We're going to get to a world, we're already kind of there, where good enough is not enough.
Good enough is going to be mediocre.
And you're going to need to differentiate through design, through craft, through point of view, through brand, through storytelling and marketing.
And I think the people that internalize that now, they're going to be winners.
That's my point of view, is that this is what's going to matter.
It's not the top of the stack.
And if you don't internalize it now, you've got an issue.
Good enough isn't good enough anymore.
As AI makes software easier to build, real differentiation is moving up the stack to design, craft point of view and brand.
In this episode, Jack Altman sits down with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, to talk about what it takes to build enduring products in a faster, more competitive AI era.
Dylan reflects on Figma's long early build, why human taste and judgment still matter and how AI fits into creative work without replacing designers.
Let's get into it.
Dylan, it's a pleasure to have you here.
Thanks for doing this.
I want to start by teeing up a contrast between Figma in the early days, which was a multi-year long build before you got things going.
And then the state of the world today, where AI startups are racing out of the gates and there's tons of competition and everything's frenetic.
13 years and it's a little different now, isn't it?
Yeah.
So you started in 2012.
August 2012 was our official start.
And then you got really kind of off to the races when, like four or five years later?
Coz Beta was launched December 2015.
GA, October 2016, didn't start charging until summer 2017.
Same day as our CFO, now CFO started.
Fun fact.
CFO started the day you started charging?
Yeah, he was like a bizops guy then, but now he's CFO.
Okay, so you had this five-year period.
And I guess when you look back on it, you could either sort of, I imagine, feel like...
That was a little too long.
Definitely too long.
If you're watching, don't do that.
But on the other hand, you built some hard stuff.
You put a design product in the browser when people had never done it.
You made collaboration, which I've read was a very difficult task.
And that had advantages too.
So how do you sort of make sense looking back now in sort of the fullness of time on that five-year period?
Yeah, I think definitely there were ways we could have speed run it.
Hiring faster, noticing that we had product market pull and that folks were literally begging us to go do things.
When we got very long docs from people saying I was so inspired by our last night together when we went through this very long user test where everything was not performing and the tool was in terrible shape.
Then they followed up the next morning with a 13, 14 page doc and It was like here's all the stuff that I want you to build.
I probably should have known that maybe people cared and wanted this thing.
But I was also nervous.
I kind of took the roadmap feedback and I was like, oh man, it's going to take forever to do all this stuff.
In reality, I should have hired faster.
I think we had the resources to do it.
I was just a little trepidatious.
But beyond that, I think, yeah, there was a lot of stuff to build.
And there were certain things we could have not done that we later pulled out.
Evan, my co-founder, loves sort of thinking about cross-platform stuff, compilation and general programming language theory.
And so he made a way to do cross-platform targeting to not just web, but also as a backup in case something didn't work out desktop.
And at some point I was like, yeah, this is all stuff we can rip out.
We can move way faster without doing this.
So there's things that we could have done to speed it up, but not that much.
I mean, there is this category of product.
I think about like Airtable, is maybe another example where I think it's like a hard product to build.
I think, like email is classically just like you, just like, can't ship a quick V1 that people will use?
So maybe there's some element of that that you had.
Yeah, and I think also it was like even after we launched in GA, we kept adding new features and every time we did, or almost every time, we would see just that retention would go up.
And so it's also interesting.
There was folks in the beginning that were very minimalist.
And they liked the minimalism of the tool.
We started adding everything people needed for their workflows.
And they're like, can we have the old thing in the back, please?
So you always have to find that balance between adding and complexity, and then simplicity approachability, but also make sure it's powerful.
Did you have the sense when you were in those early stages innings that anything you built worked?
In other words like, were you like all of our ideas that we seem to build, they all make the product better?
Like, were you sort of like um, were you having to make hard calls between a, b and c and one was going to be good and one was going to be bad?
Or was it just all of these improvements were good because it was such strong product pull and it was just like the faster you built, the better.
Once we got out and once we had people using it, we kind of separated the work streams into two.
So one was the blockers work stream, whereas these are things that are literally blocking people from adopting.
We know this for a fact.
What's the prioritization and rank order of which ones were removed first?
And there's kind of like differentiators.
We didn't call it that, but it was one project at a time mostly.
These are things like design systems, the ability to share components in a file across your entire team.
And We have to do both.
We really had to go evolve the state of the world but also make it so more people could try the thing.
When you think about that sort of experience and then you look around at AI tools now and there was a bit going around recently of an investor talking about how you got to get to a couple million of ARR in no time
And, you know, it's like a bit that you hear a lot.
And a lot of, I think, founders feel self-conscious if they're not going one to ten.
Zero to ten million in like a month or something.
Yeah.
And there's like a lot of that.
And I think then you know investors, I think are, you know, kind of helping probably perpetuate it, because the next round of investors are going to think about the same thing.
And, you know, it's like very, very different than the way Figma got started.
And I'm just curious how you make sense of seeing that around you, since you came up through one of the like slow build type of startups.
Yeah, and again, don't recommend slow build either.
But I think first of all, if we had today's tools, like if I had Figma, make today or prompt an app tool, probably I could build a lot faster.
But I also think that maybe my hot take here is that there's a lot of really awesome companies right now that are not really AI companies.
And So first of all, I think if you're looking at only AI stuff, you're just missing a lot.
