First Time Founders: Figma’s Founder on Post-IPO Life & the Road Ahead

Ed Elson speaks with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. They discuss the future of design in the age of AI, how his management style has changed over time, and what it was like to go public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

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• 1:35Ed Elson?

  Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. At the start of 2025, the IPO market felt like it had frozen in place. Then slowly, the tide began to turn. By the third quarter, deal flow picked up dramatically. Twenty-three companies raised nine figures or more and five made headlines with blockbuster listings. One of those headlines came from a company whose tools have quietly become essential to modern digital design. At this point, the company has millions of users. It's used by 95% of Fortune 500 companies. Its platform is now central to nearly every digital team's workflow. That company went public in July and it is now filing its fee after one of the biggest IPOs of the year.

• 2:22Ed Elson?

  This is my conversation with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan Field, thank you for joining me on First Time Founders.

• 2:30Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here and to finally get to meet you.

• 2:33Ed Elson?

  Absolutely. So we're going to get into how you started Figma. Everyone's been talking about it, biggest IPO of the year, really. We've been talking a lot about it on our other podcasts, Profitey Markets. But I want to start with a quote from your founder letter. "In the internet boom of the late 90s, the ethos was build it and they will come. Today, that could not be further from the truth. It used to be that design was an afterthought. Now, design is more than form and function. Design is how you win or lose." You are a design company. What is different about the world today compared to 30 years ago that makes design so important?

• 3:17Speaker 04

  I love that you read the founder's letter, first of all. So thank you for reading it.

• 3:20Ed Elson?

  Absolutely.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  I put a lot of thought into it. And so I've always been eager to kind of get that reflected back. And I love that we're just diving right into it. Let's go. It's certainly been the case for Figma that from the beginning, we had this intuition that design was becoming more important. Now, I couldn't put in the words that I could put in today. And design, I think, started to become this infectant around software.

• 3:44Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  It started to make us, the expectations for everything increased. And we started to see that in design hiring. And design ratios, you know, we're going from like, okay, we got one designer for, you know, dozens of engineers. And their job is to put lipstick on a pig and make it pretty at the end of the process. To a different set of mind, sort of shift of mindset into this more Apple philosophy of design is how it works.

• 4:08Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  And the more people that took on that philosophy, the more people that tried to meet the market where they wanted to be met. Those companies, I think, did so much better. And people were starting to realize that.

• 4:21Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  As they started to hire more designers. We saw this ratio change tremendously over that time. Suddenly, it was going to, you know, in extreme cases like Airbnb, you might have one designer for every two or three engineers. Instead of one designer for every thirty engineers or no designers. And so then, as this wave of design hiring happened, we also saw just the wave of software increase too. And all this started to come together into a thesis of design is how you win or lose. And that's the thesis we held before AI. With AI, it is like absolutely unequivocally clear that that is true.

• 4:58Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Because now that exponential, it's no longer just like this kind of, oh, it looked flat, now it's trending upwards. Is it linear or is it exponential? We're trying to tell. It's going vertical. You know, now you can create software faster than ever. I'm not saying it's going to be the best software yet. But what we do see is more software being created. And as software gets more competitive, you have to differentiate. How do you differentiate? Well, you need to have a point of view, first of all. That's on the product side and the brand. But you also have to have great design, great user experience. It has to be delightful. It has to be clear. It has to be useful. And I think that also you need to really be leaning on the brand and marketing and shining there too.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  It's not enough just to have great product design. You have to have great brand design. And you have to communicate that point of view across all of it. And your brand, which stretches across every experience the customer has with your company.

• 5:53Ed Elson?

  So you create the company in 2012. Product design becomes more of a thing. And from my understanding, you didn't fully release your product until several years after. What were those years, those first years like? And what was the product that you brought to the world?

