Maor Shlomo: commitment

Transcript context

…I love that perspective. Okay, so how did this start? There were two things I think that drove me to it. One, my girlfriend needed a website to capture leads. She has a small business, she's an artist. And I tried building that with one of the tools out there for website building, not an AI powered one. And it was such a pain trying to do that one, designing with the drag and drop and everything and then things get messed up in mobile and you try again. It's like and then how do you manage your data and so on. And in my previous company, we dealt a lot with LLMs. While I was doing that, I was like, "It doesn't any sense." I know models can write the code to do exactly what I'm trying to do right now. Build a website for my girlfriend or builds slightly more complicated than a website was actually a web app. I know models can do that. They don't have the right infrastructure to do that. So if I set up an infrastructure for like, "Hey, here the leads go to the database like okay, you can write React code and it'll solve it and it'll be great from an SEO perspective and so on," then I'll notice like it's going to be super easy and she could do it on her own. And the other trigger, I was volunteering to help with the Scouts organization here in Israel with everything that has to do with system and software and back office systems that they needed. And back then, it's a huge organization by the way, really huge tens of thousands of people and they have many as any other organization in the world that we're constantly living at has many software needs. And so every time they needed to build something, they didn't have any internal devs, any software engineers. So they reach out to other agencies and agencies usually would quote them like a million bucks just to build something that they knew people could build. I was, and still by the way, a huge fan of tools like Retool for the previous wave of no-code tools, but then those tools were really more of low code tools. You still needed to know some JavaScript, something to make them work to have the interruption. And again, also back then I was like, I know for the software and systems that they want to build, I know it could be done. It's just LLMs can write that and we can really empower the organization to build all the different tools that they want, just give it the right setting, the right infrastructure so that LLM has access to a database, maybe to another LLM to be the app on top of AI, to have some user management to have all those kind of things that it needs, but it can translate the user needs to actual code. So those two were triggers back then. I started a company seven years ago called Explorium, very different than Base44, very much like enterprise top-down sales in the data space, very capital heavy. We raised $130 million. I was a CEO for seven years. Then when the October 7th wall broke out, I went to reserves for almost a year. ke enterprise top-down sales in the data space, very capital heavy. We raised $130 million. I was a CEO for seven years. Then when the October 7th wall broke out, I went to reserves for almost a year. And then when I came out, I went to travel the world a bit just to take some time off and wanted to do what I was liked the most and I haven't had a chance because Explorium grew and grew and haven't had a chance for a while to do, which is coding. I wanted to get back to building and get my hands dirty. And so I had given those experiences both with my partner, my girlfriend, and also with the scouts. I was like, "Let's take a shot at it and start the product that I know is going to be very fun to build." And I think when you are approaching it this way and not the usual way of let's raise a ton of money and try to own the category, and I knew I'm always getting into a very crowded category. I also knew that I have some different angle and some different take on the category, but when you're approaching it this way, there's not a lot to lose and I think it gives a lot of energy and that's how Base44 started. I definitely didn't think it's going to take off so fast. But yeah, that's pretty much about it.…

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