# Wix CEO Decodes AI Disruption, SaaS Valuations, and SMB Strategy

**Podcast:** The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
**Published:** 2026-07-13

## Transcript

You're not gonna vibe called Shopify, no matter how good you are.
Today we're trading on other companies' news.
We're not trading on Wix news.
I really don't care.
We make about $400 million a year, okay, in free cash flow.
So we make cash and we invest about $200 and something million into PES44.
We all give too much credit for AI and what it can do.
If I would be in the university studying today, I would be terrified.
If I'm here, I need to be fully committed to what I'm doing.
Because I've chosen to be here.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings.
Now, it's a tough time for some public company CEOs with the SaaSpocalypse.
That is more true for this CEO than almost any other.
The Wix market cap is about $2.8 billion.
They are doing $2.1 billion in revenue.
They have Base44, which is their Vibe Coding product, which is now well over $150 million in ARR, growing incredibly quickly.
And quite frankly, the public markets just won't give them a break.
Whether it's justified or not, it's been pretty brutal.
The buyback has been about as successful as the Titanic voyage.
And poor Avishai, their CEO, is going through it.
I wanted to sit down with him and hear how he thought about how Base44 makes such a big part of their business today and what that looks like moving forwards.
How he reflects on the buyback.
What public market investors don't see that they sh**.
see.
This and so much more in what I think is probably the most frank and honest conversation Avishai has had in recent years about the Wix business.
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Abishai, it is so good to have you on the show, dude.
I've wanted to make this one happen for a while.
Thank you so much for joining me.
My pleasure.
I'm so happy to be here.
I've watched a lot of episodes and as I said, I learned a lot.
So I'm very excited to be on the spotlight.
Dude, you know, I've just got to start with just a weird thing, but I like to bring people to personality and life a little bit.
I spoke to Eran at Monday before the show and he told me that you stay up insanely late.
Is that true?
And what does the sleep schedule look like just before we dive in?
So I usually go to sleep at around 5 to 6 a.m.
And I'd wake up around 11, 11.30.
In my routine, it's pretty much just an amendment myself.
I think there's something good about it for a CEO, as surprisingly as it might sound, because I have a few hours where I can actually think and work in things and plan things and do things.
And as opposed to always being, you know, in a meeting, we have to fight to get a clear schedule.
So I have probably four hours where I can do real work and not just.
Talk to people.
Do you mind what time people come in in the morning?
If you're sleeping until 11.30, you're going to be in the office at 12.30.
Do you mind if people are the same?
Actually, I don't mind.
I don't mind.
But most people don't like that schedule, right?
So most people will not agree with that and be volunteering for that.
It also created another thing which I like is that when you're a small company, people want the CEO to solve their problems.
You know, like how do we mitigate between arguments?
But by the time I would arrive, most of the things would be solved by themselves.
So the thing that were left for me to handle would be the more, well, the harder things to solve in between people's communication skills and other things.
So I mean, that actually helps the organization be more mature.
Your whoop or your aura must absolutely hate you and your sleep score must be shit, respectfully.
Actually, Aura did at some point edit the sleep profile where they define that.
So they had this theory, right, which is a very, I would say.
Northern California, which is you have to go to sleep at like 9 p.m.
or something.
And that was the beginning.
And then at some point they added, well, that's an early sleeper.
Then they had a normal sleeper, which I think is around 12 a.m.
And then they added very late sleepers.
Okay.
So they kind of like this as well.
There are different profiles.
And apparently, by the way, it was a genetic profile.
So it's very hard to move between them.
Well, thank God.
Otherwise, your sleep school would have been in the basement.
What time do you go to sleep?
I go to sleep at about 2am so I'm pretty late but I'm not quite as late as you.
So Aura will probably now...
Classify it as a late sleeper, and that's what you're going to get.
I don't use it, dude.
I don't need another fucking device to tell me that I'm shit.
I'm sorry.
You know what?
Life is hard enough.
I've got a girlfriend to tell me that I'm not doing well enough.
I don't need a fucking aura.
But I want to be direct.
You've got a market cap today of like $2.8 billion, and you do $2.1 billion in AR Archive will take.
What does the market not see, Abishai, that they should see?
Well, I think that's kind of a thing now with all SaaS companies, right, where the multipulse went to shit.
And I think a lot of it is because the market don't know how to calculate the danger for SaaS companies with AI.
That's the reason.
In some cases, I agree.
In some cases, I disagree.
But overall, I think that's what we're experiencing now.
And, you know, time will prove who's right, but we are working hard.
Yes and no.
A lot of the SaaSpocalypse, many of them have come back, and then some of them haven't come back.
Essentially what they're doing.
What did it come back all the way up?
I mean, Atlassian's come up again.
CrowdStrike never went down.
Palo Alto Networks is up, obviously.
Box is up.
Salesforce is down.
ServiceNow is down.
Figma will be down.
So there's a lot that at the core, okay, I think it's still down.
Atlassian, if it went up, that's actually the one I'm more concerned about, and I don't have a lot of shares.
But I didn't notice that it went up.
Well, there you go.
I've provided you with some good news for today.
I'm a bringer of good news.
But essentially, you know, I have Mayer on the show from Base44.
Base44 is doing $150 million in revenue last announced.
I'm sure more now.
It kind of ascribes zero value to the core business.
Is that just completely nuts to you?
Or are you like, yeah, I get that.
In a new world where technology creation is easier than ever, I understand that.
How do you think about that?
First of all, I think it describes less than zero value to the current business because if you look at peers that are doing a vibe coding, the multipart is much higher than the one we would get for base to be at two billion, right?
So base on its own should probably be at eight billion.
You know, I'm not trying to guess.
the stock market logic.
You know, I think that most of the time when you follow companies for a long time, you understand that the market got them completely wrong, completely right.
And there's always a mix and it's a cycle, right?
And this cycle, I understand where it's coming from, okay?
I disagree with it.
And I disagree with it strongly on a few companies, less on other companies.
For example, Salesforce, okay?
Salesforce, what is the biggest value Salesforce provides?
