Speaker
Avishai Abrahami
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Wix's market cap is roughly equal to just one year of revenue, reflecting deep SaaS skepticism driven by AI uncertainty.
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.
Wix acquired Base44 when it had a single employee — Mauro — for $80M, then built an entire team around him.
Wix produces approximately $400M in annual free cash flow, investing $200M+ of that into Base44.
Wix employs approximately 3,500 people, with customer support being the single largest department.
Base44 has grown to around 400 employees since being acquired as a one-person company.
Wix executed a $1.5B buyback but the stock crashed afterwards, making the timing disastrous.
Wix's fine-tuned proprietary model for Base44 is 1%–30% cheaper than frontier models, not the dramatic savings many assume.
Wix provides services in 192 countries, one key reason a small AI-only support team won't work.
Avishai expects Base44 to grow from 400 to 800–1,000 employees in two years, mostly engineers.
Wix tried multiple off-the-shelf AI customer support tools and built its own, but admits none work reliably yet.
K Health, an Avishai investment, has proven AI diagnoses better than most doctors, though medical research remains a poor use case for LLMs.
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.
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.
Wix paid $80M for a one-person company. The board didn't ask why — they focused on business logic, team-building plan, and why Base44 beat Replit and Lovable. Avishai says the discussion was surprisingly easy, and the bet has already more than paid off.
Building your own AI model on top of frontier technology saves 1% to 30% in cost — far less than the 14–16x open-source savings Chamath claims. The real reason Wix built its own: training data specificity and better quality for Base44's use cases.
AI is incredible at reframing data but terrible at reasoning from scratch. Avishai tested Claude on a safety protocol — six required gates became one after interrogation. We've built a massive cultural trust in AI accuracy that isn't yet warranted.
LLMs won't replace white-collar jobs anytime soon — they keep making silly mistakes and aren't good at reasoning. But if there are two or three more algorithmic leaps, everyone becomes a bit like monkeys. The honest answer: be less afraid, but not complacent.
The first rule of resilience is accepting that chaos is inevitable — not rare. Avishai's personal mantra: ask yourself if you're doing the best you can with what you can control. Everything else is noise. He also credits NLP and meditation.
K Health proves AI can diagnose better than most GPs. But for medical research, LLMs are dangerous — they weight a Reddit post the same as a Nature paper. AI in medicine works perfectly when diagnosing common scenarios, fails completely for original research.
SBC is the right mechanism to align employees with company outcomes — Avishai wishes fashion companies did it too. But it must be balanced with buybacks to prevent dilution. The current tech-industry normalization of Snapchat-level SBC is a real problem for investors.
Wix's stock is hostage to Anthropic and OpenAI news cycles, not Wix's fundamentals. Avishai's response: genuine detachment. He's equally focused on problems when the stock is up 20% as when it's down 20% — and says that's the only rational response.
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.
Money's greatest gift isn't things — it's freedom from fear and the knowledge you're somewhere by choice. When Avishai goes to work despite a crashing stock and media pressure, it's because he chose to. That clarity, he says, is tremendous power.
Not every small business will migrate to vibe coding — many will stay on Wix because their business is making pizza, not building apps. Others will embrace Base44. Most will use both. Owning both sides of that transition is the entire strategic bet.
Wix had $1.5B in cash, no major acquisition planned, and bought back stock when it looked cheap. Then the market crashed. Avishai calls the timing terrible but still believes buybacks are underutilized tools — effectively a dividend for shareholders.
Wix tested every AI customer support startup on the market before building its own — which also doesn't work reliably. The problem: young companies prove a quick demo, hire salespeople, then sell into enterprises with better engineers and more complex support needs.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Technology 43%
- Business 29%
- Society & Culture 28%
Connections
Shows they appear on and people they share episodes with. Drag to explore.
