Pod Insights No Priors Designing the Future: Dylan Field on AI, Collaboration, and Independence About this episode Figma has had a banner year and the formidable team isn’t slowing down—even after regulatory issues blocked the merger with Adobe. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Dylan Field the CEO and founder of Figma, the design collaboration tool that is closing the gap between imagination and reality. They discuss what’s next for an independent Figma, how AI can augment design and speed up the iteration loop, and how Figma is expanding beyond design with products that help the entire product team’s workflow.
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Figma and Adobe are abandoning our proposed merger
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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @zoink
Show Notes:
(0:00) Introduction
(2:01) No more Adobe acquisition
(4:20) What’s next for Figma
(7:16) FigJam, digital collaboration, and expanding beyond design
(10:50) Figma DevMode
(13:06) Incorporating AI at Figma
(15:03) How AI will change design
(19:19) Creativity augmentation and the iterative loop
(22:44) Automating repetitive design tasks
(25:35) The future of AI UI
(29:44) Investing philosophy
(31:28) Leadership evolution
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Sarah Guo? Hi listeners and welcome to another episode of No Priors. Today, we're in for a treat, talking with a longtime friend and business partner to both me and Alad, Dylan Field. Dylan is the founder and CEO of Figma, the beloved and dominant design collaboration tool. Figma's been working on making it possible to design and build digital products on a single multiplayer canvas, and we're excited to talk about the world after Adobe, Figma Dev Mode, and their first AI products. Welcome, Dylan.
0:33 Speaker 01 Thank you. Glad to finally be on No Priors. We've been trying to make this happen, and I'm stoked. Let's do it.
0:39 Sarah Guo? Dylan, you've now been working on Figma for more than 10, 11 years. What was the original vision?
0:45 Speaker 01 Well, it's actually even longer. It's like, come up on 12 years, which is totally wild. But yeah, original vision was to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. And back in August 2012, 2013 timeframe, when I tried pitching people that, they were pretty confused and thought it was very vague. We had a lot of challenges recruiting people. And so we thought, okay, how about a North Star, like make design accessible to all? And we've tried to make this tool that's very powerful, but also is one where you can easily learn it.
1:28 Speaker 01 And that said, I think that the idea of what design is, is growing beyond just pixels and software. And at the same time, now you see all these amazing demos and ideas, but forth of how you can actually, actually eliminate the gap between imagination and reality like we would originally set out to do. And so I feel like those two kind of visions are converging. It's an interesting moment.
1:54 Sarah Guo? I want to come back to AI and like new opportunities for creative expression in a bit. We have to talk about what's been in the news and I think what has been preoccupying at least part of Figma for a while. You guys were on track to be acquired by Adobe, but the merger was recently called off due to regulatory scrutiny. You're coming out the other end of that with independence and a billion dollars. Like, tell us about it. How'd you manage that process emotionally in terms of decision making?
2:26 Speaker 01 Original decision to say, let's go do this with Adobe. It was obviously one that we thought very deeply about and at the time seemed like a one-way door. You know, there's the classic meme of there's one-way doors and two-way doors in business and really think deeply about the one-way doors. Turns out sometimes one-way doors can be two-way doors too. But we thought really deeply about it and we thought this is a way to just accelerate our vision and be able to do what we want to do just so much faster if we're at Adobe. And I thought that the team there, I'd learn a lot from as well. I mean, it's an incredible group of people over there. Unfortunately,
3:07 Speaker 01 regulators were not fans. And 16 months later, we kind of, at some point, said, okay, we got to call it. And that was late December. Talked to my team about that. It was actually the first day of break that I called the team back and I was like, hey, it's not going through. Here's this means for us immediately. And here's sort of the timeline from here and what we got to think about next. We had, you know, communicated along the way, hey, this is looking harder. The path is narrowing. The path is narrow. But still, I think so many people were excited about, of course. And that said, I'm just so thankful to start the year with clarity.
3:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's kind of interesting because if you look historically in the 90s, Microsoft tried to buy Intuit for, I think it was a billion or one and a half billion dollars. And that got blocked from a regulatory perspective. And now Intuit's a $178 billion company as of today. I just looked it up. And, you know, when you hear stories of that time period, it sounded like it was a similar journey where you get kind of wrapped up in all the regulatory stuff and it's uncertain and it's stressful and all the rest. And I feel like in recent conversations, you've been really re-energized. Like, when I talk to you, I feel the energy and the excitement in terms of building Figma and building future products and roadmaps. And, you know, it really feels like you're in it in a really strong way. I'm just a little bit curious, like, what are some of the things you're excited about from a roadmap perspective and sort of looking ahead with the company?
4:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, so much. I don't think the excitement ever waned, you know, but it's, it is definitely draining to be part of a regulatory process like that for such a long period of time and to not have that clarity. But I'm very thankful because You know, all the work we did as a team, it set us up for where we're at now. And I think we're in a really good place and, you know, we kind of just kept our foot on the gas and kept moving quickly.
5:00 Sarah Guo? One of the things that I guess I was a little bit surprised by is after the Adobe deal was announced, I expect you to be celebrating for more like more than a day or so. And then you're like, okay, I don't know about a lot. I didn't see that much of you for about a year and a half. I know some of that was regulatory, but you all kept pushing pretty hard, which seems smart now, but what was, what was behind that and sort of, you know, trying to lead that way?
5:27 Speaker 01 Well, partially there was travel for regulatory, of course, but I think that yes, I mean, we were, we're all really heads down and focused and we knew exactly what we need to do
5:37 Speaker 01 in terms of improving the platform. And really, if you think about Figma's platform today, there's sort of three different areas. There's figjam, which is ideation, brainstorming, imagination and diagramming. And then there's the design element with Figma Design and there's dev mode where you try to turn designs into actual working code. And so much more we can do as we kind of think about that software value chain. But, you know, if you go back to when the acquisition agreement was signed, like dev mode wasn't even announced even.
6:11 Speaker 01 And the platform, there was like very key parts of the platform that were not there yet. Over the past, you know, 16, 17 months, there's just been so much that we've sprinted at in order to kind of create the right foundations and get them in place. And now, as we think about the roadmap ahead, yeah, there's so much exciting stuff that we can do. Whether it's thinking about how do you use AI to go across its abstraction boundaries from idea to design to code? Or it's thinking about what we can do to better serve developers, which are almost a third of our users. And I think that there's still so much more we can do for them.
6:51 Speaker 01 Dev mode is just the start as it is today. And I think that that there's a lot to evolve there, but also a lot more we can offer. Or just going back to the basics, how do you make Figma even simpler? Again, if that goal is to, you know, democratize design, how do you make it so that you're able to? Bring more people in the design process and also make it so that it's less intimidating.
7:16 Sarah Guo? After building for designers for so long, like what triggered the decision to expand to brainstorming and diagramming, which is like broader teams and then expanding focus to developers with Deva?
7:27 Speaker 01 So I think we have a pattern of just sort of following the use cases that are already happening in Figma.
7:34 Speaker 01 Figma design is just this wonderfully broad platform and so many people do so many different things in it. And with brainstorming ideation, whiteboarding, diagramming, those are all use cases we saw in Figma, basically since it started. It's hard to put exact numbers on it, but I do know that qualitatively, it seemed like there was a big increase in how much that was happening as the pandemic occurred. More teams were going from in-person to hybrid or remote and trying to figure out how do we still communicate, collaborate in that time period.
8:15 Speaker 01 It's actually a tool for whiteboarding that I think is useful, whatever your work context is. But I think people kind of had the aha moment of we need something to bring us together, some space to go ideate in during that time. And so we started going, okay, we have to make some easier version of Figma, some version that's more scoped towards this use case. And really just pushed super hard to get that built. We did in record time from the start of the project to shipping a beta. I mean, it was like six to eight months, something like that. It was really fast. And the differentiator is fun. And at the time, I think that the team was a little skeptical of that. Like, really? Are differentiators can be fun?
9:00 Speaker 01 Like, are we sure that enterprises care about that? But it turns out that that's a really important part of the ideation process is this feeling of safety, of play. And if you can make people feel more at home, even through silly things sometimes, like stickers or emoji reactions or waving your cursor around and high fiving people. Cursor chat is another good one that people love.