• 6:11Speaker 04

  My co-founder and I were very excited about exploring WebGel, the ability to use the GPU in your computer in the browser. And we really started with technology rather than a problem. And I think that most companies that do well have some why now. And the why now doesn't have to be technological, it can be social, it can be regulatory. You know, there's any number of things that it can be. Some of them even have multiple why nows. I think Figma, looking back, we did have multiple why nows. But we thought, okay, we're technologists, you know, we're both studying computer science. Let's start with tech. And we looked at all the tech that exists in the world and WebGL stood out. We explored for a while, tried to figure out, okay, what are we going to do with WebGL? We've got our hammer, what's our nail?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  This is not usually where people start a company and have the ethos around. Usually they start with a problem.

• 6:59Ed Elson?

  People say it's the opposite.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  But that's the way we started, it's the honest truth. And we explored for quite some time. And we looked at all sorts of things that you might apply the verb photoshopped to in terms of taking that kind of verb and distilling it into use cases that we thought were going to be interesting for consumers. Things like face swapping, that was one of the first things we built.

• 7:21Ed Elson?

  Face swapping?

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, you know, it was like 2012 and we could, with Poisson blending, make it so that you could, we could swap our faces and it looked credible.

• 7:29Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Or background removal, changing color gradients dynamically in a scene. What we found with a lot of this was basically that the tech wasn't ready yet. And we were able to get like 85% of the way there and cases like face swapping, maybe 90, 95% of the way there. But it just wasn't 100%. And I think it wasn't until deep learning that actually we got to the point where, yeah, you can get 100% of the way there.

• 7:53Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  So then we explored, okay, we gotta ship something. Built a photo editor, but it was in the browser because again, WebGL. That was the hammer.

• 8:03Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  And I'm actually quite proud of that work. We never shipped it because we decided it wasn't the thing.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  But did all sorts of things that later informed us at Figma. And then we basically said, okay, wait a second. Like photo editing is going to happen on your mobile phone. It is not going to happen in a web browser and definitely not if we don't support RAW, which is an advanced image format for digital photographers. Why are we building a web browser when the curve around mobile phone adoption and megapixels per phone is just up and to the right in what is probably exponential way as well?

• 8:41Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  So then we said, okay, we got to back out of this and do something else. And that's when we started to pay attention to what is now Figma. So even that starting period, it took a while. If I had said, let me give ourselves six months and then we'll make a call, we would never have Figma today.

• 8:57Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  Past that, then we were on track and we started to raise money, build a team. But it took a while. Professional tools are hard to build. They have very complex workflows, a lot of mechanics that you have to get just right. And so, you know, we had an aggressive timeline that we communicated to people, investors, employees. We certainly did not hit it. We were pretty much in the right order of things, but basically offset by a year or two in each case.

• 9:24Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  You know, my favorite part of it was actually, we kept putting it in front of designers. Once we got to the point where we had theoretically met some subset of their needs we thought could get us to market. And there's entire summer where I went out and just showed people the tool. And they all were intrigued, but they all basically said, I just don't trust it.

• 9:42Ed Elson?

  Huh.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Like, oh no, what if it's like the browser element? We bet everything on this. Turns out it, yeah, those comments all went away when we did a redesign. And the visual design itself, the tool was not sufficient and that's why you didn't trust it.

• 9:59Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  You know, go figure that designers want a well-designed tool visually. So we fixed that and then we were off to the races truly. And did a closed beta launch in December 2015 and then a GA release in October 2016. And then finally started to price in mid 2017, which was almost five years after we started the company. So it took quite a while to get off the ground.

• 10:24Ed Elson?

  Basically, anyone that I know who's starting a website or creating some app or use it or creating some sort of digital product, everyone is using Figma. At least in my circles.

• 10:38Ed Elson?

  How did designers, how did people build stuff before? Like, what were people using before Figma?

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it was single player. And there's a culture that I think came out of agency culture, where there's a lot of like, I'm going to show you three things. Like, the first two are not going to be like, just what you want for the third one. Everyone's going to go, ah, it's so good. And then I'll go back in my corner and I will do my work and we won't interact that much because I don't have to try one too. And so that's completely different from the multiplayer experience of Figma. And I think that cultural shift was real. Like, the first comments we got on the launch were, you know, it was controversial. People basically said in the launch comments, stuff like, you know, a camel is a horse designed by committee.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  They said, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. But also, there was a small set of people that loved it and saw that vision of what it could mean to make multiplayer design in the browser. And with a tool that was high quality and a tool that could actually really meet their needs and be focused on their use case.

