Vlad Magdalin (01:04):

Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

Akshay Kothari (01:06):

Thanks for coming. Welcome to First Block.

Vlad Magdalin (01:08):

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Akshay Kothari (01:10):

So let's start at the beginning. I guess it would be great to just hear how did you meet your co-founders?

Vlad Magdalin (01:11):

So one co-founder is my brother. So I've known him since he was born. He is younger than me by four and a half years. My second co-founder Bryant, we actually, so when I was at Intuit, we created this, me and this other designer started this thing called Intuit Brainstorm, which turned into a legitimate business like a SaaS-based business inside of Intuit. And Bryant was our first hire, first engineering hire. By the time I started Webflow, it was one of those perfect timings where, hey, we worked together a ton in the past, you know backend way more than I know I'm able to lean into that area, and it was the perfect combination. So three of us just off to the races Initially it was just my brother and I for a couple months and then as we got some traction, convinced Brian to join. So

Akshay Kothari (02:08):

I think a lot of people say it's, it's actually harder to almost co-found a company with your family or your close friends. I think when you look back at the partnership the three of you've had, I guess is there a secret that you've had this healthy relationship?

Vlad Magdalin (02:27):

I think for us, trust was built in from the very beginning. One, my brother and I always had a great working relationship where he's great at things that I suck at and I'm great at things that he's not great at. The fact that we had a third person that wasn't in the family, so to say, Bryant became more like a brother sometimes he is sort of referred to as the honorary Magdalin and my brother more of a, I became to see him more as a co-founder rather than a brother. So the three of us kind of felt the same in terms of brotherhood or co-founders where there was not really a special treatment between whether you're family or you're a co-founder. And maybe it was that balance of having this outsider that was not in the family. That kind of created a strong bond between us. But it also depends on the sibling, right? I can't imagine starting a startup with my other two brothers.

Akshay Kothari (03:22):

Can you talk a little bit about the early days? You mentioned there were very complimentary skillset. Can you expand on that? How did the three of you bring your different skillset? How did you sort of invest in each other?

Vlad Magdalin (03:35):

I mean, we were building a product that Sergio was as the product designer, as the main designer. He was the core customer. We were building a solution to get him to build really powerful websites without a briant or myself or a developer in the picture. And so we had that core strength of somebody who really understood HTML/CSS to a degree JavaScript and was thinking how do you visually abstract this into a UI that other designers like himself would understand? Like I mentioned before, Bryant had this depth in backend scale and infrastructure. The previous startup that he helped co-found was one of the fastest growing startups in terms of the number, the amount of data ingested, how you really leverage compute and set up a server infrastructure to handle large scale. And I had come from a very, I was a 3D animator and kind of a designer that had this, but I switched to programming. So I had this really heavy front-end lean that respected design and respected how hard it was to build kind of the backend side of things. And it was just this perfect combination of, well, you're an expert in this, I'm an expert in this, you're an expert in this. And just like let's run. And I think the first six months we were at this place called the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, which just like the three of us sitting around a table and 95% of the time heads down either designing or coding. But the times where we would take our headphones off and spend time together reconciling something or debating something, just felt like there was this natural both inclination towards our strengths and also this natural tension between everyone had an opinion about everything else.

Akshay Kothari (05:27):

You came to the US as a refugee when you were nine years old. Can you talk a little bit about how that sort of impacted your founder journey?

Vlad Magdalin (05:35):

Yeah. Honestly, it was just the combination of 1000 different events that were just all, in hindsight seemed like blind luck from how that entire journey happened. But I think the most important thing is it gave me this perspective that life was so much worse or would've been so much worse where I would have grown up. This was Southern Russia back in the USSR still, that I kind of have nothing else to prove. So it's not like I had a chip on my shoulder that I want to start a large company or do something to make a name for myself. I already felt that I've been incredibly lucky to be saved from the life I would've had back in Russia. It gave me this perspective that everything is kind of upside. It also because of the way that my parents were very poor, but they lost half of their early possessions moving over here was lost in the air travel here. Half of our luggage was physically gone when we landed and went through multiple years of my parents trying to learn English, being on welfare, trying to find some way to make a living, and through that it really built up this work ethic that you kind of just had to pitch in and figure out how to help the families. And that just taught me that just the value of hard work.

