Today I walk with Bryant Chou, co-founder of Webflow and founder of Ploy. Bryant is the former CTO of Webflow, the platform behind roughly one in every hundred websites, built its growth and marketing teams, and went back through Y Combinator 13 years after his first batch, and now he's building Ploy, an AI platform that turns your website into your hardest working employee. He gets into deciding to leave Webflow in a single day, and the grandfather whose last question to him was how many people worked at his company.
We get into:
- Why he left Webflow after 13 years to start over solo at 40, and why he decided in a single day
- Being "scared s***less" of 20-year-old founders, and why he said yes when Garry Tan asked him to do YC again
- Why building a company in 2026 looks nothing like 2013, when he, Vlad, and Sergey had to cover every skill themselves
- Ploy's bet on the 99% of websites that aren't on Webflow
- His grandfather's escape from a wanted list in Taiwan, and the "keep going" that followed him through 800 employees
so much more!
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(
00:00) Bryant Chou, Co-Founder of Webflow & Founder of Ploy
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01:46) What running Webflow's marketing team taught a CTO
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03:05) "Slurping" your website into a brand design system
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07:35) Deciding to leave Webflow in a single day
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11:08) Going after the 99% of websites not on Webflow
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12:34) Turning your website into your hardest working employee
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13:41) Scared of 20-year-old founders and doing YC again
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14:30) Building a startup in 2013 VS 2026
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18:04) Why a 40-year-old third-time founder went back to YC
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20:16) Demoing Ploy cold after his son's baseball game
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24:31) His grandfather's escape from a wanted list in Taiwan
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35:41) 996, FOMO, and the San Francisco rat race
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40:10) Relearning founder mode
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50:58) Running three teams through Covid with two kids under two
(
58:00) The redemption he's chasing with Ploy
Follow Bryant
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryantchou/
X: https://x.com/bryantchou
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