The Age Of The 40-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Here

1. 0:00 – 0:38

   What Experience Gives You in the Age of AI

   1. BCBryant Chou0:00

      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, you know, 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 unmet opportunity for these business owners, for these founders, and I'm really just here to make it easier for them to tap into it.

2. 0:38 – 1:22

   Meet Bryant Chou, Co-Founder of Webflow

   1. GTGarry Tan0:38

      [upbeat music] Welcome back to another episode of The Lightcone. 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 Lightcone.

   2. BCBryant Chou1:07

      Thanks for having me.

   3. GTGarry Tan1:08

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

   4. BCBryant Chou1:19

      It is a website platform. You can build

3. 1:22 – 2:47

   His New Startup Ploy

   1. BCBryant Chou1:22

      really incredible, bespoke, award-winning websites with Ploy, but it doesn't just stop there. The premise is, 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.

   2. GTGarry Tan1:53

      Kinda sounds like hiring the perfect CMO who al- also is a designer and who can code. [laughs]

   3. BCBryant Chou1:59

      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 Ploy.

   4. GTGarry Tan2:11

      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.

   5. BCBryant Chou2:21

      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.

   6. GTGarry Tan2:45

      Oh. [laughs]

   7. SPSpeaker2:45

      Yeah, so this is mine. This is Posterous.

4. 2:47 – 3:27

   Rebuilding the Posterous website From 2008

   1. SPSpeaker2:47

      Does simple blogs by email. You can see the little, uh, the Gmail buttons and things like that.

   2. BCBryant Chou2:52

      What year did you build this site, Garry?

   3. GTGarry Tan2:54

      This is 2008, so you know, if it looks dated, it is.

   4. BCBryant Chou2:57

      So we dropped it into Ploy, and we essentially said, "Hey, go and recreate this website in Ploy," and this is what it created.

   5. GTGarry Tan3:05

      Oh my God.

   6. SPSpeaker3:06

      Wow.

   7. BCBryant Chou3:06

      Wow.

   8. GTGarry Tan3:06

      That's gorgeous.

   9. SPSpeaker3:07

      [laughs]

   10. GTGarry Tan3:08

       So this is, uh, not 2008 Posterous. It is, uh, truly 2026 Posterous. Be careful because now that you've created, I might have to actually write a million lines of code and make it real again.

   11. BCBryant Chou3:19

       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 s- embedded into

5. 3:27 – 5:04

   Rebuilding the Scribd website From 2007

   1. BCBryant Chou3:27

      Ploy.

   2. GTGarry Tan3:27

      Yeah, I mean, once you're in the land of, um, 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. BCBryant Chou3:44

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

   4. SPSpeaker3:50

      Scribd from 2007.

   5. BCBryant Chou3:52

      YouTube for documents. [laughs]

   6. SPSpeaker3:54

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

   7. BCBryant Chou3:59

      How did you even host this back in the day?

   8. SPSpeaker4:01

      This was before AWS. This was on a physical server, originally physically in my dorm room closet-

   9. BCBryant Chou4:06

      Oh

   10. SPSpeaker4:06

       ... which is how I learnt that servers are loud.

   11. BCBryant Chou4:08

       So this is what Ploy redesigned it to.

   12. SPSpeaker4:11

       Ooh.

   13. GTGarry Tan4:13

       Wow.

   14. SPSpeaker4:13

       Bring it to 2026.

   15. BCBryant Chou4:14

       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 just, like, went and just, like, brought it up to 2026, right?

   16. SPSpeaker4:22

       That's right. So it actually went to the WayBack Machine's 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."

   17. GTGarry Tan4:35

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

   18. BCBryant Chou4:43

       That's right. That's right.

   19. SPSpeaker4:44

       And asset generation. Like, I remember, like, back in the day, to, like, make images like this, you had to hire, like, a team of designers, and it was so slow and expensive. And, like, animations, like what you did for Garry's site, that was, like-

   20. GTGarry Tan4:56

       Impossible

   21. SPSpeaker4:57

       ... like impossible.

   22. GTGarry Tan4:57

       Yeah.

