912: Why did Figma buy a CMS?

Wes chats with James Mikrut, founder of Payload CMS, about being acquired by Figma! They discuss building an open source business, the future of UI design, AI interfaces, and what this means for the future of Payload and Figma. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax. 01:06 What is Payload CMS? 01:56 The big announcement. 03:03 Why does Figma want a CMS? 05:23 This has got to be about AI, right? 09:37 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 10:02 What will the interface be? 14:02 Generative, user-specific UI. 16:17 Agents make everything look like ShadCN. 18:18 What does this mean for Payload users? 20:23 How this improves Payload. 22:31 Trying to stand out as a CMS. 23:35 Is this going to cost users? 25:12 Sick Picks & Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks James: Triumph Street Triple, Malört Liquor. Shameless Plugs James: PayloadCMS. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. We got a special one for you today. You probably saw the title and I'm not going to spoil it for James just yet because he's probably really excited about this. But when I heard about what had happened, I thought like, let's get him on just for a little bit on the podcast and talk about like, like, what does it mean? What does this mean for Payload CMS? What does it mean that like, why would Figma do this? And then third, like, what is the future of building full stack apps, especially with all these AI tools look like? And I think that this was part of a play in that by Figma and we'll find out. So welcome, James. Thanks so much for coming on.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  I love being here. Last time was a blast.

• 0:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, super fun. We were, we were staying, we had a meetup in Denver a couple of weeks ago and we're like, man, we still got to do Grand Rapids. Cause I think that would be, would be pretty fun to do.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if you came here, we could make a pretty big deal out of it. We don't get a lot of interesting guests through this space, especially in the tech world. But um, yeah, there's a little, there's a little enclave of people that would be very interested. So.

• 1:05Wes Bos?

  That'd be fun. Cool. Um, well, let's, let's not beat around the bush here. Um, we'll do a quick intro. Payload CMS, give us a quick intro of what that is and then tell us your announcement.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we actually, in my head, we just refer to it as Payload, but it is a CMS. I think there's a huge like difference between Payload and any other CMS where you usually think of CMS as something to manage webpages and blog posts and media, right? But like, and they're generally not very smiled upon by engineers because they're pretty tough to work with and very rigid. But Payload flips the script on all of that. And our biggest use cases are actually like application backends for internal tools and whatever. So we're kind of a hybrid app framework in CMS and it's been a lot of fun to build, but we're just beginning.

• 1:55Wes Bos?

  That's exciting. And what's the big announcement?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Hit a layer on us. Yeah. Um, I want to kind of start from the beginning here. Payload was actively raising a Series A and.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I was out, you know, going down Sand Hill Road in San Francisco, doing the move and talking to a bunch of investors, got some pretty interesting opportunities, but Figma was interested in our Series A. And I started talking to them and it very quickly became apparent, some very interesting things that we could build together. And that went like, oh, Figma Strategic Investor, typical VCs, my interest kind of centered fully on Figma because of this vision that we laid out together. And yeah, it was a Series A thing, but Figma and Payload are joining forces. And the things that we're going to be building

• 2:49Speaker 01

  over the next couple of months, couple of years are very, very exciting to me. But yeah, Figma has officially bought Payload and now I work for Figma, which is very exciting.

• 3:02Wes Bos?

  Well, congratulations. That's awesome. So I guess my, my first question is, what does Figma want to do with us? I'm going to call it a CMS. Like, we understand that it is a suite of tools to build full stack applications and whatnot, but like, like, why does Figma want to buy a CMS?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think I'm going to fight calling it a CMS either anymore. I think that the perception of CMS should change a bit, but I think that is a pretty accurate description for us. So, you know, Figma is a digital design company, right? They work very well with the design workflow and allow design systems to be crafted to high fidelity and exploration can be just perfected. But there's still a pretty big gap between design and code. And for me personally, I don't want to compromise on any of it. I want to use a professional design tool for the design side of the work involved, but then I want to architect something beautifully in code that I understand that

