20VC: Wix's Founder on What Wall St Gets Wrong About AI and Wix | Will Base44 Win the Vibe Coding Wars | The Truth About the Economics of Vibe-Coding | The Buyback Disaster: Lessons Learned with Avishai Abrahami
Avishai Abrahami is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wix, the NASDAQ-listed website creation platform serving millions of businesses worldwide. Today, Wix generates more than $2BN in ARR and has a market capitalization of approximately $2.1BN, after reaching a peak valuation of $17BN over the past two years. The company also acquired Base44, one of the fastest-growing AI application-building platforms, scaling it to $150M in ARR in record time.
AGENDA:
00:00 The SaaS Apocalypse: What Does Wall Street Still Not Understand About Wix?
07:00 Is the Market Valuing Wix's Core Business at Less Than Zero?
12:55 Will AI Kill Wix... or Make Base44 Bigger Than the Entire Company?
19:15 "You Are NOT Going to Vibe Code Shopify" — Why Everyone Is Getting AI Wrong
23:00 Would You Really Pay $80M for a One-Person Startup?
24:15 The Buyback Disaster: Would Avishai Do It All Again?
31:00 Why Every AI Customer Support Startup Keeps Failing (According to Wix)
37:00 Should a 22-Year-Old Still Learn to Code in the Age of AI?
42:20 Has AI Been Overhyped? Avishai's Most Controversial Prediction Yet
49:00 The Hardest Lessons on Leadership, Marriage & Building Through Chaos
20Growth: How Wix Built a $100M Marketing Machine | Why LTV is BS and Why Time Return On Investment is the Most Important Metric | How to 10x Your Growth: What is the Next Great Channel with Omer Shai, CMO @ Wix
Omer Shai serves as the CMO at Wix. Shai leads a team of over 400 people and is responsible for the company's global online and offline marketing activity, which boasts an incredible growth of approximately 3 million new users every month. Under Shai, the marketing department has executed hundreds of worldwide campaigns for television and social including 5 Super Bowl commercials, creative videos, podcasts and more.
AGENDA:
00:00 — The AI Agent Revolution: 93% Automation?
03:55 — Why I'm Buying TWO Super Bowl Ads This Year
08:58 — The $100M Marketing Secret: Brand vs. Performance
13:28 — Why LTV is Bullshit (and What You Should Use Instead)
18:52 — 10x Your Growth: How to Find Tomorrow's Arbitrage
27:10 — SEO is Dying? Why I'm Increasing My Ad Spend Anyway
31:14 — The TikTok Fail: Why Even Big Brands Can't Crack It
36:11 — Stop Selling the "Why": Put the Product in the Center
47:57 — Will AI Make You Unemployed? A Warning for Marketers
52:27 — Why Celebrity Endorsements Never Work
Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami isn’t worried AI will kill the web
Today I’m talking with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix. You might know Wix as a website builder. It’s a competitor to WordPress and Squarespace. Tons of sites across the web run on Wix. But the web is changing rapidly, and Wix’s business today is less about web publishing, and more about providing software to help business owners run their entire companies. It’s fascinating, and Avishai has built a fascinating structure inside of Wix to make all that happen.
Wix is also an Israeli company. Avishai joined from the company’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. And I’ll just tell you right up front that we talked about Israel’s war with Hamas and its impact on the company. And that this conversation was not always comfortable. But the main theme of our conversation was, of course, the future of the web, especially a web that seems destined to be overrun by cheap AI-generated SEO spam.
Links:
Doom runs on Excel
Wix will let you build an entire website using only AI prompts
Wix.com Launches Wix ADI and Delivers the Future of website creation
YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians
The people who ruined the internet
The restaurant nearest Google
OpenAI can’t tell if something was written by AI after all
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born
Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena on why anyone makes a website in 2023
What will changing Section 230 mean for the internet?
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23742026
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Terraform's Best Practices and Pitfalls
Wix is a cloud-based development site for making HTML 5 websites and mobile sites with drag and drop tools. It is suited for the beginning user or the advanced developer, said Hila Fish, senior DevOps engineer for Wix, in an interview for The New Stack Makers at HashiCorp’s HashiConf Global conference in Los Angeles earlier this month.
Our questions for Fish focused on Terraform, the open source infrastructure-as-code software tool:
How has Terraform evolved in uses since Fish started using it in 2018?
How does Wix make the most of Terraform to scale its infrastructure?
What are some best practices Wix has used with Terraform?
What are some pitfalls to avoid with Terraform?
What is the approach to scaling across teams and avoiding refactoring to keep the integrations elegant and working
Fish started using Terraform in an ad-hoc manner back in 2018. Over time she has learned how to use it for scaling operations.
“If you want to scale your infrastructure, you need to use Terraform in a way that will allow you to do that,” Fish said.
Terraform can be used ad-hoc to create a machine as a resource, but scale comes with enabling infrastructure that allows the engineers to develop templates that get reused across many servers.
“You need to use it in a way that will allow you to scale up as much as you can,” Fish said.
Fish said best practices come from how to structure the Terraform code base.
Much of it comes down to the teams and how Terraform gets implemented. Engineers each have their way of working. Standard practices can help. In onboarding new teams, a structured code base can be beneficial. New teams onboard and use models already in the code base.
And what are some of the pitfalls of using Terraform?
We get to that in the recording and more about integrations, why Wix is still on version 0.13, and some new capabilities for developers to use Terraform.
Users have historically needed to learn HashiCorp configuration language (HCL) to use the HashiCorp configuration language. At Wix, Fish said, the company is implementing Terraform on the backend with a UI that developers can use without needing to learn HCL.