Erik Bjäreholt

You can now add live voice conversations, powered by OpenAI's GPT-Live, to your Lovable apps. Max Gfeller built one where you can talk to Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Amaze amaze amaze.

Listen Labs is joining Salesforce. In January 2023, Florian and I moved into a San Francisco Hacker House.  We'd just built an app that went viral and picked up 20,000 users overnight. We had no idea who they were. So over a hackathon, we built an AI that could interview them. That hackathon project became bigger than any of us could have imagined.  In April 2025, we launched Listen and it’s been a crazy ride ever since. Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen. What started as an AI interviewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave. Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met Marc Benioff.  Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and the more time we spent with him and the team, the more obvious the fit became.  With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster. To our customers, our mission remains the same. I stay CEO, Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early. To our team, you joined a company almost no one had heard of and stayed late with us more nights than we can count. To our families, who watched us move across an ocean for a dream, and to the friends and investors who supported us before there was much to believe in, thank you. These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen. Now back to work.  🚀

In a post from Andreessen Horowitz, I read a quote from Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI, that "the real unsolved problem is education, not engineering," backing it up with the statistic: "There is a massive share of OpenAI's own reach going unrealized. 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝗹𝘆 𝟭.𝟱 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝘁𝗚𝗣𝗧 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁." My assumption is that a big part of this number comes from developing countries. Greg's point makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has lived as a slow-travelling nomad in many developing countries for the past 2.5 years. From my observations, TikTok is by far the main application of AI that has penetrated these countries, and the results are deeply saddening. My most visceral experiences have come from hiking to remote villages in the Himalayas in Nepal. There I saw local people, with big hearts and a deep connection to nature, letting their children get completely hooked on brain rot content, mostly because of a lack of education on how to deal with the technology. I couldn't help but think that with the right nudges in how TikTok was architected, or when, let's say, these villagers get exposure to a "stickier" version of ChatGPT, the same tools could enable their children to get a fantastic education that takes into account the realities of how AI will impact their future. I feel deeply unsettled by the idea of a company like OpenAI deciding the "education curriculum" of this insanely powerful technology for 1.5 billion people, mostly with the aim of making its app stickier for these users. Yet the education gap is also a huge opportunity to help people build a relationship with technology that empowers human values and sovereignty, meeting each person where they are, so they can navigate what it means to be alive in our time. Personally, I am very interested in the guiding principle of asking whether each design decision in a product or service increases presence in people's lives or not. I currently use this principle in all areas of my life, including how I relate to technology. The effects have been incredibly positive. If you're an entrepreneur who wants to do long-lasting good for humanity, and not just pump VC money by riding the latest AI-wrapper cycle (maybe a bit harsh, but still...), I would lean into exploring the implications of the statistic Greg Brockman shared. I don't have any solutions, although I have many hypotheses. If you are serious about starting something in this domain with a strong ethical foundation (in the spirit of Eric Ries's latest book "Incorruptible"), I'd love to help!

Our next-gen sandbox infrastructure is looking so good!! It's amazing how at Lovable we have the agency to work on truly bleeding edge systems, usually months ahead of the research papers! Here's a quick taste of Camille, which we will talk about on P99Conf in a few weeks.

Emil Ahlbäck on the early days of Lovable: "I joined very early because I knew both Fabian and Anton since before. I worked at Anton's last company, Depict. So yeah, I helped write the first version of the codebase." "But then a part of the story is that I also left for like a year to work on other things, and then came back in late 2024, just when they were like starting to take off." "Seeing the team go from just the three of us to, we were there like eight people [in 2024], and then just like how fast Lovable started growing. That was, to me, very insane." "Just like seeing how this team of pretty, like not random, but like very skilled but very young, very inexperienced people kind of managed to build this amazing company. That was incredible. An incredible experience."

If you hear: Bruh, cracked GOATs only. Lock tf in. Let them cook. No side quests… It means: We need to deploy our highest-performing talent against our most strategically important initiatives while ruthlessly eliminating any distractions. Hope this helps with cross-generational alignment.

The Drop event made me realizing something! I’m pitching my new startup after almost 10 years not pitching, and I was glad to find out that while I was away, not so much has changed… I’m happy! It happened at TechBBQ and now at The Drop (thanks to Hampus Jakobsson and the team – amazing team, love you all!). My take – there’s a new generation of founders, investors… obviously… who know each other and speak the same 'language'… Having been away, I’ve forgotten it… I don’t know which fund spun out of which fund, who invested in whom, who built what, who exited where, even though I thought I knew from checking the internet. I know nothing ☺! I caught myself today at The Drop sitting, looking around and thinking that I have some catching up to do… Something impressed me, though – the new generation of VC researchers and associates keep the quality of the conversation very high, get straight to the point and understand quickly. They’ve really done their homework! Sure, there are also the old sharks ☺ I know from the past, whom I always enjoy meeting, talking to and sharing memories with! Anyway, what I wanted to say - I realized how much I missed this! Thank you for this, The Drop!

We’ve raised a $10.3M seed round to make CRM history. Led by Primary Venture Partners. Early 2024. AI was about to make building products much easier, and nothing was about to make selling them easier. Tuomo and I started Zero with one opinion: GTM tools should do the work, not just record that you did it. Every product we'd used had it backwards. The classic startup advice is to pick one problem and solve it well. We picked the whole GTM stack - prospecting, closing, scaling. Roughly ten startups' worth of product. There were two of us. We spoke to dozens of investors. Most passed. A few were specific about why this would never work. Then two years building in a crowded market, against incumbents from 1999 and startups with 10x our funding. Our beta customers replaced their CRM and most of the tools around it. One is closing twice the new business. Another cut its sales cycle from 60 days to 30. Their numbers, not ours. The team we built is better than the idea we started with. The customers were blunt with us when we got it wrong. Both of those shaped the product more than we did. Today Zero comes out of beta, roughly a year later than we told ourselves it would. New brand, and anyone can sign up. A lot has changed since we were two people with a crazy idea. Our opinion about GTM tech hasn't. Thank you Cassie Young for leading this round, and Erik Lindblad, Joseph Pizzolato, Dan McCormick, Mikko Savolainen, Peter Sarlin, Fabian Hedin, Gabriel Petersson, Lennard Schmidt and Tobias Kemkes for joining. And to the people who backed us at pre-seed, when there genuinely was nothing to look at: Kieran Hill, Harry Stebbings, Stefan Jeschonnek, 🦔 james hawkins and many others. Anyway. Back to the ten startups.