Building an Enduring Company, One Hard Lesson at a Time with Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin

Thank you so much, Taylor. And just to reset expectations a bit, I don't know if I'll have the time to share all of the hard lessons that I've learned, just a few of them that have stood out over the last 7 or 8 years that Webflow has been in business. But actually, Webflow has been in business 4 different times with 4 different teams and failed 3 times before this time that hopefully is on a non-fail trajectory. And I wanted to tell a little bit of the journey that I went through in those multiple attempts in trying to get it off the ground that start all the way back to more than 16 years ago now in 2005 while I was still in college and having the initial idea with the same exact name, same exact product direction. And it was sort of the early days of Web 2.0, right? After the Web 1.0 dot-com crash that happened, a lot of pessimism, but I had all this optimism that something like Webflow could exist and tried to do it solo for a long time. It was my senior project. I tried to get a bunch of clients to build a product for them, but it just— we could not find funding at the time. You really needed to have an entire team. There's a lot of skepticism around would tech investments work. And only like these outlier companies were being invested in. And eventually I just had to find a real job. So once I graduated, I got a job at Intuit, but very quickly, maybe 6 months in, kind of got the itch to start working on it again. And this was the early days of YC. This was when like Weebly and Wix were starting, like the web was kind of having this rebirth moment where there are a lot of new startups, a lot of vowels being dropped in domains, if you remember that. The Flickers, the Twitters, etc. So I started with two friends at Intuit, and we raised a little bit of funding, but just ran into too many problems. Had a trademark issue. All of us had very busy day jobs that pulled more and more of our attention into work, and eventually it just fizzled out. Various co-founders kind of decided to work on other things, and I decided to focus more on work. And then my wife and I moved to Sacramento and decided to have kids. It's sort of like at that point kind of thought that, hey, we missed our chance. Wix and Weebly are really taking off. This chance is gone. But then as I had kids in 2008, tried to start it again, but in kind of a non— I was sort of resigned to not creating a big company, just creating a really small agency where I could create a small product. Solve my own problem and kind of do it that way without all the expectations of getting funding or having co-founders, etc. But it was just too hard to keep the energy going, like with two young kids, with a full-time job, it was just not something that worked out over the course of time. I think I spent like 4 years on it and eventually gave up because I just wasn't seeing any traction. And then randomly, this is like act of providence or whatever you want to call it, in 2011 and early 2012, from fail number 2, when we had a trademark submission, I got in my house— we had moved like 2 or 3 times by that point— a trademark certificate from our first submission that somehow, you know, the company that had the trademark had gone out of business and this had like cleared some queue, and I just saw it as a sign that I need to start it again. So in 2012, I convinced my brother, who was my eventual co-founder, to start working on it part-time. So he was a designer, I was more of a developer, and we started kind of jamming on it on the side. A little bit of moonlighting, a little bit of working with clients to build websites, but also a lot of focus on building a product. So that's the iteration that I want to focus on today, because that's the one that actually took off and where I learned most of my lessons. But the takeaway there is that timing really matters. Even when I thought I had all the skills in the early iterations, either technology wasn't ready or I didn't have the right co-founders to keep me motivated and accountable. This sense of luck or privilege, whatever you want to call it, like this event where I got this trademark certificate just like kicked me into gear. And it was just really important to pick the right partners, like people who I'd worked with or people that I really trusted, like my brother and my co-founder, Brian, who I worked a lot with at Intuit. And I gave myself such a hard time through those first 3 failures of like, I missed the mark. I missed the boat on building this kind of company because other competitors existed. And didn't give myself permission to think that actually a lot of things were kind of outside of my control. And a lot of this is, to a certain degree, luck and good timing and being at the right place at the right time. So we ended up starting the company, we incorporated. And I had, as a reminder, two very young kids at the time. My daughters were 1 and 3, or almost 1 and almost 3. And we had like all this enthusiasm. I sold all the stock that I could, that I had into it. I had basically my entire life savings, which totaled about $20 grand with the stock sales and poured it all into the company and got my wife on board, got her convinced that, you know, we were going to raise a ton of funding in a couple months and it was kind of off to the races. My brother Sergi moved into our tiny little condo where we had our kids' room that we kind of like cleaned out that he crashed on the floor. We somehow had this kind of perception that we had to do all of this stuff to run a startup. We spent half a day in a park taking professional headshots, even though we didn't have a product, we didn't have a website, we didn't have anybody who cared about what we were building, but we just somehow had this check— list of things in our minds around what real startups do. But in retrospect, was kind of silly. And then we sort of like thought that, hey, we have almost unlimited money. That's what it felt like at the time. We have $20 grand that's in this business account, and you know, what do you do with that first? Buy brand new MacBooks, which is exactly what we did. And here's sort of my wife, the voice of reason, saying, is that the best idea? And you know, me rationalizing, yeah, like you need to have the, the best equipment to, to make that happen. But don't worry, we're going to do this Kickstarter and we're going to raise $300 grand and everyone's going to love this product and, and is going to buy into it. So of course we pour in, um, something like $12,000 into this Kickstarter video. We have to rent like this massive flat that