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- [00:00]
Bryant Cho
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. So many businesses, they have a great product, they have a great service, but there's just so much sort of a met opportunity for these business owners, for these founders, and I'm really just here to make it easier for them to tap into it.
- [00:45]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Welcome back to another episode of the Light Cone. Today we're joined by Bryant Cho, co founder and CTO of Webflow, which created 1% of all websites live. Today, Bryant is back in the current YC batch with a brand new startup called Ploy, which is taking the work he did on webflow to the next level. Bryant, welcome to the Light Cone.
- [01:07]
Bryant Cho
Thanks for having me.
- [01:08]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
So what is Ploy? We're looking at it right now. Kind of looks like a lot of the other things you might use to vibe code, but it's actually way more awesome than that.
- [01:20]
Bryant Cho
It is a website platform. You can build really incredible bespoke, award winning websites with Ploy, but it doesn't just stop there. The premise is, is that your website has all this traffic, it has all this data. And what we're doing is we're building 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.
- [01:53]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Kind of sounds like hiring the perfect CMO who also is a designer and who can code.
- [02:00]
Bryant Cho
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.
- [02:11]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
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.
- [02:22]
Bryant Cho
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.
- [02:45]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yeah, this is mine. This is Posterous. Dead simple blogs by email. You can see the little. The Gmail buttons and things like that.
- [02:53]
Gary
What year did you build the site, Gary?
- [02:54]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
2008. So, you know, if it looks dated, it is.
- [02:58]
Bryant Cho
So we dropped it into Ploy and we essentially said, hey, go and recreate this website, employee. And this is what it created.
- [03:05]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Oh, my God. Wow.
- [03:06]
Gary
Wow.
- [03:07]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Gorgeous. So this is not 2008 posterous. It is 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.
- [03:19]
Bryant Cho
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.
- [03:28]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yeah, I mean, once you're in the land of doing image gen and video gen, there's just a lot you have to do around curation and proper prompting. It's kind of like a dark art, actually. So being able to start off with the thousand examples that you've already pulled together, I mean, that's context in action.
- [03:45]
Bryant Cho
Jared, I also got yours coming up. We also took Scribd. We went back in the Wayback Machine Scribd from 2007.
- [03:53]
Jared
YouTube for documents.
- [03:54]
Gary
YouTube for documents. I remember fiddling with the CSS to try to make that look right.
- [03:59]
Bryant Cho
How did you even host this back in the day?
- [04:01]
Gary
This is before aws. This is on a physical server, originally physically in my dorm room closet, which is how I learned that servers are loud.
- [04:09]
Bryant Cho
So this is what Ploy redesigned it
- [04:11]
Diana
to wow into 2026.
- [04:14]
Gary
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 2026.
- [04:23]
Jared
Right, that's right.
- [04:23]
Bryant Cho
So it actually went to the Wayback Machines URL, understood the contents, and then understood the context of your business. And then it was like, oh, cool, we're bringing this business back. Let's go and redesign it for the modern era.
- [04:35]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
So, yeah, it's interesting because it's not merely web design. It's actually understanding memory reasoning process. Really like a marketing company brain.
- [04:43]
Bryant Cho
That's right. That's right.
- [04:44]
Gary
And asset generation. Like, I remember, like back in the day to like make images like this, you need to hire, like a team of designers. And it was so slow and expensive and like, Animations, like what you did for Gary site, that was like impossible. Like impossible. Yeah. Like unaffordable for any startup.
- [05:00]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yep. Oh, man. This is Harges.
- [05:01]
Jared
This is automatic for 2007. Yeah. Automatic was software for small businesses to sell online.
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Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yeah.
- [05:09]
Jared
Mostly managing their ebay auctions.
- [05:11]
Bryant Cho
And this is what we redesigned it to.
- [05:12]
Jared
Much better.
- [05:13]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Very nice. Wow.
- [05:14]
Gary
Wow.
- [05:15]
Bryant Cho
So it's able to like build these sort of like product mocks of your product.
- [05:20]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Kind of like Interact can also develop your actual website too.
- [05:25]
Bryant Cho
It can do everything a model can do.
- [05:26]
Jared
I mean, this is actually pretty interesting. That dashboard is the kind of. That's basically the kind of software we built. I didn't actually think we had that on the individual website, but that could like top listings and channel map. It's interesting that it. Yeah. The controls. Yeah, this is all like, really, really quite intelligent.
- [05:42]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yeah. It's really working backwards from what the. Who the customer is, what do they want, what are the jobs to be done.
