Post Earnings with Figma CEO Dylan Field

This is our full interview with Dylan Field, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss Figma’s growth, the rise of Figma Make, the shift from linear coding to a visual-first product loop, why taste becomes the real moat in an agent-driven world, and why design is the ultimate differentiator in 2026. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Let's bring him into the TV then I'll show him. Dylan, how are you doing?

• 0:02Dylan Field?

  Hey, good. How are you guys doing? Oh, salute back.

• 0:04John Coogan?

  Salute. Great to see you. Did you hear the news? America just won in overtime. We beat the Canadians.

• 0:10Dylan Field?

  I did not hear that news.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  In hockey. The Olympics in hockey. Yeah.

• 0:13Dylan Field?

  Oh, wow.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot to celebrate.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  Yes. But give us, but give us the news in your world. How are things going?

• 0:20Dylan Field?

  It's good. We're working hard, having fun. But yeah, we just did our earnings and

• 0:30Dylan Field?

  really strong results. We're super excited. 2025 was just a massive year for us and the fourth quarter was our best quarter yet. So we

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Forty percent year-over-year growth, right?

• 0:42Dylan Field?

  You got it. We did 304, 304 million in revenue.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 0:47Dylan Field?

  And then also, yeah, we, we don't get the whole year. I mean, we just shipped so much, went from four to eight products, launched over 200 features, and most recently, earlier this week, on Tuesday, we launched a Claude Code to Figma Design pathway where you can go from code to the Figma Canvas. And I'm really excited about how we can do this entire round trip.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13Dylan Field?

  And make it possible so that wherever you start, we can give you a way to go anywhere on the Figma platform.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Do you think people are sort of underappreciating that loop because so many of the experiences with agentic coding systems like Claude Code are very toy projects? Like, the first time I used Codex on desktop, I just remade the TVPN homepage to look like, to look like Berkshire Hathaway's website. It's like, I just took a screenshot. I didn't need to do any real work. It was a five-minute thing. And I think a lot of people are amazed by the like toy projects, but then they don't really think about what's happening when there's a design system. This is a large organization. This is an enterprise. This is going to be something that's enduring. And so can you share a little bit more about that flywheel and what it takes to actually put these tools to use in a serious way?

• 2:03Dylan Field?

  You know, I think it's actually really important, even when you're, maybe it's my mindset, I'm a perfectionist.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Dylan Field?

  Even for the toy projects, I want to go figure out like, what is the best expression of my fun toy project?

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:16Dylan Field?

  You know, uh, maybe something like a Bursar, uh, halfway website is a fairly constrained form factor. And so, uh, maybe that's not the best example.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  It's like HTML3.

• 2:28Dylan Field?

  I recently made, for example, uh, my friend was like, I want to go viral in this year and it was a birthday. Like my goal for this year of my life is to go viral.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38Dylan Field?

  Like that, well, that's kind of weird, but cool.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Dylan Field?

  And so I made them a website.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Lot of, lot of space to explore there. There's a lot of ways to go viral. Some, some can be good.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Go on an airplane, yell at people.

• 2:50Dylan Field?

  What I probably should have done is hey, said, hey, go talk to these guys. But, um, instead, uh, I, I made them a website with Figma Make.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:58Dylan Field?

  Um, and, uh, made it, you know, really beautiful and tried a few different directions out. And, um, yeah, you know, very quickly got to, okay, here is sort of, uh, with some custom prompting, like a list of ways for them to go viral, given who they are. And, uh, and then it's all collected together in a nice way. But even for a fun project like that, uh, that's just like, you know, I'm going to send to them, they're going to do whatever they do. I don't know if they're going to look at it more than a few times or even a few times. But I don't know, for me, I want to go explore wide on enterprise. Yeah, you absolutely need to go think deeply about what's going to make the best product experience for your customers.

• 3:39Dylan Field?

  And that's not going to be just a, we're going to go code it up and we're going to do whatever we come up with first. You're going to go actually think through the option space and try to figure out what it is, uh, that you want to go steer towards. That is critical. Um, and if you don't think about that as a system, if you don't actually use all the components you've standardized on, the styles, uh, then you're not going to appear the same way to your customer throughout the entire user journey. And it has to really tie together with brand as well as your product, uh, as well as your point of view and your marketing and your messaging. So it's super important to make it so that you're able to have all that come together.