Akshay Kothari (07:10):

Incredible. I've resonated with a lot with that. I didn't have nearly as hard as that, but I think a lot of the good fortune of being able to come to the US is very much shared, I think. So let's talk about, I guess the early days of Webflow. I think one thing that I read that I was super interesting is that it actually took you 10 years and four attempts to actually get it up and running.

Vlad Magdalin (07:38):

This final attempt, hopefully final, took many different tries and I think it was just a matter of timing and circumstance. The first time I tried to start it just by myself while still in college, this is around 2005. Then I had a couple other attempts while sort of not moonlighting or almost planning to leave full-time. One of those got raised not insignificant funding, I was at the time it was like $50K, but it felt like a lot of money to start a real attempt. This was different, but for various reasons, all three just either didn't work out or just took too long to get to some sort of traction where I kind of lost momentum or people left or I had had significant life events, like kids being born and getting married. That took my attention off and sometimes it was competitors coming in that I got discouraged. Other times the technology wasn't quite ready. We had built something, but it wasn't quite like in 2007 we built something that was directionally what Webflow ended up becoming, but it was more like backend oriented without the visual front end pieces, just because browser technology wasn't there yet to even imagine building something like what Webflow ended up becoming. So it was a lot of different shots on goal that ultimately all the pieces ended up coming together again in 2012, which is when this last attempt started.

Akshay Kothari (09:20):

Can you talk about the first attempt, I guess it sounds like it was an idea in your head for a while, and what was the seeds of an idea? Is there a personal problem or opportunity you saw?

Vlad Magdalin (09:33):

Yeah, so this was 2005, the TL;DR is that I went so straight out of high school I wanted to go study 3D animation or I wanted to work at Pixar. That was the dream. I was a designer through high school, but for various reasons. My parents were like, you got to go follow your brother at Cal Poly, which is computer science. So I went there for a year in the year 2000, but a year later I was just like, I wasn't doing a good, I was starting to fail classes. I really didn't enjoy computer science, so I dropped out and went to the Academy of Art here in the city. Before it was, I mean this was the early days of that school too. It wasn't accredited. It was all about just come in and learn kind of classical animation art, et cetera. So I had gone through that for a couple of years and unfortunately that school didn't work out. But long story short, I went back to Cal Poly and got an agency job, a job at an agency, at a web design agency to start to pay these student loans back. It was just an intern basically taking Photoshop files, translating them to HT LCSS. And then one day I saw an invoice for the work that our team was doing for one of our clients and for the work that myself and a designer on the creative team were doing. We were probably paid minimum wage for just a few days to come up with a design translated to this in-house CMS, and it was billed at $100K for each. It was basically this data object that was sort of the center of their billing strategy. And I was like, holy crap, there's way more value here than what we're realizing. That's when all these things came together of here we have a designer who was basically creating pictures on a screen and a developer myself who's translating those pictures into a code base. Whereas in 3D animation land, these creatives are creating entire storylines and they're animating something, pressing a button, and it goes to the screen. I mean it gets rendered, it goes to the render farm, but there's no translation layer. And that's where all of this came together of there has to be something that is like 3D animation software for web design where it's more sophisticated, more powerful, where the creative ideas are already there. These creative designers, they understand the power of the web, they just don't have the right tools to harness it and to leverage it. And that's where, especially that Spark was seeing the invoice, it's not anything in particular, but the fact that I could see that there's so much value, there was the initial genesis of, alright, I need to build a product around this.

Akshay Kothari (12:17):

Can you talk a little bit about, I guess not the current attempt that seems to be going so well, but it sounds like there was almost a seven year period where this idea was in your head. You tried a bunch of different times, I think including applying to Y Combinator and getting rejected once. That must be extremely frustrating, but can you maybe walk us through that and maybe talk a little bit about what kept you going to try another time?

Vlad Magdalin (12:45):

Yep. I would say it was frustrating to a degree, but also I always, for some reason in the back of my head just felt it was inevitable. It was just a matter of when. So every time things didn't work out. Every time I had to either wind that existing attempt down, always in the back of my head I was to various degrees thinking I'm going to try again at some point when the timing is right or when I figure out the issue that led to winding down the previous attempt. So maybe it was exuberant optimism or just some idea in the back of my head that there has to be a better way and I'm going to make it happen at some point in the future. I don't know what to attribute that to. I just like maybe stubbornness, maybe just this kind of assumption that I'm going to figure out some way to do it, but at various time prioritizing different things like when my first kid was still born, I had to focus on the family for a while before all those ideas kept rushing back.

