Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: Figma Founder, Dylan Field on How Leadership Needs To Evolve with Scale, The Transition from Application to Platform & The Future of Remote Work, Education and Digital Spaces About this episode Dylan Field is the Founder & CEO @ Figma, the company that helps teams create, test, and ship better designs from start to finish and is one of 2020's fastest-growing companies. To date, Dylan has raised over $132M with Figma from some of the best including Sequoia, a16z, Index, Greylock, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins. Figma's latest round valued them at a reported $2Bn. Prior to founding Figma, Dylan enjoyed internships at Flipboard, LinkedIn and O'Reilly Media. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Dylan made his way from an internship at O'Reilly Media and a Thiel Fellowship to founding Figma, one of the fastest-growing unicorns? 2.) How does Dylan feel about the future of education? What core questions do students need to ask before entering? How does Dylan assess the impact of the Thiel Fellowship today? Why does Dylan believe that everyone should be an intern? What did he take from that experience? 3.) How would Dylan describe his leadership style today? How has it changed over time? How did he get past micro-managing in the early days and learn to delegate? How does Dylan think about insecurity and vulnerability as a young leader today? 4.) What does Dylan foresee as the biggest challenges in Figma's transition from application to platform? How does Dylan evaluate the success of the Figma plugin ecosystem? How does Dylan think about the right cadence to roll out new products? How does Dylan think about catering to power users vs catering to the standard everyday user? 5.) What have been the most significant impacts of COVID for Figma? Why did Dylan choose to adopt a hybrid model for Figma in terms of working styles moving forward? What have been Dylan's biggest lessons of what it takes to attract the very best talent? What works? What does not? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode Dylan’s Favourite Book: Snow Crash As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Harry Stebbings? Welcome back. This is the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, following on from our episode last week with Hopin, I wanted to stay on the theme of interviewing the founders of the fastest growing companies in the world. And one growing faster than ever before is Figma. And I'm so thrilled to welcome back to the hot seat Dylan Field, founder and CEO at Figma, the company that helps teams create, test and ship better designs from start to finish, and is one of 2020's fastest growing companies. To date, Dylan has raised over $132 million in financing with Figma from some of the very best in the business, including Sequoia, Andreessen, Index, Greylock, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins, just to name a few. And Figma's latest round valued them at a reported $2 billion.
0:41 Harry Stebbings? Prior to founding Figma though, Dylan also enjoyed internships at Flipboard, LinkedIn and O'Reilly Media. And this scheduled state was such a team effort, so I want to say huge thank you to Peter Levine, Mamoon Hamid, Andrew Reid, Dan Rose, Gokul Rajaram and many more fantastic people for some really, really great suggestions. I really do appreciate that. But before we move into the show today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million.
1:22 Harry Stebbings? Check out hellosign.com/20vc to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And speaking of beautiful products there, and honestly, cutting the crap, there are a few products I truly could not live without and use 10 plus times a day. Affinity, it's a home screen app for me. And not just me, it's the number one venture capital CRM, allowing you to manage deal flow so much more efficiently, track pipeline using Smartlist or Kanban style board view, which is actually my favorite. And their alliances feature means it connects to your network, so you can always see who knows the person that you want that intro to. It's not just me that loves it though. Kleiner Perkins, Radpoint, DCM, Techstars, we all use and love it. So head over to affinity.co to check it out today.
2:07 Harry Stebbings? And finally, if Affinity recognized the importance of People, so does Zoom and Zoom realizes communication is just everything and you really need to build that relationship and there's nothing like meeting face to face and there's nothing like Zoom to make that happen. Zoom lets you connect and do business across town or around the world. Zoom ties together all of your communication needs into one easy platform for video conferencing, for phone calls, group chat, webinars and your conference rooms and connect easily from anywhere, your mobile phone, your laptop or your conference room. Zoom is how business gets done. Get your free account at zoom.com today. Meet happy with Zoom. I'm now very, very excited to hand over though to Dylan Field, founder and CEO at Figma.
2:53 Speaker 01 You have now arrived at your destination.
2:56 Harry Stebbings? Dylan, my friend, it is so good to have you back on the show for a very special round two. So thank you so much for joining me today.
3:01 Speaker 02 Harry, thank you for having me back. Good to see you.
3:03 Harry Stebbings? It's so good to see you again, but I do want to start on for those that maybe missed our first episode. How did you make your way into the world of startups and how did you come to found the game changer that is Figma?