It's not the CRM.
It's the fact that you trust SaaS providers with your data.
You have huge banks, huge companies that actually allow Salesforce to hold all of the customer data because they trust Salesforce.
You're not going to vibe for that because the trust is massive.
It's a massive part of the value that Salesforce gives.
And yes, they have the marketplace, which a lot of functionality and other things, but the CRM itself is a very small part of the value.
In my mind, I don't see how you compete with that with...
some kind of a cloud code project.
If Salesforce becomes a valueless database that agents are able to scrape and then provide in different interfaces, then you basically become a commodity piping provider, which would mean that you could almost just replace it.
What other platform will JP Morgan trust for their customers data outside of the JP Morgan closed garden DMZ secure environment?
None.
The answer is none.
They don't trust anybody else with that.
But they do trust Salesforce.
And that's huge.
That's not a small thing.
It's huge.
It means that, you know, it's extremely hard to change that.
I get that.
And actually, I was thinking of the government contracts that Salesforce has and has won.
Again, I would say trust your point.
But is that a one of one?
If we go to the other providers, the other people who've been hurt by the SaaSpocalypse, they're not in that same gilded trust.
I agree.
It depends which one.
By the way, Atlassian for me is actually the one where, again, I'm a shareholder, so I want to be clear.
Okay.
And I love the company.
I've been a shareholder for a very long time.
And when I look at Atlassian, I think that the customers are the ones that are more likely to build things with cloud code because they are developers.
So I'm always in a bit of a concern there because I'm like, somebody would replace their, really, the management stack of the tickets and workflow.
Those would be those guys.
Okay.
And yet you said, this is the one that recovered.
So obviously I'm missing something.
Right.
And I think for weeks, look, our customers, most of our customers will be the pizza store next to your house, your hairdresser, or a lot of small businesses.
Okay.
They're not going to use cloud code.
to build their business stack.
They're not going to do that for all of what they need.
It's just not in the realm of possible now.
Maybe in a few years, I would be able to do that, but we are very far from it.
We tried at Wix.
One of the first things we did with Base44 is that, okay, should we integrate the business logic of our vertical offering into Base44?
And we make a test and we said, can we build a hairdresser, just a business logic to manage a hairdresser business in Base44?
And so we had a team, they tried professional developers, they tried to do it for a week.
They ended up doing a little bit.
And so we said, okay, we're going to bring a stronger team.
Okay.
Actually the team that wrote it in weeks and two weeks later, they still didn't achieve that.
Those things are complicated.
And so I don't think you're the guy that have a, I don't know, the pizza next to your house is going to use Claude Claude to build his delivery, his scheduling, his staff management system, all of those things, and then build a website.
okay to do that well some yes okay some yes and we see it okay we see that some do okay we see it cloud code is much harder than base 44 base 44 gives you a lot coming out of the box so you can do way more with it but we see that some do but i don't think the majority will so i think this is where wix is right this is those are our customers and to assume that they're going to one day just say well you know what i'm going to start building all of those things maybe but we don't see it yet I totally get that.
But then the counter would be, okay, so it's just a TAM reduction.
Because some will, and maybe that's 20%, and that means the TAM that was 100% is now 80%.
So it's like a smaller market.
Is that fair?
Well, yeah, maybe, but then where are they going to move to?
Vibe Coding.
Yeah, move to lovable replete Base 44.
We own Base 44.
They might move from here to here.
That's fine.
If you say, hey, you know, the hairdresser's not going to do it, the construction worker's not going to do it, I get you.
Do you not think they will in...
tomorrow's model or the year after's model.
You know, I had Sam Altman on the show and he said, you have to build for the model of tomorrow or next year.
Well, we are.
That's Base44.
That's why we invest so much into Base44.
Because if that will be something that will happen in that way, that's why we have Base44.
Essentially, the way I look at it today is that there are three different options.
One, the guy that built the pizza place, that has a place and he want to build a website and the management tools for that, he's going to be...
staying a week's customer because he doesn't want to put their effort into that.
His business in life is making pizza.
So that's option number one, right?
So a lot of them will stay here.
Option number three, and I'm going to say, is that they're going to say, well, I'm actually really interested in that.
Base44 made it so easy for me to vibe code everything I need.
It's custom-made for me.
So I'm going to use Base44 for that.
And there is, of course, the middle ground, which is like some people will be here, some people will be there, which is, I'm guessing, the more likely scenario.
to happen in the next five, six years, right?
Not everybody will be in this side or in that side, which is why we have both options.
Can I ask you, when you think about like Base44's margin profile, a lot of the providers, you know, we've had Lovable, we've had Rappler, we've had Mayour on the show, and their margin is one that's hidden in a lot of cases.
And it leads to negativity and skepticism around whether they're actually good businesses.
How does the margin profile of a Base44 compare to the margin profile of a Wix?
Well, Wix is...
way more profitable.
The cost of generating Wix website is pretty much zero in comparison and hosting pretty much zero in comparison.
So way more profitable on Wix than on Base44.
The margins are much better.
The retention is also better because you start building something, you need to put a lot of effort to finish it.
It's way more challenging, but we did get the cost to go.
We're continuously seeing a decline in the cost in Base44.
There's a brilliant team always doing that.
And we just released our own AI model.
So we fine-tune a few models and then combine them and we're using that.
And then we're actually achieving equivalent to the top tier models with that.
So the cost of that is dramatically less.
So I think that in two years or maybe less, this is not going to be an important question.
Can you talk to me about the decision to do your own model?
It's a big...
technological decision to choose to do that versus use open source off the shelf or frontier models.
Can you talk to me about the decision to do that and why you thought it was strategically right?
Yeah, of course.
I think there are two parts to that.
Number one is quality.
We have a huge amount of training data that is happening for us that we're getting on Base44.
And because we get, you know, we see what users are trying to do, I see what it fails.
We understand better and better what they're trying to say and saying it with the wrong prompt.
So we learn all those things.
And by learning all those things, we think we can actually create a model that is better for Base44.
than just the frontier models that are way more generic.