Akshay Kothari (13:59):

Can you talk a little bit about that? I guess in this phase, I think a lot of entrepreneurs try it sometimes doesn't work, but life happens, right? And I think you have to figure out a way to balance that also in terms of just making sure your spouse, your kids are able to, how did you manage that in that time?

Vlad Magdalin (14:18):

Honestly, it was pretty tough. Most of the time I made the call to prioritize family and this fourth time, so pretty much every time I decided to wind things down, especially the third time when we had incorporated, we had raised some funding, we started building a product, we had a founding team, but I had to make a decision between do I quit my job and go forward? And then we had some trademark issues and basically things like slowed down to the degree where I had to take a bet, would I go full-time despite those things and try to figure out how to keep funding while I'm trying to figure out how to grow my brand new family and support them. And I had made the call to not risk too many things just because my first daughter was just born. We were not in a great financial position, so I just decided not to take that risk, which was the prudent call at the time. And then the fourth time when we actually, this last incorporation, I think we felt both my wife and I felt like there was enough, we had literally three months of savings in terms of that's how long we could go without additional having to get a job again. But then what was supposed to be three months turned into 12 months and we were literally on the verge of saying, alright, we're, I'm going to go back and get my job and we'll get my old job back and we'll figure out how to moonlight. And we were honestly on that edge that by the time we launched something in March of 2013 just to show the world what we were building wasn't even a product that we can monetize yet. We were literally on the verge of calling it quits. And I think we just got lucky with that timing that if it was maybe a month or two longer, we would just not be able to sustain at that level. But thankfully my wife was really supportive in the sense that this was my life's work and kind of came to the recurring realization that if we didn't give it everything that we could always, it might take years to build back, going back to my old job, but it will take decades to counter the regret of not trying given how long I've been trying to get this idea off the ground. So ultimately we're lucky that it worked out, but I think we were on the very, very, not even bleeding edge, beyond the edge of probably what most people should do financially to keep pouring everything into a startup.

Akshay Kothari (16:57):

What an incredible story. I mean I think just hearing it me, I gives me the feel, it sounds like an extremely tough period of time and I guess today it feels probably super fortuitous that you kept going and did it. But I bet at that moment was probably super stressful.

Vlad Magdalin (17:19):

Very stressful actually. It gives me the feels again, I need to go hug my wife just to remind her how much I appreciate that the journey we went through because she was such a big part of the determination and perseverance. There were times where I wanted to give up and she's just like, you can give, we can risk another month.

Akshay Kothari (17:41):

So you launched this in 2013. Talk us a little bit about how do you go from there to early signs of product market fit?

Vlad Magdalin (17:51):

I've never really answered the question to myself of when we got product market fit. I would probably say that the clearest sign was in 2015 when we essentially turned cashflow breakeven. So that means we had enough customers that were finding our operations, but the initial signs were not super stellar. So for example, when we launched our demo or our playground, you can still see it today, it's like playground@webflow.com to see sort of the idea of what the product would become from that. We got tens of thousands of signups on our wait list. So we thought, oh, clearly there's product market fit here. But then out of those 30,000 plus customers or potential customers, we had thought that maybe we'd convert five or 10% of them to paying customers when we actually went live with our paid plans later that August, I think it was something like 50 people ended up converting to a paid plan and those paid plans were really cheap. So that delta of, hey, we thought we were going to get 3000 people at least that we're going to be paying users to a fraction of that was really eyeopening. And we were like, what's going on here? Initially it ended up being, there was a silver lining to it. It was a blessing in disguise in the sense that those people were so webflow was so transformational for them that they were all in. For many of them it became the way that they made a living. They were in the product eight, 10 hours a day and giving us a ton of feedback. They became a part of the early community that wanted to help others in the same boat, essentially 50 true fans. Exactly. And we ended up wrapping our arms around them to support them, see what they needed most. And then that slowly grew over time, but was pretty, we had a lot of existential questions the first couple of years because we weren't growing fast enough to justify the trajectory that other startups saw, especially if you go seed round to a Series A, et cetera. So we had all these questions around are we building the right product? Is the market large enough for the professional use case that we're building for? But I think there was enough there that we consistently had just enough confidence that we really needed double down on this more professional user base that is creating things often for others, other businesses, and kind of doubling down on that professional nature of the product. Because when we first got rejected from Y Combinator, it was like the exact reason we probably would've expected to give ourselves the product was too difficult for end businesses to understand and it wasn't powerful enough yet for developer like true developers. So it was somewhere in the middle. You kind of had to be almost like a developer to take full advantage of the product, but the value was more to individuals or smaller businesses that didn't have access to a developer. So it was this weird middle zone that we sort of fit into and we had to decide to keep doubling down on that core user base. Those are the only people really knew that were using and paying for the product. So it felt like we had to honor that and keep investing into that part of our user base.