9:24 Speaker 01 Little things like this make it so that more people feel like they can speak up in a team meeting and they're energized to give their opinion. And if you can get more of those thoughts, then hopefully you can get to a better outcome.
9:35 Sarah Guo? Yeah, as someone who has never been a designer, but was still a very early handful of Figma users person, I'd always used it for visual thinking. And then, you know, we hired new folks during the pandemic, like most others did. And one of the biggest concerns I had was, how is this person going to feel like they are part of the team? And two of the big things for me was I was going to go on a weekly walk with my hires. And also using Figma Jam and getting people to like, do something that actually did feel more fun was huge.
10:09 Speaker 01 It's interesting because over time, people sort of evolve their use cases of how they use Figma Jam too. And at least inside of Figma, one of the things that we see is it kind of evolves into a better way to like, run a meeting and it's not just a brainstorm. A lot of times they're position making meetings. And, you know, we have a lot of things that are laid out, almost like a document or, you know, a knowledge base. Inside of Figma, it's in a more visual way. It solicits input, but it also drives towards an outcome. And that's a big part of the AI strategy for Figma Jam is how do we help people set those things up faster?
10:49 Speaker 02 Amongst the different products that you've rolled out recently, one of them is Dev Mode. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
10:54 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Dev Mode is a way for developers to better consume designs in Figma. We have almost a third of our users in the Figma platform that are engaged on a weekly basis. Almost a third are developers. And going back a few years, we realized that we were just not creating enough value for these users. As we surveyed them, they were often lower NPS. They were not as happy. And then you dug into the reasons why. And we did a lot of research around this and spent a lot of time. We actually acquired a company called Visly and they helped work through this. And it was really a bunch of pivots along the way. But some of the core problems were things like,
11:38 Speaker 01 You know, I just build the wrong things. Or I don't know how to work in Figma, or I don't know how to navigate Figma in the proper way. And then we started digging in deeper around Cogen, around what are the other things that developers want to use alongside Figma via plugins? And also, how do you want to actually map design systems from design to code and keep things consistent? And as we kind of explore all these areas, that's where Dev Mode came from. And so it's a great way to know exactly what you should build, but also get the relevant information via annotations, via properties that are exposed in the right way.
12:23 Speaker 01 But it also helps you keep track of changes, understand what's going on, and you can bring everything around the development process into Dev Mode with you. And so if you have certain plugins you want to use, for example, Jira or custom plugins, you can bring those in as well. And then we have a lot more thinking ahead around how do we enable even better workflow as well as map editor to design systems and looking forward to sharing that with the world.
12:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, the extensibility of Figma, I think, is one of the key things about it. I mean, I've also used it effectively for slides or for, you know, visual display of information or things like that. So it seems like there's lots of directions it could go. And to your point, one of the really interesting and exciting areas is really how do you adopt AI? And the context of Figma, I'd really start using it in deep ways. And so I'm a little bit curious about how, when you first started thinking about this way of generative AI, and then how you're starting to think about incorporating it into different aspects of what Figma does.
13:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. Was fortunate to be surrounded by futurist thinkers like yourself at the onset of this era. And as even it was kind of coming up, you know, everyone else was talking about crypto and folks like Claude were, and Sarah were saying, hey, have you, have you seen the scaling laws that are happening right now? It's pretty wild. Something might be happening here. And of course, with diffusion models improving, you know, I think we all had the aha moment. But I think it's, it's interesting to kind of ask the question of.
13:54 Speaker 01 When do you want like sort of an LM versus diffusion model solution for something and design is maybe you can define it as like art applied to problem solving.
14:08 Speaker 01 There's many different definitions of design, but I love that one. It's one that I've been thinking a lot about recently because it's like, okay, well, you know, if diffusion models go map to art, but like LM is mapped to problem solving. You know, it kind of highlights how a hybrid might be important here.
14:26 Speaker 02 It sounds like a good like 10 pages Zen book or something. Like I'm serious, you should do like a slim volume if you're really neat.
14:32 Speaker 01 There you go. I'll have a, you know, GPT-4 help me out to take my one sentence and sort of make it 10 pages. But there is a lot we can do in terms of generation of designs and I'll be honest, like we've really tried to take our time and make sure that we're shipping something that's excellent here. Or at least useful. Maybe we shouldn't hold the bar at excellent, but we should at least hold the bar at useful. And I think we're on track to deliver that and excited to share more in the future about it.