   23. SPSpeaker4:57

       Yeah. Like, unaffordable for any startup.

   24. GTGarry Tan4:59

       Yep. Oh man, this is Harj's. [laughs]

   25. BCBryant Chou5:01

       This is Auctomatic from 2007.

6. 5:04 – 6:19

   Rebuilding the Auctomatic website From 2007

   1. BCBryant Chou5:04

      Yeah. Auctomatic was software for small businesses to sell online-

   2. GTGarry Tan5:08

      Yeah

   3. BCBryant Chou5:08

      ... mostly managing their eBay auctions. And this is what we redesigned it to.

   4. SPSpeaker5:12

      This is much better.

   5. GTGarry Tan5:12

      Very nice.

   6. SPSpeaker5:13

      Yeah. [laughs]

   7. GTGarry Tan5:14

      Wow.

   8. SPSpeaker5:14

      Wow.

   9. BCBryant Chou5:14

      So it's able to, like, build these sort of, like, p- product mocks of, of your product.

   10. GTGarry Tan5:19

       Okay.

   11. BCBryant Chou5:20

       It's kind of, like, interactive and stuff.

   12. GTGarry Tan5:22

       So Ploy can also, uh, develop your actual website too. [laughs]

   13. BCBryant Chou5:24

       It, it can do everything a model can do.

   14. GTGarry Tan5:26

       Yeah.

   15. SPSpeaker5:26

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

   16. GTGarry Tan5:42

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

   17. SPSpeaker5:48

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

   18. BCBryant Chou5:52

       Yeah. Yeah, no, that's what I mean. It's better [laughs] it's better than what we had.

   19. SPSpeaker5:55

       I have no idea.

   20. GTGarry Tan5:55

       I actually understand what it does. [laughs]

   21. SPSpeaker5:57

       I had no idea what it was. [laughs] I said, "What's this?"

   22. BCBryant Chou5:59

       Yeah. Well, it, it's-

   23. SPSpeaker6:00

       [laughs]

   24. BCBryant Chou6:00

       No, I, I, I think that's actually a deep point. Like, it's not just prettier, which obviously it is. Like, the obviously, like, the visual de- design is much better, but actually the content is better too, and we always hear-

   25. SPSpeaker6:11

       That was the hard part

   26. BCBryant Chou6:11

       ... hear, hear about, like, AI slop, but, like, if it was AI slop, that wouldn't have worked. Diana, remember this one?

   27. SPSpeaker6:16

       Oh, man. We had such a hard time

7. 6:19 – 7:11

   Rebuilding the Escher Reality website From 2017

   1. SPSpeaker6:19

      trying to make our website because we had very complex tech building.

   2. DHDiana Hu6:22

      API for AR, this is back in 2017, for phones. We kinda actually hired a designer to make some of these assets, which took a while to... Took, like, a good... Jared was my group partner. We took, like, I don't know, two months to get this.

   3. BCBryant Chou6:36

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

   4. DHDiana Hu6:46

      Oh my God

   5. BCBryant Chou6:47

      ... it actually created this video.

   6. DHDiana Hu6:49

      Whoa.

   7. GTGarry Tan6:49

      Whoa.

   8. DHDiana Hu6:49

      That's so cool.

   9. GTGarry Tan6:50

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

   10. DHDiana Hu6:56

       Yeah. [laughs]

   11. GTGarry Tan6:56

       It's... Yeah.

   12. BCBryant Chou6:56

       Right.

   13. GTGarry Tan6:56

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

   14. DHDiana Hu7:04

       I think now I understand what my company does too. [laughs]

   15. GTGarry Tan7:07

       [laughs]

   16. BCBryant Chou7:08

       Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things about Ploy is that, you

8. 7:11 – 8:26

   12% of the YC Batch Uses Ploy

   1. BCBryant Chou7:11

      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.

   2. JFJared Friedman7:25

      This actually used to be a big part of office hours way back in the day.

   3. BCBryant Chou7:28

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JFJared Friedman7:28

      And 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.

   5. BCBryant Chou7:34

      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 wanna 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.