We don't need the knowledge that a lot of them have on Chinese poetry, because they do, they've been trained on that.
But we do need the knowledge that they have to focus and increase the knowledge they have on what is it you mean when you say, I want to create a task manager for me to manage my husband.
Oh, to tell my boyfriend where he's wrong.
So you have that.
So all of those things.
And we have a huge amount of data that we can use to create a model that is better and better.
Now, it's not trying to replace the frontier models, but it's trying to make us better at Base44.
So it's a different target, which is why it's easier than building a Fabel or Mythos.
We're not trying to build Mythos.
The other thing is that we did it already on Wix.
So on Wix, when you generate a website today, we are running a model that we trained.
And it's faster, it's cheaper, but it's also better.
and it makes less errors.
And we keep improving it because we have continuous, right, a continuous improvement loop, feedback loop, because we see when customers like something.
And so every week we are trying to run it again and train it again to get to a place where it's better.
How much cheaper is own model versus using a frontier model?
It depends, but I would say between 1% to 30%.
Wow, that's not nearly as much as I thought it was.
That might be surprising, but Chamath came out and said that, hey, when he uses open source, it's 14 to 16x cheaper.
Yeah, but he's using it on a smaller task.
Yes, that's absolutely true.
If you're using open source models and you can use the really basic ones for a lot of different things, they work great, then it would cost you even less.
But when you want to use a complicated model, for example, what you need for something like Base44, it's not going to get to that much of a level.
you can achieve 5% to 10%.
Do you think we're in the cost optimization period for Base44 yet?
Given you have like a replet who do like multi-agent and multi-model modes, they are not cost optimizing at all, but they are delivering a good customer experience.
We're not in the cost optimization stage for these businesses yet, are we?
No, I think it's more about quality.
If you let me have 20% more quality, 20% less cost, I'll definitely go for the quality.
It's a new market.
It's just happening, starting.
We should make it better.
Why do you not publish Base44's numbers?
Like, they're amazing.
Would it not be helpful to tell the story?
Well, we do publish them every once in a while.
We do tell ARRs.
Maor told you, and we do publish them every once in a while.
So we do publish them.
I mean, none of the players in this market are actually publishing on a weekly or monthly basis.
I know only when there is money.
We do it quite more often.
That's it.
I think there's no need for us.
to start breaking the numbers because from Wix, when we do the quarterly report, we tend to do things like move customers between one platform to the other, right?
We're pushing customers in between.
Do you encourage customers to try each platform?
Yes, but more than that, we encourage our partners and agencies to use Base24 now.
So we do that.
We actually spend time on that.
And you do that because you think it's the future?
Because you have a worse margin profile on that?
It would make sense financially to push them to the core business.
Yeah, I think that it's part of the future.
I want to be clear.
I think that the future is what I said.
It's going to be a combination.
And I think it's a bit more complicated than that.
I think that if you ever try to use any vibe coding tools and you try to build anything very complicated, it's hard.
When you're trying to do visual editing, it's really annoying.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
So I think the future is a combination of both.
And we want our agencies to have all the tools they need for the future.
100% sure.
that base 44 would be part of the future.
But I'm also almost as confident, if not more confident, okay, that things like Wix will also be part of the future.
You're not going to vibe code Shopify, no matter how good you are.
The business stack is too hard.
What happens then?
Stock markets just appreciate that trust is important.
People want Salesforce.
and Wix market cap rises again?
I'm genuinely being naive here.
Help me out.
I have no idea.
I'm not a stock trader.
So this is the truth.
I do that for my fun.
And as I said, I don't even make sense because I own a lot of Atlassian.
Even that I'm like, oh my God, all the developers will replace it with their own thing, which obviously doesn't happen.
So I was wrong on both sides, except being lazy and not selling my stocks of Atlassian.
Yes.
Are you able to detach your happiness from the market cap or the stock price?
Yes, I really don't care.
Like I wake up in the morning, I have one thing that I need to do.
I have to focus on my business, okay?
And I can control some of it, know all of it, and I focus on that.
Today we're trading on other companies' news.
We're not trading on Wix news.
We're trading mostly on what OpenAI or Antropic are saying or Google is saying.
And the reality is that I cannot influence that.
I cannot influence what people are thinking.
To be honest, I care less about it.
I really don't look, wake up in the morning and say, oh my God, went 20% up or 20% down.
Even when we went up, I was more concerned about the issues that we still have to solve, which is the same thing I do today.
I completely understand that.
And I think that's a right and very healthy mindset, one that very few CEOs are able to do.
So I'm thrilled for you that you're able to do that.
Aaron from Monday said he was not able to do that.
And so...
More white hair, you see that?
Slightly.
He's got great surfer hair, I have to admit.
Where it does become an actual tangible challenge is in M&A.
One of the joys of being public is you have a tradable currency that you can buy companies with.
And when you are priced lower, that...
currency is less valuable to buy other assets like a next base 44.
With the price today, does it make M&A impossible?
Well, we still have cash and we can get more cash if we need.
I think our issue today is that the M&A of base 44, right?
We bought a company with one person.
I want to be clear.
And then we put a lot of people from Wix into that.
So that's actually complicated M&A.
because you have to build a company around it.
Okay, we didn't get a company.
Luckily, Mo is a brilliant person, amazing leader.
So essentially, I don't know how to do another one of those, right?
At the same time, and have the same quality that we can merge the operations together.
So it's very hard.
And we are about to launch another product next month, right?
So that's a different product that we built.
I think that our challenge today is actually execution on our finance.
So if you want to do an M&A, it will fall on the execution challenge and not on the finance.
You said one person company there.
It did break news when it happened.
It was a great story.
One person, $80 million.
And since it's been an unbelievable acquisition, obviously it's now probably double the revenue that you bought it for price in terms of it's $160 million, give or take.
Yes, wild.
Talk to me about like bringing that into a board meeting or bringing that into an exec meeting and being like, hey guys.
I found this one guy male.
He's great.
It's a one-person company.
We should buy it for $80 million.
What did that decision-making look like, and how did the discussion go?
