S8E4: Vlad Magdalin and Webflow are Revolutionizing Website Design by Making it Accessible to All

That's a huge range of like what people need. And it's still a challenge to understand what is like the ideal, where to focus because these different scale of customers need different things. Thankfully, there's a large overlap around the core problem of what we're really trying to do is take the power of code and elevate it into a more intuitive experience that's visual, that is way more accessible. So people can harness that power of code in much easier ways. While still retaining a lot of the flexibility.

Welcome back to season 8. Clauds, how we doing?

So well. Can't believe it's 8 seasons of The Room Podcast.

It feels like just yesterday we were getting started in the middle of COVID and had this vision for sharing the future of founding stories to let other founders be in the room where it happened and So much has changed for us since August 2020 when we first had this inception. You're now a founder and co-CEO of Priv, which is a startup unlocking and disrupting recurring revenue for e-commerce brands.

And Madison, you are crushing it in venture. You're now a partner overseeing investments at DefyVC, an early-stage venture firm in the Bay Area, and of course an investor in Priv. We're just two women navigating our careers and asking the people who inspire us to shed light on their stories. Unlocking Access starts with a conversation context, and as a reminder, we open the door to moments in technology history that traditionally happen behind closed doors. With our guests, we unpack the experiences that led to their success and look towards the future in their verticals.

And we hit an incredible milestone at the end of last season with Spotify sharing that we were a top 5% global shared podcast in the technology sector. And so we want to thank you for being a loyal listener. And helping us achieve this milestone of amplifying more equitable voices in the room where it happens. As you look towards Season 8, get excited. We're excited. We have some incredible founders from the founder of Superhuman, the founder of Incredible Health, Webflow, Ty Haney with her new business TYB, and more. So join us every Tuesday where we sit down with leaders, founders, and funders who are changing the way it's always been done. You can expect themes across, of course, generative AI, navigating your startup in a downturn, the creator economy, and more. So be sure to hit subscribe, like, and follow so you don't miss any Tuesdays in the near future. And one quick note, since season 3 in 2021, we have been delighted to work with our partners, Cooley and Silicon Valley Bank. This season is no different, although the events of the past few weeks have brought Silicon Valley Bank into the forefront of our ecosystems conversations. Now known as Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, SVB. Thank you. And now a short message from our sponsors. Following message was recorded prior to 3/10/23. Support for The Room comes from Silicon Valley Bank.

What's next? What if? Now what?

Silicon Valley Bank understands these questions can keep founders up at night like Claudia. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped high-growth companies through scalable financial solutions, plus insights and expertise that many other banks just can't. Which could be why 50% of US-based venture-backed tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Learn more at svb.com/next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next. Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. The firm has been devoted to entrepreneurs and investors, partnering with both to transform breakthrough ideas into successful companies. Cooley works with thousands of entrepreneurs and newly formed companies to ensure that they are structured for growth and long-term success. Since 2005, Cooley has been ranked the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Learn more about the firm at cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups.

Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast. Today we are excited to share our conversation as we sit down with co-founder and CEO of Webflow, Vlad Magdalen. Webflow is on a mission to build the world's most powerful no-code development platform, and with millions of websites powered by Webflow, they are well on their way. While Webflow today is certainly a household name, their journey to what Webflow is today is certainly a thrilling one with twists and turns along the way. We can't wait to unpack in today's episode. To date, Webflow has raised over $335 million in funding from the likes of Accel, CapG, Draper Associates, and YC. On this episode, Vlad shares his story and we discuss themes such as the importance of timing while building a startup, how ideas sometimes take years to come together, how Webflow has established a multi-layered ecosystem for their customers and developers, And of course, what's ahead for the future of websites. Let's open the door. Vlad, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Before we get into the founding story of Webflow, we always like to start at the beginning with our guests. We did a little research. You were born in the USSR and moved to the US with your parents in 1991 at the age of 9. Tell us, how did moving to a new culture at an early age really shape your view of the world?