   6. GTGarry Tan8:09

      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, a doomer AI scenario where people think, like, oh, there's not gonna 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

9. 8:26 – 10:05

   The D&D Theory of Founder Skills

   1. GTGarry Tan8:26

      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, um, a little bit older, like, you know, it's actually kinda hard to fill in your brain with, like, you know, you might not be like Bryant, like a, a, you know, triple threat, [laughs] right? Like, you're like the Bo Jackson of, uh... [laughs]

   2. BCBryant Chou8:52

      Oh, man. [laughs]

   3. GTGarry Tan8:53

      Yeah, sorry. Now that's a very-

   4. BCBryant Chou8:53

      My muscles aren't as big.

   5. GTGarry Tan8:54

      Yeah. [laughs]

   6. BCBryant Chou8:56

      [laughs]

   7. GTGarry Tan8:56

      I mean, this is actually one of the great equalizers. Like, the founders in the past who, uh, did it the best, I mean, they sort of had to be super deep in all of these different ways, uh, and then now we're entering this other moment. How often is it that we meet founders who are incredibly great technologists, but when, when it comes to actually getting people to use their product, like, they actually sometimes really struggle? Like, I think, um, human beings, uh, to me resemble sort of, uh... We, I, we started playing Dungeons & Dragons with my sons.

   8. DHDiana Hu9:25

      Hmm.

   9. BCBryant Chou9:26

      Hmm.

   10. GTGarry Tan9:26

       And so, you know, when you'd have to do, like, the re-roll, 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, um, extends to capability of founders. Interestingly, like, we're sort of entering this other moment where because Ploy exists, you know, you might have someone who's, like, 200 IQ, uh, you know, nearly non-verbal, like Codex is. 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

10. 10:05 – 10:50

    Democratizing Marketing and Growth

    1. GTGarry Tan10:05

       those other things. But now that person could actually come into Ploy, [laughs] and, um, 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, uh, what, you know, markets and capitalism might be, you know? It's more access to it and then more alternatives, 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, uh, this blast from the past and then brought into the future. Can we see what it actually looks like? Let, let's actually use Ploy.

    2. BCBryant Chou10:39

       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.

11. 10:50 – 13:21

    Live Demo: The Design Slurper

    1. BCBryant Chou10:50

       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.

    2. DHDiana Hu11:04

       Hmm.

    3. BCBryant Chou11:04

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

    4. GTGarry Tan11:36

       So that's what it's doing right now. This is the sl-

    5. BCBryant Chou11:37

       That's what it's doing right now

    6. GTGarry Tan11:38

       ... the, the design slurper is doing its job right now.

    7. BCBryant Chou11:40

       That's right. And then as it's slurping, it's gonna ask you, "Hey, what's important?" And I'm gonna like, "Well, I think Cursor wants to get found in search in AI." I'm gonna tell it that, and then I'm going to turn more visitors into customers. I hit that, and now it's gonna imbue it into its memory. It's gonna understand. It's like, okay, cool, this particular user, they, they wanna 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.

    8. GTGarry Tan12:18

       And so it's, it's w- 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 would probably take a week. At least

    9. BCBryant Chou12:29

       They're probably gonna open up Cloud Code or Cursor to try to do this

    10. GTGarry Tan12:33

        Yeah, but they'll do a much worse version of it

    11. BCBryant Chou12:35

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

    12. GTGarry Tan12:40

        Boom.

    13. BCBryant Chou12:41

        Boom.

    14. DHDiana Hu12:41

        Ooh.

    15. BCBryant Chou12:43

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

    16. GTGarry Tan12:58

        Last mile

    17. BCBryant Chou12:59

        ... you need to have opinion about how websites should be made in order to do this. But this isn't the point, right? It's- 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 Ploy really shines.

    18. DHDiana Hu13:15

        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

12. 13:21 – 14:26

    Your Website Should Work for You While You Sleep

    1. DHDiana Hu13:21

       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, like, sort of the prompt following, following the-

    2. BCBryant Chou13:35

       Yeah, this is, this is where we're at-

    3. DHDiana Hu13:37

       ... was not prompted

    4. BCBryant Chou13:37

       ... 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.

