836 David Rusenko: Founder of Weebly

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business.

0:45Kara Goldin:Hey, everyone, Kara here. Let's get real about those early days of building a business, not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day, the friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected. I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. And you realize quickly, connection isn't a nice to have. It's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time. AT &T Business is a reliable provider for small business owners.

1:27Kara Goldin:For Small Business Month, we celebrate small businesses by helping them run better. This means reliable uptime, easy switching, and smart communications. Powered by AT &T Business, built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to by Grooms. Summer routines live or die by how easy they are. I've learned that if something takes too much effort, when life gets busy, it's the first thing to go. And this time of year, when schedules are packed and energy matters more than ever, I want something that actually keeps up. That's why I've been loving Grooms.

2:12Kara Goldin:Grooms is a daily pack of gummy bears that covers your greens, vitamins, and prebiotics all in one. No powders, no multiple bottles, just one simple step I can actually stay consistent with. And it's incredibly comprehensive. Most multivitamins only have a handful of nutrients, but Grooms packs in over 20 vitamins and minerals, 60 ingredients, plus six grams of prebiotic fiber. That's more than two cups of broccoli. It's vegan, gluten-free, no artificial colors or flavors, and it actually tastes great, like something you want to take. What I love most is how easy it makes everything. It supports energy, digestion, immunity, and it fits into real life without overcomplicating things.

3:06Kara Goldin:If you're looking to simplify your routine this summer, definitely check it out. Save up to 52 % off with code GOLDEN at groons.co. That's code GOLDEN at G-R-U-N-S dot C-O. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Kara Golden Show. Today, I'm joined by David Rezenko, who is the founder and former CEO of Weebly, one of the earliest and most influential platforms that made it possible for anyone to build a website without needing to write a single line of code. And David started Weebly when he was just a wee bit 20 years old and alongside two of his college buddies with the simple idea, giving people the tools to create online.

3:57Kara Goldin:And then they joined one of my favorite incubator groups, Y Combinator, in one of their earliest batches and incubated it there. and also moved to San Francisco and started building and long before no code was even a buzzword. And so over the years, David scaled Weebly into a very successful company. I'll let him talk all about it. And it was acquired by Square in 2018 and defining moment that not just for the company, but for the broader movement of empowering small businesses online. So I'm so excited to dig into David's experience and get the backstory on not only the launch and the growth and the sale, but also what he's up to right now, including his incredible new podcast that he just launched, Leap Forward.

4:54Kara Goldin:And so without further ado, David, welcome to the Kara Golden Show. Super excited you're here. I'm excited, too. Thanks for having me. This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business. Hey everyone, Kira here. Let's get real about those early days of building a business, not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day. The friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected. I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. and you realize quickly, connection isn't a nice to have.

5:33Kara Goldin:It's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time. AT &T Business is a reliable provider for small business owners. For Small Business Month, we celebrate small businesses by helping them run better. This means reliable uptime, easy switching, and smart communications. Powered by AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. Today's episode is brought to you by Warby Parker. Buying glasses used to feel unnecessarily hard, expensive, confusing, and somehow never quite right. Too many options, not enough clarity, and none of it felt simple.

6:22Kara Goldin:This is why I'm obsessed with Warby Parker. I'm actually wearing mine right now. These are the pair I picked. I wish you could see them. And what I love is how lightweight and well-made they feel. The style is modern, the materials feel premium, and I've gotten a lot of compliments on them. One of the coolest features is their virtual try-on. You can literally use your phone, point the camera at your face, and see how different frames look on you in real time, and it actually works. Plus, these prescription glasses start at just$95, and they design everything in-house, so you're getting high-quality, stylish frames at a really accessible price.

7:04Kara Goldin:They also have everything in one place, glasses, sunglasses, contacts, even eye exams, and over 300 retail stores if you want to go in person. Warby Parker just makes the entire process easier. Right now, buy one prescription pair and get 20 % off any additional prescription pairs at warbyparker.com slash Karagolden. That's 20 % off additional prescription pairs when you go to warbyparker.com slash Karagolden. Absolutely. So for those who may not know, they're hiding under a rock, they don't know about Weebly, or maybe they might not remember the early days of Weebly. What was the original vision and what problem were you trying to solve?

7:57Well, very, very early on, kind of right in the beginning, it was a class project. And the original idea was all Penn State students need to create an e-portfolio and we're going to help them do that. And that vision lasted about two days. And then we very quickly realized that actually creating a website in general was this broader need that was not well served by people who didn't know how to code. And from there, we grew into really empowering small businesses and helping them sell and grow their business online.

8:24Kara Goldin:So you started it with, or I guess this was a class project. So you had two people that you were working on it with. What did you do at that point when you decided, okay, this really is a need and it's bigger than our classroom and bigger than our teacher deciding whether or not we get a great grade on this or anything? This is a business that we want to go and do. What was the next step? Well, when I was part of a group and the idea came up, I went home, I kind of became obsessed with the idea. I came back to class, you know, the following class, like two days later, with this full database schema and just this whole, all these ideas of how drag and drop and how everything could happen, which didn't exist at the time.

