At 12, one of Brazil’s soccer biggest clubs offered Nicolas a spot on its pro track. Saying yes meant dropping out of school. He said no.
Today he’s playing the “main league” of Silicon Valley: building an AI company in SF, against the smartest, best-funded people in the world. In his words, “you’re playing against the Pelés and Kakás.”
That company became Firecrawl, the biggest web-scraping repo on GitHub. 170k stars from a team of 20.
Every founder is dealing with the same question: if AI can clone your product in a weekend, what makes yours worth using?
Firecrawl does one unglamorous job: it reads webpages for AI. It takes a page full of code and turns it into clean text a model can use. Almost every AI agent needs that and agents now browse the web more than people do (according to Cloudflare).
Nicolas and his cofounders built it without connections or a big raise. They open-sourced it, developers picked it up and it spread from there. Tobi Lütke, the founder of Shopify, invested without even taking a meeting.
In the episode, Nicolas explains why the most boring part of the stack is often the most valuable and how open source became his sales team.
Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie. Paul Navarro works with some of the best founders in Latin America, many of them guests on the podcast. I always ask my guests who I should interview next, and the only time anyone recommended a lawyer, it was Paul. Glad to have them as a founding sponsor.
[YouTube] → [Spotify] → [Apple Podcast]
Also in this episode:
[02:55] At 12, he had to choose: drop out of school or quit soccer
[31:25] The indie hacker test: if it takes a weekend, it’s a feature
[35:45] The best product is the one your users never see
[50:05] What he means by building the eyes for AGI