Akshay Kothari (21:36):

One thing that was unique was a reading up was that I think you sort of had this seed round within, you went a while without raising another round of funding it sounds like because you maybe became cashflow positive. Can you talk a little bit about that? Was that intentional and would you do the same thing again?

Vlad Magdalin (21:52):

Yeah, definitely not intentional from the get-go. So what happened was we first, we struggled a lot actually in our initial seed round, even post yc, I think a month and a half into our seed round process. We had only raised, I think we had targeted like a million dollars, but we raised like 350 K, so smaller angels, smaller funds, and it was getting, so the word I would use was I was distraught. Every morning I would wake up and it's like, okay, here's another five investor meetings where we're going to either get nos or why this isn't going to work or not hear from them again. I remember a conversation we had with Paul Graham, and this was the last batch that he was involved in YC, and it was like, look, clearly it's not working for you guys to keep raising money, you're not spending time on the product, you're hearing voice from your customers that nothing's improving. You're just focusing on fundraising. You raised enough that the three of you can keep working on it for a year. We had enough that we can just pay ourselves a reasonable salary and just go heads down. So when we let investors, everybody who was in that process know that, hey, we're stopping fundraising, a few more came in, it was like, no, no, we're kind of waiting on the sidelines. So thankfully we were able to raise that first initial seed round. It ended up being $1.4 million. And we weren't even saying no in the FOMO sense we were just literally just so tired. Yeah, we were just so tired. We just said, we're not going to keep fundraising, we're just going to go back to building. And thankfully that led to this groundswell of wait, wait, wait. Maybe we want to be part of it. But then like I mentioned, we just weren't growing super fast and even though we've had some conversations around a series A, we just didn't have the metrics and we were burning cash to the degree where it just was not sustainable. So that's when we made the call to stop hiring as quickly to essentially by virtue of survival, get a default alive because we just didn't see a clear path to the traditional raise a series A and go that same round. I think that was the non-intentional part of it where almost necessity. Yeah, almost a necessity. But by the time we got to cashflow break even, it just felt like we're kind of in control of our own destiny. Things kept working pretty well. We didn't feel the need to go out and raise additional funding. And then over time that even though we weren't growing amazingly fast, it was enough and it compounded quickly enough that we just built a pretty strong business like seven, eight years later. And that's when we got a lot more inbound interest around partnering with more traditional venture partners. And that's what led to our series A, I think in 2019. So what, six years, six and a half years after.

Akshay Kothari (25:01):

Let's switch gears a little bit, maybe talk about hiring. Can you talk about maybe the first hire you made and how did you find that person?

Vlad Magdalin (25:14):

The first hire, it was front end engineer, his name is Dan. It was kind of a fluke because I didn't have a big network at all. So I grew up in Sacramento. I literally only knew one other developer and I had met him at this WordPress meetup like three years before. So I sent him a note with the intention of trying to hire him, basically asking the question, who's the best person that is into front end engineering, fully expecting him to say, Hey, I'm down for the job, et cetera. But he said, you should talk to this guy named Dan. And he was working at a web design agency but had created his own frontend framework for animation. And it was the perfect overlap of, hey, here we're trying to empower designers to become front end developers. And there's like incredible technical depth, not just what you would expect from frontend engineer building screens, working with React. Well, React wasn't even a thing at the time, but thinking very systematically in first principles around core principles and web engineering. So he took a bet on us, but it was like probably the most influential technical hire we've ever made because this essentially in the first year had invented, that wasn't even in our initial vision, like our entire interactions and animations engine, that became probably the biggest growth driver for the first three, four years of the company. And he was at Webflow for 10 years and is now moving on to do amazing new things. But I think that was a pretty foundational hire and it was again, pure luck.