• 11:47Ed Elson?

  What does a single player versus multiplayer mean?

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Single player meaning local to your file system. One person can use it at a time. You export something, an image, send that image over. You got version control issues. You know, the web forced us to be multiplayer. We didn't initially try to do multiplayer. We had an instinct that multiplayer was important. But it was a complex thing to build. And so we thought, okay, let's not start there. Until we hear some validation. And no one validated it. Like, I think out of 100 people, maybe two people told, both of them were sitting next to each other. And they were doing this pair design sort of workflow. So they uniquely got it. Otherwise, people pulled us, this is not what I want. Like, why would I want to interact with all these people?

• 12:35Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  More stakeholders, I think that's bad. And so we didn't initially start there, but we got there because we were forced to. If I have, you know, Figma and I've got a tab and you've got the same tab open, and then I make an edit and your tab reloads and you make an edit and my tab reloads, it's a terrible user experience. So as soon as we started to get to the point where it was closer to production and we were doing that on the team. We knew we had to go build it and the benefits were tremendous. Not only the ability for more people to be in the canvas at the same time, just like a Google Doc, but also a single source of truth. Your versioning problem goes away.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Instead of, you know, V2 underscore three, five, final, final three, you know, you now have just a document, a space to go to. And it was also interesting, the behavioral change over time as people kind of got used to this world. Because they started to treat Figma like a space. And that was fascinating, like Slack went down one day during COVID. And we started to see folks basically putting text boxes in a Figma canvas in order to go back and forth and chat. And we're like, this is not what we built Figma for, but there's something here. And so that led us to Figma, which is our way to basically brainstorm, ideate, whiteboard, diagram. And it's a simpler product. It's really for that use case.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  But with it, we tried to incorporate concepts that were really speaking to that idea of, how do you create a space for people?

• 14:07Ed Elson?

  It's similar to Google Docs. I think that's a good comparison. It's like, we used to sort of write up a doc, you save it, you send it off. I mean, before that, we would print it out and someone would put notes and edit it with a pen. And then you go through it again. And then there's just this great idea where it's like, let's just put it on a single page and let's all just jump in the doc and we can comment on things and tag things. And that's basically what Figma is doing from a product and web design perspective. And it's been like this unbelievable success. Now, when I think about who you're up against, the first name that comes to mind is Adobe. I mean, Adobe is and has been the giant in digital design for many, many years.

• 14:53Ed Elson?

  And it's almost like, or at least from a consumer perspective, it seems as if they have had historically almost a monopoly. You are the first company that has really eaten into that and at least presented yourself as a real competitor to Adobe. How did you do that? Or it sounds like maybe you'll disagree with that characterization.

• 15:17Ed Elson?

  But why, how did you get to this point where I'm saying the word Figma in the same sentence as Adobe?

• 15:23Speaker 04

  We saw ourselves as going up against Adobe in the earliest days of Figma, for sure. And over time, what we found was that actually designers, they're our core audience. The core thing we do is make software for product designers. They work with teams. And multiplayer shows that even more in terms of those workflows. And if their teammates, the people around the designers are not successful, the designers are not successful. So that led us to go and both go sort of upstream in the workflow and downstream to things like Figma Jam for ideation brainstorming, to Figma Slides for alignment, but also downstream in the product design and development workflow.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Into, okay, how do we go and make it so that a developer, for example, can take the assets in Figma Design and translate them to code in the most effective, efficient way that they can?

• 16:15Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  And save time. And as we've kind of mapped out that process, we found ourselves building for anyone that wanted to go from idea to a polished application that they can deploy and get into production. But it was interesting because I think we thought of, okay, it was a small market for product designers, web designers. Bureau of Labor Statistics said it was 250,000 people at the time when we started Figma. We thought, okay, this is not going to be our long-term market. It's growing. We don't know how much, but you know, we'll have to go into other use cases around creative tools. And so we found ourselves really focused at our core on the product design, development workflow and building software.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  And how to help people build the most well-designed software. But overall, it's not like we see Adobe. There was a period where they tried. But then they sunset the product and they decided they're going to focus on their core, which is the creative professional. And also, I think, compete on the down market.

