Bryant Chou, Ploy CEO on AI Agents, Marketing and Web Growth

Grace Gong (0:01)

We're live. Hi, Bryant. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

Bryant Chou (0:05)

Awesome. Thank you, Grace, for having me. This is fun.

Grace Gong (0:09)

I'm so excited to have you on the show. And before we dive right in, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate club for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support on much better skillers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify and Higgsfield already partnered with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus, venture-backed startup can save up to 150k on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more.

Okay. I want to start with your journey because obviously, by the way, I want to give a shout out to Danny who introduced us. And I want to start with your journey. I feel like obviously Webflow is a really big part of your career, which is one of the most fascinating whether you have application or website in the world. I want to talk about, before that, I saw that you actually sold a company, Black Zone, in 2019

And what were some core lessons that you have learned from multiple successful exits?

Bryant Chou (1:16)

Well, I think the lesson is that you can't really plan for exit. Because you start a company thinking that it might have a potential return. But I never started Vungo, I never started Webflow thinking about the exit. You always go into it with some type of personal motivation, or some type of like innate need to work on something. So with Vungo, it was like, I just like was bored of big tech. I wanted to go work at a startup, I wanted to go create a startup, and I just jumped at the first one. With Webflow, I was like, okay, this is actually a really interesting industry. I just wanted to kind of throw myself at the problem of creating this like no code web design platform.

And then, you know, very similar with Ploy, right? I just felt like drawn to this. So I think with these exits, I think they were very much a byproduct of like the hard work and dedication. But, you know, as Mark Andreessen said, you have to have a really good market, and hopefully you have a really good team, and hopefully you have a really good product. And you can have two of the three, but if you don't have a good market, then you have a very low chance of actually having a strong outcome at the other end.

Grace Gong (2:32)

What is a good market to you?

Bryant Chou (2:34)

I like big markets. I like markets that are so freaking big that it would be hard to come up with customers that wouldn't want to use you. So that's good and bad, right? Because you can actually have too big of a market that there's so many entrants, or you can have too big of a market that just like, okay, it's very difficult to concentrate your resources and build against. But for me, with Ploy, like I'm choosing the market of marketing, of growth. And the way I want to build it is I want to build foundational technologies that make it possible for agents to be able to go and create growth and produce marketing outcomes for a business. So then ultimately, it's just like, hey, let's just go pick a very, very large market that I feel like I have aptitude to go and solve for.

And this is definitely my last company, so I want to just make the most use out of my time and experience in this space.

Grace Gong (3:36)

For sure.

I want to start with, one of the things that I thought were really interesting was Webflow, it's focusing on web designers or just designer space in general. But I feel like Ploy is focusing on the whole marketing function of any company. And I wonder, when you first started, who was the core person that you're designing for? So even for the web designers, there's people who are building website for just learning anything like cooking website or these other niche stuff. So when you're thinking about Ploy, who were the person or the ICB that you have in mind? Obviously, it could be used by anyone and everyone, but just curious.

Bryant Chou (4:23)

So a lot of folks asked me this when I was first starting the company. They said, hey, who are you going to go and design for? Who are you going to go build for?