Why Domain Experts Are Winning In The Age Of AI

Bryant Chou co-founded Webflow, which today powers around 1% of all websites on the internet. Now he's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI-powered website and marketing platform that doesn't just build your site — it connects to your analytics, CRM, and search console to optimize your marketing while you sleep. In this episode of the Lightcone he explains how he built Ploy to be “anti slop,” how building today compares to his first startup, and why founders with domain expertise are making a comeback. Chapters:00:00 — What Experience Gives You in the Age of AI00:38 — Meet Bryant Chou, Co-Founder of Webflow01:22 — His New Startup Ploy02:47 — Rebuilding the Posterous website From 200803:27 — Rebuilding the Scribd website From 200705:04 — Rebuilding the Auctomatic website From 200706:19 — Rebuilding the Escher Reality website From 201707:11 — 12% of the YC Batch Uses Ploy08:26 — The D&D Theory of Founder Skills10:05 — Democratizing Marketing and Growth10:50 — Live Demo: The Design Slurper13:21 — Your Website Should Work for You While You Sleep14:26 — Integrations, Analytics, and the Marketing Brain17:27 — Ploy's Anti-Slop Engine: 3,500 Curated Design Prompts20:05 — The Andy Warhol Theory of AI22:35 — Webflow Origin Story24:26 — Building in a Competitive Market Then vs. Now26:01 — First Three Months: Webflow 2013 vs. Ploy 202527:17 — What Experience Teaches You That Models Can't28:51 — Will Better Models Kill Products Like Ploy?30:32 — The Competitive Moat of Purpose-Built AI33:01 — Agents as Customers: CLI, MCP, and AEO35:02 — Young Founders vs. Experienced Founders36:36 — The Idea Maze and Cloning Yourself With AI42:37 — The Magnifying Glass MomentApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You need to have a certain amount of expertise to know what to do with this boundless intelligence that's imbued in the model. And I think this is where folks with experience, folks that have spent a decade plus in this industry, they know how to create something like this because they can leverage the model's underlying capability to create something that's just world-class. So many businesses, they have a great product, they have a great service, but there's just so much sort of a met opportunity for these business owners, for these founders. And I'm really just here to make it easier for them to tap into it.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. Today, we're joined by Bryant Chou, co-founder and CTO of Webflow, which created 1% of all websites live today. Bryant is back in the current YC batch with a brand-new startup called Ploy, which is taking the work he did on Webflow to the next level. Bryant, welcome to The Light Cone.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  So what is Ploy? We're looking at it right now, kind of looks like a lot of the other things you might use to vibe code, but it's actually way more awesome than that.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  It is a website platform. You can build really incredible bespoke, award-winning websites with Ploy, but it doesn't just stop there. The premise is that your website has all this traffic, it has all this data, and what we're doing is we're building an entire marketing platform to help you run your business, to help you run your ads, help you find your customers, help you make your website copy, but then also, most importantly, help you get found by ChatGPT, help you get found by perplexity and Claude, so that Businesses can run their marketing on autopilot.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Kind of sounds like hiring the perfect CMO who also is a designer and who can code.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  That's actually kind of my background. So like, I started as a CTO of Webflow, but then I also led our marketing teams. I also started our sales teams. So I'm just taking all that knowledge and I'm baking it into play.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Okay, so that sounds like founder market fit, a triple unicorn, making the AI triple unicorn for everyone in the world. Like, the other 98% of websites could really use this.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  That's right. So what you're seeing is that it's, sure, like a vibe coding, sort of UI UX, but you're also getting stuff out of the box that you wouldn't normally get. So you get all of these sort of integrations, but then, most importantly, you get all this traffic. So what I actually did was, just to show off Ploy's web design skills, I loaded your old startup website.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is mine. This is Posturus, does simple blogs by email. You can see the little Gmail buttons and things like that.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  What year did you build the site, Gary?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  2008. So, you know, if it looks dated, it is.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  So we dropped it into Ploy and we essentially said, hey, go and recreate this website, employ. And this is what it created.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. That's gorgeous. So this is not 2008 Posturus. It is truly 2026 Posturus. Be careful, because now that you've created, I might have to actually write a million lines of code and make it real again.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  This is definitely a Google VO video and all these sort of prompts and sort of knowledge about how to create these type of videos are embedded into Ploy.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, once you're in the land of doing image gen and video gen, there's just a lot you have to do around curation and proper prompting. It's kind of like a dark art, actually. So being able to start off with the thousand examples that you've already pulled together. I mean, that's context in action.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Jared, I also got yours coming up. We also took Scribd. We went back in the Wayback Machine.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Scribd from 2007. YouTube for documents. YouTube for documents. I remember fiddling with the CSS to try to make that look right.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  How did you even host this back in the day?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  This was before AWS. This is on a physical server, originally physically in my dorm room closet, which is how I learned that servers are loud.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  So this is what Ploy redesigned it to.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Bring it to 2026.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  And this is basically like, you basically just gave it the old website and like told it to go with maybe like a short prompt. And then it's just like went and just like brought it up to 2026, right?

