Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast Dylan Field live at Figma's Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design About this episode Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, the collaborative design platform that has revolutionized how product teams work.
In my first-ever live podcast, recorded at Figma Config, Dylan and I dig into:
• How intuition and product taste drive Dylan’s decision-making
• The challenge of keeping things simple
• Dylan’s thoughts on the future of product management
• Lessons from Figma’s early days
• How Figma built their initial user base
• Dylan’s journey from intern to CEO of a 1,000+-person company
• The future of design tools and AI
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Brought to you by:
• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny
• Anvil—The fastest way to build software for documents: https://www.useanvil.com/lenny
• User Testing—Human understanding. Human experiences: https://www.usertesting.com/lenny
Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/dylan-field-live-at-config
Where to find Dylan Field:
• X: https://x.com/zoink
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:11) Welcoming Dylan Field
(02:36) Highlights and surprises from Config
(06:58) The philosophy of design
(08:01) Raccoon feet and muffin hands
(09:57) Building and refining intuition and product taste
(12:50) How to influence leadership
(16:14) The role of product managers
(21:12) The future of product management
(22:20) The importance of simplicity in design
(26:10) The long road to Figma’s launch
(27:44) Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
(29:07) Knowing when it’s time to ship
(30:39) Early user acquisition strategies
(35:50) Spotting trends and future innovations
(39:20) Reflections on leadership and growth
(43:16) Lightning round
Referenced:
• Mihika Kapoor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihikakapoor/
• Rick Rubin on the Creative Act—60 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE1teB5bN-w
• Figma pages: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038511293-Create-and-manage-pages
• Leading through uncertainty: A design-led company—Brian Chesky (Config 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkfijg7s76o
• An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-how-figma-builds
• Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/vision-conviction-hype-mihika-kapoor
• An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-figmas-unique-bottom
• Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-30-years-of-building
• Nadia Singer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadiasinger/
• Sho Kuwamoto on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shokuwamoto/
• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/
• Tim Van Damme on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-van-damme-maxvoltar/
• Coda: https://coda.io/
• Shishir Mehrotra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shishirmehrotra/
• Websim: https://websim.ai/
• eToys.com commercial (from Dylan’s childhood acting career): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Y92aCmmbU
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] .
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Lenny Rachitsky? Today, I'm excited to bring you a very special episode, which was recorded live at Figma Config with Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field in front of a live audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the first ever live recording of this podcast, and it was so much fun. If you watch this on YouTube, you can see the epic stage that they built specifically for us to recreate my podcast studio. I could not be more thankful to the Config team for making this happen. In my conversation with Dylan, we dig into how he builds and refines his product taste and intuition, how intuition is a hypothesis generator, the future of product management, how Dylan attempts to operationalize keeping Figma simple and to continue simplifying the experience, a bunch of stories from the early days of Figma that I've never heard
0:47 Lenny Rachitsky? before. Also, he shares his favorite AI tool called WebSim, which is wild. And if you wait till the very end, you can see a very young child actor, Dylan Field, in a clip that I found online that was hilarious. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Dylan Field. Dylan, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, honey. Hi, all.
1:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Is this your first live podcast? This is my first ever live podcast. Also, a big thank you to the Config team who set up this crazy studio. I had no idea this was going to happen. I feel like I'm in my studio here with a thousand people watching us. It's very impressive. I very much dig the background and also the mics that may or may not be wired. That's right. Don't say that. Don't tell people. Sorry. There's no wires coming out of them. There's no one behind the curtain either. Okay, so Dylan, I want to start by just checking in on how you're doing. So Config is about to wrap up. We've been at it for two days now. I know how much lift goes into doing these sorts of things. I imagine you've been thinking about this for a long time now. I'm just curious how you're doing, any surprises, any highlights, any lowlights?
2:06 Lenny Rachitsky? The highlight is the community and just the incredible, incredible people here at Config. Yeah.
2:14 Speaker 01 Y'all are awesome. I don't know why I keep talking into the mic like this. It's instinctual. But seriously, it's just the most amazing community to be part of and I feel so lucky. And then in terms of how I'm doing this exact moment, like exhausted but riding on caffeine and whatever this like really cool probiotic drink is.
2:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Any surprises from the past couple of days? Anything that's like, oh wow, that went a lot better than I thought, maybe less well?
2:42 Speaker 01 Um, yeah, I mean, like, you know, demo, definitely things I would have improved. But also like the Emil and Mojica were phenomenal. And it was, it was just like so awesome to see them do their demos and present materials. And then, um, yeah, I was just really pleased with the conversation. I think that's getting started at config around AI. And I think that, you know, I was looking online on social media. And I think people are already kind of like zeroing in the right conversation, which is, okay, in a world of, you know, more software being created by AI, what does that mean?
