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And they were just going, Dylan, you've got to be more commercial.
I'm like, what does that mean?
And they're like, you've got to be more commercial.
And I'm like, do you mean, do I have to say more sales terminology and stuff like that?
What are you getting at?
And I think what they meant was price the product.
And when this design leader came and said, we can't use unless you price the product, I was like, oh, everyone.
We've got to go charge for the product as fast as we can.
So I was a little dense on it, but it got there eventually.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Dylan Field left college to figure out a better for designers to collaborate and built a company called Figma now worth billions.
If you've ever booked a trip on Airbnb, watched something on Netflix, or joined a Zoom call, you've interacted with a product that was designed using Figma.
Figma is the platform behind the platforms, a tool that lets teams of designers collaborate in real time from anywhere in the world.
And while that might sound obvious today, back in 2012 it was a pretty radical idea.
At the time, real -time design collaboration was clunky and slow.
Most people still emailed files back and forth.
Even designers were skeptical that something like Figma could work.
But Dylan Field and his college friend Evan Wallace believed there was a better way.
so much so that Dylan left Brown University at 19 after landing a Teal Fellowship to give the idea a shot.
He had never managed a team, never built a company, and had never launched a product.
It took four years of development before Figma officially launched, and even then, adoption didn't happen overnight.
But eventually, it clicked, and in 2022, Adobe, one of Figma's biggest competitors, offered $20 billion to acquire it.
But, as you will hear, the deal was blocked by government regulators.
Today, Figma is used by some of the most recognizable companies in the world to design the apps and interfaces we use every day.
But this story isn't just about software.
It's about a young founder learning to build, lead, and grow up without a whole lot of experience to guide them.
Dylan Field grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Sonoma County, California.
He was into math and computers from an early age, but also, he did a lot of acting, even some paying gigs.
You know at five, five and a half, whatever I was, I could read, I could sit still.
And I think in comparison to how I am now, I was actually a very, I was a cute kid, you know.
But that's changed to puberty, we can get to that later.
But as a kid, you know, was cute.
And so, I guess someone referred me to an agent, in no major roles or anything, but lots of auditions and some commercial work, a little bit of TV work.
So you're really, I mean, you were on this kind of path to becoming a child actor.
I mean, I know you said that you didn't really land any major roles, but I read that you were, I mean, which is kind of crazy.
You were in like a Windows XP commercial as a kid.
Yeah, that was a funny one Because there was a performance of Tommy The Who that the original actor who was going to play young Tommy fell through for because she refused to shave her head or cut her hair at her.
They needed someone else, so I got pulled in.
And this is a performance where?
Where was it? It was at SRJC.
What was that? Santa Rosa Junior College.
Santa Rosa Junior College, okay.
Yep. And then after that, I got to be Michael and Peter Pan.
Also there at Santa Rosa Junior College.
Also at Santa Rosa Junior College but during their Summer Program, which is really cool.
It's actually my most embarrassing moment in acting as a kid, was during that production because I fell asleep onstage in that scene in Peter Pan where all the kids are asleep and Wendy is talking to Peter.
And uh, the um, actress playing Peter Pan gave me my cue and I was still asleep and she gave me my cue again still asleep, and she gave me a kick.
Like, and then I leapt up and gained my line.
But yeah, I was like, Dylan didn't get up.
Anyway. But due to that production, I had the experience with stunt flying.
And then that was what they're looking for for the XP commercial.
So it was kind of a fun chain of events that led to that one.
So how did it, I mean, so you're doing all this community theater, what happened?
and why am I not talking to an adult actor today?
I mean, first of all, I was very thankful that my parents, especially my mom, who was the one who was driving me all these places, was willing to do that, but also that she was never pushing me to do it, and I think at some point, the combination of becoming a teenager, acne, braces, awkwardness in general, plus game work, math computers.
It was like, okay, and then, hey, math and computers is pretty fun, so I started diving in on that instead.
Dylan, there's an article that was written about you and we're going to talk about why later on in 2012 in the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, which I still read, I still subscribe to, just if anyone's listening, from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and your dad, Andy, is quoted in it, and it was on the occasion of you winning an award, which we're going to talk about later, and he said, you know, when Dylan was six, He was already solving algebra problems and by the time he was in middle school, he was hanging out with a janitor who was kind of a math savant helping him learn more
advanced mathematics.
First of all, were your parents kind of doing math problems with you as a kid?
Were they mathematicians?
Was that something that they were kind of exposing you to?
or how did you come to just become really fascinated with math?
Well my mom was an elementary school teacher and so I would press her for, while we're waiting for things, I'd press her for hey give me more problems to solve.
Who was the, I mean apparently in middle school there was a janitor, it sounds like goodwill hunting almost. Yeah, so he was really cool.
Yeah, he was very cerebral, varying to math and physics and I think the reason you took the janitor job was very much to just kind of think about stuff all day long and be in his head and so I try to always cultivate friendships with people who are older than me I think now that I'm sometimes the older one it's like okay you're straight out of college like there's a lot I could probably learn from you you know, and he would tell me about different ideas and concepts that he was worried about, and so himself and at some point he said, well, look, the really cool stuff is improves, you should really
learn a little bit of set theory.
And so he was super sweet.
I know that I know that you also got really into computers when when you were a kid, and, and, and then when it came time to go to college, you went to Brown, in Rhode Island, to study computer science, and I believe mathematics.
And tell me a little about, you know, your time there.
Because from what I read you you went through a bunch of different like you were interested in computer science, but you're actually more interested in like, art history classes.
And I think you even explore like, political science, maybe thinking at a certain point, maybe law school, you know, which is, which is great, right?
That's, that's like what college is for.
But did you start to kind of, I don't know, get more interested in other and less interested in computer science or computer programming?
Yeah, I've always been curious about most everything.
And at Brown, one of the best parts is there's no formal requirements for the school other than technically a writing requirement.
You need to make sure that you can write.
And yeah, I kept getting pulled back into Silicon Valley startups as something that I felt very engaged with.
Yeah, as you say, kept getting pulled back because I think the first summer of your freshman year, you go and work for LinkedIn.
You do a summer internship there back in California.
Yeah, I met D .J. Patil, who later on became the Chief Data Science Officer of America under the Obama administration.
And D .J. contacted me pretty early in my freshman year and said, hey, what are you doing this summer?