• 4:22Speaker 00

  That's right. So it actually went to the Wayback Machines URL, understood the contents and then understood the context of your business. And then it was like, oh, cool. We're bringing this business back. Let's go and redesign it for the modern era.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  So yeah, it's interesting because it's not merely web design. It's actually understanding memory reasoning, really like a marketing company brain.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  And asset generation. Like I remember like packing the day to like make images like this. You need to hire like a team of designers and it was so slow and expensive. And like animations, like what you did for Gary's site, that was like

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Impossible. Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like unaffordable for any startup.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yep. Oh, man. This is hard. This is

• 5:01Speaker 04

  It's automatic for 2007. Yeah. Automattic was software for small businesses to sell online.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Mostly managing their eBay auctions.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  And this is what we redesigned it to.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Much better.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Very nice.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  So is able to like build these sort of like product mocks of your product.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  It's kind of like interactive and stuff.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Develop your actual website too.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  It can do everything a model can do.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  I mean, this is actually pretty interesting. That dashboard is the kind of, that's basically the kind of software we built. I didn't actually think we had that on the individual website, but that like top listings and channel map. It's interesting that it, yeah, the controls. Yeah, this is all like really, really quite intelligent.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really working backwards from what the, who the customer is, what do they want, what are the jobs to be done?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  It's kind of impressive. I kind of understand more what Automattic does with this website.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that's what I mean. It's better. It's better than what we have.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  I actually understand what it does.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  I have nobody on it. It was.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, it's new. I think it's actually a deep point. Like it's not just prettier, which obviously it is like the, obviously like the visual design is much better. But actually the content is better too. And we always hear about like AI slop, but like if he was AI slop, that wouldn't have worked.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Diana, remember this one?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Oh, man, we had such a hard time trying to make our website because we had very complex tech building API for AR. This is back in 2017 for phones. We kind of actually hired a designer to make some of these assets, which took a while to took like a good Jared was my group partner. Really took like, I don't know, two months to get this.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  This happened to be one of the favorite websites that Ploy created because it's like got all this really cool screenshots and stuff. And I think this was just three or four prompts. So it actually created this video.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  That's so cool.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  It isn't just a random video. It's actually a video of AR. Like this is basically like the vision of Esha Reality, right? Diana is, yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Being able to have avatars and things just in in your real world, but totally programmatic very easily.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  I think now I understand what my company does too.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things about Ploy is that, you know, we're we've got about like 12% of the YC batch using Ploy. And one of the biggest pieces of feedback is just like, wow, I'm actually able to tell my story a lot more coherently and concisely. And then that's actually the most important part of your website.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  This actually used to be a big part of Office Hours way back in the day. We sort of stopped doing it, but the early ones used to be like, hey, like, here's your website, like, walk people through explaining what it does.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, Webflow had a big part in democratizing web development and web design. And the way I've always thought about Ploy in the beginning is I want to democratize marketing and demystify growth. A lot of incredible founders in YC, they've built these incredible products. They're starting to get a sense for how to talk about it. But then there's just like these somewhat like rote and arduous SEO marketing things that they should be doing. But it's just like, oh, man, do I need to go and hire someone for it? And this is really what I'm trying to bring to YC and to all the founders that are out there.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  I mean, this is a big deal. I mean, it does feel like we're entering this moment where, um, you know, there's sort of a doomer AI scenario where people think like, oh, there's not going to be jobs. One of the thoughts I've been having lately is like, why can't the person who they were at some company, someone is trying to cost cut here and then they're like, okay, we have to let go of all these people. Like, some of them actually could do the whole thing. They they're as good as the founders and those are the people who actually should just go and do it. But especially if you're a little bit older, like, you know, it's actually kind of hard to fill in your brain with like, you know, you might not be like Bryant, like a, you know, triple threat, right? Like, you're like the Bo Jackson of a.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Sorry, now that's a very.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  My muscles aren't as big.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  I mean, this is actually one of the great equalizers. Like, the founders in the past who did it the best, I mean, they sort of had to be super deep in all of these different ways. And then now we're entering this other moment. How often is it that we meet founders who are incredibly great technologists? But when it comes to actually getting people to use their product, like, they actually sometimes really struggle. Like, I think human beings, to me, resemble sort of, we started playing Dungeons and Dragons with my sons. And so, you know, when you have to do like the reroll, like, everyone has different hit points and different characteristics, you know? Some people are mages, some people are barbarians, you know? There's like a lot of stuff going on. I think that that sort of extends to capability of founders.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Interestingly, like, we're sort of entering this other moment where, because Ploy exists, you might have someone who's like 200 IQ, you know, nearly non-verbal, like codexes. They're able to make just some sort of hardware, software, that literally no one else could. But in the past, like, if you're that, you know, OP in one stat, you tend to, you know, not be able to do those other things. But now, that person could actually come in, deploy. And there's just so much that can help them win in the marketplace. So it's a really unusual and different way to think about what, you know, markets and capitalism might be, you know? It's more access to it, and then more alternatives.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  And so that's sort of the AI white pill that I hope, you know, Ploy actually becomes a really big part of. All right, so we've seen these, this blast from the past, and then brought into the future. Can we see what it actually looks like? Let's actually use Ploy.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. So what you can do is, you can sign up for Ploy, and then you can just get started. So it will know who you are, it'll know what domain you're coming from. And in this case, I'm just gonna pretend that I'm someone from Cursor. And we spent about, I think, like $750,000 worth of tokens to create what's called the Ploy Slurper. And the Ploy Slurper essentially is a purely deterministic method to take an existing website

