Yeah.

Like, and then getting the people who were specialists in interface to build that directly.

Um, at that time, like, this role of a front-end developer that's, like, the main web developer role today, back then that was seen as sort of like the pseudo developer that would, like, take a Photoshop file, slice it up, and then hand it to a real developer that would, like, implement it into some back end, right? Like, and every time they did that, they would kind of bungle the actual user experience, and it would all get, like, kind of slow and so on, right? Like, so I thought, "What if we can re-architect how we build the web, separate that from the back end, and then I can build, like, a product that just makes it really simple for those front-end developers to publish their UIs straight to production on the web and get them in front of people in a way where they're fast, and they can scale, and they're secure and so on."

Mm-hmm

... "Give us, give us a list." And we built this whole spreadsheet with like every VC we thought we could get in front of, who was our intro, who could be our back channel, how could we approach it, and how would we rank those, right? Like, and then started a process.

And then we had this weird thing happening where pretty much like the first of those VCs we talked to kind of came in and immediately gave us a term sheet.

Um, so that sort of priced the whole round and so on.

And then before we signed it, he pulled the term sheet again.

But when it comes to expansion, when it comes to going multi-product and having these kind of hooks, especially in this low tier, like small, mid-sized or solopreneurs, how do you think you're going to expand more in multiple segments?

So the first thing is that we've always had this core value of trying to lower the ceiling, but raising the floor, right? So it's kind of always been our mission to build everything in our platform around a a set of characteristics where getting started up building something simple feels magical and easy, but where the way we architect things also scales up to the really high end of things, right? So today you will see people come in with zero programming experience, use our new agent and database product and so on to just like...

Like you can literally just go into Netlify and say new project and prompt, like build me a personal app for managing all my recipes that allows me to paste in a URL and slurp it into an LLM and store the actual recipe without any of the fluff in the story and so on and put it behind a login.

And we'll just like kick off plot code.

In the cloud, it'll go build the whole thing, understand all of our primitives.

We've like moved from like front end cloud to building all like the full stack abilities, database, identity, everything you need for that, right? Like, and it'll just work, but you'll also see teams building like LeagueofLegends.com is on Netlify, right? Like, our Zurich Insurance is building, like, mission-critical product on us and, like, we have, like, Northface.com runs on Netlify, right? Like, billion-dollar e-commerce businesses, right? Like, so...

So we have really maintained always this promise of like, we lower the ceiling, but like we lower the floor, but we raise the ceiling, right? And that's like very ingrained in our philosophy.

So what is that you want to share in terms of these new initiatives that make you super excited?

AI time now,

right? As the term for agent experience and sort of really thinking about the evolution from user experience as like the term that like really could set a product apart from other products, not just based on a checklist of features, but based on like the experience of like Everything around it.

And then our first decade at Netlify of really centering around developer experience, that's typically been a way to set platforms aside from other platforms, right? Like by making like lower friction for developers to actually build on them and extend them and use them and so on.

Towards this idea that we suddenly...

All of us that build product have this new persona using the product that's an agent driven by AI.

And that also sort of actually have an experience of the product, right? Like whatever that means, right? Like doesn't necessarily mean that there's like some soul behind it or something, right? But it obviously has some, like it's like actually attempting to figure out how to do stuff with our product in an autonomous way, right? Like so suddenly...

the documentation about our product the onboarding experience of our product is no longer just for like a person it's also for a person asking an agent to do stuff right like and that that was what i sort of described in this article on on agent experience is something that suddenly for us at netlify became like our product north star and that i've proposed at the time should be pretty important for anybody building products in the world today.

you have a sense of where they're coming

Since that's tomorrow, why don't we pretend we're in the future, 'cause we are, and you can read us in to what is announced at Netlify Deploy, 'cause you have an all-new developer workflow.

Yeah, we have, we have, right? Like, and it's interesting when, when, when I started...

when I started Netlify, there was, like, two big similarities to now in a way that, like, there was a whole new group of developers emerging.

Like, at the time w- when I first started working on Netlify in, like, 2013 or so, right, like, the front end developer was seen as, like, a pseudo developer, right, like, that would take a Photoshop file, slice it, and then hand it to a real developer that would build it and implement it.

And one of our big thesis at the time was if we give them the right tooling and we sort of, like, decouple the front end from the back end, they will become the mainstream web developers and they will just build the UIs and the front ends we interact with and ship them on your own.

The other thing that's sort of similar was that there was, like, this new workflow layer emerging.

At the time there was, like, GitHub cent- like, the whole Git-centric workflow around branches, pull requests, and so on, right? Like, we sort of tied those two things together and say, like, "We wanna make these front end developers real developers and we want them to work entirely, like, we wanna fully integrate with that workflow of Git and pull requests and the way you iterate on code there." Now we are sort of in a similar path where there's these vibe coder emerging, right? Like, and there's still this sense, oh, they're definitely not real developers and they'll need real developers to, to, to, to work all the way.

So are you making all of Netlify a tool or an MCP server?

How, how do you think about that?

Yeah, that, that's something I think a lot about because, like, the interesting thing is that that's kind of like th- this whole sort of Jamstack architecture I, I proposed back f- in the beginning of, of Netlify's journey starts becoming really important for this as well, right? Like, because if you start going from buying 200 SaaS tools to running 200 internal specialized or maybe 400 internal specialized applications, you have to do that on a platform that's zero operations, first of all, right? Like, and that means that you start having this new stack where people like you can, can, can make a lot of m- money by, by investing in the right places.

It's all of the components that go into that kind of, like, zero operations and serverless stack of building blocks, right? Like, you definitely don't want a code gen agent that you're using to solve one of these problems to give you, like, a massive Kubernetes cluster and be like, "Good luck." You'll want it to deploy to platforms that are zero operations and serverless, and with, like, security built in and so on.

You'll want them to use serverless API services, databases that are all sort of managed with their own security team and, and operations teams and so on as the, as the Legos it kind of builds on top with and composes together.

Because otherwise, you're right, right? Like, otherwise, if it's just fully custom-built Kubernetes cluster stuff, all of it, the viability of that whole approach goes away, right? Like, the maintenance cost just overtakes everything.

And then you could speculate can the agents maintain it, but, but I think, I think that, that then we're definitely in a 15, 20-year h- horizon before, before they could be r- relied on for anything like that.

But if the agents build on top of a stack where your deployment layer is fully zero operations, serverless and so on, where you're using systems for, for hit list content or, or, or you're using, like, Salesforce as your system as records for a bunch of stuff, right? Like, you're using managed databases, whether it becomes, like, a Supabase or a NeonDB or some of the big cloud providers that, that wins out in that layer, right? Like, but the agent use these building blocks that are in this, in, in themself maintained by someone, right? Like, then you start being able to take on that level of building without exploding in terms of, like, maintenance costs.

Do you agree?