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 Cone. Today, we're joined by Bryant Chou, co-founder and CTO of Webflow, which created 1% of all websites live today. Bryant is back in the current YC batch with a brand-new startup called Ploy, which is taking the work he did on Webflow to the next level. Bryant, welcome to The Light Cone.
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.
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 that your website has all this traffic, it has all this data, and what we're doing is we're building an entire marketing platform to help you run your business, to help you run your ads, help you find your customers, help you make your website copy, but then also, most importantly, help you get found by ChatGPT, help you get found by Perplexity and Claude, so that businesses can run their marketing on autopilot.
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 Ploy.
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.
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.
This is Posterous, does simple blogs by email. You can see the little Gmail buttons and things like that.
What year did you build this site, Gary?
2008. So you know, if it looks dated, it is.
So we dropped it into Ploy and we essentially said, 'Hey, go and recreate this website in Ploy.' And this is what it created.
So this is not 2008 Posterous. It is truly 2026 Posterous. Be careful because now that you've created it, I might have to actually write a million lines of code and make it real again.
This is definitely a Google Veo video, and all these sort of prompts and sort of knowledge about how to create these type of videos are embedded into Ploy.
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.
Jared, I also got yours coming up. We also took Screed. We went back in the Wayback Machine.
YouTube for 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, which is how I learned that servers are loud.
So this is what Ploy redesigned it to.
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, right?
That's right. So it actually went to the Wayback Machine's URL, understood the contents, and then understood the context of your business, and then it was like, 'Oh, cool. We're bringing this business back. Let's go and redesign it for the modern era.'
So yeah, it's interesting because it's not merely web design. It's actually understanding memory, reasoning, really like a marketing company brain.
That's right. That's right.
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's site, that was like impossible. Yeah, impossible. Yeah. Like unaffordable for any startup.
Yeah. Oh man, this is Harj's Automatics for 2007.
Yeah, Automatics is software for small businesses to sell online, mostly managing their eBay auctions.
And this is what we redesigned it to.
So it's able to like build these sort of like product mocks of your product.
It 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 build. I didn't actually think we had that on the usual website, but that 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 Automatics does with this website.
Yeah, no, that's what I mean. It's better. It's better than what we had.
I had no idea what it was. I didn't understand what it does.
I had no idea what it was.
Yeah.
Well, it's new. I think it's actually a deep point. Like it's not just prettier, which obviously it is. Like obviously 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.
Diana, remember this one?
Oh man, we had such a hard time trying to make our website because we had very complex tech building an 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. It took like a good... Jared was my group partner. Maybe it took like, I don't know, 2 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 created this video.
It isn't just a random video. It's actually a video of AR. Like this is basically like the vision of actual reality, right, Diana? It's yeah.
Being able to have avatars and things just 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'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.
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 we'll 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, 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.
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 the 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 was 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, 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 triple threat, right? Like you're like the Bo Jackson.
Yeah, sorry. Now that's a very...
My muscles aren't as big.
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 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, there's like a lot of stuff going on. I think 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 non-verbal 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 in, 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, 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.
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 dollars 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. Their 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.
So, that's what it's doing right now. This is the slurping.
The design slurper 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?' And I'm going 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 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.
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, and probably take a week, at least.
They're probably going to open up Claude Code or Cursor to try to do this.
Yeah, but they'll do a much worse version of it.
Here's the moment of truth. Let's see if this is responsive. Boom.
Boom. Cool. So, it's responsive. You know, the fonts are showing up. Let's see if there's like some hover effects that we captured. Um, down here. Okay, cool. Some CSS hover effects. So, these are all things that are just like all these details.
You need to have an 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 Ploy really shines.