- [05:48]
Diana
It's kind of impressive. I kind of understand more what Octomattic does with this website.
- [05:52]
Jared
Yeah, no, that's what I mean. It's better. It's better than what we have.
- [05:55]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
I actually understand what it does.
- [05:57]
Diana
I had no idea what he was.
- [05:59]
Gary
Well, it's. No, I. I think it's actually a deep point. Like, it's not just prettier, which obviously it is. Like the. Obviously, like the visual design is much better, but actually the content is better too. And we always hear about, like AI Slop, but like, if it was AI Slop, that wouldn't have worked.
- [06:15]
Bryant Cho
Diana, remember this one?
- [06:17]
Diana
Oh, man. We had such a hard time trying to make our website because we had very complex tech building API for AR. This is back in 2017 for phones. We kind of actually hired a designer to make some of these assets, which took a while to. Took like a good. Jared was my group partner. Maybe it took like, I don't know, two months to get this.
- [06:36]
Bryant Cho
This happened to be one of the favorite websites that Ployd created because it's like got all this really cool screenshots and stuff. And I think this was just three or four prompts. So it actually created this video. That's so cool.
- [06:51]
Gary
It isn't just a random video. It's actually a video of ar. Like, this is basically like the vision of Asher reality. Right. Diana is. Yeah.
- [06:57]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Being able to have avatars and things just in. In your real world, but totally programmatic. Very easily.
- [07:04]
Diana
I think now I understand what my company does too.
- [07:08]
Bryant Cho
Yeah, I think that's One of the biggest things about Ploy is that, you know, we're. We've got about like 12% of the YC batch using ploy. And one of the biggest pieces of feedback is just like, wow, I'm actually able to tell my story a lot more coherently and concisely. And then that's actually the most important part of your website.
- [07:26]
Jared
This actually used to be a big part of office hours way back in the day. We sort of stopped doing it. But the early ones used to be like, hey, like, here's your website. Like, walk people through explaining what it does.
- [07:34]
Bryant Cho
Yeah, webflow had a big part in democratizing web development and web design. And the way I've always thought about Ploy in the beginning is I want to democratize marketing and demystify growth. A lot of incredible founders in yc, they've built these incredible products. They're starting to get a sense for how to talk about it. But then there's just like these somewhat like rote and arduous SEO marketing things that they should be doing, but it's just like, oh, man, do I need to go and hire someone for it? And this is really what I'm trying to bring to YC and to all the founders that are out there.
- [08:09]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
I mean, 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 they were 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. They're as good as the founders, and those are the people who actually should just go and do it. But especially if you're a little bit older, like, you know, it's actually kind of hard to fill in your brain with, like, you know, you might not be like Bryant, like a, you know, triple threat. Right. Like, you're like the Bo Jackson of. Oh, man, sorry. Now that's.
- [08:54]
Bryant Cho
My muscles aren't as big.
- [08:55]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
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, but when, when it comes to actually getting people to use their product, like, they actually sometimes really struggle. Like, I think human beings to me resemble sort of we started playing Dungeons and Dragons with my sons. And so, you know, when you have to do, like, the reroll, like, everyone has different hit points and different characteristics. You know, some people are mages, some people are barbarians. You know, there's like a lot of stuff going on. I think that that sort of extends to capability of founders. 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, you know, nearly nonverbal, like Codexes, they're able to make just some sort of hardware software that literally no one else could. But in the past, like, if you're that, you know, op in one stat, you tend to, you know, not be able to do those other things. But now that person could actually come 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 markets and capitalism might be. It's more access to it and then more alternatives. And so that's sort of the AI white pill that I hope Ploy actually becomes a really big part of. All right, so we've seen this blast from the past and then brought into the future. Can we see what it actually looks like? Let's actually use Ploy.
- [10:39]
Bryant Cho
Yeah, totally. So what you can do is you can sign up for Ploy and then you can just get started. So it will know who you are, it'll know what domain you're coming from. And in this case, I'm just going to pretend that I'm someone from Cursor. And we spent about, I think, like, $750,000 worth of tokens to create what's called the Ploy Slurper. And the Ploy Slurper essentially is a purely deterministic method to take an existing website and to not just create a design system, but to create all the components that belong on your website. So then subsequently, your next generations and stuff like that, it's going to be on brand, the buttons are all going to look the same. You're not going to have 10 different variations of your header font. And those are the things that are going to be really important, especially as a business scales. You really want that sort of design consistency.
- [11:36]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
So that's what it's doing right now.
