Basement Studio: This Design Agency Is Becoming a VC

Facundo Santana and José Rago run Basement Studio - 35 people in Argentina, working with Vercel, Mr. Beast, and Kid Super.

They poured actual wine on a surface to get a WebGL texture right. That detail tells you everything about how this shop operates.

This conversation covers how they protect quality as they scale, the R&D lab that spun out BasHub and XMP, why they open-source everything, how 30 people pile into a single Slack channel before anything ships, and why Basement Ventures is quietly becoming a real VC fund.

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 — They Used Actual Wine to Build a Website
1:55 — How Basement Protects Quality at Scale
7:02 — "Would You Show It to Your Mom?"
7:50 — How KidSuper World Got Made
10:21 — XMCP: Building Tools for Builders
13:48 — The Three-Division Model: Services, Lab, Ventures
17:07 — "Basement Should Be There Forever"
21:17 — 30 People in One Slack Channel Before Anything Ships
25:47 — The Tooling Stack: Figma, Cursor, Next.js
27:08 — AI Raises the Bar
29:33 — Why Open Source Everything
33:25 — Tommy's Takeaway

LINKS:
Basement Studio: https://basement.studio
Facundo on X: https://x.com/falanfantana
José on X: https://x.com/ragojose

LISTEN ON:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/basement-studio-they-used-wine-to-build-a-website-heres-how/id1859897039?i=1000760254933
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/25ZycWOCOb3VKZrlXHsVHJ?si=9b1eaadd8dc54029

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