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I can build on top of in six months and I can bring a whole team in and we can all effectively work in a system together. Like, the better engineered that side of it is, the more interested I am in working on it. And Figma sees that, right? There is currently kind of a gap between design and code and they're making a lot of strides to closing that gap. But, I mean, imagine like a button in your design system, right? It's in Figma, it is beautiful, it's got all the states. And you can specify like the appearance and the, the properties of the button and like the different varieties, but You could also go to code from that. Like they just released an MCP server, which basically

• 4:42Speaker 01

  high fidelity like takes your frame and transforms it into JSX and without losing any detail. But that's only half the battle. There's also where does the data come from? Like if you're going to connect that button to an interface for admins to be able to place that button in different pages or different areas of your website, whatever it is. Then you need to know about that too, right? You need to know about the data, the source of the data, the shape, the types, everything. And so to effectively close that design to code gap, a CMS is actually a pretty natural thing to slot into that equation. And I'm really only hitting the obvious parts right now, but I think what we're going to be doing goes far beyond just informing design systems.

• 5:24Wes Bos?

  Hmm. I was pretty excited when I heard this because the idea with payload is that like, like it's both like, kind of like your ORM, right? Like you can, you set up your data types and your whole schema and everything like that. And then you also get like a, like a UI that you can, can use to edit it, right? And, and those, that's not your typical, like you log in and like, like WordPress, you have, you have to find where that piece of data lives in the backend of it, right? They're, they're a little bit more connected and AI is, is so good at writing, like, like you said, it's so good at writing JSX and it's so good at writing interactive applications. But wouldn't it be, especially like AI is so good at next JS as well, right? It's, it can spit out components. We've seen V zero is very good at that.

• 6:08Wes Bos?

  But like the, the one step further is, is what if it was like totally trained on something that could save data? I know GitHub had something like that, that they're, they're kind of working on as well. But like going that one step further of it's able to spit out soup to nuts, absolutely everything, like kind of right now, we're just like in the, the, the, the application, right? And it can write some backend code and whatnot, but with this, at least I see it is that it's, it's pushing it a little bit further into the like saving to database and, and being able to manage your data side. And then what I, I hope comes of this is it goes a little bit further in the other

• 6:50Wes Bos?

  side, which is it's, it's hooked into like the actual design of the application as well.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Right. I was laughing because I need to look up the origin of the phrase soup to nuts. I don't know what that could possibly have come from. But yeah, so for Payload, we haven't really started focusing on this yet. But one thing that I know that is true is that large language models work best when they can use systems that have predefined guardrails for business logic. And this is how you do this. This is how you do that. And you write this and then you get all this, right? And that's why it outputs Tailwind 99% of the time, right? Yeah. And that's also why it works well with declarative frameworks like, like JSX, right? But Payload has our config, which is declarative. It takes the complexity and makes it simple.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  You don't have to open up your own endpoints. Like in a typical MVC world, you define your models and your views and your controllers and all of that stuff. And you basically wire it up all from scratch, right? And that's a lot of complexity, even though it's a framework and it makes something simple, makes them maintainable. You still have a lot of code and it's verbose. Whereas with Payload, you just define your schema. And then you get your whole set of APIs and you get your entire admin UI and you get everything that is derived from that one config, which an LLM should be able to output very accurately. And the result of the code that the LLM outputs is within the confines of predefined business logic, right?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  So it's not creating something from scratch. You know, an LLM is very good at writing raw SQL queries. But is that really the future? Is an LLM is going to write raw SQL queries for every single thing that your app needs to do? Probably not, right? And so I think that's kind of a superpower of ours. I think you will see us double down on that. But ultimately, one thing I also feel pretty passionately about is that large language models will automate a lot of what we do and make it easier to be efficient while we work as engineers. But I personally have a great interest in not surrendering engineering perfection to something else, right?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  And in certain complexity levels.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  An LLM will be able to get you going, but then you as the author of this product can enforce architecture that ultimately makes it more efficient and that makes it better organized and more dry. And those types of things are really interesting to me. I don't want to sacrifice on my ability to get in there and clean and to organize, right? So it'll play together, I think.

• 9:37Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io/syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 10:01Wes Bos?