It's like actually there's some gems there.
For example, recently did investments in companies like Ambrook.
Ambrook's an amazing company trying to help farmers with their financial situation and figure out how to make it so that they can do taxes better and deal with all the compliance and forms that come along with it.
And I think that they have a real opportunity in front of them.
Another company I invested in, Laura Deming, her company is called Until Labs.
And they're a whole body reversible cryogenics company.
That's their moonshot goal.
But along the way there's a real problem to solve where organs you might have an organ come available but you have a very limited time window to get it to a recipient.
And if you're able to basically use that same tech to be able to vitrify the organ and then rewarm it at its destination, then you have a longer period of time to go make that match.
And that can save a ton of lives, especially combined with new emerging technologies.
And it's like yeah, neither of them are really AI companies, but they're great businesses and I am strongly convicted.
It's interesting when you have these trends as strong as AI now, maybe crypto some number of years ago, obviously there's others.
There's probably a dynamic where there becomes such a strong gold rush to that thing that the people who are not working on that thing are missionaries at a much higher rate also.
And that's probably also the flip side trap is in the gold rush.
There's a lot of people who are going to be very missionary about it, but there's also a lot of people who are hey, I can go zero to 10 next month.
I think the other thing that's interesting is that AI closes gaps.
And so because it closes gaps and makes it so you can do things that might otherwise take a very long time in a short amount of time.
It also expands markets.
And so I think that's probably implicit to the assumptions here is that there's a little hanging fruit all over.
If we're able to identify these companies that are growing so fast, we're also identifying the big markets.
People haven't tapped yet.
And I think that might be true it's certainly going to be true for some companies but also there's a dynamic where Yeah, probably some of the companies that go straight up go straight down.
And it's a question of when.
And then there'll be some amazing winners.
But also it's just like this default of yeah okay, if the why now is AI, it's the same why now as everyone else's why now.
And if your pure strategy is, it's a gold rush, I'm going to get there fastest, then you have to be charging incredibly hard.
And you have to be strategic.
And I think, first of all, you have to know that you got that in you.
Because not everyone does.
996, 997, whatever it is that people need to sign up for.
It's also, besides the hours, it's also a set of business decisions. look a certain way.
They look very different than the way you built Sigma, for example.
For sure.
And I think also it's like, okay, is this something that you think is long-term defensible?
Is there any reason for you to believe that?
But also at the same time, if you get there first, it's often the case you can just kind of go all sorts of interesting places.
So all these companies, it's very hard to puzzle through what will happen.
And I think that's leading to the climate we're in, where folks are just racing towards opportunities.
And then they get there and people are lining up to go back to them at very large valuations.
Where we're seeing these mega seed deals before people even launch anything.
That's not a judgment on whatever's going on right now, because some of them will be amazing companies.
It's just a description of where we're at.
I'm curious do you ever think about imagining building a company in the opposite ethos of the way you built Figma and think about it and say that actually sounds kind of fun?
Does it sound fun to you or tiring to you to do a very hard charging just like?
Go for a really aggressive raise a ton, hire a ton, burn a ton, take a market which is very different than you know.
You obviously built this like super profitable, you know sort of, you know focused company.
I mean, basically, the first part of that, the hard charging part, is what we were doing at Figma.
I think that the team is working incredibly hard right now, myself included.
And we see massive opportunity in front of us.
Figma Make is one example.
That's an industry where There's a lot of different players.
We think we have a differentiated approach where you can go from Figma Design, pull context in into Figma, Make use that to create a better designed application and then also go back to Figma Design tweak and eventually it'll be hopefully a round trip, two sides of the same coin.
We've talked about this a little bit publicly but be able to do more workflows assistant, type things in Figma design, where you can prompt there too.
And, just in general, so excited about making it so that more people can create these designs that are consistent with their overall brand language, their design system, and get their ideas out there.
Because if you scribble something on a napkin, it will not be treated as seriously as if it looks the same as your usual UI.
Doesn't mean you don't need a designer.
We're going to get to a world where good enough is not enough.
Good enough is going to be mediocre.
And you're going to need to differentiate through design, through craft, through point of view, through brand, through storytelling and marketing.
And I think the people that internalize that now, they're going to be winners.
That's my point of view, is that this is what's going to matter.
The stuff at the top of the stack.
And if you don't internalize it now, you've got an issue.
This is one of the topics I wanted to ask you about is, As far as you can see I don't even know how many years that is today, but as far as you can see do you think that the role of the human designer will flip somehow from maker to editor or something different like that?
Or does it only focus people on the most creative, most pivotal flourishes or most important integral parts of the product?
Where does this go? if you look out as far as you're able to look out?
I think, first of all, I've been kind of in this place of maybe the roles are all merging together.
And I was saying that before even AI was the topic.
Yeah, you were.
Even 10 years ago, five years ago, it's been something I've been kind of noticing, just slow progression towards.
And now I feel like everyone PM engineer designer, researcher the sort of typical roles you find in the product design development process.
And I think that if you look at sort of like the general pull of AI, it makes everyone feel like they should be more generalist to keep up.
And then also, if you look at the way that things are actually playing out, I think it's those roles merging, because the roles are still there.
But it's the responsibilities, it's the things that people are doing every day.
Those are starting to get more murky.