It was pretty informal at the time.
That was kind of the process.
And yeah, Doo -Doo was great, you know, at the start of the internship he said, Hey, you know, everyone at LinkedIn on this team, you know, they all do something the first three months.
They do something that's like really incredible and foundational, so you got to figure out that is for you.
And I was like, oh, okay.
And, you know, it's in the back of my head I'm kind of searching for that challenge as well.
And And there was an end day, which is kind of like a hack day.
And I kind of noticed that people were really excited about this idea of LinkedIn for good.
Like see if we can harness the power of LinkedIn to do good, whatever that means.
Exactly, so that was kind of the idea, is there a nonprofit aspect that we can explore, et cetera.
At the meantime, I saw a lecture from someone who was talking about the work he had done to translate text messages for victims of the Haiti earthquake.
But the issue was, they didn't have enough CRAL speakers, so they couldn't translate to the emergency responders the text messages of people that were stuck in rubble.
It was horrible. And I'm sitting there and going, my gosh, we've got all the data to know who the speakers of CRAL are.
And so it kind of spawned this idea of, okay, maybe there's some way to connect people to nonprofits based on skills.
So you ended up working on this project called LinkedIn for Good, which basically aggregated all of the skills that were available on the site.
I guess it even caught the attention of the CEO of Jeff Weiner.
Yeah, the real effort started after, to develop it started after I left my internship.
Jeff Weiner certainly came out to me after I presented about the project at all hands, and after the all -hands he goes, hey, so do you wanna keep going at LinkedIn?
And I said, well, I think I wanna go back to school.
Thank you though, and Tia, sorry, you thinking about starting something someday?
I said, maybe. He said, well, if you do, call me.
At least that's my recollection.
His recollection is slightly better, or a better story.
His recollection is saying, hey Dylan, are you going to start something some day, maybe, I don't know, well if you do, I'll fund it.
And I got to say, I like his version better, but I don't remember it quite that way.
And foreshadowing a little bit, we'll get to it, but a few years later, he did become one of your earliest investors in Figma.
Yeah, he has been an incredible advisor and mentor and investor in Figma and supporter from day one.
All right, so, you go back to Providence, Rhode Island, and start your sophomore year and really getting more into design, right?
Because you'd done a lot of, you know, you'd been interested in web design but you were a programmer but you're getting more into design.
And I guess the summer after your second year, you go work for this company called Flipboard, which I think they're still around.
Yeah, they are. And they basically created this way to look at the internet, the web, look at a webpage, but like you were flipping through a magazine.
Yeah, so Flipboard was one of the first iPad apps that really took advantage of the iPad surface to explore what was possible.
Yes, it was iPad, yes, it looked so good.
It looked so, so good, yeah.
And you ended up going to work there, they were also in California in the Bay Area.
Yeah, they were in Palo Alto, And, you know, it was a very buzzy company at the time.
And it was just an absolutely gorgeous product.
And yeah, I just started to get to hang out with the designers and I'd always been really interested in design.
And, you know, one thing that I got to learn at Flipboard was just really the more about the history of typography of layout, and I'd always been surrounded by magazines growing up, my, my dad found some ways to like, get crazy discounts on magazines through some coupon codes online or something like that.
And so there's always just like endless magazines around the house.
Yeah. And I guess the next year, you go back to Flipboard to work there, again, for a while, I think this time in design.
And then in your third year, Brown, you decide to apply for the Teal Fellowship, which is this fellowship where the winner gets a couple hundred thousand dollars to basically drop out of college and start a business.
So did you have an idea in your mind of what you might wanna do or even who you might wanna do it with?
Well, I thought to myself, okay, there's no way I'm gonna go start something if I'm not doing it with someone that I think is amazing.
And I thought, okay, the only person I'd start a company with, and whatever way it goes, I'll learn from them.
And it'll be an amazing experience because just being with them will be, you know, a gift into itself is Evan Wallace.
Evan Wallace, who's a year older than you at Brown, and just somebody you really respected and admired.
Yeah. Evan was my TA for a computer vision class.
At the time I said, Hey, do you want to get dinner?
We got dinner and I said, you know, you're about to graduate next semester.
What are you going to do?
And he goes, Well, I've got offers from, you know, lists all the places he had interned in Microsoft, Pixar and he goes, You know, I just think that like I'll be probably not as challenged in those environments, but you know, it could be cool.
We'll see. And by the way, Evan's not like a super cocky guy.
He is as humble as humble gets, but also he was very clearly the most genius person I'd ever met.
His nickname was CJ.
Computer Jesus, because Evan was basically on the computer every chance he got and it turns out if you spend 10, 12 hours a day programming from a young age, every single day, you are a really good programmer.
But yeah, Evan and I got dinner and we started talking about, okay, well, would you ever start a company with me?
And he goes, yeah, I consider that.
That might be more fun than joining a bigger company.
And I always said, great, well, let's meet up some more and see if there's any ideas we like.
And so, what did you guys start to bat around?
What kind of ideas?
Kind of every themes.
The question that we were trying to answer was, why now?
Like, what is the change that's happening in the world that would make a idea interesting?
You know, I had a huge list, you know, as did he and kind of merged them and then started striking them out.
And at the end we got, we had two that we thought were kind of interesting.
One was one that I was more bullish and excited about.
One was something that he was more excited about.
But we're both kind of interested in the other one, too.
And the two were drones and WebGL.
WebGL, which is basically a way to produce 2D and 3D graphics in a webpage.
And so this just made it, this is gonna factor into what he would eventually create, because this was a revolutionary change.
WebGL introduced frictionless, This frictionless ability to see, like, 3D renderings in a webpage, which today we take for granted.
But 2011, that was still quite radical, revolutionary.
So yeah, so one of the directions was GL, which Evan was, you know, way ahead of everybody else on.
And I was also a fan of too.
I thought that there's so much you could do with it, but I also had some concerns.
And the other one was drones.
I looked at the world in late 2011 and said, okay, we still need to figure out the use cases, but I'm pretty sure that quadcopters and sort of what will come out of that will be huge.
And I think we're both right.
I want to go back to, what compelled you to apply to this fellowship in the fall of 2011?
2011, I mean, because they want you to drop out of school, but why did you decide to do this when you were absolutely convinced that you were gonna graduate from college?