3:11 Speaker 02 So I started off as an intern and my first internship was at O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly, if you don't know it, is a start off as a textbook publisher, but they're also do events, they do online learning and all sorts of other things. And they're headquartered in Sebastopol, California, which is about a half an hour away from where I grew up, which is near Petaluma, California, Pen Grove, if you know where that is. And O'Reilly was amazing to me. I mean, I started off as sort of a marketing, online content intern, let me do design, development, all sorts of things. And I also got to spend time at food camp, which stands for friends of O'Reilly, but it's kind of a pun. And the pun refers to the foo and bar variables people use in programming, which are kind of like placeholders. And through that got to meet a lot of the tech community and got really inspired about entrepreneurship and startups. And then from there, I got to work at a startup a summer after high school. I went to then to work at Microsoft Research as a research assistant to Dana
3:54 Speaker 02 Boyd, which was a really cool experience. She's one of the most smartest, most thoughtful people I've ever met. Got to work as an intern at LinkedIn on the data science team there. And that was actually one of my first real exposures design. I've been interested in design for a long time, but a designer named Micah Alpern actually took me in his way. And I remember we had these kind of like late night conversations where we talked about various design challenges at LinkedIn. And he was somebody who was just a nice guy. Like he didn't get anything out of it. The team didn't get anything out of it. He was just trying to be nice. He ordered pizza and talked about design stuff. And I got to work as an intern at Flipboard after that, as a software engineering intern. And then from there, went back to Brown for semester, went back to Flipboard for a six point hundred chip, as a design and product intern at Flipboard, and then went and started Figma.
4:27 Harry Stebbings? Got it. I mean, it's always great to hear stories like that, especially when someone does something with kind of no expectations of ending in return. I do have to ask you, because it really was very early in your career starting Figma. You really were a very young leader and bluntly, something that always not troubled me, but it's always very much on my mind is kind of the insecurity and vulnerability that does come with that. I'm really intrigued. When you think about kind of being the very, very young leader that you are and were, especially in the early days, how do you think about kind of insecurity, self-awareness as a young leader today and when you were?
4:53 Speaker 02 Well, first of all, I think that I didn't fully recognize at the time, but management and leadership are skills. I think that it's really easy to forget that, especially all my internships and in various ways, I had some sort of leadership position. Maybe not all of them, some of them at least. And I think that it's really easy to fool yourself and think, oh yeah, I've got some leadership experience. So like the startup thing, no big deal. The reality is that management's hard and you really have to to learn it, just like a skill and craft, like everything else. And that's something that it took me a while to figure out. I didn't get it instantly. And maybe it took a year or two and also learning from people that I hired to figure out how to manage people effectively. And I think that, like you said, there is some insecurity there. Once you realize that you don't know everything and once you are sort of sufficiently self-aware, if you're not like a sociopath, hopefully you are going, oh gosh, there are a lot of things to learn and I really have to figure out how to better support my people.
5:38 Speaker 02 And so I was lucky to have mentors and advisors and investors from previous places I'd interned at that all came on to Figma and support us in our seed round. So I could turn to you and ask for help. But honestly, even with all the best help in the world, you still just got to put the reps in. So now I'm starting to figure out more, okay, here's my groove and here's how I lead and manage. But I think that that's something that's an evolving thing and something that you don't get right away. And so it's good to be proactive at it and label to people that are coming on. Here's where I'm at in my journey and here's how your feedback can help me too. And we're both going to learn in this relationship.
6:05 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, given the self-realization then of kind of knowing where you are in your groove and kind of with the element of hindsight, I guess, how would you analyze or describe your leadership style today, do you think?
6:14 Speaker 02 Well, I think it's evolved over time. I think that early on I wasn't empowering enough and that was a really hard part for the team. I was at Henry Ports or so and we hadn't launched the product yet and everyone was going, gosh, will this ever be a thing? Will anyone ever even care? It was like this very existential moment. That was a period of time where it was just really hard. And also I sort of responded by delegating less, trying to control more. I hope that now I'm a more empowering leader overall. I think that one of the things that I think Is one of my strengths in terms of leadership is around being able to kind of push things into existence more and be able to really focus on stuff and work with my team to get things over the line. But the challenge is making sure that you're not too forceful, that you get people off space and trying to find that right tension, I think, between pushing and also empowering is sort of my constant question as pro leadership that I'm working through and trying to make sure that I help my team with.