3:22 Speaker 01 And, you know, the impact on craft and the impact on quality and the need to have more unique design and how design is a differentiator. And I think some people are saying I agree with that. Some people are saying they disagree with that. And that's exactly the bounds of what the conversation I kind of imagined would emerge from yesterday. You know, it was funny, the make design feature, you know, we, I think I said on the keynote, I was like, this is going to give you the most obvious thing in the most obvious form possible. And then people online are like, it's just going to give you some obvious thing. I agree.
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6:48 Speaker 02 That's useanvil.com/lenny to learn more or start a free trial. That's use-a-n-v-i-l dot com slash lenny.
6:57 Lenny Rachitsky? Let's keep talking about design. You once said that the definition of design is art applied to problem solving. Can you just add a bit more to that? What do you mean by that? Because that's an amazing line.
7:09 Speaker 01 Well, I don't think it's my original line. I think someone else said it. But there's a lot of definitions of design out there, too. I mean, there's also "design as dialogue" or "design as problem solving." You can just go straight there. I could go with like 10 more. But yeah, I like art applied to problem solving because I think that design is often... There is some component of creativity to it, and a unique expression that you're trying to provide and create and put out into the world. But you are also trying to do it and match it to a user need, a problem that needs to be solved. And I think that it's not pure art. And if you lose the art and you're just solving the problem,
7:53 Speaker 01 like it's totally utilitarian and it lacks soul. And so the combination of those two things is, to me, really beautiful.
8:02 Lenny Rachitsky? I'm going to pivot to a very hard-hitting question. I hope your PR people don't kill me for asking this. Many people ask me to ask you this question.
8:09 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Very important. Please explain a Figma tradition called raccoon feet and muffin hands.
8:16 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:20 Speaker 01 I should probably just leave this interview now. Okay, so this is a conversation, I'm not sure exactly where it started, but it started early Figma. And basically, we had these lunch tables at Figma where we would just kind of all gather and have very long, interesting meandering conversations before we got back to work. And one of the questions that was a would you rather was, would you rather have raccoons for feet or muffins for hands? And I think this is a deeply philosophical question. I've pondered it since I've heard it. I still don't have one answer. If you've got an answer, I'm curious what it is.
9:01 Lenny Rachitsky? I've got follow-up questions. Are the raccoon, can you control where the raccoon take you? Or are they just deciding on their own what's happening?
9:09 Speaker 01 I think that raccoons probably wouldn't even agree with each other where to go.
9:13 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, that's complicated.
9:16 Speaker 01 I mean, if you had raccoons for feet right now, do you think that it would interfere with this podcast?
9:21 Lenny Rachitsky? But muffin hands would also interfere with my newsletter, and I feel like I'd be out of work. I don't know if you can type. I need a special keyboard. Okay, this is very difficult.
9:29 Speaker 01 You haven't even thought about the upsides of this yet.
9:32 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, what are the upsides?
9:34 Speaker 01 We could get there.
9:35 Lenny Rachitsky? Maybe you could eat some of the muffins.
9:36 Speaker 01 There's a case for optimism.
9:37 Lenny Rachitsky? Cupcakes.
9:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, if you have muffins for hands, you know, maybe if you're hungry.
9:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Do they regenerate after you eat them?
9:43 Speaker 01 That's a good question.
9:44 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay. There's no answers here, just questions.
9:47 Speaker 01 Do your nails grow?
9:49 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah? Oh, okay, interesting.
9:53 Lenny Rachitsky? It's deeper than you might think. Okay. Okay, I'm gonna play a short clip with Rick Rubin, and then I have a question about it, okay? So we'll see if that plays.
10:06 Speaker 03 But exactly what he does and how is difficult to describe.
10:11 Speaker 04 Do you play instruments? Barely. Do you know how to work a soundboard? No. I have no technical ability, and I know nothing about music.
10:21 Speaker 04 You must know something. Well, I know what I like and what I don't like. And I'm decisive about what I like and what I don't like. So what are you being paid for? The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.
10:44 Speaker 01 Okay, so I'm not gonna say this is you.
10:48 Speaker 01 Need to grow the beard.
10:50 Lenny Rachitsky? But I think this is a little bit you because what I've heard from a number of your colleagues is that one of your superpowers is intuition and product taste. And someone said that you have the sixth sense for what's going to work when you're designing Figma and you're making decisions in the product. So I'm curious how you've built and refined your intuition and product taste when it comes to Figma and then even broadly.
11:11 Speaker 01 That's a lot kinder than I thought you were going to be. I thought you were going to be like, "You don't know how to code or you don't know how to design."
11:18 Lenny Rachitsky? No.
11:19 Speaker 01 But, um, no, I, I mean, I think, um, here's my framework for it. I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator and you're constantly generating these hypotheses and others are generating hypotheses as well. And you then take these hypotheses and you put them forward and you debate them and you try to find data to support them or negate them. And then you wind it down into like, what is our working hypothesis? And from that, you move forward.