To be fair, very easy.
Actually, I never thought about it in the way that you describe it.
So you're right.
Maybe it was surprising that it was that easy.
We have a really good board, really smart people, and we explained the logic behind it.
And they were like, yeah, it makes sense.
And they would kind of ask us a lot of really smart questions, but none of them was that, why are we willing to pay so much for one person?
That was not part of the questions.
They actually focused on the business, the business logic, what we're going to do in terms of marketing, how we're going to build a team around it.
So we got a lot of questions in regards to that also about why we think it's better than Replit or Lovable.
So we explained it, and until now, I never thought about it like that.
Can I ask you, you said that we have a lot of cash.
How much cash do you have?
I should know this and it's public, but like...
Ah, yeah, it's complicated.
I actually don't know.
Like we have a debt here, a loan there.
We make about $400 million a year, okay, in free cash flow.
So we make cash and we invest about $200 and something million into PES44 or a bit more than that.
And so overall, I think we're okay, you know.
If I was sitting with you and we have pubs in the UK, I'm not sure if you have pubs in Israel, you probably have bars.
If we were sitting in a pub, I'd say to you, Avishai, dude, let's take this private.
What a mispriced asset.
Would you like to take it private?
I think it would be pretty much illegal for me to even answer that, right?
I'm focusing on the company, building the company.
We're doing incredible things.
We have super smart talent.
It's an exciting journey.
So I love that.
And we're going to continue to do that.
And, you know, I'm not buying the company, that I can tell you.
And I think the stock market should be a place where smart people make money.
And, you know, if they think like you do, that it's a mispriced asset, then that's a great opportunity.
If they think that AI is going to kill everything, then obviously that's a terrible opportunity.
And so this is everybody has to do their own decision making and planning.
totally get you in terms of like the stock market and how people make money from it.
You did do the buyback.
How did you think about the buyback and any thoughts and reflections on that?
Well, obviously we had terrible timing.
Dude, I didn't say it.
I did.
I could.
I was like, you know, I think that, but it's very hard to time the stock market.
Very hard to time the stock market.
I think we had too much float and I think we had a lot of money in the bank.
And that was sitting there.
We knew we were not going to do a major acquisition because we are too focused on the new product coming and on base 44.
So we cannot do both things.
We cannot do another acquisition.
So we had a billion and a half dollars that we kind of like, okay, it doesn't make sense for us just to hold it.
And then we said, okay, let's, you know, let's use that opportunity where the stock is very low to buy it.
Obviously, you know, the stock market jumped like this when we did it and then jumped, we went crashing down.
All right, that's part of life.
But I think the big question is now what happened in the last.
Three months, it's where it's going to be in three years.
And I hope that by that time it's proven to be a smart decision.
I mean, if you want real bulls, then you buy back more now.
Is that conversation like, is it like, no, no, no, we had that discussion.
How do you reflect on future buybacks given what you know now?
I think that buybacks are a fantastic tool for a company and companies should use that.
And I think they don't use it enough.
I think the concept that companies always issue more and more, increase their delusion by issuing more shares to employees and for other things, is something that should be balanced with buyback when the company can.
I'm really in favor of that.
I think that it's another way of giving a dividend to all of your stockholders.
That's my opinion.
Again, I'm not a professional stock market person.
That's not my profession.
I'm a geek.
I'm an engineer.
I'm a bit of a marketeer.
I'm a product guy.
I'm worried about the level of stock-based compensation that we're seeing.
It seems like we're normalizing insane levels, a la Snapchat, that make it very difficult for me as an investor to see the same attractiveness in terms of returns that I had before.
How do you think about SBC being good to employees but also not screwing investors?
Well, I think you have a choice.
I think that I would say that you want to...
get the best talent and you want to keep maintain the best talent right and and part of it is allowing them to because they build the company they should be invested in the dream and you should give stocks to employees that's my opinion right i think that the fact that it's only in technology companies and it's not in any in many other companies that's a different issue right there i would actually love to see that every fashion company give the cold team stock options because i think that's way more fair And maybe if the US government would do that or the British government would actually have better people running the country and somehow finding that their compensation is related to their achievements.
I think it's a really good mechanism.
I think that when companies started making cash, so you collect cash, you have essentially a few options of what to do with this cash.
Number one is acquisition.
But you can only do so many acquisitions and maintain the company.
I mean, some people muster that.
And I look at them and I admire them.
I would be able to do that.
The majority of the companies didn't, right?
And the majority of acquisition failed.
So I think that that's a path that some companies should pursue.
Every company probably should pursue a little bit.
But so this is one thing you can do with your money.
The other thing you can do with your money is do a buyback, which essentially is the same as give dividends.
And then you balance your stock-based compensation.
And I think the first thing you can do with your money is invest into hiring more engineers, maybe.
But then your EBITDA gets destroyed.
So the stock market hates you.
At this point, though, do you give a shit if the stock market hates you?
One of my neighbours is a public company CEO.
And he's like, honestly, dude.
And he's one of the companies that have been hit.
We haven't mentioned them.
But he's like, honestly, dude, at this point, can't do any worse, can I?
I'm sure we can, but it's hard.
Okay.
But again, I have a huge amount of respect for everybody who put money in Wix and bought stocks.
And I do understand that my job is to do my best to create a wonderful company.
I have a bigger obligation, right, to my customers.
That's another big obligation that I have.
I don't think they are one against the other.
I think I should balance both.
And then for my employees.
But I think that, like, there's no stock market you can talk to, right?
millions of people with different opinions.
I don't know how to take that into consideration.
I don't know how to even listen to that.
I am friends with many of these enterprise SaaS company CEOs.
We've mentioned some of them.
And when I chat to them, all of them are like, oh my God, my talent is leaving.
And, you know, their stocks is not worth what it was.
And it's very difficult.
Morale is down.
How do you advise them on how to retain talent when you are in an environment as you are?
I think it's a huge challenge.
First of all, I think it's a magical solution.
There's no magic here.
Everybody's going to lose talent, and we are losing talent.
Everybody lost talent.