6:57 Speaker 02 And then also, I think that unpacking, giving enough context to the team to make sure that they understand where I'm coming from and why I make the call I do is something that I'm always working on too.
7:05 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask your advice? How do you handle moments where when goals aren't met and milestones aren't hit? You really insert your point and really let people know how you feel in your frustration and disappointment, but then also you don't create a culture of disappointment and denigration and sadness. How do you put that point across without really lowering the tone of the culture almost?
7:24 Speaker 02 I think that first of all, there's a cultural decision to make, which is are you a culture where you're always improving or not? And to me, the answer is an obvious yes, you always want to be improving. If you're not always improving, then what are you doing? That's on all of us to always improve. And that's not just me telling people that are below me, it's people telling people that are above them too. And it goes both ways. I think that there's always the challenge on packing why, why do I think this? You're not gonna go into me and say, hey, this is shit. You're gonna say, hey, like, I don't think this is the right decision. Here's why I believe that. And I think it's really important to be able to unpack and be able to tell people why. And I think that as we're all moving so fast, which is if your day is chunked into half hour bits, there's so much pressure to constantly be giving people the answer or telling people, no, this way. And the thing that I'm trying to challenge myself to do more and more is just to really step back and say, here's why, here's why I think this.
8:06 Harry Stebbings? I totally agree. Can I ask another bit of advice? And sorry for killing your schedule, but you said also about kind of the more challenging times and how you kind of manage more and try to take more under your wing. I really struggle when it comes to delegation. I just think that I know it better, so I'll just fucking do it. And so I don't hire people and now I'm like Benjamin Button and single and no hopes of ever getting laid. But my question to you is, how do you delegate and how do you trust someone when you know that you can do it better?
8:29 Speaker 02 I think if you think you can do it better, you haven't found the right person yet. Like, I mean, Harry, for anything that you're talking about, do you really believe that there's a skill in the world that you are the best at? I don't think I'm the best at anything. I think I'm pretty good at some things, but I always believe I can find someone better than me at most of my skills, if not all of them. And so if you can find the right person, then of course you try to have them do it instead of you.
8:45 Harry Stebbings? Dylan, I'm a VC and I actually think I'm well classed at this.
8:50 Speaker 02 All right, well, I mean, I'm talking to the wrong person there, but hopefully someone that hears this will know what I'm talking about.
8:55 Harry Stebbings? I'm sure they will, just not me. That one didn't resonate.
8:59 Speaker 02 But Harry, I dare you to introspect your dating life. The purpose of your dating life, you know, might depend on it, as you said.
9:04 Harry Stebbings? Totally. That was a brilliant advertisement just for me right there.
9:07 Speaker 02 You heard it here, folks. If you want to date Harry, just DM him.
9:10 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, what's my at handle? Remind me. Um, yeah, no, I do want to ask you, before we move into Figma as a product. I spoke to quite a few of your investors before, and they said, you know, Dylan's fascinating when it comes to education and the future of education. How do you think about the future of education, especially given the TIL fellowship experience and all that you have there?
9:27 Speaker 02 Well, first of all, the TIL fellowship, for those who know it, is a really neat program. It's a non-dilutive grant. It's 100K over two years, dispensed monthly because it's for people that are usually under the age of 20, or people that haven't graduated college at least, and those people don't always spend money in those effective ways. So it's better for it to be something where you, over a period of time, rather than all at once. It's an amazing network. It's basically 20 people a year who are working on just world-changing products and projects. And when I reflect back on some of the people I've learned most from, the people that came from the TIL fellowship. And so I've got a very weird experience here and a point of view that most people don't have. I'd say that for the TIL fellowship, it's extraordinary to see how much different young people have been able to achieve in such a short period of time. And so it's really, along with my experiences through Figma, it's made me question the belief that you need a ton of experience
10:10 Speaker 02 in order to go do something that's at sort of the world scale. And just to give some examples, you've got Laura Deming, who has created one of the most amazing VC funds in biotech. You've got like Vitalik, who created Ethereum. You have, just this week, Luminar went public via SPAC. They're doing something to try to help change the future of self-driving oil rooms, Upstart, and more. These are all created by TIL fellows, and there's a lot more where that came from, too. And so it's very inspiring to be part of that group. And I think that sort of the thesis of the TIL fellowship is that we're very much on a tracked existence. And how do you create these sort of counterexamples to those tracks? How do you make it so that more people are able to go accelerate the progress they might not otherwise? And I think that we can have more of that thinking in the world, and another thesis is that people get into too much debt early on, and that prevents them from doing interesting things.