looks like modern. We record this entire video around the idea of Webflow, the product we're going to build. Um, and, and of course it's like a plea to the Kickstarter users from other videos that we've seen that were successful. So at this point, most of our money is gone. We even had like this, the guy convinced us to do a little keyboard cat impression that Sergiy almost made on the internet, but I'm glad we spared the world from that happening. And then reality started to hit. At this point, we're almost out of money, but we still have all this optimism that we're gonna post the Kickstarter, It's gonna go bonkers, we're gonna get all this money, and we're gonna build the product, etc. And on that emotional high, we decide to apply to YC thinking that, hey, we have this great idea, we have this Kickstarter video that we're about to put up. And in a matter of 2 days, we got both a rejection from YC saying that, you know, they're not open to interviewing us in that round, and Kickstarter telling us, hey, actually we don't support SaaS software. It either has to be downloadable or it has to be something that you physically ship to people. And of course, our entire video is like, hey Kickstarter, hey Kickstarter, like you can't just like ad-lib or mad-lib, you know, Indiegogo in or something like that through post-production. It was essentially a completely shot project that we had to throw away. So we went into like just deep work mode. We moved to this place called the Hacker Dojo, which is completely free, but also pretty You kind of had to fight for space and had to be there super early in the day to get a table to work on. And then we're kind of at the precipice of nothing's working. We got rejected from YC. This Kickstarter doesn't work. And right at the end of the year of 2012, my daughter gets really sick and with a life-threatening condition. And of course, when we started the company in September, I had personally made the calculation like, hey, family's healthy, kids are young. If something happens, like all we really need is catastrophic health insurance. So our health insurance was of the variety where it's like a $10,000, $15,000 deductible where just the tests alone to figure out what kind of surgery she'll need came to like $12,000 or whatever. And because it's close to the end of the year before the surgery actually happens, rolls over to January 1st and the deductible resets. And all of a sudden, like, we're completely out of money. I'm borrowing money on credit cards. Things are really, really tense at home. Thankfully, we're able to borrow enough to like pay for the surgery and she's perfectly fine now. But things are getting so, so tense that we're just like scraping together money. We sold the family car that we had a little bit of equity in, converted it to a really cheap lease. And then Sergi and I figured out, like just to survive on the company front, we found this restaurant called Una Más where for $8.30, you could order one fajita plate that came with two sort of like fajitas, but enough raw materials to make two burritos. So that was our daily sustenance. We were just like, go to this place once a day, have those, you know, have an $8.30, meals expense per day, and that was keeping us going. And the thing that really brought it home, like the one gift my wife gave me that Christmas, because that's how things felt at home, was this placard, like this thing where this framed $20 bill that said, "In case of emergency, break glass." And we were such like hanging on by a thread where we started talking about like Sergi, my brother, moving back to San Diego, getting his job back. I was already talking to Intuit colleagues to figure out if there was a place back for me at Intuit so that we can kind of moonlight on the side. So big, huge lesson there. Even though we didn't have that much cash, it felt like we had enough that it didn't give us this sense of frugality and sense of scarcity that we just, in retrospect, wasted it on these large projects, not really thinking carefully. So I would encourage every startup, whatever cash you have, cash is king. It's something that gives you not just a lifeline, but also the ability to make core decisions on things that you truly need. And also read the freaking terms of service, because that is something I still regret not doing to this day. So we're in this kind of mode of, okay, we have to like either shut down the company or move back to our old jobs. Why don't we give it like one last shot? So we gave ourselves 2 months. This was kind of a decision we made in January of 2013. We can't, we just don't have the time and energy. I wouldn't say energy, we had the energy, but we just didn't have the scope of the product we wanted to build was way too huge. So why don't we build just a demo that will show people what the product could be? 'Cause that's the only thing we can realistically build. And our third co-founder, Bryant, joined us at this point. We were coworkers at Intuit. So we started building this product and eventually came up with this demo site. You can still see it at playground.webflow.com, which was not an actual product. You couldn't actually do anything with it. You couldn't save or design a website. It was just an idea for an interface for how a non-coder or a non-developer, like a designer or an entrepreneur, could make changes on a canvas that typically required code. But do that through a visual interface. And we had, it just felt like such a Hail Mary because, you know, A, it's not a product that people would pay for. It's just an idea of something. And on the morning that we tried to launch it, we had like all of these definitions for who this product would be for. It would be for designers and for entrepreneurs. So where do they hang out? So we found some design forums. There was like some Reddit subreddits around where designers hang out. And we posted to all of them and nothing really took off. There was no traffic coming from them. And I remember that ominous morning when we were just seeing that there wasn't any traction coming from trying to get this into the hands of designers. I went to Starbucks and there was like, this was always ominous for me where like my name is misspelled. And I just knew that, that, that just felt that that day was not going to be great. And then as a Hail Mary, like somewhere through the day, we just decided Hey, why don't we try Hacker News, which is primarily a developer-centric community? And we just had every doubt that it would take off there, but it was worth a shot. So we put it up there and it just, over the course of several minutes, completely changed, flipped our world upside down. Oops, sorry.