• 11:11Speaker 00

  And to not just create a design system, but to create all the components that belong on your website. So then subsequently, your next generations and stuff like that, it's going to be on brand. The buttons are all going to look the same. You're not going to have 10 different variations of your header font. And those are the things that are going to be really important, especially as a business scales. You really want that sort of design consistency.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  So that's what it's doing right now.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  That's what it's doing right now.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  The design slurper is doing its job right now.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  That's right. And then as it's slurping, it's going to ask you, hey, what's important? And I'm like, well, I think Cursor wants to get found in search in AI. I'm going to tell it that. And then I'm going to turn more visitors into customers. I hit that and now it's going to imbue it into its memory. It's going to understand, it's like, okay, cool. This particular user, they want to go and improve these things. And in about 75 seconds, we would have slurped the existing site, recreated all the components, refactored it, and you get this.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And so it's operating in real time. I mean, it's probably doing the equivalent work of a team of three to five engineers and front end people and probably take a week at least.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  They're probably going to open up Claude Code or Cursor to try to do this.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  But they'll do a much worse version of it.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Here's the moment of truth. Let's see if this is responsive. Boom.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Boom. Boom. Cool. So it's responsive. You know, the fonts are showing up. Let's see if there's like some hover effects that we captured

• 12:53Speaker 00

  down here. Okay, cool. Some CSS hover effects. So these are all things, or just like all these details.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Last mile.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  You need to have an opinion about how websites should be made in order to do this. But this isn't the point, right? The point is not to just recreate something. The point is, after your website's done, what can it do to work for you? And that's where play really shines.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  There's a bit of a nuance here that I don't know if everyone in the audience would know, but when you try to create something like this with any other vibe coding tool, it's not consistent. It kind of remixes and forgets all the design consistency. And that's pretty impressive to get it to do that. It's sort of the following, following the.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is where we're at, I think, in the age of AI, which is, I think, you need to have a certain amount of expertise to know what to do with this boundless intelligence that's imbued in the model. And I think this is where folks with experience, folks that have spent, you know, decade plus in this industry, they know how to create something like this because they can leverage the model's underlying capability to create something that's just world-class.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Let's see, so say I'm Cursor, I release Composer. It's a new type of model. Can I just come and deploy and, you know, paste in screenshots and even my like PM spec? And you could make the product page for me?