Akshay Kothari (27:06):

Webflow is a significant large company. How has the hiring processes evolved? And maybe can you talk a little bit about what you've learned specifically around leadership hiring?

Vlad Magdalin (27:16):

I mean, it's evolved probably a hundred different ways, but I think the thing that has remained consistent is alignment to the mission. We've learned a few times that even when skills experience, et cetera exist, but there's just, you're foregoing this excitement around empowering other people to create for the web when that's something that's more of a side thing for somebody, it's like, yeah, that's interesting, but I'm here to do a job that has almost never worked out. That has remained a constant around why are people joining and how much is the core mission and a part of the reason why they want to be part of this mission or this core team. The second thing, especially around leadership hiring, especially lately I've been leaning a lot more into kind of leaders who sweat the details. So there's a tendency, or there was a tendency over the last few years where there's more of a focus on just people management or just leadership or people leadership in terms of supporting a team, empowering a team, all those things are super important, but leaning more towards the details and the craft of the thing that you're building together and the importance of a leader, really understanding those details to set a really high bar for not only what the team creates together, but also the people that join the team. The way that the team works together is a reflection usually of what the leader brings to the table. Just nothing like a leader that is holistically is almost a representative of the product, the mission, the vision, the culture across the entire stack, not just one part of that in many ways, wanting a builder mindset.

Akshay Kothari (29:23):

So I think one of the things recently I've been seeing is there's been just rise in companies building in public, and I feel like you all have a public wishlist that you publish. Can you talk a little bit about how you all landed on that, maybe how that has allowed you to engage with the community more?

Vlad Magdalin (29:46):

So I think we landed on that pretty quickly from the very beginning. So the first thing we did was we set up a form, this was before we even launched. We set up a user and community form and we saw a lot of requests bubble up through that, but it was really tough to manage because you have many separate threads, like loudest voices usually win in our forum. Before that, people wanted everything. And in this wishlist that we set up, we created this dynamic where you had to use a Webflow count to up vote something and you only had a certain number of votes. So to vote for something else, you kind had to remove a vote from another area. So it almost created this stack ranking algorithm or stack ranking effect where people really had to choose what they really wanted and we gave the power for folks to dual vote. So if they really wanted something, they could use five of their 10 votes on this one thing to show how much that was needed in their area. So it gave us this really rich input into what is missing in the platform. So that's a big benefit of that. The shadow side is that you can never build everything, and a lot of times things that got a lot of up votes were not necessarily always strategic for us or that we would get to next. So it didn't always represent a one-to-one mapping between what we believed was the most important thing to build for the company. In hindsight, I would say there were times where user insight was probably more right than what we thought was the next most important thing to build, right? We might've thought this would be a cool new area of functionality, whereas a lot of our users are saying this core thing is broken, please focus on that before building this new shiny thing. Other times it created a pretty set of tough conversations between why is it that this top most voted thing is not getting a lot of attention for years? So it's come with its, I would say overall it was largely net positive, but it had some downside to the appearance of building in public, whereas in some cases we had to be pretty honest with, Hey, we're not going to work on this area. And sometimes the toughest one was when we would take an idea and actually devote a lot of time to it and tell our community that we're working on it and then realize either it was too hard to build or some business constraints or some technical constraint or some other reason why something else made sense. And to go back on our commitment was a really, really rough series of conversations with our community many times. So I would say it's a tool like anything else, but it's not universally perfect or universally bad depending on, it all depends on the kind of relationship you have with your user community. And for us, I think it's been pluses and minuses largely beneficial, but also has caused some of these rough edges in how we interface with our community.

Akshay Kothari (33:17):

Another unique thing I guess that I noticed was that I think in the early days you avoided looking at enterprise customers, and this is something that I guess the Valley keeps talking about is always move up market, move up market. And I think Notion has also not done that. And so I'm curious what made you decide to not do that initially and then how did you move into it gradually?

