Dylan Field on the “Permanent Underclass of Zero Taste”

Figma Co-Founder and CEO Dylan Field joins Sourcery behind-the-scenes at Day 0 of Config 2026, aka the “Coachella for design,” just before 10,000 attendees arrived. The headline going around is that “design is dead” and AI has turned it into a commodity. Field's argument is that the market has this backwards. Anyone can prompt a model into the average, and in a world flooded with templated software the average does not stand out, so taste and a real point of view are what separate the products people actually use from everything else. He also points to a shift in who is on the platform. Engineers now come to Figma to take what they built fast with AI and make it beautiful, and designers are giving the kind of feedback that used to come from developers. Design, in his telling, is expanding, not shrinking. From there we get into vibe mathing and LLM psychosis, why judgment and empathy do not scale with raw IQ the way math does, why he thinks we are still stuck in a prompting age five years after GPT-3, his three losing rounds on Founders Fund's Mafia game, what the Thiel Fellowship actually gave a 20 year old founder, why he is bullish on SpaceX, and whether Elon Musk is right that a truly special product needs no logo. Dylan Field: https://x.com/zoink Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/3xfMDWEVQWY 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Dylan Field, Co-Founder & CEO at Figma (00:57) Day Zero begins: backstage at Config (01:44) The "Coachella for Design" is real (02:35) Why Dylan started Config back in 2020 (03:47) Why "design is dead" is completely wrong (06:11) How Figma turned engineers into designers (06:54) Inside Config before the crowd arrives (07:55) The Config speakers Dylan can't wait to watch (11:34) Inside the exclusive Pantone Lounge (12:00) The one question every designer gets asked (13:16) Getting killed in every single game of Mafia (15:33) How to escape the permanent underclass of zero taste (19:51) Why execution is cheap but taste is everything (22:25) What actually builds a trusted brand (25:51) How AI agents are rewiring company structure (28:54) The AI safety debate happening right now

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

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Figma, Figma, Figma, Figma.

• 0:07Molly O'Shea?

  Heard this was the Coachella for design, but I'm literally seeing that. So there's 10,000 people that are expected to come. What kind of companies are representing this crowd?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Pretty much all of them. It's international, people come from all over the world. Not just tech or software, it's everything you can imagine, any role you can imagine. In terms of software and media, advertising and content. I mean, you know this better than anyone, the potential economy is real. Staying out is hard. I think that it takes not only human steering and human intent, but also it takes a point of view. It is not enough to wear a thinking cap, you have to actually think.

• 0:42Molly O'Shea?

  Elon Musk once said, "If a product is special enough, it needs no logo." What do you think about that?

• 0:57Molly O'Shea?

  Dylan Field.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:00Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Welcome to Config.

• 1:03Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, I've heard this was the Coachella for design, but I'm literally seeing that. It hasn't started yet and it's already packed.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is day zero.

• 1:10Molly O'Shea?

  So what goes on today?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Well, today we got Config Commons, most importantly. And it's a good time for you to get your badge so that we don't have a long line tomorrow. One time we had like an hour keynote delay, it was very embarrassing.

• 1:21Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we have a pre-reg thing now. But also try to give people food, hangout spaces, get them to mingle. I think it's really cool because like people are always reconnecting with like old friends here. But also they have a chance to just meet so many people in the design community. And it's a really special community. And that's not just for Figma, it's just for design more broadly.

• 1:44Molly O'Shea?

  So there's 10,000 people that are expected to come.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:49Molly O'Shea?

  What kind of companies are representing this crowd?

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Pretty much all of them.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  But no, really, I mean, it's international, people come from all over the world. And not just tech or software, it's everything you can imagine. And, you know, any role you can imagine, I see to leadership. We have everybody from Like the chief design officer to the students that are part of our student programs here. So yeah, it's all over the place.

• 2:17Molly O'Shea?

  It's pretty exciting. Okay, we're gonna attempt to walk through the crowd.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Let's go for it.

• 2:22Molly O'Shea?

  You already had some paparazzi on you, so we'll see how this goes.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I think they're coming for you, you know?

• 2:28Molly O'Shea?

  No, they're not, Dylan. This is literally the config, like, Figma conference. Okay, so how many years have you been doing this and why start it in general?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we started in 2020, right before the pandemic. And it was, this is actually our 10th config. Because we've done international configs that are fastballs to the config in SF. But the reason it started, we had basically user groups starting to pop up all around the world. And then from there, as the user groups started to really gain momentum, we wanted some way to bring everyone together. And at first, we're like kicking around ideas like, oh yeah, maybe like a few hundred people. We decided, let's go big, like 800 people. And that sold out instantly. So then from there, we were planning to, right afterwards, like, okay, next time it's gonna be really big. Well, it actually ended up being even bigger because of the pandemic. And so it was like, this is gonna be a remote conference now.

