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the ten thousand startups that will exist every year and then next year a hundred thousand and maybe a million mm-hmm that all invest in and YC will invest in and venture capital that catalytic effect is what makes the human species go forward and creates wealth for everybody
I question the entire like the entire value of the App Store in general it's almost like you like the App Store feels like Yahoo was for the web in the late 90s like you have to get Yahoo's approval to be on the Internet right or AOL before that like you have to pay for a keyword to be like in the platform
it's just a matter of Apple having to be pressured enough socially to allow that after the first class it isn't because they're they're monitoring and they should charge people for the app review mm-hmm so that they can increase the number of app reviewers and make it a better process probably because they're like yeah it's free to put an app you know to get your app review but it's so arduous and then because they don't make any it because it's a cost center yeah as opposed to a revenue Center
there's not much of a discovery benefit to the App Store because there's millions of apps that you have to acquire users through like Facebook etc to climb those lists so you businesses that are small that are not in like the top 100 they don't they don't get the advantage of the App Store they essentially it's essentially a barrier between a user and the actual app
they're very protective of their App Store ... they just don't want to flood the store they have a hard time dealing with Swift and you know objects and they're just like I don't want a bunch of people flooding the App Store with apps I think they're they have an edition sent 'iv because they make you know billions of dollars through the App Store
when you hit that break even it's like you just cross that finish line you're like I did it yeah I'm not gonna go away right we're gonna be around
that 1.5 eventually about a year and a half to two years later that funded the creation of our visual CMS which is the what led us to there's like no code path from just a website builder to like a more generic way to to build way more powerful things than just like landing pages
in 2013 mobile is all the rage so you say anything about websites or the web and it's like okay I should make this for mobile are you working and what is not an iPad exactly just like because three percent of web consumption is tablets
we had like the the problem of half of investors saying hey this is like too complicated for me to understand you know this is not it's not easy to use right because it's what flows a powerful tool and we had the on the other side we had this just isn't powerful enough because we had a developer try it out and it just doesn't do anything else
it's almost like the Microsoft strategy when they let like a software be pirated yeah office was like yeah if you want to go for it right we're not gonna go and like build an enterprise sales team and I can't shake everyone will talk to you in 10 20 years talk to you in 20 years
the big conversation is not about revenue they big conversation it's it's actually we're thinking about things that will actually decrease revenue potentially because we let go for adoption god the whole the whole equation here is how do we maximize wet flows long-term mission how do we get a lot more people creating more software sooner learn how to do that
we actually had a town hall with excel at web flow and somebody asked that question from our employees yeah and it just hasn't been discussed because they're there typically with a lot of VCs you have like five to seven year old windows sometimes ten your windows for funds with Excel and this particular fund that we're in I mean it's it's the California pension fund it's the Canadian pension fund easy it's in 20 like a hundred year time horizon types of multiply your money
we did clean up the cap table a little bit
I or YC is gonna look at that say yeah no codes I think no we're not gonna be Precious about it being no code yeah you're gonna enable another whole swath of people to participate in capitalism
the ten thousand startups that will exist every year and then next year a hundred thousand and maybe a million mm-hmm that all invest in and YC will invest in and venture capital that catalytic effect is what makes the human species go forward and creates wealth for everybody
our strategy there is to really double down on the web for now
we now support ecommerce so you can actually run a store which is just just like Shopify but now with a visual interface to it
we never want the product to be beyond what an individual can be empowered by
we definitely have a lot more work to do to deliver way more sort of enterprise-e features for like larger larger marketing teams larger startups etc
we did clean up the cap table a little bit okay say that nice that's a great innovation in Silicon Valley letting the founders clean up the cap table take a little second there it takes the edge off for all that suffering and let you go long
the big conversation is not about revenue they big conversation it's it's actually we're thinking about things that will actually decrease revenue potentially because we let go for adoption god the whole the whole equation here is how do we maximize wet flows long-term mission how do we get a lot more people creating more software sooner learn how to do that it's almost like the Microsoft strategy when they let like a software be pirated yeah office was like yeah if you want to go for it right w
whereas my first conversation with Arun was like that's interesting this is great but you can really change the world with taking this way that you can apply no code to web sites and apply to all software you can get like you said millions of new products being created
almost all conversation I had with VCs were hey great this Web flow thing is working like web website design website publishing you all are disrupting WordPress and look at how many web sites like you now power 0.005% of the internet but WordPress owns 38 percent look at that opportunity yeah it's so massive I can go after Shopify etc you can go up market you can build an enterprise sales team it's all about like alright here's this thing working let's just pour more money into it right
we got to break even and late 2015 onwards we will break even
without the 1.5 you wouldn't imagine we wouldn't have been short yeah we would have had to you wouldn't have to write exactly would have missed the runway
that 1.5 eventually about a year and a half to two years later that funded the creation of our visual CMS
one of the insider investors sort of doubled down and put another 1.5
we raised one point four
half of investors saying hey this is like too complicated for me to understand you know this is not it's not easy to use right because it's what flows a powerful tool and we had the on the other side we had this just isn't powerful enough because we had a developer try it out and it just doesn't do anything else
we wanted to just bootstrap ... we ended up going more than twelve months without funding ... it wasn't until August 2013 in September 2013 when we did our seed round