like an apple feeling the things you do you do them the purpose okay and so we have hey don't say uh yes to everything is there anything else which you did or didn't do that really shaped how you think about the early days of lovable no I think moving fast um and I I would say Talent is the most important thing and culture how you work together every day like how people interact and collaborate quickly uh those are the two most important thing for for almost any company okay let's just unpack talent because it's been a I spoke to Frederick at creandum before this and he said we had to chat about this too you favor Talent overe experience which sounds kind of obvious respectfully you're going to go for like an like an experienced untalented person but how how do you think about your hiring lessons around experience versus Talent um so I think experience can be a negative thing in some cases you often want people who are super ambitious they have a lot to prove and they are more open-minded towards how how you should work together in a team H so um I mean for many RS I I think uh junior Talent is is first of all super easy to to get them into the company they don't they're not uh already committed to some like many their projects the best people that you can hire at a young age they would go on and become Founders and then you can't hire them anymore right so so that's why junior uh people are often quite good will you hire them if they haven't done what you're hiring them to do before the benefits often of hiring someone experiences well I can see they've been at X company for four years they can do that at my company will you hire someone who hasn't done what you asking them to do before in most cases yes uh but I mean if it's engineering you have to know software engineering of course um and you for some roles you definitely want in that domain someone with a lot of experience like that who can coach and who can uh tell the more Junior people what Great Looks Like These are going to sound like strange questions but you mentioned the word ambition there did you always know that you would be successful when you were younger building did you always think I will be successful in something that I do I no I don't think so I I I I was always frustrated with how people around me didn't understand things as quickly as me it felt like and then after at some point I felt like well sometimes it's me um being too naive I like that's something I learned over time but uh many of the like truths about what's going to happen in the future have I have a very good track track record on and I think that's my this one of the superpowers that have made me have made me successful so I I felt I had that superpower I didn't know it would translate into building something successfully how did you first make money what was your first entrepreneurial thing Anton ooh I think so I always uh nerded out with kind of computers and setting up our um like land parties when I was a kid and so on and so I noticed that all neighbors and like friends or families they had the comp computers and they had some issue and then they called they wanted my help and many of them wanted to pay me afterwards so that became a bit of a side hustle when I was I was a young teenager did you do gaming when you were younger yeah yeah you're like the I'm so sorry to be rude but you're like the easiest like archetype because you fit like all the characteristics of like successful Founders that I have on the show it's like number one made money early number two exceling gaming uh both very very clear um archetypes I want to move to lovable so GPT engineer starts as a side project where does the idea come from we've left to pick G uh gbt engineer starts as a side project where does the idea come from um this was the spring after chat GPT came out and I've been playing with the the precursors of that as well and I from already like a year before then I felt there's an there's a massive wave coming from scaling up these models with more data and the p is not set up for for currently not set up for leveraging that after like I was actually traveling with my now wife as her engagement trip and when you're traveling I get extra creative and there um I don't think there was anyone who was talking about like AI agents at the time but I uh during those like sitting on an airplane I was I started writing a lot of like okay [ __ ] you can you should hook them up and make uh you basically put the large language model in a for Loop and then you can have it to do a lot of agentic things and then uh when I'm back in Sweden I'm like okay where do I apply this obviously on software engineering and I'd been talking to people about this and I felt no one was really sufficiently imaginative to what I was thinking about and I had to like prove a point in that this is already now with the current first versions of chbt apis you can build an agent that writes code and then I put together that there were two I drank a lot of coffee and then I just crammed away and um I got the first version that really impressed people you write create a snake game and then you get a running snake game on your computer yeah so that that was the the first version of what what we're building now how long did it take you to build V1 with that caffeinated session I think it was um like one main weekend and then a bit of Polish over with a few hours here and there on two two weekends after that what are the biggest lessons or advice from building many different v1s for many Founders that are listening it depends what you're building for um for most like firsttime Founders I would really focus on the user and the user problem and say like how can I get one person to love what I'm building in in this V1 uh that that's my general advice I didn't do that I just put out a video on Twitter and it got dozens of academic references and millions of people using it so take me to that so we have this weekend