Sorry.

Somehow I moved my screen. Um, it just completely flipped our world upside down. We had, in the span of several hours, 10,000 people signing up, and then through the course of the day, almost 20,000 people signing up for not even a product, for something that, that was going to be a product in the future. And it was such a huge surprise to see the developer community, like people who typically we thought would, you know, they were in the past really arguing against tools like Dreamweaver or Wix and Weebly, et cetera, that don't generate clean code, et cetera, were just giving us all this positive energy around, hey, you might have actually cracked the code around empowering designers to build like developers build. And it was just such a huge day for us because we're deeply in debt. On the precipice of quitting and going back to our jobs, and here we have this amazing traction that is just a jolt of energy and hope. And from that, for, you know, the lesson is if you can get traction, that is life for a business. But I also want— don't want people to walk away here like hearing my story and think that, oh, I might be in a situation where I'm really deeply in debt or making decisions between family and startups. And I just want to recognize that what happened to Webflow, what happened to me, there's just so much survivorship bias built into our story that it just happened to work out. We were at the right place at the right time and lucked out with putting Webflow in front of the right people so that we could get that traction. Once we got traction, it unlocked so many more doors for us. So right as, as that happened, we, we finally got a little bit more relaxed. We moved to a different coworking space, started working on the product, and decided to apply to YC again. This time we felt a lot more confident that because there's some indication of user demand that, that we would have a better shot this time. So we applied, we went to the interview, and walked out of the interview feeling like completely dejected, sort of thinking, you know, there's just no way that they're going to say yes to us. We got peppered with a lot of questions that we didn't have great answers to. So, and this was kind of midday, so we decided to go to Mountain View and grab a couple beers, but we're still super nervous. And just to kill time, we went and bought tickets to Oblivion with Tom Cruise, which was kind of how we were feeling at the moment. but it also happened to come out that, you know, that week or the previous Friday or whatever. So we're sitting in this movie, you know, nervously waiting for a call. And the way YC works is if you're in, you get a call. If you're rejected, you get an email. And I see my phone buzzing with like a 650 area code, which, you know, kind of recognizes somebody in the area. And I hop out of the movie theater. And of course it's somebody from YC saying, We would love to invest. You guys did a great job. Do you accept these terms, et cetera? And I'm like, yes. And Brian and Sergey ran out and obviously we're really happy. Hugs all around, calling our families and our significant others, got dinner arranged. And because dinner was a couple hours from then, we just went back and finished watching the movie. And as we're watching the movie, I'm kind of instinctively still checking my phone. And out of the blue comes an email that says, unfortunately, we decided not to fund you at this time. And the reason is exactly why I would think that Webflow would be rejected. Like, your product is too technical for non-technical users and not powerful enough for technical users. This will make it hard for you to achieve the kind of revenues that we as investors hope to see. So it was like being at the top of the world and then crashing back down to, you know, the Mariana Trench, it felt at the time. So we call our families and say, Hey, dinner's off. We try to call YC, we try to respond to the email, and eventually we just decide, you know what, we're just gonna drive over there, even though it might be closed, just to see if we can get on somebody's radar and see what happened. And as we're driving there, we receive a phone call that's— and we're sure that the phone call was a mistake at this point because they didn't say the word Webflow, they didn't say my name. It was sort of like a more generic, like, welcome to YC type of phone call, whereas this is super specific. Knew for sure that this was the real rejection and the phone call was a mistake. And as we're driving to their office, we get a phone call that says, hey, we're really sorry, like the email was a mistake. And I wish we had taken a photo of that moment because it was like the most elated feeling ever. Like if we were feeling high at getting in, knowing that we were almost rejected and then like truly getting in felt We were over the moon. And the only thing I could find was a stock photo with 3 guys high-fiving. That's all you can get at this point. So we go through YC and it was really grueling, where we had to wrestle with a lot of our own sense of— most of us were designers, we wanted to create this perfect product. We had this idea for what people would pay for, what people wouldn't pay for, because every one of our competitors at the time, Squarespace and Wix and Weebly and Adobe had blogging and publishing and multiple pages and a lot of other things that we didn't. And our tendency was to delay launching and delay charging for it until we had all those things, which could have taken years. But one thing YC, I'm so glad that one of the partners did, was like, they just said, hey, if you don't launch this thing, even if you're embarrassed by it to a certain degree, then We might actually kick you out because this is the point of YC to make sure that we get to some marketable product within a very constrained time period. And it was such a key lesson for us because the product that we wanted to, the product we were comfortable building and releasing and charging for, we didn't end up building for another couple of years. And there was much more demand than we thought for the product that we, the super lightweight product that we launched around Demo Day. The big lesson I learned there is like, have your big dreams and look at what you want to build in the future, but ship often. Figure out what users need now and try to deliver that to them as soon as possible. Also, at every step of the moment, we were very uncomfortable with what we were charging, and every step of the moment, we found out that people were willing to pay much more in many cases. So I would encourage all startups to A, seek monetization as a fair exchange of value, but also be really thoughtful about trying to charge sooner because it's always, always harder to introduce that in the future. So we're in YC, we finished Demo Day, and of course you think, you know, the story in our heads is all these other success stories you hear before. Once you're in YC, you're going to have no trouble raising money. So we start doing all this kind of like pitch training. Where I'm an extreme, or at least was an extreme introvert, where going up on stage was the most anxiety-inducing thing. The fact that I'm even talking to this group right now is kind of a modern-day miracle. But we did all this kind of speech training. We launched the product. We had a TechCrunch announcement. And we thought surely the investor dollars are going to pour in. And we did find some early investors that put in