I think the question might be how has it? It's, it was a really huge culture shock in terms of the way I experienced life in the USSR and what I saw here as basically the stark difference between, you know, not feeling wanted, uh, because we came here as refugees and it was related to the religion my parents were, which was just like mainline Protestant, what's considered totally normal here, but But coming from a place where you just know that society doesn't want you and knowing that your parents or your dad has trouble keeping a job because of what he believes or what the family is sort of oriented around to coming here and seeing a completely different story. Only later did I realize that Russians were like the bad guys in a lot of movies. And even with that social context, I was accepted by all the students, all the teachers, all the people, the sponsors that brought our family over here. To go from a place where you're mostly rejected and not wanted to a place where you're accepted and helped even at great personal cost. Because a lot of sponsors, other folks had to put their finances on the line to support new families coming the way that, that we came. So that just really gave me a lot of faith in humanity, right? That persisted today. People doing things that more for the benefit of other human beings to make their life easier and even with all of our faults, this country is— it's not a surprise why so many people resonate with the stark difference of how they experience life in a different country and how they come here. It was in all aspects of the phrase life-changing, where it sort of went from a land of scarcity, not even just financial scarcity. We were extremely poor growing up here. We were on welfare. But even with that, it felt like the world of possibilities was there for you to harness rather than a world where nobody wanted to see you succeed or wanted wanted you to leave or wanted to see you suffer. So it, it was just like a night and day difference. I feel incredibly lucky that my family even had the chance to immigrate here and for this country to open up its arms the way that it did. I wish that was the case for more people.

We've had many guests on the podcast that have immigrated. Me and my co-founder did as well to the US just for more opportunity. And it's consistently been such a pivotal part of The founder's identity. Could you tell us a little bit more about how this early childhood experience of moving and coming to this new culture has shaped how you operate as a founder today?

I never really wanted to be a founder. I wasn't like looking for business opportunities or wanting to be like my own boss or whatever. But one thing that I remember experiencing quite a lot is seeing my dad really try to figure out how to make a living here and not knowing the language. Not having many, you know, transferable skills because he was working sort of somewhat in the technology field, but in the USSR, everything was like 15 years behind because anything computer related was essentially contraband because nothing was manufactured within the USSR. So there wasn't much in terms of transferable skills outside of manual things like soldering chips onto control boards. So he got like these— just seeing him go through a lot of side gigs to try to make a living for our family, trying any possible idea to make more money. Side jobs to teaching people how to use computers to helping out various businesses to set up their networking, which he was learning on the go, instilled this, we all have to go above and beyond to try to survive as a family. Like we would, as a family, go and clean dentist offices every night, pack up 6 kids and our parents into a van. And for 2, 3 hours a night, we would just clean offices. And it was just like part of life. And it wasn't even like, in my mind, it was sure all the kids were annoyed, but we saw that as like a, it's just what the family has to do to make a living. And I think that really ingrained into helping me believe that if I see an opportunity, that there's, there's not just one established path at life where you just get one job and work towards a specific career. And that gave me a lot of not just optionality in itself, but mental optionality that when I see an opportunity, maybe it's worth exploring, even if it's not clearly defined as what that path is going to be.

So fast forwarding maybe a few years, while you didn't think you were going to be a founder from your early ages, you did go to college with a plan of following in the footsteps of your brother to study computer science. But I don't think that lasted very long. Tell us a bit more about your passion for digital design and animation and what those years starting college really looked like for yourself.

Well, it wasn't actually a plan to follow my brother intentionally. So what actually happened is through high school, Based on my dad, to try to make ends meet, got me these little side jobs, under-the-table jobs as a designer. I was working for this outfit called the Russian Yellow Pages, which made ads for the Russian community in Sacramento. And through that, I learned how to use Photoshop and got the hang of doing like creative work. And when I started thinking about going to college, it was to try to pursue that actually, but you know, Pixar was becoming really popular. I wanted to do visual effects, but my parents said essentially, hey, we can't afford. And, you know, I couldn't afford to take on loans at the time because all the art schools were accredited, private. You couldn't get like federal loans for them. And they're like, well, your brother already goes to Cal Poly. We're already driving him there. Might as well follow those footsteps. So, and my brother convinced me that was like a pretty lucrative career option. And then when I actually arrived there, I did not have a fun time at all. So the first year was so hard and, you know, I just didn't really enjoy it that I dropped out and actually went to up here in San Francisco to art school, which at the time felt like a complete rebellion. My parents were confused. My brother was confused. I was sort of like not operating rationally. The kinds of loans I took out to fund this thing. At the end of the day, it wasn't the wisest decision because 2 years later I dropped out, kind of realizing how dire job prospects were in that field. And ended up going back to Cal Poly. But that experience in itself was invaluable because that's where I really started to explore what the possibilities could be around like deeper creative design. But ultimately that experience inspired Webflow, and I couldn't have made a better decision in retrospect, but it was like blind luck that led to those circumstances happening.

