Vlad Magdalin, co-founder and CEO of Webflow, reflects on advice he received regarding parenthood and founder dedication during early fundraising.
Opinion
Vlad Magdalin: Top-tier VC pitches are mostly generic and transactional
“I had so many conversations with like pretty much all the top tier firms, like partners at those firms, and there weren't many standouts, right? Like most of the conversations were kind of the same, like, oh, there's something working. How do we double down? H…”
Insight
Vlad Magdalin: Contractual board control is an illusion as startups scale
“The more a company scales, all that stuff gets away from you anyway, even if on paper you own more of the company. I mean, you see the stuff that we work, you see like Travis having to leave Uber. Even though they technically legally had control, like what rea…”
Opinion
Magdalin: In 2012 investors believed building web software was wasting time
“Nobody was paying attention to the web space because mobile was the new hotness. So, you know, all the investors, all the companies were kind of like, if you're working on the web, you're wasting your time. You're kind of like building on a dying technology.”
Disclosure
Vlad Magdalin accumulated $60K credit card debt and sold cars for Webflow
“We went over 60 K in credit card debt. We had to cash out our four on K even with like massive penalties, sell two cars.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Webflow met with 70 VC firms during its seed round
“We probably met with 70 different firms, and it was a pretty consistent theme around, well, there's not enough traction yet, or the tool that you're building is not powerful enough for professional developers, and it's too sophisticated for sort of the Wits an…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Paul Graham advised Webflow to stop seed fundraising at $350K
“And we really just tempted to, I think we went back to PG all Graham and sort of said, we only raised, we're kind of targeting a million dollars, but we only raised 350 so far. And he sort of told us this perspective is like, Hey, look, if this is like stressi…”