15:05 Speaker 02 Are there any aspects of design that you think are going to be most impacted holistically by AI? Is it more about changing the role of a designer? Is it changing the skill sets? Is it experience set? Because you look at, for example, some like mid journey. Yeah, that's, you know, mainly sort of a image generation tool, but you know, it's used pretty broadly in terms of different aspects of images used for all sorts of purposes. And in some cases, professional use cases, in some cases, individual. But the main thing it's done is it allowed a large class of people to suddenly become creators. And in the context of Figma, you have the sort of UI generation. There's the brand assets. There's actually writing the code. There's so many different things that could Akur, I'm just sort of curious about which aspects you're most excited about or
15:50 Speaker 02 how you're thinking about things holistically.
15:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that there's a ton you can do in terms of lowering the floor and making it so that more people can start to do design work. And if we can make that happen, I think it'll be really important for the industry and allow more people to be part of that conversation. But I also think there's more you can do in terms of making it so that designers can be more efficient. There's so many repetitive tasks that you do as a designer, and if you can make it so that you don't have to do as many of those and you have a great way to interface the tool via AI, that could be very powerful. And yeah, of course, we're thinking about, again, all those transition states between idea to design, design to code. And I think there's a lot more you could do there, too, whether
16:33 Speaker 01 it's on the platform made by us or through partnerships. One thing that's underexplored when it comes to AI is how much are agents going to be crossing boundaries in different data areas? I think that, you know, we're all kind of just trying to figure that out right now, but it's still very early.
16:50 Speaker 02 Are there any aspects of AI in design that have surprised you? I'll give you an example, something I thought that was kind of neat was like the first time I saw Kria. And as you're typing things, it literally will change the generation of the image, right? A sort of real-time adaptation to a prompt or other inputs. Is there anything that you've seen where you're just like, whoa, that's really cool. I mean, I'd be quite ready for primetime, but it's kind of a glimpse at the future?
17:14 Speaker 01 When you see tools that leverage direct manipulation like that, it's something that you can viscerally, you know, touch, change, change something around, change a prompt, and get a response back. And I think that's very powerful and creates a great loop with the user. I think that there's some things that are coming out in the 3D space, for example, that are letting designs be defined more parametrically, which I think are sort of similar. Like, if you could generate a 3D design and have some of the variables that define that design be parametric, and then be able to use the slider, for example, to change that input and thus change the actual generated form.
17:57 Speaker 01 That's another example of something that's direct manipulation, AI-generated, and I think is really cool. But I think it is that loop between the human and the agent or AI, or whatever you want to call it, the model, that ends up really mattering. The faster you can make that loop happen, the better. And I think there's so much more to explore there in terms of different interfaces to let people just kind of wade their way through latent space. Like, I mean, there's no way that having to remember all these different sort of like magical phrases to summon the right image via diffusion model is the end state, right?
18:39 Speaker 01 And yeah, maybe there's something where you draw some shapes and you add a prompt, but like, that still seems so primitive compared to where we're going to get to. And I just think it's like, if you think about any vector, for example, what if you could say, okay, there's a sort of a vector on one side, it's optimistic, and the other side is pessimistic. And somehow you can define what that means, that a traversal space for an image. And you can nudge something more towards optimism or pessimism, or, you know, pick your polarities. You know, that's another example of like, what can you do if you can start to nudge images in a certain way or outputs in a certain way?
19:20 Speaker 02 That's really cool. Yeah, basically, you're moving from a human-to-human collaboration company to a human-to-AI collaboration company over time in some sense, because, you know, what you're describing seems like a really interesting way to have co-pilots augment humanity or augment creativity. Are there other ways that you've thought about the substantiation of that sort of creativity augmentation? Or how AI really interacts with human creative potential?
19:46 Speaker 01 Well, and these are just examples of things that I have seen or thought about that I think could be cool in the creative space, because you asked about. But I think in the design context, one thing that really matters a lot is the iterative loop and being able to keep going back and forth to an agent and give more instructions over time. If you just kind of like go to first principles here, there's so much that you're not able to communicate via prompt.