It's always so interesting when threads from years past which at the time seemed like a waste of time or like a dud, turn into the one thing that gives you the edge. So incredibly cool to hear that. In 2002, you also co-founded ChatterFox. So while you didn't stick with computer science initially, your first year at Cal Poly, you did find your way into programming by looking to build a better messaging platform for you and your friends. Tell us a little bit more about this first startup experience.

To call that a startup experience is also pretty generous. The things that happened, I thought it was going to be like a massive startup because that was, I think 2001 or early 2002 was when CRV, Charles River Ventures, I think introduced the convertible note aspect, which sort of felt like winning the lottery, right? People would give you cash and you would have runway to work on a startup. So that happened where I thought, hey, maybe I can drop out of college and actually get funding and work on this thing because I heard other founders doing that after the dot-com crashed, but I didn't really have any ideas, like what would I actually do to start a startup? So it was kind of a pipe dream. And then it wasn't an intentional choice to go build this messaging company. It was actually a service that my friends used through high school called QuickDot, I believe, that was really popular in the '99, 2000 era. And they had raised a bunch of funding and they just happened to crash around that time. They raised a bunch of venture funding and it was like a communication platform. This was at a time when it was sort of like asynchronous group chat, almost like WhatsApp before group chat was a thing. And it was just happened to be in a web app. And the motivation there was like, hey, I don't want to lose communication with my friends. And I know some things about coding just from my one year at Cal Poly. So I like ordered a book, but nothing about web development. All of that was around. So I picked up a book on ASP.NET, which was a popular-ish web framework at the time and hacked this application together. Enough so that it replaced it for my own friend groups and some people who— there was a forum for QuickDot. Some people peeled off from that. And then I sort of saw the reality of what it actually takes to run a service where I really didn't know what I was doing. I was like self-taught where I've never built a web application before. And one time my older brother, who's a way better programmer, or was at the time at least, and is now, he was working at Microsoft where he looked at the code. He's like, this is not Good code. The reality was it was good to experience it where I have the startup dreams. Maybe this is going to be a company. We're going to hire people, but it really came crashing down pretty fast based on the reality of like not knowing how to run the service. So I was at that point going back to Cal Poly, but the server was in San Francisco. So almost every few days I would drive up to San Francisco to like turn it back on or something. And there was like colocation costs. And the service wasn't making money. If anything, that kind of gave me some motivation that I can start something from scratch, but actually gave me more demotivation. Like, this is way harder than I thought it was gonna be. I think MySpace was coming up at the time. I thought that, oh, for sure I could build a better social media experience than MySpace, but not realizing how much work goes into actually building and scaling a service.

I'm loving this image of you checking out a book from the library to actually build a website, which in our modern construct is just mind-blowing. The first thing I would do if I wanna build a website is go to Webflow. Thinking back to that time when you're managing your own servers, you're checking out books to build something.

That one server.

So sorry, a singular server. And really the, this need of yours, which was, I need to chat with my friends online and this service that I was using failed, is what prompted this first iteration of your founder journey. Another need though, really ultimately brought you to your first job outta college, which was Intuit. Do I have that right?

That was officially my first major job out of college. My first job before that was actually at a web agency during Cal Poly as a quasi-intern, but it was full-time, so it was trying to slip it in between classes, but working a full 40-hour week. But that felt like my first major job.

That is the moment you graduate after this twisted journey of your undergraduate experience, early founder moments smattered in there. 6 years into it, ultimately, what was the aha moment for Webflow? How did that experience inform what became your true first startup?