11:47 Lenny Rachitsky? I heard that you read every tweet that mentions Figma and share them with folks and there's a Slack channel where you paste them. I imagine that is a part of this, where you're just constantly watching what people are saying about Figma, what people are complaining about.
11:59 Speaker 01 I mean, I, I definitely look everywhere. I'm trying to constantly ingest information about Figma and it's not just like twitter/ x, whatever that's called now. But, you know, anywhere on the internet, support channels, et cetera. And yeah, I'm always trying to understand. I also ask a lot of questions and I try to get to root problems and understand where people are coming from and what are they actually trying to solve? Sometimes people are saying, "Hey, I need X," but they really want Y or Z. And, you know, trying to do that myself and kind of engage and dive deeper there, but
12:44 Speaker 01 also to encourage our team to do that, I think leads to, you know, really good outcomes in terms of what we ship.
12:50 Lenny Rachitsky? Is there something you've changed your mind about, kind of building on that? Either based on customer feedback or some employee just like making a case and like, "Okay, you're right." Is there something that comes to mind of something you've changed your mind about recently? Somebody said flies.
13:08 Speaker 01 Someone started out with flies. I have not. It's Figma slides. Um.
13:14 Speaker 01 Well, it's not recent, but like, one good example of me changing my mind is that you all have pages in Figma. You're welcome. But like, I think I have deep skepticism about pages still.
13:30 Speaker 01 Like, I'm not sure they're like, if you could freeze time, and I could just go in with my team, work on Figma for a very long time, I'm not sure we'd come to the same implementation of pages that we are at today.
13:46 Speaker 01 I just don't think it's like the most elegant solution in the context of like the entire system of product design that you could create.
13:53 Speaker 01 The world told me and our team that that did not matter and they needed pages. And don't worry, we're not unshipping pages.
14:03 Speaker 01 But yeah, I'm still very skeptical of them. And I think that, in general, probably my team would tell you that I don't always change my mind, but I also
14:19 Speaker 01 I like build trust with people in deep ways. And I think across our organization, if things are not going to be fatal, then if I hear from someone, "Hey, I really think we should do X", then I'll say, "Okay, just go with it. And here's my feedback, here's what I'm skeptical of, let's see what happens." And then, you know, sometimes they come back to me and they're like, "See, I was right", but usually they're pretty polite about it.
14:48 Lenny Rachitsky? Just to build on that, something a lot of people try to work on is being good at influencing leadership, execs, CEOs. What do you find helps you, works to change your mind? What do people come to you with that helps you like, "Okay, you're actually right"?
15:05 Speaker 01 I think the more concrete an artifact is, or the more you can debate something, the better.
15:11 Speaker 01 I like ask for examples a lot. I try to ask follow-up questions about things and make sure I fully understand it. And I think where I get stuck sometimes is if I like ask follow-up questions and we don't have answers yet, and then... My response might be, let's go find the answers to these questions and then let's go back to this conversation if I think it's something that's really important. And I think for some people, they might go, okay, this is actually really obvious. Like, I can't believe you're so dense and you don't get it yet. And sometimes they're right and they come back and they're like, okay, here's the data. Now can we move on? And we do, we move on and they're right.
15:48 Speaker 01 And, yeah, I just think that it's important, though, to just really understand something from first principles for a lot of decisions. And maybe it's just a perfectionist quality, but repeated over time, I think it leads to good outcomes, as long as you make sure it's not bottlenecking the organization.
16:14 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, so kind of following up on that, let's talk about product management.
16:18 Speaker 01 Okay.
16:19 Lenny Rachitsky? So last year, you had Brian Chesky here, I think maybe on this stage, maybe a bigger stage. And he kind of said that they got rid of product management at Airbnb and everyone cheered and all the PMs were very sad. And he didn't actually mean they got rid of product management, they changed the function and evolved it. I'm curious just to get your take. Yeah, it's funny.
16:38 Speaker 01 This year, we have you here, Lenny, so you know, that's your answer, no?
16:43 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I had him on the podcast.
16:44 Speaker 01 Surprise after all, surprise.
16:45 Lenny Rachitsky? We're still here, we're still here. I want to get your take on product management. You all have amazing product managers at Figma, I've had three of them on the podcast already. I'm curious just what value you find the best product managers bring to Figma.
17:00 Speaker 01 It was really funny, last year after that interview, so Yuki, our Chief Product Officer, had invited me to a dinner for our PM team. And, you know, it took a while to get out of config at the end of the day. And I eventually made it to dinner, but I was like 40 minutes late. And I walk in and Mahika, who was on stage yesterday presenting slides, Figma slides, slide, slides. She was, she was like standing up and doing a mock Brian Chesky impersonation.
