Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.
Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, joins us to explain how she's leading Webflow's transformation from a $4 billion website builder into an agentic marketing platform, why she believes the internet is filling up with AI-generated "garbage" from people who never asked what's worth building, and how she thinks about winning in a market where AI capability itself isn't a moat.
During the episode, we also explore an interesting trend and tension: what it takes to build “taste” into AI-generated products when every model can now write clean code but none of them can reliably read a brand. Linda also shared how enterprise pricing negotiations are exposing the gap between what companies pay for and the value they actually get, and how she expects websites themselves to evolve from static pages into something closer to Google Maps: constantly reinteracting with and reshaping around each visitor.
About Webflow
Webflow gives every team the tools to build, manage, and grow a website that drives real revenue. Founded in 2013 by Vlad Magdalin, Sergie Magdalin, and Bryant Chou (via Y Combinator), it’s grown from a niche tool for freelance designers into infrastructure used by 300,000+ businesses. The company raised a $120M Series C in March 2022 at a $4B valuation and has taken in over $330M total.
Watch now: Linda Tong, CEO at Webflow
Watch or listen now across YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X
Download the transcript 👇
Timestamps
(0:00) Meet Linda Tong
(2:04) The Current State of Building
(2:40) What's Changed for Webflow in the Last 12 Months?
(6:06) Base44 Reaches 10M Users and Lovable Raises $400M
(8:02) How to Support Builders in This Era
(9:18) How Do You Select Which AI Model to Partner With?
(12:00) Is Taste the Next Biggest Moat?
(13:41) Are Agentic Co-Workers Next?
(16:03) Webflow's Current Challenges
(18:46) How to Navigate Human Change
(21:08) The Change of Software Pricing
(25:12) Inside the Webflow CEO Role
(26:32) How Do AI Models Affect Product Roadmaps?
(28:35) Where Does AI Go Next Over the Next 6-12 Months?
(32:52) Will Websites Still Be Relevant?
(34:25) Building Trust With Your Fanatical Users
(36:25) How Linda Runs Webflow
(39:14) A Winning Mindset
(41:10) Are We Just 1% of the Way There?
(43:23) Airtable Acquisition
(45:09) Ollie Joining as Linda's Chief of Staff
(47:19) Personal Time Out
(48:20) Board Members
(50:50) Where Does Webflow Go From Here?
Lessons from this episode with Linda:
1. Linda can build an app with a prompt, but still can’t book a doctor’s appointment less than 6 months out.
Right after saying AI has barely scratched the surface of solving real problems, Linda brings up trying to schedule an appointment and being told the system doesn’t open bookings for another 6 months, so she’d have to call back in 3 months just to schedule it. Her point: we’re maybe 5% of the way to AI actually mattering in daily life.
2. “Just have everything run agentically. Go watch Netflix.” She’s not buying it.
Pushing back on the one-employee-plus-millions-of-agents narrative, Linda says AI still isn’t reliable enough to run unsupervised. You still need people reviewing and coaching the system regularly, and anyone claiming they’ve replaced their whole workforce with agents “is just not real.”
3. “I’m paying for a million seats but only 10 people actually get value out of it.”
Her example of what’s broken in software pricing: when she sits in on procurement negotiations, this is the exact complaint she hears. She argues it’s a sign the pricing was never actually tied to value in the first place, and that the constant tough renegotiations are the tell.
4. Airtable sold for 2.5x revenue, after being privately valued at $11.5 billion.
On how fast valuations are resetting: Airtable, a $500M-revenue company, got acquired at roughly 2.5x enterprise value, a fraction of the $11.5 billion it was last valued at privately. Her takeaway: “times are changing,” and the old rules for pricing a software company no longer hold.
5. Internet garbage: Only 200 million of the internet’s 1.2 billion websites are actually alive.
When Linda joined Webflow four years ago, she looked at the market and found roughly 1.2 billion websites live on the internet, but only around 200 million were active businesses actually being used. She says that ratio hasn’t meaningfully moved since, even as AI makes it trivial to spin up more of the other billion. The ability has shifted to build fast, people have built a lot of websites but that doesn’t automatically translate to tangible value.
6. AI didn’t kill the SDR job. It turned “send more emails” into “review the AI’s calls.”
Her clearest change-management example: an entry-level SDR used to be capped by how many calls and emails they could physically make in a day. Now an AI agent makes the calls and writes the emails, and the job becomes reviewing what the agent learned and deciding what to test next.
7. Her agents don’t do one task and stop. They run until the goal is hit.
She contrasts most “agents” today, which complete a task and hand it back for a human to judge, with what she calls closed-loop agentic workers: give it an outcome like “drive this much pipeline,” and it writes the brief, launches the campaign, measures results, and keeps iterating on its own. Her live example is Webflow’s AO agent, which pushes content and schema changes to improve a client’s visibility on answer engines like ChatGPT, then measures and repeats.
8. Pricing debates (subscription vs. seat vs. consumption vs. outcome)
Her contrarian take: none of these pricing models are wrong, they’re just successive attempts to get closer to charging for the actual value delivered. AI just makes it possible to meter something closer to real value than ever before.
Links
Follow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsyth
Follow Linda on X - https://x.com/YayLT
Vist Webflow - https://webflow.com
Episode Partner - Discover Harmonic, your go-to startup database - https://harmonic.ai
Previous episodes include
See all previous episodes here 👉
If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.