about $250,000. Or just shy of $300,000. But every— a lot of the startup— the VCs we pitched after Demo Day were either like a no, but most likely a, you know, no answer or a delay or a, "Can you come back again?" And I just remember those days being really, really anxiety-inducing where we spent more than a month not really building product, not really focusing on anything that was important for our users. But just like waking up every day in like cold sweats, pitching more people and not really knowing where the company is gonna go in terms of runway. And then eventually we met with Paul Graham at YC and he just gave us permission, said like, "Hey, look, this is obviously really hard for you guys. Like you're seeing a lot of resistance from many investors. And you can just make the decision now. You have $300,000, there's 3 of you, there's enough runway for 3 people. Sure, you might not be be able to hire the team that you want, or it's not going to look like all the other startups that are raising $3 million rounds at the time, but you can actually focus on customers and on users when they need you most. Because we were really starting to hit a wall where people noticed that we weren't improving the product. We were just out raising money. And the second that we did that, just decided like, hey, we're okay not raising more. We're actually going to revisit that conversation later, and told that to a lot of the investors that were either kind of a wait and see, then immediately a lot of conversations started happening really quickly. So the moment that we weren't desperate for the cash and we felt like really in control of being able to survive for another year, it just like, A, removed the sense of desperation from us and the signals that we sent to other investors. And maybe like a sense of FOMO kicked in with a lot of investors where we really rounded out a pretty healthy seed round of $1.4 million soon after we decided not to raise more. So maybe the lesson there is like investors want to invest disproportionately to how much you need them to invest. So the less you need their cash, the more they're willing to invest. And again, we just felt really happy that we had at least that financial burden from out under us. But then we kind of like switched back into normal startup mode, you know. We got an office, uh, we, uh, went to IKEA, got a bunch of desks, put them together, got a ping pong table, got some interns, you know, built a Kanban board, wrote down this big hairy audacious vision that 50% of the internet is going to be powered by Webflow, um, and started doing retreats. Got another office that was a lot fancier, got like started having Christmas parties. And then I had this like big uh-oh moment where I was sitting down and looking how fast our revenue was growing, which was not that fast, and how fast our expenses were growing, which was really, really fast. And the curve for how much, how fast we were losing cash was really scary. And I figured that we would be out of cash in 11 months if something didn't change, because it was actually starting to accelerate. Like we were hiring people much faster than we were growing revenue. And that's what, when I decided like, hey, we really have to focus on sustainability and being default alive rather than having to go back through that same experience of having to raise money just because we have to. So we're really focused on defining our pricing. We started working on a product, our visual CMS, that we thought was going to be a major revenue driver. We launched that. And then I remember this one moment coming over after the launch of the Webflow CMS, coming to the office over the weekend with my wife and kids, because we would sometimes go to the city and kind of go to the zoo and stop by the office. And I was sitting there at my desk looking at revenue dashboards and QuickBooks where we could see expenses, and I realized that the graph was inflecting, like revenue was starting to grow faster, and we really, since we decided to slow down hiring, our expenses were growing much, much slower. And I finally had this realization that we might be sustainable without any additional cash input. And I looked to the side where I saw my daughter and I took this picture where she was writing on the wall, "Webflow is the best because my dad works here." And I had this moment of realization of freedom of, hey, this is actually something that can last and endure forever if we choose. For it to, because we are now in control of the two main variables of revenue and expenses, because we can make the choice to be sustainable. And that felt like the ultimate freedom at the moment, where we just felt that maybe we'll grow slower, but we have that lever to pull of how quickly we grow and how well we serve our customers, and don't work ourselves into a situation where we're desperate to raise just because we have to, just because our expenses grew grew much faster than our revenue. And that just puts you in the driver's seat. It gives you the ultimate freedom to optimize your people, your mission and vision, and less so just the sheer survival of the business. And just as a little tidbit, like that, when we launched that CMS, the inflection we saw in revenue, we thought was going to be, you know, game-changing. But in retrospect, if you look back over the course of time, like that's the blip that that was, which maybe there's a little mini lesson here around this is really the long game. And no single feature that you're going to launch is going to be a make-it-or-break-it thing. Focus on overall bringing value to your customers and listening to them, and it compounds over time. So now that we've had this sort of sustainability moment, we really started focusing on building an enduring company, like one that would last on its own accord. So we started hiring more people. But in a way that was very thoughtful. As we got more revenue, we'd hire another designer. As we got more revenue, we'd hire another developer. And we started having larger retreats where the team grew over time, but it was very much scaled to how we were serving customers because our customers were our main source of funding. We're getting these mini funding rounds from Stripe every week when customer accounts were cleared. Eventually, we reached almost 150 people, and that's when we— it's still on our own terms where we're running in a very sustainable way, where we're cash flow positive, profitable in certain quarters, and it really put us in the driver's seat, like I mentioned before. That's when we started thinking about, okay, what does it mean to scale our ability to have a huge impact on the world. Oops. Sorry, this keeps happening. What does it mean for us to scale as a team, to take our mission and vision and actually bring it to more people sooner? The sustainability path guarantees that you can do that for as long as possible. But there's also a non-conflicting path where you can augment that with with more capital to accelerate that trajectory without risking the sustainability of the company or the long-term endurance of the company. And that's where I really started considering adding partners that are true partners, that are first and foremost firm believers in the mission and vision of the company, and join essentially as extended co-founders or extended team members that help us get to that, climb that intimidating mountain that we're climbing, because they have the experience to do that. And even