Linda Tong Transcript
Clint Betts
Linda, thank you so much for coming on the show. What an honor to have you. Webflow is an incredible company. I'm sure a lot of people who are watching or listening have used it, heard about it, or at the very least are curious about how it's all working in this age of AI. You became the CEO about two years ago. Tell us what led you to become the CEO of Webflow.
Linda Tong
Thank you. Well, actually, one small correction. I actually only became CEO about seven months ago.
Clint Betts
Oh, I'm sorry.
Linda Tong
No worries.
Clint Betts
Incredible.
Linda Tong
But I've been at Webflow for about two and a half years now.
Clint Betts
Okay. That's what it is.
Linda Tong
I've been at this company, and I've just been a part of the story. I had the great honor of stepping into the CEO role more recently. And so, for those who don't know, Webflow is a web development platform that empowers non-developers to build powerful websites. We are a visual abstraction of code, so designers and marketers can come together and build these incredible websites for their companies, these global marketing sites, or main dot coms. What's great about it is that it allows people to move faster and get incredible, powerful sites built that ultimately drive return on investment for their businesses. So whether it's driving conversions or signups or just brand awareness, it's such a powerful platform.
And for me, I love Webflow. So, part of the mission is to bring development superpowers to everyone. And my background is actually that of a product manager, which is really close to being technical but not quite. My background is in healthcare economics, so it clearly has development capabilities. But as a product person, I always had this chip on my shoulder. I had this idea of the things that I wanted to build and the experiences I wanted to unlock, and I always had to rely on a team of engineers to execute it for me. And a lot of times, between vision and execution, there's this translation layer, and it doesn't always work out as planned. I've always wanted to be able to build it myself because I never felt like my vision was ever really being executed appropriately. And when I saw Webflow and I saw what we could do, the idea that someone like me could be empowered to go build for the web and see my vision through the way that it's sort of captured in my mind felt like one of the greatest missions to be on. And so for me it's really been about taking this mission and bringing it to billions of people.
Clint Betts
Well, it's like magic, right? I mean, just a few years ago, it was really hard to build a website, and you had to have at least some sort of technical background. What led to it being like magic through Webflow?
Linda Tong
I mean, credit goes to the founders; they are this really unique blend. There's three of them, Vlad, Bryant, and Sergie. They are this unique combination of front-end and back-end developers paired with design prowess. They've always had this eye for what great design and great experience look like. Vlad himself, who was a previous CEO, had actually been building websites to fund Webflow. So it was sort of this freelance gig, and he's this engineer who also went to art school. And he was always like, why is it so hard, even as an engineer, to go build these websites? It doesn't have to be this difficult. And Sergie, his brother, is a designer. And Sergie was the first customer of Webflow. He was the first person that we designed and built for.
Vlad and Bryant started building this platform with Sergie in mind. How do we get a designer into this place to go build in a very intuitive way while, in the background, Webflow would handle all that complexity of code? And so they built it with that magic in mind of how do we empower a designer who isn't technical to be able to build something so powerful and beautiful without sacrificing what someone would do else otherwise with code. And because they were so hard-lined about ensuring that every element, every component that you drag onto the screen, is actually a one-to-one mapping with code, you never sacrifice the power of code so you could really build anything you can imagine. And they've continued to invest in that way such that even today with Webflow, there's nothing you can't do with Webflow that you can do with code.
Clint Betts
And what are some incredible products? I mean, I can think of a few, but what are some incredible products or companies that have literally been built on Webflow?
Linda Tong
Oh, man. I mean, we've seen so many incredible websites. I do Orangetheory Fitness a lot, I don't know if you like to put yourself through that pain.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Linda Tong
Orangetheory Fitness's website is built on Webflow. When you go and book your classes, every morning when I book my classes and get ready for that pain, I know it's running on Webflow. I get to go... What's really cool is actually I see a bunch of these cool sites, so it's Orangetheory Fitness, see sites from Dropbox, I see sites from Waste Management, they have these powerful main dot coms are all hosted on Webflow. Discord: I'm a big Discord person, and their website is on Webflow. So, you can find that just under 1% of CMS-powered websites are hosted on Webflow.
