JoyConf Stories: Netlify’s Matt Biilmann on the Power of the Storyblok Partnership

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it’s impossible not to like Matt Biilmann. 

Maybe it’s his easy-going temperament or his effortlessly cool demeanor. Or how the combination of those attributes helps him make complex technology less… well, complex.

For me, this is why he tops the list of inspiring Silicon Valley luminaries – the kind that enroll talented people into their flock and drive ideas into scalable businesses. 

He’s certainly done it with San Francisco-based Netlify, a modern platform that helps developers build, deploy, and operate websites, apps, and AI agents. Netlify is the engine under the coding hood, helping global brands ship their ideas to production and run them fast and frictionless.

Matt co-founded Netlify in 2014 with partner Chris Bach (another cool human), but it’s come a long way, baby. Last year, the company reported that over five million developers had signed up on its platform, with most joining in the last few years. Today, it helps power some of the world’s largest logos, including Nike, Unilever, NBC Universal, and more. 

I’ve known Matt for a while now, and when we connected at the end of February, something big was brewing. When he laid out the foundation for what he was calling Agent Experience – or more colloquially, just “AX” – I had to remind myself that this was the same guy who coined the term Jamstack a decade ago. Odds were reasonably good that this idea was going to stick around. 

And it has. When we sat down two weeks ago at Storyblok’s JoyConf 2025 in Amsterdam, Matt was more bullish than ever about the opportunity and urgency for embracing AX, a reflection of the widening enterprise focus on agentic AI. 

Since writing my in-depth analysis of the trajectory of Agent Experience, Matt has aligned with partners like Storyblok to further shape the landscape and translate AI-powered strategies into real value. We discussed how that’s manifesting in a newly formed partnership between the two companies, providing a targeted combo for leveraging content workflows with blazing-fast deployment, automation, and edge delivery to customers.

Storyblok calls this bundled offering its Content Hosting and Delivery partnership, which can be procured entirely through Storyblok with a Premium or Elite plan. It effectively eliminates the need to manage servers and unclogs the bottlenecks that result in lost time waiting for releases. 

Because the publishing workflows run fluidly between Storyblok and Netlify, updates will trigger fast deployments and revalidation across Netlify’s global edge network via cache refreshes – keeping your content fresh. The feature also enables users to create and update via Storyblok’s visual editor with live previews, allowing marketers to make edits in real time and even roll back safely.

In our conversation, Matt also reflected on the big announcements of Storyblok’s new Storyblok FlowMotion – powered by n8n – and its forthcoming Storyblok Strata solution, and why he’s excited about what’s ahead. 

A couple of Matts discussing AI, agents, MCP, and more at Storyblok JoyConf 2025.

I do my best to remain unbiased when analyzing technologies. But as far as people go, I make no apologies for picking favorites, and Matt is top-tier stock. Surviving and thriving in this intimidating era of AI requires a mixture of technical prowess, business savvy, and stick-to-itiveness, and he blends these in a way that makes the future look bright – even when things feel a little dark.

You can catch the big concepts from my conversation with Matt in the video below (or keep reading for more). And don’t miss the second video at the tail end of the article, where Matt talks about the future of developers in a world where Vibe Coding is becoming the norm. 

Storyblok and Netlify: A relationship with deep roots

During their shared time on stage at JoyConf, it was easy to see that the bond between Matt and Storyblok’s CEO Dominik Angerer was more than familial rapport. As Matt explained, the roots of the partnership date back to the early days of Netlify, when they were developing a network of headless CMSes. Storyblok was always on his radar.

“Our partnership really started taking its earliest shape several years ago when Dominik invited me to a small [Storyblok] event in Berlin, where I was giving a talk around Jamstack,” he said. “I got to know Dominik personally, and as founders, I think we're very aligned in how we think about the world and the web and what we are building. And then over time, we spent time together, and that feeling has continued.”

One thing Matt keyed in on was Storyblok’s focus on maintaining its pure positioning in an increasingly complex landscape of choices. According to the latest IDC Marketscape for Worldwide AI-Enabled Headless Content Management Systems 2025, Storyblok is now challenging many of its peers in the Leaders position. This clarity has made them a natural partner for what Netlify offers in an API-driven architecture.

IDC Marketscape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Headless Content Management Systems 2025. Source: IDC, 2025

“I'm really enjoying the way Dominik has focused Storyblok around being a headless CMS in a time where I think a lot of the headless CMSs are broadening out and trying to be like a full DXP platform, and where it kind of becomes hard to then discern,” he explained. “This original value proposition of being great at being a headless content API that developers can build around and that you can architect any experiences in Storyblok really stands out.”

As Matt reinforced, a big focus of the partnership has been around reducing the friction of buying the whole package of Netlify and Storyblok and providing a simple way to bundle in Netlify and sell together – thus providing a best-of-breed headless CMS with the deployment platform for running your web apps, agents, and content-based sites.

Building on the vision of ‘Agent Experience’

In my previous deep dive with Matt on AX, we talked about the seeds he was planting –  and the practical applications he hoped would blossom. Those were early days (heck, we’re still in the “early days” for all of this agent stuff), but he and his team were already contemplating how human and agent interactions would unfold in this new paradigm. 

Source: agentexperience.ax website

“Agent experience is really a parallel to user experience and developer experience, and it's really about a discipline of understanding that when we build products, websites, web apps, or e-commerce, we're now going to have a new kind of user that's not a human, but an autonomous agent trying to do things on behalf of someone,” Matt described. “Making that experience really seamless and frictionless for the agent starts becoming as important, in some cases, more important than the direct user experience of our product, as more and more of our users are accessing our content, our product, and our offerings through agents.”