20:16 Speaker 01 Like if you think about great design, it often captures something about the culture, the ethos of the moment. It captures something about the temporal aspect of the sequence of interactions someone's having, or the context they will have mentally. Something about affordances, what people are used to in terms of the language of design, which is sometimes similar and dependent on the platform. But oftentimes, there's something about emotional state, too. There's videos that the designers probably watched, or in-person research interviews they've conducted. And so I think fitting all that, plus the product requirements, plus visual style into a prompt that's
20:56 Speaker 01 hard. Even if you could just get unblocked by an AI helping you brainstorm and thinking through problems, that's your first sort of draft. And from there, you can keep iterating. From there, you can keep evolving things. I think that could be very, very interesting as a first step.
21:14 Sarah Guo? What's your response to people who worry that AI, like in every role, are going to eliminate the need for designers?
21:24 Speaker 01 For all the reasons I just mentioned around emotions, user context, knowing how flows go, having that history of interactions and whatnot, I think it's unlikely that that's the world we're seeing in the short term. I think no one knows what's happening in the long term. If we have superhuman intelligence, like, I don't know what it means for any of us on this call, podcast, or anyone listening. If we don't try to ask about what that case it looks like, and instead ask about, okay, if we assume that there's continued improvement, what does it mean for design? I think design's
22:06 Speaker 01 actually in a really good place. Probably before you see potential replacement of any part of the design role, you instead see augmentation, and you see access. You see efficiency, so that designers can get more done. And I think probably a lot of engineers do more of their, put more of their time Towards design and they put towards what we consider coding tasks today. And the abstraction level of coding changes. There's probably still a human loop for engineering, but I think that it's not, not clear to me that humans are going to write like every line of code in a year, three years, five years. So we are obviously already we have copilot, but I think that you could go even further than that. And a lot of companies are trying to do that.
22:47 Sarah Guo? I mean, I can't make multi-year bets in the current environment, but my expectation would be that we, maybe it's because I'm an optimist, but I think we're just going to get better and more software. And better designed software versus fewer, fewer designers or engineers.
23:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I definitely think that as a metric, like number of pieces of software that will be created will go up tremendously. And it's interesting, like there's, there's some visions out there of the future where people interpret the capabilities of AI to mean that you won't like have any interface at all. I think it's really cool to see this explore like the rabbit we've talked about, Sarah. I haven't used it. I think you did. Is that right?
23:31 Sarah Guo? But yeah.
23:31 Speaker 01 I think it's a really cool vision and I think that there will be so much more software in a year, two years or five years from now than there is today. Like both could be true that there's demand for that and there's just way more software.
23:44 Speaker 02 So I guess one of the repetitive tasks that designers often complain about is interacting with product managers. So I don't know if you've considered automating that away or, you know, creating a bot for each designer to respond to PM pings or things like that. But I'm just throwing it out there as an idea. You can use it if you want.
24:04 Speaker 01 Okay, I'll take it back to the team.
24:08 Speaker 01 You know, it's so funny. We had at the last config, Chesky from Airbnb. You know, he was, he was talking, I think, really about sort of their unique structure and setup at Airbnb and how they have more of a program management function, kind of like Apple. But he kind of had this throwaway line of like, we don't have product managers. If look at the capability of product managers, I don't think is even true. But in any case, uh, you know, he kind of misinterpreted and all the designers were like, yeah, no product managers.
24:38 Sarah Guo? There was real attachment to that claim.
24:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's usually the reaction. I actually worked as a PM for much of my career and so before becoming a startup CEO. So I definitely mean it tongue in cheek.
24:52 Speaker 01 You know, it's funny because product is such a hard role to define. And I think that's why you get these jokes. But the reality is if you have people who are deeply in tune with user needs, who are really strategic and are able to understand technical requirements, but also dive into the design details, like that's a very powerful role to have in the team. And I mean, I'm so lucky. We have amazing Chief Product Officer at Figma, Yuki. And he's just like incredibly design oriented and amazing thought partner on all the things. I mean, I talk to him so much. I'll try to stop slacking you late at night, Yuki, but anyway.