10:52 Speaker 02 I think that there are real questions that people need to ask about college, and especially going into debt for college. I think a lot of places are not worth going into debt for in the first place, and I think that Also, debt as a society is holding us back a lot. In addition, I think that if you look at sort of the way that college expenses have grown over time, they are way higher than inflation, just like healthcare has and other industries. And so it is interesting to ask the question of why that is. And also, are we actually getting the value we expect to get from our money? And do the best people really need a college education in the first place? And also, that's deeply offensive for some people. So I'll just unpack that and say that college is something that is a lot different for many different people. Some people, it's like a very important social experience where they find a mate, where they get out of their zone of comfort for the first time for the people with purely academic. Other people, it's purely vocational. And I think just really, it's important for people to introspect and to ask themselves the question of like,
11:35 Speaker 02 what is it that I expect to get from college in the first place?
11:38 Harry Stebbings? Listen, I totally agree with you. After dropping out of law school after a month, I think we are very aligned there. I do want to touch on the Figma product, though, because we both were actually waxing lyrical about Kevin Quok's piece, which I think if you haven't read it, obviously Dylan, you have done, but anyone listening, if you haven't, amazing. I think the most interesting thing is like when we think about like Figma transitioning from application to platform. And when we think about that challenge, I actually spoke to Howie D at Airtable about it quite recently. But my question to you first off is like, high level, what do you think are the biggest challenges in making that transition from application to platform?
12:06 Speaker 02 I think some companies start with a really innate sense of how to build a platform. So for example, I think of Coda as a great example of this. I remember the early days of Coda and talking with Shere and I would ask him about like, hey, like what specific user journey are you trying to solve for here? And he'd be like, well, the platform thinking is. And I was always like, man, like, that seems really tough to take that approach to market. Like, why not take a specific use case? And the reality is you can go both ways. I think it might take a little bit longer to go platform route, but then you have this sort of opportunity in the backend to scale it faster. And then you can also, of course, do the Figma thing, which is go for the use case and then go to platform over time. But I think either way, you have to eventually figure out how to think in a more platform focused way. And that's something that we're still figuring out. I think we did a good job of creating sort of the V zero or V one or whatever of our platform in terms of plugins. But there's so much ahead of us still in terms of where we can take the Figma platform. And I'm really excited to make that happen.
12:49 Speaker 02 But I think that there's a lot of challenges there and it's going to take a lot of effort on our team to continue to evolve it over time and to make sure that we're supporting developers in the best way.
12:56 Harry Stebbings? Kevin, in terms of like rollouts and product rollouts and product dev, how do you think about doing it fast enough, but not too fast that suddenly you have four or five new and it's too much too fast? What's the right kind of cadence in terms of rollouts, do you think?
13:08 Speaker 02 Well, there's a lot of Ways to look at that, right? So there's the user experience, there's also the marketing aspect. From a marketing standpoint, what we've found is that people really want Figma to always be improving. And of course, we want it that way, too. But I think also it is possible to go too fast and to not consider things fully enough. And so it's important to make sure that you keep things simple. And I think that especially later in your product lifecycle, the requests you get are dominated by power users sometimes. And they're asking for more power, more power. You can't forget that the reason they became a power user in the first place is because they're able to use the platform. And if you're ever introducing power user functionality that is at the expense of the basic user experience, you're probably going a little bit too fast.
13:44 Harry Stebbings? How do you think about that? Because that's one thing that's fascinating, which is that you do have just the most incredible product evangelist for Figma. And the depth of requests that I've seen in terms of for the Figma product is insane. How do you think about meeting the demands of the absolute evangelist with the everyday designer who's much more moderate and tempered?
14:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, there's a quote in design where it's keep the simple things simple and make the complex things possible. And I think it's really important to do both. You do have to make those complex power user cases possible. You don't necessarily have to do it today, but you have to get there over time. Otherwise, people will look for other product solutions. And of course, there is a question, too, of do you do that in the same product or in a different product? But you can't do it at the expense of keeping the simple things simple. And so it's, it seems like it might be a conflict because as you introduce power, you're also sometimes raising complexity. But I think the best solutions are ones that manage to accomplish both at the same time. Those are the home runs.