Well, it wasn't necessarily a dropout situation.
You can always go back.
Right. Yeah, and plenty of people take a leave of absence.
So I think that was my mindset, first of all, like even if the startup flames out, I learn a lot from Evan, had some savings from the acting days, and at the same time, I thought the probability of this happening was very low.
Will I get the TO fellowship?
Almost certainly not.
Will Evan decide to do this with me?
Who knows? But it'll be fun to explore and I'll put an application just in case.
So you get the application in just an hour or two before the deadline.
You submit, they have all these questions about you.
They want to know what publications you've been in, so, of course, you were written about in the Brown student newspaper a couple times.
So you were also in an NPR story in 2011, which was about one of your mentors, DJ Patel.
And he, in this article, is quoted as saying, oh, this kid is just phenomenal.
I've known him since he was 16.
And so that's a pretty great endorsement to have that guy saying in this article.
But the other thing that I noticed about your application, because there are 500 people applied for this that year, there's a question that they ask, which is something like, you know, tell us something counterintuitive, like what the world strongly believes in, that most people think is true, but that you just disagree with.
Just something that you completely think is wrong.
Your answer is, I'm going to just read a little bit of it.
It says, tell us what you think is true, but that most people think is not true.
And you write, chocolate is repulsive.
And then you go into a whole essay about why you hate chocolate, you think it's horrible, you can't stand the smell of it and then you include the fact that apparently 2 % of the population doesn't like chocolate and that Nestle did research into this and they found that maybe there's a, Small end, but yes.
Maybe there's an imbalance of gut bacteria that, which, because to most people you're thinking, chocolate is repulsive, this is insane, who thinks that?
Everybody knows chocolate is delicious but this is truly a counterintuitive idea And I have to think that that really caught their eye.
Cause all of a sudden, you're just, it's just like a left turn, totally not connected to technology.
You know, it's funny, I was really proud of that essay.
And I had a lot of fun writing it because I really don't like chocolate.
And people have always thought that was the weirdest thing ever.
So I thought I was answering the question the purest away possible.
And maybe even being a bit meta -contrarian.
But I think that they want counterintuitive thinkers.
And I mean, you're competing against 500 of the smartest kids in the country, under 20.
And I guess your parents initially were not psyched about you really pursuing this, because they wanted you to finish school.
Your mom and dad wanted you to finish college.
They were savers, and I had my own savings as well.
They were not rich. They had...
Oh, no, not at all.
They had solid middle class careers.
they had put a ton of resources in my education.
So the idea of, you know, potentially squandering that is, it's like, what are you doing?
And with Evan, we would talk every weekend, even as this process was ongoing and just kind of keep moving forward, talking about ideas to prototype.
And the thing we're exploring then was using WebGL, but it was, Because again, that's the hammer and everything was a nail.
So basically, we were exploring, how do you take a photograph and convert it into a 3D scene.
And so we thought maybe there's a way to go and explore many different tools that will let people do the sort of things that you can accomplish in high -end programs, such as Photoshop or 3D tools, but do them in a way that anyone can access and really democratize that.
All right, so you guys are batting around ideas and you really kind of land on this idea of using WebGL to create something that will sort of empower people to be designers.
Somehow, you're not really sure what it's gonna be and then you become a finalist for this fellowship.
You get to the final round, 40 people under 20, and you get it, you're picked.
You present, you fly to San Francisco, you present this idea.
And my parents came.
Your parents came. And they're getting more excited now.
And they got bought in because they met all these other finalists and went, oh.
Or, as my dad put it, he goes, I always thought you were weird, but these people are weird too.
And so you are, you find out at the end of your junior year, May of 2012, that you, you get the fellowship.
Evan is about to graduate, and he's going to join you.
you're gonna move to California back home and you're gonna start working on this.
So technically, I think you took a leave of absence.
You did not drop out of Brown, right?
Yeah, I mean, these fellowships get so much attention because it's such a big deal.
I mean, Peter Thiel is encouraging people under 20 who have great ideas to pursue them.
Yeah, I was excited about the fellowship and also to the other people that were taking the fellowship or applying were just so cool.
And the chance just to have this community around of people that literally knew what I was going through and spend time with them, it was just socially very helpful.
And also very inspiring, people would push you and say, hey, why are you thinking small, think bigger.
And that actually I think was a big input to why we got to where we eventually headed for Figma.
All right. So, you in an article written about that time, I think the Press Democrat wrote a piece about you.
You were still, I don't want to say vague, but you were still working out what this was going to be because you're starting to work on this.
It was described at the time as like photoshop in a browser.
Journalists, and I say this as somebody who was a journalist, I think for well -intentioned reasons, like to simplify things.
so people can understand.
So they can visualize what it is.
And that was kind of initially how people described it.
And I guess that summer, it was just you and Evan kind of working together and what were you, tell me what you guys were literally doing every day.
Well, so first of all, we didn't start till August because Evan didn't want to graduate, of course.
And we got started a bit later than when we received the fellowship.
And the start coincided with media that the Fellowship had kind of offered up.
And so, you know, the actual, like, first or second day of doing the Fellowship, starting to work with Evan, I flew out to New York with my mom to be on the Today Show, and I had no idea what we were doing yet, because we hadn't barely started.
And so… And they probably were like, and today we're gonna introduce you to a whiz kid genius – Dylan Field.
Welcome to the today's show and they were saying and tell us what what are you gonna do?
Well, how are you gonna change the world?
You know, I gave him a very big answer because we really didn't know When we come back in just a moment Dylan and Evan launch a tool that will change how designers work Only to learn that a lot of designers don't really want to change so they work Stay with us.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Raz. So it's the summer of 2012, and Dylan and his partner Evan are gearing up for the Teal Fellowship, working on an idea that has something to do with design.
The first thing we looked at was 2D face swapping.
So basically, you know, I got your face, I got my face, how can I take your face and swap it onto my face?
Kind of a cool party trick.
But with something called Poisson blending, which Evan found a way to do very fast in realtime in the browser with, you know, some graphics wizardry, we were able to make it so that we had an amazing demo in just like a week, and - So, just to interrupt for a sec, you weren't necessarily, like, playing around with these ideas sounds like you weren't going for the serious designer crowd, maybe you liked more people who wanted to make memes.