Everybody will lose talent.
And I think a lot of times it's a healthy thing for a company.
As long as you don't compromise on who you keep and you make sure that the people that you allow to stay, okay, are really great people, you're going to find you have a lot of talent that you never noticed before, okay?
And that's going to refresh a lot of the organization.
So it's not about how do you prevent people from leaving.
And it's more a thing about how you make sure the organization keep being an organization where the vast majority are top talents.
And the fact that a lot of us get very, well, used to, very spoiled by saying, well, you know, we have people here working for 15 years that are always top talent and nobody ever leaves because our stock is it, whatever.
That kind of made us spoiled to the fact that.
That's not a natural thing.
Now, I do highly appreciate it.
There's a lot of super smart people around me that are extremely sad if they leave and worried.
But saying that, it's still, I think that we got a bit spoiled on that.
And I think we need to remember that when we got those people, they didn't have 15 years of experience working on our problems.
And they became, and the reason that they are here later, and they're super hard because they had talent to begin with.
And so we need to find a new generation, actually bring a lot of those in.
So I think that's...
For me, the challenge.
And saying all of that, just to be clear, I'm working extremely hard to keep the top talent in the company, right?
But that's life.
How many people are in Wix today and how many are in Base 44?
So Base 44 is around 400 people.
Wow.
Wix in total is about including about 3,500.
You have to remember, we have a lot of small businesses.
We need to support them.
3,500?
Yes.
Well, hello, Jeff Bezos.
I'm so sorry.
What are 3,500 people?
Where's the majority of them in customer support?
Customer support is our biggest department.
Wow.
Are you using AI?
That must get taken to like zero pretty soon.
Well, I don't think ever it will be zero.
Not quite zero, but maybe 10.
What, 10 customer support?
Yeah.
Well, we are offering our services in 192 countries.
It's a bit tricky to speak for 10 people to do that.
We just have to remember, it's a different scale of operation when it comes to that.
Did you build your own customer support AI or do you use off-the-shelf providers?
We're built on.
It doesn't work.
Abishai, this is what I don't get.
You know, you see all these hyped customer support companies, and I'm going to get in trouble here, but I'm too old to give a shit to, so who cares?
And everyone who I speak to, whether it's Airwallex or Klarna or Navan or Wix, you build your own.
We actually try not to build our own.
You know, we tried, we tested many different things.
It doesn't work.
I didn't get this market.
Well, to be fair, you know, we're looking at young companies that built AI agents, right?
And they proved something very quickly and hired a bunch of salespeople and trying to sell it.
And then they are going to one of those companies you mentioned where they have super smart engineers that are really focused on that.
They have more engineers supporting their support, right?
And all of the HR on those companies that are trying to sell them, okay?
And better engineers a lot of times.
So yes, it's not so...
I think in five years it's going to be different.
It's going to be different in five years?
Again, dude, I have no idea.
I'm a freaking podcaster in London.
I'm not sure.
To be fair, I don't know.
But we tried.
It didn't work.
We tried again.
It didn't work.
We tried again.
It didn't work.
We kept working on our solution on the side.
The template was like, okay, enough.
In three years' time, how big will the Wix team be then?
Well, it's very hard to say, you know.
I would love to say, well, Wix team in three years will be a thousand people in Base44 and a thousand people in Wix and everything else will be AI agents.
I'm not so sure it is possible.
We all give too much credit for AI and what it can do.
And then when you start looking at the details, it's not really doing that well for a lot of the things.
It's amazing.
It's incredible.
It's super powerful, but, and the bat is pretty big.
You need to be more American.
Okay?
Alright, alright.
It's gonna change everything, everything's gonna happen and whatever.
I'm gonna be by myself in the office, me and my, or most of the time we're gonna play PlayStation, alright, and this is...
Now you're like Sam Altman dude you sell the dream it's much I've learned this is much easier in life to be Walt Disney Tell me a story than it is Jerry Maguire show me the money and the trouble with Israeli entrepreneurs I find is you're all like show me the money You're generally not that excitable.
You're very realistic.
You're very direct.
I can tell you what I dream about here, but it's not about AI replacing my customer support.
That's a nice thing to have.
I think that we're going to be able to have a way for AI to do so with AI and with technology.
Small businesses will be able to achieve so much more than they do today that it'll be more efficient, grow faster, and way more profitable.
And I think that is something that I'm sure will happen.
So if you are, if you're on a gym, right?
or your personal trainer, your ability to utilize AI, to manage your business better, to sell additional products, and to reach out for new customers will be massively enhanced.
And not in 10 years, not in five years, next year.
And that will really have a massive effect on how you do things.
It's a small business.
But dude, is that not a little bit paradoxical?
And you're like, it'll have a massive effect next year.
Great.
I'm a venture capitalist.
That means massive revenue growth and my companies grow fast.
Cool.
But you just said AI is not that great and it doesn't actually do that much and like the questionability of value is there.
No, no.
I actually said, well, it's really doing a lot of amazing thing.
but and the but is very big okay because we all tend to how many times you go to charge pt and you said i want to know what this thing in medicine is or i want to know what that is or tell me what is the chance and i can tell you like i needed to test something and i wanted charge pt to write me the safety protocol i actually use cloth not charge pt sorry some i got six gates okay and he said those are the gates you have to make sure to test every one of them so i started to ask why this one and we started to analyze and we worked on it from six it became one All of the other ones say, oh, you know what?
You really caught me here.
I might have overstepped.
We'll emphasize that.
And then he writes, well, I'm removing it from something you must test to something that you might need in the future to take a look at.
And we all tend to do that, right?
We all tend to have this massive trust into AI models.
And I think that's one of the things where the bad is, OK?
But when you take an AI model and make it work really well for something, it can be incredible.
I'll give you an example, like the most basic thing we all take for granted now.
You can actually have a conversation with AI more, right?
You can actually have, talk to you on the phone, talk to you on your computer.
We couldn't do that five years ago, four years ago.
I actually do that.
I do that when I drive.
I actually, I have a thing I want to do.
I click on it and I love the way it works in Chachapiti.