I should say that aha moment actually came way earlier when I first started in this internship at this web design agency during Cal Poly. And it was a similar to Chatterfox. It was realizing that I need to solve my own problem better. So after I started building ChatterFox and I learned like this ASP.NET technology, I start to pay back some of the loans from this Academy of Art experience, which were like pretty astronomical. I think they were like $50K per year. I started building websites for smaller businesses. Actually, my first major client was one of the dental offices that we cleaned. I got so lucky because this person, when you're building one of your first websites, usually your clients nickel and dime you, but this person was like, I really believe in you. I think he gave me like a $4,000 budget, like go build what is really valuable for our business. And there's every possibility where he could have offered me $500. I would've taken it in a heartbeat, but I started building websites on the side. And then when I started working at this web design agency, the entire job was taking mocks from designers. There was an entire creative team and then converting them to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and this database thing in their homegrown CMS. And maybe like 2, 3 months in, I just saw that as my job. I didn't see a breakthrough of this could be easier for myself or for others until one day I happened to see an invoice on the desk of one of the creative directors that I don't think I was supposed to see. It was for one of the agency's clients where I could see how much they billed for the work that I was doing for the conversion process. So there's the creative fee and then there was the fee of actually converting every single, what they call a object, business object, for a client like Quicksilver, the clothing company, they had products and they had like events or they had riders, which was their representation of people who were like celebrities or like surfers that were wearing their clothes or whatever. For each of those things, I would take the designs and convert them to the CMS. And it would take me 3 or 4 days of basically manual conversion to code and billed it at like $100,000 per object where I was like, holy crap. And that's when all of these things flooded in my 2 years of experience trying to learn visual effects and trying to work at Pixar. Where there's like really powerful visual software where like animators are directly creating these characters. They're not going through some sort of translation layer where some engineers are saying like, hey, I get your character vision, I'm gonna go translate it to like WebGL or like vertices or whatever. And that's when I was like, there's such an opportunity here to build something that these designers who are using Photoshop can directly use where they don't need somebody like me to translate those creative ideas into the reality of running in the browser. So that was the initial aha moment. And then it was, I actually wrote my senior project on this idea of how would you build an app around this and tried to create an entire product then. And then by the time I actually started into it, I already tried to productize and start Webflow as like a solo founder to where that idea was already deeply percolating. But I had just graduated, gotten married, and we're planning on starting a family. I was like, there's no way I can go down the risky path. And have to go get a real job at Intuit, but I kept moonlighting on the side to keep trying to make it happen.

It's so important to just acknowledge the lens through which you first had this aha moment, which was to bring agency and empower the creator and the digital producer to build in a web-first way and actually streamline what you were able to do, but it didn't need to be done that way. And you saw this moment of these things are gonna converge eventually, and I think I can be the one to build a better tool suite to make this convergence happen faster.

Retroactively, I think what I felt like in that moment was sort of like the telegraph operator where people come in, it's like, hey, I wanna send a message to my family. And then I'm like, doo doo doo, like converting it to Morse code because I have like the special skills of sending this message over the wire. And that's how I felt in that moment. Like, there's gotta be a better way. Even though it might mean like my current job would be different, that job seemed super boring of just taking something and translating it one-to-one. I would much rather the creative juices started flowing around how can I create the software that helps other people harness their creativity.

So understandably, you're starting a family, you have debts that you're trying to pay off, you're in this moment where you can't take the risks, and so you do get the stable job at Intuit. Still know Intuit today. I'm sure it was a fun place to work back then as well. What prompted slash what became the moment where your risk appetite changed and you actually took the leap into starting Webflow in earnest?