Yeah, I mean, that first one, yes, I think we were also looking at more consumer cases that were not as meme -oriented as well.
At some point later on, we literally create a meme creator.
That was the darkest week of Figma.
I was pitching Evan saying, look, I've done the research, I've looked at the data, this meme thing, you know we're just used to it because it's internet culture and we see it online all the time and we share them with our friends but like most people haven't discovered it yet.
Like it's a very early part of an exponential trend around memes.
Memes are gonna be way bigger than we could ever possibly imagine, we should make a meme creator.
And Evan's like are you serious?
And so he kind of humored me for a week or so, like five days.
We made a meme generator And it was a very good meme generator.
And at the end of the week, we just kind of looked at each other and I'm like going, man, I dropped out of brown for this and Evan's going, I think I'm gonna quit.
And it was a good sign of like, we're gonna work on some more serious stuff.
So you guys are working on this and just so I can understand this, Today, oftentimes Figma is kind of described in shorthand as Google Docs but for images, for graphics, for design.
When did that idea start to converge?
Was it in 2013 when the two of you thought, well, what if we build a collaboration tool like Google Docs but for design, for graphics, for images?
Yeah, so I think that that experience of working at Flipboard, working with the designers there, it always been my mind as something that was amazing to be part of this design process and Flipboard was way ahead of its time.
And the collaboration didn't exist. It was emailing files or at best you put them in a Dropbox folder, but, you know.
And oftentimes if you were a designer working collaboratively, you might start to work on and something that was emailed to you.
Fix it up, but then only to realize that this is already two days old, and people have already moved on.
Yeah, people have already done other stuff with it.
And Evin and I both grew up using Google Docs, playing multiplayer games.
And so the nature of real -time collaboration, that was native to us, and just kind of like obviously the way that things should work.
That said, we weren't sure about the market size for design.
I looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and it said there is something like 200 ,000 designers in the United States, or web designers it is.
And so that's obviously a pretty small number.
And at the same time, we felt like there's something there.
We felt like maybe this is a starting point.
We go broader afterwards into other areas, but let's try it out.
And just to clarify, you looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers and saw that in 2013, there were only 200 ,000 web designers in the U .S., which is kind of hard to believe, because it's a small market, if that's who your target audience was.
But you had a hunch that given the tools that were available, which were clunky, and there were plugins and they weren't really, they didn't make collaboration easy, you felt like there was a real opportunity here.
Did you get, I mean, and this is still, you're still miles away from having a product ready to go, but did you hear that from people?
Did you have an opportunity to interview designers or to talk to them and ask them what they wanted?
Yeah, so both I'd been working as a designer at Flipboard or Design Intern.
I went and talked with other designers that I knew.
I also started talking and researching and learning about how companies were growing their design teams. And there was something that seemed very off Because these companies were investing a lot in design.
Facebook was acquiring entire design agencies to try to make their design team bigger.
And it was like, wait, how is it the case that all this hiring is going on?
There's only a few hundred thousand web designers in the United States.
Like either the number's wrong or it's growing so fast that it doesn't matter.
And either way, we can go into other areas later, so I think let's go.
Let's go do this. And at first, we were very focused on what are the things that we can just do so much better from the tool standpoint, not the collaborative standpoint, but as an individual user, you know, what are the breakthroughs we can introduce?
Can we make a better way to create grids and guides?
Also, how do we honestly build a project of this magnitude on the web?
That was something that we had a lot of technical work to do to figure out what was possible.
All right, so you have – so you guys are really focusing and doubling down on this idea.
And because of the Thiel Fellowship, I'm sure there are a lot of people who are interested in maybe even blindly investing in whatever you – I'm sure there are people who are like, I'm just going to put half a million dollars down on every single one of these people.
Now, you had already had a relationship with Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn.
He had told you like two years before, hey, if you ever start something, get in touch with me.
In fact, you guys went to him and a group of other people to raise some money for seed funding which you did, you raised almost $4 million in June of 2013.
So, about a year after you got the Thiel Fellowship, at that point, was it a fully formed idea?
was it were you able to articulate what this was going to be you know not not yet you know I honestly I've looked back at that pitch and I don't know if I would invest in myself if I saw it you know you know back in 2013 it was it was very vague it was not clear yet like what we were going to do exactly exactly the strategy was I think that came very shortly afterwards but we just a bit ahead of being concrete on our direction.
There was one guy you really wanted to be involved with this and this was a guy named John Lilly who was – he had been the CEO of Mozilla and was now partner at Greylock, and I imagine you wanted him involved because of his experience with Mozilla running a browser business but he did not – he decided he was not going to invest at the seed level, that he didn't feel like you guys really knew what you were going to do.
And normally, not normally, oftentimes people just move on.
And they're like, okay, he doesn't want to do it.
But you were really, you wanted him involved.
Right. And I guess, you felt like you had to figure out a way to get him to convince him that this was going to be something.
What, tell me a little bit about that relationship.
Well, I mean, John is just a excellent human.
And immediately I was just so impressed.
Like not only was he super high integrity.
It was just very clear and principled.
But he was also, his belief, his care about design, it was off the charts.
And then said, hey, I'm down to keep in touch. I like you guys.
Let's just keep talking.
At some point, maybe a year and a half or so later, And so John said, you know, if you're ever thinking about raising another round, let me know.
So it would be another year and a half before he would factor in again financially.
But during that year and a half, you have almost $4 million to work with, which is a pretty good runway.
And now you begin to build something, right?
In your mind, when did you expect to have a product ready for at least for some people to play with.
Oh, I was totally unrealistic.
I'd have to check the deck, but I think we probably expected it to be like, you know, a year or so, maybe a year and a half.
But yeah, we thought it would be a pretty straight shot.
It was not. It took a while.
So just to kind of put this in context somewhere to dig into this.
It would take you about two years before you had something that you could let designers play with and you had a team I think around 10 people that you were able to bring on to help you and Evan build this thing.
Now, you're the CEO, right?
Evan was the CTO, technically or officially.
Okay and both of you are like, I mean he's a little bit older, but you're what, I don't know 21 maybe by this point, 20?
And your only experience, experience, but it was as an intern, basically, a paid intern.
You had been an intern for a bunch of companies, and now you're 20, and you are a very nice guy but zero experience as a leader or a manager, understandably.
What 20 -year -olds have that experience?
