Keynote by Maor Shlomo, Founder & CEO of Base44 | RAISE Summit 2026

Base44 Overview

• Founded 18 months ago as a "vibe coding" platform; grew to over $150 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
• Recently acquired by Wix despite raising zero dollars from external investors.
• Operated for most of its existence as a one-person entity supported by AI agents handling engineering, marketing, and support.
• Achieved 50x growth in the past year, deploying to production hundreds of times daily.

Operational Pivot from Traditional Models

• Former founder experience with "Explorium" (8 years) involved traditional VC playbooks, heavy hiring, and management layers that slowed reaction to the 2023 LLM market shift.
• Recognized that legacy structures with "broken communication" and team dependencies failed to pivot fast enough compared to AI-native workflows.
• Restructured as an experiment to build a company solely around AI speed, discarding prior startup playbooks.

Principle 1: "Teams of Ones" (Individual Conductors)

• Reimagined the organization around individual contributors (ICs) redefined as "Individual Conductors" who leverage AI agents to execute end-to-end without dependencies.
• Organizational structure features 41 direct reports, a configuration the speaker notes would be considered a "disaster" under traditional management playbooks.
• Specific example: A single person manages the entire billing system for a $150M ARR entity.
• Strategic shift: Moving from building "efficient teams" to building "over-delivering individuals" capable of 10x to 1000x output.

Principle 2: The "30% Rule" (Investing in Tooling)

• Allocates 30% of time toward building custom automations, agents, and tools rather than using standard external solutions.
• Driven by the necessity to compete against teams 100x larger by creating personalized tools that accelerate work bottlenecks.
• Created proprietary task management and experiment platforms to align exactly with internal workflows, such as eliminating all meetings except a daily morning sync.
• Generates an exponential productivity loop: time saved via AI is immediately reinvested into building better tools to save even more time.

Principle 3: Compounding Ambitions

• Adopted a mindset shift to leverage AI-induced productivity gains to pursue significantly more ambitious product goals rather than repeating past roadmaps.
• Recent product expansions achieved in months include: training a proprietary LLM, releasing a mobile app, extending to website games, slides, and autonomous sales agents.
• Core thesis: AI enables increased throughput, allowing organizations to define "the biggest thing" they can do instead of maximizing efficiency on existing scope.