we released the product what happens then dude yeah so it wasn't clear to me that I would build a business on this at all I thought it was fun that there was like and this was an open source project so I I started nourishing like a community that went on to work on this open source project while I I talk went to my co-founder and said like Okay so this thing is absolutely huge um I've been thinking of doing something else to be honest and they here is like pretty like this is a bit of a wake up call for me that it's it might be time to find a good replacement for me as a CTO at at picked that's what happened next and then then a few months passed and so a few months pass the community continues to grow what happens then no but I I I figure out a good replacement for me I decide I need I want to have a great co-founder that I can have as like my partnering crime here and and there was a guy who is the most super efficient zero fluff and [ __ ] and engineer and entrepreneur so he had sold a company previously that I wanted to work with and I I I biked to apartment and said hey let's take a walk and uh plan the future so he I got him him on board and then we started building and created the first version of what became loveable lovable okay so we're building the first version of lovable you've got your co-founder talk to me about that time when did we release and how did the official release go with lovable as a product in company so the the launch of lovable like the product was one year after we started building and um in the meantime time we launched like great listed preview versions called GPT engineer app that was I mean that that's the getting user feedback cycle and um building building up I guess some some excitement about what we were work working on and employer branding as well and the the first versions I I think they were very good as they were good they were not very good and we had some people really liking it but the like the Thea moments didn't click for sufficiently many people like okay this is how I get real value from this when we when we went on to iterate over the coming year we packaged together all of these things so that you can ask today lovable I want to build the basically a SAS business and then people have built their entire SAS companies and get made made money by just prompting our AI I just want I just want to break down a couple of different things that you said there you mentioned the weight list do you have any big lessons or advice on how to do a weight list strategy well I think the weight lists are useful in that you can control exactly how many people you want to get on board and take user interview interviews with with so I think that's the like just get sufficiently many people on the weight list find a good way to qualify who you want to talk to like you have you probably have a different hypothesis on who should get who you should talk to who you're going to sell into who you're who has the most value from your product and then uh qualify only those and talk to them when you do the user interviews and user feedback sessions what are your big lessons or piece of advice on how to do them well what questions are good what questions are bad any lessons uh so there there I think for us there are two different type of user to use we we had this this type where we just see them use the product and see like where do they do they understand the product and so that's more of a you user experience interiew um and the other one is uh to understand like if they have just tried the product a bit we ask them okay so you tried the product a bit what's why are you even interested in this and ask them like what problems they're facing in their business try to identify what's the biggest pain point that you that they're actually looking to solve it might be oh I want to get more customers and I think I can get more customers if I can show to my customers that I can get the first version out with AI more more quickly H so those those type of questions how does it change the structure of teams when you look at teams today you have obviously software Engineers you have designers you have developers you have front end you have backend how does it change the structure of teams themselves Harry if you want to create a personal website for you it's super productive you can do it you don't have a team it's just you you just create it with AI if you want to ship the first version of yourselves and start making money it's all you it's not a team like a team just slows you down maybe you get some input from a designer like he how does this how do you think it's just look and and so on uh but once you have existing software with users and then you want to iterate and change that software AI might absolutely bring down kind of mess up your entire codebase I might mess up your code base so then you would want to work with a software engineer that knows how to bring have quality and consistently keep quality in the product you mentioned like people took a bit of time to find that aha moment how important is the time to aha moment I think it's very important and it's funny because you asked me this question and I I think we are very bad at making the time to a moment super short I think we could like double our conversion rates if we become better at uh like speed to a h moment but you I can say something we're doing let me take credit for something when you come to love you just see a prompt box it's very inviting instead of getting to a landing page you you see a prompt box and then for the ones that do enter a prompt box you get a quite a quick a of the first aham and there has to be many aha moments in lovable it's quite a complex a software engineer is a very complex feature but uh that that we are doing well and that's what I I would recommend just give the user something interactive with instant reward you mentioned that the prompt box itself I've had many guests on the show say