• 3:25Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  We got so lucky the first time because we were able to, three weeks, I think, before the pandemic started in full in the US, the world shut down, had the chance to bring everyone together. And I can't imagine what it would be if it was three weeks earlier.

• 3:44Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, that's insane.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:47Molly O'Shea?

  So the big headline right now, which I think you have pretty much disproven, is that design is dead.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't.

• 3:57Molly O'Shea?

  Why is design not dead?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Look around you. No, I mean, I think that... The weird thing right now is everyone is kind of putting down all the other roles. So like, you know, I'm seeing way too much of engineers saying, I don't know, either PM and designer. And the PM is like, I don't need the engineer or designer. And the designer is going, maybe I don't need the PM or the engineer. And so like, why is that happening? And I think that we're in a temporary phase of people really, you know, getting excited about what they can do with AI.

• 4:36Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  But not yet realizing all the limitations that they have. And hey, and yeah, so I think that there's like, it's truly exciting what you can do, but also the value of a team is really important. And I think we're hitting a line here.

• 4:56Molly O'Shea?

  We got stuck, we're in a line. What is, is this for, is this for food?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:02Molly O'Shea?

  I heard that you guys, not to deviate too much, but I heard you guys are going to sell out of merch in like five seconds.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  I hope not, hopefully it lasts a little longer. But the, but yeah, so I think it's like very lonely, the idea that you're just going to work alone on everything forever. And I think that, you know, if you want to build scalable, real systems, explore broadly, build the right thing, not just like something fast. Then I think it's really important to lean into design, not just from a visual and aesthetic standpoint, but also from a user experience standpoint, from like understanding the user, understanding the culture around you. Like, design is so much more than visuals and aesthetic.

• 5:43Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  That's just the tip of the iceberg. But what I think is really promising is how I'm seeing so many engineers now that are, I hope our cameraman did not trip.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  We're seeing so many engineers now just get interested in Figma. And as that happens, they're starting to really pick it up because you go build something really fast, that's awesome, but then you're like, okay, can I like actually now make it great?

• 6:11Molly O'Shea?

  Right, I mean, what I thought was interesting is like, Figma not only unlocked design for just normal people who like just didn't really know how to design anything, but your software is like really easy to use, it's very intuitive, but now you're involving code into it. And so now engineers are literally coding design.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yep, and I think that the

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Aspects of like what we're launching tomorrow will be even more in that direction.

• 6:40Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  So I'm really excited about that. Go for it. Thank you.

• 6:44Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so now we're inside, so it'll be a little calmer.

• 6:49Molly O'Shea?

  Now we're inside. Let's do a little 360 here. Come around.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  This is the emptiest it'll be.

• 6:54Molly O'Shea?

  So how is it all set up? Where do people really mingle and all that kind of stuff?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  The mingling will occur everywhere, but downstairs is gonna be more like main stage keynote. And that's like where there's a lot of activations and area to explore.

• 7:09Molly O'Shea?

  Is that your favorite part?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  The main stage keynote?

• 7:11Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  I don't usually remember it, so once I get past it, then I'm like...

• 7:17Molly O'Shea?

  Do you blackout?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a little bit of a blackout experience.

• 7:19Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you can watch it later online and then you're like, oh, I said what?

• 7:23Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I was talking to Michael about this before, but I was like watching all of the previous config videos and I was like, shit, this is really cool.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Well, the content that we're doing is so...

• 7:33Molly O'Shea?

  You're getting so much.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the content on all the tracks are amazing and we've had such incredible speakers and like at legendary times too.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  I, actually one of my favorite ones was Jesper from TH Engineering. I don't know if you saw that one?

• 7:48Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  I got to interview him and yeah, he is a character. Definitely watch that one later.

• 7:54Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:55Molly O'Shea?

  Are there any speakers this year you're excited about?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  So, so many speakers that I'm excited about, but two that I'm like off the wall excited about. One is Holly Herndon. She's a total visionary artist who I think people don't appreciate like how far ahead she sees things. You know, she was into very specific like quirky ways of using NFTs or they weren't called it then. Early on, she open sourced her voice with AI early on. You know, this is back in like 2021 or something, 2020. I mean, it's just like the time scale that she's operating on is different than the rest of us.

