What we talked about
Join us for an episode featuring Zvonimir Sabljić, an engineer and tech entrepreneur. He founded AWW (A Web Whiteboard), serving 1.5 million users and attracting Apple as its largest customer. In 2021, AWW was acquired by Miro. Now, Zvonimir’s focus is on GPT Pilot, where innovation continues. Tune in for insights into his tech journey and the future of innovation.
https://github.com/Pythagora-io/gpt-pilot
Show notes
Building an application is not the same as writing code, that distinction sits at the center of this conversation with Zvonimir Sabljić. After selling his collaborative whiteboard company AWW to Miro, he spent a year studying machine learning, then turned a feedback loop from 200+ developer interviews into GPT Pilot, a tool that crossed 10,000 GitHub stars in its first seven weeks.
What we covered
- GPT Pilot reframes the developer’s role: instead of writing code all day, the developer becomes the team lead who reviews, corrects, and redirects an AI that handles the actual coding, running, and debugging loop.
- Software is unusually well-suited for LLM automation because code output can be run programmatically and fed back to the model, unlike legal or medical documents that require human review to validate, code can validate itself.
- The pivot from Pythagora (automated test generation) to GPT Pilot came directly from user research: developers trusted AI-generated code more when it was derived from tests they had written themselves, not the other way around.
- Zvonimir’s acquisition advice runs counter to standard brokerage wisdom, he fired the broker, let the exclusivity contract expire, approached Miro directly as a strategic competitor, and sold the company for more than twice the amount the broker said was the ceiling.
- On the emotional reality of founding: the lows are as extreme as the highs, and the only thing that separates founders who make it is the willingness to keep pushing through that cycle rather than any particular skill or strategy.
- The future-of-developers question remains genuinely open, Zvonimir’s honest answer is that in five years, software development will be “unrecognizably different,” but nobody yet knows what that means for how juniors acquire deep technical knowledge.
About Zvonimir Sabljić
Zvonimir is a Croatian engineer and serial entrepreneur who built AWW (A Web Whiteboard) to 1.5 million monthly active users before its acquisition by Miro in 2021. He is now co-founder of Pythagora, where GPT Pilot, an open-source tool that orchestrates the full app development process using LLMs, is his current focus.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zvonimirsabljic
- Website: https://www.pythagora.ai
Episode 3 of the PreVetted Podcast.