before that almost the biggest sin that chat GPT did was make chat the default UI for a future of AI do you think that bluntly chat and the prompting that we have today in in lovable and many other products is the right default UI for an age of AI I think yes prompting can you can do almost anything with prompting and explaining your thoughts in in written form it's um er it's also easy to implement an itate on but but it's going to get more advanced over time with not just prompting I love the way you took a deep breath there it's like this is a weighty question I'm thinking about it a lot I mean you're building the interface for creating software and no one knows what that interface is going to look like but the prompt thing yes I think it remains but I'm kind of going chronologically through the story because it's an amazing story um you rejected YC at some point yeah talk to me why did you reject YC we felt that at uh best YC would be a lot of dilution and some acceleration but a lot of dilution and some acceleration and at worst it would be a distraction H to go to SF and go through all of these like fun things that happen when you go to YC um and we we just took some funding instead and uh built focus on Talent the seed round when does the seed round come does that come post launch or pre-launch so that comes before we launch the first the first waight list of our product even okay how did that seed round go so before you've launched the weight list of the product how did that round go how did it come to be yeah so I I I have this advice that I've always gone by which is to work with investors that you like and I I had some people that I know from before that I just think are amazing people that I want to have by my side and if things go sour if things go well uh and I spoke to a few uh I kept it very very brief I got like a preemptive offer and I said yeah let's let's do it I love it how big was this round so we took three million and then we added on um I got the advice to say like yeah just to get a lot of cash because you never know what happens in the markets so we we raised a quite a large pre uh with an up to uh almost $8 million would you advise Founders to raise quite large preed rounds if they can if the money is on the table would you say take it depends on how you want to operate like if you like talking to investors which at the time I was like no I just want to build the technology then then the answer sure take ra a big pred so you can you get time to figure things out um if you like talking to investors which I um I think you should if you think it's an interesting to just talk to a lot of interesting people who care about understanding the market then I would go more race more iteratively smaller smaller runs we're seeing a lot of Founders today be immensely dilution sensitive from day one in a way that they haven't been before like 10% is like the max they're willing to give up on a round how did you think about dilution sensitivity uh here again like I have a very wise person who was like no dilution does does matter so much it's all about the size of the pie and I I think that was I was both affected by that advice as so as my like no minimized ution this is this is my life life's work so that's mainly how I think about it now so we now raise this round we have the wait list we're skipping a little bit take me to go live day when when does that happen and how does go live go we go live with lavall the 21st of November last year 21st of November last year [ __ ] that was only four months ago yes four months ago isn't it nuts how much like life changes in four months it's true it can change really fast yes yeah so November 2024 you launch from day one is it just nuts How does it go um so I mean we had users paying users on like earli version that was called something else um and then our launch I think it wasn't one of these like wow launches I I think we could have gotten like 10 times more press on the launch 100% um but people start noticing like w this is really good and and we continue to quickly improve things in the products chip things very rapidly um so it ramps like growth starts ramping up after we launch and we we like wow we're growing 1 million AR per week at some point and and that just keeps going accelerating through that was in December and that it just keeps ACC accelerating we it was a bit on the technical side it was a bit frustrating because we have we have some a lot of scaling issues that we run into and the team is like okay we can continue to uh patch this but they say like we let's rewrite everything while we're seeing this explosive growth and there's so many quick fixes that we want to do on the product side so you roted ASAP and stabilized it then yeah so it took a bit more than eight weeks I mean it's not completely done to date but that we took eight weeks and then now we're shipping faster can I ask you you mentioned that like a millionaire r a week how much are you growing now a week two million year per week two million a week now yeah like it's so funny for me dude CU like when you live in a world Adventure you don't you don't kind of get this I don't think and I don't mean that rudely to you but like your companies go from like one to four in a year and that's like [ __ ] a four a in a year amazing that would be good and then you're like growing 2 million a in a week does that sink in like do you know how nuts that is no I guess no I I mean um I a lot of things last few weeks have just blunted me and I'm just I'm just focused on all the things that we have to fix and like improve and that's all I think about what do you think are the most common ways or methods that company's development process slows down for Founders listening what should they watch out for that often happens what makes product development slower is usually that you have a complex product and you have a lot of requirements on your product so you you said earlier har