• 8:35Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Grant Sanderson, 3blue1brown on YouTube, is another person that I think will give a great talk and I can't wait to watch it. He's someone that I've been following for a long time. I'm lucky to call a friend. And he does these explainer videos for math that are just incredible. And really uses graphics and design to be really craft forward in his explanations. And he puts so much care into them and just has been a teacher for so many.

• 9:07Molly O'Shea?

  Is this why you're vibe mathing?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  That's just for fun.

• 9:11Molly O'Shea?

  What does that mean?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  It's just a form of LM psychosis.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Until it's not, but we'll see. I think that the models are really decent at math, like pure math. And it's a bit of an antidote to the non-verifiable domains that I'm usually in. So for Figma, I mean, it's all vibes, right? Like, you're trying to figure out.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's very clear, okay, like literally you didn't center the div, like learn to center divs AI. But I think more often, you know, it's more like, okay, well, actually, you're giving a lot of styles that are very similar here. You're not as broad in your range as you could be if an LM provider is asking us for feedback or we're trying to steer it. And the evals were running on stuff we're doing, stuff others are doing. Like, a lot of it is inherently non-verifiable. It's like, gotta be human judged at the end of the day. And you can set up more automatic methods for that, but you still have that human intent. Whereas formal domains like math, I mean, that's as formal as it gets if you set up

• 10:20Speaker 01

  the formal systems correctly, which are really easy to mess up. And I think it's kind of just a nice antidote and contrast to like Figma experience.

• 10:28Molly O'Shea?

  I love that. It's very unexpected.

• 10:33Molly O'Shea?

  So you're talking about some of the speakers. Were there anybody else that you're excited about?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  So many, I think that, well, I'm in keynote brain right now.

• 10:41Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  And I think the keynote will be really awesome. So we're gonna have a bunch of figmates that are showing just incredible stuff.

• 10:49Molly O'Shea?

  I know, I love that. It's like we were, we started by the big sign and then all of a sudden you got swarmed.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Oh, well, those are all people I see all the time. Yeah, we have a great team. Actually, Ian, who you met. I was in a class in, it's my senior year of high school. We were in a real analysis class together and that's where I first met him. And then he randomly applied to Figma at some point and didn't even tell me. I was like, why didn't you tell me? And I found out, as soon as I found out, I'm like, this is the smartest guy like I've ever, one of the smartest people I've ever met. Like, please, can we get him in?

• 11:21Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  He still went through the full loop, of course.

• 11:22Molly O'Shea?

  Shout out to Ian.

• 11:25Molly O'Shea?

  Alright, so we're gonna head over and sit down for the Pantone Lounge.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 11:30Molly O'Shea?

  It's super exclusive. There's a...

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Just two of us.

• 11:33Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Alright, Dylan Field, we are in the Pantone Lounge.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  We're in the Pantone Lounge, we made it through.

• 11:39Molly O'Shea?

  We made it through the crazy crowd who was screaming your name and taking pictures.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Maybe exaggerated a little bit.

• 11:46Molly O'Shea?

  I'm not exaggerating.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  It's a great group out there, so I'm glad you got to be there.

• 11:49Molly O'Shea?

  So how did you convince all of them, or their bosses, that they should take the day off?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I think if you convince them and their bosses to come, it helps. So that's more of, I think, what's happening.

• 12:01Molly O'Shea?

  So they're all having a lot of fun. Because we're in the Pantone Lounge, I want to ask you a very pressing question.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:09Molly O'Shea?

  What is your favorite color?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Purple.

• 12:12Molly O'Shea?

  I'm not gonna ask about ref number, purple?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a purple guy, but purple has a broad range. And so it's very hard to define exactly where in purple, I kinda like the range. You know, and sometimes it's like more of a reddish purple, something more bluish. But yeah, I also think it's amazing when people are great at color theory, I am not.

• 12:34Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  I know enough to know that I'm not amazing at color theory, but I have the utmost respect for those that are.

• 12:42Molly O'Shea?

  You haven't gotten your color waves checked, you know that's like a thing too?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Like if I'm, what, tetrachromatic or something like that?

• 12:49Molly O'Shea?

  Like if you're, like it's a, I think it's like a Korean thing where they like color theory you and like see what your aura is and what colors you should be wearing.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Are yours?

• 12:58Molly O'Shea?

  No, I don't think so.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  But no, I mean, I think that composition and color, it's like a real skill. And a bunch of people really try and train for this and some people have got it to the degree that others don't, and it's amazing when you find them.

• 13:16Molly O'Shea?

  We're gonna take it even more serious, okay? You were recently on Mafia.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:23Molly O'Shea?