So there is a big difference between if you take AI and try to do customer support for a very complicated company or to help you run.
your customer's order, your schedule, and if you build the right skill, the right tools for it, then it can become super efficient.
And it can also call your customer and talk to them and do things.
So yes, you can have that massive extra layer.
Do you find SMBs are excited or terrified by AI, both in the product and when you speak to them?
There's a lot of scepticism.
It's not always welcomed.
Well, I didn't see that with SMBs, actually.
I think that we see it more with everybody else.
I think SMBs, when they wake up in the morning, they have so many issues of running their business.
So they really want something to help them run their business better.
As opposed to, if I would be in the university studying today, I would be terrified.
That's the truth of AI, because like, why am I learning this?
Would it even exist in a year?
Do you want to hear something wild?
To change the university curriculum in the UK, this is, so forgive me, I'm sure it's pretty similar around the world, but it takes three years.
to change the material that goes on or goes through a yearly program.
Three years to change it.
Imagine the changes that have happened in Claude.
If you're doing computer science, like it's pre-ChatGPT almost.
I think that actually, I don't know how long it takes here, but it takes time.
It's challenging, I think.
So if you were genuinely advising a 22-year-old, imagine a 22-year-old son of yours.
I know you've got a newborn, so just skip a few years.
What would you say to him, genuinely?
I would not be that concerned with LLM replacing every kind of white-collar jobs.
That's not going to happen.
It's not that smart.
It keeps making silly mistakes.
It's not very good.
Actually, it's not very good at reasoning.
It's very good at collecting data and reframing it.
I would be less afraid of that.
However, if we get another two or three jumps in algorithms.
right, then we all become a bit like monkeys, right?
The core question for me actually is that, you know, we're an investor in Lagora, which is an AI legal service.
And the core question for me is, do we see the same rate of improvement in adjacent functions to coding that we saw in coding?
You know, Andre Kapathi went from doing 20% of his coding work with coding tools to 80% in six months.
Do we see that same jump in amount of legal work done by AI?
I think, you know, it depends on a few things, right?
And law might be a very good example for it, but I do believe that when it comes to laws, because laws, a bit like code, are mostly about textual context, and there's a tremendous amount, a huge amount, endless amount, way too much amount of legal written documents, right, and cases.
And so I think that this is one of the perfect places for it to be useful.
But every time I see a doctor trying to do research by using LLMs...
I get horrified because that's the wrong tool.
It will probably read, it will answer you, but it's read somewhere on Reddit that somebody wrote.
And for the analemic perspective, it's equivalent to the best research done on nature.
There's no difference.
It holds them all in this giant thing that it is.
I will try to verify it somewhat.
Most of the time, it doesn't read the research when it actually answers you, even if you use the highest level of it.
So for legal stuff, I think that's really good.
For a lot of other things, I really think that it's not the right algorithm.
Do you buy that for the health?
I'm just being honest here.
I think OpenAI and ChatGPT is a lot better than the majority of doctors at this point, actually.
And on top of that, health is now the second biggest usage of ChatGPT.
Well, I'm invested in a company called K-Health.
I don't know if you're familiar with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alon.
Yeah, Alon.
And they've proven that they diagnose better than most of the doctors.
All right.
That's not the same as doing research, right?
No, it's very different to doing research.
And for that, absolutely.
I think that if you have...
Because most of the time you go to a doctor, they diagnose you have a flu, go home.
They give you some pill and they tell you, take the pill and you get healthy in five days and you would get healthy without a pill in five days.
So nobody knows.
And so when it comes to the specific cases, yeah, I think that it makes sense that AI, when it comes to understanding the natural scenario that you go through, then yes, absolutely.
So legal...
The legal system will have a lot of those.
But there's no research in legal.
Well, what is research?
But you do have research in medicine.
I think when it comes to research, it's not a good tool.
So it's a bit different.
Do you think frontier models will really only be used for a very small use case or kind of small amount of use cases like science research, molecular biology, astrophysics, very, very difficult complex things?
I really cannot do those things.
You cannot do research on astrophysics with...
with LLM.
They don't have the capacity for that.
It's not what they do.
They might answer you, but they don't run the models, the simulation, the background.
You want to have the simulation background, you have to move the deep mines, right?
They do some of that, but not Chachapiti.
Fine, but like model providers, you don't think they will do that in three years' time?
Maybe, but then they have to connect different kind of models and different kind of architecture to their LLMs.
It's not that trivial.
I don't think it is, but I do think your isomorphic labs and your latent labs and your chai discovery, who specialize in very, very complex reasoning around scientific...
Oh yeah, but that's not...
I agree, but that's not just...
probably not just an LLM unless they just try...
No, I totally agree with that.
Yes, 100%.
So those are completely immemorials.
Absolutely.
Yes, you can.
Obviously, you did the protein folding, right?
DeepMind did that.
Amazing.
An amazing achievement, of course.
You come across as quite chilled in a nice way, like composed, calm.
Have you always been like that?
No, I'm half Italian.
I'm south of Italy, I know.
Does money make you more chilled?
Well, I think that a Slavic wife.
What makes you more chilled?
Yeah, it makes you more resilient.
What does it take to have a successful marriage?
I'll tell you a story about my wife, which is one of the things that I think this is where I understood it's something different.
I came home and she looks at me and she was like, listen, I have a terrible mood.
You did nothing wrong.
I'm going to the room to relax.
You go play PlayStation.
And I was like, wait, what?
You have a terrible mood and it's not my fault?
And she's like, yeah, you did nothing.
It's not you.
I need to relax a bit.
You go play PlayStation.
I was like, oh my God.
So I think that is the number one quality.
that I learned that for me it works, right?
So what's the number one quality?
Distance?
No, no, no.
It's the fact that she is able to know that you don't load your emotion on somebody else.
And for a cement, the number one thing you have to learn is to say, yes, I agree.
Whatever.
It doesn't matter what happened.
Yes, you're right.
How did making money change you as a leader?
So I have a theory and the reason for this is I think richer investors and richer founders make better decisions.
