Figma’s Dylan Field on the Future of Design

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, a design software company that went public in July 2025. Founded in 2012, Figma transformed how people design, prototype, and build products together. After a $20 billion acquisition attempt by Adobe collapsed in 2022 because of regulators, Dylan helped Figma rebound stronger than ever. Just three years later, Figma listed its shares at nearly $20 billion and its stock price more than tripled on its first trading day. A few highlights: Expanding a sleepy market Merging of designers and product roles Counter-narrative to polarizing CEOs If models get better, we have to Remembering Brat Summer

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  That's my point of view. Is that this is what's going to matter. It's up to the top of the stack. And if you don't internalize it now, like, you got an issue.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Dylan, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for doing this.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Jack, thank you.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Okay, I want to start by teeing up a contrast between Figma in the early days, which was like a multi-year-long build before you kind of got things going. And then the state of the world today, where like AI startups are racing out of the gates and there's tons of competition and everything's frenetic.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  13 years in.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  13 years.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  And it's a little different now, isn't it?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you started in 2012.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  August 2012 was our official start.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  And then you got really kind of off to the races when? Like, four or five years later?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Closed beta was launched December 2015. GA, October 2016, didn't start charging until summer 2017.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Jeez.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Same day as our CFO. Now CFO started. Fun fact.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  CFO started the day you started charging?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was like a biz ops guy then, but now he's CFO.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so you had this five-year period. And I guess when you look back on it, you could, you could either sort of, I imagine, feel like... That was a little too long. We should have.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Definitely too long. If you're watching, don't do that.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  But on the other hand, you built some hard stuff. Like you put like, you know, a design product in the browser when people had never done it. You'd made like collaboration, which you don't, I've read is very, 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?

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think definitely there were ways we could have speedrun it. Hiring faster, noticing that we had product market pull and that folks were like literally begging us to go do things. You know, 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 performant and it was, you know, the tool was in terrible shape. Then they followed up the next morning with like, you know, 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 like cared and wanted this thing. But, you know, I was also nervous. I kind of took the roadmap feedback and I was like, comments could take forever to do all this stuff. In reality, I should have hired faster.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  I think we had the resources to do it. I was just a little trepidatious. But beyond that, I think, um, yeah, there was a lot of stuff to build. And there were certain things we could have not done that we like later pulled out. You know, we had Evan, my co-founder, loves sort of thinking about cross-platform stuff, compilation and general programming language theory. And so he made like a way to do cross-platform targeting to not just web, but also as a backup in case something didn't work out, you know, 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.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  So there's things that we could have not speeded up, but not that much.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there is this category of product. I think about like Air Tables may be another example where I think it was like a hard product to build. I think like email is classically just like, you can't, you just like can't ship a quick V1 that people will use. So maybe there's some element of that that you had.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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 Figma back, please? So you always have to find that balance between adding and complexity and then simplicity, approachability, but also you gotta make sure it's powerful.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Did you have the sense when you were in those early 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, were you having to make hard calls between A, B, and C and one was gonna be good and one was gonna 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?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  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 like, these are things that are literally blocking people from adopting, we know this for a fact. What's the prioritization and rank order of, you know, 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 and the ability to share components in a file across your entire team, you know, and we have to do both. We really had to go evolve the state of the world, but also make it so where people could try the thing.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. When you think about that sort of experience and then you look around at AI tools now and, you know, there was like a bit going around recently of an investor talking about how you gotta get to, you know, 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.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Zero to 10 million in like a month or something.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  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, you know, round of investors are gonna 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.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  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 made today or Prompta app tool.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  To build a lot faster.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, probably could build a lot faster. But. I also think that maybe my hot take here is that

• 6:47Speaker 00

  there's a lot of really awesome companies right now that are not like 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, you know, did investments in companies like Ambrook. Ambrook's amazing company trying to help farmers with their financial situation and like, 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 Demeen, her company is called Until Labs, and they're a whole body reversible cryogenics company.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  That's their moonshot goal. But along the way, you know, there's a real problem to solve