though we talked to, I would say, hundreds of investors across many different firms, especially as Webflow became more and more profitable and more sustainable, only a few of these relationships really rose to the bar of like true partners, people who really believe in our missions first and foremost. They want to make the internet a lot more rich and help it come to its full potential by empowering more and more people to build for it. Right now, the power to create for the internet is kind of locked up unless we're talking about like YouTube comments or a Medium post or something like that. The power to truly create software for the internet, it's still locked up in like one out of every 4 400 people, like 0.25% of the world. And, and we found partners that, that truly don't find that acceptable and, and want to do everything possible to bring that kind of empowerment into the world, but also create the kind of company where each individual on the team can feel like they're having an impactful and fulfilling life. So it's not just about the business or what we're doing for customers, it's also about the kind of team that we want to build internally and what kind of feeling that we want to have with the people that we work with and, and how we prioritize people overall. And, and, um, as I thought through like how to partner with these folks, um, it was really, really important to like level set, uh, with, uh, with each partner. First it was Arun at Excel, then, um, later on Leila from CapitalG joined us, um, around the importance of, um, reframing this idea that a board or set of investors is like a boss to a company and they're there to keep a company in check or whatever, but truly as partners and equals, people who have had more experience scaling companies, have a lot of resources and connections to help us unblock certain problems and tackle certain challenges as we scale. But not see it as a— sorry, this keeps happening— but not see it as primarily a financial outcome that they're seeking. Sure, that's important, right? There should be a return for an investment, but truly the most important thing that we're solving for is the expansion of Webflow's mission and vision. And I even took it to the degree of signing social contracts with each of these partners. Things that go far outside of a term sheet, and that even challenge the very idea of the Friedman Doctrine, where it's like, if you solve for shareholder value, then everything else kind of solves for itself. Instead, we look at this— there's this perspective called the infinite game. We're kind of playing this game where it's not like a basketball game, where there's like a score and then there's an end. We're really playing an infinite game where our goal is to expand and promote this cause that's much greater than ourselves and create a company that will outlast all of us. And that requires a focus on relationships, a focus on people, a focus on sustainability that might not be the most natural when you see a business opportunity and you can say, like, I can pour all the money we have into that, but if it risks risks the sustainability of the company, that becomes a problem. And you have to find partners who really align to that perspective, because then they're truly partners. They're not like people you constantly disagree with. And the kind of takeaway there that I came to is that it's so important to focus on what you do for people, which people you partner with, and what kind of people that you work with and who you serve. And finding those, you know, key individuals that not only can bring value to expanding your mission and vision, but also are completely aligned with the values and principles that you hold, so that you're not constantly battling on the things that are so, so important. You should be, you know, you should be working through challenges that are outside of values and principles. Like, it's so hard to align on values, and people are so different in in the values that they hold. So biggest piece of advice is to really take the time to pick the right people that share your values as you partner with them. So I know I'm probably way over time here, but my top takeaways here in how, at least up to this point, I feel we've gotten to building a sustainable and enduring company, is to seek becoming default alive as quickly as possible, which means, like, getting enough revenue and cash flow where you feel that you're in control of your own destiny. You can move the levers of either growing revenue or controlling expenses and spending really wisely to where you feel that the company can survive forever without additional investment. And that just gives you so much optionality. And most importantly, it gives you the time to do number 2, which is to choose your partners wisely. Because if you, are not in a place of being default alive or not in a place where your business can sustain on its own, then you could be in a position where you're pretty desperate to pick any partner that will give you money. And that's almost like rushing into a marriage just because somebody is— might have some sort of factors that make your life easier for a moment. But over the long course of time, it's not a partnership that had the time to develop and align on values and really understand like where each individual and each person kind of fall in terms of principles. So really, like we spent so much time, I spent time with my family and Arun's family. Unfortunately with COVID Layla's family and our family weren't able to get together yet, but there was a lot of conversations virtually, etc., where really these are multi-decade type of relationships. So choose them really, really wisely and make sure these people really care about the future mission and vision of your company and are not just solving for some sort of financial return. But again, being default alive gives you the optionality to do that for years, because you're not rushed into that decision and you can make that decision thoughtfully. And finally, it's it's all about people. Like a lot of people will say, oh, it's a business. Business's goal is to increase revenue and build shareholder value. But really, like, where's the purpose in that? So one thing I've learned is that everything about this business, the business is just a vehicle to advance a cause greater than yourself, to bring more value into the world that hopefully makes other people's lives easier, and to serve the people on your team. Like, this is a group of people who are committing so much of their life to building a product product or building a company that is such a big part of their lives. So those people matter too. And the people that you bring on as partners, first and foremost, they're people. They're people relationships. They're not like business relationships. The business is just a vehicle to, or a structure to sort of organize around. But to me, at least to me personally, thinking about a business just purely as a business has never been really all that inspiring. But thinking about what, who are we solving for? Who am I doing this with? How are we making other people's lives easier? And what value are we bringing to the world that truly empowers others and enables others to succeed? It's ultimately about the people. So, With that, I think that's all I have. Just wanna thank you all for listening, and, and we can open it up for, for questions if there are some. Actually, I see that there are some in the chat already.