I think my risk appetite started to actually decrease because in 2007, 2008, tried again while I was at Intuit to get Webflow funded. We actually got a little bit of funding, got incorporated. And then again, hit a bunch of roadblocks where we just ran out of money. And this was like with other co-founders that were also started into it at the same time. So we were all excited, but moonlighting on it. Then neither of us had any significant savings or were going to invest it into the company. So we were all agreed to spend our nights and weekends on it, but then we ran out of money again. So it was like different people to different extents lost motivation, myself included. When a co-founder starts focusing on their core job more because they stopped to see the possibilities of what could happen here. And there was a bunch of other things that happened at that time. Like Weebly started becoming really huge and got a ton of funding. I think they had the biggest funding round of any YC company at the time. And okay, somebody else won. Put it on the sidelines. Again, super lucky chain of events where during that time, right before we ran out of money, there was like a big trademark dispute where Part of the reason we ran outta money was because we had incorporated Webflow, but then got a trademark violation notice from another company. And we were like working with lawyers to try to figure out a different name or whether we could keep the name 'cause we had the domain name. And ultimately it just got rejected and we didn't have enough funds to keep paying lawyers to try to figure it out. Started focusing on my role at Intuit and we started building a product internally. Where I met one of my now current co-founders, Bryant. He was the second engineer on that product, so we got to work really closely together and we're really focused on that. And on the side, to try to pay back loans faster, I started working with my brother to build more sites for businesses, actually based on WordPress a lot of the time, to pay back student loans faster. So I had this kind of parallel track where we're getting into it and had Webflow set up as an agency at that point. It was like a formal company, but had smaller ambitions. And then out of nowhere in 2011, when I already had two kids, like settling down, I was assuming that I was going to be at Intuit forever. We had an offer on a house. This trademark certificate arrives to our house, which of now we have moved from the Bay Area to Folsom and then to Citrus Heights, which is a suburb of Sacramento. So somehow like, and this is what, 4, 5 years later. So somehow, even though it was rejected before, the company that that had put in the objection had gone out of business or let it lapse or whatever, and we were in some queue. So this trademark arrives that says, congratulations, you're the owner of the trademark Webflow for anything web design related. And all these possibilities came rushing back. And by the way, we didn't have like significant savings at the time. So I started talking to my wife around like, okay, this something's meant to be here. Like this doesn't just happen. But it was still a wish and a dream. And then In early 2012, I saw this video randomly on Facebook. Somebody had shared it called Inventing on Principle, which was this conference talk, and it's all about visual development. And part of it is about why do you do the work that you do? The things that you're building, what is their purpose and how does it impact the world? And seeing that conference talk in combination with the trademark, I don't know what you wanna call that, just from coincidence to miracle, you can spread the gamut of however you want to translate it. It was like all the signals I needed. And the next morning I put in my notice and convinced my wife that this is what, because we were worried how we're going to pay for two kids, et cetera. But put together a spreadsheet around like, look, with the savings that we have, with the credit card loans we have available, we'll have like 3 months of runway and then we'll do this Kickstarter and we'll raise enough money to pay for ourselves for a couple years and we'll build this product and everyone's going to buy it and then it's going to be off to the races. Of course nothing happened that way, but it was like this exuberant optimism that felt like we're gonna figure it out. The solution has to exist and we'll figure out how to make it work. So a ton of credit honestly goes to my wife for like taking the risk on what felt completely unassured and taking a bet on moving cities, canceling this offer on this house, and even like picking a place to live sight unseen. She was traveling with family and then we have to move to the Bay Area. I was only around for one weekend to look at apartments and it was one of the one of the first ones we saw, and she took a huge bet on this idea.

It often is the people around you who have that conviction in you and your vision before maybe even you do that help you get to the moment where you are today. And a little bit of a plot twist or spoiler alert for our listeners, of course, Webflow has absolutely changed the face of web development and design over the last decade since you really did ultimately take that leap on what was quite a twist and turn journey to ultimately becoming a founder in earnest. And to date, you've raised over $300 million from hallmark venture capitalists, everyone from YC to Accel to Draper Associates to even CapG. So congratulations. It wasn't up into the right always, but incredible.

Thank you. Thank you. It feels very surreal to even hear you say that it's been a decade. And to have all that sort of summarized feels like an alternate reality to what I imagined even 10 years ago when I, even when we were starting, I thought it was gonna be like 10 people.

And how many people are you at now?

Over 600.

Amazing. So I guess you're saying yes to this journey, your family's saying yes to this journey, but usually you need one more yes, which is an investor's yes. Who is the first investor to hop in on this journey with you and say, okay, Vlad, I got you, I believe in you?

It didn't happen for at least a year. So initially we were self or non-funded, right? We're just living off savings and credit cards, banking a lot on this Kickstarter idea, which didn't work out despite us spending 80% of our savings to make this video. Kickstarter does not allow hosted software, which I, I always encourage people to read the terms of service. And then it wasn't until, and then my daughter, like one of my daughters had like a really critical medical emergency that just basically blew us past any savings. And we actually almost shut down the company because this was 6 months after we said we had 3 months of runway. And we got rejected by YC once. And my brother and I at the time were like, okay, we only have a month to figure something out, to even get an idea out into the world, to try to get some traction, to try to get some investment. It wasn't until March 2013 that we ended up, so this was 9 months after founding, 9-ish months after founding, that we were able to get a demo out to the world and we showed it off on like Reddit, Hacker News, et cetera. And it was YC who took the original bet on us. They gave us an interview and they gave us that initial, I think it was like $15K of investment at that time, which gave us a lifeline, gave us both that validation and a little bit of cash to stop the bleeding. And then through that summer, as we were working towards Demo Day, it was two investors that were— believed in us early. One was Tim Draper after one meeting. I think he had a different vision for how we described it. Like he was, he's just excited about everything. And he gave us that, that shot where he committed to, it was a relatively small check relative to how other like YC companies were raising, but it was enough to give us a bunch of confidence. And then a friend from Intuit, this guy named Eric Bond, who has since started a new venture fund. Called Hustle Fund, and he was somebody that was further along and into it and had seen us build internally and really believed in us. And it was his first angel check. It was the combination of those two that really believed in us early.

