Vlad Magdalin, Leading No-Code With Webflow
Not everyone can bounce back from a string of failures. But Vlad Magdalin, the CEO and co-founder of Webflow, did just that. His story is one of dogged persistence and never giving up.
“When it came to making hard decisions, I leaned more on my morality rather than business sense. And that’s the thing I regret the least.”
– Vlad Magdalin.
Launching and maintaining a startup can be tough. According to Forbes, 90% of startups fail within their first year of existence. The reason for this high failure rate is not only due to a lack of funds but also because of several other factors, including the ability to quickly adapt. This means you have to be extremely strong-willed to cope with all the early vicissitudes of startup management if you hope to reap the fruits of your labor.
One man who has an abundance of strong mentality is Vlad Magdalin, CEO and co-founder of Webflow, the leading no-code visual development platform for the professional website and CMS market.
Saddled with near bankruptcy, debt, and a young family to cater to, Vlad persisted for nearly 10 years to keep his dream project alive. Today, Webflow is an elite no-code tool generating $100 million in revenue and valued at $4 billion. The company now boasts over 200,000 customers globally, helping individuals and businesses such as Rakuten, Shift, Vice Media, Discord, Dell, and more build powerful websites without code.
Who is Vlad Magdalin?
Vlad Magdalin is a part Ukrainian-part Russian born in 1982 in the former USSR. When Vlad was nine years old, his parents fled to the US with him and his five other siblings (at the insistence of his grandmother) due to religious persecution by the atheist Soviet government. They landed at a New York airport on December 4, 1991. Their Christian family is of the Baptist denomination. Vlad remembers how the charity organization World Relief helped his parents borrow money for their eight plane tickets to the US and that his family had less than a thousand dollars on their arrival.
The highlight of their journey was the theft of two large pieces of luggage (33% of their worldly possessions) while in transit. Thankfully, the family would get $1500 compensation for each piece of luggage, from which they bought “our very first computer (IBM 386!) — which was my dad’s version of the American Dream.”
As a Russian family in the post-Cold War United States (they settled in Sacramento), life was not easy for young Vlad and his family. According to him, “the next few years were pretty tough, but they were marked by many highlights of kindness and generosity from many individuals and America as a nation.”
During his early high school education, Vlad learned graphic design to help his father’s import-export business advertise in Russian-language classifieds. He was particularly interested in 3D animation but was compelled by his dad to jettison his childhood passion for a computer science program at Cal Poly, where his elder brother was already a computer science student as well.
He spent a year studying computer science but had to drop out towards the end of his first year after realizing that he “really, really hated” the course. He then moved to San Francisco and enrolled in the Academy of Art University, then an unaccredited private institution that he described as “super expensive.”
But rather than delve into his beloved 3D animation immediately, he soon discovered that the art program first involved studying other subjects such as sculpture, color theory, composition, anatomy, painting, illustration, and hand-drawn animation. Moreover, he observed that computer science graduates seemed to fare better in the labor market. So, after two years, he again dropped out of art school and went back into his computer science program.
Ironically, his love for programming received a big boost when he was still in art school, when the often-crashing communication software he used (known as Quickdot) made him create an alternative app he then called Chatterfox. It was in that process that he realized the huge potential of programming.
Back at Cal Poly, he got an internship at a web design firm around 2004 to enable him to start repaying the loans he took for his art school program. His job was to translate creative designs into code. It was his day-to-day observations or experiences about design and coding at this company that generated “the original spark that eventually led to Webflow.”
The Evolution of Webflow
That spark during his internship would motivate him to try launching Webflow three times: in 2005, 2007, and 2008, mostly as an employee of Intuit. All three attempts ended in failure. He quit Intuit in 2012, the same year his younger brother Sergie and Intuit colleague Bryant Chou joined him as Webflow co-founders.
At that time, the boys were desperate for funding. Vlad had no income and just three months of cash cover (he had a wife and two daughters, one of whom was very sick and required surgery). The team applied to Y Combinator (YC), but their application was turned down in November 2012. Subsequently, Vlad had to pull out $50,000 from his 401k, enter into a $60,000 credit card debt (leaving him and his family with no safety net), and sell his two cars. They kept working hard even as their lean finances got leaner.
Their luck would change forever in March 2013 when they published a working prototype on Hacker News, leading to over 10,000 people signing up for their beta program, to their uttermost surprise. This unexpected interest motivated them to quickly file another application for the Y Combinator 2013 summer batch. That application was successful, and Vlad Magdalin would later disclose that:
“We were so nervous that we forgot to take the classic ‘here’s our team before the YC interview’ photo next to the famous YC sign.”
They eventually cleared YC with a series of $2.9 million in funding from Rainfall Ventures and others. On August 7, 2019, Webflow closed a $72 million Series A round of funding from Accel, Silversmith, and several other investors. As of that same year, Magdalin had led Webflow to profitability with over $10 million in annualized revenue. By the end of 2020, the company had over two million users, 225 employees, and more than 100,000 customers across 190 countries.
On January 13, 2021, Vlad Magdalin announced that his company had raised another $140 million in Series B funding, thus increasing Webflow’s valuation to over $2.1 billion. That year, the number of Webflow users had risen to over 3.5 million, with more than 450,000 websites built with the company’s tools and monthly visits to websites hosted by Webflow exceeding 10 billion.
Webflow raised an additional $120 million in Series C funding less than a year later (on March 16, 2022), giving it a new $4 billion valuation. This new round brought the company’s total funding to more than $330 million. Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund led the round, with existing investors such as Accel, CapitalG, Draper Associates, and Silversmith also contributing.
Buoyed by this achievement, an elated Magdalin declared that “when we first launched Webflow years ago and struggled for many years to get significant traction, I never imagined that we’d reach the scale of a $100 million ARR business that serves 200,000 customers across freelancers, agencies, startups, and enterprises today.”
Recognition and Philanthropy
While announcing that Series C fund, Vlad also disclosed that his company will be devoting $10 million to the members of the Y Combinator community as investments and reimbursements through its community grants program. The program aims to provide grants and reimbursements for:
● Community engagement, learning, and networking activities all over the world
● Educators that create content or curriculum aimed at teaching people how to build a career in visual development.
● Programs are meant to assist marginalized groups to learn and build through Webflow.
● Freelancers working on non-profit and humanitarian projects.
● Community members are developing innovative content or programs that inspire and help several others in the community thrive and succeed with Webflow.
Notably, Webflow has been named in the Forbes 2022 Cloud 100 for three consecutive years (2020, 2021, and 2022). “Being recognized for three consecutive years on this list of great companies further validates our mission to bring the life-changing power of web development to everyone while also helping startups and enterprises transform how they build their main websites,” said Magdalin in appreciation of the recognition. Webflow has also been named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list for 2022.
References:
https://www.accel.com/noteworthy/secrets-to-scaling-with-webflows-vlad-magdalin
https://webflow.com/blog/webflow-series-b-funding
https://twitter.com/callmevlad/status/1118592100142960640
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