  The, the space of building sites, let's talk about that right now is like the, or maybe the interface of, of building sites right now, right? You see there, there's, there's chat apps, right? You got Bolt and V0 and Lovable and things like that where, where you type into the chat box and it kicks something out, out the other end. And then the other hand, we've got like a cursor, which is you've got agents and you kind of tell it what you want it to do. And then there's, there's several other sort of implementations of like, what does the interface of building a website look like? And then throwing design into the mix as well. What are, I know you don't have concrete plans of, of what this will look like, specifically in Figma,

• 10:44Wes Bos?

  but I just in general, like, what do you think is the interface of building sites will look like?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I can give you a parable. So I have obviously used all of these vibe coding tools and I think they're incredible, right? Like they can do a lot. And clearly the industry is changing and there's real opportunity here. Although one time I was building a proof of concept for a prospect of payload and I don't want to write tailwind classes myself. Like, I don't find that enjoyable. I don't want to write like HTML structures. I want to like, if I can take a shortcut to get through that part, I'm going to take that shortcut. Although, so I tried to use, I was using Cursor, I was like, I personally did the backend in payload because I was excited about it. But then when it came to

• 11:32Speaker 01

  like the JSX on the frontend, I was like, oh, God, I've done this so many times, I don't want to do it again. And so the frontend was purely Cursor's responsibility, right? And it was like a checkout, like multi-step form, right? So you have step one, like, I don't know, shipping address, step two, billing info, step three, review, step four, congrats. And I had this like Figma design, and it was like three circles or four circles with like step labels, right? Everybody's done this, with like a little line that connects the circles and the first step highlights the first one. And I had this JPEG, and I'm uploading it to Cursor. I'm like, please,

• 12:13Speaker 01

  please make sure that the line that connects the dots is centered vertically and make the space have enough space for each label so that like step one, billing info. And I gave it the design intent, but it just could not hit what I wanted to do. And by this point, I'm not writing tailwind. I'm not going to get in there and clean up this AI-generated code. Like, please, just can we get there with vibes? And we did not get there with vibes. And I actually had to like stop trying because it just was getting worse. And I was spending a lot of money. And like, I think the fidelity of going from something that's well-designed and deliberate to code has lots of areas of improvement. Like, if I have something that's already deliberate,

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I know what it needs to be. I've designed it exactly how I want it. There's a lot of opportunity there to continue to invest in the fidelity, which also has data ramifications as well, right? So to really create a seamless process that not only allows you to get to an MVP, but also allows you to continue extending and building and maintaining. You kind of need to know about all these different pieces all together. And so I think the future will have, it will require a system that can be well-trained for specific goals and design is where it starts, right? That is, I don't know if I've told you this before, but I started as a designer. Like that is, that is my history.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  So I feel very passionately about, like, the good products will start with intent. They will start with explicit goals and those goals and that intent will be designed. And so I'm very interested in payload actually having the ability to connect to design in more natural ways. That'll be the future.

• 14:02Wes Bos?

  Interesting, interesting. And something I've heard several times, which I'm not sure I buy or it part of me is like, that kind of makes sense. And part of me is like, nah, nah, is the fact that design or UI will not be something that is the same for everyone, meaning that the UI may be generated as you need it. You know, like I want to build my own UI for, for Twitter or something like that. And part of me is like, that sounds great. But the part of me is like, most people don't know what they want. And then the other part people say is that like, there will be no UI. It's just MCP servers all the way down and you just simply talk to it back and forth. Do you have any thoughts on either the generated or the just the no UI as well?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think there will always be some sort of visual interface. It doesn't, it's never just going to be text, right? Like as soon as you introduce any type of imagery, video, assets, brand, tone of voice. Experiences will need to be crafted, no matter what. I do think that there's a world where we just talk to our devices and like they do what we need, but they're still going to communicate with you, right? They're going to get, it's going to be back and forth. And so there will be an interface aesthetic, uh, brand, tone of voice, all those things. As far as somebody creating their own interface for something like Twitter X, it's been years. I should just get on that train.

• 15:23Wes Bos?