that you have three three things that are good in your product I think that's uh generally A very wise thing to do Simplicity leads to product Direction knowing where you're going and what you're working on when you look back since the start of lovable where from a product perspective did you invest and spend time where was the benefit of hindsight you shouldn't have done I think at Lev ball we we thought a lot about the community and like Community features inside of the product and the that I think that could have made a lot of sense if we had seen slower growth but now that you just like growth is not something we not a concern you don't need Community features to power growth so that I think that was pretty much waste waste of effort do you agree with the sentiment build it and they will come the growth has been amazing from day one it feels like since gbt engineer even people have just kind of come for the product because it's been amazing and different do you believe and they will come actually does stand true today if you have a very strong vision of how that where there is untapped potential if you really know that deep down and you have track record of showing that then build it and they will come is going to work um uh and and you also have the runway your personal like energy Runway and so on to really make it work and they make them come but for in most most cases yeah that is too risky it's too risky to just build it and they will come and it's you can build it and make them come or try to make them come at the same time and that's much lower lower risk you said there about energy and it reminded me of a statement that Nick revolute said to me in a show when he was talking about his investing and he said the most successful Founders that he invests in are between 30 and 35 they don't have the naivity of the incredibly young founders but they don't have the bluntly tiredness in some ways or that you know you have more energy when you're younger of older Founders how do you think about that given your age today I think energy is uh super important and uh I think the navity is is a benefit often but uh I mean I I I made mistake a lot of mistakes was the first time manager as well that uh dep picked pretty much what was the biggest mistake he made thinking that we should change the culture and become a more of a scale up something slow moving or like more management layers when we became 40 people that's that was the biggest mistake I did why did you think that that was I mean my co-founder um and other senior people we spoke to said like oh now you have to hire Executives and so on and that uh was um that was a bad idea that okay and so did you start hiring Executives pretty much yeah or yeah we did and then they don't work uh one person I hired didn't work out uh which slowed me down and they kind of set us back a lot and so when you think about that what would your advice be to other Founders don't believe the [ __ ] you can scale way longer without exag many Founders hire more mercenary style maybe like skilled people but just like they are running in their Lane um I hire generalists and I like try to empower them as much as possible and if you have a lot of General super super smart generalist that you're um doing a lot of smart like new initiatives and so on adding Executives on top of them um is high risk and like reward is questionable it's at some point of course it makes sense does culture break at any point when you're scaling user base so fast you're scaling Revenue so fast I mean usually I think it does yes or it changes it changes it evolves um for this is something I'm very mindful about and I why I'm so scared of adding too many heads what are you worried about the most important thing for everyone at our company I which I talk about is uh to role model how much you care about the product the users the entire the team how how well the team works and role model and Mak sure other people care it as much as you and feel that that comes from a feeling of of ownership of the culture and the team if you're a lot of people that gets diluted typically so um yeah that that's that's what breaks or that's what's harder okay so we have the team scaling we have user base we have Revenue scaling we're making actually a lot of money at this point why a series a I just had some scheduled checkins with investors and there was this one guy and his team that had like obsessed about lavable for the last few months and they they're hearing fedck he's here in Stockholm at kandum and uh he G he just gives gives an amazing impression on me and I'm like okay I could I can wait because I know it's very clear to me that this is just the beginning and I can I can could raise it later but we can accelerate by adding an investor that is a partner in on in helping to find more amazing people in um just as a sounding board Fredick helped grow Spotify from from nothing um and uh I we decided to raise a small round okay so you decided to raise a small run I have to ask this you have many well-funded competitors in the US I think it was Neil Murray that said you put like we're Devon that actually works from like very early on yeah which I thought was bold um when a competitor has a lot of money do you have to raise too I don't think so no I mean you can just we could bootstrap like you don't you can bootstrap most things so you never have to raise but they can outs spend you on Talent on customers on marketing no yeah I mean if you're I I'm not afraid of any of those if being out spend on any of those I think it's the only thing that matters is execution so if you can outperform your own execution then I'm scared where could you improve your execution today we spoke about speed of shipping amazing culture's great the talent's phenomenal where would you say execution wise you could improve I think you can always improve on like how the decision Loop on how fast you take decisions and communicate those