17:41 Speaker 01 And she's like standing up in front of the entire product team and she goes, "And then Brian Chesky's like, 'There don't need to be any PMs.'" And Dylan's like, "Ooh."
17:52 Speaker 01 And I'm like, hi, Mika. And, you know, I'd never seen her so red. And then I gave like a, you know, like quick, hey, PM team, I believe in you. Thank you for your hard work. But seriously, I think that if you kind of zoom out, it's always tricky whenever you're asked to formally define what is the separation between a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. It's always hard to actually create those clear lines. And I think in many organizations, they're blurry. But at the end of the day, you know, a PM and designer, they need to have some technical
18:33 Speaker 01 expertise, or at least understand how the systems work, to probably create the best things they can possibly make. You know, a designer engineer, they should probably have some sense of the business objectives. They should have some sense of what users want. An engineer and a product manager, they should have, you know, taste and craft and some sense of the option space and some ability to care about, or desire to care about the visual implementation. So I think, and you can include research in there too, if you want to make it four legs of the stool rather than the trio. And you can talk about, you know, all three probably should have exposure to users and
19:17 Speaker 01 be talking in dialogue with users. So I think that if you think about sort of that group holistically, each is important. If you think about a team, there's all these qualities that you have to have to make a great product. And that said, I think for product managers and the product function, what I think it sometimes when you see people that fall down on that function is because they treat it too much like process, which is very important too, don't get me wrong. Good process can help support good outcomes.
19:56 Speaker 01 But I think that you can't lose sight of the problems that you're solving. You have to go talk to users and you have to actually have a strategy. And if you're really good, you should have a point of view. And some point of views are going to lead to good outcomes and some point of views aren't. And there's some tense sense of taste. And you also have to bring everyone together and make sure that they get to the objective that it's celebrated and that at the end of the project, or when you complete a milestone, everyone's stoked. Otherwise, it's not going to be a team that gels. You're not going to get to the next outcome. Even if, you know, you get to an outcome and, you know, it's a milestone, but if everyone's
20:40 Speaker 01 unhappy, like you kind of failed. And so somehow, good product people are able to do all this and they're able to create great frameworks that bring everyone along with them. And so everyone's able to have a shared headspace around what it is they're trying to get to.
20:54 Lenny Rachitsky? Someone said that if a PM, if PM's disappeared, or if a PM goes on vacation, everything's okay for like a week or two or three and then things start to crumble a little bit because they're, they kind of glue everything together. Do you, I don't know, do you find that sort of thing? Let me actually ask a different question along those lines. Are you bearish or bullish on the future of product management? Do you think PMs will continue the way they are? Do you think PMs will dwindle? Any sense of the future of product management?
21:23 Speaker 01 I think probably everyone's learning to do a bit more of everyone else's job in this current moment. That said, I definitely think there's still immense value in product, immense value in design, immense value in engineering. And so I think those roles will continue to exist.
21:43 Lenny Rachitsky? So maybe just, I just want to come back to the question of just the, what the best PMs that you work with, do you find, what value do they most bring? I guess, is there anything that's like, here's what would be gone if we didn't have these PMs?
21:57 Speaker 01 The best PMs, I think, again, create those frameworks that bring everyone else along and those frameworks also have a point of view and a strategy associated with them. So you're able to kind of like, take the strategy, take the point of view, wrap it all up in a framework and then make it so that everyone knows what the destination is and how to, how to get there.
22:18 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Okay, so kind of along these lines, something I've heard you're really big on is simplification. Somebody told me that when you're in a designer view and things just feel too complex to you, quote, "You furrow your brow and insist there must be something simpler."
22:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Why is simplification so top of mind for you? Why is it so important for you? And just why is it so hard to do?
22:41 Speaker 01 Oh, gosh.
22:43 Speaker 01 Well, I think probably anyone here who's worked on product knows how hard it is. It's, I think, the more that you add, the harder it is to create something that's coherent. You know, one essay that Evan, my co-founder, introduced me to early on in famous history, I think from Stevie's drunken blog grants or something like that, it contains the term irreducible complexity. And it's based on this idea that like 1 plus 1 does not equal 3. It sometimes equals like 1 and 1/2. And the more that you add and the more that you continue to put in something, the more complex it gets and the worse it gets. And I think this is definitely true for tools.
23:28 Speaker 01 So in the context of Figma, we can make it more powerful, but to do that in a way that's not making it more complex at the same time is extremely hard. And we have to always be paying attention to how complex or how simple things are.
23:45 Speaker 01 Because if we don't, it just kind of becomes a monstrosity really fast. And there's parts of our product that, like, I don't want to dive into that part of the conversation, the self-critique, but definitely like as I'm in conversation with a bunch of our product leaders at Figma, there's parts where it's like, okay, this thing is too complex as a system. And we made like all the right local decisions. And yet, together, they're too complex and they're not working anymore. And let's go revisit the system now.
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24:59 Lenny Rachitsky? I know you just redesigned Figma. I imagine part of that came from things are just getting too complicated, not as simple as we want. Is there anything that's been like the bugging you in the old Figma that like, oh, this is way too complicated. I really want to simplify this thing.
25:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
25:10 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay. What's that?
25:12 Speaker 01 We'll move on, but I... Many things.
25:18 Lenny Rachitsky? Sounds good.
25:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay. And in terms of how to keep things simple, so I had Dharmesh Shah on the podcast. He's the co-founder of HubSpot.
25:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:27 Lenny Rachitsky? And the way he described it is that you're always fighting the second law of thermodynamics, of entropy, just the product getting more complicated. And he kind of sees himself as part of the solution. If you're top down, you have to like be on top of that. Is that the way you see it? Like that's kind of your role to keep things simple? Do you think people further down the ladder can do that? Or I don't know.
25:46 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah. Everyone's responsible for simplicity. And I think another quote that is not mine, but is a really good one is, you know, keep the simple things simple, make the complex things possible. I think that's a really important principle to hold as your designing tools.
26:02 Speaker 01 And...
26:04 Speaker 01 I'd say that it's really easy to make the simple things complex, unfortunately.
26:10 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, I want to pivot to talking about early days Figma.
26:13 Speaker 01 Sure.
26:14 Lenny Rachitsky? So I don't know how many people know this, but it took three and a half years to launch Figma from when you were beginning to work on it.
26:19 Speaker 01 Way too long. Don't do that.
26:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, this is my question. So it took three and a half years to launch and then five years to get your first customer. Dylan, what the hell were you doing all that time?
26:29 Speaker 01 I don't think it took five years for a first, well, okay, first paid customer.
26:33 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, okay, fine.
26:35 Speaker 01 Slightly less, but approximately five years, it gets to round up.
26:42 Speaker 01 I mean, I think that, you know, if I had been probably better at hiring and recruiting, like I see Nadia in the audience, making eye contact with her the entire time for some reason. She's our Chief People Officer. If she had been at Figma from day one, we would have hired probably faster and we would have gotten to market faster. But I think that, yeah, it was a hard product to build and to get everything to come together with. I also see Shou. And I think for, Shou has joined us as a Director of Engineering. He's a VP of
27:20 Speaker 01 Product now. Again, people can wear many hats. And he was someone that joined Figma and said, "Hey, y'all need to ship this thing. You're really close." And he really helped catalyze us to ship in that moment. And I think he, week one, he gave a presentation and was like, "Here's what we gotta do. Here's the gap. Everyone agrees on it. Let's go."
27:45 Lenny Rachitsky? And so you already said that you wish you shipped earlier. Is there any advice there for just people building something today of just get it out as fast as you possibly can? Like, everything they tell you about, you know, making sure that you get a product out really quickly?
27:58 Speaker 01 Is totally true. The faster you get out, the more feedback you get. That is a positive thing. And now I index on that when we try to build. And FigJam is a great example of that. We shipped it incredibly fast. And it helped us get to market and get feedback faster. Figma slides, great example of that too. Dev mode, for what it's worth, it took us longer. We just had to keep iterating and building it and building it again. You know, certain directions we tried didn't work out. And we really had to get to a place where we were able to really believe that we were adding value and really understood the developer as a user.
28:41 Speaker 01 And it just didn't happen for a long time. So it's interesting because I think people look at Dev Mode and sometimes they go, oh, this is quite simple. To the point about simplicity.
28:52 Speaker 01 You know, Figma, like, is this simpler than FigJam? And the reality was it took like at least three times as long.
29:04 Lenny Rachitsky? So your advice is ship quickly. There's also this kind of push that-
29:09 Speaker 01 That hold a bar, for sure.
29:10 Lenny Rachitsky? That's kind of the question I have is there's also a lot of talk of just like the bar has risen. You need, especially B2B software, craft is really important. Like Linier talks a lot about this, just like the bar is very high for people to switch from something out there. Is there anything, I don't know, I don't think you'll have like, here's the answer when you're ready to ship. But just any advice of just like, here's good enough versus like, no, you should probably wait.
29:32 Speaker 01 Well, you know, another thing that Evan taught me was that for a new launch, you got quality, features, deadline, choose two. And I think that
29:43 Speaker 01 the beautiful thing about software is you can keep iterating on it. So it's not like a physical product where you have to always have quality in there. Otherwise, it's never going to have quality. You can ship it with features and deadline and then improve it iteratively over time. I'm not saying you should always do that. Sometimes you need to at least have a minimum bar of quality for the things you have. And you're going to ship less features, maybe. So you choose quality and deadline. And sometimes you say, actually, here's the minimum feature set. And we're going to have this quality bar and you're willing to push it out. But I think you have to know when you're introducing a new thing, what it's going to take. And then to make that minimally awesome product, but also when you're-
30:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that when you're iteratively improving it, you shouldn't just be focused on the features, you had to focus on the quality, too.
30:33 Lenny Rachitsky? I like this term you use, minimally awesome product. Love it.
30:39 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, so the way you got your early users for Figma is quite fascinating. I don't know how many people know this story, but you basically wrote a script to scrape Twitter and create a graph of the most influential designers on Twitter. And then you made it your mission to convince them to use Figma and make them evangelists. Is there anything more to the story there? And then I have a question about kind of along those lines.
30:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, you can't do this anymore, first of all, because the Twitter API doesn't exist anymore. Rest in peace Twitter API. But, I mean, look, I was in internet LinkedIn. And when I was there, I saw some really cool work people had done with Gaffy, which was a sort of network visualization tool. And based on that, I thought it'd be interesting to try to, like you said, look at who the design network was, who the central nodes were, which you can just run page rank on and see. And you could do that for other communities, too, which I have done in the past just because I'm curious about social network dynamics and social network analysis.
31:42 Speaker 01 And you could just do those things back in 2012, 2013, when Figma started.
31:50 Speaker 01 So yeah, so I kind of constructed this list of like, here are the most central designers in the graph. But also then I looked at their work. And the ones that I was really inspired by, and like as a total fanboy and someone who wanted to learn as much as they could about design,
32:07 Speaker 01 was inspired by these folks. The ones I was inspired by, I reached out to and said, hey, can I buy you a coffee? And most of them were really kind. The design community is amazing. And they said yes. And then from there, I was able to learn from them, show them Figma, get their feedback. And I think it started, honestly, more as like me fanboying, me gaining feedback. I mean, one example is Tim Van Damme.
32:32 Speaker 01 You know, I saw him on Dribbble, you know, Maxwell Tar. I'm like, oh, my God, this guy is just genius. These icons are incredible. Like, I think the first time I met Tim was at Dropbox. And I had this total fanboy moment. I'm like, I've been tracing your icons. It's like, hi. And I had been working on vector networks with a team. And my test cases were like a lot of his icons. And because they were just like beautiful and I liked looking at them and studying them. And you know, to now have Tim on the team and have him like doing the icons for UI 3 is
33:14 Speaker 01 like such an honor and like privilege to work with someone of that craft. But yeah, so reaching out to your hero sometimes works.
33:24 Lenny Rachitsky? It's interesting because when people hear that story, when I've heard that story many times, it was always like, here's a growth hack. Find the most influential people in your field, go try to convince them to use your product. And the way you're describing it is you were using it more as feedback. I just want to show you the product, get your feedback, make this better. And then ended up working and they're like, oh, I love Figma, I'm going to use it.
33:42 Speaker 01 Well, I think it especially works for designers that way because designers are really good at giving feedback. Like it turns out that not everyone is good at giving feedback. But yeah, designers are awesome at that. So we're really lucky. And I mean, literally, you know, early on in Figma's existence, folks, I think Payam Rajabi is here somewhere. I'm not sure if he's in this room, but I was hoping to see him before the end of config. You know, Payam wrote like a very long doc for us about all the things that he wanted to see in Figma after we did like a user research study with him with a bottle of wine because our text editing didn't work very well then. So I ran through the user study and knew we'd need a bottle of wine to finish and it took like hours because the type of sentence in Figma was so slow.
34:25 Lenny Rachitsky? That reminds me of a story I've heard where one of your first customers was Coda, sponsor, I think of config, used to be called Crypton. And there's a story where you installed Figma, you helped them get set up, you drove home and then they called you like, hey, Figma's not working anymore. And you drove back like yourself to help fix them and it ended up their wifi was down, right? Or there's a wifi issue. Is that the story?
34:52 Speaker 01 I don't remember what the solution was, but yeah, it was like, we were like halfway home and somehow I saw, I'm sure I was not looking at my email while driving. Definitely is not something anyone here should do. But yeah, somehow found out that they were, had an issue and we turned the car around. Yeah, and they were, Shashir is amazing, by the way, and like, has been a mentor for a long time to me and many people on our team. And he, I think, at the time, did not know he was the first customer. And later on, he came over to Figma's office, and I introduced him without really thinking about that. And I was like, yeah, this is Shashir. He's the first, you know,
35:37 Speaker 01 his team was really the first user of Figma as a team. And he goes, wait a second, I am?
35:46 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. Okay, I want to talk about something totally different. Something I've noticed you are good at is you spot trends ahead of other people. So obviously, WebGL, you were on early, and that's what allowed Figma to exist, to link it in the browser. I saw you tweeting about CryptoPunks way before they were worth millions of dollars. You're just like, I like CryptoPunks. Look, I got a few. They're really cool. They're super cool. Little pipe. I'm curious if there's anything these days that you're really excited about that might become bigger in the future?