- [11:37]
Bryant Cho
That's what it's doing right now.
- [11:38]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
The design Slurper is doing its job
- [11:40]
Bryant Cho
right now that's right. And then as it's slurping, it's going to ask you, hey, what's important? And I'm like, well, I think Cursor wants to get found in search and AI, I'm going to tell it that and then I'm going to turn more visitors into customers. I hit that and now it's going to imbue it into its memory. It's going to understand. It's like, okay, cool. This particular user, they, they want to go and improve these things. And in about 75 seconds we would have slurped the existing site, recreated all the components, refactored it, and you get this.
- [12:18]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
And so it's, it's operating in real time. I mean, it's probably doing the equivalent work of a team of three to five engineers and front end people and probably take a week at least.
- [12:29]
Bryant Cho
They're probably going to open up Claude Code or Cursor to try to do
- [12:33]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
this, but they'll do a much worse version of it.
- [12:35]
Bryant Cho
Here's the moment of truth. Let's see if this is responsive. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Cool. So it's responsive. The fonts are showing up. Let's see if there's some hover effects that we captured, um, down here. Okay, cool. Some CSS hover effects. So these are all things that are just like all these details.
- [12:59]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Last mile.
- [13:00]
Bryant Cho
You need to have an 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.
- [13:15]
Diana
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 sort of the following, the.
- [13:35]
Bryant Cho
Yeah, this is where we're at, I think in the age of AI, which is, I think you need to have a certain amount of expertise to know what to do with this boundless intelligence that's imbued in the model. And I think this is where folks with experience, folks that have spent 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.
- [14:05]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Let's see. So say I'm Cursor. I released Composer. It's a new type of model. Can I just come and deploy and paste in screenshots and even my PM spec? And you could make the product page
- [14:17]
Bryant Cho
for me even better. So we have integrations with like 50 different tools. It can not only just connect to your code base, but it connects to Figma, connects to all of your analytics tools, CRM spreadsheets. It can even draft emails on your behalf based off of who's coming to your website.
- [14:33]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Okay, this looks like a company brain for your marketing then.
- [14:36]
Bryant Cho
Exactly.
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Host (Light Cone Podcast)
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 almost like the source of truth for how you discuss what you're building.
- [14:57]
Jared
It really reminds me of rippling in the early days would sound odd, but I remember like the very first thing Parker built was an offer letter generator.
- [15:05]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
And I remember someplace.
- [15:07]
Jared
Yeah, but like it's the only insight you get is like a second time founder. Because at the time I was like, you're pitching this really big vision, but like you're starting with like an offer letter generator.
- [15:14]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
But it was, everyone has offer letters, everyone's hiring people. So but then, yeah, that becomes an HR system. And then once you have hr, you have auth, and then boom, you're like literally your company app store os.
- [15:27]
Gary
And if you think about the journey of a new employee, the very first step with the new employee is they get an offer letter. That's where like every. Everything else starts. Very first thing with the website is the homepage. Yeah. And then everything else on.
- [15:38]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
I mean, even for a business, right, like you might start with Stripe Atlas, but right after that, like, I better make a homepage. And then it might be very cryptic, but when you actually launch it, it better say what it is.
- [15:49]
Bryant Cho
Yeah. So 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 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. 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, Noploid 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? It's like, oh, wow, someone from this company clicked on this call to action button and now I can do something with it.
- [16:47]
Diana
I think what's pretty cool is basically you're taking this very esoteric niche thing that Open Claw users know about with a dream cycle when it iterates and improves the skills, which I think only people that are in Super Long Tail and in Open Claw, which I don't think the rest of the world knows. You're doing that for everyone else, doing
- [17:06]
Bryant Cho
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 a met opportunity for these business owners, for these founders, and I'm really just here to make it easier for them to tap into it.
- [17:23]
Gary
So I wired this up to Y Combinator's Google Analytics and Google Search console and pulled in all the data. And what was cool is that like right out of the box without me having to do anything other than code, click through a couple of OAuth flows, it was able to give me like a full SEO report with a bunch of suggestions for the site. And I was thinking about how I would do it without ploy and with enough effort, I could have maybe gotten Claude code to do it. But Claude code doesn't know how to connect to any of those things out of the box. So it'd have to figure out the APIs and have to suck in all the data. And it doesn't really know how to do SEO optimization. So there'd have been so much prompting and work to get that same result.
- [17:57]
Bryant Cho
Yeah, 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 that is one of those examples where let's just feed the model data, structured unstructured data, and just let it cook.