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Even better. So we have integrations with like 50 different tools. It can not only just connect to your code base, but it connects to Figma, connects to all of your analytics tools, CRM, spreadsheets. It can even draft emails on your behalf based off of who's coming to your website.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Okay, this looks like a company brain for your marketing then.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  So you start with the website, but that rapidly becomes sort of your company brain for how you describe your product and show it off. And it makes sense that you would start off with your homepage. I mean, I'd probably do that, the same thing, too. It's like your homepage is sort of your face. And if the homepage doesn't have it, that's almost like the source of truth for how you discuss what you're building.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  It really reminds me of Rippling in the early days. Would sound odd, but I remember like the very first thing Parker built was an offer letter generator. And I remember seeing it.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  You gotta start someplace.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, but like, is the only insight you get is like a second time founder? So at the time, it was like, you're pitching this really big vision, but like you're starting with like an offer letter generator.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone has offer letters, everyone's hiring people, so, but then that becomes an HR system. And then once you have HR, you have auth, and then boom, you're like literally your company app store OS.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  And if you think about the journey of a new employee, the very first step with the new employee is they get an offer letter. That's where like everything else starts.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Well, the very first thing.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  First thing with the website is the homepage. Yeah, and then everything else unfolds.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  I mean, even for a business, right? Like you might start with Stripe Atlas, but right after that, like I better make a homepage. And then it might be very cryptic, but when you actually launch it, it better say what it is.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it can not only just integrate to your GitHub, but your entire systems of record. The really cool thing is that it's actually Thinking about what to do while you're sleeping. So every single night, we look at all the traffic. We check your Google Search Console. We see what your pipeline looks like. And it's able to like, offer suggestions, right? Like, oh, you got a active target account. Oh, you've got someone engaging with your campaign. Um, these are all sort of things that it's telling you like, and it's able to glean. Because instead of like, checking your analytics every day, NoPloy can literally just tell you everything out of the box, right?

• 16:32Speaker 00

  So this is just really basic analytics that we offer. But it can also tell you who's coming to the site. And I think that's really cool, right? It's like, oh, wow, someone from this company clicked on this call to action button. And now I can do something with it.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  I think what's pretty cool is basically you're taking this very esoteric niche thing that OpenClaw users know about with a dream cycle. When it iterates and improves the skills, which I think only people that are in super long tail and in OpenClaw, which I don't think the rest of the world knows. You're doing that for everyone else.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Doing it for businesses. Cause I just think that so many businesses, they have a great product. They have a great service. But there's just so much sort of a met opportunity for these business owners, for these founders. And I'm really just here to make it easier for them to tap into it.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  So I wired this up to Y Combinator's Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and pulled in all the data. And what was cool is that like, right out of the box, without me having to do anything other than like, click through a couple of OAuth flows, it was able to give me like, a full SEO report with a bunch of like, suggestions for the site. And I was thinking about like, how I would do it without Ploy. And like, with enough effort, I could have maybe gotten like, Claude Code to do it. But like, Claude Code doesn't know how to connect to any of those things out of the box. So I'd have to like, figure out the APIs and have to like, suck in all the data. And it doesn't really know how to do SEO optimization. So like, it would have been so much prompting and work to get that same result.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's stuff that I'm surprised by because I think the best companies that I've met in Y C, they are on the right side of model development. And what these models need is with a little bit of steering, with a lot of data, there's just so much alpha that you can derive. So I think like that is one of those examples where let's just like feed the model data, structured, unstructured data, and just let it cook.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  How did you imbue it with like an understanding of like how to market websites, how to design websites? Are there some ways that you like distilled lessons from Webflow?

• 18:32Speaker 00

  This is stuff we geek out about at Ploy.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  So we're in App now.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  So yeah, we're in the admin. Yeah, this is behind the scenes.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  The lookbook.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  So what you're looking at is our curation of what we believe is the frontier of web design. And this is stuff that you can't really get anywhere else. And we've used a collection of models, OpenAI's ChatGPT images. But then we've created 3,500 prompts for web designs that then Ploy takes inspiration from. So you're not going to get a website that looks exactly like this when you're using Ploy. What you're going to get is you're going to get some of the vibes of these sites. And I think that's really actually how human designers work, right? So if you go and work with the agency of freelance web designer,