Vlad Magdalin (33:43):

I mean, initially it was very much based on YC’s advice. Other advisors that we had who essentially saw the pattern that we encountered with our first enterprise customer. This is like 2015 where you're very tempted by the revenue because our first enterprise check was something like, it was like $250K when we had maybe a million dollars in the bank. So it's a material amount of revenue and cash. But it came with, thankfully we're able to avoid these strings in our first deal. But typically the initial pressure was essentially we'd be building our product towards the needs of this much larger company. And that seemed like an existential risk. It seemed like it would help our business in the short term, but over time we would lose the special early first early adopter community that was for whom Webflow was not just a helpful part of their business, it was their livelihood at that point. And we just had to make a call between, alright, our team was what, maybe 20 people at the time. And we just saw that, hey, if we keep doing more of these, it's just going to pull us towards this direction where we're constantly at the mercy of larger businesses to just build for what they need while not necessarily ignoring the lower end, but just by virtue of only having so many few people, we would just have fewer people working on the needs of our core core product. So it wasn't until we were probably at, I'm trying to remember the revenue scale, maybe 25 million in ARR that we started to legitimately start to look at. We started to see so much organic demand of just existing upmarket customers who were on our self-serve plans to get more, right, whether it was single sign-on or account support or deeper security features, et cetera. And that's where it became, we started seeing it more as incremental rather than as a replacement of our core business. So that's when we started layering on more enterprise functionality, had an enterprise offering and that's sort of the direction we're heading in now where it's not a shift to a different type of customer but an expansion beyond our core customer base to go more upmarket. And that's been a more natural and organic way to explore it where we're still a relatively small part of our business around 20%, but we're finding ways to do it kind of in conjunction with our core product and our core business.

Akshay Kothari (36:31):

You mentioned there's a time when you sort of hit 1 million ARR. Can you sort of go back in time and tell me more about that particular milestone? A lot of younger entrepreneurs that is the first version of product market fit.

Vlad Magdalin (36:48):

I've gotten to some scale. Yeah, I wonder, I honestly have struggled to remember that exact moment because I think when we hit 1 million in ARR we're burning quite a bit of cash, quite a lot of cash where I was just, if we're, I don't know, making whatever it was around a hundred k per month in revenue, we were probably burning 150 in expenses and it just looked existentially bad. So I don't remember seeing that revenue milestone as a huge milestone in, so you're focused on this getting to a cashflow deposit. At that point, I was more worried about, okay, great that we have this, but it's just not sustainable. It almost felt like a vanity metric at that point, if I'm remembering correctly. And the costs of that time were primarily people or primarily people. Got it. We had some, I would say in retrospect, some pretty bad decisions we made on things that were around. So I remember shortly after our seed round, maybe a year after, when we were looking to launch our CMS, which was our major first big product expansion, we spent, maybe we had a million dollars in the bank, maybe a little bit more, but we spent 200 k on this ad campaign with this famous agency that was making all the other startup videos at the time. And it seemed like a good idea. We're like, oh, we're going to make this thing and it's going to be super popular and it's going to bring in a lot of business like a sandwich person. Exactly. Good guess. And it was honestly, I think used that video. We thought it was going to be funny and it's going to resonate with the market, but it sort of made fun of developers in a kind of kitschy way, but it had enough blowback that it just didn't have much business value. So we stopped using it in ads and anywhere else, and that was just a terrible financial decision. We could have hired two engineers for the amount of money we spent there, but outside of that it was mostly just hiring people and engineers and designers to should keep that video. That's kind of a good reminder. Totally still have it. It's in the archive.

Akshay Kothari (39:19):

One of the things you've sort of believe is Webflow has really helped spark this no-code revolution, and that's really transformed much of the software landscape over the last few years. I guess as you look into the future, do you have a vision for where this goes in the next 10 years?