Thank you so much for sharing that journey. So you get institutional funding, you're getting investors on board, and now it's really time to continue building the product, scaling it to customers. For our audience that If you might not be familiar, Webflow is the platform for just building websites in the most incredibly powerful, customizable way. I'm a customer. When I first stumbled on Webflow, we were building our website for my startup a couple years ago, and I was shocked by the power of what Webflow was able to provide. You know, in hours we were able to create a website that made our pre-seed company at the time look and feel established with incredible animations and great components that were easy to update. But a year later, we also discovered a whole community of developers and agencies that now build on Webflow. We're actually redoing our site right now. Could you tell us a little bit about your core customer? How do you reach them? And a little bit around how Webflow went to market.

It's both a blessing and a curse that our market can be so huge, right? A lot of people need websites, but it's also difficult in that you can't be all things to all people. Where we really started to see the most traction initially is with web design freelancers, people who were building for other clients because they're like in the same shoes that the designers who I worked with at the agency were in, where they were making things in Photoshop. They had a vision for what a website would be, but then they would have to rely on somebody like myself who was a programmer to bring it to life. And quite a lot of those folks early on saw the opportunity of like, Whoa, like Webflow can enable me to do all that without relying on a developer. That can lead to me creating my own freelancership or my own agency where I can go direct and find clients and build a really incredible site for them. So that's how we initially started to grow. And the web design market is so fragmented. There's not one place where people hang out, right? So we have to go everywhere and try to be in every place that designers hang out from. Forums to even things like GoDaddy forums, right, where people register domains because that's where people tend to start off, to design-related conferences, which we try to do in a very scrappy way. But the biggest thing that drove growth was word of mouth, right? Like getting other designers to start talking to other designers around like, this is what I'm using, which sort of was a tricky thing to try to grow around because for many designers, especially freelancers, they wanted to keep Webflow as a secret weapon, right? So they would only tell people who were in different markets who might not compete for the same customers or the same end businesses to build sites for. Eventually the market became large enough, people were less afraid of that.

I'm chuckling, Vlad, because we had the founder of RunwayML on this season as well, and he has this crazy story about some CBS video editor using RunwayML and doing all of his editing that's supposed to take him 10 hours in like 5 minutes. And everyone on his team goes, you're superhuman. Like, how are you doing this? And then all of a sudden he's like, a week later he was like, I felt too bad. I had to reveal my secrets.

This kind of reminds me when the iPhone first came out, we lived in Sacramento in kind of a, the Russian community was not the most tech savvy and I was the only person who had like internet and Wikipedia on their phone. So sometimes in conversations I would like look up like a fact or something and I didn't wanna reveal to anyone that I had that secret weapon. Eventually that became ubiquitous. I had to tell people like, Okay, this is what I'm actually doing. And then over time, Webflow started to become adopted by more and more companies as like the kind of way to run their entire digital stack for marketing their product, service, et cetera. And then it became more and more mission critical to run it, like larger and larger teams, like teams internal to companies started to bring in the product directly to transition from either like code-based approaches or WordPress, et cetera. And we still have this wide range of a lot of freelancers, a lot of individual designers, a lot of like early startup founders that are doing everything themselves to now like huge teams that are running like enterprise scale, like web deployments that we recently started powering Orange Theory Fitness, running all their membership signups through Webflow in some way. That's a huge range of like what people need and it's still a challenge to understand what is like the ideal, where to focus because these different scale of customers need different things. Thankfully. There's a large overlap around the core problem of what we're really trying to do is take the power of code and elevate it into a more intuitive experience that's visual, that is way more accessible. So people can harness that power of code in much easier ways while still retaining a lot of the flexibility. And that's still valuable to an individual, a freelancer, somebody who's building for other businesses, or like in businesses themselves that have large marketing teams that expand the gamut from creative folks to copy folks to like SEO specialists to IT folks that are running like other technical integrations. There's just so much around the website that, that becomes like mission critical. And I wish I had an easy answer around like how we got customers, but every month and every quarter was something different. Trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work, running a lot of experiments. A lot of them failed. A lot of them were like, hey, let's invest a bunch of our limited cash into like this big event, like South by Southwest, 7 years ago. And just like with Kickstarter, you would spend all this money and then come back and like, okay, we maybe got 2 customers to sign up from that. It was a journey, right? You learn along the way.