Clint Betts
And do you integrate with things like WordPress and other platforms? I mean, WordPress isn't the only one, like Ghost, and I'm just thinking, I mean, there are millions of them, but how does that all work, or does Webflow have its own kind of back-end platform?
Linda Tong
So Webflow does have its... It's a seamlessly integrated back-end. So if you think about Webflow as not only the visual development piece where you can just go and you can drag components on a screen and interact with them and design your website, we also have a CMS, a really powerful CMS that's seamlessly integrated into the designers. If you want to add things like a blog or things that require a data structure, that's really where a lot of the back end comes from. And then, we have integrated hosting. So once you've designed and built your site, you actually just click a button, and it's published and live. So you don't really need to integrate with the likes of WordPress or Ghost, but rather, we actually have the full stack in one place.
Clint Betts
That's so incredible. And how has AI changed all of this? Tell me about the way AI is obviously facilitating a lot of this and how you're thinking about it and implementing it within the company.
Linda Tong
Yeah. I mean, I think, gosh, there's so much going on with AI. First, philosophically, I think AI, like any other technology, you have to ask yourself, is this a disruptor, or is this an accelerator? And I think, in general, most technologies, if you look at it as an accelerator, are just that. To us, it's an accelerator for enhancing and taking the core value proposition of Webflow. So, for us, it's democratizing technology; it's about allowing people to move faster and improving ease of use. And for us, AI does that. It's about when someone comes into Webflow; they are already moving pretty fast in designing that website. With AI, they can go from zero to a prototype very quickly, whether it's a prompt-based sort of blank canvas to prototype, which is a core use case of AI. In addition to that, iteration is important because you're going to design something and call it, tweak it, change things, and want to iterate and get feedback.
And the process of doing that, you see that in code today with these co-pilot-like experiences. For us, we have a very similar solution called AI Design Assistant that allows you to go and iterate different sections and start to change them; whether you want to change styles, layouts, structure, or whatever, we have this AI co-pilot called AI Design Assistant. In addition to that, we have AI to help generate content because a lot of times, you might design the shell of a site, but you really need text, you need imagery, and then you need to translate that text and imagery as you think about localization. So, AI is the backbone that powers a lot of that. So we have a writing assistant, and we're working through image generation and integrating third-party solutions like Adobe Photoshop Express to do image generation. Then we also leverage a translation service, so as people want to take their website and unlock it for whatever geos and languages they support, all of that is AI-powered. And so we see AI throughout our product as this accelerant to help people get more value out of Webflow faster and seamlessly.
In addition to that, though, I think AI is a really interesting technology in general. It's not just about incorporating it into our product to make our product more powerful for our customers, but it's a technology that we can leverage in our day-to-day operations. So whether we have an AI customer support agent right now that really handles a lot of the top questions that we're seeing, that's feeding our documentation. We've incorporated AI into our development philosophy, and many of our engineers are leveraging multiple different co-pilot experiences to help improve their speed of coding efficiency and quality.
We have AI plugged into how our people team is running all of our solutions and engagement. We have AI plugged into our legal team, which is helping us review contracts and documentation. AI is supporting our go-to-market efforts, everything from automation on the sales side to how we identify leads to marketing content generation. So it's something that I think can plug into everything we're doing to improve how we operate but paired with the talent of our team to make sure that we still, both from an operations perspective and a product perspective, believe the creator is the heart of what you want to accomplish and AI as a partner, like a collaborator to help unlock that.
Clint Betts
What advice would you have for software developers, people who want to be software developers, or software engineers? What should they be focused on? We really are coming into this world where you can build a lot of things without having to know how to code, just basically by prompting and things of that nature and what Webflow does. What advice do you have for them? I mean, should they just stop doing that?