14:28 Harry Stebbings? No, I agree in terms of accomplishing both at the same time. You also mentioned kind of phase one being the plugin ecosystem. And we put this question out on Twitter, you know, what should I ask Dylan? And a lot of people suggested the plugin ecosystem. And actually, Kevin mentioned it in his article. Lenny Rogitsky asked, how do you think about the success of the Figma plugin ecosystem? Let's start with that.
14:44 Speaker 02 Again, I don't think of it successfully yet. I think it's very early. One of the things I'm most excited about, too, and I think it's holistically with plugins, is community. So one thing we're trying to do with Figma is make a worldwide design community, sort of a third place for design, if you will. That's a reference to like the first place being home, the second place being your place of work, which now, of course, those two places are collapsed. The third place is your place of interest. So if you want to learn about design, if you want to practice design, if you want to engage with topics around design, where do you go to? And right now, maybe the answer is like design Twitter. But I think there's a possibility, a potential to create a much better experience than that, that's centered around design, the way designers work. And so that's something we're hoping to do with Figma. And I think we're just in the earliest age of that right now.
15:19 Harry Stebbings? How do you think about the defensibility that a plugin ecosystem builds?
15:24 Speaker 02 I think that anytime you're able to introduce more workflow, that is a pretty inherently defensible thing that will help your product. That said, a lot of the plugins that we're seeing are across many different tools. And so it's not just enough to make it so that a plugin exists on your platform and people use it. But you also need to make it so that the plugin works best in your platform.
15:41 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, we mentioned kind of defensibility there, which leads to the question of competition. How do you think about competition? Do you monitor it incessantly? Do you think about it much? And how do you advise founders to approach competition?
15:51 Speaker 02 I would say that it's important not to be too focused on competition, otherwise you're not building what's unique with you. At the same time, you have to listen to your users. And if users are saying, well, your competitor's better, you better make sure that you understand why and that you adapt. Otherwise, you're going to lose. So it's a balance, like anything else.
16:05 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned the collapsing of home and work there and the kind of transition to the third place for design. In terms of what COVID's done, I spoke to Peter Levine at Andreessen before the show. And he was like, you have to ask Dylan about the internal and external impacts of COVID on Figma. If you had to break them down, what do you think are the top one or two, internal and then external?
16:23 Speaker 02 Well, let's start with external, because I think it's, if we go macro, it gets really interesting. I think that what we've seen over decades now, not just 2020, but decades, is a shift from physical to digital spaces. And of course, 2020 is that inflection point where there's a rapid shift, the moment where all of us transitioned all at once. But this is not like, this is like a long-term thing. So Google Docs, for example, that launched 15 years ago, is rightly. I think Mark Andreessen, Peter's boss, he penned his famous Software is Eating the World essay almost 10 years ago now. Figma, we launched in the browser five years ago this week. And so what I see is that there's a transition over time that's been happening. And 2020 is that inflection point, that sort of big rush into digital spaces. Now we're adapting to them. And so what's unique about digital spaces? Well, one is that digital spaces have no walls. They're inherently accessible, they're collaborative and transparent.
17:06 Speaker 02 And as more organizations, I think, shift into these new spaces, I think a lot of our work culture and our values are changing. I also think that they bring new challenges too, because in digital spaces, it's really hard to be spontaneous. Where's that spontaneous interaction between people, like you have in a physical space where you randomly bump into folks in the way of the bathroom or something? And I also think that the cross-team connection in the workplace that exists in physical spaces is really hard to replicate in digital spaces. And so I think it's really Important for us to figure out when we want to be synchronous and when we want to be asynchronous. For Figma internally, pre-COVID, we were entirely in person. And now we're supporting remote work, of course, just like everyone else does. But also, we're permanently doing that long term. That was a big pivot for us. I think the scale, you can't really be all sync, because then you have challenges around how you communicate and how you make decisions.
17:48 Speaker 02 But you also can't be async, otherwise you lack connection, you lack spontaneity. And I think our software needs to evolve and to make it so that we're able to have more spontaneity and more connection across these spaces.
17:58 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, is there anything that you've done internally, in terms of like culture maintenance, really, to encourage that spontaneity? Encourage that more casual warmth within the team?
18:06 Speaker 02 We're trying a lot of things. One thing I'm trying is just more breakfast and more ways to connect with people and spend time with folks on the team. We're trying things like Donut, which is a Slack app you can use to basically pair people across the team randomly. And that way, you're making these connections across team. I think one of the things where the weeks where we tried the most was actually last week, where we had our Maker Week for Figma. And Maker Week is kind of like a hack week, only it's for the entire team. And during Maker Week, one thing that we did at the start was we actually broke the team into houses, sort of like Harry Potter. And each house, there's four houses, had to come up with, as their first challenge, sort of a house identity. A name, as well as a house shield, basically, that was sort of the identity as a house. And then from there, everyone that did that got like 150 points. And from that point on, then, there's all these different challenges that the house had, which were basically to get points.
18:49 Speaker 02 But basically, the house with the most points won the house cup, which also came with the prize of a custom Figma keyboard for everyone in the house. Which was a very cool keyboard. We're a type geeks at Figma, and so that was a very sought-after prize. And so, one of the things that we did was we really split up teams, and we also split up departments across these houses. And it's like anything else, we're a population size of 260-ish right now. And so, you know, some people really hated it, some people really loved it, a lot of people are in between. But overall, one question I asked in sort of the feedback survey was, what's the name of one person that you met during Maker Week that you didn't know before? And almost everyone had an answer for that, which I thought was really special. And a lot of people were able to forge new connections and even work on entirely new teams for their projects that were all within their house. One of the things that was also really cool was just like the collaborative creation we saw across houses.
19:32 Speaker 02 So, for example, one of the challenges was make something with your team. And that was it. Like, I said, there's one constraint, which is you had to be able to see as a viewer how many people participated. To verify number of points because you got a dynamic number of points depending on how many people collaborated. We had people do these synchronous dances in Figma. We had just all sorts of cool projects come out of that. We also had people do like collaborative art projects. And we also had like a giant capture the flag game where people learned about security for the first time. It was this really cool week and a lot of people engaged and collaborated in this new way.
19:56 Harry Stebbings? No, I love that. I heard about it from quite a few of your teams, so.
19:59 Speaker 02 Oh, you did. Now I'm curious who all you contacted.
20:02 Harry Stebbings? It was Kyle Field and then Praveer, so I have to give them credit. They loved it, man. So it was great here. It was actually Kyle that said to me, Dylan says continuously these days, hypergrowth is no joke. But it's what everyone kind of dreams about. And so I guess my question is, what's the hardest part of hypergrowth so far? Bit growing so fast in 2020.
20:20 Speaker 02 I mean, it's scaling culture during a pandemic. I mean, it's, it's a big change. And so I think it's really important for us right now to understand what that means, how to solve for it, what the problems are. And also in any world, when you scale the way we're scaling right now, you have to scale culture. That's hard, but doing that with the added constraint of like, there is no way to gather in person, which even remote teams usually gather in person at some point or many points during the year. That's a tough one. So that's one that I'm really making sure that we get right.
20:44 Harry Stebbings? You also have to get the talent in the door bluntly to manage the scaling as well. I mean, it was really interesting comparison that a lot of your investors made. They were like, Figma, it's now like Stripe in terms of the level of talent that it's consistently hiring. Talk to Dylan about that. So what been your biggest lessons in terms of what it takes to hire some of the very, very best?
21:01 Speaker 02 Well, first of all, it's very kind because I'm a huge fan of Stripe. One thing that people don't usually realize when they're hiring talent is that it's a very long-term game and it's based in relationships. And so some of the most important hires we've made have been hires that we have focused on for such a long time. Our director of design Noah, I think it took us like two or three years to get him in the door. Sometimes people will recruit them, they'll go to a different job, they'll leave that job for a different job, and then they'll come to Figma. It's just, it can take so many years sometimes. That's okay, because different people have different profiles of risk and your company's going to keep growing. And eventually, hopefully, you can get them to come. And for the best folks, it's worth building those relationships with.
21:32 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask you a question? I've made the mistake before in the media company of looking at someone's CV, seeing great logos and going, great. Don't need to do the trial runs or the test mockups or whatever. They worked at the BBC. Great. Like, that's my mistake. When you look at ones that haven't worked out, what have been your takeaways or learnings from those experiences?