• 17:20Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  And so it's just a very, two very different businesses at this point.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  We'll be right back.

• 17:37Scott Galloway?

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• 18:37Scott Galloway?

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• 19:44Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The regentech trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 20:29Scott Galloway?

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• 20:55Ed Elson?

  We're back with first-time founders. Let's just move to you going public. It's kind of fascinating to hear this, those first five years and how messy it really did sound.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  It's always messy. Every startup is.

• 21:09Ed Elson?

  And now you are a public company, biggest IPO of the year. We were looking at the IPO pricing and we said on our podcast, we were like, this is a buy. It was originally priced at 25. Then it was repriced at 30. We said it was a buy at 30. Then it was, I mean, 33.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  33 years.

• 21:27Ed Elson?

  We said it was a buy. And that's what it went at, the IPO price. And then it opens in the market and it's 85. And then it goes up to 100. And, you know, we thought that you guys would see a big pop. I didn't see it being that crazy. And then it's really interesting, you know, a lot of our listeners, I've heard people saying like, hey, it's, it's come, it's come down a lot since 100. But I keep wanting to tell you, like, I was saying buy at 33. That's what I was talking about. The point being, now that you're a public company, there is a lot of pressure on you to return value to shareholders.

• 22:12Ed Elson?

  Even I was receiving that pressure as someone who just talked about the stock. So I could imagine that that would be kind of a different paradigm where everyone's watching you. Everyone's asking questions, people like me asking you, what do you think of the stock? How do you feel about the price and how has that changed your overall experience as a CEO?

• 22:32Speaker 04

  Well, I told the company before we went public during the IPO, literally on listing day, before we saw any signals in the market and after, and then also after IPO. Then I just showed up about it is, look, the number's going to go up. The number's going to go down. We do not control the number. The only thing we've got control over is the inputs. And so we have to keep our eye on the prize and we got to do everything we can to drive those inputs.

• 23:06Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  And we have to take the long-term view. You know, the irony is, of course, that as a public company, you have to report earnings every quarter. And I think that one reaction that is to take a quarterly view. Of course, we care about our results and also you have to take the long-term view. And the long-term view always has to come first. And so I spend my energy thinking not about, okay, what is the stock price doing on any given day? Some days I like literally forget to look because I'm so focused on what we're trying to do for the long-term. And you only get one shower thought a day. There's a great Paul Graham essay on that.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Your shower thought needs to be on what are the long-term things we can do to make our customers' lives better?

• 23:56Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  Value will follow.

• 23:58Ed Elson?

  There's the great Bill Walsh quote, which is the score takes care of itself, which is a very similar dynamic. It's like if we focus on our inputs, on driving value, on our fundamentals, the score is going to take care of itself. The stock price is going to take care of itself. But I could also imagine now as a public company CEO that at the same time.

• 24:23Ed Elson?

  You kind of take care of the stock price as well as the vibe setter, as the leader of the narrative. And, you know, we talk a lot on our podcast about the narrative versus the numbers. There's the numbers that can drive a stock and then there's the narrative that what do investors think is happening? Do you feel any pressure? It sounds like you don't want to think too much about this is the story we're telling people. You want to think about are our numbers good? Are our inputs high quality? But do you feel a pressure now to, you know, show up on that earnings call and like, capture the imaginations of people to set a narrative that investors are really excited about?

• 25:06Ed Elson?

  Is that something that you feel is incumbent on you now as a public company CEO?

• 25:12Speaker 04

  I think what's most important, and this is the same perspective I had when we were a private company, is to make sure that people understand what the company is doing.

• 25:21Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  And to make sure that people are educated. And so that's most of my focus. It's why I do demos on earnings calls, probably so far. Maybe at some point I don't do them. I don't know. I feel like I can't commit to that forever. But yeah, but I like doing that. I like to show people what are we actually improving? And I think without that, it's so easy to get lost in sort of whether it be narrative or numbers or whatever for people. And my advice to anyone who's like looking at the stock is understand our company.

