Steph

@Lovable just raised $400M at a $13.3B valuation. My journey with Lovable started two years ago. But my journey with the problem started as a kid who just wanted to make things for the internet. For most of my career, I thought the goal was to earn a seat at the table. Now I think the industry has been asking for the wrong thing. I grew up terminally online and the internet felt like infinite possibility. I spent my time in forums and online communities, hacking things together and figuring out just enough to make an idea work. But I’d always hit the same wall: to make the thing I actually had in my head, I needed to properly learn how to code. I tried. I got frustrated. I failed. Over and over again. Eventually I fell into design. Unlike programming, it clicked. I loved caring about how people used things and the problems being solved, rather than how things were made. It became my career. And like a good team player, I learned to embrace my limitations. I learned handoffs. I learned to play to other people’s strengths. I learned to stay in my lane. But the original impulse never went away. Talking to Lovable users, I see the same impulse: people who accepted their limits, right up until they started creating with Lovable. I believe we have an uncanny ability to tell when something was made with care. We hear it in music. Taste it in a home-cooked meal. Feel it when friends and family show up for us. What I didn’t expect was how clearly I’d see the same thing in software, when the people closest to a problem can build it themselves with a depth of care that’s impossible to hand off. @thisabri at Plinq is using Lovable to fight gender-based violence in Brazil, reaching >$500k MRR and raising funding. @Ivanovic_nenad at Nursa is building tools to educate nurses, saving >$1M a year. There are two conversations in tech I’m looking forward to retiring: Should you learn to code? And how do you get a “seat at the table”? I think they were always the same question: how do I get agency? For most of my career, getting a seat at the table felt like an ambition. Now, you don’t need to ask for a seat. You can just build the table.