  You made it to game three, you're now the star of the show. Dylan, how does it feel to be killed on the first try?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  To be specific, so there's game one where I was killed by the Mafia the first night, game two where I was the Mafia, and definitely did not play my best game, I'll be real. And then game three, made a decent argument, but not my best work either, and got killed by the Village first night. Uh, it's yeah, not the best showing, but it was a lot of fun.

• 13:53Molly O'Shea?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Uh, and I was rewatching the third episode and I think the star is actually Palmer.

• 13:59Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Until the very end, when he smirks, sorry spoilers for your listeners. Uh, but at the very end, he kind of smirks when he's like almost one. That was the first time I was going, oh, I would have figured it out. The other two, I would have figured it out because they had tells. The Palmer, there was like nothing. He was just the same energy throughout, so I was pretty wowed watching it.

• 14:22Molly O'Shea?

  What have you learned about human psychology from that?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Uh, from Mafia? I, I, I think there's not much to learn about human psychology from Mafia. Um, I've played a decent amount of Mafia or Werewolf, you know, same game. People have religious wars around what to call it. Uh, but yeah, I think that, um, you know, probably that people's attention spans are short, that you can diverge and kind of divert conversation. Um, at some point I stopped playing the game, actually. Uh, because I figured out that it was a lose lose. Either you actually do well and you've like lost because people afterwards oftentimes are like, how could you? I trusted you. Just like, I feel terrible.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Or you've like literally lost like I did those games. Um, and so I, I prefer to moderate and definitely on a practice, but it's a fun one.

• 15:20Molly O'Shea?

  It's super fun.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  And it was really cool that Sana, uh, did that. I think he's had that vision for a long time and I just give him all the credit for like making it happen that way.

• 15:30Molly O'Shea?

  Totally.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  I think more people gotta do that. They just gotta take a big risk and a big swing and just go for it.

• 15:34Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, I think that, that'll be kind of like a through line of most of our conversation because there's like so many attempts right now of like building a brand in the abyss of like templated AI. Literally everywhere. And so whether it's like comms, marketing, media, brand, product, like we're kind of like stuck in this like bell curve of the middle.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:56Molly O'Shea?

  And so how should people, especially with Figma, like escape what I kind of call like the permanent underclass of zero taste?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a perfect like meme fusion there.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  We'll have to steal it for our marketing. I think, basically, first of all, there's a taste and there's the distribution comment. They're very separate.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I think that first, it's important to acknowledge, if you just use an LM for everything and have it literally tell you how it wants to go build a thing, how to go design a thing, you're gonna get something that it wants to give you. And it's kind of diverged to that point from whatever's in your head to however it processed it. I do think through workflows, we have something called Figma weave, for example, where you can take model outputs and you can pass them through a workflow and really steer it along the way. And that can get you closer to, I think, non-terministic generative workflows that get closer to intent and are systematic. But in general, yeah, people that are just like, "Yeah, design me the thing," you're

• 17:08Speaker 01

  gonna get the average and it's not going to stand out. And in a world where there's just more than ever in terms of software and media and advertising and content, I mean, you know this better than anyone, the tension economy is real.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Staying out's hard. And I think that it takes not only human steering and human intent, but also it takes a point of view. And I think that is something that people fall down on all the time, because it's kind of scary to have a point of view. It's like a real point of view and to be bold and to take a risk. And so I'm hopeful, and actually I think there's good early signs of this everywhere right now, that folks are already internalizing this, even if they can't speak about it in the same words yet. And they're already kind of from the market, teaching them, realizing they have to go take these bolder bets, bigger swings.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  And as they do that, I think they're going to really unlock just this explosion of creativity. And we're gonna see so many things tried that haven't been tried before. And so that's something that I cannot wait for.

• 18:26Speaker 01

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• 18:32Molly O'Shea?

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• 19:16Molly O'Shea?

  That's B R E X dot com slash S O U R C E R Y. Bye. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real-world judgment. That's why companies like Nvidia, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit turing.com/sourcery. There was a tweet that you posted retweeting a graph of like number of apps

• 20:00Molly O'Shea?

  that are being released and then the actual usage of those apps. We actually just like, I talked about that with Mark Pincus. He's super product guy. He definitely pays attention to that. But in that point, you were saying execution is cheap, but design and creativity are actually very, very important and separates the wheat from the chaff. But in terms of that, like, what kind of risks should people be taking? Like, what do you see is kind of like overlooked right now?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  I think so much is overlooked. I mean, everything from like, what problem are you even tackling? To how do you brand? What positions do you take as a company? How do you connect with people? And what emotions are you trying to bring through your brand and marketing? But also through the application and software? And then for the software side, I think, you know, I'm just eager to see not only more interaction patterns tried, but really folks understanding like, what is the core thing that people need? And pushing all the way to get there? It's so much easier to apply patterns that you've already seen.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  But I think that there's just like this huge unexplored space out there of stuff that, you know, it takes a long time to get right. And that is a risk because you might not actually hit. But if you can actually go all the way and think through the system really well, hold it in your head and hold it in your team's head, which is, you know, even harder