21:49 Speaker 02 I think it's like any role, you can't make a hire unless you have total conviction. And so it's a balance, right? Because you want the team to feel a lot of pressure to hire. And especially as you scale, it's not just about you hiring anymore. It's about making sure that everyone has this point of view. And it's important to hire, but also that you want to be slow and thoughtful about it. But if you're trying to double a team in a year, you can't be too slow. And people feel very much like they wake up in the morning and the first thing they think about is hiring. And they realize this is like the thing that, one of the things I'm measured on is if I can make these hires. And so it's sort of holding both those thoughts in your head simultaneously of you have to grow fast, but you have to go right. And you can't just like make hires and you have to be a little bit conservative on these decisions.
22:21 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, one thing that I think is like really interesting is thinking through your board construction, through the frame of mind of like, would I hire them into the company? What do you think about your board management? As we said earlier about being a very young founder when you started especially, what does successful board management look like to you? And has your style changed over time?
22:36 Speaker 02 One thing that I think has been a big shift in mindset for me is that in the start of Figma, I really thought of the board as this group that I was reporting into. And I think now I think of it more as Figma is the group that we're all reporting into. And I'm leading the board on behalf of Figma. Because I think as CEO, you always have the most context, more context than your board has. At the same time, your board has context from all these other companies and they have all this wisdom, hopefully. It's definitely the case in Figma, it's not probably the case in all companies. But hopefully you've constructed your board with people that you can learn a lot from. And it's your job as CEO to frame up the right questions for them, to get their insights and to kind of draw those out of them. But also to say, when you have a firm point of view and you know what's right, to push for that and make it happen.
23:14 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, no, I agree in terms of really pushing for that and making it happen when you know it's right. Can I ask, on the flip side, like advising me who sits on boards, two amazing founders, hopefully like you, what can I do to be the very best board member that I can be? And also, how can I create that environment of safety where you feel you can come to the board with anything? And this is not a board where you report to?
23:31 Speaker 02 I think it's important to reward and to praise people when they come to you with information about mistakes. And it's something for what it's worth that I'm still learning to do better at Figma. But I remember recently when I came to one of my board members with a big mistake. I won't say what it is, but it was a pretty meaningful one in terms of revenue and totally preventable. I came to them and said, hey FYI, like this happened, it's going to show up in our numbers this month. And here's what we learned from it, here's what we're doing differently. And I said, oh man, thank you so much for letting me know. I really appreciate it. That was their first response. And I was just like, wow, that's amazing. Like I know who my first call is going to be next time I make this mistake. Or a different mistake like this. And it's so easy to have a reaction of like, what the fuck are you doing? Or what were you thinking? Right? Like, that's such an easy default reaction to have. So to default have the reaction the other way around, that's huge.
24:10 Harry Stebbings? No, listen, I totally agree. And I like that in terms of praising the transparency. Final question for the quick fire. We co-invested in quite a few companies, I think, now, and you're on some of the best account tables in the business. How's investing in companies and working with founders from the other side of the table? Has that changed your mindset at all to Figma and to operating?
24:26 Speaker 02 Well, I certainly learned from people that I invest in, so probably yes in that way. But I think mostly it's the value it brings to Figma is that it's just very energizing for me. I really like helping people and helping people as investors is a very different way of helping people on my team as an operator. There's a very different relationship there. And so that's something that I draw a lot of energy from, and then I can pour that energy into Figma, which I also draw energy from, of course, but it's a different type of energy sometimes.
24:46 Harry Stebbings? No, I totally get you in terms of the energy. I do want to dive into my favorite, though, the quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. You ready to rock and roll?
24:53 Speaker 02 I'm ready. Let's do this.
24:54 Harry Stebbings? So favorite book and why? What must I be reading?
24:56 Speaker 02 Well, you asked me this last time, and I think I tried to dodge the question. I said I don't have a favorite book. That's still true. But a recent book that I read, again, this is a reread for me, which I really appreciate even more in 2020. So I think it's like the quintessential 2020 book is Snow Crash. And one of the things it talks about is this idea of the metaverse, which is very, I think, consistent with our conversation today, of how you have this sort of like online space, it's permanent, that builds on itself, that people can interact in. And it also, I think, the other thing that's very 2020 about Snow Crash is sort of this idea of a mind virus that can infect people. And if you think about QAnon and the way that's spreading right now, I think that it's kind of crazy how much Snow Crash is related to that.
25:30 Harry Stebbings? Tell me, what would you most like to change about the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem?