    5. GTGarry Tan14:04

       Let's see. So say I'm Cursor, I released Composer as a new type of model. Can I just come and deploy and s- you know, paste in screenshots and even my, like, PM spec, and you can make the product page for me?

    6. BCBryant Chou14:17

       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

13. 14:26 – 17:27

    Integrations, Analytics, and the Marketing Brain

    1. BCBryant Chou14:26

       tools, CRM, spreadsheets. It can even draft emails on your behalf based off of who's coming to your website.

    2. GTGarry Tan14:33

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

    3. BCBryant Chou14:36

       Exactly.

    4. GTGarry Tan14:36

       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 would 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 s- almost, like, the source of truth for how you discuss what you're building.

    5. JFJared Friedman14:57

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

    6. GTGarry Tan15:06

       Gotta start someplace

    7. JFJared Friedman15:06

       Yeah, but, like, it's the only insight you get as, 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.

    8. GTGarry Tan15:14

       Yeah.

    9. JFJared Friedman15:14

       But it was like-

    10. GTGarry Tan15:14

        Everyone has offer letters. Everyone's hiring people, so, but then-

    11. JFJared Friedman15:18

        Yeah

    12. GTGarry Tan15:18

        ... 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.

    13. SPSpeaker15:26

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

    14. GTGarry Tan15:32

        Yeah

    15. SPSpeaker15:32

        ... every, every- everything else starts, yeah.

    16. JFJared Friedman15:33

        Well, the very first-

    17. SPSpeaker15:34

        First thing-

    18. JFJared Friedman15:34

        ... big game

    19. SPSpeaker15:34

        ... the thing with the website is-

    20. JFJared Friedman15:36

        Yeah

    21. SPSpeaker15:36

        ... the homepage, yeah, and then everything else unfurls from there.

    22. GTGarry Tan15:38

        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.

    23. BCBryant Chou15:49

        Yeah. So it, it can not only just integrate to your GitHub, but your entire systems of record. But 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 Go- 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, no, Ploy can literally just tell you everything out of the box, right? 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? Just like, oh, wow, someone from this company clicked on this call to action button, and now I can do something with it.

    24. DHDiana Hu16:47

        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 the super long tail and in OpenClaw, which I don't think the rest of the world knows. You're doing that in a, for everyone else.

    25. BCBryant Chou17:05

        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 unmet opportunity for these business owners, for these founders, and I'm really just here to make it easier for them to tap into it.

    26. SPSpeaker17:22

        So I wired this up to Y Combinator's Google Analytics and Google Search Console

14. 17:27 – 20:05

    Ploy's Anti-Slop Engine: 3,500 Curated Design Prompts

    1. SPSpeaker17:27

       and pulled in all the data. And what was cool is it, 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've been so much prompting and work to get that same result.

    2. BCBryant Chou17:57

       Yeah. I, I think that's stuff that I'm surprised by because I think the best companies that I've met in YC, 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.

    3. SPSpeaker18:23

       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?

    4. BCBryant Chou18:32

       This is stuff we geek out about at Ploy. I just-

    5. SPSpeaker18:36

       Okay, so we're in, we're in admin now. This is behind the scenes mode.

    6. BCBryant Chou18:37

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

    7. GTGarry Tan18:39

       Oh, wow

    8. BCBryant Chou18:39

       ... behind the scenes.

    9. GTGarry Tan18:40

       The look book.

    10. BCBryant Chou18:40

        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 gonna get a website that looks exactly like this when you're using Ploy. What you're gonna get is you're gonna 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, a freelance web designer, 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."

    11. GTGarry Tan19:43

        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, you know, sort of overwhelms their, um, you know, inbuilt predilections. You know, you can... One of the examples is like for some reason the, the models really love that, um, you know, left-hand rule-

    12. BCBryant Chou20:04

        Yeah

    13. GTGarry Tan20:04

        ... with the rounded

15. 20:05 – 22:35

    The Andy Warhol Theory of AI

    1. GTGarry Tan20:05

       corners.