• 4:21Dylan Field?

  And, uh, just being in code, I think is very linear. It might be running fast, but it might be running towards the wrong direction.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's driving the Figma Make growth? Is that the same archetype as the Figma user? Does it diverge in any interesting ways? What can you share about like how interesting ways people are using Figma Make? And also how you're thinking about growing that product?

• 4:47Dylan Field?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Dylan Field?

  When you look at Figma Make, I think what's really cool is to see how many non-designers are using it.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:56Dylan Field?

  And that is something that we've really picked up on. It's not just designers that are going in and making really amazing prototypes through Figma Design, but also folks are coming in and making these files and prototypes and actually full working web apps and experiences. I mean, 60% of files created in Figma Make are non-designers at this point.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 5:20Dylan Field?

  Which is amazing.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that was a big part of the original Figma thesis was that there were going to be non-designers using this tool.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically, if you did, if you looked at the TAM of the business purely on a, you know, product designer basis, it didn't look like it would be the business today.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  I don't think you ever had a job as a designer, right?

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and yet I've used Figma every day for a decade.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, yeah, that's interesting. How do you think about the growth of that product in terms of adding plugins, features, hosting, deployment, uptime, edge, distribution? Like, that could grow into its whole thing, right?

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or maybe a more simple question is like, where do you want to partner?

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  Or do you want to build yourself?

• 6:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:09Dylan Field?

  I mean, I think that we're going to see tons of partnerships for things like Figma Make, where you need to be able to pull in context from whatever system people use. And then with that, use it to help create and help access data. But more importantly, I think that it's really key that we both create a simple surface that if you're just getting started, you can use. And also, we figure out, how do we make it so that you're able to go above and beyond and go really professional and do things that basically require a skill ladder to traverse?

• 6:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Dylan Field?

  But visual first, that's the thesis, is visual first. But yeah, make users agree 70% quarter over quarter. I mean, we're seeing great adoption. I think people are really resonating with the product and finding all sorts of fun and awesome use cases for it. And I think there's such opportunity, given the way that our active users of Make are also using Figma Design, to bring new services close together, which I think is back to that divergent point, because Make is still too linear for my taste.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  What are, what feature requests are you prioritizing and most thinking about? And what are some maybe more wild feature requests that you may, Figma may not get to?

• 7:37Dylan Field?

  Well, I mean, there's a feature request in this conversation to go do edge computing. I don't think that's gonna happen.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:45Dylan Field?

  You know, all of our, all of the folks out there working on edge computing, you know, come partner with us.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Hardware.

• 7:51Dylan Field?

  We're not in your space, don't worry.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Hardware, I want a hardware device. You mentioned taste, how have you been reacting to the taste discourse? Is taste a new?

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  How many different cycles of taste discourse have happened?

• 8:05John Coogan?

  This is the first time I've ever heard of taste.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  Have happened since Figma was started. I think about companies like Linear, who like, to me exemplify like a taste-driven company. And how many of these cycles were they like, oh, they care about this again, great?

• 8:25Dylan Field?

  I mean, look, like, I think that from the start of Figma, you know, the goal was not just to get everyone doing design or making design software usable by everybody and expanding the market. That wasn't the way we thought about it. It was like, how do we get people started on this journey? Where they can actually go and be more expressive, more creative, and you know, really start to solve problems and, you know, maybe it was a bit of like, projection, but for me at least, I wake up in the morning, I'm like, I want to go create software, I want to go build stuff. And so how do I make it so that anyone with that impulse can just do that? That doesn't mean they're all gonna have like taste and craft and epic design skills.

• 9:08Dylan Field?

  I mean, I think for the rest of my life, I can work on that. And many designers have made that a lifelong pursuit.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, there's something, there's something that's very real where you start on this creative journey and your taste level can be way above your skill level. And it's incredibly frustrating and some people start and they just stop because they feel like, like I have this idea for what I want something to look like or be like, and I'm kind of like trying to make things that match that and I can't. And that's part of why AI in general is like incredibly exciting because it can help you close that gap faster and potentially help you close that gap almost instantly in some circumstances. But you might create a hundred different outputs before getting to the one that actually meets that, you know, level.