Well, what's so interesting about the website is that it's such a platform, cross-cutting horizontal with different business verticals that build on top of it. Startups is one bucket that have really embraced Webflow, but As someone that has e-commerce brands and customers, I've also seen a lot of enterprise companies wanting to own their storefront instead of leveraging platforms like an Amazon. And given Webflow's excellence in beautiful configurable website experiences, I've actually seen more and more of my customers' e-commerce storefronts actually be hosted on Webflow, and maybe they'll have like a Shopify cart redirect. How do you see Webflow's position in powering commerce more broadly beyond the storefront?

To be honest, it's more in that hybrid approach where you leverage Webflow where it's best, which is visual development and customization, and you leverage other platforms like Shopify, like WooCommerce, et cetera, where they might be best. And initially, maybe a few years ago, we had this ambition of like, maybe we'll build a better version of all things retail commerce. But that is really hard, right? Like Shopify is 10 times larger than we are. And they're not even close to solving that problem for like retail commerce for their own customers. Their own customers are banging down their doors. They're like, here's what you have missing. And if they have things that are missing, we absolutely have things that are missing because we haven't been, you know, laser focused on just e-commerce over the last 10 years. So it's exactly that. We're seeing a lot more customers sort of leverage the power of Webflow's UI building tools and our like core CMS to then augment it with something like Shopify and integrate it really well.

I was just gonna say that kind of mindset we're calling headless commerce, like in the investor ecosystem, is kind of what you're describing. And it is really interesting to see how you can use Webflow for what it's best at, maybe use Shopify for what it's best at, maybe use a headless platform like Nacelle, what have you, and use all of that to create the best consumer experience at the end of the day.

Exactly. At the end of the day, it's each business, especially one that has its core Success criteria is, uh, through their website to drive business results. You're not gonna wait like 3 years for some company, whether it's Shopify or Webflow, to be ready with exactly what you need today. You'll need to like mix and match. Consumers don't really care, right? They just want a great experience. They're not gonna check your code and see like, okay, this is powered by XYZ. For us, we just wanna make sure we're able to play our part in helping our customers be successful.

There's just so many like continued opportunities to do that and expand in so many different directions. So incredibly cool to hear your take on that. Switching gears a little bit, looking into the future, we've had a lot of guests this season chat about AI, generative AI. It's been a big theme on this season. How is Webflow thinking about the future of the website and generative AI?

Our philosophy is very similar to how a lot of other companies are approaching it, almost like in copilot mode. Where I don't think there's ever a, especially for something as important and complex as a website, it's not just an image you're generating or text that is like lacking. It's much more similar to GitHub Copilot in the sense that you can harness the knowledge of a lot of previously built things to help along the way to give you guidance around how to do something better, right? Like imagine you're designing in Webflow and you say, I need a testimonial section here that looks exactly like other parts of my site, but harness the, the testimonial sections that are best performing across like our popular templates or popular sites, et cetera, and have that be generated as a starting point that you can edit to your heart's desire using the powerful tools that we already have. So much of that is, at least I hope, is still in the realm of like human intelligence and like linking all of these ideas together. Generative AI only goes so far. It's like an enabler to help you move faster in some areas, help generate a lot more ideas, diverge so you can help converge on something that like really works for your brand. But we really see it as an enabler, not a productivity boost or something that helps you explore a lot more ideas. Not necessarily something that there's all this talk about, like ChatGPT is going to destroy every single interface that humans have with technology and communication. Like, No, it's not. The world is still transitioning from mainframes and the vast majority of businesses aren't even using SaaS software yet. We're just getting started there.

I'm so excited that we are just getting started. I'm curious within this future state where Webflow is helping prompt and build and understands how to build with the templates that you have in the robust marketplace that you have within Webflow itself, is there a model like a large language model or a transformer that you guys are most interested in using and thinking about partnering with as you continue on this journey?

We're doing a bunch of experimentation right now. The tough part is that there's not a direct text translation, cuz large language models are based on, are trained largely on language, whether it's programming languages or a huge sort of scale of all human written communication and writing that's published on the web. But we are exploring ways to map that to the way that we represent sites in Webflow, which are a kind of a different declarative format than just your code in pure text. But there are very promising directions that help us leverage what many large language models offer that are trained on code or like to map to a more like Webflow-specific context. So it's inconclusive yet, but let's just say there are very promising avenues that we're exploring.