Linda Tong
Absolutely not. I think I was reading this article, and it was kind of one of those doomsday articles, but they were talking about how AI is not an equalizer. It's not something that takes everybody and suddenly puts us on the same playing field, but rather, it's a multiplier, and it takes the best engineers and makes them 10x better, and it takes mediocre engineers and only slightly improves them. And so what you see is this larger disparity because it still takes a lot of intention. The technology is not exactly where we want it to be yet. It's not like it in anything I do where I'm writing a prompt, or I'm running sort of a query or a sequence, and it's just done. It takes a lot more thought and understanding to actually get to the output you want. So whether it's coding, I see developers leverage AI, and they're constantly reviewing the code and then prompting, and reviewing it, and prompting. It takes a really good engineer to be able to shape it in the right direction to get the output you want.
And so walking away from having that core knowledge or not building that expertise, I think, is actually going to put you on the low end of how much AI can truly multiply your capabilities. And so I do think there is foundational expertise and excellence that people should strive for, and they should look at AI as really an enhancement to what they have, and it can only enhance your core capabilities so much. And so if your core capabilities are light, enhancement's light. Your core capabilities are strong; it can take you so much further, and I think people should approach it that way.
Clint Betts
I think that's brilliant. I think that's the best answer I've heard. That is exactly right. Yeah, you won. That was the right answer. No, I'm just kidding.
Linda Tong
I'm an Asian. I like positive reinforcement.
Clint Betts
No, I think you're exactly right. It can only enhance what already exists, right?
Linda Tong
Yeah.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you as CEO?
Linda Tong
It's funny. I wish I had an answer to that, but my days are constantly changing. There are always things going on, whether... I was looking at my calendar, I have days where I'm doing a bunch of one-on-ones and coaching, I have days where I'm doing org planning, I have days where I'm prepping for QBRs, I have days where I have board meetings or prep for board meetings, or we'll do annual planning and strategic offsites, or we'll have strategy conversations on pricing and packaging. So it's kind of all over the place. But I think if I were to look for points of consistency in what my day is, the points of consistency are that every day, I have clarity of what's the most important thing to accomplish, and it's prioritizing my calendar. And if it's not, then things move around. And so it's always, I like to think of my days as high-impact days and every day is meant to be a high-impact day; sometimes, I fail. Just like anybody else, I'm not perfect. But my typical days are ones in which I have clarity on what it is I'm looking to accomplish. My calendar reflects that in terms of where I'm spending my time and prioritizing.
Clint Betts
Tell us about, you just recently launched a couple things. You did the Webflow Optimize, Webflow Analyze, and this was launched in October. Tell us about that. That seemed like a good step forward for the company.
Linda Tong
Absolutely. So a lot of people have thought about us as a website builder, the ability to come in, design a website, build it, publish it, run it. The thing is, as soon as you launch a website, I think a lot of people used to think about websites the same way that they think about brick and mortar. It's like this fixed thing. It's just a store, and it's structured, or it's sort of like an entity that you just go to, and that's it. The reality is when you go from brick and mortar, and you go onto the internet, and you think about the dynamism of the web, there's no reason why websites should be static, and that's why the best companies have turned their websites into these living, breathing dynamic beings that are highly personalized to the people who are coming to them. And so the power that comes with the ability to have different experiences for different people across different periods of time means that that website can't be something that you just publish and set and forget.
It needs constant iteration. What we realize is that what feeds that iteration is getting regular analytics and being able to build personalized experiences by the different sorts of cohorts of users that are coming to your site and understanding that data system; when someone lands, they get special experiences carved out for them. And so our analytics product, our Google... Sorry. Webflow Analyze is about being able to understand where people are coming from, what they are doing, and how they are traversing the website. Then, Webflow Optimize is about understanding, as we create different experiences, how we maximize the throughput based on the goals that we've intended. So, is it a signup or a click-through conversion? Whatever it is, we can start to create these experiences and cater them to individuals.
These two products are seamlessly integrated into the web builder. So instead of right now today, people will go to a website builder, then they jump to another analytics solution and then jump to another personalization solution, and they'd have to hop back and forth and try and marry all this data and create an experience, it's all seamlessly integrated into Webflow. So, as you design, you can see analytics side by side. You can create multiple designs and call them different experiences, load them into Optimize, and make sure that they're hitting the right cohorts. But these seamlessly integrated products are what allow us to go from being a website builder to being a website experience platform, and it's fundamentally changed the way that people should be building and iterating on the web.