- [18:23]
Gary
How did you imbue it with an understanding of how to market websites, how to design websites? Are there some ways that you distilled lessons from webflow this is stuff we
- [18:34]
Bryant Cho
geek out about at Ploy.
- [18:36]
Gary
We're in admin, so yeah, we're in the admin mode.
- [18:39]
Bryant Cho
Yeah, this is behind the scenes, the Lookbook. So what you're looking at is our curation of what we believe is the frontier of web design. And this is stuff that you can't really get anywhere else. And we've used a collection of models, OpenAI's ChatGPT images, but then we've created 3,500 prompts for web designs that then Ploy takes inspiration from. So you're not going to get a website that looks exactly like this when you're using Ploy. What you're going to get is you're going to get some of the vibes of these sites. And I think that's really actually how human designers work. Right. So if you go and work with the agency of freelance web designer, some of the best might come up with something incredibly bespoke and unique that no one's ever seen but before. But a lot of them, you know, they get inspiration and that's essentially what we're trying to do here with our product, which is like, hey, let's like emulate how real humans work and let's think about how we can create some really unique layouts, really unique designs that can really stand out.
- [19:44]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
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 sort of overwhelms their, you know, inbuilt predilections. You know, you can. One of the examples is like, for some reason the, the models really love that, you know, left hand rule with the rounded corners.
- [20:06]
Bryant Cho
I mean in web design there's so many AI tells. I would like to say that Ploy eliminates all of them, but you can't necessarily eliminate all of it with all the prompts and guardrails and steering. However, we have spent a lot of time to make sure that the sort of essence of the human individuals and the businesses bespoke sort of representation, their brand can be reflected, employed to the best of our ability. And I think the best analogy that I have for where we're at in the AI cycle is Andy Warhol created paintings, but 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 want to be able to deliver for digital marketing.
- [21:02]
Gary
Why digital marketing? You could have done factories for anything. Why is this the thing you decided to build the factory for?
- [21:09]
Bryant Cho
I think that the web is still one of the most transformational technologies. Sure, it's done some funny things with how we consume media, how we respect sort of media organizations. However, ultimately, 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 where we're at in AI, these businesses, they still need to be found. And I actually think there's going to be way more small business in the future. You're not going to have massive companies anymore that are dominating. I think where society is moving is I actually think entrepreneurship might become way more important than it has been entrepreneurship, especially if you're a small business, you need to be found. You need to be able to tell your story. You need to be able to represent your brand well. And I think that's just like a really exciting space for me.
- [22:13]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
This is like 13 years after your prior company, Webflow.
- [22:18]
Bryant Cho
You were my group partner, remember?
- [22:19]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yeah. I remember you coming in with basically the best visual, like, graphical user interface for building a website because it was built directly off of css.
- [22:31]
Bryant Cho
Yeah. So, I mean, it was incredibly novel at the time, but we created this visual interface over HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and it was sort of the first no code application that was out there. Power's 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. 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.
- [23:05]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
He doesn't know css. He knows HTML tags. And he, you know, and you could, like, put, like, font properties on it, you know, but that's about, you know, Hacker News was more or less like, about what he understood.
- [23:17]
Bryant Cho
Yeah. And like, for someone that's like as technical as pg, we thought that it was like, oh, he would be able to get it. I mean, he built Hacker News.
- [23:24]
Diana
Right.
- [23:24]
Jared
So this was 2013. What was the market for website builders like then?
- [23:29]
Bryant Cho
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's 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, Sergey and Vlad were like perfectionists and they just like stressed over every minute thing. And when you're building something that's supposed to scream pro, it's supposed to scream craft. That really helped, maybe go into more detail.
- [24:06]
Jared
Like, how did you come up with the original idea? And I think the reason it's interesting is it feels like from our perspective, in the batches ChatGPT launched and there was just green field for 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 how do you build the confidence to enter a space that's competitive and how do you know that you have edge that's worth digging into?
- [24:30]
Bryant Cho
I think for me this time around it's almost opposite of webflow. At webflow we focused on one Persona. That Persona was this like freelance web designer, you know, just like there's probably only 50,000 of them. Honestly, with Ploy, you know, we're essentially solving for tens of millions of people. And I think that's just like a really interesting thing now that you can do now with AI. I mean we've talked about like boiling the lakes, the oceans. Like this is a very much ploy is very much a boil the ocean.
- [25:01]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
You couldn't do this before, but now you can do it and you can do it to just sort of an award winning degree.