• 7:39Speaker 00

  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 re-warm 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, you know, it's like, yeah, neither of them are really AI companies, but like, they're great businesses and I am strongly committed in them.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  It's interesting when you have these like trends as strong as AI now, maybe crypto some number of years ago, you know, 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 gonna be, you know, very missionary about it, but there's also a lot of people who are, hey, I can go zero to 10 next month, so.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Well, 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 like a very long time in a short amount of time, it also expands markets. And so I think that's probably implicit to assumptions here.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Is that there's a little hanging fruit all over.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  And I think that that might be true. It's certainly going to be true for some companies. But also, there's, you know, a dynamic where, yeah, probably some of the companies that go straight up, go straight down.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  And it's a question of when. And then there'll be some amazing winners. I mean, you know.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  But also, it's just like this default of, yeah, OK, if the why now is AI, you know, it's the same why now as kind of like everyone else's why now.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  And, you know, if your pure strategy is like, it's a gold rush, I'm going to get there fastest, then you have to be charging incredibly hard.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  And you have to be strategic. And I think, you know, first of all, you have to know that you got that in you.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Because not everyone does.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  You know, 996, 997, whatever it is.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  That people need to sign up for.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Totally. It's also, besides the hours, it's also a set of business decisions.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  They look a certain way. They look very different than the way you built Sigma, for example.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  For sure. And I think also, it's like, OK, 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 that you can just kind of go all sorts of interesting places. So it's, you know, all these companies, it's very hard to puzzle through what will happen. And I think that's like 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 then at very large valuations. Where we're seeing these mega seed deals before people even launch anything.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  And that's not a judgment on whatever is going on right now, because some of them will be amazing companies. It's just a description of where we're at.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Do you ever, I'm curious, do you ever think about like imagining building a company sort of like in the opposite ethos of the way you built Figma? And think about it and say like, ah, that actually sounds kind of fun. Like, does it sound fun to you or tiring to you to do like a very hard charging? You know, 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, high sort of, you know, focused company.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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, you know, hopefully a round trip, two sides of the same coin.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  And you'll be able to do, 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, like 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 like you scribble something on an app again, it will not be treated seriously as if it looks, you know, the same as your usual UI.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Doesn't mean you don't need a designer. 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.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  That's my point of view. Is that this is what's going to matter. It's stuff at the top of the stack. And if you don't internalize it now, like, you got an issue.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  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 become, you know, only focus, you know, people on the most creative, most pivotal flourishes? Or, you know, most important integral parts of the product? Like, where does this go? You know, if you look out as far as you're able to look out?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  I think, um, first of all, I think it's, 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.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  You know, 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-

• 14:25Speaker 01

  The roles being sort of-

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Oh, PM, engineer, designer, researcher, you know, the sort of typical roles you find in the product design development process. And I think that, um, 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,

• 15:09Speaker 00

  like, I'll go commit some code. Or as a product manager, I should go actually make a prototype from my idea rather than just a PRD.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, you've always had like full stack product builders at like a startup. And like, you know, the co-founder, CTO, has always done all of that for since the long as software's been going.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Well, but oftentimes, they go work with a product manager or designer.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  And all of them just are doing it all.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  And I think, though, that now we're in a place where you should be hiring a designer right away. Came back to your question around, what's the future of the designer role? I think design is like 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, like what is it they really want? Trying to think about the system and how it shows up in all these different places.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  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. And all these decisions are at the root of how you'll win or lose a business.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's good AI tooling around a lot of what you just said. I mean, even like getting user feedback, you know, used to be, and you know, to some extent it still is, but it used to be like the way you had to do it was like, go schedule 130-minute calls. And now you can do it other ways.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  And so it's like you think about a designer and they're able to get feedback scalably. They're probably able to like make at least good enough versions of designs that they can start playing with. They can probably start to get something into production, like all from sort of like a cockpit.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm not saying that like in the next year or two years. That designer will then be able to scale the company as one person.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  You're gonna have a mess. And that's where we see security vulnerabilities and we see hacks going on and user data leaking. And we see, you know, companies that start to scale and they break.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Do you think this is like a moment in time issue? Or do you think that this is like a perpetual issue?

• 17:34Speaker 00

  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. Like, it's kind of an interesting question for math as well. Like, I think math is probably underappreciated as one of the most deterministic areas where RL should shine the most, like even more so than code. And it should be the case that like, I don't know how much it costs, but we have a 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.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  And they're kind of gonna be almost fishermen trying to fish for the theorems, the proofs.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  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 explore even further, look at more options.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  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 not 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.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  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?