9:10There's no idea, you know, no concept of like a drag and drop website, but or anything like that. And I went to my professor and said, actually, I'd like to do this project on my own, in my own group. and I'll do just as good as any other group. And he said, okay, I know you, like you could do that. And then I said, also, I want to create in Pearl, not PHP. And he said, that's where I'm going to put my foot down. So that's why Weebly was built in PHP originally. And then very quickly, you know, over the next few months, brought on my two co-founders, Dan and Chris, and we were just working on it that whole summer.

9:38I was, you know, I was interning at Merrill Lynch in New York and both of them were in New York as well. And we were just working nights and weekends, literally every other hour that we weren't working on internships, we were working on Weebly. And then that fall, we applied for Y Combinator, drove out to Boston to interview, and got into the program.

9:54Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical.

10:38Kara Goldin:Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week.

11:20Kara Goldin:With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Grooms. Summer routines live or die by how easy they are. I've learned that if something takes too much effort, when life gets busy, it's the first thing to go. And this time of year, when schedules are packed and energy matters more than ever, I want something that actually keeps up.

12:02Kara Goldin:That's why I've been loving Grooms. Grooms is a daily pack of gummy bears that covers your greens, vitamins, and prebiotics all in one. No powders, no multiple bottles, just one simple step I can actually stay consistent with. And it's incredibly comprehensive. Most multivitamins only have a handful of nutrients, but Grooms packs in over 20 vitamins and minerals, 60 ingredients, plus six grams of prebiotic fiber. That's more than two cups of broccoli. It's vegan, gluten-free, no artificial colors or flavors, and it actually tastes great, like something you want to take. What I love most is how easy it makes everything.

12:51Kara Goldin:It supports energy, digestion, immunity, and it fits into real life without overcomplicating things. If you're looking to simplify your routine this summer, definitely check it out. Save up to 52 % off with code GOLDEN at groons.co. That's code GOLDEN at g-r-u-n-s dot c-o. That's amazing. And what year was this? That would have been 2006. So the first line of code was written somewhere around February 2006. That was the spring semester of my junior year. And then we applied to YC in the fall of 2006. So you're a college student, not now, but when you started this. And for any college students listening, we have a tremendous amount of college students worldwide who listen to this podcast.

13:43Kara Goldin:So if you could sort of visualize you sitting there, what gave you the confidence and kind of the, or maybe it's naivety to actually go and launch this? I mean, you applied to Y Combinator. I mean, all of these factors. Had you been around this? Had you followed businesses starting? What sort of gave you this confidence to say, I'm going to go and do this? Well, it was really just a project. I mean, I just thought it was really cool. I had this, I had this, you know, at the time I had a friend. I mean, at the time, if you bring yourself all the way back, if you didn't know how to code, there wasn't really a way to make a website.

14:24You know, there was these tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, but they didn't make websites, they didn't build menus and they didn't have structure. They just kind of created an online Word document. And I was helping a friend build her e-portfolio and I was just like frustrated by the whole process and all the ideas were kind of brewing. So I think like a lot of ideas started, it was just this, it wasn't a confidence that I was going to build a big company. It was just something cool that I knew I could build. And I built it because I thought it was super cool. And I showed it to other people and they thought it was cool too.

14:51And it just grew from there.

14:53Kara Goldin:I always tell people who ask, maybe they're in college as well, or even my own kids, when I'm talking to them, I'm like, do it now, because maybe people will forget, right? When you're young and you're just getting started, right? I mean, why not? What do you have to lose? Well, literally, I mean, what I always tell people in a similar situation is it's the best thing you could possibly do for your resume. You know, starting a company isn't actually that risky. You know, even if you're currently fully employed and not a college student, you know, you leave your job, you start a company, you get some of the best experience in the world.

15:32All kinds of people are going to want to hire you after that. Right. Like that is one of the best things you could do for your resume. So it's the opposite of risky. It's actually even if it doesn't work out, you're going to be set up for something better.

15:41Kara Goldin:This message is a paid partnership with AT &T Business. Hey everyone, Kira here. Let's get real about those early days of building a business, not the highlight reel, the actual day-to-day, the friction, trying to manage everything across time zones, across teams, across locations, and realizing how much depends on staying connected. I remember those days at Hint, a retailer call, an order, a decision, all of it. and you realize quickly, connection isn't a nice to have. It's the lifeblood of your business. As a founder, you don't want to think about your connectivity. You just need it to work every time.

16:23Kara Goldin:AT &T Business is a reliable provider for small business owners. For Small Business Month, we celebrate small businesses by helping them run better. This means reliable uptime, easy switching, and smart communications. powered by AT &T Business, built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing.

17:14Kara Goldin:Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical. Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI powered interviews for initial screenings.

18:00Kara Goldin:Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Grooms. Summer routines live or die by how easy they are. I've learned that if something takes too much effort, when life gets busy, it's the first thing to go.