- [25:07]
Bryant Cho
You know, I've been in tech since 2006, like 20 years. And you know, when cloud computing came out, it was like, oh, this is revolutionary. I've got like untapped sort of compute, networking, storage. And now, you know, as of a couple years ago, there's this new primitive of intelligence. It was just like so irresistible to not build something in this space.
- [25:31]
Jared
How has that changed the way that you've built Ploy? Like have like the first three months or so of Ploy being compared to the first three months of webflow.
- [25:40]
Bryant Cho
To be honest, when we were in YC 2013, we worked a lot and we also covered so much product in those three months manually coding, like, what is this? Like I have to like type stuff. So I would say that we covered a lot of functionality just coding, but now it's obviously a different league. Everyone can code. You don't have to have all this background and infrastructure and systems design. You know, like, these models are really, really good at it. So I would say like the biggest difference is the output. You know, you're probably going to get more tests than you ever wanted. You're probably going to get way more code coverage, way more sort of functionality. 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.
- [26:38]
Gary
I'm curious how that factored into buildingploy. 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 remember decisions you made and how you design ploy that maybe somebody who didn't have that experience would have like not done it that way?
- [26:56]
Bryant Cho
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. It's 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.
- [27:55]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Let's play it out a little bit. The models are going to get, I don't know, unbelievably better from here. And then where does that leave Ploy? Like, you know, how good is it going to get from here? What's the future of the web?
- [28:07]
Bryant Cho
I can't predict the future. However, I can predict that there will be tons of businesses out there that are going to want an opinionated solution to help them solve real problems for the things that really matter to them. The way I think about it is that these underlying models, they're really good at a lot of different things.
- [28:30]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Their general purpose.
- [28:31]
Bryant Cho
Their general purpose. And I think there's just going to be a big need for something that is purpose built to help a customer achieve an outcome. And that's where products, even pure SaaS products still have a right to really kind of explore that and to really leverage the model capabilities to benefit the end customers.
- [28:50]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
I guess there's an interesting competitive play here. Like basically if ploy becomes really, really good, you know, one of the things you do, for instance, is everyone's on the Internet's talking about loops. But you know, you have basically a marketing and you know, 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, people see it, you know, they click on it, they want to use it in the future. Like if you're not using things like Ploy, then your competitors will win. So there is like a competitive dynamic to it, which has already happened for coding tools, for instance, like sort of unconscionable in 2026 to not be using Claude code or Codex or cursor, you know, just, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to stay on top of what's going on.
- [29:48]
Bryant Cho
I happen to think that software engineers are one of like the worst customers to, to sell to and they, they can change tools on a whim. Something new comes out over here, they'll it. So I, 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, 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. 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 their most important pain points, I think that's going to be one of those things that I'm always going to try to focus on.
- [30:48]
Diana
I think there's a world, which I think it is true, where there's still a lot of that you can value that you can build on top of the models because these are so good. And I think the limiting factor is knowing how to prompt them and sort of imbuing all these 20 years plus experience that you have to really get the models to focus. It is almost that you're building a very special hardness. We talk about hardnesses 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 just a year there's a lot more that can be done for lots of domains. You're kind of doing that for website creator creation.
- [31:33]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yeah, I mean you're selling skills, but you're also selling code. And it's fat skills, fat code, some
- [31:38]
Bryant Cho
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. But if you're a small business owner, if you're a cmo, you don't want to worry about that. You're not going to go and stitch together this MCP and have your cloud code instance and then make sure it's running all the time. These are just to your point, Diana. The harnesses that we're going to make sure is always on, always working for you and ultimately it's going to drive you outcomes without you losing sleep over it.
- [32:17]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Has anyone asked you yet for Ploy, but make it really, really easy for agents to use a given product? Like do you have a bunch of lookbook stuff around proper LLMs, TXT and things like that? I mean in the YC batch we're seeing this wave of for git, it's like code storage for instance. It's doing super well. Right. And then int forge in the current YC batch is like sort of AWS agent phone, agent mail, like resend. If the agents choose you, that's actually big and they're gonna win.
- [32:49]
Bryant Cho
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, oh, I never even thought of that. And to that point, you know, you're getting a lot of stuff out of the box employee 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 Ploy.
- [33:25]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Oh cool. So that works.
- [33:26]
Bryant Cho
Working on it, working on it. So then, you know, just wire it up to your claw and like, if claw needs to go and build a really awesome site, play is one of the places where hopefully it can go.
- [33:37]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yeah. Are you going to do MCP or how are you going to implement it?
