YouSaid · the spoken record

Vlad Magdalin

lines on the record: 34
first: 2019-11-01
most recent: 2019-11-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Exciting thing for me is how do we move from just websites into the broader set of software creation? I'm so excited about this one. Such a fanboy of yours. I'm so excited for the times ahead with Webflow. And thank you so much for. Course, this is my pleasure. Thank you so much, Harry.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complexity of web design and web development so covers use cases from WordPress and Shopify. But the next five years are all about expanding that into broader software use cases. So I can imagine five years from now people building the next, not just MVPs, but entire software products on top of Webflow, like the next Airbnb, whatever that idea is, the next Twitter, the next product hunt, all of it, like there's so many, there's thousands, if not millions of ideas stuck in people's heads that they can't implement because they aren't an engineer or don't have access to being able to afford an engineering team and Webflow is going to lead the movement on this visual web development category where we're going to empower more and more people to build for the internet without having to deal with this code barrier, without having to learn how to code and who knows what that's going to create. Like it's going to create many more businesses, many more products and services, maybe like new social networks, things that me and you are using five years from now, like on our phones, like TikTok or whatever. So that is the really”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're doing it publicly, it starts to create more and more of a separation between you and the rest of the team. And I think that's something that's appropriate or more appropriate after a big exit or something where everybody gets to benefit from that upside. But mostly it's kind of a focus thing. When your team, at least in my perspective, the reason I wouldn't lean too far into angel investing is because it might make my team feel that I'm already focusing on other things and making other bets and more excited about something else. In actuality, like my time can be much more impactful, like dollar for dollar or time per dollar into making WebFlow more valuable. And that makes their stake in it more valuable. And it shows that I'm all in. Okay, final one, and then we're going to do a round two. Next five years for you and for Webflow, paint that exciting vision of the roadmap ahead. Yeah, so Webflow started as a visual website building tool where we're abstracting away a lot of the”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely unaffordable to live here, like the infrastructure here can't really handle it. We're gentrifying this entire area. I just don't think it's sustainable. The other thing I would change is that goes along with the same theme of distribute Silicon Valley into a more worldwide phenomenon. Because now with things like Zoom and Slack and so many of the tools that we have for collaborating across state lines and across time zones, there's just so much more you can do with much smarter people than trying to sort of like have this mindset that the most innovative things only happen in Silicon Valley. I had a really interesting conversation with Brianne Kim or one of your investors and she's had her views about founders Angel investing. How do you feel about founders Angel Investing? I think it personally removes focus. It introduces another thing to worry about. But more importantly, I think it drives a potential wedge between kind of a founder and the rest of the team because especially as you start angel investing maybe.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Factored in and respected and multiplied, man, you get a much, much better outcome. What do you know now that you wish you'd known at the beginning? Perfection is the death of innovation, honestly. In the beginning, as an engineer, I would want to get everything perfect, even if it took like a year to do that. I just felt that if it's not perfect, nobody's going to pay for it. And I've paid that cost so many times. We're seeing how much pain that gives to customers to have to wait for something that you think is perfect. And then you launch that thing that you think is perfect and still has a ton of problems. So if I could tell every founder, it's just like focus on delivering value faster. You can always incrementally add up to your vision, but just ship, ship, ship. As you said, you've seen from the very early days of YC, living on the West Coast, you've seen the growth of the techie ecosystem. If you could change one thing about the world of tech in the valley, what would it be and why? Well, I would decentralize the valley first and foremost because I think like tech has saturated so much in Silicon Valley that makes it”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Move into a quick I say a short statement, you hear me with your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to dive in? Let's do it. Okay, so the favorite book and Why? What Must I Read? Leaders Eat Last. Why is the pinnacle of a servant leadership? That was the book that convinced me that you get higher performing teams, you get way more people take on ownership willingly. They perform much better. They have a much better experience doing that. They have the sense of autonomy. They get to master their craft. They feel a strong purpose for doing the work that they're doing. And you end up with like a much better, like whatever you're trying to lead, that effort becomes much more effective when you have this mindset of how can I as a leader make your life easier and make you empower you more versus this more traditional command and control. Here's a strategy. Go execute it. Here your KRs if you don't meet them like you're in trouble, et cetera. When people feel supported, when people feel like their humanity and their fulfillment, it's”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that would give that company, like that's what I see our board members doing, and that's hyper helpful because I know they're always out there hustling for our company to make sure that our experience here or the foundations that we're setting from like a scalable company building perspective are being built by everyone mutually, not just by somebody coming in and giving directives or asking for faster movement or whatever. I just feel like it's a true partner. That's equally like rolling up their sleeves and helping out wherever they can. No, I love the model of servant.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever so you can provide a bigger return. I think if the founders of the board that you're participating in have this feeling that, you know, Harry's there to support me in whatever I need. He's there as a sounding board. It's safe to go to you to ask questions and like think through really tough situations, like talk about the biggest fears of what's not working. That is the pinnacle of being a very effective board member in terms of like that psychological safety piece, but I think it's equally important to keep reminding founders and because sometimes you have this dynamic of seeing the board as like this totally separate thing or like this higher level thing of treating every board member as somebody who equally has responsibilities to do things for this. So almost like you should ask for homework. Like what can I do in the next month before the next board chicken or whatever that will make your life easier as a founder or as a CEO or as a CTO or whoever else is on the board? Or what are the two, three hires that I can help you make?”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so like I mentioned, I see the board as serving the mission of the company. The company is not there to answer to the board per se. The board, just as the founders and the executives, they serve the needs of the company. So I expect every board member, everybody who's in that board meeting to come with the perspective of how do I make this company's mission succeed faster? How do I support everybody in this room and everybody not in the room, like all the departments of the company? How do I make them more successful? How do I serve them? And I'm really a huge fan of this servant leadership model versus the how do I go in here with the perspective of like, why aren't we getting returns faster? Why aren't we growing faster? Like asking the direct hard questions, those have a place, right? But they have to come from a place of you want to drive for that because you fundamentally care about the mission of the company and the people that are doing the work, not because you see those things as secondary, just because they're going to attract more talent or what.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your trajectory and your ability to hire really amazing talent and all that stuff. So you sort of like missed the force from the trees and try to keep a larger part of the pie, but your pie gets smaller or doesn't grow as fast because you kind of have this tight grip on your cap table or whatever.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what really ends up happening? Like, what drives everything is what's the right thing to do for the organization and the company and the mission of the company. So all the sort of legalities of exactly what percentage of the company you own or what are voting shares like, that is all minute details because ideally you're running a company where you're not even doing any kind of like board level voting. You come to decisions by consensus, et cetera. So in that, I know it sounds like a kind of wishy-washy answer, but I always strive for like true partnership, even though Excel might not own a major portion of company, they are an equal valued partner at our board meetings to discuss the direction of the company, like how do we get to our grand vision faster, et cetera? None of that should come down to like exactly how does voting control structured, et cetera, but I definitely understand when founders try to optimize for that stuff. I just think sometimes they overoptimize for that stuff and wait way too long and not find this partner that can really”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great question. I mean, again, survivorship bias here, so we had the leverage to basically have very, very company friendly terms outside of a 1X liquidation preference, which is very standard. We have a true partnership with Excel. It's not like Excel, just like the founders are here to serve the company. Like the company is not serving the board or serving LPs or whatever. Of course, there's fiduciary duty to work towards a return. But that is a given with a growing business. So I think the terms are if you're sort of thinking about it as a legal strategic thing, you always like founders have this mentality of I want to retain as much controls possible, which the more you can do that, the more it gives you sort of like a sense of safety that things are under your direct control. But I think the more a company scales, all that stuff gets away from you anyway, even if on paper you own more of the company. I mean, you see the stuff that we work, you see like Travis having to leave Uber, even though they technically legally had control.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can I support you to make that happen? And sure, there's a bunch of practical stuff that comes after the fact of how I can be helpful immediately, but the emotional layer of safety, like psychological safety, is so important. And I think it's very hard to build those kinds of relationships because there's this kind of expectation of business, business, business and tactics, tactics and tactics. But I think at the end of the day, this whole thing, innovation, VC, how we do work together, it's all a people game. It's like at the end of the day, it's all about relationships and how we support and care for each other. Everything else follows and becomes even better once that stuff is strong.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How are you feeling? How's family? We've hung out as families. We know each other's kids. And there's just so much more to that relationship that you just feel like there's this true partner there to support you. And it's almost like being a good, I hate to make this analogy, but being like a good parent. Like one way to do that is transactionally. But if you do that transactionally, your kids aren't going to come to you. Or if you're always sort of only disciplining and, you know, like you did bad here or your report card's bad or whatever, you're always going to have like this fear relationship between like a kid and a parent because they're not going to share stuff with you. They're not going to come to you in the hard times and get advice, et cetera. And I think a great investor is a similar type of mindset. If they truly care about like the founders and the mission of the company, they're going to approach it not from like, are you meeting your numbers? Of course, that stuff is important for accountability and to make sure the mission succeeds, but they're coming at it from like, I truly first and foremost care about you as a person and the people that are at WebFlow in this example and about the mission of the company.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversation with Ron from rainfall ventures where I truly knew that he had my best interests at heart. We were on this walk around building in San Francisco. And he was like, you know, I never expected this from an investor. He's like, hey, Vlad, do you know about the Patagonia founder? He kind of takes like six month vacations, sort of disconnects and goes fishing or something like that. He's like, how do you think about your company if you were to strive towards that, the kind of leverage where you can put really skilled people in place and you can build like a foundational long-lasting company and not be living week to week, quarter to quarter like always stressed out or whatever. And like, when do you ever hear that from an investor? Like, that's the kind of, I knew that he cared about me as a person, about my experience in life as a person, about how fulfilled I feel and sort of the day-to-day versus just like being driven by the bottom line, et cetera. And same thing with other investors, especially Arune itself. Most of our conversations, you know, over breakfast or not around practical things around the business. It's like,”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where they actually don't. I think all of our investors have added value, like practical value across the board, especially Excel now, given that they're so involved, like especially with hiring, like most of our intros come through them, update, they help interview people, they really help us understand what roles have worked, what hasn't worked, like making introductions to like really key companies, you know, like Slack and Atlassian and all Dropbox and getting us set up with mentors, like on the practical side, tons and tons of value. I think value is even more important on the human side. So both the RUN and Ron that you mentioned that you talked to, the fact that they make you feel supported, not through practical help, but this sort of like a meta-concept of like, whatever you need, I'm here for you, like even if it's venting or emotional support or, you know, just being there for you is so much more important, right? Like being happy for you when you go take vacation or recharge or like build relationships outside of work. You know, I remember a very early”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, for me, it has nothing to do with tactics. It has nothing to do with quote unquote value add. What can a VC firm bring or whatever? Almost all of them can add a lot of value, bring connections, bring resources, et cetera. It's honestly, and this is going to sound really, really fuky, but it's how do you make me feel? Am I like so energized that I want to spend more time with you as a friend or as a mentor, as something I gravitate to? Or was this what's more common a kind of an exercise in ego expression or, you know, here's everything that's great about me and how we're better than the other guys, et cetera, sort of like a selling pitch. I think really what gets me going is this idea of like true partnership and a true partnership, just like a true co-founder relationships or”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Considering sort of the quote unquote venture life or like the venture growth path, but the more conversations we had, and actually a lot of the conversations we had sort of doubled down that fear because a lot of investors we talked to and we talked to 100 plus over the three plus years that people knew that we were running break even and start to grow and started to get some adoption. I had so many conversations with like pretty much all the top tier firms, like partners at those firms. And there weren't many standouts, right? Like most of the conversations were kind of the same like, oh, there's something working. How do we double down? How do we go into enterprise? How do we extract more revenue? What kind of team do you have to build, et cetera?”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to be honest, we didn't choose a time. We didn't actually go out and start raising. It was, you know, we had some articles and some conversations we had on Twitter around our company being profitable and how we're just in trying to attract candidates in all the things we would say publicly in terms of like employer brand to try to get more people to join us. And that attracted more and more investors. Like they sort of saw that something was working. A lot of the conversations in the community, something was like really special was happening. And that led a lot of inbound conversations of investors reaching out to us. We never actually started a process. We were always skeptical around if we were to raise like what would we use the money for and really honestly the biggest concern for us was does partnering with a VC fundamentally change sort of a values driven and a mission driven and a purpose driven organization? And that was always why we were kind of like hesitant to go into”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spending money way too fast, and we might not have this lifeline that somebody else will throw us. And that's when that mindset kind of shifted to what if we get to break even more of as a safety measure. It's like, how do we survive longer rather than intentional like, okay, let's build a profitable company, et cetera? So we kind of like stumbled into it, to be honest. And I think a lot of it was a little bit of forced humility in that, shoot, our startup isn't growing fast enough to raise an extra round. What do we need to do practically to make sure that doesn't kill us?”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I will also not take credit for this because it may look intentional looking backwards. But back then, we were just operating the same way that we saw all of our peers operating, which was like raise as much money as you can and then start preparing enough traction for the next round. So we didn't have this mindset going in like, how do we optimize for profitability or how do we get to break even? So we started, we kind of got this initial round, started hiring people, started hiring a team, and then didn't see the kind of incredible blockbuster growth that we were expecting like the product didn't do that much initially. And it was sort of like that slower growth in the realization that, hey, holy crap, like we might not actually be able to raise another round because we don't have like stellar metrics to raise a series A or whatever, that forces to think like, wow, like we're default dead if we keep doing what we're doing, if we're not going to be able to raise something else. And that's what forced the mindset shift of.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way I remember it and the way it felt during the time is one of the most anxiety inducing moments of my life. Ben might have a different perception because only saw several parts of that conversation. But for us, it was, you know, Yeah, it's like, wait, wait, kind of like seeing the potentially closing window. And I think that was more of a confidence-inducing thing for us once we felt safe that we were going to have enough, at least for what we wanted to do. It helped us exude this confidence that gave investors more confidence that we knew what we were doing. And that's when it's sort of like the round filled up pretty quickly and we end raising like 1.4 or something.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just about meeting quarterly commitments, but it's about how we make sure this company is around 20 years from now and has an amazing culture. And I think like having kids really force that conversation because I honestly think that if I started the company without kids, I wouldn't have had the kids. I would have always thought I'm too busy right now or too much stuff is going on. I can't devote when Webflow exits or whatever. Maybe that'll be the time. But that would have either never happened or would have forced Webflow to be like shorter lived kind of company. So for me, it's been like a foundational pillar of why we've been able to build like a long-term focused company. And I'm just glad that by the time I started, we were kind of in that situation.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With other operators in VCs, where I would ask them, what are your biggest regrets? And over and over, they would come back to, you know, I wish I didn't ignore my family. Like it always seems like in the moment that it's something that can wait, but I absolutely don't think so. Even though there was a season of about a year where we had to like really work honestly like seven to eleven every day, including weekends with only a few breaks just because the survival of the business depended on it. We're like literally running out of money. Having kids force a type of company culture where we really try to get the most important things done as quickly as possible, but it forces a more long-term perspective. Like, how do we build a company that is not going to burn people out? How are we going to build a company that does not put human relationships on the back burner or as a secondary or tertiary thing? How do we build a company where people feel a sense of balance and can follow through on their commitments and like a reasonable long-term oriented work style where it's”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It changed everything. Honestly, like going into starting the startup with kids, you just have to, it forces you to think about prioritizing because I'm personally as much pressures there was early on to like not talk about kids. You know, we went into VC meetings and even at YC, we sort of got the advice of like, just don't mention anything about kids or family because it signals that you're not into your startup or like not going to dedicate everything, which I found pretty depressing. But to me, it forced that prioritization of like knowing what's truly important and knowing that I would much, much rather lose my startup and lose or lose some sort of like business upside than lose my relationship with my kids. Like that's just something you can't mortgage that and sort of think, oh, well, I'm just going to work like a dog and not ever see my kids and my wife and my family and my friends and come back to it 20 years later when there's some sort of exit or whatever and live an amazing life. Like that just doesn't happen. And I think I was lucky enough to have some early conversation.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lovely questions. So, I have two daughters, they're eight and ten, about to be nine and eleven. They're born around the same time. They're amazing. Both totally different personalities. One's a lot more like me, like quiet, reserved, introvert, one's a lot more like my wife, just lives life, emotions on her sleeves, just like super happy-go-lucky. They have such different interests that what I end up doing is having individual dates with each of them and they get to pick what to do. So for one, it's a lot of video games. And Dave and Busters and like Chuck E. Cheese and going to like, you know, trampoline places to jump around, laser tag, video games at home. For another one, it's really deeper conversations. Like I, you know, helped her build something that she really wanted to build for her friends to track animal facts or end their building in Webflow. So we read Harry Potter together and watch those movies and sort of like bash how bad the movies are compared to the books. And usually when we end up doing stuff together, it's like watching stuff together ends up being Shark Tank actually.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just want to acknowledge how much kind of luck and privilege and all these intangible factors go into something that at the end of the day looks like it's successful, but it's hard to give advice on this topic. Like I always say, you know, keep going, like if something really drives you and if you keep working hard, you're going to make it happen, but you also have to acknowledge that there may be so many other factors and so many other advantages that I had that other people didn't. It's hard to make a blanket statement around what will make others succeed equally.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was, look, there's a much better way to do things, and I've seen it, I can see the impact it has on people. It gives like designers and entrepreneurs and creatives like these superpowers. Why doesn't this exist? It's almost like you land on an alien planet or whatever and you know that everyone's walking around and you know that a bicycle exists or you can invent a bicycle. And it's just like this overriding feeling of like I have to get this efficiency into the world, right? Like people should have an easier life, people should have an easier way to do things because I just know that something better exists. And that's a feeling that you can't just hide. You'd be very disappointed and have a lot of regret if you don't make that a reality. I think I'm lucky in that I had that kind of idea or that sort of realization because of these moments in time that gave me that kind of insight. Like who knows where my life would have been if I wasn't lucky enough to see that invoice or somebody didn't leave that out. I have no idea. I'd probably be working at Microsoft maybe on like office like my brother. Who knows? I'm not diminishing that, but like I also”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, that's the hardest advice for me to give because it's so irrational. For me, it was just blind optimism that this has to exist, that it will become a thing at some point in this irrational drive that there's a better way and I can help make that happen. But when you're in the weeds, when you're especially in my case, the fourth time we started, I already had two kids. We had a life to finance. You know, you have car payments and you have rent and you can't just like operate on those dreams. So it's really hard in the moment to say stick at it because I did things like we went over 60k in credit card debt. We had to cash out our 401k even with like massive penalties, sell two cars. None of these things I would recommend to my friends now. So I don't want to give this advice of like do everything possible because there's so much of like survivorship bias in my advice and saying like, well, it worked for me and therefore you should basically mortgage everything in your life and make dumb financial decisions. But honestly, the overriding driving force.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Application from 2007, five years before, somehow got in some queue, then that business that owned the trademark, like they let it lapse. And it just, for me, that was a sign that Webflow has to come back. There's something there. Then that kind of got the ball rolling, reached out to my brother, who's now my co-founder, one of my co-founders. He was a designer. He was like the perfect storm at the time. Chrome and Firefox became like really powerful browsers so you can actually develop web applications in the browser responsive design became a huge thing.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Filed for the trademark earlier. Some of the team members didn't have the right motivation and went back to working full time and had to keep paying the bills. So that sort of fizzled out. And then my job at Intuit got really interesting, like sort of moved into their innovation department and worked on a totally new SaaS product, which built up some chops around how to build a business. And Webflow sort of like took a back burner because I thought, you know, Weebly and Wix and all these companies are doing a great job. And even though I saw a lot of opportunity where they weren't really coming up to this high standard of building professional websites, I still sort of thought that it was too late. And then in 2012, I saw this video, actually, no, like I have to mention this episode because I think it just we wouldn't be here without that. So in 2007, we filed for a trademark that denied that whole like cease and desisting happened. But then in 2012, randomly at my house in Sacramento, an envelope arrived with a trademark certificate from the US trademark office with apparently our application.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bubble dreams. Try to get it off the ground. Actually, got stuck in implementation land, couldn't see the forest from the trees. That kind of failed. Then after I graduated, right after that, I got married and tried to start it again, but just didn't have the time. My wife said, I think we might need some real income, you know, so we can get the things that rent. So got a job at Intuit, at Intuit. You know, I was working on their payroll product, QuickBooks. It was a really great customer-minded kind of experience, but got boring pretty quickly. So about a year in, this was the third attempt, got a couple of co-founders and started putting together pitch decks, you know, at that time, like Weebly and Wix were getting popular, started getting a team together, incorporated, formed the convertible notes were starting to become a thing. So we had dreams of like raising, applying to YC, and then a bunch of stuff fell apart, just like couldn't get the trademark, got effectively a cease and desist or almost sued by a company that said you can't use the term webflow because, you know, we”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Glorified translation of somebody's creative vision into this medium of the web. And I thought I was being paid really well, like $12 an hour. That's more than minimum wage, right? And seeing the value that that created and how slow it was, relatively slow to take somebody else's vision and like make it real. That's when the whole spark hit of like, this creative team should have the tools to take their vision and put it into production so that it doesn't require like this translation step. And from there, it was like, that's the second that the idea for Webflow came to be. And then many, many attempts later, well, for it to be exact. But first, I tried to kind of start it as I started writing my senior thesis on that idea of how to empower creative people and like knowledge workers in general, nonprogrammers to create more and more complex applications via some sort of GUI or a graphical user interface. And first, I tried to, I thought I was going to graduate and like have this multi-million dollar startup right away. I had like these big post.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the very moment that the original spark for the idea came to be, it was, like you mentioned back in 2004, I was an intern at a web design agency, a very prestigious web design agency that was doing work for Apple and HP and tennis channel and quicksilver, all these big brands. And my job was literally I was college and it was the lowest of programming jobs where I was working with a genius creative team. They would take these designs. And my job was to implement them into this custom CMS that this agency had developed. So it was taking me three or four days per what they call objects, you know, a quicksilver would have events and writers and products and things like that. And I would translate each of those things into HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And all of that was fine and dandy until one day I saw the invoice for one of the customers. And per object, they charged over $100,000. And that was the aha moment of like holy crap, this is something I'm essentially doing.”
2019-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Webflow's Vlad Magdalin on The Journey To Breakeven and Raising A Monster $72m Series A, The Single Most Important Question To Ask When Determining Which Investor To Select & The Challenges of Founders Angel Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source