• 9:58Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I think that the key thing is that you really have to go wide and explore and then challenge yourself. If you find areas where you're going, hey, actually, I don't feel like I am liking this enough. I'm not happy enough with the solution, then you gotta go keep pushing.

• 10:19Dylan Field?

  But the more you can sample the possibility space and see some things that you like and you don't like, gives you something to react to. And I think that the constant thing is you need to be constantly critiquing and thinking about what is it that you like, you don't like, etc. And you know, people talk about agents all the time. And I'm obsessed with agents too, we all are, right? Agents are cool.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  How many Mac Minis do you have?

• 10:47Dylan Field?

  No comment.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  No comment. He's the reason that Mac minis are sold out.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  There's a line item in the 10K.

• 10:54Dylan Field?

  I swear I am not Claude Baud. But anyway, but yeah, but like, I think that the bigger point back to taste is, you know, if an agent can do it for you, then unless you've got some amazing sophisticated prompting and super unique, like an agent can do it for someone else. And so I think that this discourse on like agents are just gonna do all the things. Well, what is different about your setup than others? You at least have to have something different there in order to not think that you're just gonna get the same thing everyone else is gonna get.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Dylan Field?

  And even then, I don't know if it's gonna get you to stick extraordinary.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, we read a post yesterday that was sort of trying to quantify the background that leads to taste. And he was basically saying that like Steve Jobs was incredibly high IQ, but also had like varied training data in that he had like been homeless and like traveled the world and like got all these like bizarre experiences. And I'm wondering if that like resonates with you, or you think that it's like too difficult to even quantize what makes for a great designer or great taste?

• 12:07Dylan Field?

  You know, I think that the great designers I've met through my life have come from so many different backgrounds. You know, a lot of folks have come through rigorous design training, like they just went through a system.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 12:19Dylan Field?

  And other people, wow, they went and created, you know, their band poster.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Dylan Field?

  And that got them into like graphic design. And then somehow they like showed up at the right house and crashed on someone's couch and then became a product designer and then never went back. You know, it's like everything in between. And there's not really any pattern. Some people have traveled the world and, you know, gone on the meditation retreats. And some people are like as buttoned up as you could get and just totally straight laced. I think that the nice thing about designers is they're so unique. And there's no pattern matching.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about variability of design going forward? Are we?

• 13:05Dylan Field?

  So excited.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Are we at a sort of a narrowing period because most people come with just a generic prompt? Or because I saw your Figma make examples and I was like, I didn't even know that was possible. There were so, but I was like, I would never have gotten there. So is, are there going to be tools to maybe help people? Like be inspired by your background, which has a whole bunch of variation on it. I, I don't know. Yeah, I, I'm just, I'm just wondering because I mean, we were just, we were just talking about a company that it feels like the prompt was like, copy Jordy's website. Maybe it wasn't, maybe it's just coincidence, but it felt like, okay, like there wasn't, uh, there wasn't like a twist here where it was like, oh, just do something completely different.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  That's never been applied to this particular category, at least like steal from a different niche instead of from the one that's like very, very similar. But I'm, I'm wondering how you're, how you're seeing like variation in design, uh, take, take, take hold in, in the world.

• 14:02Dylan Field?

  Yeah, this is the moment, I think, uh, where we're going to see the pendulum go from, I mean, let's look back, right? So we had the flash era, GeoCities, like I'm not saying it was high quality era, but there is a lot of variation.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Dylan Field?

  And then iPhone comes down as like skewmorphism and then like Swiss minimalist design. And nothing wrong with Swiss minimalist design. Uh, like that is a really cool and storied field and lineage. But it is just one part of the greater aesthetic realm. And we can go into such interesting places and try so many interesting patterns on the UX side, too. It's not just UI and the visuals, it's also the structure, the IA, the way that people navigate through these things and the interaction patterns. And, uh, I think there's innovation that's going to be flourishing on all of it.

• 14:57Dylan Field?

