Today I’m talking with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix. You might know Wix as a website builder. It’s a competitor to WordPress and Squarespace. Tons of sites across the web run on Wix. But the web is changing rapidly, and Wix’s business today is less about web publishing, and more about providing software to help business owners run their entire companies. It’s fascinating, and Avishai has built a fascinating structure inside of Wix to make all that happen.  

Wix is also an Israeli company. Avishai joined from the company’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. And I’ll just tell you right up front that we talked about Israel’s war with Hamas and its impact on the company. And that this conversation was not always comfortable. But the main theme of our conversation was, of course, the future of the web, especially a web that seems destined to be overrun by cheap AI-generated SEO spam.

Links: 

• Doom runs on Excel
• Wix will let you build an entire website using only AI prompts
• Wix.com Launches Wix ADI and Delivers the Future of website creation
• YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians
• The people who ruined the internet
• The restaurant nearest Google
• OpenAI can’t tell if something was written by AI after all
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born
• Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena on why anyone makes a website in 2023
• What will changing Section 230 mean for the internet?

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23742026

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices