Matt Biilmann

Biilmann grew up in Copenhagen and began programming on a Commodore 64 at the age of 10. “I was programming computers since I was 10 years old,” he recalled.⁠[1]

He attended Aurehøj Gymnasium in Gentofte, north of Copenhagen, where he met Christian Bach, with whom he later co-founded Netlify.⁠[2]

He earned a bachelor’s degree in musicology and comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen and began, but did not finish, a master’s in cultural studies; while studying he worked as a music journalist for Danish Radio. He has said that “the classical composers were like the first programmers.”⁠[1]

Biilmann moved to Spain with his Spanish partner and, finding no market there for writing about music in Danish, turned to software engineering. He joined a Spanish startup as a senior Ruby on RailsRuby on RailsRuby on Rails (often shortened to Rails) is an open-source, full-stack web application framework written in the Ruby programming language that builds database-backed web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson and first publicly released in 2004, it is known for design principles such as “convention over configuration,” and companies including GitHub and Shopify use it in production.Open the full entry engineer and became its chief technology officer within three years.⁠[1]

He then co-founded Webpop, a cloud-hosted multi-tenant content management system, in Spain and moved to San Francisco to scale it; Webpop’s annual revenue stalled at about $100,000.⁠[1]

Biilmann first built BitBalloon, a minimum viable product that evolved into Netlify. Over the 2013 Christmas holiday he travelled from California to Copenhagen to visit Christian Bach, and after long conversations the two decided to pursue the business idea, founding Netlify together in 2014.⁠[1][2]

Netlify came out of private beta at the end of March 2015 with a “Show HN” post on Hacker News. “Back then, Netlify was just two Danes bootstrapping, with me as the sole developer,” Biilmann recalled. Bach moved to Silicon Valley in mid-2015.⁠[3][2]

Biilmann has said that part of Netlify’s founding thesis was that “these frontend developers can’t build the whole user experience end to end.”⁠[1]

On March 8, 2018, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry published the podcast episode “a16z Podcast: Containing the Monolith — From Microservices to DevOps.” It was based on a developer-focused panel recorded at the a16z Summit in November 2017 and moderated by a16z general partner Martin CasadoMartin CasadoMartin Casado is a computer scientist, entrepreneur and venture capitalist who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads infrastructure investing. A major proponent of software-defined networking, he co-founded Nicira and served as its chief technology officer, and after VMware acquired the company he ran its networking and security business; he also co-founded the nonprofit MuralNet.Open the full entry, where Biilmann, as co-founder and CEO of Netlify, appeared alongside Mesosphere co-founder and CEO Florian LeibertFlorian LeibertFlorian Leibert, known as Flo Leibert, is a software engineer and venture capitalist who co-founded the data-center software company Mesosphere and served as its first chief executive, and later became a managing partner of the venture capital firm 468 Capital.Open the full entry and SignalFx co-founder and CEO Karthik Rau.⁠[4]

The panel discussed what happens when monolithic architectures are broken into containers and microservices and whether companies are being split into smaller units as well, covering dynamic websites, enterprise cloud monitoring and elastic application scaling. The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019.⁠[4][5]

On January 28, 2025, Biilmann published “Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters” on his personal blog, defining agent experience as “the holistic experience AI agents will have as the user of a product or platform” and arguing that products should be designed for AI agents as they are for users (UX) and developers (DX), for example with clean, well-described APIs that agents can operate and machine-readable documentation.⁠[6]

In May 2026 he said on Evil Martians’ Dev Propulsion Labs podcast, “DX was our North Star for 10 years; in the next decade, agent experience is gonna be what’s gonna matter the most.”⁠[1]

On March 7, 2025, Andreessen Horowitz’s AI + a16z program released “Agent Experience: Building an Open Web for the AI Era,” a conversation between Biilmann and Martin Casado, the a16z general partner who leads its infrastructure practice; the video was uploaded to the a16z YouTube channel the same day.⁠[7][8]

The conversation discussed how AI is changing web development beyond faster code generation, centering on agent experience, in which AI agents are “active participants in development,” and covered how Netlify was adapting, why the next 100 million web developers would work alongside AI, and whether the web would become an open, AI-powered internet or be dominated by walled gardens.⁠[7][8]

On March 31, 2025, Biilmann wrote a retrospective on Netlify’s first ten years, stating that the platform had “scaled to more than a billion unique monthly visitors and petabytes of monthly data transfer.”⁠[3]

Biilmann coined the term “Jamstack” to describe a web architecture that decouples the frontend from the backend.⁠[3]

In a July 2020 interview with SiliconANGLE he described the approach as “really about getting an application into the browser using JavaScript as the runtime,” adding, “Serverless starts becoming a really important part of this JAMstack approach.”⁠[9]

Netlify: Official website: https://www.netlify.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

Personal website: https://biilmann.blog/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/biilmann (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathias-biilmann-christensen-a5a3805/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]