The Age of the Solo Founder

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 Welcome back to another episode of The Light Ce. Today we're joined by Briant Cho, co founder and CTO of WebFlow, which created one percent of all websites live today Bryant is back in the current YC batch brand new startup called Ploy, which is taking the work he did on Webflow to the next level, Brian Welcome to the light con Thanks for having me. So what is Poy? We're looking at it right now. Kind of looks like uh a lot of the other things you might use vibe code, but it's actually way more awesome than It is a website platform. You can build really incredible, bespoke, award winning websites with Play 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 Rnder ads helpp you find your customers, help you make your website copy, but then also most importantly Help you get found by Chad, GBT, help you get found by Perplexity and Clud. so that businessuses can run their marketing on autopilot. It kind of sounds like hiring the perfect CMO who also is a designer and who can code? 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. Okay, so that sounds like Founder Market Fit a Tple Unicorn making the AI tririple Unicorn for everyone the other ninety eight percent of websites really use this That's right. So what you're seeing is that it's sure like a vipe 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 Bys web design skills. I loaded oldld startup websites. this is fine. This is posterous, does simple blogs by email. You can see the Little the Gmail buttons and things like that. What year did you build this site, Gary? two thousand eight. so you know, if it looks dated it is. dropped it intoploy, and we essentially said, Hey, go and recreate this website employ. and this is what it created. Oh my God. Wow. Wow, gorgeous So this is not two thousand eight posterous, it is truly twenty twenty six posterous. Be careful because now that you've created, I might have to actually wrrite a million lines of code and make it real again 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 play. Yeah. I mean, once you're in theand of doing image genen and Vide 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 and action Jared, I also got yours coming up. We also took Scrib, We went back in the way backack machine Sccared from two thousand seven YouTube forot documents, YouTu documents. I remember fiddling with the CSS to try to make that look right. How did you even host this back in the day? This is before AWS. This is on a physical server Originally physically in my dorm room closet, whichich is how I learnnt that servers are loud. So this is what Ploy redesigned it to. Oh Bringing into twenty six. 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 just like went and just like brought it up to twenty twenty six, right? That's right. So it actually went to the wayayback machines URL, understood the contents and then understood the context of your business. and then it was just like, oh, cool, we're bring this business back. Let's go and redesign it Yeah, it's interesting becausecause it's not merely web design. It's actually understanding, memory, reasoning. uh, really like a marketing company brain That's right. That's right. And acid gener Like I remember like back in the day to like make images like this. you used to hire like a team of designers and it was so slow andexpensive. And like animations, like what you did for Gary Site, that was like impossible impossible. Yeah It's like unaffordable for any startup. Yeah. Oh man, this is hardarges.atic two thousand seven. Yeah, omatic software for small businesses to sell online mostly managing their eBay auctions. And this is what we were desesign it to do much better.. W. So I was able to like build these sort of like product mocks of your product. kind of like interact can also develop your actual website too. It can do everything a model can do. I mean, this is actually pretty interesting. That dashboard is the kind of that's basically the kind of software we'd built. I didn't actually think we had that on the individual website but by top listings and channel map, it's interesting that it Yeah, the controls. Yeah. this is all like really really quite intelligent. Yeah, it's really working backwards from who the customer is, what do they want? what are the jobs to be done? It's kind of impressive. I kind of understand more what Okimatic does with this website. Yeah, No, that's what I mean. It'sal. I actually understand what it does. I have no idea what it was.. Well it's new I think that's actually a deep point. Like it's not just prettier, which obviously it is. obviously the visual design is much better, but actually the content is better too. And we hear about like AI slop, but like if it was AI slop, that wouldn't have worked. Diana remember this one? Oh man, we had such a hard time trying to make our website because we had very complex teag building API for AR. This is back in twenty seventeen for phones We kind of actually hire a designer to make some of these assets, which took a while to took like a good. Jared was my goodroup partner. Mbe it took like, I don't know, two months to get this. 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 it actually did this video. who.. It isn't just a random video. It's actually a video of AR. Like this is basically like the vision of Achure reality, right? Dian being able to have avatars and things just in in your real world, but totally programmatic very easily. I think now I understand what my company does too. Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things about Ploy is that you know we're We got about like twelve percent of the YC batch using Poy 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. 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. L walk people through explaining what it does. 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 And there's just like these somewhat like roote 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 this is a big deal. I mean, it does feel like we're entering this moment where 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 We're at some company. someone is trying to cost cut here and then they're like Okay, we have to let go all these people like some of them actually could do the whole thing. 