Yeah. Thanks for a great presentation, Vlad. And just from the event platform, you have some OG folks in the room too, David and Andrew. So they've been using Webflow since 2013, so that's really cool. Nice.

That's longer than I've been using it. All right, I see some questions here. How did investors react to brother co-founder? Honestly, it was, you know, there was a lot of precedent set with Patrick and John at Stripe and other places where, you know, no eyebrows raised. There's a lot of trust that's sort of built into a sibling relationship. We didn't have any red flags around that. I have 4 other siblings, and I think Sergii and Natalie, our sister, also works at Webflow. But there are some siblings that would be much easier to partner with and some siblings that, you know, we're not quite on the same page. But we didn't have any kind of feedback from investors on that. I see Misha asked, what do you think is the biggest difference between being a founder now versus 2012 for those starting companies? First of all, I think terms are much better now. There's just, you know, the technology companies are valued much higher. You have to sell much less of your company in terms of equity in order to get a similar investment. So that's something that is really, really founder-friendly. There's also a much bigger recognition that founder-led companies are long-term most sustainable and successful. Before Emerald Row and in the multiple times that I was starting, that story shifted quite significantly where it used to be, okay, founders who are not experienced— I wasn't an experienced founder at all. I was a software engineer before starting Webflow. I didn't really have experience managing people or hiring people or leading larger teams. There was kind of this this theme that you can sort of go through the early years, but then you have to bring in a professional CEO or an adult in the room or something like that. I think that trend has more or less gone away, thankfully. And there's been more and more trust placed in founders, given the right support to scale companies into IPO territory, et cetera. So yeah, and it feels like, I think that even despite COVID and a lot of the setbacks we had last year, it's just a great time to start technology companies. Like there's a, you know, the entire no-code trend, not to kind of do a shameless plug, but it's so much easier to build things now because a lot of things are abstracted that weren't before. So it takes fewer people to build the same things that it took, you know, 10 years definitely a lot fewer people to do the same thing than it took 20 years ago. You know, 20 years ago you had to like rack your own servers and buy all this equipment and hardware just to launch a little web app. Today you can do that with one person in AWS. So there's just fewer obstacles and a very rich environment of funding for the most part. There's still a lot of areas where there's under— a lot of underinvestment, especially with historically marginalized or underrepresented founders. There's still too much of a reliance on individual connections and network effects that I hope to see a lot of change around. But the environment is really friendly to start a new venture right now, at least from what I'm seeing in the market. Another question came in. Seems like Webflow sometimes 2016 or so became a designer's favorite? What changed, if anything? I'd say kind of like the slide I had where we had an expectation that at some point there would be an inflection point, but really was gradual. I think so much of it was word of mouth and people seeing success with building websites and applications and style guides and building things that actually go to production without requiring an engineer to translate those things. To reality, more and more of those stories started being told, where you could just do a lot more with Webflow. And of course, we kept innovating on new features and things like that. So it wasn't really any one thing. It's just the combination of a lot more people being successful with the product, forming a community where people are helping each other, combined with just more capabilities that we were releasing. It didn't feel internally that there was like a magic moment, like, aha, we're a designer's favorite now. It just kind of started happening slowly over time. And hopefully we can keep that designation for as long as possible.