It's like everyone has their specialization, but then they also have increased ability to have impact elsewhere outside their specialization.
So now it's like, okay, as a designer, I'll go commit some code.
Or as a product manager, I should go actually make a prototype of my idea rather than just a PRD.
Yeah, I mean, obviously you've always had full stack product builders at a startup.
And the co-founder CTO has always done all of that since as long as software's been going.
But oftentimes they go work with a product manager or designer and all of them just are doing it all.
And I think though that now we're in a place where you should be hiring a designer right away.
Getting back to your question around, what's the future of the designer role?
I think design has kind of everything going forward.
If you think of that as the top of the value stack and you think about all the things that can impact design and all the things you're trying to pull in, you're thinking about the business logic, you're thinking about the user problems.
You're trying to get to the hard user problems.
What is it they really want?
You're trying to think about the system and how it shows up in all these different places.
The brand, the way that you're able to incorporate culture, the affordances you want to use, the style that you want to go with, but also the structure.
All these decisions are at the root of how you'll win or lose a business.
Yeah, and there's good AI tooling around a lot of what you just said.
Even getting user feedback used to be and to some extent it still is, but it used to be the way you had to do.
It was go schedule 130 minute calls.
And now you can do it other ways.
And so it's like you think about a designer and they're able to get feedback scalably.
They're probably able to make at least good enough versions of designs that they can start playing with.
They could probably start to get something into production all from a cockpit.
I'm not saying that in the next year or two years that designer will then be able to scale the company as one person.
I actually think engineers are more needed than ever to be able to architect systems properly, to think through what is the right way to go and figure out how you should structure everything.
Because if you just let these agents run right now, you're going to have a mess.
And that's where we see security vulnerabilities and we see hacks going on and user data leaking.
And we see companies that start to scale and they break.
Do you think this is like a moment in time issue or do you think that this is like a perpetual issue?
I think it's for sure the issue right now.
And I would expect it's an issue for a while longer.
And I think the developer will still be in that outer loop even as these models improve, as will researchers.
It's kind of an interesting question for math as well.
I think math is probably underappreciated as one of the most deterministic areas, where RL should shine the most, even more so than code, and it should be the case that I don't know how much it costs, but we have an ASI mathematician.
Does that mean that mathematicians are out of a job?
No, I don't think so.
I think that the mathematicians will be prompting and reasoning through things and working with that ASI and they're kind of going to be almost fishermen trying to fish for the theorems, the proofs.
Do you think that we are...
I think what you're describing is there's a future where we have potentially even more designers and engineers than we have now, but they're just much more productive.
I think much more productive, but let's be clear about productivity.
In the engineering context, productivity is building something well.
In the design context.
It might be that it is just further exploration of the options space.
Sometimes
Because I think right now, oftentimes you're constrained by timeline.
You can only explore so much.
You might not be getting to the best solution.
If you can explore even further, look at more options and figure out how those actually will work out in the decision tree, then from there you can figure out okay, here's the option I want to go with, and then go even deeper.
And you can actually go and apply even more craft to that option.
And I think that design is inherently non-deterministic, unlike math.
And so the role of AI and how it shows up in design will be very different than the more deterministic loops like code and math.
Do you buy the argument that we'll have lots of small companies with a billion of revenue?
Or do you think that instead, what will happen is the level of competition is just going to rise and companies will be about the same size, but the software is just going to be way sicker.
I think that there's already companies that are smaller than you would expect with large amounts of revenue.
And then the question is, how much will they scale before they just totally break?
And I think we're going to find out.
I'm sure that you and I both have mutual friends that are in this situation.
And I talked to these founders and they're proud of how much they've accomplished with so few people.
It's like, oh my God, I got to this revenue milestone that's quite huge and I've got 10 people.
It's amazing, wow, and they get all this positive reinforcement.
But then they also say if you talk to them a little bit longer, I'm really trying to hire.
You got any referrals for me?
Because they are desperate for more people to go help with all the problems they now have at scale.
And so I don't know if it's true that team sizes will decrease a lot.
There's a lot of problems to deal with.
Yes, AI makes some roles more efficient, not all roles.
And as AI improves, we'll get more efficiencies, but also there's just more work to be done.
Totally.
I mean to that point.
It's like if the engineers get much more productive because of CodeGen, it's like well, you're going to start building a lot more product.
Yeah, and testing a lot more product too.
Probably need more designers.
So I do think it all kind of plays that way.
And I think the competition aspect is really important.
If you have more software in the world, we've had this exponential curve so far.
That's the part I've never understood.
It's like company A is doing the same with less now, and then company B is like well, I'll just do more with the same and we'll win.
I see it as, for Figma, we just went through headcount funding.
It didn't really cross my mind to go, hey, let's reduce headcount, or let's keep headcount flat.
It's like, we got so much we want to do.
We have so many ideas.
Let's increase headcount.
Let's go hire people that are great.
And let's go do all that stuff.
Amazing stuff for our users.
And I think, just like that's the mindset I think more companies will find themselves in is, oh my gosh, like there's more possibility.
I can do more and I need more people for it.
Yeah.
And then some companies will go, oh, maybe I can get more efficient.
But I think that might be a recipe for long-term sort of.
They might not be as effective as the companies that are trying to grow with this technology.
On this competition point, one of the things I wanted to ask you about.
