MATHIAS BIILMANN

Mathias "Matt" Biilmann Christensen co-founded Netlify in 2014 and has been its CEO since. He trained as a musician and music journalist in Denmark before becoming a self-taught developer, building content management systems and web infrastructure for two decades before Netlify. In 2015 he coined the term Jamstack to describe the architectural pattern Netlify was selling: decoupled front-end UIs talking to APIs and services, with static delivery at the edge. The term stuck, the category grew, and Netlify scaled with it.

In January 2025, Biilmann published the foundational essay on Agent Experience (AX), the discipline of building products with AI agents as a primary user class rather than an edge case. The framework has four pillars: Access (can agents reach your product), Context (how they understand it), Tools (what they can do), and Orchestration (how they combine those tools). Netlify pivoted around AX at its January 2025 kickoff and shipped Netlify.ai in April 2026 as a separate entry point built purely for agents, using content negotiation to route agents and humans to different URLs. The phrase "Agent Experience" has moved from one essay to common industry vocabulary.

On the podcast, Matt argued that every product already has an agent experience, designed or not. Agents interact with your website whether through computer use, fetching, or workarounds, and the only variable is whether the interaction works. His broader argument cuts at SaaS economics: Netlify is watching customers respond to right-sizing calls by asking if they can build the same functionality with an agent instead, then canceling. When the cost of building drops toward the cost of buying, ninety-percent-margin seat-based SaaS faces structural pressure. He also pushed against fifty years of computer science orthodoxy, arguing that LLMs are not organized around data structures, and that context, flows, and creative approaches may matter more than both data structures and code for the next wave of software.