• 25:53Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  It's very simple. Like, go read our S1. Go watch the earnings calls. Go look at our filings. Go look at what we're doing. Like, that's how you understand. Now, on narrative, of course, there's importance to narrative. This is different than narrative for markets. This is a narrative for the business. If you don't have a narrative about what is going to occur in the world, you don't have a vision.

• 26:19Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  You don't have a point of view on where you're headed. And so to me, it's very important to storytell there. It'll show people and unpack the contexts in my head about where we're headed for our employees, for our customers. And that's something that, you know, I feel a lot of pressure on because otherwise we don't have a North Star.

• 26:37Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  And then I think the fundamental question that maybe is related to markets and is deeper related to strategy, the question that everyone seems to be asking these days for any company, private or public, is this an AI winner or an AI loser?

• 26:51Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  And this is a very important question to answer, obviously. If you care about the long term, you gotta be on the right side of AI.

• 26:59Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  So what's that mean? To me, it means that you have to be in a place where as the model capabilities improve and come online, you are getting better as a company. It's that simple. And so my advice to everybody is make sure that that is true for your company.

• 27:17Ed Elson?

  How does AI play into Figma's business and Figma's product? I guess, let's hear the answer to that question.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, one of the products we have right now that it's, you know, a pure AI product in many ways is Figma Make, which is our basically prompt to working app product. We see it used for prototyping use cases by designers to make it so that they can go explore prototypes that are more interactive. We see it used for people that are shipping websites or web apps publicly. And even internal tools use cases. And Figma Make is fascinating because there's so much that we can do on the application level to make it better all the time. And also, yeah, you get a new model in there that's got better functionality, more power, and it makes the product better.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Like, literally, we see that with all the model releases.

• 28:10Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Overall, for our entire ecosystem, I think that, you know, we've publicly said about how we're introducing prompting and Figma Design, that's still a work in progress. You know, we're in early alpha stage there, lots to do. But Figma Design and Figma Make, you know, those should be two sides of the same coin. You should really go back and forth rapidly. Right now, you can copy from Figma Make to Figma Design. You can copy from Figma Design to Figma Make. That's very powerful. You can use the design systems that you've built up in Figma's platform and convert them into a form that you can then use in Figma Make. But, you know, there's all this room to be more seamless across it and to make it so this is all feels very integrated.

• 28:50Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  And we are working hard on that and figuring out the best way to unify and to make it so that the entire platform is AI-native in a way that fits that criteria. And the last thing I'd say is just, it might actually be true that ironically, you know, design is non-verifiable. There's no way to know other than, you know, rigorous debate, A/B testing.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  Is design A or design B better for my audience?

• 29:20Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  And even with A B testing, you could hit local maximums and not the global maximum. And you might be missing sort of the forest for the trees.

• 29:30Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  And so there's so many different inputs to design, whether it be product design, visual design, brand design, that are just kind of beyond the context that you have in a tool or in a model. You know, there's just sort of like, what is the culture right now? What's the system we're trying to create? What's the brand we're going for? What's the ethos we stand for? What's the point of view we have? What are the business constraints? Like, I can keep going. And also, what are the flows? What's the before and after of these states? And how do we want to manage our complexity? And how do we want to make it so that we're able to have progressive disclosure? What's our philosophy and viewpoint on all of this? And like, this is a lot of context to go gather.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  And it should lead to many outputs. If you give it to an L M. And I don't even think it's possible right now to give a lot to an L M. But the better that the models get at generative capabilities that are highly opinionated, I think it's actually better for the conversation around design. Because if I show you a very opinionated design, you'll have a reaction.

• 30:39Scott Galloway?

  Yes.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  You're gonna love it, you're gonna hate it, but you're not gonna be neutral. If I show you a not very opinionated design, you know, something that's kind of like the average of averages, you will be more neutral. Be like, oh, it's all right.

• 30:51Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  As the craft increases, as the aesthetic increases for these models, as they get better at that, it's almost like you're planting all these different flags in a potential option space. And it's your job as a designer, as a team, to go figure out where in that option space to want to go even deeper. Push harder and explore further.