That might come off, as you know, ignorant or annoying, so sorry in advance.
I always read Figma as having somewhat low competition relative to being such a big market.
And obviously you had other products that you were competing with.
There was Adobe and there was Sketch um, and that's not to minimize any of it, but it seemed to me like the market didn't catch on around you as fast as i thought it might have, versus in other markets that seem smaller.
There's many, many more companies working on it.
Is that right, or am i misreading it?
I think it's changed over different periods of time.
I mean, in the beginning of figma, when we first started, I remember looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics because I wanted to know the market size.
You should know if you're reading any business book.
And the answer was 250,000 designers.
There's 250,000 designers in the United States.
I'm like, shit.
That's not the market that we can use to get VC funding.
So my pitch was basically, we'll start with design, we're going to broaden out.
And then...
What I think was actually happening.
It's my intuition, but I can't articulate it very well.
All the time was everything else was getting easier.
You didn't have to host servers anymore, you could just use the cloud.
You didn't have to go make box software, you could go use app stores.
Dev tools were getting better.
And as all these things were changing, whereas ValueCrew topped the stack to designs, then people are, whether they're able to articulate that or not, they're hiring more designers.
And the ramp we saw in terms of number of designers in the world over the first decade of Figma was tremendous.
That market got so much bigger.
So yeah, when we started off, I mean Adobe had just killed fireworks because they thought it was not.
You know, it's kind of a mess, I think, maybe on the code side and acquired through Macromedia.
And they thought, okay, this is not where we put our efforts right now.
That's my sense.
And basically then people switched to Sketch.
And our main competitor was Sketch and then Vision as a combination.
There are other tools that start to appear like Abstract.
All these companies founded by really amazing, impressive people with really cool strategies and marketing and tech.
And some of the people that have worked at these companies are at Figma, some are not.
But Sketch was really the competitor and is today still a competitor.
They keep going on and they're a really, really cool company.
The InVision aspect was fascinating because I remember their marketing was just so good.
And at some point they put out basically a teaser of their next product, InVision Studio.
I was trying to raise the time.
And I remember there were VCs that told me, hey, I just cannot reconcile your position with Vision.
Pass.
I'm like, but they haven't even launched the thing yet.
Are you sure?
As a founder, you're like, come on.
But also, I think, because it was teams that were distributed in weird ways across time zones and they were always racing for the next milestone.
They just had so much tech debt and it really slowed them down.
Which I also think is a potential issue for all the companies that are moving so fast right now and doing so in a way that's not well thought out.
So anyway, I think that the competition felt very real then.
Then Adobe XD came along, we were really worried about it.
And then it kind of faded away.
They put it into a sunset mode and just kind of went, hey, this is not working.
And then you compare that to now.
And I think this is the most exciting time ever.
I mean, the reason we got into this space was that we could create more tools for people building products.
And now I think we've validated that there's a market there.
People are excited about that.
And there's a lot of people that are trying all these cool different approaches and I think it's awesome.
Like so much for people to try and learn from.
Like the option, spaces can be fully explored of how we build products and software, and I think it's great.
I think what I heard in there is besides the fact that there was competition.
Maybe one of the like learnable things for founders is you started and it was not the market size that it is right now.
And so, you know, you started in a thing that was 250,000 users.
Maybe people thought you could charge 20 bucks a month.
So some VC is probably sitting there thinking well, like geez, that's not like a ton of revenue possible.
You're not going to get the whole thing.
So you probably had a lot of people passing over market size.
And so one of the flip sides of being in a sort of illegible market is you might get a little bit more time to build and grow.
Definitely true in the past.
Is it true today?
Maybe.
Is the thing that would be different today because there's just so much more of everything?
Yeah, I think the amount of software.
Again, going back to the exponential graph, it's been exponential since Marc Andreessen wrote that essay.
Was it 2011?
It was like, software's eating the world.
You look back to that time and it's like the exponential increase has been real.
Now it's like vertical.
But I also think there's an opportunity that is underappreciated to go build in boring spaces.
It's like as long as you're passionate about it.
Don't do something you're not passionate about.
If you're a founder and you're waking up in 10 years and going, why the heck am I working on this?
Let's be real, you didn't even make it 10 years.
You probably made it a few.
And you burnt out and you either tried to flip it and it didn't work or it did work.
And you're stuck with this thing if you didn't.
And if you take it on VC money, then you probably keep going.
It's like our friend Adam Gilt, building owner.
You and I both obviously invested and are friends with him.
He's very passionate.
And he's building in a space that I think has been overlooked by tons of entrepreneurs.
Yeah, I think he thinks it's the most interesting thing possible in the world.
And a lot of other folks are of the opinion that this is very boring.
And I think it's an advantage to work in a space that other people consider boring.
Yes, but to your point, you can't go just fake that.
Because you've got to work on the thing for 10 years.
Maybe 20, maybe 30.
If you're lucky, you'll work on it forever.
That's what I'm hoping for Figma.
I want to talk about the way that you show up as a CEO.
Because I think there's a somewhat widely held opinion which might have grains of truth but maybe not which is that to be an unbelievable founder, unbelievable CEO, you kind of got to be rough and you got to be aggressive and you kind of got to be sharky and out for, you know, your company and yourself and all these other things.
And obviously there are people who do it that way and who are very successful and that's fine.
