You built amMap in 2004 as a pin-map for yourself and quit your job in 2006 with no clear idea of what came next. What happened after that?

I flew to Spain, got on a bicycle and started pedalling. I came across the Camino de Santiago by accident — everyone knows it now, but back then I had never heard of it. I rode for about a month, through Spain and Portugal. My head cleared, and I understood that I wasn't going back to the office (I had my own web design company). I freelanced for a while, and wrote a script that drew a pie chart. After that, things went roughly like this:

Within a couple of years amCharts (that's what I named the product, after my initials) had become one of the best-known data visualization libraries in the world. If you opened up the Fortune 500, probably every second company on the list has bought an amCharts license of some kind. In 2009 Apple tripped us up a little: they announced that their phones and computers wouldn't support Adobe Flash, and the library had been built in Flash — at the time that was the standard rich media format. By the time I had a JavaScript version ready, competitors who had been writing in JavaScript from the start had taken a large share of the market. I had to play catch-up.

Twenty years have passed and amCharts is still going — we keep releasing new versions and new products.

You kept the team deliberately small and the amCharts business grew anyway. What is the scale of amCharts today? Did this growth surprise you?

Right now there are two of us: me and Martynas Majeris. At one point we had expanded a little, but we couldn't keep support under control. I don't remember exactly, but I don't think we ever had more than six people at one time.

We have never done any serious marketing. Our position is that a good product markets itself. To be honest, that strategy no longer works. Today a good product does not market itself — you have to push it. We were simply lucky — old enough to have caught the moment when making a good thing was still enough.

Besides, marketing would need people, more customers would mean a bigger team, and neither Martynas nor I want that at all. And now that a large part of the work can be delegated to AI, I see even less point in having a big company.

What connects amCharts and Master Version 1.1, if anything beyond the author? Why did the book come out when it did, and will there be more?

The author — and the English translator — is the entire amCharts team. Seriously though, it isn't only the author that connects them: both the library and the book are things you can make on your own, from beginning to end, without asking anyone's permission. I like trying out new fields, especially the ones where you can work alone.

Circumstances lined up: I'm a member of the Lithuanian Riflemen's Union, and I had been getting deep into drones. Arūnas Kumpis, a volunteer who fought in Ukraine, is a friend of mine — after his missions he would tell me a great deal about them, and he wrote his own diary-book, Ukrainos karo audrose ("In the Storms of the Ukrainian War"). When your head is full of material, it usually generates something. That's how my book came about.

Will there be more? I won't promise anything; I haven't started a new one. I've heard it said that the second one is harder to write, especially if the first one went well.

AI has shifted the moat under every developer library, yours included. How do you see the future of products and teams like amCharts?

AI both hurts us and helps us — we build and improve the product itself faster than ever. But our main customers are other developers, and instead of reaching for a library, they simply ask an AI to draw the chart. They get a result that looks perfectly good at first glance. But that drawing is usually a one-off: untested, unverified. For some people that is enough, of course. So I won't hide it — it does affect sales. But there are only two of us, so no tragedy happened: we don't have a team or an office to keep alive.

Predicting what comes next is hard. Right now developers are churning out projects like mad, delighted that in a single day they can build what used to take months or years. But it raises a question: is there actually demand? Who needs that many products? And if one of them does turn out to be a success, what is to stop the AI company from improving the tool itself so that it provides the same service on its own? We may well end up with one or a few mega-corporations providing every service there is — especially when, or if, we reach AGI.

Where that leaves companies like ours, I don't know. I only know that we'll adapt. And if not, there's a plan B — I already live in the countryside, growing vegetables and keeping five chickens (free eggs!).

Visit amCharts:  

‍amcharts.com

Read the book:

‍masterversija.lt