Clint Betts
So what do you read? I mean, I'm seeing these books behind you, and by the way, they're perfectly color-coded and incredible. I imagine you read a lot. Tell us what you read and what reading recommendations would you have for us.
Linda Tong
So I read everything, I'm all over the place. Everything from a lot of sci-fi, big Orson Scott Card fan, so Ender's Game is an annual repeat for me, to a lot of nonfiction, to what I call my leadership self-help books. It's just a lot of these leadership books that I think have been recommended to me over the years. But I would say, if I were to make a recommendation to this group, the most impactful book on the shelf would probably be by this woman, Annie Duke. She was a professional poker player, but she has now turned VC. But this book is called Thinking in Bets. It is the perfect articulation of how I think about decision-making. I would take every single quote from that book and just regurgitate it to you as what I think of as the best set of leadership lessons you can learn and how you do effective decision-making.
Clint Betts
Yeah. That actually is a great book, Thinking in Bets, and she's incredible as well. Can you give us a sense of the size of the company and how... My sense, as an outsider here, is this is a rocket ship taking off. Give us a sense of how it's grown even since you've become CEO.
Linda Tong
Yeah, so the company has been growing fast. We are about 700 or so people. I think ever since I stepped in the role, we've probably hired 70 to a hundred people. So it's been growing really quickly from an employee count size. Revenue, we're growing in a really healthy way. We don't share those numbers, but really healthy growth on a base. A little over a year ago, we announced that we had crossed a couple hundred million in ARR, and we also shared that we've crossed 300,000 customers. So there is a really nice foundation that we've been building in terms of reach and revenue scale that has been wildly exciting. And now, as we go from being a single-product company to a multi-product company, we've brought in some really incredible leadership over the past year and a half, and I'm pretty excited to see where we go. We've got a really bright future.
Clint Betts
How do you think about leadership now that you're CEO? How have you thought about that previously? What changed or was unexpected for you, and what does it mean to be a leader now that you've taken this role?
Linda Tong
Gosh, I think leadership is something that has... I think good leadership rather is something that has changed over the entirety of my career. I think I had ideas of what made a good leader, what I thought I needed to be as a leader, and what I look for nowadays when I hire leaders or even when I try to model myself. I'll give you an example. I think back in the day, I used to think leaders were just the best. They were the experts at what they did, they made decisions, they were just the most qualified. I think I'm a very merit-oriented individual. And because they were such experts, they knew everything; there's some magical level of expertise that they reached to become leaders.
And nowadays, I realize that that is totally false, or maybe I'm just a terrible leader. But it's just, I think good leadership nowadays is about curiosity, is about surrounding yourself with people who are curious, who can collaborate, who are aligned on problems and look to get as much information as they can, but ultimately make reasonable decisions that move a business forward because they're moving in an aligned fashion. To me, it's about being decisive and owning the results of your decisions, good or bad. It's about constantly challenging yourself and being open to learning because things are constantly changing. You'll never know everything.
And then I think, frankly, it's about being able to influence. And I think the biggest difference between where I started and where I am now, I used to think about leadership as just being at the top and telling people what to do. I think I like to break things down into binary models because it is easiest for my simple mind, but I think a lot of people think about leadership as an authority. It's having authority over people. They always say, "Oh, if this person reported to me, I could make this decision." And I think good leadership is when you don't need a leader with authority.
I think it's actually leading with influence and the ability to inspire many people against a common goal, and executing together is what actually amplifies someone's leadership. The more people you inspire, the more effective and impactful you can be because once you're in a leadership position, you're no longer rolling up your sleeves, you're no longer doing all the work, right? You're really inspiring a scaled organization to work together, execute something, and create something bigger than themselves. And the only way to really do that in a leadership position is to inspire and influence others.
Clint Betts
What are some products, tools, and apps that you use every day or you just couldn't live without?
