Opening Wix DevCon 2022 | Avishai Abrahami

Today is really exciting for me. I'm going to tell you why in a minute. You might not know it, but I have a terrible stitch right now, which I'm usually very good at handling. Today being so exciting, it's even harder. So hopefully we're fine. I'm going to let me tell you why.

In 2006, my co-founder Giora Kaplan—we call him Gigi—and I were thinking about building Wix. We had these ideas and we were struggling with what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. It was very obvious to us that we can make this page builder that we can make to make many pages so we can build a website. And we were thinking that yes, but that's probably not enough. How do we make it into something truly exciting, something really inspiring that we're going to really enjoy building a company around? And we said, what happened? I said we have this drag and drop thing. What happened if we had a database, a way to write code into it, a way to scale everything so you can actually build software and do it kind of like Visual Basic for the older guys here or ladies that remember that. For the internet, I mean, we were very excited about that idea, and this is why we decided to found Wix. Because we said, well, we can build this really cool way that you can draw those pages and then add functionality to them. That's going to be amazing. And really believe that just doing a page builder will not be enough. Of course, we were absolutely wrong about the first assumption because we built this first part and Wix just exploded into this massive growth. And because Wix was growing so fast allowing people to build simple websites, we never had a chance to build a true vision, which is the combination of adding a development environment on top of that page builder. So we actually founded Wix to do what we're talking about today. That was the vision behind it. It took us pretty much 16 years to get to the point that we can actually really work hard to achieve the second part of our vision. So that's why it's really so exciting for me today to be here.

And before I talk about what we do here today, I want to talk—and this is a keynote speech, I have no idea how to do a keynote speech because all of my team said, well, don't talk a lot about what we're doing because we want to, you know, you're going to still have thunder, don't do that. So I'm going to talk a bit about what we're doing, but more than that, I want to talk about the way we think about what we should be doing. So we're going to try and take you into how we think about what our long-term goals are and not just what we're doing now. And so before that, let's put some context into that and talk about the evolution of the internet. So from a website building perspective, everything started with homegrown solutions. You would go and build a website because you had nothing else. You'd usually use some text editor to edit HTML, write some JavaScript or Java code, and you want to build the website. Everything was custom made. And then at some point, about 15 years in the past, we started to have things like CMS. The beginning very simple ones, the more complex ones: WordPress, Drupal, a bunch of others. And this allowed you to have a lot of the software stack ready, easier way to edit, easier way to do things. But you still have to worry about all of your infrastructure, security, upgrades, all of those things. You still have to worry about and you still need to be very technical in order just to have a server running. A lot of this also happened before AWS or Google Cloud or Microsoft Cloud, so you actually had to rent a server somewhere. And then about 10 years ago, we started to have SaaS website builders, which kind of give you way easier ways to edit content than the standard CMS. But also, you don't have to worry about hosting, you don't have to worry about security, you don't have to worry about a lot of the other things. And this is where Wix is, Shopify, WordPress.com, and then Squarespace and a bunch of other companies.

If you look at the internet growth, in the last 10 years, while we're at around 200 million active websites—active websites we mean a domain that has a unique website behind it, we have a few ways of measuring it, this number of course is not exact—and then it's growing at about 1.3 percent over here, which is not a lot, but it is growing. But you look at the CMS market, it grows ten times faster than that. How is that happening? It's simple because a lot of people upgrade their websites into better technology, or building better websites from scratch, or replacing what they're doing. So this is growing way faster. And if you look at the SaaS CMS, it's actually growing twice as fast as CMS sites. So it's always expanding and taking more and more. And this, by the way, accelerates. So this is actually growing in the last year faster than it grew compared to CMS, faster than before. And we're seeing this trend continuously. And which is a great thing, I think, for everybody here. If you guys are using Wix, this is a great thing. It means that we are available potentially to more and more customers. And again, why is it happening? Why CMS is winning over legacy CMS? Well, the simple answer is that it is a better solution. It's easier to edit content, it's easier to install applications, you don't have to worry about security, you don't have to worry about reliability, you don't have to worry about how to make your site fast in the Far East or in Europe because we do all the things for you. So this is why it's growing. If you look, and I believe by the way that usually continue to accelerate, I think the gaps between what you have traditional CMS on a dedicated server compared to what you get in the SaaS solution is going to continue to grow all the time. Building websites is getting to be harder, harder, harder, and harder every year.