• 19:23Speaker 00

  some of the best might come up with something incredibly bespoke and unique that no one's ever seen before. But a lot of them, you know, they get inspiration. And that's essentially what we're trying to do here with our product, which is like, hey, let's like emulate how real humans work. And let's think about how we can create some really unique layouts, really unique designs that can really stand out.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Ploy is basically like the anti-slop. It looks like given the corpus of data that you have, the context you give the agents, it actually sort of overwhelms their inbuilt predilections. You can, one of the examples is like, for some reason, the models really love that you know, left-hand rule with the rounded corners.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  I mean, in web design, there's so many AI tells.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  I would like to say that Ploy eliminates all of them, but you can't necessarily eliminate all of it with all the prompts and guardrails and steering. However, we have spent a lot of time to make sure that The the sort of essence of the human individuals and like the the businesses bespoke sort of representation, their brand can can be reflected, employed to the best of our ability. And I think like the best analogy that I have for where we're at in the AI cycle is like Andy Warhol, you know, created paintings, but you know, the stuff eventually ended up at a factory and the factory would use machines to recreate these prints, but it's still a Warhol. And I think that's where we're at, which is like these models, they are essentially

• 20:54Speaker 00

  the factories for human creativity. And that's essentially what I want to be able to deliver for digital marketing.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Why digital marketing? Like you could have done like factories for anything. Why is this the thing you decided to build the factory for?

• 21:08Speaker 00

  I think that the web is still one of the most transformational technologies. Sure, it's done some funny things with how we consume media, how we respect sort of media organizations. However, ultimately, the sort of democratization, the dissemination of information for the internet, to me, is a really exciting tenant. It's a really exciting space to be, even after working in this space for for dozens of years. My approach is that where we're at in AI, these businesses, they still need to be found. And I actually think there's going to be way more small business in the future.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  You're not going to have like massive companies anymore that are dominating. I think

• 21:55Speaker 01

  We love that.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Where where society is moving is I actually think like entrepreneurship might become way more important than it has been. Entrepreneurship, especially if you're a small business, you need to be found. You need to be able to tell your story. You need to be able to represent your brand well. And I think that's just like a really exciting space for me.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  This is like 13 years after your prior company, Webflow.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  You were my group partner, remember?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember you coming in with basically the best visual, like graphical user interface for building a website because it was built directly off of CSS.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, it was incredibly novel at the time, but you know, we created this visual interface over HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  And it was sort of, you know, the first no code application that was out there. Powers, you know, big portion of the internet today, something I'm really, really proud of. It's just one of those products and companies that I think is just, uh, I never knew it'd become that big. You know, I remember doing office hours with PG and PG couldn't figure it out. And it was like, started to stress me out. We're all sweating.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  He doesn't know CSS.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Not at all.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  He knows HTML tags.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  And you, you know, and you could like, put like font properties on it, you know? But that's about, you know, Hacker News was more or less like about what he understood.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. And like for someone that's like as technical as PG, we thought that it was like, oh, he would be able to get it. I mean, he built Hacker News. Right?

• 23:24Speaker 04

  So this was 2013. What was the market for website builders like then? I think it was pretty competitive by that point.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  It was extremely competitive. I could probably, I remember there's probably eight of them, four of them I still remember. And then even in our history, there are so many different ones that popped up. Right. So I think like the things that we did really well was, and it really bothered me at the time, but my co-founder Sergey and Vlad were like perfectionists. And they just like stressed over every minute thing. And when you're building something that's supposed to scream pro, it's supposed to scream craft, that really helped.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Maybe go into more detail, like how did you come up with the original idea? And I think the reason it's interesting is it feels like from our perspective in the batches, we chat GPT launched and there was just like green field for like all these ideas to build. Now it feels like we're entering a bit more of an age of where it's competitive and it's harder. And often you're entering in a new idea, but you've got several competitors. So like, how do you build a confidence to enter a space that's competitive? And how do you know that you have like an edge that's worth digging into?

• 24:30Speaker 00

  I think for me this time around, uh, it's almost opposite of Webflow. At Webflow, we focused on one persona. That persona was this like freelance web designer, you know, just like, there's probably only 50,000 of them, honestly. With Ploy, you know, we're essentially solving for tens of millions of people. And I think that's just like a really interesting thing now that you can do now with AI. I mean, we've talked about like boiling the lakes, the oceans, like this is a very much, Ploy is very much a boil the ocean.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can do this before, but now you can do it.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And you can do it to. Just sort of an award winning degree.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  You know, I've been in tech since 2006, like 20 years. And, you know, when cloud computing came out, it was like, oh, this is revolutionary. I've got like untapped sort of compute, networking, storage. And now, you know, as of a couple of years ago, there's this new primitive of intelligence. It's just like so irresistible to not build something in this space.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  How has that changed the way that you've built Ploy? Like have sort of like the first three months or so of Ploy being compared to the first three months of Webflow?