18:46Kara Goldin:And this time of year, when schedules are packed and energy matters more than ever, I want something that actually keeps up. That's why I've been loving Groom's. Groom's is a daily pack of gummy bears that covers your greens, vitamins, and prebiotics all in one. No powders, no multiple bottles, just one simple step I can actually stay consistent with. And it's incredibly comprehensive. Most multivitamins only have a handful of nutrients, but Groom's packs in over 20 vitamins and minerals, 60 ingredients, plus six grams of prebiotic fiber. That's more than two cups of broccoli. It's vegan, gluten-free, no artificial colors or flavors, and it actually tastes great, like something you want to take.

19:40Kara Goldin:What I love most is how easy it makes everything. It supports energy, digestion, immunity, and it fits into real life without overcomplicating things. If you're looking to simplify your routine this summer, definitely check it out. Save up to 52 % off with code GOLDEN at groons.co. That's code GOLDEN at gruns.co. Yeah, definitely. So the Y Combinator, you get into Y Combinator, and what did that experience unlock for you? Well, you have to remember where we, like, if you really place yourself in our shoes at the time, you know, we didn't go to Stanford, you know, we didn't go to UC Berkeley. We were three kids from Penn State.

20:32You know, at the time there was a lot of skepticism post.com boom and bust um and we were going to like in new york we're going to new york tech meetup but we were really like scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of people who were interested in talking to us and certainly no investors were willing to invest in us so we get into yc we move out to san francisco we work on the idea you know total sprint for three or four months and on the outside of that that was not only us getting to meet i mean And I remember we met Evan Williams, who started Blogger. We met Mark Zuckerberg, who was coming, you know, early on, who was coming to talk at Ycomner.

21:05So not only were those experiences valuable, we had Paul Graham and Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail, who was like giving us technical advice and design advice. So all that, you know, those experiences were instrumental. But, you know, in addition to all that, it was really the stamp of approval of saying, you know, now we're in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Now there were investors who wanted to talk to us. Now TechCrunch wants to write about it. So all those things, I think, together were all incredibly valuable.

21:32Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. It sounds like such an amazing experience. And as I mentioned before we hit record, we've had a lot of founders on the podcast who have been through the Y Combinator experience and everyone just thinks its praises. And many say it's hard, right? Like it's not, you're not pretty every single day. I mean, they really make you better. And was that your experience as well? Yeah, I mean, every week we had the dinners. There was other startups in the program who, you know, it was like friendly competition. We'd come and show them what we'd built in a week. They'd show us what we built, you know, what they had built and be like, oh, man, they're moving faster than us.

22:13We got to, you know, we got to step it up. Right. And so it's very intense. But on the other side of that, you certainly make more progress than you could imagine. You know, yours worth of progress in like condense into two or three months.

22:26Kara Goldin:So the idea of no code is everywhere now, but you were so early. And did you know how big this could become? I mean, what was the point when you said, you know, this can be a very, very large business, a very large industry, there's going to be competition out there? What was that point where, and maybe it was shortly after joining Y Combinator, where reality started to set in and say, wow, we have a huge opportunity, but this is going to be really hard. You know, we always thought, again, early on, we didn't do it because we thought we're going to build a massive company. You know, and I remember telling people, I think we even told our earliest investors out of Y Combinator that, you know, I think the question was like, how big do you want to build this company?

23:14and I think I told him, which is like totally the wrong answer in retrospect, but I told him like, oh, when this company's huge, like 25 people, you know, I'll hand over the reins to like a professional CEO or someone else, right? And, but I think we did it because we thought it was like really important. We thought it was really cool. The idea that people could build websites. We had this faith that a lot of people wanted to do that. And then we spent the first probably three or four years convincing people that it was actually a big idea because it seems in retrospect, it seems like the idea of no code and allowing people to build websites seems like obvious.

23:48But at the time, everyone thought it was a really stupid idea. And that anyone who wanted to build a website could just learn to code. And anyone who didn't do that just didn't need to build a website. And it seemed like a stupid idea at the time to a lot of people. It wasn't until eventually it started growing and growing that people recognized that this is actually a really, really massive market.

24:07Kara Goldin:What was one of the best scrappiest things you did in the very early days to get traction? I mean, lots of things. You know, we didn't have any marketing budgets. We didn't have anything to spend. I mean, the number one thing throughout the years that got us traction was word of mouth. So word of mouth, you know, throughout all the years was about 80 % total of our sort of adoption. early on about the remaining 20 % was between PR and we had these links on the footers of websites that people could see and it helped us with SEO and that kind of thing and then we were just scrappy with PR I mean anyone can still do this today you go out and you meet reporters and you become friends with them and you know you offer them more than just pitching them and over time you build a relationship and then they want to cover you so I think you know one of the benefits of being, you know, in the Bay Area is just all that all that in-person social connection.

25:03You know, I think that was that was pretty important.

25:06Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. So you grew it to from just a few founders, young founders to to over 350 employees. You've talked about maintaining human connection while you're scaling. I mean, it's hard, right? You hadn't been inside of companies and sort of senior leadership teams and moving into this role. Now you're it, right? The buck is stopping with you. What was kind of the hardest reality in actually running a company versus maybe what you thought it was going to look like? It's a good question. I think what's hard changes depending on the kind of the scale and the size of the company. So there's various breakpoints that felt like everything was falling apart and And you had to completely change the way, you know, I like to say that about once a year, my job as CEO would just completely change.