  Uh, and I'm just so excited to see the internet get like really dynamic and, um, really visual and, uh, try, people try things that. They just have, we haven't seen in a while and, and things that people haven't seen ever. Because I think that that's what's gonna take to stand out now. There's so much there, like the exponential curve of software is just, it's taking off in a way that, um, it's always been exponential, but now it's vertical. We talked about this before and in order to stand out, I mean, you guys have a show that you're managing to actually break through and get people to be watching this. Like this is not normal, right? Like, but you have worked very hard, very diligently

• 15:42Dylan Field?

  to create the conditions under which you have this audience. Well, this is the thing that everyone has to figure out now is how are you gonna actually get any attention in a world where there's constantly new information? Even beyond America winning the ice hockey match.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, since I've been, I've been thinking about, uh, uh, how Gen AI is impacting marketing. It's allowing, if somebody has like a unique idea and then it used to be like you had like at least a month to kind of like run with that unique idea. Maybe three months if it was like, you know, a specific campaign or something like that. And now somebody can literally fast follow you and your idea almost immediately. So good ideas always get copied, but they get copied even faster now. Another thing that, that I was thinking about when you were talking about kind of the explosion of UI. Uh, John had a, had a post yesterday that he was sort of jokingly making like a BuzzFeed style listicle,

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  like five, five features that could explode your LLM's usage or something like that. Uh, and one of them was like caching and people have had this idea of like uh, generative UIs, UIs that's being made like on the fly. And I feel like we may get, we may like.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Have products where that's happening, right? Like you're in an L M and a UI is being generated. But it will still make sense like if if there's something that happens all the time, like thousands, millions of times a day, billions, like it does not, it really stops making sense to just generate it on the fly. It's like, hey, this happens a lot. Let's like,

• 17:21Dylan Field?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  make the best version of this and we don't need to like.

• 17:23Dylan Field?

  I had a poster on this, actually, exactly this topic. Um, I can send it to you if you want, but the, um, basically the post was about how the length of time that an artifact will exist for is inversely proportional to the likelihood it's going to be generated. And I think this is true across media. So basically, like, if you are, uh, writing a book, unlikely that you're going to have like AI just generate your book.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Amazon booksellers would like the word.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, you just, you can just say you don't read adult romantic fiction. We get it.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I think, I think, I think, continue. Yeah.

• 18:04Dylan Field?

  But like, I think, um, you know, something that's like a ad that will live for, you know, a few hours.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 18:11Dylan Field?

  Like, yeah, probably you're gonna have an agent that's gonna generate that.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The difference is like you're making an asset for to respond to with a meme format to news. Makes a lot of sense to like, put that through a Nano Banana or Chat G P T. But if you're putting, making a billboard, maybe you're still using AI to some degree, but you're going to invest like significantly more time.

• 18:34Dylan Field?

  If you're gonna make a billboard that's gonna cost money and it's gonna be up for a month. And, uh, you know, a lot of people are gonna see it. I think you're gonna have a human touch. We actually with Weavey, uh, now female weave.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Dylan Field?

  We, um, you know, we've been looking a lot at these kinds of use cases and. You know, one thing that just we think about a lot is how you have this first prompt, but then you actually want to go and have it go through a process where you can transform and mutate it and almost like clay that's being shaped, you can treat it like a medium to get to a final output that's amazing. So like in our earnings call, we talked about how Nvidia, which they've actually done this as a public case study, they put the entire making of this keynote online and they used Weeby with it. And what they did was they had all these robots and they needed to basically get to a 20K image of this whole scene. Like,

• 19:29Dylan Field?

  how do you create a 20K image with perfect lighting throughout? I mean, it's really tough. So they had a whole custom pipeline with Weeby they did. And just like the amount of work to go do that at scale of that pixel density is immense. And I thought their workflow was super cool, so I'll chat with you too.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  I love it. Yeah, please send us that. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 19:56Dylan Field?

  Thank you for having me.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Always a good time.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  We were so fired up seeing the results from yesterday. Really a testament to how locked in, locked in the team.

• 20:06Dylan Field?

  The team is amazing.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Dylan Field?

  They're working so hard and they're just an incredible team. I'm so grateful. And I think it's a proof point. I think that we're going to see it over and over again, whether it's the taste discourse, just customers with Figma. But design is a differentiator. Like, figure it out. Go learn design, hire your designer. Otherwise, you're going to have a hard time. That's my last message.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.