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 seven or eight years that WeFlow has been in business. But actually Webflow has been in business four different times with four different teams and failed three times before. This time that hopefully is on a non failed 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 web10.com crash that happened. A lot of pessimism, but I had like all this optimism that something like webflow could exist and try 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 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 six months in, kind of got the itch to start working on it again. And this was the early days of yc. This is when like Weebly and Wix were starting. Like the web was kind of having this rebirth moment where there were a lot of new startups, a lot of vowels being dropped in domains, if you remember that. The Flickrs, the Twitters, et cetera. 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 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. I 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 four 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, in early 2012, from fail number two, when we had a trademark submission, I got in my house. We moved like two or three times by that point. A trademark certificate from our first submission that somehow the company that had the trademark had gone out of business and this had cleared some cue and I just saw it as a sign that need to start it again. In 2012, I convinced my brother, who was my eventual co founder, to start working on it part time. He was a designer, I was more of a developer and we started 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 like that's the one that actually took off and where I learned most of my lessons. But like the takeaway there is that timing really matters. Like 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. And this sense of luck or privilege, whatever you want to call it, like this event where I got this trademark certificate just 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've worked a lot with at Intuit. And I gave myself such a hard time through those first three failures of like, I, 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 it into it 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, my brother Sergey 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. Like 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 best equipment 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 is going to buy into it. So of course we pour in 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. 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 Sergi 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 going to post the Kickstarter, it's going to go bonkers, we're going to get all this money and we're going to build the product, et cetera. 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 two days we got both a rejection from YC saying that 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. You can't just like ad lib or mad lib, 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 just deep work mode. We moved to this place called the Hacker Dojo, which is completely free but also pretty. You kind of like had to fight for space and had to be there like 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 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, $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, it 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 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 a 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 just to survive on the company front, we found this restaurant called unamas, 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. 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 frame $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, Sergey, my brother, moving back to San Diego, getting his job back. I was already talking to Intuit colleagues to figure out if. If there was a place back for me. Add 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, like 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 frequent 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 either shut down the company or move back to our old jobs. Why don't we give it one last shot? We gave ourselves two months. This is a decision we made in January of 2013. We just don't have the time and energy. I wouldn't say energy. We have the energy, but we just didn't have the scope of the product we wanted to build was way too huge. Why don't we build just a demo that will show people what the product could be? Because that's the only thing we can realistically build. And our third co founder, Bryant, joined us at this point. We were coworkers at Intune It. So we started building this product and eventually came up with this, like, 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 non developer, designer and 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 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 is always ominous for me, or like my name is misspelled. And I just knew 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 move my screen. 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 that typically we thought would they were in the past, really arguing against tools like Dreamweaver or Wits and Weebly, et cetera, that don't generate clean code, et cetera. We're just giving us all this positive energy around, like, 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, you know, we're deeply in debt. We're 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 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, you know, really deeply in debt or making decisions between sort of 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 in to our story that it just happened to work out. We were at the right place at the right time and lucked out with being like, putting webflow in front of the right people so that we could get that traction. But, like, once we got traction, it unlocked so many more doors for us. Right as that happened, we finally got a little bit more relaxed. We moved to a different co working 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 we would have a better shot this time. 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 gonna 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. 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 Surge ran out and obviously we're really happy. Hugs all around, calling our families and our significant others. Got dinner arranged 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. And out of the blue comes an email that says, unfortunately, we decided not to find you at this time. The reason is exactly why I would think that webflow would be rejected. 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 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 going to 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. 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. So we 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. 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, you know, we were, we were over the moon. And the only thing I could find was a stock photo with three guys high fiving. That's. 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, you know, we, 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, at the time, like Square, 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 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're very uncomfortable 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 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 extreme, or at least was an extreme introvert where going up on stage was the most anxiety inducing thing. Like 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 DOL or just shy of $300,000. But a lot of the startup, the VCs we pitched after demo day were either like a no, but most likely a 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 cold swe, pitching more people and not really knowing where the company is going to go in terms of Runway. And then eventually we met with Paul Graham at YC and he, 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 know, you can just make the decision now you have $300,000, there's three of you, there's enough Runway for three people. Sure, you might not 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 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 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 under us. But then we kind of like switch back into normal startup mode. You know, we got an office, we 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, and started doing retreats, Got another office that was a lot fancier. Got like, I started having Christmas parties and then I had this like big 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 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 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 at QuickBooks where we could see expenses. And I realized that, like, 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 like, 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 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 at cms, the inflection we saw in revenue we thought was going to be game changing. But in retrospect, if you look back over the course of time, 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, you know, 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, 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. Like, 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 scale to how we were serving customers because our customers were our main source of funding. We're getting like these mini funding rounds from Stripe every week when customer accounts were cleared and 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. And 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? Like 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 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, you know, 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 kind of sustainable, only a few of these relationships really rose to the, 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 help it come to its full potential by empowering more and more people to build for it. Right now, you know, the power to create for the Internet is kind of locked up unless we're talking about like YouTube comments or you know, 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 400 people, like 0.25% of the world. And we found partners that truly don't find that acceptable 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 how we prioritize people overall. And as I thought through how to partner with these folks, it was really, really important to level set with each partner. First it was Arun at Excel. Then later on, Leila from Capital G joined us around the importance of, like, reframing this idea that a board or set of investors is like a boss to a company, and they're there to kind of keep a company in check or whatever. But truly, as partners and equals, people who have had more experience, you know, scaling companies have a lot of resources and connections to help us unblock certain problems and tackle certain, you know, challenges as we scale, but not see it as a, sorry, this keeps happening, but not see it as a. Primarily a financial outcome that they're seeking. Sure, that's important. 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 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 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, I can pour all the money we have into that, but if it 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. And finding those 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, enduring company is to seek becoming default alive as quickly as possible, which means 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 two, which is to choose your partners wisely. Because if you are not in a place of being default alive, or you're 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. That's almost like rushing into a marriage just because somebody 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 where each individual and each person kind of fall in terms of principles. So really 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's a lot of like conversations, you know, virtually, et cetera, where really like 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, right? 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, you know, increase revenue and build shareholder value. But really like, where's the purpose in that? So one thing I've learned is that you know 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, or building a company that is, you know, such a big part of their lives. So those people matter too. And the people that you bring on as partners, like, first and foremost, they're people. They're people relationships. They're not like business relationships. The business is just a vehicle 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 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 want to thank you all for listening and we can open it up 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.