• 19:40Speaker 00

  You know, 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, you know, I talk 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. It's quite huge and I've got like 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?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Because they are desperate for more people to go help with all the problems they now have at scale.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  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. You know, yes, AI makes some rules more efficient, not all rules.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  And as AI improves, we'll get more efficiencies, but also there's just more work to be done.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, to that point, it's like, if the engineers get much more productive because of code gen, it's like, well, you're going to start building a lot more product.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  You need a lot.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  And testing a lot more product, too.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Probably more designers.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  So I do think it all kind of plays that way.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  And I think the competition aspect is really important. If you have more software in the world, and we've had this exponential curve so far.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  I see it as for Figma, I mean, we just went through headcount funding, you know. It didn't really cross my mind to go, hey, let's reduce headcount. Or let's keep headcount flat. It's like, we've 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.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  And then some companies will go, oh, maybe I can get more efficient. But I think that might be a recipe for long-term, you know, sort of, they might not be as effective as the companies that are trying to grow with this technology.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  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, but.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  It's a good way done.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I always read Figma as having somewhat low competition relative to being such a big market. And obviously, you had, you know, other products that you were competing with. And there was Adobe and there was Sketch. 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?

• 22:38Speaker 00

  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. Like, 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. Like, that, that's not the market that we can use to go get VC funding. So my pitch was basically like, 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. Like, you didn't have to host servers anymore.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  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, where's value accrue? Top the stack to designs. And people are, whether they're able to articulate that or not, they're hiring more designers. And the ramp we saw in terms of the 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 Mac Media. And they thought, okay, this is not worth our efforts right now. That's my sense.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  And basically then people switched to Sketch. And our main competitor was Sketch and then Vision as a combination. There are other tools that started to appear, like Abstract. All these companies founded by really amazing, impressive people with really cool, you know, strategies and marketing and tech. And some of the people that, you know, have worked at these companies are at Figma, some are not. But, you know, Sketch was really the competitor. Yep. 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. I remember.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  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 are VCs that, you know, told me, hey, like, I just cannot reconcile your positioning with InVision. Pass. I'm like, but they haven't even launched the thing yet. Like, are you sure? You know, as a founder, you're like, come on.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  But also, I think because, you know, it was teams that were distributed in like 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 like well thought out.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  So anyway, I think that the competition felt very real then. Then Adobe XD came along. We were really worried about it. Then it kind of faded away. They put it into like a sunset mode and just kind of went, hey, this is not working. And then, you know, you compare that to now.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  And I think this is the most exciting time ever. I mean, the reason we got into the space.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  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. I think it's great.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  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 VCs 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.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Definitely true in the past. It was true today, maybe. I think.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Is the thing that would be different today because there's just so much more of everything?

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think to the amount of software, again, going back to like exponential graph, it's like, it's been exponential since Marc Andreessen wrote that essay. Was it 2011? I was like, you know, 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.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  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? Like, let's be real, you didn't even make it 10 years, you probably made it a few. And you burnt out, and you like, either tried to flip it, it didn't work, or did work, and you're stuck with this thing if you didn't. And if you're taking on VC money, then you know, you gotta keep going.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  It's like our friend Adam Gil, building owner, you and I both, obviously, invested, and are friends with him.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Well, he's very passionate.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  He's very passionate, and he's building in a space that I think has been overlooked by tons of entrepreneurs.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think he thinks it's the most interesting thing in the possible, in the world. And a lot of other folks are of the opinion that this is like, very boring.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  And I think it's an advantage to work in a space that other people consider boring.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yes, but to your point, you can't go just like, fake that.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Because you gotta work on the thing for 10 years.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Uh, maybe 20, maybe 30. Like, if you're lucky, you'll work on it forever.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  That's what I'm hoping for, Figma.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you will. I want to talk about the way that you show up as a CEO, because I think there is 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 kinda gotta be rough, and you gotta be aggressive, and you kinda gotta 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 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.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  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'd 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?

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, I think there's just like, a bajillion ways to start a company. You know, 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, you know, 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, I mean, you can find every personality, every kind of makeup of a founder that you can imagine. It's awesome.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  I think that, you know, some investors have this thesis of like, They gotta have a chip on their shoulder. It's gotta be like some like mega trauma.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  I had a pretty amazing childhood. I'm very thankful to my parents. Like, you know, I do like to win. I'll say that. I hate losing, but otherwise, it's not like a

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  big chip on their shoulder that, you know, I gotta 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. And, you know, it's really fun.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  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, you know, happened wrong in their life or somebody wronged them. It seems like you just love what you do.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  I mean, I get to do the most awesome stuff ever, which is like build tools for designers, create people, and then go see what they make in the world. Like, I can't imagine something more interesting or exciting to work on.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  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, maybe 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?