Anyone else have questions for Vlad? We have a few more minutes with him here. If you're in the room, feel free to pop on your camera and unmute yourself if you'd like to ask live. Vlad, we are seeing a couple folks in the chat. Chris Bowen said that he's been to Unamas many times.

Nice. It was literally the reason we're— one of the reasons we're still here, just because that saved us so much money. But when— oh, go ahead. When Bryant joined as a co-founder a few months in, he was like, No way can we do this. So we switched to Specialties, which was like a sandwich shop. Oh yeah, that had more variety.

Um, Alan's asking, what helped you develop the people management skills you didn't have as a software developer?

Um, the biggest thing honestly was, uh, the biggest unlock for me was reading a book called Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, which is all about How do you understand the needs of your team and serve those needs versus just directing them to do something? And that was a big unlock that led to better understanding where people find impact, fulfillment, sense of autonomy, ownership, a sense of purpose, etc. And just really having that as a conversation rather than just seeing people as worker bees or people to direct or resources to direct. I hate that word resources. So that was really a big piece of inspiration for me. I know a lot of people like mention High Output Management and other things like that, but for me it was that book that really helped me develop into a leader that really empathizes with people and their goals in their own careers, and tries to motivate folks to focus on the right things. And there was another book called Drive by Daniel Pink, I believe, where it really tries to frame what motivates people to do the best work of their lives, is having autonomy, having a sense of mastery, or mastering their craft or their chosen profession, and a sense of purpose. Like, why is the work that you're doing How is it helping other people and making the world a better place? That really helped too. But this is like an ever-evolving journey. Like every moment, every day at Webflow, there's like, ah, you know, this is broken or that's broken. And I wish I was a better manager. I wish I was a better leader. Like, why do people trust me to even be in this position, you know, not having done this before? So it's a really messy process, but Just those two books have really helped shape my perspective in terms of management.

Awesome.

There's another question. How early did you create your company values and have they evolved at all in your growth trajectory? We actually ended up creating them about 4 years in, something like that. Our values were kind of, we call them core behaviors. Values you can state, something, that you believe in something, or that you value something, but how you behave is truly the, the what proves that, that you're living those values. We created them in 2017, I believe, and we articulated the second part of our mission. So we have a two-sided mission. One is to empower people to create software without code. That's the what we're kind of bringing for others. And the second part of the mission is to create the kind of company where each individual can live an impactful and fulfilling life, whatever that means to them. And that was defined at the same time that we defined our core behaviors. And that was really key in kind of helping bring on the right people. They have been sort of like shifting over time, where we're talking about some potential tweaks to them. Like we used to have one that was, called Move Uncomfortably Fast. That was very like, move fast and break things. And we changed it over time to move intentionally fast. Especially as you move through scale, you don't want to break a lot of things. And you want to proceed with intention, but still keep speed for customers as a top-level principle. So there have been changes like that. And I think as the company grows and scales, might tweak them even more. But the most important things have been kind of the combination of these two missions that live side by side, that value both the product that we're creating and the impact on the world, but also the kind of company what we want to create, which is a product in itself. And very important to a lot of people, including myself.