• 31:10Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  And so I think it actually amplifies the role of designers.

• 31:13Ed Elson?

  It is interesting when you talk about having an opinion. I've found that that is the worst trait of AI right now is that it's so good at aggregating. It's so good at collecting. It's got the best memory of all time, but it's so bad at having an opinion, saying something interesting, novel, new. Even when I push it, I'm like, you must have an opinion on this subject that I'm bringing to you. And it says, well, there are both sides, which ultimately leads to, I imagine, in the design space, bad design. Because, as you say, you say non-verifiable. Another word for that would be subjective.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 31:55Ed Elson?

  It's about taste. And AI has kind of bad taste. So what is AI going to do to design? Is it going to, I mean, the classic question, replace designers? Or would you say that there's, this space is a little bit more protected in that, in that sense?

• 32:15Speaker 04

  If you're at a company that values design, the opportunities will be even bigger than you are, they are today. If you're not at a company that values design, you already have some problems. So that's the problem that maybe you should already look at.

• 32:28Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  But every company that wants to win should value design right now. And again, there are ways to actually prompt models to make them more opinionated. It's just that the range with models that are currently released, you can't get that far. I think that'll change.

• 32:48Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  We'll get to a place where with clever prompting, you'll be able to go further on a static. That does not mean it's the thing you're going to ship. The more that you can explore, currently limited by human toil, is, and I'm not saying that's not enjoyable, you know, work for a lot of people too. But that's all stuff that limits how much of that option space you can explore.

• 33:11Ed Elson?

  It will be on the human to pick which is the right one.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  I actually think it's not just picking. I don't think it's a curation role. I think it's pushing.

• 33:18Ed Elson?

  Pushing.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  And I think it's, you have to explore the option space. You need tools that help you. And then when you find something that you like, it's your job then to push and to go way deeper there.

• 33:30Ed Elson?

  Yep.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  And that's what's going to lead you to a truly differentiated design, level of craft and expression. That's our philosophy across all the products at Figma.

• 33:41Ed Elson?

  I have a quote from an interview that you did in 2021.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  I'm so curious now.

• 33:48Ed Elson?

  You said, I was, I was not a very good manager when I started Figma.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  No, I wasn't.

• 33:53Ed Elson?

  Yeah. I was intern before that, so I had a lot to learn. What were you bad at from a management perspective? And how have you improved? And now that you've improved, what does it take to be a good manager of people?

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Management and leadership are different. And you can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa. For me, I think I'd always, you know, been a leader in terms of leading different initiatives I've been a part of, or trying to help whoever was the leader really do their best. And from that, I kind of came into starting Figma and just thinking I was good to go. But turns out there's this whole new skill set around management that I definitely did not know. And the good news is if you're a first time manager, like it's all very learnable. It'll feel like muscle memory eventually, but it's knowing where your team is at, building great relationships.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  The tactics are things like one on ones, creating context, making sure that people know what their goals are, holding them accountable with those goals, making sure that you're able to keep good cadences for your team.

• 35:07Ed Elson?

  And you about it all of this.

• 35:09Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, I had no muscle memory. And so I just kind of like, and I think also, you know, you take on VC money, you're trying to get this into market. It's not in market for like ever. By the way, I want to be clear too, for anyone listening. Don't do what we did. Like, if you have any way not to, go build faster. Yes. The best is to get me out rapidly. Like, that's the question I'm always asking in my product reviews. How do we go faster here? What can we stage? What can we... What assumptions do we have that we can maybe cut? So, please don't take away that you should take five years to launch a company, or you'll be dead. Like, we are the outlier from a different time. Yes.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  But, yeah, I think I was bad at all of it. What was tremendously helpful was hiring our first manager. He came in as Director of Engineering, his name is Show. And he was someone that came from this amazing history of companies who worked at General Magic, Macromedia, Adobe, Medium, as well as starting his own thing a few times. Deep history and knowledge of our space, also just a great human, and just like an incredibly smart human, but also deeply empathetic. And, yeah, I mean, he came in and instantly went, "Okay, there's a bunch of stuff to change and improve." And, you know, we talked every day for quite a long time, and I learned a ton from him.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  And I learned a ton from the next people we hired that were leaders and managers as well. In general, I think your mindset has to be hire people you can learn from. One of the biggest traps, the biggest mistakes, is sometimes people will try to hire folks that they will just like look up to them and revere them. I think a lot of times, they look for people that might be not as skilled because they feel like there's some control aspect there or something. And I think that's like the worst thing you can do. You need to find people that will push you further, the company further, that are aligned with you in terms of where you want to go. But also, they will add new skills and new possibilities to the company, the organization.