But um, you to me are an example of doing it the other way, where it doesn't come from a place of, like you know, hate and revenge, or winning or all these things which again, there's nothing negative about building in those ways, but there is this other way to do it.
And I'm just curious if you have reflected on this, because I'm guessing you also see that in yourself and you see this in other people.
And I would just be curious to sort of like hear your musings on this topic of like to be a world-class founder CEO.
Do you have to be a certain way here?
Well, first of all, I think there's just a bajillion ways to start a company.
You don't have to take VC funding at all.
You can bootstrap it.
You can take the VC funding.
There's expectations attached to that.
You can do it on your own, you can do it with a team, and all personalities can shine.
If you look at the founders that are in Silicon Valley right now, that are scaling, you can find every personality, every kind of makeup of a founder that you can imagine, which is awesome.
I think that some investors have this thesis of they got to have a chip on their shoulder.
It's got to be some mega trauma.
I had a pretty amazing childhood.
I'm very thankful to my parents.
I do like to win.
I'll say that.
I hate losing.
But otherwise, it's not like a big chip on the shoulder that I got to go prove myself every day.
It's more that I really enjoy building what I'm building.
I think I found this amazing group of people to do that with.
You know, it's really fun.
That's what's interesting is, you are extremely driven and motivated, but it doesn't seem to come from any of that stuff that you'd often hear from a VC on a podcast about a chip on a shoulder or something that happened wrong in their life or somebody wronged them.
It seems like you just love what you do.
I get to do the most awesome stuff ever, which is build tools for designers, creative people, and then go see what they make in the world.
I can't imagine something more interesting or exciting to work on.
Do you think this is like an uncommon source of this type of motivation or do you think like, like.
In other words, do you think that this conception that a lot of investors founders, a lot of people have, do you think it's off base or do you think it is, in fact, the more common source that drives people?
I don't know.
I think I probably get like a, a sample.
That's maybe not representative, because I have a lot of friends that also are just really driven by mission.
Some of them have chips on their shoulders, some of them don't.
I guess the bigger thing is maybe just don't get so attached to the chip on your shoulder that you don't work through it.
Like, if you're excited about what you're doing and you heal a bit, that's okay, trust me.
I've seen friends go through that journey and they show up at their company the next day or week or month or year or 10 years, however long it takes them to work through it.
And yeah, they're kicking ass.
So I don't think it's this thing where you should stigmatize something like therapy or introspection, because you're trying to feed the VC capitalism machine.
You can still feed the machine and you can work on your shit.
It is funny.
I don't know if you experience it this way, but I experienced building a company.
Form of therapy is probably too strong of a word, but it is a form of understanding yourself and working through a lot of stuff.
It's something.
Don't get me wrong, I hope I'm not an asshole, but I definitely am intense in many meetings and often times I reflect afterwards and go, oh man, I should have showed up there better.
But yeah, you show up.
A certain way people will tell you if you've got a good culture of communication and then you improve.
It also just forces so many weird psychological situations and then you have to reflect on those.
Sometimes you do realize that behaving a way that I'm not, you know, the most proud of was effective, and now how do i deal with that?
You know, like i had a lot of those kind of things too, where i was just like wow, you're just put in these situations that force a lot of reflection and personal growth, i think, which is good, but um, but yeah anyway, i just thought this was interesting because like, you're often cited as like an example, as in the counter to this thing um, and i just like want there to be more of that in the world.
Um Well, changing gears to another topic,
You and I, I think, first got to know each other.
This wasn't how, but around the time we got to know each other, when we were younger, we had this group of other friends and people I think even younger than us who were like smart engineers.
We called it Toad Chat for whatever reason.
You called it Toad Chat.
You made the group, just to be clear.
But you let me join as an honorary Toad.
You were like, I'm not a Toad. but I'm here to participate.
I was honored to be there.
And looking back, there were a lot of people in that group.
There was you, Alex Wang, Ari, and Conrad.
And many others.
Yeah, it was awesome.
And I look back at that, and I don't know, we must have been mid or late 20s.
They were early 20s.
And I often think about that, as like the importance of being connected to young people as a founder, as an investor, as just anybody in tech.
Cause I do think there's so much just raw sort of um effort understanding you're at the front of so much stuff there.
And um, you know, I think about this now, as we're like and getting into like mid thirties and um, you know, like how does that change over time?
And I don't know, I'm just curious your own experience.
Cause you're somebody who yourself started as a young person.
You started the company as a young person.
You've been connected to young people throughout.
You still are, of course, but how has that journey changed for you?
Yeah, I fear sometimes I'm not as connected to the youth as I once was.
And I think that when you're young me starting Figma Evan as well we've grown up playing World of Warcraft multiplayer games using Google Docs at school.
So it just gave us a mindset because of the tech stack we had grown up in, the culture we had grown up in, that seemed to us obvious, native.
And then I would go talk to an investor and be like, oh yeah, I like Google Docs.
And they're like, wait, you use Google Docs? it's 2012, it's 2013, who doesn't use Google Docs?
We're on word and outlook here.
And simultaneous collaboration, I'm not sure I've ever experienced it.
I'm like, what?
This is my life.
So the generational divides can sometimes be very real.
And I always try to educate myself by understanding what it is that people are surrounded by.
I think that social media can be one way to do that, but it's hard to reconstruct in an algo feed world.