If you look at Wix by the way, Wix is always growing into bigger market share. In fact, in last year, one in every four sites built on the CMS platform is built on Wix. And that's amazing, at least for me, as a CEO and co-founder. But it means that we're doing something right. And what we're doing right, I think it's very simple: we're working very hard to make it faster, better, easier, and have more functionality and open Wix more and more. The more we do that, we continue to expand. So one of the things that we've been doing from day one in Wix is that we always advertise Wix is easy, stunning, and it's available for everybody. And we didn't speak a lot about the fact that Wix is a professional platform. And sometimes it was not true. Sometimes we think that we need to improve in order to actually have that claim. But we are at this point, and a lot of what we're doing and last year in marketing has changed. You don't see us advertising so much easy and free. You're seeing us talking about being a professional platform. I want to share with you some things that I'm sure all of you know. So we worked a lot to improve SEO and can see our SEO capabilities. And we can see that the SEO community today actually embraces Wix. In fact, if you look at SEO experts, how they talk about Wix, 99 percent of the time it's super positive. They'll say really good things about us. I think it's very important because when you guys go out there to do projects, people really care about that. If somebody wants more of that, the team here will have more information and give you abilities. When you look at performance, so obviously as you can see, all of this CMS platform have worked very hard to improve. But today, Wix, well, I would say the fastest, even that this is how Google measure it, it's not necessarily fastest, but Wix is number one in how Google perceives performance. Which I think is excellent.

If you look at reliability, so we have all of those points on the map of how we cache information. We have four data centers that allow you to have endless reliability. In fact, when a few months ago when the Eastern AWS data center collapsed, we were the only one that stayed alive because we managed to move everything to our European side and to the West Coast side. So this is a lot of the things that we're doing. But doing those right, well, security, are we spending a huge amount of effort, maybe too much, on security for Wix sites? It's really hard. Almost impossible, nothing is impossible, but it's very, very hard to hack into a Wix website. In fact, we don't have a documented case of somebody that did it. I suppose if you think about WordPress, the average time it takes to hack into a WordPress website is less than seven minutes for an average hacker, not for a good one, just to put it in perspective. But we don't just do those things. We actually have a lot of campaigns now telling about that for the world. And this is important because if you want to achieve the second part of that vision that we spoke about, me and my co-founder spoke about in 2006, we need to mention that Wix is a professional platform. We need to be able to say that. So we are spending a lot of money now working on branding Wix as a professional platform. And things take a while. We almost spent a billion dollars saying Wix is easy and free, so it's going to take a while for it to be as widely known. But I think this is very important for everybody here.

Well, this is another issue. So if you look at projects on the internet, well, pretty much every website, there's this graph where you have something very, very simple—Joe's Pizza is probably very simple—and then if you look at the left side, you have Amazon, right, that's your website, and that's really hard. So you have the spectrum from super simple to complex projects. And today, if you want to build using SaaS website builders, you pretty much go with products that are standard. It doesn't matter, even on Shopify, even on WordPress, you're pretty much stuck in that universe unless you do a huge amount of custom development. And we think we can improve that. But for me as a CEO, I have to worry about both sides because we have a lot of those and a lot of those. So what we're doing for the simple projects are the things that you guys all know: we build AI builders so it simplifies how you do layout, we do things like better UI, we do things like bigger media libraries so our customers can find more, and a lot of those things. But this conference is not about this. This is not what we're going to talk about here, even I think it's important to mention. I think it's about this: how can we attack the other side, the custom, and allow Wix to address a huge part of it. Today, as a developer, you kind of have two options: you go to a pre-built system and you can do a lot as long as you're in the box of that system, or you write a lot of code to have your own server, build the infrastructure. And we really believe we can change that. We can live and enjoy the benefits of both. And if you remember, this is exactly the vision we had in 2006: what happened if we allow you to have this UX like you can draw everything, a lot of business components out of the box, something that we're doing now, I'm going to talk about it in a minute, consistent development environment, and running on a scalable enterprise infrastructure so you can actually enjoy the SaaS benefits, the security, reliability, ease of that, on one hand, while having the flexibility to develop software the way you want. And this is the long-term goal. This is what we are trying to achieve. And this is what as a company I really focus on: how we can do that. You can enjoy both worlds at the same time.