decisions so that everyone is really on the same page that's uh how how you do that how do you make them today how could it be improved I think it's about doing fewer I think we could do fewer things as well at lovable like there's a lot of uh people with great ideas that each each idea in isation is great but you can only have so many you should only execute on so many at the same time we mentioned the team and the culture one and we mentioned there you've been pretty Ardent around building in Europe keeping the team in Europe being a European company a lot of people say to me by staying in Europe you are deliberately not doing what is best for your career if you were in the valley you would be more successful what is your response to them the most important thing is talent and culture and it's more raw there's more raw available talent in Europe uh the culture isn't on the like the US has more culture that fits succeeding as a startup I have to say per default so what what specifically do you think it is about that culture so it's about then theault of thinking big and being super ambitious and being very committed to making things work that that in Europe people are more like about uh living a balanced uh life and uh we're we're kind of taught that we should um in in Sweden we we talk about the law of jante which is that you should be better than others okay yes this so This concerns me so how do you respond to people who say you would be more successful if you were in the valley we would be S so if you're a Founder I think you you have more free entropy of like talents to use and channel into some into something successful but there are of course many benefits from being in the valley I think it's a bit of playing on the on hard mode here from Europe and I get excited about playing on hard mode and showing that you can create a category defining company uh which is lovable in our case from Europe are you positive about Europe moving forwards we are in a doom loop around Europe which we both disagree with and hate are you positive and what guides your thinking yeah I'm uh I'm super positive I think there is a like an strong Underdog mentality among all of us Founders now which is usually a a winning concept to be to feel like the underdog and having wanting to prove others wrong I also think there's incredible superpowers in using the Arbitrage pricing of incredible engineers in Europe and selling into the US you can build huge companies selling into the US from Europe doesn't mean you can't sell into the US just because you're a European company true no it's a very Global Market dude um I've got some questions which are a little bit spicier but I have to ask them okay so a spicier one is if one were to criticize lovable they would say amazing God look at the revenue growth look at the user growth but is this like AI um Sugar Sugar Revenue in other words it's not sustainable and it will churn very quickly how do you respond to it's not really real stainable revenue and it's not sticky we have month one retention that's better than chat gpt's month one retention on paying customers and so it's about 85% and that um that is just going up like they of course there's a lot of things to be desired when you working with an AI system there's a fraction of people some people that come in and they're they just like flip up their credit card because they want to try they they want to learn which is rational thing to do and then they know that they are going to stop using it almost they almost know so we have a fraction of users who are like those people wow 85% month one yeah wow that's great because you're also too early to have month six what could you do today to increase retention most significantly the easiest thing we can do is to give more more of the important aha moments to ensure that every all of our users get more of the important aha moments on how to use the product I I I don't I don't really respectfully agree or get you because like you give prompts Under The Prompt box so you say like build me a sass app or build me a dog website or whatever the prompt is dude all you need to do is click it and you see the code being written and then you see it being created like the aha moment is pretty obvious no so there are many aha moments for or like education moments to get the most value get the full value out of using it and there the most important of those are with regards to when the when you feel like you're getting stuck and the AI doesn't understand you and there's a there are many things in how to get around around that that you can pick up as user it is how you about how you prompt it's about how to understand what doesn't work and explain or explain clearly what what the what the problems you're seeing what what you find could be the problem when you're building a more complex feature and it's about that you can actually onboard an engineer to do small changes to the code base like those are things our users should know and not everyone knows them what's your norstar matric today if you have one metric on the TV for the whole team to focus on what is it um it's the number of uh users that go all the way to getting like users on what they built getting getting something hosted with users on what they built that's what we focus on what's the amount today so we have almost 40,000 paying users and then that's the proxy for that wow 40,000 PES as [ __ ] okay do you care about the time it takes to go from start to website created or not we care about I I have to say Harry like the these things about the onboarding and how much can improve um is not something that I we have had focus on like we were just making the core AI Parts better better better that's what we focus on okay so you say about making the core AI Parts better better better yeah amazing people also say ah rappers on top of other people's models why are they wrong with that assumption I mean it's very easy to create a cool demo with