You weren't even a camp counselor, right?
I have been RA. Okay, you've been resident advisor on your dorm, right?
But now you're running a business of 10 people, probably a bunch of them older than you, if not all of them, and — I think everyone was older than me at some point.
And you were also building this product.
So tell me a little bit about being a manager, running a team.
How did you — how did that work out?
Well, I think that we had a very clear product roadmap, and we all felt that there was something here.
But I could have done a better job of helping people see it through, like, conversations with customers and whatnot.
I was having those conversations.
I'd kind of come back, share all my notes, but what I found is that if employees are not talking with the user directly, they just don't see it the same way.
And they don't understand the pain that people have unless they can actually interact with folks and hear about it firsthand.
And I think, you know, there's plenty of things to get on the Mandarin side to be better, but I think it was—it didn't really like blow up per se until a little later.
And what was the blow up about?
Because at some point everybody on the team—like ten people that confronted you—and they were like, I don't know, what did they say to you?
Yeah so at that point we raised our A round from Zhang Lili.
We moved to San Francisco.
December of 2015, okay.
Yep and moved to San Francisco.
And you know also I was like definitely going through a hard time personally you know my dad had been diagnosed with with cancer and I certainly was an experienced manager I was still kind of getting the mechanics right around how do you just set goals and motivate at people and we still hadn't chipped anything.
And now people are looking at the clock and going, is this ever gonna chip?
Is this just like endless?
What would you, Dylan, what would you do?
I don't think you were yelling at people or you were mistreating people.
Were you micromanaging?
Were you slowing the process down?
Tell me what you were doing that was causing frustration among your team.
Micromanaging is a good way to describe it.
Perhaps even a mild way.
I think I had for quite a while thought about every aspect of the product experience we wanted to build, and I felt a lot of pressure to get something out there.
And so I would just kind of come in and say, hey, this is the way we're gonna do it.
Turns out when you hire smart people, they have ideas too.
And it also turns out that sometimes those ideas are like really, really excellent.
But I think the time urgency combined with like having thought about it a lot, made me lean into, you know, we just got to do it this way.
Let's go. And that was not a fun environment to be in, I think.
Well, when you say people are getting frustrated because the product wasn't wasn't ready to be shipped.
Was that because of you?
You kept saying it's just not ready.
It's not good enough yet?
Well, we validated that.
So we went out and found all these companies in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, especially.
And we talked with, I don't know, it must have been dozens of companies.
We'd show them Figma, and just kind of like a flat response.
They were not too interested.
They're just kind of like, oh, cool.
So you were basically trying, I mean, you had tested this, and people were based, the feedback wasn't great.
So you couldn't put it out there yet.
And when your team came to you, I mean, what did they say?
Did they say, Dylan, you're not managing well?
Like how do they confront you?
Yeah, I mean, people were clearly not happy.
They felt like I needed help.
They're right, I actually did need help.
I needed someone to help on the management side.
We were not gonna be able to scale fast enough without bringing someone else on to help run a part of the company.
I just kind of felt offended though, I think, because I obviously poured my heart and soul into this.
And yeah, I felt bad because at some point, and not me, I did raise my voice.
I mean, just in response to one of the kindest guys in our team who was saying something that was actually quite constructive.
And probably you were under a lot of pressure because you had now raised money And there's real money on the table and you probably felt like, personally, this was on you to make something.
How did you start to take in that feedback and criticism and maybe change the way you operated?
Well, I first called John Willie who we talked about and said, hey, something happened and I'm taking a few days away from the office.
I gotta clear my head.
And John's like, whoa, okay.
He knew I had been going through stuff with my dad and that things worked pretty tough medically, and, you know, he went into the office and, you know, talked with folks, and I think his sort of sense was, okay, like, this is solvable.
Don't raise your voice.
But like, we gotta get this thing shipped and we can get this back on track.
Huh. And I guess, fortunately, right, um, right around this time you were able to hire someone, a lead engineer named Shou Kua Modo, who was a guy who'd worked at a lot of other companies like, like Adobe, and he was identified as somebody who could, I guess, kind of help steady the ship a bit?
Well, he was identified as someone who had just, like, really unique experiences relevant to what we're doing and yeah I think he came in and week one was like man what company I just joined this is a some weird weird stuff going on here but very quickly he kind of got a sense of where people are at and said Dylan we gotta ship this thing let's figure out what it is it's wrong why people are not resonating with it but you know my sense is there's only a few features missing and we already know that we need to redesign it visually.
And he did a presentation to the team end of week, first week about like kind of rallying cry of you all have been working so hard, so long.
We're really close.
Here's what it's gonna take.
Here's the gap. And we rallied.
We got it out. This is in December of 2015.
Just to clarify, you could say you got it out but this is closed.
It was just for beta users, right?
Yeah, we made sure that we had a really great early blog post, formed a press strategy, created a launch date, and got out there.
And it was controversial, honestly.
It was not universally well received.
It was very mixed reviews.
Very mixed. So, I think, and again it was closed, so it's not like everyone's using it and giving it mixed reviews.
It was mixed reviews to the perception of what it could be.
Yeah. And there were some people that immediately got it, but a lot of people went, why would I want to design collaboratively?
Why do I want a product that I could bring up?
It could be seen as very solitary thing.
This is my vision, I'm going to design it.
You can maybe make some improvements, but this is my thing.
Yeah, a lot of designers at that point were coming from an agency culture where you go explore, you come up with a few solutions for the client, you present three solutions, and then you have a grand reveal of here is the big, amazing thing that you should obviously do.
And that's just not the way that product development should work on a team internally.
Instead, there's a wide range of things you consider, you collaboratively need to work through them.
But people were so used to that agency method of working that some of the initial comments and the launch were stuff like, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers.
I mean, a lot of the early comments were like, And this is interesting because this is 2015, this idea that design being a collaborative thing was not a thing necessarily, like one comment was a camel is a horse designed by committee.
Essentially saying like, if you design things by committee, it's gonna suck.
Yeah I mean, I think that that was maybe the mainstream view of the design culture then but there were also a lot of people Let's sign up for the wait list." And then we started to every week let more people off the wait list into the product.
And we saw right away that people were using it even without everything we knew that they needed.
And then every time we added additional functionality to the product we saw that that conversion of people going from, okay, you're off the wait list to you're actually using it, it would go up.
