Koen Bok
5 Mar 2026Claude Vs Gov, OpenAI Backs Down, Framer CEO Joins Live
Framer CEO Koen Bok on Taste, AI & the Canvas
Framer's co-founder and CEO Koen Bok joins as the show's newest partner, showing off Framer merch, and explains why 'taste' is suddenly trending now that building software is cheap — nobody can yet predict whether taste-havers or trained builders will win, per his house-building analogy. He hopes LLMs will keep software beautiful through continuous iteration rather than bit rot, argues the canvas — not a black box of code — lets non-engineers inspect and ship agent output, and describes his own shift to chatting 80–90% of the time. He also shares that an early Framer AI release drew 500,000 signups but only two actively used websites.
Framer's Series C Pivot: From Prototyping to Websites
Asked about pivots (with reference to Intercom's Fin pivot), Koen advises founders not to do what Framer did at Series C, admitting they were 'honestly very lucky.' Their high-fidelity prototyping tool stalled at a couple million in revenue as lower-fidelity tools like Miro and Figma won, so they used their canvas tech to attack websites — 'the most opposite thing' — targeting $1M in first-year revenue. He argues that owning deployed output rather than mockups positions Framer well as building gets cheap, before the hosts wrap the show and sign off.