You're not operating from fear.
You're not operating from losing homes, losing school fees, losing core pillars of life.
I actually make much more rational decisions now.
I'm not doing it for the money wholly.
I tend to agree.
I think that, you know, overall, when you're less afraid of things, you're more reasonable, but you're also a bit more lazy, right?
I think a really interesting question is what does no one tell you about making money that you wish someone had told you?
The way I look at it, okay, and that's my personal opinion, is that money gives you one thing beyond everything else.
And that's freedom, okay?
Freedom from fear that you won't have food tomorrow.
And then freedom also to know that you are here because you've chosen to be here.
Because I can always, and you can always say, you know what, I want to be in Costa Rica on the beach.
I want to be in Brazil, you know, dancing the carnival.
or I can change completely what I'm doing and you have the ability to do it.
You don't have to wake up every day in the morning, go to work that you don't like, just to maintain and have food.
I mean, that is the number one value you get from having enough money or a lot of money.
It's that freedom and that knowledge that I'm here because I've chosen to be here.
There's no other reason except that.
I think that's, for me at least, is freedom to understand that if I'm here, I need to be fully committed to what I'm doing.
Because I've chosen to be here.
Nobody made me.
There's nobody, no reason except me choosing to be the CEO of Wix, see the stock crashing like that, see other things happening, you know, all those things.
I've chosen to be in the middle of that.
And that's, I think, is tremendous amount of power.
What would you say to someone who wants to build resilience for a shitstorm that's about to come?
Like you said that, dude, I mean, the pressure, the fucking headlines, the stock crashing, the this, the...
It's just like, hit, hit, hit.
What would you advise me?
or someone listening who wants to learn how to be resilient for the hits that are going to come.
I think that the first thing to accept is that it will happen.
Because we tend to think that, you know, if yesterday was easy, the day before it was easy, then tomorrow will be easy.
That's not how life works, right?
You never know when the next home is coming from.
You never know COVID arrives.
You never know if a war arrives.
Or you never know when the stock market crashes.
You never know.
And it will happen.
For sure, 100%.
It will happen.
We tend to believe, you know, reality is going like this.
If you're here, it's going to go slowly up and slowly down.
But it doesn't.
It goes in an extreme speed at some places, right?
So it will go like this and then boom and then boom.
And this is how reality is.
The worst thing that happens is probably going to be some random thing that happens on some random Wednesday.
It's not something that you get a lot of warning for.
In this sense, I think AI is the exception because it was an extreme thing that we've seen happening in slow motion, right?
It took a few years.
It didn't happen, boom.
The first thing is to accept that it will happen.
And the second thing, and this is something I remember from Babylon 5.
You remember that TV series?
Yeah.
And there was this time of flying to this...
conflict somewhere and the lady on the captain on that ship was very nervous and the guy that told her why are you nervous?
She's like you know we're going there and I want to make sure.
I said listen we're going to get there when we get there and the weapons that we have are the weapons that we have okay and this is the most you can do so you just have to think about it that this is how it is and this actually run in my mind it's not very smart you know not like a very inspiring sentence but for me it's like am I doing the best that I can right that's a huge question right?
And I always try to make sure that my answer for that is yes.
Everything else is what can I control?
I cannot control more than what I can.
So I try to do the best with what I can control.
I know it's not a deep answer, but I don't think there is a deep answer here.
The big question is, are you doing the best that you can in the situation that you are in?
And if you are able to be honest with yourself and say, I think I am, then that's a lot of the pressure going away.
The other thing is that...
I believe in meditation.
I believe in neural and linguistic programming, NLP.
And I did a lot of those and that's really helpful.
I totally agree.
One of the things I always think to you is a mentor said to me, you're never wrong to do the right thing.
And the right thing is often the hard thing.
Oh, I agree with that 100%.
Then I'll tell you the last thing I always remind myself is that you go around and you see happy people, right?
A lot of these places and they are not necessarily correlated with how much money they have or where they are or whatever.
So I always remind myself, the happiest people I've ever seen on the planet are in Brazil.
I can always move to Brazil.
Are you surprised?
It's not England.
I mean, obviously, right?
After 5 p.m., people in England become more happy.
But they go to the pub, right?
Dude, you haven't been to England in a while.
We go to the pub at 3 p.m.
Two hours more happy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dude, Finland is actually the happiest country in the world, which is astonishing to me when you look at the hours of light in Finland.
But there you go.
I'm guessing the one who wrote that, never been to Brazil.
But for me, my experience, so I always say, you know, worst case scenario, I can actually, all of the things matter to some degree.
At the end of the day, I can always go to Brazil.
Do you find it difficult to contact switch in your relationship?
My biggest problem now in my relationship is like, I come home and I'm stressed.
I've been bashed all day by whatever's happening.
And then you come home and it's like, they want to talk about life and just like normal things.
And you're like, you're still in your zone.
Do you struggle with that?
I used to.
I used to, it was horrible.
That was very hard for me.
That was very, very hard for me.
I remember that.
I would come home and I have this massive list of things in my mind.
And then I would be either not patient for my partner or not really attentive or whatever.
And that would, it was very hard for me.
I learned with time, when I got older, that I stop most of it now and then I'll do it later, with the thinking.
And that's why I go to sleep at five, right?
You time-bound your thinking and it allows you to turn off for the time being with your wife?
Yes.
So I'm just doing that and then I'm turning it back on.
And sometimes I write myself things that I need to think about in two hours.
That's perfection because I cannot do that at all.
Final one, and then we'll do a quick fire.
I care very much about being a great parent.
I don't have kids yet, but I very much want to.
You do have kids, and you're a public company CEO, and under a fuckload of pressure, let's just be honest.
What advice would you have for me on how to be the best father that I can be?
Well, kids don't care so much for the amount of time that you're with them, as much as they care for the quality in that time.
So if you find yourself and give yourself, let's say, oh, no, I can be with them for a few hours every day or every few days, okay?
Make sure that you are there and happy when you're there and have fun with them when you're there and not coming there because you force yourself and then you want your phone and then you're fighting with everybody.
