Why Domain Experts Are Winning In The Age Of AI

**Bryant Chou** (0:00)
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 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 a met opportunity for these business owners, for these founders.
And I'm really just here to make it easier for them to tap into it.

**Gary** (0:45)
Welcome back to another episode of The Lightcone. 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 Lightcone.

**Bryant Chou** (1:06)
Thanks for having me.

**Gary** (1:07)
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.

**Bryant Chou** (1:19)
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 Chat, GPT, help you get found by Perplexity and Cloud, so that businesses can run their marketing on Autopilot.

**Gary** (1:53)
Kind of sounds like hiring the perfect CMO who also is a designer and who can code.

**Bryant Chou** (1:59)
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 play.

**Gary** (2:11)
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.

**Bryant Chou** (2:21)
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.

**Gary** (2:45)
Yeah, this is mine. This is Posturus. It does simple blogs by email. You can see the little gmail buttons and things like that.

**Jared** (2:52)
What year did you build this site, Gary?

**Gary** (2:54)
2008 So if it looks dated, it is.

**Bryant Chou** (2:57)
So we dropped it into Ploy and we essentially said, hey, go and recreate this website, Ploy, and this is what it created.

**Gary** (3:05)
Oh my God.

**Diana** (3:06)
Wow.

**Gary** (3:06)
That's gorgeous.
So this is not 2008 posterous, it is truly 2026 posterous. Be careful because now that you've created, I might have to actually write a million lines of code and make it real again.

**Bryant Chou** (3:19)
This is definitely a Google Vio video and all these prompts and knowledge about how to create these type of videos are embedded into Ploy.

**Gary** (3:27)
Yeah. Once you're in the land of doing ImageGen and VideoGen, there's just a lot you have to do around iteration 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.

**Bryant Chou** (3:44)
Jared, I also got yours coming up. We also took Scribd, we went back in the way back machine.

**Jared** (3:50)
Scribd from 2007

**SPEAKER_5** (3:52)
YouTube for documents.

**Jared** (3:54)
YouTube for documents. I remember fiddling with the CSS to try to make that look right.

**Bryant Chou** (3:59)
How did you even host this back in the day?

**Jared** (4:01)
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.

**Bryant Chou** (4:08)
This is what Ploy redesigned it to.

**Diana** (4:12)
Bring it to 2026

**Jared** (4:14)
This is basically like you basically just gave it the old website and told it to go with maybe a short prompt, and then just went and just brought it up to 2026