So early customers like CODA, Notion, Microsoft, Uber, MindBody, you know, there was a bunch that started to really use the platform.
Did you find that people were starting to use this in ways that you didn't anticipate?
Because initially it was for, right, web design, software design.
But eventually, you know, people would use it—designers and agencies would use it for, like, restaurant menus or like even the interface on a screen on an airplane.
Like, did you anticipate that, or did that happen organically by users?
So much happened organically.
It was kind of like anything visual that could be created, you know, ended up being created at some point in Figma.
All right. Dylan, that year I just want to ask you, because we're talking about you professionally focused on this, trying to put this out there, but this is a tough year.
I mean, your dad is very sick.
How are you balancing this really intensive development, but also going back and forth to see Him?
Yeah, I mean I was doing everything I could to try to be there for Him, and also at the same time he did really want me to be progressing Figma.
He was really excited for what we were doing.
And yeah, it was definitely back and forth.
There are days where things were really dark and I would just not be in the office.
And I'd go up and see him.
It was unclear sort of like how long he had.
He was in just such immense pain.
But his body was, you know, he was a athlete his entire life.
So he was a strong dude.
And even with the immense amounts of pain that comes with cancer spread everywhere, including bone, his body was just holding on.
And yeah, so that launch happened, he was very proud to see it, but yeah, he passed quite soon after.
He was able to see the beginnings of what you would go on to become very well -known for, which is amazing.
Meantime, you guys are building this thing, you launch it to general use in October of 2016.
And it was free, right?
Initially, it was free.
And you really wanted, I think you guys wanted to keep it free as long as you could.
You knew eventually you had to have some business model, right?
Because you've raised money, you had a series A, you raised $14 million in a series A in December of 2015, but eventually you had to figure out a plan.
what, I mean, was that thinking that okay, we're gonna make this free for as long as we can, but we will eventually have to charge for it or was that not the plan?
We definitely were planning to charge, but knowing what to charge, how to charge, we wanted to kind of watch people use the product first. And also I personally, after all this time of being told it's not ready by a lot of people, I was not in the mindset of like, it's working.
Right? I just had in my head there's so much more we got to build.
When we come back in just a moment, figma gains more traction than loses an acquisition worth $20 billion.
Stay with us. I'm guy Roz and you're listening to how I built this.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Raz. So it's October 2016, and Dylan and Evan have finally released Figma to the general public.
They're not charging for it yet, but they soon discover that they probably should.
You found out that Microsoft, they had designers there who were really using it.
But I guess corporate said, hey, you can't keep using this product as a free product.
And it's not reliable enough.
If you really – we can't trust it.
It's not – who knows what's going to happen to it.
But the idea was that because it was free, it was somehow not fully baked, and that was sort of a kick in your butt, right?
You thought, well, we better start charging for it or we're gonna lose Microsoft. Yeah, Microsoft was actually really cool about the way they did this.
One of their design leaders came to our office and spent some real time with me, and he, I think, was sussin' out, like, are they serious or not?
And at the end, he goes, you know, your tool is free.
I said, I know, we gotta make some improvements I think before we pay.
He goes, well, we're gonna have to probably rip it out at Microsoft if you don't charge us soon because we gotta make sure you stay in business.
So crazy, yeah. And at that point, I just had a conversation with our board where they took me out to lunch. It was a pretty hard conversation I think for them and they were just going, Dylan, you gotta be more commercial.
I'm like, what does that mean?
And they're like, you gotta be more commercial!
And I'm like, do you mean, do I have to say more sales terminology and stuff like that?
Like, what are you getting at?
And I think what they meant was price the product.
And then, you know, that didn't really break through, but when this design leader came and said, we can't use it unless you price the product, I was like, oh, everyone, we gotta go charge for the product as fast as we can!
So I was a little dense on it, but it got there eventually.
So, you start charging for this and in the meantime, you guys are presumably working on ways to make it better.
You start in August of 2012 and you're shipping something out in December of 2015.
So that's a long time.
Just for a moment, during that time, that three -year period when you didn't have anything yet to show for, were you feeling anxious?
Were you feeling like, did you have a lot of sleepless nights?
I think the sleepless nights were more cuz I was just so excited about like what was possible to build.
At least once we got on the track of what would become Figma.
I think between when we started and when we got to we're gonna go build a design tool.
That period I had it sleepless nights because we didn't know what we're doing.
Yeah. But once we were on that track and we had it validated and I had talked to people, and I knew what they needed.
No, I mean, like the, it was more just my head was spinning about there's so much that's possible.
Weren't you getting impatient?
Oh yeah, for sure, impatient.
I mean, I've always been impatient about like, how fast can we build this thing.
That's just my default state, but anxious is the wrong word. I was, you know, very confident in our approach. No one else was doing it the way we were doing it.
It was just like, how do we get this to market?
it. How do we get this in front of people?
And how do we build a great product?
I mean, it's not—I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that from the time you've released it to general availability, it was a hit.
I mean, people really adopted.
Designers really began to adopt it.
I mean, the parallel I can think of, it's not the best parallel, but a little bit is Instagram, or Snap.
I mean, not obviously the same kind of virality because that appeals to just a mass consumer audience.
But for designers, and your intuition about companies hiring more designers was true.
It proved correct. I mean, when people start to adopt this pretty quickly in large numbers, were you like, yep, I knew it?
Well, it's more about like what's the next thing to go do?
How do we go and make sure that we, you know, there's still, even as people were adopting, there was a lot of things that they told us they needed.
And those were the same things that would cause people not to adopt.
And then separately, we started to see that our assumptions about the ways teams work were maybe correct for small teams but not as correct for large teams. Larger teams needed different ways to, you know, organize their work, they needed different security things, and so we need to meet the large the needs of these larger teams as well.
Jay Haynes Meantime, as you started to really explode in growth and usage, and I mean, we're gonna I can't talk about every funding round, but you do another 2015 was the last round and then there's a series B in 2018.
And then a series C in 2019, which valued the company at half a billion dollars.
Did you start to see competitors come out?
I mean, you must have by that point started to attract the attention of the Adobe's of the world.
slepte Yeah, I know, literally being Adobe came out with Adobe XD, which was their offering, not web based, but a very solid and interesting desktop application.