Remember, it's more about how you're there than how often you're there or how long you're there.
It goes back to what we said about being like present, not stuck in your own head.
Easy to say.
I'm not sure it's so easy to do, but yes.
impossible to do.
It's like the tying happiness to stock price.
Honestly, I remember interviewing Vlad from Robin Hood, okay?
And I interviewed him when it was worth like 20 billion and interviewed him when it was worth 120 billion.
I can tell you he was legitimately six times happier when it was worth 120 billion compared to when it was 20.
It was a different fucking person.
He looked different.
He sounded different.
He was different.
I get it.
Okay, we're going to do a quick fire.
What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
Actually, a bit on AI, I'll say it like that.
I was very concerned, very concerned with how quickly we're going to find humans being replaced with AI.
And I think I'm now looking at the same thing.
I think it's going to take much longer than I anticipated.
Why?
Because, you know, I remember that, you know.
A year ago, we would hear Elon Musk speaking about he's waiting for AGI because AGI, you can have a conversation with it about how to solve big problems in physics and how to do a lot of things and everything.
And now everybody's talking about, well, you know, we kind of achieve AGI, but he still cannot do those big questions, right?
So we kind of changed the definition to fit something that doesn't do the critical things.
And the more I know about AI, the more I see the frontier more, the more I see things, I think they're tremendous, as I said, but I don't think they're going to replace us that quickly.
I think you're being far too nice.
I had a picture of me and my mother on the beach for my holiday last week and I said, like, remove the people from the background to like Gemini.
Dude, they changed my mother's face.
They put a different woman in there.
I was like, what?
I think solving that might happen faster than you think.
Which competitor do you most respect and why them?
It's not direct.
I think that the one company I really, really appreciate, Figma.
I think they're brilliant product, understanding of their market.
And when I look at it, I'm just like, I really admire some of the things, the quality they can bring into that.
So I really like them.
Like really in terms of not just respect, it's almost admiration of some of the things you can do.
People are almost religious about Figma.
I know very little product that are like that.
My designers, they love it.
They go crazy about it.
They'll do their gross series list on Figma, okay?
They'll do everything they can on Figma just because they love using it so much.
And that takes...
Massive skill from Figma to do it.
What's your single biggest concern today?
It's always the same.
I think that execution.
I think we have good plans and good ideas.
And I think the biggest challenge is always from execution.
How do we get a team to be super efficient?
How do we get them to be more ambitious?
I think that it's to go for a bigger goal.
I think those kind of things.
You said that Base44 is 400 people today.
How many people is it in two years' time?
All right, that's one of the things that it's very hard to predict because it depends how well AI does and how many models they did.
I'm a huge believer in Base 44, okay?
I'm a huge believer in Base 44.
I'm a huge believer in what Wix does.
I hope that Base 44, and I see the way it scales, I would imagine probably 800 to 1,000, and the majority of them would actually be engineers, right?
So I think that is another thing.
Final one for you, my friend.
What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
I think there's a lot of really kind things that people did for me.
And when I started, I see how often people that were way ahead of me in this business, right, would take time to sit with me and to talk to me about things, the mistakes they made, and give me advice and stick with me about other things.
I think that's extremely kind because this is not about giving you money.
It's about giving you the most precious currency those people had, right, which is time.
And when you see that, I think, and advice, it's amazing that they did.
12 months time, who will have a higher market cap your Monday?
It's kind of like asking me to compete between which kid of mine I like more.
Your eldest.
And so my eldest is Wix, right?
But, you know, I've been lucky to be involved in a few amazing products, right?
Wix, Monday and Base44.
And I think I got this rare opportunity to see that happening, to see this thing happening three times.
And I think that's an amazing experience.
And I do believe that all three companies, all three products, right, have tremendous market potential and potential to be helpful for many different people.
And so hard for me to choose.
I think Iran and Roy are really incredible CEOs, probably better than me.
So maybe I'll bet on them or me.
No, actually.
But then Maori is a great CEO.
I don't know.
It's very complicated.
Avishai, it's been fantastic to have you on the show.
Thank you so much for being so open, for being so wise in your love, family, parental CEO advice.
It's been fantastic, man.
Cheers, man.
Thank you so much for having me.
Love what you're doing.
But before we leave you today, founders face a different set of challenges at every stage of growth.
For Sid Shait, co-founder and CEO of Dematrix, JPMorgan delivered the guidance and expertise to help navigate what came next.
He credits JPMorgan's high-touch approach with supporting Dematrix as it grew and expanded internationally.
Whether you're in the early days or expanding into new markets, JPMorgan helps startups navigate complexity with real confidence, offering personalized guidance and deep sector expertise.
Find out how JPMorgan helps...
founders at jpmorgan.com forward slash grow without limits.
JPMorgan is the bank of the innovation economy.
While JPMorgan supports growth, Corgi protects it.
My word, what an arresting first line.
Get your ass covered with Corgi insurance, and I'll tell you why.
If you're running a business right now, you already know this pain all too well.
Getting insurance, it's really slow, it's confusing, and my word, it's full of paperwork.
Well, that's exactly why Corgi is here to change the game.
Corgi is the first and only insurance carrier designed specifically for tech companies, allowing you to get covered in minutes instead of days.
Corgi provides essential coverages for all growth stages, such as...
DNO, E&O liability, cyber, commercial, general liability, and more.
Get your ass covered.
I love the way we say ass with Corgi Insurance alongside thousands of other startups at corgi.com forward slash 20VC today.
That's corgi.com forward slash 20VC.
You won't regret it.
While Corgi covers risk, Flex gives you room to move.
Business owners run their whole financial life on Flex.
One platform from business revenue to their personal spend.
Float every purchase for 60 days.
Tap capital that grows with your revenue and pay vendors in 170 countries across 32 currencies.
Plus, the whole back office, bills, expenses, accounting, all in one place.
So you spend less time reconciling and more time growing.
That's why thousands of owners use Flex, named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of 2026.
Visit flex.one, that's F-L-E-X dot O-N-E and use the code 20VC.