• 21:35Speaker 01

  to communicate it, like you kind of have to memify it inside your company sometimes. But if you can do that, and you can come up with like more novel ways for people to interact with systems, that's where I think, you know, it'll really be amazing. And the example is, I'm still shocked that we're in a prompting age. Like, it's been what, five years since GPT-3 now?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  I think it's 2021, June 2021, GPT-3?

• 22:04Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I think so. And

• 22:07Molly O'Shea?

  That's crazy.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like, we're still prompting away.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  There are other ways to explore latent space. I just think that the interfaces for how you interact with models will evolve so much. And to the degree that models are part of software, we will see a ton of exploration there.

• 22:26Molly O'Shea?

  When we're talking about brand and personality and forming trust, AI has really stopped a lot of trust in technology and just kind of like mainstream media. It's like, I think it's like literally worse than ICE. So what builds a trusted brand?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Well, AI, first of all, I would say is really bimodal case, right? Because you've got folks that are literally, in the case of, you know, a Foro or Claude, like, in love with the model. And I don't just mean like they really like its outputs. Like, they have affection for the model. I would say that's trust. And then you've got people that are like, it could take my job. I'm listening to things people are saying about how it's going to destroy the world or the economy or whatever, and doom. And so, that is, couldn't be further apart. Like, the super fans versus the super detractors. But in terms of just generally, brand, I think it's consistency over time.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  And how do you actually show up in a way that people can expect, can model in their heads? And, you know, keep living your values, keep showing up the right way, and really doing things with the customer's interest at heart.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  If you're not doing that, what are you doing?

• 23:53Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  So, I also go back to a line that Tim O'Reilly would always say. My first internship professionally was like at O'Reilly Media, and I loved it there. They were amazing to me, and I'm so grateful to them. Tim O'Reilly would always talk about, "Create more value than you capture." And I think that is extremely important. And when you're perceiving, you know, singletons for AI, folks that, you know, you perceive might want to become monoliths, and they're not saying that they're not going to want to do that. There's going to kind of be like a black hole and suck it all up, which I'm sure that that's not going to be what ends up happening.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  I think that they're all going to get a lot smarter than that. And I think most don't even want to do that in the first place. But, yeah.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  You know, the definition of a platform is that you're creating even more value outside of the platform than you are from the platform itself. This is also the Microsoft definition. It's like, what's the GDP of everything created on Windows? Back when, you know, Windows was the top priority of Microsoft. They wanted that sort of GDP of stuff built on Windows to be greater than the revenue of their Windows line. And I think that's a really special way to think about ecosystem. And yeah, overall, the more that I think we lean into that kind of mindset as an industry and AI companies are vocal about that and show that, then I think people have more trust.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  But the doomerism has to stop as well, and it has to stop with good rationale.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  You know, we have to come up with the best arguments we can for not what can go wrong, but how we're gonna go address it and paint an optimistic future vision for humanity.

• 25:52Molly O'Shea?

  Right. I've been seeing a shift in sentiment towards productivity, not job loss. And so while like, I guess it's weird, but kind of the new North Star is to have more agents than employees, because they'll help equip your employees and you'll run faster, you'll be able to do more as an organization, you can be more on the offensive side, which I think you and Figma have been doing really well. And then, I mean, you could also see this with like, figure AI, like, they now have more humanoid robots at their office than employees. Obviously, they're gonna sell them, but still.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a little different.

• 26:25Molly O'Shea?

  It's a little bit different, but I'm curious, from your standpoint, as the proliferation of AI agents increase, like, how does that change the internal dynamics of software and how you're selling and the products you're creating and all that?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  I think that there's a bunch of ways this could play out, and so we'll have to see. But. Overall, first, I think it's not even clear how do you define the unit of an agent? Yeah. So that's kind of a difficult one. But yeah, in general, it should be the case that there's great services that you offer if folks are trying to do inference and use AI with your software and your platform. That should result in like value to the customer. And it should be the case that that's driven, I think, by humans.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Overall, I think that humans being the loop will be the way that you steer towards the best outcomes. And I think that all my experience with the AI so far have shown that on formal domains, things that are verifiable, it can get to amazing outcomes with enough IQ points. And yet judgment is like somehow not purely correlated with just adding IQ points to the model. Design certainly does not seem to be correlated with adding IQ points to the model. These seem to be other capabilities that you have to figure out how to train.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  And judgment, I'm really curious about in particular. Because yeah, just intuitively, you know, the folks that are really good at strategy, like I have not even found with humans, the common characteristic of how to go find them. And design, I think, you know, how do you teach a model true empathy for a user? How do you make it so that they can not just, you know, read a transcript of a user interview, but understand the relationships that user has? The inflections in their voice when they're talking about the problems they have and how it matters?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And connect that with like their world and actually have that empathy for their worldview and where they're coming from to build for them? I think it's really hard.