• 25:39Speaker 00

  To be honest, when we were in YC 2013, we worked a lot. And we also covered so much product in those three months manually coding. Like, what is this? Like, I have to like type stuff? So I would say that we covered a lot of functionality, just coding. But now it's obviously a different league. Everyone can code. You don't have to have all this background and infrastructure and systems design. You know, like, these models are really, really good at it. So I would say like, the biggest difference is the output. You know, you're probably going to get more tests than you ever wanted. You're probably going to get way more code coverage, way more sort of functionality.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  But the thing that hasn't changed is what to focus on and how to, how to actually mold it. I think that's something that still benefits experienced builders. That's something that if you have a very strong vision, if you have all that track record of building products, that's where AI can really help you.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  I'm curious how that factored into building Ploy. Like, you've been doing website design the old fashioned way since 2012. You probably watched a million people use Webflow to design a website. Can you like remember decisions you made and how you designed Ploy? That maybe somebody who didn't have that experience would have like not done it that way?

• 26:55Speaker 00

  I have such a great example of this. For example, I just like have spent so much time in a visual builder, right? I was like, you need this panel to help you like drag and drop and to help you resize elements, to help you control the flow. And we stressed a lot about how to like bring some of that visual tooling into Ploy. And then we just kept deferring it and kept deferring it. And we're essentially at a position now where if you essentially just give the models enough context, screenshots, images, and just essentially here is something that you can do right here is you can essentially just use our annotation feature and say, click on this and just like rewrite this copy,

• 27:39Speaker 00

  make it super bold and you just send it off. And now you can just have this web designer that's imbued in the product that just sort of absorbs your intention and translates it into incredible outputs.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Let's play it out a little bit. The models are going to get, I don't know, unbelievably better from here. And then where does that leave Ploy? Like, you know, how, how good is it going to get from here? What's the future of the web?

• 28:07Speaker 00

  I can't predict the future. However, I can predict that there will be tons of businesses out there that are going to want an opinionated solution to help them solve real problems for the things that really matter to them. The way I think about it is that these underlying models, they're really good at a lot of different things.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Their general purpose.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Their general purpose. And I think there's just going to be a big need for something that is purpose built to help a customer achieve an outcome. And that's where products, even pure SaaS products, still have a right to really kind of explore that and to really leverage the model capabilities to benefit the end customers.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  I guess there's an interesting competitive play here. Like basically if Ploy becomes really, really good, you know, one of the things you do, for instance, is everyone's on the internet is talking about loops. But you know, you have basically a marketing and your SEO slash G E O marketing loop. You build content, you figure out how to say what you need to say to get someone to understand what it is to want it. And then you improve it and agents see it, agents want to use it. People see it, you know, they click on it, they want to use it. In the future, like if you're not using things like Ploy, then your competitors will win. So there is like a competitive dynamic to it, which has already happened for coding tools, for instance,