A few more questions coming in through that platform. So Ahmed's asking, how do you think the designer's role will evolve in the next few years?

Ooh, this is interesting. I think designers will become closer and closer to production. There will be what I believe, what we call visual developers or software designers, where what they create is not just an idea for what's going to go live, but in many cases it is the thing that's going to go live. So we're kind of removing more and more of the translation layers, which doesn't mean that we get rid of developers. We're going to need way more developers than we have right now. In fact, The rise of designers who are able to take things to production will actually necessitate a lot more developers, because there's always— will always be custom things that will need to be done through code that can't be done through no-code or visual development tools. But designers will play a more and more critical role in the creation of the actual software, where it's not just like, here's a mock, or here's an idea, and somebody else will build it. It's going to be like building the actual thing and pushing into production. I mean, that's happening with Webflow every day, where like designers are now driving all of of the marketing experience, and in many cases, even applications, because they have a visual development environment that helps them push that kind of power out to the world without relying on developers. So that trend is well on its way, and there will be more— designers will be able to do more, but also the expectations of designers will rise, where it will— more and more companies will expect that designers will need to understand the core principles of software and how to take things to production. Not just, you know, build an idea.

Awesome. Thanks for your question, Ahmed. A couple questions are coming in about enterprise-related things, Vlad. So Jason's asking, what are the biggest customer use cases like? Are you going more enterprise?

Yeah, well, the way we look at enterprise is 100% of our enterprise accounts come through self-serve. So people at companies start to use Webflow, they, they really love it, it expands to larger teams, Some of the biggest use cases are entire marketing departments run— like, removing their dependence on engineering. Usually, like, marketing has to borrow engineers from product, and it's something that nobody really likes. Like, product engineers love working on product, and marketing doesn't like being beholden to engineering or waiting weeks, if not months, to get a change made. So the biggest use case is teams of designers and content folks, like, running all of a marketing presence, the primary website, primary.com, etc. There's a bunch of other use cases around building prototypes and fast product vapor tests and things like that, but primarily it's how do you take the entire marketing function and give them the tools to go live to production very quickly and iterate very quickly by giving them the tools to do it visually without that translation layer.

Awesome. And then as a follow-up question to the enterprise stuff, um, Anshu is asking, do you have sales teams selling to enterprise, or sales all bottom-up? If you do have a sales team, when did you start hiring them for enterprise specifically?

Yeah, we, uh, we have a new sales team that we started hiring last year, so just as COVID was starting. Um, it was unrelated, uh, but it was because we saw so much demand from self-serve folks saying like, hey, we need you know, an SLA or security or better roles and permissions, or we just don't want to deal with seats, you know, or like credit cards, and we want to do things with invoices or whatever. So it's sort of like organic that we saw more and more of a need for like sales assisted, a sales assistant motion. So we started building that team last year. Right now, I believe all in, because it includes our partner motion, our experts program. That team is a bit over 10 people, more or less. But that revenue has been scaling very quickly. I think we 10x'd it over last year, kind of on a smaller base, but are 10x'ing it again this year. So it's a big, big opportunity for us. But we always see enterprise as a— we don't see ourselves becoming an enterprise company, where we want Webflow to be a fundamentally empowering technology for everyone so that everyone can build software, and as can enterprises, right? But just because they're willing to pay more does not mean that we just cater to those use cases. But thankfully, the vast majority of the features and things that you need to build, whether it's a user, a designer in an enterprise company, or a designer that's a freelancer that's working for small businesses, it's the same product. So we build for both, kind of like a lens that serves both needs. But so far it's been a really great kind of start to our sales team. It's all kind of taking over inbound leads, people who are already using Webflow, kind of showing them the power of it and expanding into larger accounts. But it's still pretty early for us to see where it'll go.

Awesome. Well, Vlad, thank you so much, and thank you to everyone for joining and for all your great questions. Um, Vlad, we just really appreciate you sharing your incredible story with us and for joining us on SASTR. There are a few more sessions throughout the rest of the day, everyone, so definitely check those out, and we'll see you soon.

It's my pleasure. Bye, everyone.