We also saw, and this is probably the one that, for me, felt more concerning at the time.
There was a company called Envision, which had been around since we started.
Because Envision was started in 2011, and they had put out a competing product, what by when?
I believe it was around 2017 was when they announced it.
But it was - And that, to you, felt like a real threat.
We were pretty worried because the mindshare they had was so huge.
And they made this huge announcement and said, We're coming out with InVision Studio and I remember for our Series B round, even with all the traction we were starting to get and how inevitable it was starting to seem, there were certain VC's that take the meeting, but then they go at the end of the meeting, you know, look.
Very impressed with what you've done and great job, but I just cannot reconcile this with the work Envision is doing.
Like, I'm sorry. I mean, just to jump ahead, Envision eventually shut down in 2024.
They don't exist anymore.
But it is amazing, right?
Because at the time, they could have been the the Figma killer, right.
And that was the prediction by some people.
But how did you guys you had an advantage because you've been working on it longer.
But But were you looking at what they were doing to make sure you were staying ahead of the curve?
Well, I mean, yeah, we looked at, of course, their product and why people were resonating with it.
But by the end of the day, it was like, No, I think our roadmap is correct.
And we just continue to push ahead to the things that we thought people really needed.
And I feel like that was the right strategy.
All right. So you guys are just moving forward and you're growing at a pace, and by 2020 you raise a Series D at a $2 billion valuation.
Now, again, you started this in 2012, kind of, right.
So this is eight years on.
And by 2020 you guys have really, I mean, you're growing.
yeah the start of 2020 about hundred employees and a 2020 we were to 3240 Wow and so we're growing at pretty rapid speed and we're also opening up presences internationally at the start of 2020 we put into motion opening our first office outside United States in London or create a leader for that and It kind of opened right as Covid started and everyone went home.
But the thing that happened, I definitely didn't anticipate, which was because of the multiplayer aspect of being in this infinite canvas, people started to hang out in Figma.
Yes, you didn't need to be in an office anymore.
You could do this all, you could basically collaborate, but you didn't have to be in the same room.
Yeah, it was pretty wild to see this behavior emerge.
And at first it was like across companies, people were illustrating virtual studies together to have a sense of community.
And then it was within Teams. We started hearing about how people were brainstorming together and using it as like a Hangout space.
Or I remember one day Slack went down and people were typing in text boxes and Figma for their Slack replacement comms for the day.
Obviously it's not made for that.
And it's kind of like we're watching all this behavior and going, wow, we've always seen whiteboarding, diagramming, brainstorming cases in Figma.
I think we need to go build like a virtual whiteboard and diagramming tool.
And we started to dig into how are people using Figma.
And the thing that kind of kept coming back for this use case of ideation, brainstorming in a remote way was fun.
Like, people wanted to have fun while they're doing it.
That was the way that they were trying out the best ideas.
They were, there's something about the Figma setting that was enjoyable.
And that element of fun became the differentiator, doing things like if you wave your cursor around a lot, it turns into a giant hand, you can high five somebody.
Or how do you make it so you can put stamps on things or have emoji reactions.
COVID, of course, this was the perfect product for COVID because all of us in remote work.
Because all of a sudden you could do - you had this collaborative tool that could be done remotely.
And so, the adoption increases.
You come out of COVID, you know, just a really well -placed product.
And for a brief moment, you guys had - not brief, but for a moment you had considered going public, but decided against it.
And then September of 2022 Adobe announces they are going to acquire Figma for $20 billion.
So $10 billion over your last fundraise.
And that's a big deal.
I mean, this was a, arguably, certainly more than arguably, a competitor.
They were going to acquire you for 20 billion dollars, which was I'm sure extremely exciting to get that kind of validation.
Yeah, I mean, I think the validation was less what we cared about.
There's lots of validation from the world but it was obviously something that kinda came out of left field for a lot of people at the company that that was not what they expected us to go do But what made us excited about this Adobe acquisition was first of all, we have a lot of respect for Adobe, always have. And the chance to continue our work at Figma there while also doing a lot to help them rethink what could Creative Cloud, know, other traditional projects products look like, in age of AI, in a way that, you know, really was design centric.
That was so exciting to me personally.
And part of that agreement was that if for any reason it didn't happen, they would, you know, pay billion dollars.
I have to imagine that that on your side, there was maybe some concern that the government would not approve it, but immediately after it was announced the Department of Justice, you know, European Commission, UK regulatory bodies announced that they were going to investigate this as an antitrust violation, violation of antitrust law.
And they begin this investigation, which would now last for over a year.
Were you nervous? I mean, you know, we did a story about Harry's razors a few years ago on the show, When similar thing happened, they were gonna be acquired by a bigger brand.
There's an antitrust investigation that was launched and eventually it unraveled.
Did you feel like you guys would be able to withstand this?
Well, first of all, obviously I never would have agreed to an acquisition by Adobe if I thought it wouldn't go through.
So the breakup fee was something that I was advised that we should have. So we include it as part of the negotiation, but honestly it was a pretty fast part of the negotiation.
and we are focused much more on the amount of time I spent talking through the Adobe, how exactly will the setup work?
Will we have Figma .com emails or will we have Adobe .com emails?
That part of it was probably 100X longer, not joking, than a conversation about a breakup fee because I just didn't think there was any reason why that would be an issue.
Our lawyers said that it would almost certainly go through.
And so I also felt like, you know, Figma is all about software design development and Adobe is not.
So it was just, to me, it was despite, you know, some of the earlier aspects of the company when we first started thinking about some of the creative use cases, it just felt very complimentary to me.
The deal basically by mutual agreement, you guys decided to abandon this.
And in December of 2023, it became clear that the government would not allow this at that time.
Maybe it would be different today.
Who knows? It all depends on who's running the justice department." And that was it.
I mean, they paid you a break -up fee, it was a billion dollars.
But here's the thing I'm curious about.
I mean, you know, Adobe was a competitor.
All of a sudden, they were an acquirer and I think rightly so, you were all in.
You were Mr. Team Adobe, as I would be, if I was in that position.
Adobe is a great company.
They make great products, but they were very well aware.
I mean, they'd been your data room, they'd really looked at your product, they knew how it worked.
They knew what you were doing.
Now, no longer could you, could you join forces.
So they're once again a competitor.
And how does that it's like, they're really not.
I mean, they're not okay.