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 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 Oh man. sorry. now that's My muscles aren't as big Yeah. 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? When it comes to actually getting people to use their product, like they actually sometimes really struggle. L 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 re roll, like everyone has different hit points and different characteristics. you know, someome 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 the 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 two hundred IQ uh, you know, nearly non verbal codexes, they're able to make to 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 and 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. And so that's sort of the AI white pill that I hope you know Plooy 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 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 going to pretend that I'm someone from Cursor. And we spent about I take like seven hundred fifty thousand dollars worth of tokens to create what's called employys slurper. And the Pooy sllurper essentially is a purely deterministic method takeake an existing website And to not just create a design system, but to create all the components The Long Layer website So then subsequently your next generations and stuff like that is going to be on brand. The buttons are all going to look the same. You're not going to have ten 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 So that's what it's right now. That's what it's doing right now. The design slipper is doing its job right now. That's right. And then as it's slurping, it's going to ask you, hey, what's important I'm like, well I think Cursor wants to get found in search and AI. I'm going to tell it that and then I'm want 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 was like, okay, cool, this particular user, they they want to go and improve these things. And in about seventy five seconds, we would have slurped the existing site, recreated all the components, Stir it And You get this 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 probably take a week At least. They're probably going to open up Cad code or cursor to try to do this.. But they'll do a much worse version of it. Here's the moment of truth. Let's see if this is responsive U So. So 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 downown here. Okay, cool. some CSS harbor effects. So these are all things are just like all these details. smile. You need to have 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. 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 is not consistent. It kind of remixes and forgets all the design consistency and that's pretty impressive to get it to do that. It sort of the follow following the Yeah, this is this is where we got, 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 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 Let's see. So say I'm cursor, I releasase 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 evenven better. So we have integrations with like fifty 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 Okay, this looks like a company brain for your marketing then. Exactly. 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 home page. I mean, I'd probably do that the same thing too. It's like your home page 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. It really reminds me of rippling in the ear days, which would sound odd, but I remember like the very first thing Parker built was an offer letter generator. And I remember see somepl. Yeah. but is the only insight you get as like a second time founder? at that time I was like You're pitching this really big vision but like you're starting with like an offer letter generator. But 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 You're like literally your company, app store, OS. And if you think about the journey of a new employee, the very first step with a new employee is to get an offer letter. That's where like everything else starts. very first first thing thing with the website is the homepage. Yeah, and then everything else on. 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 better say what it is. 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 U 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 They 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 on this call to action button and now I can do something with it. I think what's pretty cool is basically you're taking this very esoteric niche thing that open clw users know about with a dream cycle. when it iterates and improve the skills, which I think only people that are super long tail and an open clw, which I don't think the rest of the world knows You're doing that in a for everyone else. Doing it for businesses because 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 So I wired this up to Y comombinators, Google Analytics and Google seearch cononsole 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 Oh 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 Claudcode to do it, but like ClaudCode doesn't know how to connect any of those things out of the box. it would have to figure out the APIs and how to like suck in all the data and it doesn't really know how to do SAO optimization. So like it'd been so much prompting and work to get that same result. Yeah. I think that's stuff that I'm surprised by because I think The best companies that I've met NYC, they are on the right side of model development. And what these models need is with a little bit of steering withith 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. How did you imbue it with like an understanding of like how to market websites, how to design websites. Are there some ways to do like distilled lessons from Webflow? This is stuff we geek out about pl' we're in an A and now. So yeah, we're in the ads mode. Yeah' behind the scenes. The look book. So what you're looking at is our curation 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, open AIs, chat GPT images But then we've created thousand five hundred Prompts four 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 So if you go and work