We'll have to have you back on to talk about that. Well, Vlad, thank you so much for sharing this incredible journey to building what is really the website experience that I use, Claudia uses. And most of our friends use. Just 'cause I am straight up curious, how many websites would you say Webflow has built to date? Oof.

I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but it's in the millions. I know it was like north of 4 million last year, and there's the websites people build and launch, and there's also a lot of the things that people build and then, uh, transfer elsewhere. Anything above a million blows my mind. When we were getting started, I was thinking that we were going to help empower hundreds of sites and just— and it's nowhere near the scale of something like WordPress or Squarespace even, or Wix, which are in the tens, if not hundreds of millions. But we're just getting started.

Millions of websites built is just an incredible feat. And I don't even know how to ask this question because I don't even know what is next for Vlad. But I want to know, even with all of this amazingness in your rearview, What is next? What are you looking forward to?

One is AI takes over the world. Nobody needs websites, so I can retire tomorrow. Um, joking. To go back a little bit, the reason I think I'm not— don't have the exact number for websites is the thing that has been most inspiring for me is not just the sites that people build, but how many people are now able to make a living because they learn this new skill of visual development. That is to me a I think the most life-changing thing or the most inspiring thing or the thing that gives me the biggest sense of purpose, not just like, hey, a bunch of websites are built. It's more like, wow, a lot of people and families, hundreds of thousands of people who are putting food on the table because of the income they make through Webflow, not just because they built their website in it, but because they're able to make a living by making websites for others, or their entire career on the marketing track is so Webflow-centric, et cetera. That is just mind-blowing that it's gotten to that point where You go on LinkedIn, you like people advertising for, I'm a Webflow developer, or we're looking for a Webflow developer. That just boggles my mind. It's almost like a programming language at this point. In terms of what's next, if what we did in the last 10 years is any indicator, I think the next 10 years is gonna be 10x. I believe that so much more is possible than what I thought was possible 9 years ago when we were first launching. We're still relatively early in how many people know about Webflow, build on Webflow, and have like discovered this new way of building really powerful sites this way.

I love this orientation around the impact that Webflow has been able to have both at the employee level with your own company. You mentioned over 600 employees today, but also the creators and the ecosystems that have been built through the power of Webflow. And just that honestly is what Claudia and I are in this to do, both through the pod and through our day jobs and Yeah, it's just really a nice moment of reflection to say at the end of the day, like if someone else is able to put food on the table because of your product for their family, that is an experience well done.

Nothing more fulfilling. I wish we lived in a world where you didn't have to like work all the time to make a living. It's really satisfying to know that we can be a major part of many people's like equation there.

And that's the impact you've had on others. But I guess our closing question that we ask all of our guests is who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

That is an easy answer for me. It's this woman named Leila Sturdy who's on our board, who actually now she recently took over all of CapGee, CapitalGee, which is one of our major investors. She used to work at Google, et cetera, but she's just an incredible human being and leader who has helped me believe much more in myself, in like what we're able to do as a company to be like this encouraging and convicting voice many times around like what we could be doing better. And it's just such an incredible human being. Like we can spend hours together and it feels like both we're making Webflow better, but also each other better as human beings. And she just has a superpower around how to help you believe in something greater than even what you believe you can do. In a way that makes you feel inspired and not like you're not good enough, or there's a lot of work ahead to do or whatever. So Layla is just one of those incredible human beings that I consider myself insanely lucky to even know, let alone work with on like a week-to-week basis to help succeed. So I— somebody that I wish everyone could have, not just on their board, but as a friend.

I was going to say, I think we all need a Layla in our life, and perhaps maybe we can sneak having her on the pod at some point, especially with her new exciting role.

I can try to put in a good word.

Thanks a lot. Appreciate that. I really appreciate you hopping on and spending some time with us today to tell about your incredible journey to both America and becoming a founder and the future of websites at the hands of Webflow and your ecosystem. It was a super fun conversation and just grateful that websites are in your hands for the future.

Thank you. Thank you. It was such a pleasure and honor to be here. Thank you, Madison. Thank you, Claudia. It was so great to spend this time together.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode Tuesday, 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia and Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Defy VC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.