• 28:56Molly O'Shea?

  What is the biggest question right now that people should be asking?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Actually, I think that, you know, for recording this on Tuesday, maybe I haven't looked at the news this morning, maybe it's already a different question. But as of right now, we've got a live situation with US government in Thropic, where they're discussing a jailbreak. I'm not even sure if jailbreak's the right word, but the use case they're concerned about seems important. But I would say that jailbreaking is something that is understudied. And I actually think that there needs to be a kind of different posture towards trying to get people to jailbreak models

• 29:44Speaker 01

  in order to battle test them, the same way that we do with HackerOne. There are programs that are being run by the labs, of course, but I think that there needs to be way more incentive out there to do that. And we need to find what it means. Jailbreaks are very wide in terms of the spectrum of what they do. You know, and I don't think we can have a conversation like this without even defining what a jailbreak is. So that's one question I would say, is what's a jailbreak?

• 30:13Molly O'Shea?

  You seem to be doing some jailbreaking yourself, so...

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I don't know what is a jailbreak. So, no, I mean, I think that there's a period of time where I enjoyed just like trying to figure out how models worked, reasoned from the outside end. I'm more enjoying now, just like with open weight models, looking at interpretability research and whatnot, when you can actually get access to compute for that. It's pretty fun. But...

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Overall, I think, you know, it's, I mean, just, just talking with models long enough leads to states that you could call a jailbreak for basically a remodel.

• 31:00Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  But again, what is jailbreak? It's not like you have to do some fancy JSON thing. Like, that's what people like to popularize it online with, but, I mean, you can just talk to them and ask them questions.

• 31:13Molly O'Shea?

  Are you token maxing?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  I, I think that, um, yes and no, like, I, I try to have, uh, for stuff that I'm working on, like, oftentimes, I'm trying to get the agent running longer, um, as long as it's got a defined goal. But, yeah, I mean, I could be running like an agent swarm or something, and I'm not doing that. We have plenty of people at Figma that are and are getting great results, though, and it's amazing how much we can do there when you have folks that really understand the infrastructure that they're trying to build. And they go and, uh, you know, they're already 10x, and they can 10x themselves again by having the agents really, uh, break up tasks properly.

• 31:59Molly O'Shea?

  So, one thing that was really interesting, I had an interview with Daniel Strackman from, uh, previous, from Teal Fellowship, like, maybe a year ago now. And the one thing-

• 32:11Speaker 01

  She's wonderful, by the way.

• 32:12Molly O'Shea?

  She's so cool. That was a really fun interview. The one thing that she brought up, and she named you, I think, a couple of times in the interview, but you were an early Teal Fellow. She said that you were hyperflu性的. I mean, even you talking about LLMs right now and like AI, like, you're definitely more in the weeds than I think common folk. So, like, why, why do you think it's important to have that trait of, like, deep curiosity and hyperfluency? And how did that develop?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  I just think the world's, like, amazing and, uh- Yeah, I don't know. I kind of just look at anything and I'm pretty much interested in it. So I don't have a great answer, but definitely like if you're not always learning or finding a way to learn from any conversation, anything that you can encounter, it's like, well, why not? You know, there's just so much interesting stuff out there in the world. And so, yeah, I feel like we get such limited time on earth, like let's make the most of it and try to learn, connect the dots and figure out how to create some frameworks around what's happening and then

• 33:20Speaker 01

  break them, you know, it's just, just like a great mystery that we're alive and what's out there.

• 33:26Molly O'Shea?

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• 34:10Molly O'Shea?

  stock is included. And before you invest, you can even back test your idea against the S and P 500. So you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond generated assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com slash sorcery, paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone, anywhere, get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com slash sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash sorcery.

• 34:55Molly O'Shea?