Same context now.
I think just talking to people and understanding their frame is always important.
And also just making friends across age groups.
I've got friends that are younger than me, older than me.
I've got friends that are 80s.
The other day I was talking to this incredibly precocious, amazing 16-year-old who, like I, got off the call and was like oh my God, how do I hire you?
Is that legal?
Like, please come work at Figma.
Isn't it amazing when you talk to somebody who's like those ages and you're just like.
I can't believe it.
Yeah, I mean, you know, talking to this person, I was just like you're more mature than a lot of 30-year-olds, I know.
And it's just incredible.
I was talking to a founder that I would have guessed just by the way he was talking.
I would have guessed was 30.
And it was 20.
I was like, man, I was not like that when I was 20.
I think that the generational divide and the notion of generations is real.
Like millennials, have one outlook and we're raised in a time where I mean who are the most famous millennials?
Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg.
I don't actually know who the most famous people in Gen Z are.
I mean, you do.
I don't know.
Like who are the role models?
I don't know who the role models are.
I mean, I could probably... But then there's like the shift in philosophy too.
I mean...
For Gen Z.
I think there's a very different view and framework through which people that are in that generation roughly I'm not saying for everyone, but for a lot of them they look through the world and see the world.
And for folks that went through COVID and had to be locked up and antisocial and not see other humans for a few years instead of going to school.
I mean, what effect does that have on you?
A lot of effect.
Also imagine if you graduated college and came into the workforce in 2020, right as COVID's happening.
You have plenty of people that did it at Figma.
But then you start Zerp.
Or imagine coming in in 2022 and everything's tough.
And then imagine coming in 2025 and everything's AI.
It's just like a few years make a big difference.
Huge.
And I think the mindsets, also just approach.
I mean, I think there's a lot of emergence right now of nihilism.
I don't think it's like a permanent thing maybe, but if you look at it and you're like okay well, if you're told that AI is going to take all entry-level jobs I like a lot of media and you're told that climate change is going to fuck the world and you believe that you have no economic prospect long term, you'll never own a house, you'll never be able to support kids in America, that will change your outlook on things.
And that's the media narrative for a lot of people right now.
I don't think it's quite right.
I'm more optimistic than that.
I think you get both.
I'm optimistic too.
I think there's a lot of people who don't succumb to that.
But I think you can also sort of empirically see it in...
I think there's great parts of crypto, but there's parts of crypto that reflect nihilism.
There's great parts of sports card and collectibles, and there's parts that are nihilism.
There's probably good parts of betting.
For example, in crypto, I mean, I got... except NFTs really early.
Before they called it NFTs, we called them crypto collectibles usually.
I remember on Clubhouse you had that big, that sort of thing.
Yeah, well that was years later.
But I went from this era where it was all idealism and all this energy around, this just kind of tension of the idea of digital scarcity.
How can something digital be scarce?
That's so cool.
Early crypto was this very romantic missionary thing.
Yeah well, and then there's early crypto and early Bitcoin, which was, like you know, libertarian philosophy and hard money and people that really didn't believe in state and thought it shall be debundled.
That was a totally different mindset.
I was there because I thought social digital scarcity and art was cool.
But then it evolved.
And as it picks up, a lot of crypto becomes degenerate gambling.
And NFT space was no different.
I think I missed the tradition at some point where it became that.
And I was still in the idealistic frame.
And then the frame emerged of like no no no, this is how you make a lot of money really fast and get rich quick.
And it's kind of interesting, actually.
I feel like right now with vibe coding, There's been almost that same arc of for me.
I think of things I'm going to make and I'm like okay, great.
Now everyone can go make prototypes and make production apps faster and ship them.
It's so cool.
You can just do all this stuff that used to take so long so fast.
And you can improve it, you can iterate.
I think a lot of people also see it as like I can finally build a piece of software and get rich quick.
And of course, there's stuff in the middle too.
But I don't know.
I mean, it takes a long time to go build a company.
It's not like, it's just an overnight thing.
And I think a lot of the folks that are just like, I will spend an hour on my app and I'll ship it.
Like, they're probably going to eventually phase out.
And I think that the folks that remain will be the ones that are using it as a tool.
I think it's interesting because I think this whole rise of apathy nihilism whatever, is very real.
And I feel like you sort of you know, opened it up with this, but you can't blame people, because it's like yeah homes, you know, you know, like we're sitting here in San Francisco, like homes seem like ridiculously unaffordable if you're 22 and just getting started.
There's just like all these reasons why it's like well, I got to do something like a little divergent to get something to happen.
So like, why not gamble?
Um, and I think a lot of this same sort of mindset applies, and sort of just like it's not just in the gamble.
Like it's also in people building, you know, companies and doing venture and all of that.
I think you get to see sort of the range of just like going for it for you know, sort of the the long-term reasons versus like what can I, what can I flip this year?
And then there's a lot of people who are also like extremely long-term, have a thesis about the world yeah optimistic yep, and they're trying to inflect the world for the better and they're mission driven, not monetarily driven.
Yeah, I mean, hopefully more of those than ever, like as tech grows, hopefully it's more than ever.
Those are the folks inspire me.
Yeah, One of the things that I thought was very impressive among many on the Figma journey is the company seemed to get stronger through the Adobe acquisition and sort of it falling apart.