That's longer than I've been using it. All right, I see some questions here. How do 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 in to a sibling relationship. We didn't have any red flags around that. I have four other siblings and I think Sergi 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 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 vs 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 I Remember when in the multiple times that I was starting, like, that story shifted quite significantly where it used to be? Hey, founders who are not experienced. I wasn't an experienced founder at all. I was a software engineer before starting webflow. 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 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. And it feels like even despite Covid and a lot of the setbacks we had last year, it's just a great time to start technology companies. There's the entire no code trend. Not to 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 10 years and definitely a lot fewer people to do the same thing than 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 a 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. 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 Uno Mas 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.

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 that had more variety.

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

The biggest thing, honestly was 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 like 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, et cetera. And just really having that as a conversation rather than just seeing people as, you know, worker bees or people to direct or resources to direct. I hate that word, resources. So that, that was really a big, big piece of inspiration for me. I know a lot of people, like, mentioned 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 and 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, 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, 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 four years in something like that. You know, our values were kind of, we call them core behaviors. You know, 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, you know, move fast and break things. And we changed it over time to move intentionally fast, you know, 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 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?

Oh, this is interesting. I think designers will become closer and closer to production. They 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 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 designers are now driving all the marketing experience and in many cases like even applications, because they have like 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, you know, more and more companies will expect that designers will need to understand kind of the core principles of software and how to take things to production, not just 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 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, et cetera. There's a bunch of other use cases around like building prototypes and like fast kind of 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 and she was 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 have a new sales team that we started hiring last year. So just as Covid was starting, it was unrelated but it was because we saw so much demand from self serve folks saying like hey, we need to, 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 you know, all in because it includes like our partner motion, our experts program. Like that team is you know, a bit over 10 people more or less. But that revenue has been scaling very quickly. I think we 10x it over last year kind of on a smaller base, but are 10xing again this year. So it's a big, big opportunity for us. But we always see enterprise as a like we don't see ourselves becoming an enterprise company where we want webflow to be a fundament empowering technology for everyone so that everyone can build software as can enterprises. Right. But just because they're willing to pay more does not mean that we just like cater to those use cases. But thankfully the vast majority of like the features and things that you need to build, whether it's a user at an a designer, an enterprise company or a designer that's a freelancer that's working for, you know, 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 for all your great questions. Vlad, we just really appreciate you sharing your incredible story with us and for joining us on saastr. 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.