    2. BCBryant Chou20:06

       I mean, in web design, there's so many AI tells. Um, I would like to say that Ploy eliminates all of them, but you can't necessarily eli- 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 business' bespoke sort of representation, their brand can, can be reflected in Ploy 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 the factories for human creativity, and that's essentially what I wanna be able to deliver for digital marketing.

    3. GTGarry Tan21:01

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

    4. BCBryant Chou21:09

       I think that the web is still one of the most transformational technologies. Um, 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 tenet. 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 gonna be way more small business in the future. You're not gonna have like massive companies anymore that are dominating. I think-

    5. GTGarry Tan21:55

       We love that. [laughs]

    6. BCBryant Chou21:56

       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.

    7. GTGarry Tan22:13

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

    8. BCBryant Chou22:17

       You were my group partner, remember?

    9. GTGarry Tan22:19

       Yeah. 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.

    10. BCBryant Chou22:31

        Yeah. So I mean, it was incredibly novel at

16. 22:35 – 24:26

    Webflow Origin Story

    1. BCBryant Chou22:35

       the time, but you know, we created this visual interface over HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it was sort of, you know, the first no-code application that was out there. Powers, you know, a 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, uh, I, 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 were all sweating.

    2. GTGarry Tan23:05

       He doesn't know CSS.

    3. BCBryant Chou23:06

       Not at all.

    4. GTGarry Tan23:06

       He knows HTML tags.

    5. BCBryant Chou23:08

       Yeah.

    6. GTGarry Tan23:08

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

    7. BCBryant Chou23:16

       Tables and... Yeah, and like for someone that's like a- as technical as PG, we thought that, it was like, "Oh, he would be able to get it."

    8. GTGarry Tan23:22

       Yeah.

    9. BCBryant Chou23:22

       I mean, he built Hacker News.

    10. GTGarry Tan23:23

        Yeah.

    11. BCBryant Chou23:24

        Right?

    12. JFJared Friedman23:24

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

    13. BCBryant Chou23:30

        It was extremely competitive. Um, I could probably... I remember there was probably eight of them, four of them I still remember, and then even in our history, there were 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-founders Sergi 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.

    14. JFJared Friedman24:04

        Maybe go into more detail, like how did you come up with the original idea? And I, I think the reason it's interesting is it feels like from our perspective in the batches, we... ChatGPT 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 the confidence to enter a space that's

17. 24:26 – 26:01

    Building in a Competitive Market Then vs. Now

    1. JFJared Friedman24:26

       competitive, and how do you know that you have like a, an edge that's worth digging into?

    2. BCBryant Chou24:30

       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 type of product.

    3. GTGarry Tan25:01

       Yeah, you couldn't do this before, but now you can do it.

    4. BCBryant Chou25:03

       Yeah.

    5. GTGarry Tan25:03

       And you can do it to just sort of a award-winning degree.

    6. BCBryant Chou25:07

       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 couple years ago, there's this new primitive of intelligence. It was just, like, so irresistible to not build something in this space.

    7. SPSpeaker25:31

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

    8. BCBryant Chou25:39

       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. Um,

18. 26:01 – 27:17

    First Three Months: Webflow 2013 vs. Ploy 2025

    1. BCBryant Chou26:01

       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 gonna get more tests than you ever wanted. You're probably gonna get way more code coverage, way more sort of functionality. But the thing that hasn't changed is what to focus on and how to f- 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.

    2. SPSpeaker26:38

       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've, like, not done it that way?

    3. BCBryant Chou26:55

       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 I s- we stressed a lot about how to, like, bring some of that visual tooling

19. 27:17 – 28:51

    What Experience Teaches You That Models Can't

    1. BCBryant Chou27:17

       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's 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, 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.

    2. GTGarry Tan27:55

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

    3. BCBryant Chou28:07

       I can't predict the future. However, I can predict that there will be tons of businesses out there that are gonna 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.

    4. GTGarry Tan28:30

       They're general purpose.

    5. BCBryant Chou28:30

       They're general purpose. And I think there's just going to be a, 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.