And I would imagine that would be the kind of thing that could spiritually break a lot of companies culturally, a lot of founders who were like, oh man, I was right there and now I've got to do this whole emotional and cultural reset thing.
So how did you navigate that?
I guess starting with your own psychology.
Yeah, that was probably the hardest, my own psychology.
Because everything else is downstream of that.
If you're not bright in your own head, then how can you lead?
Or make good decisions even.
And for me, I think the start was kind of like, oh, 95% certainty, I'll go through, no worries. just kind of every time we checked in, the certainty went down.
And eventually you know at the end it's like oh, there's maybe a 5 chance.
You know, in that arc.
You know, at some point, very quickly, we're just like, okay, this is not a sure thing.
Keep the foot on the gas, keep building.
That's the best outcome, whether we join Adobe or we're independent.
And you can't be in this constant state of we're so back, it's so over.
It's just rapid cycling through that.
Your brain falls apart and turns to mush, in my opinion, at least for me.
And so the word of the year for me then was equanimity.
I think I said equanimity more times that year than I ever will say the rest of my life probably.
But it's just like okay.
How do you find peace in every option and know that everything's going to be okay?
We're building a great company for amazing customers and we have a lot of stuff to do.
Let's go do it.
And whatever happens, we're going to put our best foot forward.
It's the contract we signed with Adobe and we're going to make sure that we do everything we can to close this.
If it doesn't work out, we'll have a great independent path.
And then you know you get to the end of it.
And I think, the relief the team felt at knowing an answer and having just this supervisional state collapse into okay, we know we're going to be independent.
That was real relief.
It was the end of the year.
We found out as I was about to fly out to visit my in-laws.
And I think I was hashing through all the details of how to communicate with the team on a Saturday night and a Sunday.
Then Monday, we announced that it was not going through.
And people had already gone on break starting on that Friday.
Sent a message to this team on Slack, like at channel.
You know FYI press release and details about what meant for them.
And said, hey, no pressure.
If you want to join, though, here's a Zoom call.
And we'll be talking about this then.
And just the relief on the Zoom call was palpable over Zoom, which was pretty wild.
It was like a big relief to know.
And then the break is going and I'm like, okay, not everyone is in that place.
And so we made a program called Detach, which is a Figma pun.
You can detach a component.
It's something that some people frown on.
But it's also a necessary task sometimes.
And the idea was just, hey, look, if you don't want to be at Figma, we don't want to trap you.
Here's three months of pay.
If you decide to leave, leave.
And you're still cool with us.
We're cool with you. everything's fine.
And if you decide to reapply, you can't reapply for six months, but then you're welcome to reapply after that.
There's no issue if you decide to take this.
And if you don't, FYI, We are a hard-charging startup.
It's going to be intense.
We've got a lot to do.
And so we rolled this out, kind of a nervous few weeks as people made their calls.
And then a little over 4% of people took us up on it.
What year was that again?
That would have been, I think, 2023.
I have to double-check that.
I get the dates all confused sometimes.
Was there any element coinciding there too of like?
There was like something in the water in tech at that time where like a cultural reset was happening at a lot of companies?
And did that play in in any way?
Did it help in any way that that was going on other places or did it just have?
I don't think it factored in.
Just be clear I think it was end of 2023 that we communicated for the first time, but like early 2024, that it was the detached program, if I'm accurate there, and I think that really what we looked at what people were doing, why they decided, I mean, a lot of it was just like you know.
I
I'm tired.
I need a break.
And I want a lot of people making career changes.
It was really interesting.
Early career sales reps moving over to politics.
Stuff like that.
It's also a domain hobby.
I bet you, for a lot of people, you know when you flip a coin and you don't know what you want, and you flip a coin and you get tails and then you're sad and you wish it was heads or vice versa.
There's probably also some people going through that experience where they're like, oh wow, I was actually really hoping that we could put a bow on this, because I was ready for my next thing.
Or people got attached to the idea and Yeah, there's definitely a few people who were amazing.
And, of course, you go talk to the folks that you're like.
Okay, I know you said this, but are you sure?
And their headspace was one of, okay, I get it, you're done.
At least for now, some people boomerang back.
It's a really great move, though, because basically you just took the situation on the front foot.
And rather than just being like, oh, let's just see how we do, you're like, hey...
If you want this, you've got to sign up.
Yeah, I just feel like it's best in general to deal with things and move on.
So I try to be direct in my communication with people, make sure I'm sending clear expectations for friends.
Give very clear feedback.
You're always telling me bad stuff.
Oh my gosh, that's not true.
There's not much to critique.
But yeah, I mean Then from there, it was like because we had put our foot on the gas the entire time, we were able to launch a bunch of product.
I mean we doubled our product offering at Config recently due to the work we did in that period of time.
Right after the deal was dissolved, launched in GA dev mode.
And that was really, really exciting to watch that take off.
As well as just like countless other product updates.
The velocity only increased, the momentum was real.
I think leaning into it and just acknowledging it.
And On that note, I want to go to the final area, which is how you're thinking about AI impacting your roadmap and your product.
Maybe you could just even talk about the things that you've been working on over the last six or 12 months that are AI-related, that I think are most important for Figma.
First of all, it's not just designers in the process, although they're the heart of it.
They're working with developers.
They're working with product managers and more researchers, marketers.