  I, I can't even, I, I don't say it, but I also don't apologize. I know what people are saying.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  All right. I'm going to do that from now on Twitter. Like there's this famous like modal on X that there's an X button to close the window, but then there's the X icon, which is the logo.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Which one do I click? This is insane. Yeah. I think there will be like human interface 3.0 coming soon, right? Like the touchscreen was a big evolution of interface design, but there is another wave of interface design that's coming that none of us can really fully predict right now. But I do feel pretty confident knowing that each one will need to be deliberate, customized, complex, and have a lot of jobs to do. That you can't just cowboy your way into like, oh, I want X to work this way, right? Like that's, that's going to be, uh, I don't know that I buy that either.

• 16:17Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. I'm kind of excited about this because like a lot of the like AI generated apps do look good because a lot of them are built with Shadzian and Shadzian looks awesome. But they all do look somewhat similar because people don't go further and customize them for, for what it is that they need. So I think like putting that into the mix of like being able to document it and, and play around in a design tool and then push that into your, your code. And like, keep those lanes open as well. You know, what happens if I change something in one spot? And and then they're synced.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Well, um, there, I think we should kind of disseminate between two different types of applications. Like there is the small application that you need to get up and running quickly. And then there is the massive enterprise design system that's very deliberate and branded that needs to be pervasive across 16,000 different digital footprints, right?

• 17:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And

• 17:14Wes Bos?

  Eight different frameworks.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, eight different frameworks. Like you might have like a Swift app that has the same look and feel as the web equivalent and they need to be consistent. So there's that common denominator of the design system that needs to pervade both of those surfaces. And so, you know, for for the the Shad CN, like, number one, I love what they're doing. And I think it has a lot of value. I don't even think that there's a problem with certain apps looking and feeling in the same way.

• 17:45Wes Bos?

  No.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  If they do their job.

• 17:46Wes Bos?

  I O S proved that that consistent E Y is good.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Right, right. But that doesn't negate the need to have a well-defined system, especially for scale. And those are two different outcomes. Those are two different goals, right? I've always liked systems. I've always liked working on larger projects that need to be thought through carefully. And that's, I think that's why payload is good, because it allows for that type of thinking, and it encourages it. But yeah, there's both, really. There will perpetually be both of those different worlds.

• 18:18Wes Bos?

  Let's talk about people who are using payload right now are probably watching this and saying like, what's gonna happen to payload? So what's gonna happen to payload?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  I'm still running it. The whole team is, and it will remain open source. I, you know, early on with conversations with the Figma team who have been fantastic, they were very clear about like, we love the open source community that you've built. These, this community is fired up. They are making pull requests. They are contributing to RFCs on GitHub. They are helping shape your product. The engagement is incredible. And the open source nature of the product. Is very important to us and Figma as a company, I think they've always wanted to do more in open source and they want to foster this. They payload will remain open source. I think it's

• 19:11Speaker 01

  easier now than it ever has been to deploy payload wherever you want. You can put it on Vercel because obviously we're next JS. You could put it on Netflix. You can put it on a container. You can spin up an EC2 and manage your entire Linux, whatever yourself if you want to. That will remain payload as a core framework is kind of like layers of an onion where payload as the centerpiece where we maintain all of our config and our business logic and our access control and our hooks. Like that doesn't even know that next JS exists, right? Like payload itself does not have a dependency on React or next JS. But then if you want to go with next JS, then boom, there's that next JS package that allows you to use

• 19:54Speaker 01

  the router and all that stuff. But the core payload framework is gonna be built on and it's gonna be integrated into new ways inside of the Figma ecosystem and it's gonna be maintained. It's gonna be doubled down on. It will still be free and open source, but it will power a lot more. So it's gonna get a lot more exposure, a lot more usage, a lot more eyesight. And I'm pretty excited about that. I see very clearly where we're going and I think everybody's gonna like it.

• 20:24Wes Bos?

  And when you say power a lot more, like what does that, what does that look like?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Um, so being that we are called the CMS, right? CMS is often thought of as the core thing in a marketer workflow, not necessarily a developer workflow, right? So there are a lot of opportunities. Like when we talk to customers, they want AB testing. They want better asset management, right? So like there's entire different like tool ecosystems called digital asset management, DAM. And you upload a bunch of assets and you mark these ones are public, these ones are private, these ones like the brand team has signed off on whatever. But then you want to use them in your CMS and like there's an entire another side of this, like the data in your CMS needs to connect to your design system. It needs to be.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Integrated with other surface areas that the rest of your team can use, not just developers, but also the marketing team or content managers or anything. And if you think about Figma as an ecosystem, there's so much potential there, right? Like imagine a frame in Figma, you click that frame and export an asset to your CMS, right? And it's linked so that if the designer goes and updates that frame, then the asset is automatically updated and used on your homepage of your website.