• 29:34Speaker 01

  like sort of unconscionable in 2026 to not be using Claude Code or Codex or Cursor, you know, just.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  You wouldn't be able to stay on top of what's going on.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  I happen to think that software engineers are one of like the worst customers to sell to. They can change tools on a whim. Something new comes out over here, they'll adopt it. So I see it as like almost this this market that's always incredibly competitive, but also like lowest common denominator. It's like, who's going to provide an engineer the most tokens? And that can always shift and that battle is just really, really difficult. For me, I'm always someone, and maybe this is where my background working at Intuit sort of comes into play. It's just like, hey, just go and pick a customer that has like a true, true, true pain point and just really, really focus on that.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  To me, it's businesses, it's small businesses, it's startups. And I think like by building this product to solve for their most important pain points, I think that's going to be one of those things that I'm always going to try to focus on.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  I think there's a world, which I think it is true, where there's still a lot of that you can value that you can build on top of the models because these are so good. And I think the limiting factor is knowing how to prompt them and sort of imbuing all these 20 years or plus experience that you have to really get the models to focus. It is almost like you're building a very special harness. We talk about a harness as this being this thin layer to getting the models to do the right outcome. And Anthropic did it wonderfully for Clockcode. It took the world by storm and within just a year. There's a lot more that can be done for lots of domains. You're kind of doing that for website creator creation.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you're selling skills, but you're also selling code and it's fat skills, fat code.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Some of these foundational primitives. So for example, you're getting a database out of a box that is very opinionated. Around website use cases, CRM use cases. And sure, you can go and, you know, go use a Postgres hosted Postgres server. But if you're a small business owner, if you're a CMO, you don't want to worry about that. You're not going to go and stitch together this MCP and have your Claude code instance and then make sure it's running all the time. These are just, to your point, Diana, the harnesses that we're going to make sure is always on, always working for you. And ultimately, it's going to drive you outcomes without you losing sleep over it.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Has anyone asked you yet for Ploy, but make it really, really easy for agents to use a given product? Like, do you have a bunch of lookbook stuff around proper L L M's dot T X T and things like that? I mean, in the Y C batch, we're seeing this wave of, for Git, it's like code dot storage. For instance, it's doing super well, right? And then Insforge in the current Y C batch is like sort of A W S, agent phone, agent mail, like resend. If the agents choose you, that's actually big and you're going to win.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is huge. And I think that's one of the biggest benefits of doing Y C again is that I'm living two years into the future, like right now here at Y C. And just being able to see these founders think in this way, I was just like, oh, I never even thought of that. And to that point, you know, you're getting a lot of stuff out of the box employed to make sure that it's A E O. You get F A Q sections, you get structured sort of schema markups, bots are crawling it, connections to all the things. But I think one of the most exciting things is being able to let an agent sign up for Ploy.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Oh, cool. So that works.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Working on it, working on it. So then, you know, just wire it up to your claw and like if claw needs to go and build a really awesome site, Ploy is one of the places where hopefully it can go.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are you going to do M C P or how are you going to implement it?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  I think we're going to do a C L I with skills. So an M C P would be really good if we had more constrained sort of things. However, I think with the number of things that you can do employ, I think the C L I is going to be the way we do it.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  C L I seems to be becoming the right UX for agents. This is why I think going back to clockwork versus cursor ended up doing so well. It's just, it's just so much more freedom being.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Fully on command line, same thing with open clock.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  I mean, ASCII characters, they're really good.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  I'm curious to get your perspective as like, you know, one of the more experienced founders in the batch. Like we, again, we certainly saw ChatGPT launch, there was a heavy snap towards young founders, sort of like intense rise of young founders. Because it's only young founders that are actually, well, using the technology and building with the tools. It seems like it's either coming back towards the middle, extending further than the other direction, I'm not sure. What's your take on it from being in the batch? And then to extend, you can share like what, when you look around and you see young founders, like where do you see them having an edge? And where do you feel like, like, I don't know, I've got you.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  I do think as an experienced founder, there's just so many lived experiences you've had. There's so much appreciation for how something gets done. And sometimes it actually can hold a founder back. It was like, oh, don't do that. It's really, really hard. I was burned by that many years ago. So I think like you have to kind of, for, for experienced founders, adopt a little bit more of that bravado. And that risk appetite. But then also for the earlier founders, I should have maybe an appreciation for how some things you have to get right. And not to bring it back to Ploy again, but you can't create a hundred websites and then expect Google to think that, hey, you're an authoritative source.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  And just creating content for content's sake is not the goal. So I always bring it back to like the first principles of it, right? Just like make sure you can tell a coherent story, make sure you're providing value in the world. And then hopefully people will notice and you'll succeed.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  What you get to do today is you get to draw on all these years of like all the things that went wrong and all the things that went right. And I like the idea of.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  You just go directly to the part of the idea maze that you were before. And then when you have a company that's multi-billion dollar company like Webflow, like many, you know, how many people were in your org?

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Um, hundreds.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, basically, when you have that momentum in like what the org is and what you're trying to do, like, how often is it that you're in that little idea maze? And you're just like trying to see around corners, like you avoid monsters and like find the gold, right? And once in a while, there's like this offshoot that comes off. And you're like, well, like the gold's over there for sure. But man, if I could clone myself, I would like go and check out this other place. And like, there might be even more gold. I don't know, it's like one of those things that now with a lot of experience, you could just like, you can actually do both of these things.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  I think the key word there was clone yourself.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  I have always lived in scarcity, scarcity of time, scarcity of my own capacity, mental and physical. But, I mean, AI is here and I'm really replicating myself, not just in the products, not just in the technology that we're building, but also in the company. Then also in some of the sort of really AI native ways that we're trying to build the company as well. And that's just like a completely different world.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Can you talk about any of them?