  What did you learn the most while you were a Teal fellow? What was that like?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  It was.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  A really special experience overall. I was the second year of the Teal fellowship, so 2012. Or sorry, rather, I started, yeah, I started in 2012. And it's a two-year fellowship, so the class I was with, I got to know well, and they're doing amazing stuff, and still some of them are really dear friends. And there's also folks from the first class, too, who have stayed in my life as close friends and people who have been mentors and people I've looked to for advice on all sorts of things. You know, the amount of learning from that group, off the charts.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  But also, I think it's just so lonely to start a company when you're younger. Like, I was doing an internship at Flipboard before the Teal fellowship. And at Flipboard, it was awesome. My coworkers were great. I hung out with them, but they were like in their 30s, and I was 20. Yeah. And just, you know, my friends hadn't graduated yet. I grew up in the Bay Area, but my friends in the North Bay, they were doing their own thing, and it kind of was further to go. The chance to just be with this group of people and socialize with them, like, for me, was very important. Some people probably don't need that, but, I don't know, like, once a week, seeing a human.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  And other than my co-founder, you know, who I loved dearly, but, you know, his preference on the weekend was to write, work on his compiler project. That's how he unwound. You know, he was special, special brain, a total genius. But yeah, for me, that was like the biggest value that I did not even expect from that program. A hundred K over two years, amazing. But the community was just even more special. We're gonna go for

• 36:55Molly O'Shea?

  For a curve ball right now.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:57Molly O'Shea?

  I know all of that is super fun, but we have this urgent question from Elad Gil.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:03Molly O'Shea?

  Or Elad. I don't know how you like to pronounce it.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a great controversy itself.

• 37:09Molly O'Shea?

  It really is. I started my interview with it and I'm pretty sure I mispronounced it both times. Like, I guess there's like four ways to pronounce it.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Accepting is the good news.

• 37:19Molly O'Shea?

  So, are you ready for this?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 37:23Molly O'Shea?

  I like laughing and I haven't even said it yet. Okay, um, composure.

• 37:30Molly O'Shea?

  Dylan, how can a man who is so skinny live a life so fat?

• 37:41Molly O'Shea?

  P H A T, fat.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  With great mentorship from Elad Gil.

• 37:51Molly O'Shea?

  What sparked that question?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  What is the question? I don't know what that means.

• 37:54Molly O'Shea?

  I genuinely don't know, but he sent it, so I asked it.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I, I think it's a compliment. I'm gonna take it as a compliment.

• 38:01Molly O'Shea?

  I think you're living well.

• 38:05Molly O'Shea?

  I love that. Okay. And then we have some from Christian Garrett too.

• 38:12Molly O'Shea?

  Well, these aren't as, no offense, Christian, these aren't as fun as that one.

• 38:17Molly O'Shea?

  So, um, Sigma is on a tear. Our last earnings really proved it. We talked about this with Mark Pincus too. What are people missing about AI and enterprise software?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  I think that, first of all, like there's, you know, markets snap to narratives. Right now, the narrative seems to be like software is, you know, kaput.

• 38:41Molly O'Shea?

  Good time to buy, non-investment advice.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  But I think that a lot of software will do just fine, or actually even amazing.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  And since like, what are the properties of that software? Well, I think that network effects matter. I think network effects can show up not just in social and human situations, but all, you know, in collaboration or social networks, but also in like marketplace liquidity. That is its own network effect. I think the sort of distribution of customer base matters.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  And I would say that boring software is not to be undercounted, or things that people would call boring. I wouldn't call it boring, but probably there are just so many things that you can find where the folks who are living the problem every day don't have that default impulse to go build software for it. And yet it's a huge problem. And finally, I would say that like the data liquidity that you can establish and how that can create context, how that context can create capability in a system, that is its own flywheel. And if you get that flywheel right, I think it's very value accreting to the customer

• 40:01Speaker 01

  in a way that can be extremely useful. So that's a lot of the stuff that I'm thinking about.

• 40:08Molly O'Shea?

  And everyone is your customer.

• 40:11Molly O'Shea?

  That's what I've learned.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  I'm not sure everyone, but we were lucky to have a lot of great software companies and companies around the world using Sigma.

• 40:19Molly O'Shea?

  So let's talk about the evolution a little bit. This is another one of Christian's questions, but Sigma evolved to platform from design to code to development and now multi-product expansion. So where's a platform going next?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  I think both there's the impulse and the like quest of how do you take these surfaces and bring them all together? When you are, we mourned AI and generation. There's a huge opportunity in doing that in one place and not having to think about where do I start? And so that's something that I've always wanted to accomplish with Figma. It's extremely hard. And then there's also the question of like, how broad can you go in terms of serving all the needs of a designer? Which are growing and vast. I mean, designers, you know, is the feedback we used to get from developers now. And so I think that if we could kind of do both of those and find ways to help people create their own tools

• 41:17Speaker 01

  on the platform, share them with their team and get value out of that, that'll be really awesome.

