Quote · The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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Is the Market Valuing Wix's Core Business at Less Than Zero?
At 9:48 · chapter starts 7:00
The conversation turns to a more granular question: which SaaS companies deserve their discount, and which don't? Avishai's framework is built around trust. Salesforce's CRM is not the product — the product is Salesforce being the entity that Fortune 500 banks trust with their most sensitive customer data. That trust cannot be vibe coded, iterated around, or disrupted by a cloud-based project. JP Morgan's DMZ-protected data stays with Salesforce not because the CRM is irreplaceable, but because the institution is. By contrast, Atlassian's customers are developers — precisely the people most likely to build their own ticket and workflow management systems. Despite this concern, Atlassian's stock has recovered, which Avishai admits suggests he's missing something. He also addresses Wix's own customer base: the pizza shop owner and the hairdresser are not going to use Claude Code to rebuild their business stack.
Wix's market cap is roughly equal to just one year of revenue, reflecting deep SaaS skepticism driven by AI uncertainty.
SaaS multiples didn't collapse because companies are bad businesses — they collapsed because markets can't calculate the AI risk. Avishai says the cycle will prove who was right, and points to Salesforce's trust moat as a durable asset markets are completely ignoring.
Base44 has scaled past $150M in ARR at record speed since acquisition, likely more at time of recording.
At current vibe-coding multiples, Base44 alone should command an $8B valuation. That means Wall Street is effectively pricing Wix's entire core business — $2.1B in ARR, 192-country operations, $400M in free cash flow — at less than zero.
Avishai argues Base44's vibe-coding multiple should put it at $8B as a standalone, meaning the core Wix business is valued at less than zero.
The vibe coding revolution has a ceiling, and it stops at complexity. Wix ran internal tests where professional developers couldn't build a basic hairdresser management app in two weeks. Enterprise stacks like Shopify are simply too hard to replicate.