Much like Jamstack, the foundational idea of AX has already evolved into a movement, which you can get involved with at agentexperience.ax – and it’s beginning to accelerate thanks to stronger LLMs that have emerged. 

The key to this rests with agent loops, the core operational cycle of an AI agent that allows it to act autonomously and complete a task by repeatedly performing a series of steps: observation, reasoning, action, and learning. In the beginning, agent loops were limited to a few minutes at most. Now, as Matt said, these cycles are much longer – sometimes as much as 18 hours – allowing for much more immersive training and operations surrounding complex tasks.

“We keep seeing a shift happening towards more and more agentic behavior,” he explained. “Tools like ChatGPT have evolved from a pure synchronous chat platform to having real agent capabilities, where you can put it in agent mode and interact and get it to do stuff. And with that, we'll see more and more people having agents they have a preference for using, and that have memory of their interactions.”

Armed with that memory, Matt believes we’ll see more building of agents with AX in mind, and thus an increase in users bringing their own agents to products versus building them within a closed product ecosystem – and targeting them at things like content generation. 

This frontier of agent freedom and control is something Storyblok has been championing from a composable perspective. But as Matt eluded, it’s also about supporting the pursuit of high-quality content as an activator. 

“I think a lot of the other CMSes have very quickly jumped towards putting agents inside their products that can write content, and I don't actually think anyone wants that. I've never really seen that as something that people actually ask for,” Matt said. “I think Dominik gets really centered around that idea of how do we make the CMS help people operate high-quality content and put agents in charge of that.”

As Matt said, this focus on automation in workflows is a key differentiator, and a place where FlowMotion is answering the need. Together with Storyblok Strata, there’s now a toolbox for building experiences that are inclusive of AX.

“With tools like Strata, you'll see a powerful combination where you can work really effectively with the content,” he said. “You can have AI help with your workflows and orchestration and all of that. And then you can build both traditional web experiences, but also interactive, agentic experiences that understand the same content and can use models to process it for users and do really interesting things. And I think that's going to be really exciting to collaborate around.”

Reimagining the future of web development

I’ve been paying close attention to the shifts in the developer community since before the pandemic. Obviously, there was an outsized explosion of hiring for builders during the COVID years, and we’re now seeing what Amazon calls a “rightsizing” of its workforce, exacerbated by AI. 

The future for developers feels palpably uncertain right now (and that’s putting it mildly). According to data I’ve been tracking from ADP, there’s been a precipitous decline in developer jobs across industries since 2019, specifically in the U.S. 

At the same time, we’ve seen a huge spike in the number of GitHub repos that have been created – and an explosion in the use of frameworks like Python and PyTorch that fit squarely in the AI stack. 

Source: ADP Research

This incongruous data suggests that while traditional prospects are disappearing, more people are building AI projects – and that’s where Matt sees an evolutionary moment for developers. 

“When I started Netlify, I started working on it in 2013, and at that time, the role of a front-end developer was seen as kind of like a ‘pseudo developer,’ right? It was not a real developer. It was someone who took a Photoshop file and then sliced it up and handed it over to a real developer who would implement it into a proper website or proper application. A big driving vision of Netlify was that if we can give these front-end developers the right end-to-end tool chain and decouple all this back-end stuff from building the experiences and give them the tooling to ship it all the way to production, they will become the actual web developers.”

Enter the new domain of Vibe Coding, a software development approach that allows you to leverage natural language to guide an AI in generating, refining, and even debugging executable code. While many self-proclaimed vibe coders wouldn’t classify their skills in the same category as, say, JavaScript developers, they’re unquestionably reshaping the ecosystem. 

Matt referred to tools like Bolt.new and Lovable.dev that are expanding this definition of what it means to be a web developer, enabling the creation of apps and components using plain language prompts – and allowing vibe coders to become more ambitious. 

While this trend has reduced the barrier for building, there’s a need for deeper technical skills for delivering secure, scalable, and performant applications to market.

“I’m suddenly seeing all these people with no development experience writing code indirectly and building on the web without being real developers,” he recounted. “There's this notion of a ‘vibe coder’ that's definitely not a real developer, right? It's someone who's just like vibing and playing around and so on. They all need a real developer to take their things to production, and I see the same parallel with Netlify to bridge that gap between real development and building real-world projects in production with these new kinds of developers that are coming in the front door.”

More like breaking down the front door. According to Matt, Netlify’s daily sign-ups have grown from 3,000 new users in 2024 to 17,000 today. A lot of those come from non-developer backgrounds, identifying as marketers, product managers, and designers. 

Matt Biilmann at Storyblok JoyConf 2025.

“I think we can really help them become developers,” Matt said. “We can open up the field of what it means to be a developer from being a very binary thing, where either you're a coder and you know code and write algorithms and know syntax, languages, and frameworks – and if you don't, you're not in the club and just can't participate. We can help shatter that barrier and make being a developer something much more fluid.”

That fluidity is exactly where the promise lies. And Matt Biilmann sees Netlify – and its partnership with Storyblok – as an activator for the possibilities. For democratizing the web and opening up creativity to almost anyone in profound ways.

As he said on stage at JoyConf, You are a developer. And this is your invitation to be a part of the web’s next chapter.

“I'm really excited about helping these next potential 3 billion people to be part of the developer community,” he said, smiling with unabated excitement, “and actually building software on the web and not just consuming it.”

It’s a big vision. But if anyone can see it to fruition, he can.

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