• 41:23Molly O'Shea?

  Lastly.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:25Molly O'Shea?

  Well, not really lastly, but from Christian, why are you so bullish on SpaceX?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Let's talk about SpaceX in the pantomime.

• 41:34Molly O'Shea?

  Is SpaceX in the room with us right now?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Are they?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I think there's tons to be seen on, you know, AI and their cloud business, I guess. I really don't know how to read that, so let me just like remove all that for a moment. The XAI part of it. And instead just talk about the non-XAI part of it. I mean SpaceX is a great example of a company where you've got amazing talent who are, I think, really missionary.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And that talent, you know, goes and quests and conquers after challenge, after challenge, after challenge. And I think that people lack imagination when it comes to what they can do on Earth and also what they can do in the stars and how important space can be in the long term. And I think that there's many categories that folks don't think of them going into, which they will go into probably. And I, I believe it could be a very, very important company, you know, for the century or the next. So I hope Figma can follow too.

• 42:46Molly O'Shea?

  Elon Musk once said, "If a product is special enough, it needs no logo." What do you think about that?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  I actually think that that's right, but also if the product is that special, then I think it's probably got enough brand characteristics that it kind of functions as a logo. And so, for example, a Tesla car. Like, can you take the Tesla logo off a Tesla car? Sure, but like you probably still know it's a Tesla.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  And if you don't, that's a problem for Tesla. So, and also they have a logo.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  But, yeah, I think that overall, brand systems, you can do a lot with them. And there are many ways that brands can show up to people, or it was just a part of it.

• 43:29Molly O'Shea?

  As we close out, Sorcery is proud to be sponsored by Brex, and they're all about performance and spending smarter, moving faster as a startup or a large enterprise. I think performance really comes down to who you surround yourself with, and like who you get inspired by, maybe who's mentored you along the way. Are there anybody in your circle or like on your career path of building out Figma that's really inspired you?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  So many. How long do we have? I mean, look, like, there are people that have mentored me and have no idea, because it's from before Figma times, and maybe we didn't interact as much during the building of Figma, but like there are voices in my head. You know, so folks from Riley, LinkedIn, you know, Microsoft Research. I think that during Figma, the folks that I've got on the board have been incredible. And I'm very thankful for them, but also our employees. You know, our first manager hire, Shou, Director of Engineering at the time, he really taught me management. I didn't know anything. I was an intern before Figma.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  And just in general, I mean, we've had interns that have taught me stuff. We've had folks from anywhere in the org that I think you can learn from. And also the community, and just the folks that have surrounded us with great feedback. I mean, I'm so grateful early on, but today as well, for the design. designers have sat down with me and given me that gift of feedback. We are very lucky as a design company to have designers as users and customers. Because they are trained to give good feedback.

• 45:07Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  So the feedback we get is so much better than like your average feedback that a company gets. And I never take that for granted and I always count it as a blessing. But yeah, I look for mentorship everywhere and I'm very, very grateful for it.

• 45:22Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. I think Michael mentioned that you really like Alan.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Alan Kay is awesome and there's many other HCI and sort of design thinkers that I also think are incredible, looking back, but also I think that we need to get back to the sort of work that was done, you know, back by, you know, sort of sixties through eighties timeframe. In terms of just what are the fundamental ways to think about using a computer in the first place? And what are the possibilities? I think the only place we're seeing it right now is kind of in VR. Where it's really seen in a gaming context, but there are new interaction paradigms being created there.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  And that can exist in software too, like probably the last big one that people will reference, if you just look for the consensus opinion, is pull to refresh. Like, we can go further. And if you look at an iPad, like, why is it a big iPhone? You know, I think that there's so much more you can do with touch technology, but also with just more pervasive computing. And also as you go beyond that into the world of AI and, you know, different devices, different form factors. I think the future of design and interactivity is really gonna be fun.

• 46:52Molly O'Shea?

  Like snap specs.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  We'll see. Yeah.

• 46:57Molly O'Shea?

  Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Dylan.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 46:59Molly O'Shea?

  I know you're so busy right now. There's 10,000 people waiting to come in the doors.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  This is the, I'm just, we'll see it, but it's a, it's a lot of fun and I'm excited for the config. And I'm thankful that you're here.

• 47:09Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Enjoy.

• 47:09Molly O'Shea?

  Appreciate it. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.