25:31 Speaker 02 Should make Yuki GPT. You can just create an embedding and just start chatting with them. Speaking of chat, how do you think about the shift in UI in general? That's going to come with AI. A lot of things are kind of collapsing in the short run into chat interfaces. There's a lot of people talking about a future agentic world, which does away with most UI altogether. And there's just all programmatic stuff happening in the background. How do you think about where UI is going in general right now?
25:56 Speaker 01 I mean, I kind of think this kind of comes back to the rabbit point I was making earlier. Yes, there's a lot of innovation happening in terms of agents. But I think like in terms of the way that we use UI to interact with agents, we're just the beginning. And I think that the interfaces will get more sophisticated. But also, even if they don't, I suspect that it's just like any new media type. When it's introduced, it's not like the old media types go away, right? Just because you have TikTok doesn't mean that you no longer watch YouTube. Even if it's true that a new form of interaction is via chat interfaces, which I'm not even sure I believe, but if even if we take that as a prior
26:41 Speaker 01 on the No Priors podcast, then I think that you still have UI. And actually, I think you have more UI and more software than before.
26:50 Speaker 02 Do you have any predictions in terms of multimodality? Like, do you think there's more need for voice? Like, so, you know, a lot of the debates people have is like, when are you going to use voice versus text versus other types of interfaces? And, you know, you could imagine arguments in all sorts of directions in terms of, you know, when do you use what and things like that? And a lot of people are, not a lot, some people are suggesting because of the rise of multimodal models, you'll have like more voice input or more things like that because you'll be able to do real time. Sort of smart contextual semantic understanding of like a conversation. And so you have more of a verbal conversational UI versus a text-based UI. And so it kind of changes how you think about design. So I was just curious if you have any thoughts on that, that sort of future looking stuff.
27:35 Speaker 01 There's all sorts of contexts where a voice UI is really important. And I think that it might be that we find that voice UIs start to map to more traditional UIs.
27:50 Speaker 01 Because it's something that like you could obviously do in a more generalized way. But yeah, I mean, personally, I don't want to navigate the information spaces that I interact with every day, all day via voice. I also don't want to do it in Minority Report style on the Vision Pro exactly either. Maybe with a keyboard and mouse and like an amazing Vision Pro monitor setup or Oculus. Like, that could be cool, but I don't want to do the Minority Report thing. And so it's, it's interesting. So I think that we get these new glimpses at interaction patterns that are really cool. And the natural inclination is to extrapolate and say they're going to be useful for everything.
28:33 Speaker 01 And I think that they have like sort of their role. And it doesn't mean that they're going to be ubiquitous across every interaction we have. But that's a natural cycle to be in. And I think it's good. It's healthy to have sort of that almost mania around what can it do? Because if you don't have that, then you don't get to find out. And so I'm supportive of people exploring as much as possible, because that's how you kind of progress on HCI and figuring out how to use computers and to the fullest potential that could be possible.
29:08 Sarah Guo? One of the things I am really bullish on is, I mean, you just think of it as an input mode or a peripheral, but it's really hard for people to describe things visually. And so the idea of intelligent cameras, even in the like most basic sense.
29:25 Speaker 01 Oh, it worked.
29:25 Sarah Guo? It worked. I think that's actually a really fun space to be, as you said, like exploring, because I actually think that will be useful. And it's something that every user is capable of, right? Taking pictures, capturing video. And so I think that'll be, I'm pretty bullish on that. Dylan, I talked to a few of our friends in common. And one thing that I was kind of struck by was Danny and John both like, they both admired one, I mean, I'm sure they admire many things about you, but they admired one thing in common about you, which was like your breadth of interests and like ability to invest, think about other parts of technology
30:06 Sarah Guo? and entrepreneurship and in AI. I think they were both sort of of the belief that that was really good for you in your job as founder and CEO of Figma. Can you talk about how you think about like investing and paying attention to the rest of the ecosystem and talking to founders? Because you have so much energy for that in a way that I think a lot of founders of important, growing at scale platform companies don't necessarily.
30:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I just find it really fun.
30:34 Sarah Guo? I mean, I get that. Yeah.