• 21:38Wes Bos?

  Uh huh, yeah.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  The ecosystem is huge, right? So Payload as an app framework is already damn good and that will get better. But there's just a whole world of potential opportunities to make that brainstorm, design, build, publish, brainstorm, design, build, publish that that loop there.

• 21:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Connected and seamless. And I'm pretty excited about all that.

• 22:00Wes Bos?

  Ah, that's awesome. I never even thought about that, but it it's true that the the people use Figma in many different ways, you know? It's not just a, it's not just a design tool. The the amount of like slide decks now that I see or or like little pitches or like presentations that are are done now in Figma. It's like, oh, wow. I I think I I realize that this is not just a build some buttons on and and and export them for in CSS, you know?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah, and I don't have a full answer to what are we going to build over the next five plus years? But I can tell you that it's going to be things that only we can do. And that is another part of the the decision factor of like, okay, are we going to raise a series A? We're going to keep growing? Are we going to keep taking investor funding? Are we going to be another CMS face in the crowd? There's a million of them, right? Or can we truly do things and fix different problems that no one else has even thought about before? Right? And that I truly think that we're we're moving in that direction and that we don't need to make any compromises at all as we do it. I don't want to make compromises. I want developers to have the tool that they want. I want designers to have the tool that they want.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  I want them to work well together and finally remove some of that friction between those two processes. And then once they're, once the product is built, it needs to be maintained and operated by an entirely different set of people. So I just think there's a lot of opportunity to fix things in this industry that haven't ever been fixed before.

• 23:34Wes Bos?

  Wow, well put.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I think everybody's gut reaction is that Payload is going to be paid and you're never going to be able to use Payload open source again. And that's just not true. That is very important to us that we're going to continue to protect the open source nature of Payload. I think you're going to see a lot of design to code improvements. I think you're going to see a lot of native connections to tools that you already use, a lot of investment in large language models outputting the config, just a lot of, lot of good stuff.

• 24:04Wes Bos?

  Sick. Well, I'm super stoked to see what you guys build. So excited and congratulations again for you. I'm sure you're, you're excited to get going and start building all this stuff. I'm sure that was not a, I'm sure that was a very long process. And now I'm, you probably just want to get heads down and start building stuff.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, the team has been busy in the meantime. I mean, this has been in the works for a while and we've shipped folder view, we've shipped orderable collections, we've shipped more join field features, like all those features, everything we've been doing recently has been in parallel to all of this. And I had my second kid a couple of months ago. So I have a newborn now that it's been a lot. Yeah, I'm excited to build.

• 24:49Wes Bos?

  Sick, sick. Cool. Well, hopefully we'll be able to come down. If you are listening to this and you want to see us in Grand Rapids, let us know because we've been talking about doing a world tour and I've been, I was telling them, I was like, we should do Michigan. Scott's from Michigan, he can visit his family. So we're going to try and make it happen.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  All right. Are we doing a sick pick? Because that just gave me an idea.

• 25:16Wes Bos?

  Yes. Yeah, like give it. What's your sick pick? Lay it on us.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Well, my first choice was going to be my motorcycle because it's perfect and I want to buy a new one, but I don't have anything to buy because mine's already perfect. That's the Triumph Street Triple. But the real idea that you just gave me was that if anybody wants to stop by Michigan, there's this thing called Malort, which is really good. It's a liquor that is from Chicago that is kind of a thing around here, but you'll find out what that means. And that's my sick pick, Malort, for sure.

• 25:45Wes Bos?

  Oh, man, extremely fast motorcycle and some alcohol. Those are some great sick pics. Please do not enjoy those at the same time.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  No, no, no, different times.

• 25:55Wes Bos?

  Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate you giving us the little bit of a scoop on this and congrats again.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Thank you and thanks for having me. I hope you're well.

• 26:05Wes Bos?

  Peace.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  See ya.