with the agency of Freelance Web desesigner Some of the best might come up with something incredibly bespokeen 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 basasically like the anti slop. It looks like given data that you have, the context you give the agents, it actually you know, sort of overwhelms their elections, you know, 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. I mean, in web design, there's so many AI tells Um I would like to say that Bloy eliminates all of them, but you can't necessarily eliminate all of it with all the promptps and guardrails and steering. However, we have spent a lot of time to make sure that the sort of essence of the human individuals and like the business' bespoke sort of representation, their brand 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 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 want to be able to deliver for digital marketing Why digital marketing like You could have done like factories for anything. why is this the thing you decided to build the factory for? 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, this 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 dozens of years. My approach is that whereere 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 You're not going to have like massive companies anymore that are dominating I think with know that whereere society is moving is I actually think like entrepreneurship might become way more important than it has been Entrepreneship, especially if you're 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 This is like thirteen years after your prior company, Webflow. You were my group partner? 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. Yeah. So I mean, it was incredibly novel at the time But you know, we created this visual interface over HML,SS 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 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 he was like, started to stress me out. We're all sweating. He doesn't know CSS. No He knows HTML tags any, 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. Yeah. And like for someone that's like as technical as PG. We thought that it was like, o, he would be able to get it. I mean you built hacker news.'s. So this was twenty thirteen What was the market for website builders like then? I think it was pretty competitive by that point. 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 cofounder, 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, Post the screen craft That really helped. Maybe you go into more detail. 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 ChGBT launched and there was just like green fuld 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 competitive and how do you know that you have like an edge that's worth digging into for me this time around, it's almost opposite of wetflow At Webflow, we focused on one persona That persona was this like freelance web designer, you know, just like, there's probably only fifty thousand of them, honestly. With Plooy You know, weird 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 boiled ocean. you can do this before, but now you can do it and you can do it too just sort of an award winning degree. You know, I've been in tech since two thousand six, like twenty years And, you know When clloud 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 years ago, there's this new primitive of intelligence. It's just like so irresistible to not build something in this space. How has that changed the way that you've built I have sort like the first three months or so of Ploy being compared to the first three months of webflow To be honest, when we were YC twenty thirteen, we worked a lot and we also covered so much product in those three months, manually coding. likeike what is this? L I have to like type stuff So I would say that covered a lot of functionality just coding, but now It's obviously a different League everyone can code U 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 get more tests than you ever wanted. You're probably going 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 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. I'm curious how that factored into buildildingploy. Like you've been doing website design the old fashioned way since twenty twelve. You've probably watched a million people use Webflow to design a website Can you like remember decisions you made and how you decide employ that maybe somebody who didn't have that experience would haveve like done it that way. 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 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. It's super bold. and you just send it off and now you can just have this designer that's imbued in the product that just sort of absorbs your intention and translates it into incredible outputs. Let's play it out a little bit. The models are going to get I don't know. know unbelievably better from here and then Where does that leaf ploy? Like you know, how good is it going to get from here? What's the future of the web? I can't predict the future. However, I can predict that There will be tons of businesses out there that are going to want Cionated 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 a lot of different things generalurpose They're 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. I guess there's an interesting competitive play here, like ically if ploy becomes really, really good, you know, one of the things you do, for instance is Everyone's on the internet' talking about loops You have basically a marketing and your SEO slash 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 agents see it, agents want to use it peopleople see it they click on it, they want to use it. In the future, like if you're not using things like ploy than your competitors will win. So there is like a competitive dynamic to it, which has already happened for coding tools, for instance, is like sort of unconscionable in twenty twenty six to not be using clawed code or codex or cursor, you know just would you wouldn't be able to stay on top of what's going on I happen to think that software engineers or one of like the worst customers to sell to. And they can change tools on a whim. somethingomet 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 Iuit 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 it. 