30:35 Speaker 01 You know, you're both investors as well. So I think we share a passion around this. And to me, just helping people and seeing them bring something to life, it just gives me so much energy. That's energy I can, I can pour into all sorts of stuff as well. You know, a lot of night, I remember going on walks where he would say like, so, so why, why are you doing this again? You know, a nicer way, because he's a, he's a super sweet guy. And I didn't like have a very good answer then. I don't have the perfect answer now because I really like it. And I like kind of helping people and, and it's fun. And I like learning. So yeah, it's, it's kind of greedy in that way. But hopefully helpful to others do.
31:16 Speaker 02 Hope I phrase it in a more positive way. It's amazing you're doing this right now. So, you know, maybe the, the tone came off longer.
31:23 Speaker 01 No, no, you're always nice.
31:27 Sarah Guo? Okay, new step forward. When you think about the company at this scale and with the clarity of, you know, being independent, investing for your future, does that like, how do you feel like you've changed as a leader in terms of the culture you're trying to build and what that looked at like year one at Figma, year five at Figma versus now?
31:53 Speaker 01 Well, I've certainly evolved a lot as a leader. I mean, I didn't know how to manage or lead people when I started Figma, and I hope I've learned something over the years. I definitely have learned something over the years. That said, I'm still learning, and I think that each stage of the company, it forces you to continue to grow your skill set, to grow your frameworks, and to be able to understand, you know, how do you lead it at a greater scale and do so in a way that empowers, but it's also efficient and streamlined. And those are sometimes, they can seem like two sides of the same coin, but, you know, they also are two poles. And I think that in terms of Figma's culture,
32:34 Speaker 01 that's the thing that maybe hasn't changed as much. Like, I think different values and parts of Figma have been more emphasized over time or less emphasized over time. Like, you know, a big part of our culture and values that is play, for example. And I'll be honest, like, right now, in these few months, we are sprinting fucking hard. Not as much of a moment of play. It will return. Like, we have so much to create, so much to innovate on. Right now, though, the thing that we're talking a lot about is the value run with it. You know, and how do you make sure that as we scale, that if you see something to be done, that you just do it, rather than like, wait for someone else to come along,
33:19 Speaker 01 or, you know, who has the responsibility for this, or who owns this thing. It's so easy to get trapped in that as you scale. At other times, I think, Things like building community, or craftsmanship, or employee growth have been really important values that we've leaned on. I think that it's kind of wild that some of our early Figma mates who departed and came back and boomeranged, a lot of them had made comments about how Figma feels very similar. And I think it starts with the fact that based on what we're doing, and this kind of vision that we're, and this quest that we're on, it attracts people that are really creative, really maker oriented, and
34:02 Speaker 01 I think also very thoughtful. And I'm thankful that we have a culture that's quite humble as well. And I think that the combination of those things ends up being very special, ends up being very collaborative, be also partially due to the products that we built. And it's a really unique environment that I think a lot of people are really grateful to be in. And I'm grateful for the team we have. It's an incredible team.
34:27 Sarah Guo? When you think about the ambition you have for Figma, you said like, hey, we did Figma Jam because we were following user stories that we already saw in the product and supporting them. And dev mode is the same. Like, what's been the feedback on those products? And if Figma originally was compressing that distance between creativity and that implementation in the real world, like, is that still the same mission? And like, still the same user base you focus on?
34:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's definitely the way I think about it still, is how do you eliminate that gap between imagination and reality? And I think that there's so much opportunity still to help people navigate that process. When we talk about it internally, is this IDMA's that you're always trying to explore? And how do you proactively see which branches IDMA's are worth prioritizing, worth going deep on? If you can figure that out quickly, then you're able to Pick the right branches to go down. And that's the stuff that you might go and work with through with a team. So I think that's pretty exciting if you can bring things to life quickly. But yeah, more broadly, Figma was never meant to just be a design tool.
35:41 Speaker 01 And the more that we can expand out as a platform, the more we can think about that entire value chain of how software is created. Everything from that first idea, but also through to alignment to not just design and coding, but how do you ship it? How do you measure it? How do you experiment? How do you keep going from there? I just think there's such opportunity.
36:04 Sarah Guo? Din, this is a great conversation. Thanks so much for finally joining us.
36:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me.
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Previous Big tech earnings and the current AI debates, with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil Next Speed will win the AI computing battle with Tuhin Srivastava from Baseten Page updated October 12, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