36:15 Speaker 01 Well, we talked about WebSim. I mean, we were just talking about them backstage, and I think before this conversation, too.
36:22 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
36:23 Speaker 01 And that's an example of something where it's so interesting, because it's like, there's a generative UI component, and yet, it's not what we're going for for Figma. It's totally different. So we actually invested in WebSim with Figma Ventures.
36:39 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. Maybe explain what WebSim is for folks that have...
36:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. WebSim is like a hallucinated internet, basically. If you go to websim.ai, you can use different models, like Claude or GPT-4O. And you can do that either through their defaults, or you can use OpenRouter to get like a bigger context window. And the more that you use it, the more you construct this context window of this almost universe that you're building up in WebSim. And as you do it, it's almost like you're world building. And I just have like, gone deep and geeked out on this when I've had time, and they've evolved the platform a lot. So like, we were back there, and they were showing me some new
37:23 Speaker 01 functionality that's really cool, too. But yeah, it's, I think, so interesting to see it as like this like, almost lean forward entertainment tool, using the internet.
37:36 Lenny Rachitsky? So I thought you would answer this. And so we're gonna have a picture come up here that I tried WebSim and played around with it. And hopefully a photo comes up somewhere. Okay, so this is, so all I typed here was gmail.com slash Dylan Field. So this is in an invented Gmail, just came up with this using AI, of what your inbox should look like. And it looks pretty accurate. I don't know, there's like Adobe stuff.
37:59 Speaker 01 As do J9FTC.
38:00 Lenny Rachitsky? Financial. This is not actual information. Nobody buy stock based on this.
38:08 Lenny Rachitsky? So.
38:09 Speaker 01 No comment on 75% year over year.
38:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, so like the way it works.
38:14 Speaker 01 Funny, I had never tried Gmail before.
38:16 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
38:16 Speaker 01 Did you try you? What was your inbox like?
38:17 Lenny Rachitsky? I didn't do me. I don't think it would have anything if you like.
38:20 Speaker 01 I bet it does.
38:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Where are you? So yeah, the way it works is just you type a URL or a prompt in the URL field and it'll just invent what that website looks like. It's hilarious.
38:29 Speaker 01 It's awesome.
38:30 Lenny Rachitsky? It's awesome. So I think they're gonna get a lot of traffic right.
38:32 Speaker 01 One time we, someone posted in our random channel on Slack, they said, "I had a dream last night." It's always a good start for the random channel. "I had a dream last night that I was working on Figma Jam, but it wasn't Figma Jam, it was Frog Jam."
38:52 Speaker 01 And so I, in WebSim was like, figma.com/frogjam.
39:01 Speaker 01 And it came up with a whole marketing website, complete with like toad puns
39:06 Speaker 01 for Frog Jam. The sticky notes were lily pads. And you were supposed to, like it had this whole metaphor of hopping from lily pad to lily pad to generate new ideas.
39:16 Lenny Rachitsky? It's awesome. This is genius. Okay, so
39:22 Lenny Rachitsky? interestingly, before Figma, your only other job was an intern at three different companies. And now you're leading this juggernaut of a business, 1,000 plus people. I imagine there's a lot you've had to learn over this time. So I'm not going to ask you what you've learned because I think it's probably a lot. I'm curious, just what has most helped you scale and learn? Is it exec coaches? Is it CEO friends? Is it hiring execs? Like, what's most helped you scale with the business and become the leader you are today?
39:51 Speaker 01 I think all the above. And also just having like a mindset of you have to constantly adapt and grow and change and adapt. But yeah, I would say that mentors can come from anywhere. It can come from the community, all of you. Mentorship can come from the people you hire. It can come from, you know, folks that you actively seek out as investors or explicit mentorship and mentors. It can come from people that call themselves coaches. Like, and you know, what's interesting too is it can come from people you mentor as well. Like, there have been plenty of people where they ask me a question at some point and I give them an answer and they think it's insightful for whatever reason.
40:34 Speaker 01 And then years later, where we're talking again and I ask them a question, they're like, "Well, years ago, you told me." And they like repeat back, "But I told them, like, that's a really good point." Or they've grown and they've changed and they've learned and they tell me something completely different. They give me a new framework. And so I think that when you're, like, a lot of times when I talk with new founders, they teach me things that are totally things that I've just never, never thought about. Or interns at Figma have been mentors to me in many ways. So you really have to have a very mindset and just always be ready to absorb new information, I think.