• 31:11Speaker 00

  I don't know. I think I probably get like a sample that's maybe not representative because I have a lot of friends that also

• 31:18Speaker 01

  You attract people like you.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  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 like,

• 31:30Speaker 00

  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 like 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 and a week, or a month, or a year, 10 years, however long it takes them to work through it. And yeah, they're kicking ass. So like, I don't think it's this thing where, you know, you should stigmatize something like therapy or introspection because you're trying to feed the sort of VC capitalist machine.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Like, you can still feed the machine and you can like work on your shit.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  It is funny. I don't know if you experienced this way, but I experienced building a company. A 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.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Same here.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  It's something.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  You know, and Well, don't get me wrong, like, I hope I'm an asshole, but I definitely am intense in many meetings. And oftentimes I reflect afterwards and go, oh, man, I should have shut up there better. Right? But yeah, you show up a certain way. People will tell you if you got a good culture of communication and then you improve.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it also just forces so many like weird psychological situations and then you have to reflect on those. And you know, sometimes you do realize that like, ah, 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, I had a lot of those kinds 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 is in the counter to this thing. And I just like want there to be more of that in the world. So, okay.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  You called it Toad Chat. You made the group, just be clear.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I made the group.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  But you let me join as an honorary toad.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  You were an honorary toad. I was very like. You were like, I'm not a toad, but I'm here to be, I'm here to.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  I was honored to be there.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  And looking back, there were like a lot of people in that group. You know, there was you, Alex Wang, Ari and Conrad, like there was.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  And many others.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Many others. Yeah, it was awesome. And I look back at that and I don't know, we must have been mid or late twenties or you know, people in their early.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  They were early twenties.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Early twenties. And I often think about that as like.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  The importance of being connected to young people as a founder, as an investor, as just anybody in tech, because I do think there's so much just raw sort of effort, understanding, you're at the front of so much stuff there. And, you know, I think about this now as we're like, and getting into like mid 30s and, you know, like, how does that change over time? And I don't know, I'm just curious your own experience because you're somebody who yourself started as a young person, you started a company as a young person, you've been connected to young people throughout, you still are, of course, but like, how has that journey changed for you?

• 34:46Speaker 00

  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 like, you know, playing World of Warcraft, multiplayer games, using Google Docs at school. So it just gave us a mindset because of the tech stack we'd grown up in, the culture we'd grown up in, that seemed to us obvious, native. And then I would go talk to an investor and be like, oh yeah, like Google Docs. And they're like, wait, like, you use Google Docs? I'm like, it's 2012, it's 2013, like, who doesn't use Google Docs? They're like, oh, we're on Word and Outlook here. And sometimes collaboration, not sure I've ever experienced it. I'm like, what? Like, this is my life.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  You know, so the generational divides can sometimes be very real. And yeah, I always try to educate myself by like, understanding what it is that people are trying to buy. 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, like, 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, you know, I've got friends that are 80. The other day, I was talking to this incredibly precocious, amazing 16 year old who, like, got off the call and was like, oh my God, how do I hire you? Is that legal? Like, please come work at Figma.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Isn't it amazing when you talk to somebody who's like, those ages and you're just like, I can't believe it?

• 36:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  And it's just incredible.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  I had this experience.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  So amazing.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  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 he was 20. And I was just like, man, I was not, I was not like that when I was 20.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  I think that, you know, the generational divide and the notion of generations is real. Like millennials have one outlook and, you know, we're raised in a time where, who are the most famous millennials? Taylor Swift?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Mark Zuckerberg.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  I don't actually know who the most famous people in Gen Z are. I mean, you do.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Like who are the role models?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  I don't know who the role models are. I mean, I could probably.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  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, and see the world. And for folks that went through COVID and had to be locked up and antisocial and not see their humans for a few years.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Instead of going to school, I mean, what effect does that have on you? A lot of effect.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Also, imagine if you graduated, you know, and came into the workforce in 2020, like right as COVID is happening.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Right as, you know.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  There are plenty of people that did it at Figma.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, and but, but then you're like, you know, 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.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Huge.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  And I, I think the mindsets, the, also just approach. I mean, I think there's a lot of emergence right now of nihilism.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  You'll never own a house and never be able to support kids in America. Like, that'll change your outlook on things.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  And that's like the media narrative for a lot of people right now. I don't think it's quite right. I'm, I'm more optimistic than that.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  But like.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Well, 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. You know, 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. You know, there's probably good parts of betting.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think often the arc is like, you know, for example, in crypto, I mean, I got excited about NFTs really early. Before they called it NFTs, we called them crypto collectibles, usually.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  I remember on Clubhouse, you had that big, that, that sort of.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that was years later. I mean, I, but like, I went from this era where it's all idealism and all this energy around like this, just kind of like tension of the, like, idea of digital scarcity. How can something digital be scarce? That's so cool.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Early crypto was this very like romantic missionary thing.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  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 de-bundled. That was a totally different mindset. I was, I was there because I thought, yeah, especially digital scarcity and art was cool and like.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  But then then it evolved.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and as it picks up, a lot of crypto becomes degenerate gambling.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  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 just like, no, no, this is how you make like a lot of money really fast and get rich quick.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  And it's kind of interesting, actually. I feel like right now with vibe coding, there's been almost like that same arc of, you know, for me, I, I think of things like Figma Make and I'm like, okay, great. Like now everyone can go make prototypes and make production apps faster and ship them. It's so cool. Like you can just do all this stuff that used to take so long, so fast. And, 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.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  But I, I don't know. I mean, it takes a long time to go build a company. It's not like,