Linda Tong
I am so old school. I have actually tried leveraging all these different products and tools. I have a Stream Deck to create all these macros to open things and make me more efficient. I was using different note-taking apps. I was using AI note-taking. I created a whole system for docs and how I want to manage information. And I realized I tried those things, and then I sort of grew out of them because it took so much mental load to incorporate new systems and processes into my life that I stripped everything out, and I actually just do... I literally go down to a notebook. So I have notebooks and my trusty 0.38 pen, that's it. This is the bane of my existence but also the one thing I can't live without.
I started doing this probably in 2017. In all of my meetings, I just take notes, and I have a really simple system for what I flag as an action item, an area to do research and follow up, or just a note that I want to call out and remember. I keep my calendar always up to date, and I always date things in these notebooks, and I order them one through whatever. And anytime I look back on a meeting, I can find the right notebook, look to that date, and look at my notes from it. It's just that simple. But I've realized if I take notes, I am present in the meeting, I'm focused, the things that I write down or the things I want to take away, and my action items are all in one place, and it makes it really easy for me to follow up. And so I keep a really simple, low-tech approach to how I operate and execute.
Clint Betts
I love that. Yeah, I'm very similar to that. I've tried every app and various things, and then I'm like, is it as good as just writing it down?
Linda Tong
Writing just creates that memory when you write it. It inks itself into you.
Clint Betts
Yeah, you have to think about it more. There's something about writing it down that, like you said, kind of inks it into your brain. Hey, 2024 was an interesting time to run a company, right? There was a lot of uncertainty; some industries were doing really well, and some were basically in a recession. There's an election not only in the United States but throughout the world; there's about a bunch of those. And so there's a lot of uncertainty going into 2024. It does seem like 2025; maybe there's a little bit more certainty. You can't be entirely certain, but it does seem like there's more certainty going into 2025. How did you think about 2024, and how are you thinking about 2025?
Linda Tong
I think it's a... Every year now feels like it's going to be intense and have a lot of uncertainty regardless of what it actually is. I think that this may have been my generation of leadership during the pandemic, but I don't think anything can really unseat what happened in 2019. And so now, every year to me is just a year that we just need to be ready for whatever is going to come, have clarity of what we want to accomplish, and then be ready to iterate based on whatever happens. 2024, when I compare it to other years, yeah, there's uncertainty, but honestly, it frankly didn't compare to how significant the pandemic was or the following years from that. So even this year, though there was an election, though there's a lot of change, though there's especially a lot of corporate moments, and even just a couple of weeks ago with the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, there's just a lot of things happening.
What I found is there will always be a lot of things happening, and it's a question of whether it's going to disrupt my ability to lead or if I'm just going to absorb that and understand it and figure out whether I need to make changes in our organization to accommodate for what's happening. And so I think I look at 2025, and so far, it looks like there's probably more certainty, but I'm not going to bet on that. If history is a guide, I think there's going to be a lot of disruption in 2025 that I'm just not thinking about yet. So I'd rather just set the expectation as open for anything and ready to iterate.
Clint Betts
Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Linda Tong
My first big role, my first leadership role, came out of a startup called Tapjoy, and the way I got to that company was that of a friend taking a chance on me. I was previously at Google in product marketing, and I wanted to shift to product management. At the time, Google said, "Hey, you can't be a PM unless you're an engineer, so you have to go back to school and get a degree in CS before you can come back and do the job." I just wasn't having it. Because I was like, I'm already doing the job, I had been doing my 20% time.
And this friend was working at Google with me; he was a product manager, and he hired me as the first PM in his startup, Tapjoy. I went from being the first PM to becoming the chief product officer in a matter of two years and ended up running all of product design and engineering. It really set me on the course of my career. It was probably the fastest, most dense two years of learning in my life, but it all came down to him giving me that shot. So it's my friend, Ben.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Linda, thank you so much. Congratulations on everything. I don't know when this will be posted, but we're recording this as the holidays approach. Happy holidays, and enjoy all that. And thank you so much for coming on. Really, it was an honor to talk to you.
Linda Tong
Of course. Thank you for having me.
Edited for readability.