All right, so what are we doing? Well, the first thing we do is that we're taking the business blocks we built on Wix and we're breaking them out. So we spent the last 12 years building things like e-commerce, payment gateways, loyalty, member areas, email campaigns, all those. And now we're saying, well, today they are integrated in the way we fund, they should be for that pre-made functionality. What happens if we allow you to change that, to replace that, so you can actually override it either with API or SPI, which is the ability to replace a component part in a flow. I'm going to show it in a minute. So this is really the first part of what we're doing: saying, well, everything we have, you can break into components now and use. Let me show you. So this is kind of like, of course the infrastructure is obvious, then you have all of those layers, right? So it's from payment to geo lookup to multilingual, and then all the business models. So we are now in the process of taking each one of those, packaging them as independent components that you can use in your code. And it looks kind of like this. Look at this, this is the normal flow of e-commerce. And normally each one of those models is pre-made. But we said, well, if you break it into models and define the very clear API between them that you can override them in place, you can actually come here and say, well, I don't want the additional fee model that you have, I want to throw it away and I want to write something else that is completely different. It is based on the color of the item, it is based on the way, it is based on something completely different. I know what I'm doing. And so we enable that now. And Dor is going to show a lot more about it in the e-commerce platform session, so I'm not going to go into details. But it really allows you to replace every part of the system. But this is one side of it because, by the way, it also integrates automatically to the UI because the messaging is such that you change something and then it appears automatically in the UI in a consistent way. Of course, you can replace the UI if you want. But the question is, how do you build something like this? How do you do something which is this complex with pretty much none of the standard functionality that we have fixed? Can we break Wix enough into components that you can use those components to build something that is completely different, has completely different business logic? And we think we're almost at the point where you can now pretty much—this is a huge amount of components—and we have those components. And the more we open them, well, we have multilingual, we have search, we have ability to override catalogs, we have the ability to do reviews. And the more we open Wix to those individual components, the more we enable you to even build Airbnb on top of Wix. So this is the vision. This is what we're trying to achieve. By the way, here to build Airbnb, we actually went and mapped the services from Wix that you need, the components, information. So this is the map. And we pretty much have all of them. We have a fantastic calendar, we have really good way to do currency converter, we have gift cards, we have all of those. So in theory, pretty soon you should be able to do that. And that's going to appear probably require 0.1 percent of the code, if not less, than what you need to do Airbnb in a different way. It still requires coding, obviously, just to be clear, because the logic between that and regular e-commerce is dramatically different. So we are getting there. And again, you're going to see a lot about that today here in the conference, how much closer we got to this.

So what else are we doing? Well, we think that Velo should be a very modern development environment, and we are not there yet. So we're doing things like adding Git integration, local IDE, which is—thank you everybody here that is working on Velo, I know that's important. I want to say for me also, the fact that you have a really good IDE is very important. So I'm a developer, professional, I think this is where you spend most of your time, you want to have something that is very modern. Monitoring, logging, gradual deployment, which is essential, this is how we work. Automatic scaling, so you can actually increase databases capacity and replication and choose where you want it to be. And then ability to integrate to any database, right? If it's integration to a database that you guys have, or easy integration to any of the big clouds, right? So AWS, Amazon, Microsoft, so you can easily integrate to their databases. So we're really working on that. You're going to see a lot of it here already. And if not, what you're not seeing here is going to come very soon. So this is a big part of our target.

So this is for me probably the most exciting part of what we're doing. And again, my team asked me not to say a lot about it and they're coming right after me. Well, I want to tell you why I think it's so amazing because what we allow you to do is that we allow you to take components and build anything on Wix, add code, add databases, everything to that package, it in something we call blocks, so you can consume it in many places on the same website. Imagine you build a new gallery or you build a new application, but also it allows you to take it beyond that website to many other websites. So it's the easiest way to build a reusable component combining graphics, logic, databases, that I've ever seen. And then you can actually upload it to the app market and sell it, or consume it in your websites. So this is an incredible way of just leveraging what you do in many different places. Another interesting fact about that is that you can change the design of each one of them in the Wix editor. So you build a software component that somebody can actually visually edit without breaking the functionality. The team is going to show you. For me, this is one of the most exciting things I've seen. But it all comes from our belief from 2006 that really the future of the internet is in the hands of people like you, developers. And the more we enable developers to be more productive, do more, it's going to create fantastic things for everybody that is involved in that. Every day it's becoming harder to build a website, not because the technology to build it, because now you have legal requirements. Who had GDPR five years ago? With cookies and consents and a bunch of management and the ability to how do you track advertisement, all those things keep changing every day and becoming more and more complex. We just heard from our team in Germany that now in Germany it's considered to be really a bad practice if you use Google Fonts because it allows Google to know that somebody arrived to the website. Now to be fair, I'm not sure it's true because Google usually have their data centers, so actually if they're sitting in the front of the data center, they can look at the traffic and see if anything goes in the data center anyway, which is most of the internet between them and Amazon. So you pretty much have to choose. But it doesn't matter, this is a perception. Now you have to solve that. And every year it's becoming harder to build websites. You need to handle more complex things. And I think enabling developers to focus on development and not solving all those insane lists of things that you need to catch up with is an amazing goal for us and something that can provide hopefully a lot of value for you guys. Thank you.