just a rapper it's super easy to make a cool demo with just a rapper the hard part is to get to or get close to 100% you get what you're asking for and there's a lot of small details in making that work there's a lot of small details and there's a chain of at large language model API calls and other algorithms that run and that chain is like you can continue to optimize that for years without reaching Perfection whose models do you sit on top of today we we use all of open AI models Google Gemini and the main Workhorse is anthropics Claud model for writing the code I was going to have this in a quick F but I have to ask it now you've got anthropic at 60 billion you've got open AI at 300 or you've got grock at 50 which do you buy and which do you sell okay so um I think I would I I care about the best talent here and I feel like uh Elon is very good at tent so I would buy I would buy Gro I think they're also very ruthless in like finding business opportunities we we'll see about that but I feel like they could be good at that even though anthropic is my favorite I love the the culture and I love the like the leadership there um and I will short open AI because they're they're like have been very good in the scrappy face but they they haven't proven that they can um we have a clear product Direction and focus now over the last years so I would push sorry I'm it's a Sunday we're allowed to be a little bit more casual I would push back on you and go the two biggest things that matter in this next wave is brand yeah recognition on the consumer side and it's consumer facing frontend products and when you look at Brand everyone's mother knows chat GPT they don't even know open AI but they know chat GPT and then on the consumer product side respectfully they're way ahead of anyone else that's true am I wrong I just I just think we're still early in the days of AI and if you look at the Enterprise Revenue like anthropic is almost caught up to open AI from nothing from being absolutely dominated and I don't know what Gro is going to do here but I expect them to be having a like open a I lost all their best talent to to anthropic I think Gro might be able to pull something off here I spoke to a very wise friend of mine before this and they said that the biggest conc that I have is that open source or Mega corpse of the world with massive distribution advantages come in and win the market how do you think about that and is that a concern the big Mega Corps they move very slowly in many domains so they're never going to in many years they're not going to have the best product on the market there are distribution advantages for some of this Mega Corps and that's like the marketing and distribution is is what I'm more concerned about um but overall it's going to be like a growing Market where you can easily as a startup be both best position for some parts of the market one thing that's going to be a real shift I imagine that you have to face is the shift from plg and kind of prosumer to Enterprise how do you think about that shift and is that just not a concern given the speed of Revenue ramp how do you think about that um yeah I think if we would do Enterprise I would want to do that really well so we're holding off with doing Enterprise for now we're holding off and U our goal you may asked about the north Zone north star metric what we want to have is we want to be the best place for for Builders to create products and get the hund get get a million of the most talented builders on lovable and if we succeed in that that's a great segue into many other areas including Enterprise when you look at Shopify what do you learn from them blazing a trial in the way they have done as efficiently as they have done i' I'd I'd love to hear from you har what's the what do what are you most impressed by with Shopify honestly I would say it's their narrative around everyone being an entrepreneur I think Harley's a phenomenal communicator and Storyteller at bringing very real businesses to life and how Shopify changed their processes their sales and really made an impact and I I love to and I think he's obviously a brilliant technologist but I think without Harley's storytelling narrative entrepreneurial Vibes to life it would be a different company so I would learn from that a lot in terms of how to tell your customers stories yeah to not totally I I think Shopify um has been able to execute on many things and just created a good package I they've iterated fast that's my impression they've iterated fast on serving all the needs for for building your e-commerce and I think this velocity is was one the most important thing for building the best product when we look forward dude what would you most like to build in the product but for whatever reason you cannot why what would that reason be I think I can build anything into the product really like team would block you um that PRI prioritization not the right time okay so something that we have to say no to right now yeah so I'd love to build in a way for Founders to get everything you get out the Y combinator into lavable so that that includes like some marketing infrastructure why comor has that uh all the entire Playbook and going above that and even saying like oh here's your Incorporated Delaware C comp company your stripe setup you just have to focus on the product and talking to users and creating content for marketing when you look at partnership ships today apis that we have today into the different providers that's that's quite a real and possible product yes yes it's a it's on the road map wow yeah good okay well YC are going to love you after this show uh um final one when we look forward dude what concerns you most if you had to choose was it be regulatory challenges competition or hype Cycles I think if someone competitors is super super good at marketing uh that would concern me how important is brand I think brand is mainly the outcome of your product there's