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  it's just an overnight thing. And I, I think a lot of the folks that are just sort of this like, I will spend an hour on my app and I'll ship it.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Like, they're probably, you know, gonna eventually phase out and

• 40:59Speaker 00

  I, I think that the folks that remain will be the ones that are using as a tool.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  I think it's interesting because I think this, this whole rise of apathy nihilism, whatever, is, 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,

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  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 gotta do something like a little divergent to get something to happen. So like, why not gamble? And I think a lot of the 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?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  And then there's a lot of people who are also like extremely long-term, have a thesis about the world.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Optimistic.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  And they're trying to infect the world for the better and they're mission-driven, not monetarily driven.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, hopefully more of those than ever. Like as tech grows, hopefully it's more than ever.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Those are the folks that inspire me.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  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, you know, sort of it falling apart. And I would imagine that would be the kind of thing that could like spiritually break a lot of companies culturally, a lot of founders who are like, oh man, I was like right there. And now I gotta do this whole like emotional and cultural reset. So like, how'd you, how did you navigate that? I guess, starting with your own psychology.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. That was probably the hardest amount of psychology. Because everything else is downstream of that. And if you're not, Like bright in your own head, then how can you lead? Yeah. Or make good decisions even. And for me, I think, um, you know, the start, it was kind of like, oh, 95% certainty you'll go through. No worries. And just kind of every time we checked in, the certainty went down. And eventually, you know, at the end, it's like, oh, it's maybe a 5% chance. You know, in that arc. Yeah. You know, at some point, very quickly, we was 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.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  And, you know, it's like, you can't be in this constant state of we're, you know, we're so back, it's so over. And just rapid cycling through that, like it's just, your brain falls apart and turns to mush. In my opinion, it's for me. And so the word of the year for me then was like 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 gonna 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 gonna put our best foot forward. It's the contract we signed with Adobe.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  And we're gonna 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 like this, you know, supervisory state collapse into, okay, we know we're gonna be independent. Like that was real relief. I bet. It was the end of the year. You know, we found out as I was about to fly out to visit my in-laws. And I think I was like hashing through all the details of how to communicate with the team on like a Saturday night and a Sunday, then Monday, we announced that I was not going through.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  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 like what meant for them. And said, hey, if you want, no pressure. If you want to join though, here's a Zoom call and we'll be talking about this then. And, you know, just the relief on the Zoom call was palpable over Zoom, which was pretty wild, just the chat was.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  It makes sense, though.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  It was like a big relief to know. And then, you know, 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 like something that some people frown on, but like 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 like 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.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  And yeah, you're like, there's no issue if you decide to take this. And if you don't, like FYI, we are a hard charging startup. It's going to be intense. You got a lot to do. And so we rolled this out, you know, kind of a nervous few weeks as people made their calls. And then a little over 4% of people took us up on it.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  What year was that again?

• 46:23Speaker 00

  That would have been, I think, 2023. I have to double check that. I get the dates all confused sometimes.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  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 any way? Did it help in any way that that was going on other places? Or did it just have?