41:09 Lenny Rachitsky? When you were just tinkering around with Figma 12 years ago, I think at this point, did you ever imagine you'd be running a thousand-person company and audience just spellbound by what you're building? There's like people lining up to take photos with your logo in the lobby. Like, that doesn't happen. That's very rare. Just to give you a chance to reflect on just how it feels to have built that over time. How does, how does that feel? I'm sitting here right now.
41:32 Speaker 01 I feel very, very lucky, but also very humbled by just the community that is around Figma. I mean, I mentioned that, you know, but just like the people that are in the Figma community are the people that are shaping the world's technology and the chance to serve them and to make software for them and hopefully improve their life in some little way is such a privilege, it's a responsibility and one I don't take lightly, but also I try not to like carry that as a weight, but rather as like pump me up and get me excited to go build for them. So.
42:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, when we were talking about this idea earlier, the like the first thing you said is it's a responsibility, which I didn't expect. Is there anything more there? Just like, wow, I really have to help.
42:19 Speaker 01 Well, again, it's, you know, going back to the simplification point, you know, it's very important that we continue to make Figma more and more simple. We make Figma as powerful as we can for the people that are in our community, that we figure out what people's needs truly are and that we advance the state of the craft and make it so we do that in a responsible way and that we champion design and champion quality. So we're trying to do all those things. We sometimes mess up, but people have been very patient with us and we're very thankful for that and thankful for the support of just everyone
43:00 Speaker 01 here and in our community that are giving us a chance to make this impact.
43:05 Lenny Rachitsky? Is there anything else you want to? Oh yeah, there's some applause. Love that. Applause break. Is there anything else you want to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very, very lightning round, very quick lightning round?
43:22 Speaker 01 Well, no, I just, I think one thing I'll share is
43:29 Speaker 01 I think we're so early on this journey of computing in general. And in our lifetimes, we're going to have the chance to just build such incredible technology and incredible products. And I'm really excited to see what everyone in this room builds, but also this everyone in the internet that's listening maybe also builds and send me cool stuff. So if you build something cool, like message me somewhere and share it with me.
43:56 Lenny Rachitsky? What's the best way to message you?
43:58 Speaker 01 Email's good. You can probably figure out my email if you work at it for like five seconds or use Whipsum. And Twitter slash X is good. Those are two places at least you can find me.
44:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Dylan, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. We only have a couple of minutes left. It's a very short one. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love other than Whipsum?
44:28 Speaker 01 Well, I'll say that it's not like a favorite product, but I will say that if you get like, not to,
44:41 Speaker 01 I'm trying to hesitate if I should say this or not. We'll cut it out in post, don't worry about it.
44:51 Speaker 01 It's so fast, I'll say this. It's so fascinating to look at all the different LMs out there right now and what each one is uniquely good at. And it's really fun if you can hack them the right way and get them in the right mood, what they'll do. That's what I'll say.
45:07 Lenny Rachitsky? Whoa, what does that mean?
45:11 Speaker 01 Okay, it's my diplomatic answer.
45:13 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, interesting, okay. Do you have a favorite life motto that you come back to, repeat to yourself, share with friends or family that you find really useful?
45:22 Speaker 01 I don't know if I've got a like life motto, but one piece of advice I've always appreciated is when people give you advice, they're not giving you advice. They're giving themselves advice in your shoes. And I think that's like an interesting one. So if I gave you advice here, give myself advice in your shoes.
45:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Final question. Not many people know this, but you were an actor, a child actor when you were five years old. Do you think you made the right career move? Do you feel like you sometimes regret acting?
45:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, definitely. That's my mom. My mom's in the audience and she says yes. No, I mean, like, we've been talking about product. If you're an actor, you're a product in some way. And that's not to disparage actors. Actors are awesome. Acting is awesome. I loved it. But my differentiators when I was five, five and a half, I think, was that I could read and I could sit still. And I was decently cute. And I had puberty and those things were no longer differentiators. And then it was like, let's do some computer science.
46:38 Lenny Rachitsky? So at the close, we're going to play a... Oh, yeah, applause. We're going to play a clip, something I found on YouTube to close, and enjoy. 30-second clip.
47:09 Speaker 05 Where will you find a world of ideas for your child? Only at eToys. From Barbie to Brio to Swimways. eToys, where great ideas come to you.
47:24 Lenny Rachitsky? That was a good find.
47:25 Speaker 01 Thank you.
47:27 Lenny Rachitsky? Dylan, thank you so much for doing this.
47:28 Speaker 01 Thank you. Can I make one comment about that commercial?
47:31 Lenny Rachitsky? OK, one comment.
47:31 Speaker 01 OK, one comment before we end. That commercial made that company go bankrupt. Thank you all for joining. And thank you for having me on EToys.
47:40 Lenny Rachitsky? Thanks, Dylan. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Previous The social radar: Y Combinator’s secret weapon | Jessica Livingston (co-founder of YC, author) Next Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Partner at Floodgate) Page updated October 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