They're very focused on other aspects of their business.
And that was made abundantly clear in the antitrust process to all the regulators to I don't know if they believed Adobe, but that was what they said.
And that's how they behave since they they the regulators believe they were going to this is gonna be anti -competitive, your argument is that they're not competing against your product at all.
Correct. But what was good was we kept accelerating and coming out of it, obviously, it's a hard thing for the team to absorb that, okay, we thought it was going to be one thing and we're going to all work at Adobe.
And actually, no, we're still in hard -charging startup mode.
And if anything, we gotta prove ourselves even more now.
And the team, I think just, um, there's a, a really sense of relief, not because people weren't excited about Adobe, but because we finally had certainty, and then we just rallied like the launch of Dev Mode came a few months later, but yeah, and this is basically allows you to take designs and translate them into code.
Yeah. and also make it so that you can help designers explain to developers how to go build products in the right ways.
And that was a huge launch for us.
It meant it's that 30 % of our users who are developers, we could provide them with a much better experience in Figma.
And we really just started to invest in our platform so that we could go build more products and also improve the stuff we have. I'm curious.
I mean, you guys are a much bigger company.
I think, 1600 employees, right, in the offices and cities around the world.
But we are entering and we're already seeing it every single day, a really just a rapid pace of sort of innovation around artificial intelligence.
I mean, we're talking now, here, by the time this airs, who knows what's going to be available.
Just a couple weeks ago, you know, Chad GBT said, oh, you can turn anything into a Studio a Ghibli or a Simpsons thing and everyone's doing that.
Now you're seeing people animate whole Tom and Jerry cartoons based on what they're writing into an AI platform.
Products like Figma, even this podcast, right?
They depend on the creativity of people like me talking into a microphone, but I can tell you right now, within five years AI generated podcasts will be, And they already are pretty good.
They will be so good that people will make money off of them, and my value will probably be doing things live, or people trusting that it's really me and not an AI that just sounds like me and mimics my voice and my mannerisms and the questions I ask.
I have to imagine that this is something that is also top of mind, because if it requires teams of really smart designers to collaborate and put something together now, it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination, a figment of our imagination, so to speak, to imagine that, you know, with a couple of sentences, people will be able to generate the things that they're generating in Figma now that take days or weeks or months.
I think what becomes differentiator to differentiator is design.
It's craft. It's how it works.
It's brand. And as we look at the future, that's what I believe will still be the differentiator for software.
it's going to be that craft, and I think that the value of design, of good design, will actually go up even more in this environment.
And can you create a piece of software that has some design with a prompt?
Absolutely. Can you explore the entire option space and figure out what it is that you should ship?
I think that requires human judgment to go navigate that and figure out what is the right approach. And I think we're still very early in any level of AI being applied to that process.
So I'm actually more bullish today than I've ever been on the role of design in the software process.
Jared Ranerel -Tilman -Tilman, Jr. And Evan left the company.
We did mention this, I think shortly after the pandemic he wanted to he was sort of wanted to just kind of move on and understandable as a lot of, you know, probably a really hard at work to get to where the company got to, and are you guys still in regular touch?
Yeah, Evan is still one of the people that I look up to most in the world, and that was why I was so sad he left because he's somebody that genuinely I have so much respect for.
So yeah, he's an amazing, amazing guy, and the work he's done after Figma 2 on the open source side has been incredible, no surprise.
I'm sure over various rounds you were able to take some money off the table, and you did not grow up wealthy, but you are and certainly will be even more so.
The company's last, I mean, $20 billion acquisition offer from Adobe is quite significant.
And you're young, you're very young.
Gosh, how old are you?
30? 33. 33? Yeah. Many founders we talked to on the show don't even start until they're 33.
Really get things going at 33.
40. 45. If you could, I don't know, look out.
First of all, into the future, what do you think you want to be?
Do you imagine in 15 years you're still going to be running this company that you started?
you know, I think that the chance to work on a platform like Figma and to impact an industry like this, it's truly once in a lifetime opportunity.
And the more that I get to know other companies and whether it's through investment or just friendship, watch other founders, the more I appreciate how unique this experience and opportunity is for us.
And I just think about the vision that we started with.
I can't think of a better thing to work on.
When you think about the journey you took and where you are now, so many things happened because you sort of manifested them, but also there was a lot of really just fortunate encounters.
I was getting to LinkedIn and managing to meet the CEO and all these different things.
And all those connections over the years would play out.
These characters would come back into your life, in and out of your life.
And here you are, you're just 33 and overseeing a company that's multi -billion dollar value to billions of dollars and, by some accounts, does over $600 million in revenue a year.
You know, when you think about where you got to now, how much do you attribute it to luck?
How much do you attribute it to the work you put in?
Oh wow. There's a lot of luck, not just in the connections along the way and the ways that folks have helped and I really care to pay that forward and try to, but also I think the timing.
I mean, if we had started this a few years earlier, who wouldn't have had WebGL.
A few years later, maybe someone else would have already been at it and that timing is truly lucky.
The chance to interact and intersect with Evan and the fact that we're the same place at the same time.
That was luck for sure.
But also I think, yeah, there's always the question at the back of your mind of like with an incredibly talented team of people, how much am I adding versus how much is this amazing group of beef humans around me adding.
I think back at the acting from childhood and whatnot and just not being afraid of failure and even the days where we get punched in the face it's like great.
You get back up and you keep running at the same thing.
What do you think was the key factor in making you not afraid of failure?
Looking back as a kid I went on all these auditions.
There are so many that you get rejected right away.
And then sometimes, you know, you get to the final audition for like a big big part and it's actually like two or three people in the room and they actually look just like you.
Then it's kind of hard to blame them on a look but it's like okay well for whatever reason they have what they're looking for and I didn't at this time.
But I it always felt like there's another one ahead.
It's about playing over a long period of time.
And the more that you can keep going, the more you can win.
That's figma CEO and co founder Dylan field.
Shortly after we did this interview and about a year after the deal with Adobe fell through figma filed for an IPO.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show.
And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please send them from my newsletter at guyrozz .com or on substag this episode was produced by Kerry Thompson music composed by Rumtina and Bluie.
It was edited by Neva grant with research help from Casey Herman.
Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley.
Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, JC Howard, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, john Isabella, Andrea Bruce and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.
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