    6. GTGarry Tan28:49

       I guess there's an interesting,

20. 28:51 – 30:32

    Will Better Models Kill Products Like Ploy?

    1. GTGarry Tan28:51

       um, competitive play here. Like, basically, if Ploy becomes really, really good, you know, one of the things you do, for instance, is, um, everyone's ta- on the internet is talking about loops. But, you know, you have basically a marketing and, you know, SEO/GEO 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, uh, agents see it. Agents wanna use it. Uh, people see it. You know, they click on it. They wanna 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. Like, sort of unconscionable in, uh, 2026 to not be using CloudCode or Codex or Cursor. You know, just you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to stay on top of what's going on.

    2. BCBryant Chou29:48

       I happen to think that software engineers are one of, like, the worst customers to, to sell to. [chuckles]

    3. GTGarry Tan29:54

       Mm-hmm.

    4. BCBryant Chou29:55

       And they, they can change tools on a whim. Something new comes out over here, they'll adopt it. So I, I see it as, like, almost this, this market that's always just incredibly competitive, but also, like, lowest common denominator. It's like who's gonna provide a engineer the most tokens and, 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.

21. 30:32 – 33:01

    The Competitive Moat of Purpose-Built AI

    1. BCBryant Chou30:32

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

    2. DHDiana Hu30:48

       I think there's a world, which I think it is true, where there's still a lot of, um That you can value, that you can build on top of the models because these are so good, and I think the li- limiting factor is knowing how to prompt them and sort of imbuing all these 20 years of 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 our harnesses 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. So you're kind of doing that for website creator creation, where you have to-

    3. GTGarry Tan31:32

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

    4. BCBryant Chou31:38

       Some of these foundational primitives. So for example, you're getting a database out of a box that is very opinionated f- 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, or if you're a CMO, you don't wanna worry about that. You're not gonna go and stitch together this MCP and have your CloudCode instance, and then make sure it's running all the time. These are just, to your point, Diana, the harnesses that we're gonna make sure is always on, always working for you, and ultimately it's gonna drive you outcomes without y- lo- you losing sleep over it.

    5. GTGarry Tan32:17

       Has anyone asked you yet for, um, Ploy, but, um, make it really, really easy for agents to use a given product? Like, do you have a bunch of lookbook stuff around proper LMS.txt and things like that? I mean, in the YC batch, we're seeing this wave of forget. It's like code.storage, for instance. It's doing super well, right? And then Insforge in the current YC batch, um, is like sort of AWS, agent phone, agent mail, like Resend. If the agents choose you, that's actually big, and you're gonna win.

    6. BCBryant Chou32:48

       That is huge. Yeah, that is huge, and I think that's one of the biggest benefits of doing YC again, is that I'm living two years into the future, like right now here at YC, and just being able to see these founders think

22. 33:01 – 35:02

    Agents as Customers: CLI, MCP, and AEO

    1. BCBryant Chou33:01

       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 in Ploy to make sure that it's AEO. You get FAQ sections, you get structured sort of schema markups, bots are crawling it, connections to all the things. But I think one of the most in- exciting things is being able to let an agent sign up for Ploy. Let an agent-

    2. GTGarry Tan33:25

       Oh, cool. So that works

    3. BCBryant Chou33:26

       ... working on it.

    4. GTGarry Tan33:26

       Okay.

    5. BCBryant Chou33:27

       Working on it. Um, 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.

    6. GTGarry Tan33:37

       Yeah. Are you gonna do MCP, or how are you gonna implement it?

    7. BCBryant Chou33:40

       I think we're gonna do a CLI with Skills. So an MCP would be really good if we had more constrained sort of things. However, I think with the number of things that you can do in Ploy, I think the CLI is gonna be the way we, we do it.

    8. DHDiana Hu33:56

       CLI seems to be becoming the, the right UX for agents. This is why I think going back to Clockcode versus Cursor ended up doing so well. It just, it's just so much more freedom being fully on the command line. Same, same thing with OpenClaw.