Vlad Magdalin (39:36):

Sort of all the trends that are coming together right now put together, you know no-code, low-code, and AI? I think it still feels that we're at the beginning of this kind of democratization revolution of getting more people to create software or benefit from the leverage that software can bring. Maybe roughly one to 2% of the world right now is creating software in any meaningful way, even with the advances in ai, while the vast majority of the world, especially the world that's online, is benefiting from software being a part of their lives. So I think over the next 10 years we're going to see that percentage hopefully rise to, if not close to maybe half of the degree, the way that literacy exists today. For every person that is able to read a book, people have the fundamental skills and to a degree the steps that they can take to write and distribute a book. We're still nowhere near that when it comes to software development and creation of not only traditional apps, but just leveraging software in our day-to-Day lives. Notion's been a big part of creating automation light, sort of automating things that typically you might do manually, but I think we're just scratching the surface of what's possible even with the AI tools we see today. So I think the next 10 years are going to be transformational in that way where no matter what happens to these platforms or these businesses, I think they're all going to be part of the story of how do you get the world to think of software as a key, a thing that you use to solve everyday problems, whether they're business, personal or otherwise. And I don't know, I don't have enough confidence to prognosticate exactly what that's going to look like, but my hope that 10 years from now, it's like a normal thing to have a kid that is 10 years old using software to solve real problems or automate things in their life or whatever, the same way that they use math today. Or use writing or use Plato or Legos. I love that. I think there's a lot of similarities to how we think about the future of the world. And I think there's this general push that I think Webflow and notion is doing just towards making more people into the creation phase rather than just consumption phase is so inspiring.

Akshay Kothari (42:15):

Alright, we ask these two closing questions to all our guests. So here's the first one. Describe a day in your life. How do you start your day? Do you have any sort of customs or rituals that you do every day?

Vlad Magdalin (42:31):

Kind of boring. The days almost always feel different, but they almost always start the same. So I have this kind of pretty easy but challenging enough five minute workout that I do every morning right before I shower. And I have a gratitude journal where I jot down a few things morning and evening. And typically I'll either drive to work or if I'm at home, walk the dog and then settle with in my home computer and my home office. But that's really the net rituals of my life, always starting every morning roughly the same. And I have other workout routines throughout the week, but that has been, I wouldn't say fully transformational, but a steady, steady thing that helps me get grounded. I've tried all sorts of meditation practices or whatever. This is the only thing that stuck is something physical, something a little bit challenging, something that makes me feel healthier and start the day on a positive note.

Akshay Kothari (43:39):

And what about the evenings and family time? Are there certain times you try to get back at and you plug back in?

Vlad Magdalin (43:50):

Yeah. Evening is pretty sacred. My daughters are at a point now where one's going to high school, just started her first year in high school. One is two years away from that. So they're kind of at the point where they don't want to spend time with me organically. You have to do more to create that space to build relationships. After the first year, it was really important for me to create a culture at the company where we're not working nights and weekends. And when I'm home with the family, it hasn't always been a hundred percent adherence. There's some tough moments, especially through the pandemic that I had to take some extra time to focus on fires. But I try to be home at 5 36 most days where we're can have dinner as a family and that is just irreplaceable. So to me, family is, if I had a choice between family and webflow going to zero tomorrow, easy choice. That's where most of my kind of sense of self and belonging and purpose lives. Even though my sense of purpose with my work is so, such a big part of my life, it's not even in the same family clearly wins.

Akshay Kothari (44:58):

And then the last question. If you were to write a book about what's gotten you to this point in your career, what would you title it?

Vlad Magdalin (45:08):

Honestly, I don't know exactly what I would call it, but I would have the word empowerment in it because I've seen so much of the magic that happens when you put more power into people's hands and especially economic power. And I think that's what's been behind our mission to how do you get people to feel like the skill that they're developing, like opens up new doors for them, helps them start a new career, put food on the table, et cetera. So something about the empowerment economy where, and I think you've seen this too at Notion where how much magic happens when somebody feels like they are not only exploring a tool or platform, but they're seeing it as an avenue to bring more prosperity into their life, bring more creativity, bring more they feel empowered, they feel like they have superpowers. And that to me has been the engine of our success so far. And I think will remain the engine of what creates a strong business around putting more power into people's hands. I like that. The empowerment economy. It's a good drink to it.

Akshay Kothari (46:13):

Thank you so much for sharing your story. So inspiring and I really appreciate the time you spent with us this morning.

Vlad Magdalin (46:20):

It's an honor to be you here. Thank you for having me.

Akshay Kothari (46:26):

First Block is brought to you by Notion for Startups. We at Notion care deeply about startups and founders, and we hope these stories inspire you to keep building. To learn more about how we are supporting startups, please visit notion.com/startups.