• 37:21Speaker 00

  I mean, I think we're doing the stuff that everyone else in Y C is doing, right? Making sure everything is recorded, making sure that your Claude code, you know, can access all of this. Making sure that, you know, our systems and operations on the go to market side are as automated as possible. So every single call gets transcribed, gets put into CRM, proposals get automatically drafted, email follow ups are automatically scheduled. And now like, we're just able to just like take on way more or way faster and still feel like we have room to think. And I think that's something that's just like a level of abundance that people don't really talk about when they're talking about AI.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I just love the, you know, not only do you get to think, but you also have the agent run a cron that will surface interesting patterns and it'll think with you. My favorite thing to do is go into open claw and just say like, what did you learn about me or Y C or my companies in the last week? Like, what was the most surprising thing? And then when you have Fable five, it's like, actually really insightful. It's like, oh, I didn't notice that. That's really interesting. So one of the cool things to go back to the IDMA's analogy is, you know, not only do you in your brain have it all mapped out. I mean, to talk about Parker Conrad and persona again, briefly about Rippling. I mean, obviously Zenefits was this huge, you know, all the way up and then

• 38:48Speaker 01

  all the way down, you know, sort of rise and fall. And it was such a no brainer for me to fund him again, because I knew that he had loaded all of that stuff into his brain. Like, he knew who to sell to, you know, he sure did know the regulatory by then, you know, when that's like seared into your brain at that point. And you could just go directly to that point again. And, you know, the difference between him and you, Brian, is that he still took two years and he went into a cave and he had to write code with a team of five or 10 people, literally in a basement in the mission. I'd go and visit him. After the first six months was like, okay, cool. You haven't launched anything

• 39:32Speaker 01

  yet. No worries. And then like after a year is like, oh yeah, it's been a year like, but the demos are really impressive. And then after two years is like, oh man, like, are we gonna launch? Like, you know, what's gonna happen? And then, of course, he did launch, but he didn't launch like just this one little thing. It wasn't like a wedge. He actually launched the whole package of HR and onboarding in one go with insurance, like done right, you know, without having to scale with people and things like that. And so that was sort of the defining startup that I got to see, you know, sort of before AI really came to the fore in a way. And what is happening now?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Is that instead, imagine, you know, Brian, you're in this idea maze, but you don't clone yourself like once, you don't clone yourself twice. I mean, by my measure with G brain and G stack and just like the code I'm releasing open source, I'm actually on on track to do like four or five million lines of logical, logical lines of code. This is like adjusted for like bloat and things like that. And so it's basically like 400 to 1,000 clones of myself from, you know, from 2026 right now. Right? So not only do you, are you able to sort of like flash forward into

• 40:52Speaker 01

  exactly the right place inside the idea maze, but you know, you have like 500 to 1,000 versions of yourself with like your skills and your taste and all the, you know, imagination and the things that came with you, you know, like Parker still needed to hire five and 10 more people and that was a process. It's like, how do I train people? How do I give them the right things? How do I give them like a few weeks? And then let's do a checkpoint like, you know, did you do what I need or not? And then now it's like, actually, what would take a week or a month or a year, like you literally do in, you know, minutes, hours, or, you know, at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like 20

• 41:34Speaker 01

  to 40,000 lines of code, like what would take a typical engineer an entire year, you do it in a few days. Right? This is like a really, it's not like a little thing. It's actually a really big thing that's happening. So this is why this is the age of the 40 year old solo founder. I mean, you don't have to be 40. You just have to have taste, you know?

• 41:53Speaker 00

  That's right. It takes a while for a startup to catch fire, but I feel like I'm standing outside with the magnifying glass under the blazing sun and I'm able to focus it and I'm able to focus all my experience, background, technical and knowledge of the customer base, knowledge of their buying patterns, knowledge of these cycles and just catch something with fire.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Well, let's fucking go.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Brian, thanks a lot for joining us. For those of you watching, if you actually want more customers, if you actually want to win, if you want to beat your competitors, I don't know why you wouldn't use ploy.ai.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Thanks, guys, for having me.