    9. BCBryant Chou34:13

       I mean, ASCII characters, they're really good. [laughs]

    10. JFJared Friedman34:18

        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 found- it was sort of, like, intense rise of the young founders because it was only young founders that are actually, were using the technology and building with the tools. Um, uh, it seems like it's either coming back towards the middle, but extending further in the other direction. I'm not sure. What's your take on it from being in the batch? And then, uh, to the extent 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, uh, like, "I don't know. I, I've got you"?

    11. BCBryant Chou34:51

        I do think as an experienced founder, there's just so many lived experiences you've had. Um, there's so much appreciation for how something gets done,

23. 35:02 – 36:36

    Young Founders vs. Experienced Founders

    1. BCBryant Chou35:02

       and sometimes it actually can hold a founder back, where it's 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-

    2. JFJared Friedman35:16

       Mm-hmm

    3. BCBryant Chou35:17

       ... and that risk appetite. But then also for the earlier founders 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 100 websites and then expect Google to think that, hey, you're an authoritative s- source.

    4. JFJared Friedman35:36

       Mm.

    5. BCBryant Chou35:37

       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.

    6. GTGarry Tan35:51

       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, um, I like the idea of 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?

    7. BCBryant Chou36:15

       Um, hundreds.

    8. GTGarry Tan36:16

       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, uh, once in a while there's, like, this offshoot that comes off,

24. 36:36 – 42:37

    The Idea Maze and Cloning Yourself With AI

    1. GTGarry Tan36:36

       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 could actually do both of these things.

    2. BCBryant Chou36:52

       I think the key word there was clone yourself.

    3. GTGarry Tan36:54

       Yeah.

    4. BCBryant Chou36:55

       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 a company as well. And that's just like a completely different world.

    5. GTGarry Tan37:20

       Can you talk about any of them?

    6. BCBryant Chou37:22

       I mean, I think we're doing the stuff that everyone else in YC is doing, right? Making sure everything is recorded, making sure that your cloud code, you know, can access all of this, um, 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 in the 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 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.

    7. GTGarry Tan38:04

       I mean, I just love the, you know, not only do you get to think, but, um, you also have the agent run a cron that will, uh, surface interesting patterns, and it'll think with you. My favorite thing to do is go into OpenClon and just say, like, "What did you learn about me or YC or my companies in the last week?" Like, "What is the most surprising thing?" And then when you have Fable 5, it's like actually really insightful. And it's like, "Oh, I didn't notice that. That's really interesting." So one of the cool things, um, to go back to the Idea Maze analogy is, um, you know, not only do you in your brain have it all mapped out, I mean, to talk about Parker Conrad and Prasanna again briefly about Rippling. I mean, obviously, Zenefits was this huge, um, you know, all the way up and then all the way down, you know, sort of rise and fall. Uh, 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, uh, who to sell to, you know, uh, 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, uh, him and you, Bryant, is that, uh, 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, it was like, "Okay, cool. You haven't launched anything yet. No worries." And then like after a year, it was like, "Oh yeah, it's been a year, like, but the demos are really impressive." And then after two years, it's 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, uh, you know, sort of before AI really came to the fore in a way. And what is happening now is that, uh, instead imagine, you know, Bryant, you're in this Idea Maze, but you don't clone yourself like once. You don't clone yourself twice. Uh, I mean, by my measure with GBrain and GStack 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-

    8. BCBryant Chou40:33

       [laughs] That's crazy

    9. GTGarry Tan40:34

       ... uh, 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, of, from 2026 right now, right? So not only do you, are you able to sort of like flash forward into exactly the right place inside the Idea Maze, but, um, 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, y- at, at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like 20 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, uh, solo founder. I mean, you don't have to be 40. You just have to have taste, you know?

    10. BCBryant Chou41:53

        That's right. It takes a while for a startup to catch fire, but I feel like I'm standing outside with a 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.

    11. GTGarry Tan42:13

        Well, let's fucking go. [laughs]

    12. BCBryant Chou42:15

        [laughs] Love it.

    13. GTGarry Tan42:16

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

    14. BCBryant Chou42:29

        Thanks, guys, for having me. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 42:42