- [33:40]
Bryant Cho
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 the way we do it.
- [33:56]
Diana
CLI seems to be becoming the right UX for agents. This is why I think going back to clock code versus cursor ended up doing so well. It's just so much more freedom being fully on the command line. Same thing with openclaw.
- [34:13]
Bryant Cho
I mean, ASCII characters, they're really good.
- [34:18]
Jared
I'm curious to get your perspective as one of the more experienced founders in the batch. Again. We certainly saw ChatGPT launch. There was a heavy snap towards young founders. Sort of intense rise of the young founders because it was only young founders that are actually, well, using the technology and building with the tools. It seems like it's either coming back towards the middle, extending further in the other direction. Not sure what's your take on it from being in the batch and then to extend you can share. Like what? When you look around and you see young founders, like, where do you see them having an edge and where do you feel like, I don't know, I've got you.
- [34:52]
Bryant Cho
I do think as 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 bravado 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 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, make sure you're providing value in the world and then hopefully people will notice and you'll succeed.
- [35:52]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
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 idea maze that you were before. And then when you have a company that's multi billion dollar company, like webflow, like many, you know how many people were in your org?
- [36:16]
Bryant Cho
Hundreds.
- [36:17]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
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. This is like one of those things that now with a lot of experience you could just like you can actually do both of these things.
- [36:52]
Bryant Cho
I think the key word there was clone yourself.
- [36:54]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Yeah.
- [36:55]
Bryant Cho
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.
- [37:21]
Gary
Can you talk about any of them?
- [37:22]
Bryant Cho
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.
- [38:04]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
I mean I just love the, you know, not only do you get to think, but you also have the agent run a cron that will surface interesting patterns and it'll think with you. My favorite thing to do is go into openclaw and just say like what did you learn about me or YC or my companies in the last week? Like what was the most surprising thing? And then when you have Fable 5 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 idea maze analogy is 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, you know, all the way up and then all the way down, you know, sort of rise and fall. And it was such a no brainer for me to fund him again because I knew that he had loaded all of that stuff into his brain. Like he knew who to sell to, you know, he sure did know the regulatory by then. You know when that's like seared into your brain at that point and you could just go directly to that point again. And you know the difference between him and you, Bryant is that he still took two years and he went into a cave and he had to write code with a team of five or 10 people literally in a basement in the mission. I'd go and visit him after the first six months was like, okay, cool, you haven't launched anything yet, no worries. And then like after a year was like oh yeah, it's been a year, like but the demos are really impressive. And then after two years is like oh man, like are we going to launch? Like you know what's going to happen. And then of course he did launch but he didn't launch like just this one little thing. It wasn't like a wedge. He actually launched the whole package of HR and onboarding in one go with insurance like done right, you know, without having to scale with people and things like that. And so that was sort of the defining startup that I got to see, you know, sort of before AI really came to the fore in a way. And what is happening now is that 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. 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 4 or 5 million lines of logical, logical lines of code. This is like adjusted for like bloat and things like that. And so it's basically like 400 to a thousand clones of myself from, you know, from 2026 right now. Right. So not only do you are you able to sort of like flash forward into exactly the right place inside the Idmas, but you know, you have like 500 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 10 more people and that was a process. It's like, how do I train people? How do I give them the right things? How do I give them like a few weeks and then let's do a checkpoint. Like, you know, did you do what I need or not? And then now it's like actually what would take a week or a month or a year? Like you literally do in, you know, minutes, hours or you know, at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like 20 to 40,000 lines of code. Like what would take a typical engineer an entire year? You do it in a few days, right? This is like a really, it's not like a little thing, it's actually a really big thing that's happening. So this is why. This is the age of the 40 year old solo founder. I mean, you don't have to be 40, you just have to have taste, you know.
- [41:53]
Bryant Cho
That's right. It takes a while for a startup to catch fire, but I feel like I'm standing outside with the magnifying glass under the blazing sun and I'm able to focus it and I'm able to focus all my experience, background, technical and knowledge of the customer base, knowledge of their buying patterns, knowledge of these cycles and just catch something with fire.
- [42:13]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Well, let's fucking go.
- [42:16]
Bryant Cho
Love it.
- [42:16]
Host (Light Cone Podcast)
Bryant, thanks a lot for joining us. For those of you watching, if you actually want more customers, if you actually want to win, if you want to beat your competitors, I don't know why you wouldn't use ploy AI.
- [42:29]
Bryant Cho
Thanks guys for having me.