And I think that if you can give developers a good way through MCP to pull context from design so they can be able to make things faster, it's a win.
So we introduced DevMode MCP, And folks are able to use that with well-structured design files to go build a front-end experience so much faster.
It's really wild to see how this works when you actually experience it live.
You get a lot of the front-end built for you by the AI that can interpret what we send over and do inference, and it can be just extraordinarily fast.
We're also thinking a lot about, of course, how do we make sure that you're able to have great prompting experiences in both Figma Make but also Figma Design.
And Figma Design, we've teased it, but it's not out yet, but we're really excited about that.
In general, I'd say it feels like we're kind of in this MS-DOS era of AI where we're going to look back in some number of years and go.
It's kind of wild that we're just typing text all the time.
There will be some amount of dimensionality collapse into interfaces.
And it's also the case, I think, for any AI company.
The strategic question you have to be positive on is as models get better, do we get better?
And their answer has to be yes.
If it's no, in some way, you've got to readjust strategy.
In late October, as you know, we announced Weavey, now Figma Weave.
And this is an acquisition we've made that I think really meets these attributes and I am so excited about.
Basically, it makes it so you can use all these different generative models for image video, but also to transform across modalities like image to 3D, for example.
And you can then connect them in a node-based workflow, Use it to creatively explore or also create a pipeline, make a process.
And the things we're seeing people do with it are just so cool and wild and expressive.
And I guess overall it's also made me reflect a lot, because a lot of people call the output of these models slop.
It's almost like a derogatory term.
And without making any comment on slop versus not slop, I mean some things I see as outputs.
I'm like wow, it's amazing.
But I think the more important point is whatever you start with, it's a starting point.
And you can use that in a workflow to get to something amazing for your own craft.
And I think with Weave that's what we're seeing is just this incredible way that artists and creatives can go and create all sorts of different types of multimedia generation.
And then also use it across the Figma platform.
And so I'm really, really excited about what we're doing there and just the fact that they trusted us to join up and what we can do in the future.
As you add more and more AI into the product.
What do you think?
What do you think is the final bastion of human designers?
Will it be taste, coordination?
What will the set of things be that you're most confident in will always be just human tasks?
I think that we are so far away from AI replacing designers.
And if you actually look at the designs generated, I think it's very easy to tell that.
But even if the design generation from an aesthetic standpoint gets better, it's not considering the entire system.
It's not considering all the constraints.
You're not exploring the full option space.
You're not thinking about the context culturally.
You're not thinking about the business problems you have to solve or the greater system that connects everything.
That's all these different targets across all these different experiences you're trying to create.
You're not thinking about the emotional qualities you're trying to create and the brand and how that gets pulled in.
It's just so much.
And the best designers are able to take all these different inputs and then be able to explore out very dense and deep trees of possibility, to figure out what is the best approach and then go build on it.
And I don't know.
It's like one example I go through a lot that resonates with the Gen Z people, but not the millennials or folks that are older.
Always is Brad Summer.
You know Brad Summer, right?
Oh, Brad Summer.
Yes, Brad Summer.
Brad Summer, of course.
See, you got it.
Brad Summer, I was like, who's Brad Summer?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, we can talk about Brat Summer later.
Anyway, Brat Summer.
I use Brat Summer as an example a lot because think about it.
The album cover.
Obviously not just the album cover, but as a design artifact.
Lime Green Square.
I think it was Comic Sans or something that Brat was written in.
What ASI designer would create Brat Summer?
I don't know.
I mean, or if they did, it would be one out of 100,000 and no weight would be thrown behind it.
Because I think that's the other piece of design is.
It's not just the artifact, it's knowing.
This is good and we're going to put the right sort of message behind it.
And so for aesthetic I mean the ability to go think of all the possibilities in the world and end up on that album cover like you put me in a room for 100 years.
I don't think I would have come up with that.
And on the other hand of it, the other extreme, it's like, okay, what about usability?
What about hierarchy?
What about the ability to think about the different permutations of the way you take a data model, express it through UI and allow people to actually control an interface?
And what affordances to use and which ones to get rid of and innovate on and go find new ways to do something that are out of distribution.
I think that the role of a designer is going to be one where AI makes it so that they are able to get rid of the drudgery they won't have to engage with repetitive tasks anymore.
Instead, they'll be able to be really thinking more holistically, thinking further and going to beyond.
And I think it'll lead to an explosion of creativity, explosion of really interesting, amazing outputs.
And I'm pretty excited for it.
You know, I think the same thing that you just described is true with music, where obviously AI music sounds pretty good.
But I still think these albums that take over a summer or just a song that captures everybody, there's something more soulful that has to be captured that I just don't think we're there yet.
Well, I also think it's possible that, on the music side, AI-generated music can inspire an artist to to go and riff on that.
And inspiration can come from anywhere.
I think AI is a great inspiration tool.
It's also a great tool to figure out what do you not want to do?
I never use AI for writing personally.
I find it doesn't capture voice.
But I love asking AI, what are the 10 cliche ways to say this?
So I can go push beyond it and figure out the actual new way to say the thing that I'm trying to say.
And I don't know.
I think that, just like, the more we capture the distribution that exists today, the more we can think outside of it.
And that's human creativity.
Yeah, I love it.
Dylan, this was super fun.
Thanks for having me.
Great to see you as always.
You too.
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