Lovable’s first designer and fourth employee Nad Chishtie got on a call with co-founder and CEO Anton Osika to sense-check his approach for his first few projects. Osika interrupted him to say: “If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I want you to take action on the things you’re confident about automatically, instead of telling me first. I get annoyed when people don’t just do things on their own.”

Chishtie made foundational design decisions without ever asking for permission again. The original web app used a lot of red, which he wanted to reserve for destructive actions, so he made the call to change it in literal seconds. He pushed to launch the product without showing code in the interface. He led the rebrand to Lovable’s signature heart logo — as a team of one.

This edition of our “Firsthand” series takes us inside the Swedish AI coding decacorn, where you’re trusted to follow your instincts and if that doesn’t work, you try again with new information. Chishtie writes about how Lovable’s culture of extreme ownership pushed him to produce exceptional work at a pace he hadn’t been allowed before.

“We call this clock speed: your internal pace of thinking, decision making and executing. Some people's clocks tick faster than others. Anton and Fabian are fast, and they want everyone around them to be fast, too — which is what made me realize my organic clock speed is fast as well,” says Chishtie. “Lovable pushed me to reset a clock speed I'd been suppressing for years.”