• 37:19Speaker 04

  So, that's what I'm always looking for, is ways to level up our team and people to learn from. I think I can learn from anyone. That's how I do interviews, too, when I'm on the other side of the table. And I'm asking them questions. You're looking for, can this person teach me something? Yeah. I mean, my mental test for an interview is like, "Okay, did I come out of this learning something?" Yep. Among others. But that's one of the things that I care about.

• 37:45Ed Elson?

  We'll be right back.

• 37:54Speaker 00

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• 38:25Speaker 01

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• 40:05Ed Elson?

  We're back with first time founders. What are your core strengths, would you say? I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of companies that have tried to do what you did. And you won, for lack of a better word. What are you really good at? What did you do differently that you think other companies didn't do?

• 40:24Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, there's a lot of the story to be written. So, you know, the bigger the ambition, the more there is to tackle. And that's definitely not my mindset. I never feel like we've won. But I would say that, you know, the first great decision I made was working with Evan. He was my TA, Brown, smartest guy I knew. And I felt like, okay, if this thing works out, great. But if it doesn't, I'll learn more by working with Evan than doing anything else in the world. And so it's the easiest call. Yeah. For me, I guess, you know, I have a hard time talking to myself this way. But curiosity is definitely a strength. I'm always trying to make sure that it stays a strength.

• 41:05Speaker 04

  And I love learning about new things, new spaces, patterns. Sometimes even are teaching people something and they ask you a question and you give them an answer and you realize, wait a second. That answer I just gave, like, that applies to the situation I'm in right now. So ironically, you can learn by mentoring too.

• 41:24Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  I think in addition to that, I think that early on in my share of tech career, being at O'Reilly Media, which for those who don't know is they do many things, but they hosted conferences, they publish technical books, they're the ones the animals would cut on the covers. Their entire business was basically seen around corners, understanding tech trends. And being able to really project in the future and understand. What's going to happen or what's sort of the tech tree going forward? And how would unlock, what's too early, what's on time? What will be later on? And just the different stages of technology development and being able to kind of

• 42:12Speaker 04

  be able to track that in my head and have like global state there. I think that's the strength.

• 42:16Ed Elson?

  You do have a history of recognizing what the trend is going to be on a very large level, starting as early as 2012, when you realize there's this big problem, which is that design is not, it's not good enough on the internet, on your mobile phone, et cetera. For someone who wants to be better at that, at understanding and predicting what the future is going to be, what the large trends are going to be. How can we be better at that? What is, what are some of, is that just talent? Or is there a way to kind of coach yourself?

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Absolutely a loop you can be in that'll help you. It's very simple. You form hypotheses about the world, rim them down in a specific way that is testable. And make sure you kind of set a timeline to it. And then, yeah, see how things play out. See what happened in the system that did not match your mental model.

• 43:09Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  See what happened that did. And when you don't have a match, don't just get discouraged, like that's a learning opportunity. Use any delta to inform how to enrich your mental model of the world.

• 43:22Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Or models, you know, the best cases that you actually have many frameworks and you're able to try on different ones, different times according to the situation, rather than just having one rigid framework that you see the world through.

• 43:34Ed Elson?

  Who do you look up to?

• 43:37Ed Elson?

  And this could be past or present. Who are your heroes? Who are your role models? Who are the kinds of people that you're like, yeah, that's the kind of person I want to be?