other factors too and then so I mean product is the important thing and then product good product plus awareness just creates brand that's that's I think was sufficient so it's more of a downstream effect of something else then it is important when you're doing 2 million a week in in additional ARA you're going to have more and more investors want to give you money how do you think about that and what what makes it worth it to take versus this is a distraction get out of my face it's currently it's a distraction I think it might make it worth it it will make it worth it when we know know how to exactly how we want to spend the money or it's a partner we really want to work with and um it's like terms where we we would never regret saying yes to them what if done would be a massive needle mover for the company one or two more of the perfect technical product hires dude I could talk to you all day I want to move into a quick fire around so I say a short statement you give me your thought so yeah what do you believe that most around you disbelieve I think we have models today that are really smart I think that's where people don't agree with me they're they're smarter than humans but they don't have memory in the same extent as we do they don't have context how fast will we ramp context in memory given scaling today it's the ramp what you need to ramp is to decide what like the the process for storing memory I think is what you have to ramp and it has to store all of these things like my conversation with Harry has to be stored somehow into the system and all like my childhood almost has to be stored as well I don't know it's going to take years you can buy and hold one public stock for the next 10 years which one do you buy and hold um some Talent play would and what comes to mind is Tesla and they're also interestingly positioned outside of uh software wow okay what was the most important trait in a Founder that no one talks about U okay I think great judgment people probably talk about but but I think um I like people who hire like see potential in people it's like okay this this person can become amazing and and the Judgment in picking Talent like that what's your biggest weakness as CEO today um I'm not as good as multitasking as I would like to be if lovable failed tomorrow what would be the reason like investors WR a premortem which is like a reason why something doesn't work what is that um we lose momentum and excitement and that's like that's what fuels us today right all the excitement and the momentum what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months you don't need to be attached to One Foundation model provider they're all going to be amazing you don't need to there's not going to be one winner here are we seeing Foundation models be completely commoditized yes we won't see specializations like we do today I know Claude is better for codee and Engineering do you think that will really uh equalize yeah I love the sweds [ __ ] one word answers um what's your favorite failure um I I think so when I was 17 I failed my exams at school Anton I failed them badly yeah like D D's across the board and I I looked at myself and I was like I'm either going to work behind a bar or I can make something of my life mhm and I chose to work harder than ever and make something of my life um that is my favorite failure I think my favorite failure um I probably that I didn't um the pict didn't work out so I could do more things what concerns you most in the world today I think that leadership in this in the world today I I love that whole leadership to be true idealists and not like function of circumstances and the people to pleas um and be much more open-minded to people who disagree with them and super intelligent as well but leadership in the world today uh are usually like a bit corrupted and uh narrow-minded and that's what concerns me do you think they would say you're naive I uh like I want to be naive to to the challenges of leadership to the challenges of having a you know a voter population you sometimes have to be certain ways I think we used to have like better presidents and leaderships in throughout the last century so no I don't think I'm too n but I'm definitely always a bit I totally agree with you I think the state of leadership today is woeful um who penultimate one what's your biggest short in the public markets I not so read well read on the public market it would be a SAS company it would be like a SAS company that has a per seat pricing where th those their ICP um is going to be replaced by AAS that just replaces the employees so the the number of SE goes down what's the future pricing in an AI world yeah I think it depends on how defensible your you like your business is if you're selling to like Enterprises that never change SAS software you should try to make some value based pricing I don't know how you how you get the good value based pricing but I would do something like that otherwise I think you should should don't innovate so much too much on pricing do what do whatever works today I love the facial expressions uh my my final one I like optimism and I think we need more of it in the world I'm incredibly excited for the next decade because I think we'll find cures to my mother's got multiple curosis which is a horrible disease I think we'll find cures to diseases that we really didn't think possible before what excites you most about the next decade that we have coming I think it's that AI is hopefully going to make us humans understand each other better and be better at doing win-win playing win win and that would be awesome I'm excited about that so like you our leadership actually being um enhanced by super intelligent AI Anton listen dude I've so enjoyed doing this thank you so much for joining me and thank you for inspiring a generation of European entrepreneurs that they can build unbelievable businesses is in Europe thank you har it was it was super fun