• 46:46Speaker 00

  I don't think it factored in. Just to be clear, I think it was end of 2023 that we communicated for the first time, but like early 2024, that it was the Detach 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'm tired, need a break.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  And I want a lot of people making career changes. Like, it was really interesting, like, early-stage, or sorry, early-career sales reps moving over to like, politics, stuff like that. It's also like total domain hopping.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  I bet you for a lot of people, it's, you know, when you like flip a coin, and you don't know what you want, and you like flip a coin, you get tails, and then you're like sad, and you wish it was heads, or vice versa. There's probably also some people going through that experience with like, "Oh, wow, I was actually really hoping that we could put a bow on this, because I was ready for my next thing."

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, or people got attached to the idea. And yeah, there's definitely a few people who were, you know, amazing. And of course, you go talk to the folks that you're like, "Okay, I know you said this, but like, are you sure?"

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  And their headsspace was one of, "Okay, like, I get it, you're done." At least for now, some people boomerang back.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  It's a really great move, though, because basically you just like, took the situation like 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, like, you gotta sign up."

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just feel like it's best in general to deal with things and move on.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  And so, I try to be direct in my communication with people, make sure I'm sending clear invitations.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  You know, for friends, like, you know, like, give very clear feedback.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  You're always telling bad stuff.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, that's not true. It's not much, not much to critique. But the, um, but yeah, I mean, then from there, it was like, because we had put our foot in 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, we, right after the deal was dissolved, launched NGA Dev Mode. And that was really, really exciting to watch that take off.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  As well as just like countless other product updates. The velocity only increased, the momentum was real.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  I think lean into it and just acknowledging it and starting that conversation was part of it.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. On that note, I want to go to sort of like the final area, which is how you're thinking about just AI impacting sort of your roadmap and your product. And maybe you could just even talk about like the things that you've been working on over the last six or 12 months that, you know, AI related that I think are sort of most important for Figma.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  So much. I think that first of all, you know, 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 Dev Mode MCP and folks are able to use that with well-structured design files to go build a front-end experience so much faster. I mean, it's really wild to see how this works when you actually experience it live. You know, you get a lot of the front-end built for you by the AI that can interpret what we send over

• 50:14Speaker 00

  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, and we've teased it, but it's not out yet, but we're really excited about that. In general, I'd say like, 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 like typing text all the time. There will be some amount of dimensionality collapse into interfaces. And, you know, it's also the case, I think, for any AI company,

• 50:55Speaker 00

  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 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, 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.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  And the things we're seeing people do with it are just so cool and wild and expressive. And I guess like overall, it's also maybe reflect a lot because a lot of people call the output of these models slop. It's almost like a derogatory term. And, you know, without making any comment on slop versus not slop, I mean, some things I see as output, I'm like, wow, it's amazing. But I think the more important point is like, 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.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  As you add more and more AI into the product, what do you, what do you think is like the final bastion of like human designers? Will it be taste, coordination? What will the set of things be that you're most confident in, like will always be just like human tasks?

• 52:47Speaker 00

  I mean, 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 aesthetic standpoint gets better, like 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 like 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

• 53:32Speaker 00

  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 systematically 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 Brat Summer. You know Brat Summer, right?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  No. Oh, Brat Summer.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Yes, Brat Summer.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Brat Summer, of course.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  See, you got it.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Who's Brat Summer? I was like, who's Brat Summer?

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, we can talk about Brat Summer later.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, Brat Summer's cool.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Anyway, Brat Summer. And I use Brat Summer as an example a lot because, well, think about it, right? Like, the album cover, obviously not just the album cover, but as a design artifact, lime green square, I think it was what, Comma Sands or something that Brat was written in?

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  What ASI, you know, designer would create Brat Summer?

• 54:36Speaker 01

  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, you know, we're going to put the right sort of message behind it.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Well, I definitely wouldn't, yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  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 a UI?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  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?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  Like, I think that the role of a designer is only 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 like 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.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  And I'm pretty excited for it.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  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 like these albums that like take over a summer, or just like a song that captures everybody, like I just, there's something like more like soulful that has to be captured that I just don't think we're there yet.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Well, I also think it's possible that like on the music side, AI-generated music can inspire an artist to go and riff on that. And inspiration can come from anywhere.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Like, I think AI is a great inspiration tool. It's also a great tool to figure out what do you not want to do? Like, 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 like push beyond it and figure out the actual new way to say the thing that I'm trying to say.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  And I don't know, I think that just like we're, the more we capture the distribution that exists today, the more we can think outside of it. And that's human creativity.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Yep, I love it. Dylan, this is super fun.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Great to see you as always.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  You too.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.