• 43:44Speaker 04

  In technology, I think, whether it be Larry or Sergey or Zuck or Satya, Elon, in some ways, the people that have found a way to kind of bend the world and find a way to create technology that serves many, many people, like, and do it at scale. You know, you can analyze it from all sorts of lenses. But yeah, you look at Elon, for example, and plenty of people will say negative things, but then you look at SpaceX. And SpaceX is incredibly, incredibly important company. And what they've done there is remarkable.

• 44:22Ed Elson?

  So do you want to bend the world in that, in that way? Do you feel like you want to shape the world in, in some way? I mean, I think of sort of Steve Jobs, who, who talked a lot about that. The idea that you can make things just happen. You can shape, if you have an idea for how the world could be, you can actually just shape it to become that. Do you think about that a lot?

• 44:45Speaker 04

  I think of it less from like a me perspective and more of an enabling perspective. So I think that there are unequivocally things that will be good for the world. And you have to be willing to say that there are things that will be good for the world in order to have this point of view. People that maybe come from different moral philosophies will disagree with me on that, but I'll put that out there. That's my starting point is that you can say, okay, like if we cure cancer, for example, that's good for the world.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  It's a harder one to debate, but if anyone has a debate against that, I'd like to hear it.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  You know, or if we can make it so that more people are able to find meaning, find joy. That seems good. So I kind of start from, you know, the sort of unequivocally obvious places. And then from there, I go into, okay, what's the role I can play to help? And whether it be Figma, where I'm able to be in this amazing position to create a platform that helps people achieve their dreams, put food on the table, make it so that our society has better design and better ways to interact with technology. Or it be trying to help by investing or by mentoring next generation founders who, like

• 46:04Speaker 04

  me, are coming from a background where they didn't yet have exposure to business, but now they're finding themselves in a situation where they can't just do the technology, they can't just do the product and the design. They actually have to go figure out how to go and, you know, build forward. And if they can't get the capitalist loop working, they're not going to be able to get the scale that will actually transform the world into a better place. Then those are ways that I find that I can have impact is through that empowerment.

• 46:32Ed Elson?

  You've been massively successful. You're a first time founder. What is your advice to founders? What is your advice to young people who are building their own companies today? Who see the success you've had and want to replicate it?

• 46:47Speaker 04

  First, don't try to replicate stuff.

• 46:49Ed Elson?

  Okay.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  Try to understand what it is that you have unique insight on. So have some self-awareness. Be humble. There's a lot that you're going to get punched in the face over. If you don't have the humility, you won't get through it. And be willing to adapt. But also, yeah, I think get started. If you're not already on the track and you just got this great idea in your head, what's stopping you? If it's financial, how do you get to the buffer? That you need to go thoroughly explore something. And again, if we'd stopped at six months, that would have been it.

• 47:22Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  There would have been no Figma. It took at least nine to 12 months before we really felt like we had the real shot there. So that space, which was afforded to me through the TIL fellowship, I'm very, very grateful for that.

• 47:33Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  That's an example of, for me, how I had that buffer. I also had savings that I could dip into from internships. That's the problem you have to solve first, is to give yourself that buffer. And then I also would just say, there are ironically a lot of ways to go make businesses that make money. People don't think that, but it's actually true. I'm not saying they're all going to be like giant scale, but at least in the small scale, there's a ton.

• 48:01Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  And so be greedy in your selection of a problem to work on in the first place. Do not start something that you can't see yourself working on in 10, 20 years. I have plenty of friends who have done that or are doing that. And it just inevitably it leads to burnout. It leads to them being kind of negative on the world, cynical. And you will lose something of yourself if you find yourself in a place where you just don't yet have the problem that like gets you excited every day to go work on. You've got to find that thing that just gets you up in the morning every day and you're so psyched to work on. And you will, if you project out in the future, that's not going to change. You're still so excited and treat it like a multi-decade journey from the start.

• 48:44Ed Elson?

  Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan, this was awesome.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 48:52Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research associates are Dan Shalana and Kristin O'Donoghue, and our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from Procter Media. We'll see you next month with another founder story.

• 49:17Speaker 06

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• 50:18Speaker 08

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.