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 I think there's a world which I think it is true where There's still a lot of u 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 twenty years of plus experience that you have to really the models to focus. It is almost like you're building a very special hardness. We talk about our hardness as this being this thin layer to getting the models to do the right outcome and Anthropic did it wonderfully for clock code. It took the world by storm and within which is 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. Yeah. I mean, you're selling skills, but you're also selling code and it's Fat skkills Fat code 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 go use a postgres hosted postgres server B 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 Coud 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. Has anyone asked you yet for employ, but um, make it really, really easy for agents to use a given product, likeike do you have a bunch of lookbook stuff around proper LMs. txtT 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 In forge in the current YC batch is like sort of AWS agent phone agent mail, like resnd if the agents choose you, that's actually big and they're going to win. 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 in this way, I was just like I never even thought about 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 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 exciting things is being able to let an agent sign up for play. cool. So that works. Working on it. working on it. So then you know, just wire it up to your cllaw and like if Claw needs to go and build a really awesome site ploy is one of the places where Hopefully it can go Yeah Are you going to do MCP or how are you going to implement it I think we're going to 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 employ, I think the CLI is going to be we do it. CLI seems to be becoming the right UX for agents. This is why I think going back to Clockc versus Cursor. ended up doing so well It is just so much more freedom being fully on the command line. same thing with I mean, AsI characters, they're really good I'm curious to get your perspective as one of the more experienced founders in the batch. again, we certainly saw Chasa Beauty launch, there was a heavy snap towards young founders sort of like intense rise of the young founders because there's only young founders that are actually while using the technology and building with the tools. It seems like it's either coming back towards the midle or extending further in the other direction.mot sure. What's your take on it from being in the batch and then T 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 like I don't I've got you. 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 experienced founders adopt a little bit more of that bravada and that risk appetite But then also for the earlier founders, should maybe an appreciation for how Some things you have to get right and not to bring it back to playoy again, but You can't create hundred websites and then expect Google to think that, hey, you're an authoritative source. 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, makeake sure you're providing value in the world And then hopefully people will notice and you'll succeed. 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 You just go directly to the part of the ideMAs 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? hundredundreds 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 could actually do both of these things. I think the keyword there was clone yourself. Yeah I have always lived in scarcity, scarcity of time, scarcity of my own capacity, mental and physical. 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. Can you talk about any of 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. 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 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 I mean, I just love the You know, not only do you get to think, but you also have the agent runickron that will surface interesting patterns and it'll think with you. My favorite thing to do is go into openpenCw and just say like, what did you learn about me or YC or my companies in the last week? like 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 Prersana again briefly about rippling. I mean, obviously Zenefits was this huge you all the way up and then all the way down, you know sort of rise and fall h 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. likeike he knew who to sell to he sure didn't 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 u himim and you, Briant, 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 ten people, literally in a basement in the mission. I'd go and visit him. After the first six months, I 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. But the demos are really impressive. And then after two years it was like, oh man, Are we going to launch like, you know, what's going to happen? And then of course he did launch, but he didn't launch like 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 is that inststead imagine, you know, Briant, you're in this ideM maze You don't clone yourself like once. You don't clone yourself twice U 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 four hundred to a thousand lo of myself from, you know, from twenty twenty six right now, right? So not only Do you are you able to sort of like Fash forward into exactly the right place inside the IDMAs but, um, You know, you have like five hundred to a thousand 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 ten 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? you literally do in you know, minutes, hours or, you know at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like twenty to forty thousand 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 forty year old solo founder. I mean, you don't have to be forty. You just have to have taste, you know. 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 Well, let's fucking go Briant, 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. Thanks guys for having me