25:33 Speaker 02 I mean, I like to expand it more past Silicon Valley. I'm not one of those people that says Silicon Valley is dead. I don't think it is. But I really hope that there'll be more ecosystems like Silicon Valley in the world. But I also think it comes with a challenge of how do you make sure that, especially as these ecosystems are often online, how do you make sure that there are more and more ways for people to break into these ecosystems? I think that cities provide this like default way for people to break into ecosystems just by walking on the street or going to a party. How do you replicate that in an online environment? How do you replicate that when we're more distributed and there's less people at our central? And so I think it's important to get both right.
26:01 Harry Stebbings? How did you tell the team you were going fully remote? It's a massive decision and move, obviously.
26:05 Speaker 02 Oh, we're not going fully remote. We're going partially remote. So we are basically fully remote during COVID, but after Covid will be hybrid and we'll continue to support remote work afterwards. So I'm sorry if I wasn't clear there.
26:13 Harry Stebbings? Why did you go hybrid?
26:14 Speaker 02 So I think that there's going to be a lot of people coming out of Covid that will want to stay where they are. And I also think that it's important that we support talent all around the world. There's great talent everywhere. And I think that it's a minute we're going to have to learn how to do as an organization going forward. And I also think that's sort of a stepping stone to being a global company anyway, which is our ambition. And so if you want to be a global company, you should be able to support a hybrid model of work.
26:33 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, no, I agree. One from Kyle Parrish. What's the single greatest threat to Figma? Always a tough one from Kyle.
26:39 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, it's like what we talked about already, which is such an opportunity or danger of messing up our culture while we scale really fast. Especially in the next year or so, as this critical moment arrives.
26:47 Harry Stebbings? How many people do you plan to add over the next year?
26:49 Speaker 02 Well, we're still, speaking of board, we're still finalizing our 2021 plan, but I think we'll near double the team again, which is pretty wild.
26:55 Harry Stebbings? That is pretty wild at 240, 250. Yeah, absolutely. What's your biggest strength and then what's your biggest weakness?
27:00 Speaker 02 I'd say biggest strength that sometimes like I can focus enough on something and make it happen. And it's really cool to kind of like get things into existence that way. Biggest weakness is that I'm not always focused enough. And also sometimes when I am focused enough, I'm very forceful about it. So trying to do that in softer ways, I mean, I'm trying to figure out how to do.
27:15 Harry Stebbings? Final one is from Andrew Reid. Andrew Reid asks, what if everything goes right? What does Figma look like in like 2030?
27:21 Speaker 02 I think that there's an opportunity for us to totally own and support the design process and lifecycle. So everything from idea to mock up to research and consolidation to prototyping all the way production. How do we support an entire lifecycle of design? And I also think that, just like we've talked about over the course of this conversation, as the world moves from physical spaces to digital spaces, we're going to see more and more software out there as a big part of the global economy. So how to make it so that anyone in the world can be a designer and can go through that process to bring their ideas to life? And also have access to that economic opportunity that that shift is going to create.
27:52 Harry Stebbings? Dylan, as I said at the beginning, I've wanted to do this one for a very long time, since our first episode. I hope I've improved in my interviewing style.
27:58 Speaker 02 You were really good back then and you're awesome today. So thank you. Thank you for having me back.
28:02 Harry Stebbings? Listen, the pleasure's all mine. You're a star. So thank you so much for this.
28:05 Speaker 02 Thank you, Harry. Have a good one.
28:08 Harry Stebbings? I have to say, I just could not be more excited for the future ahead with Dylan leading Figma. It's just such an exciting time for the company. And if you'd like to see more from Dylan, you can find him on Twitter at Zoink. Likewise, it'd be great to welcome you behind the scenes here. You can do so on Instagram at H Stabbings1996 with two Bs. I always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million. Check out hellosign.com/20vc to join the thousands of companies
28:53 Harry Stebbings? and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And speaking of beautiful products there, and honestly, cutting the crap, there are a few products I truly could not live without and use 10 plus times a day. Affinity, it's a home screen app for me. And not just me, it's the number one venture capital CRM, allowing you to manage deal flow so much more efficiently, track pipeline using Smartlist or Kanban style board view, which is actually my favourite. And their alliances feature means it connects to your network, so you can always see who knows the person that you want that intro to. It's not just me that loves it though. Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint, DCM, Techstars, we all use and love it. So head over to affinity.co to check it out today. And finally, if affinity recognises the importance
29:35 Harry Stebbings? of people, so does Zoom. And Zoom realises communication is just everything, and you really need to build that relationship. And there's nothing like meeting face to face. And there's nothing like Zoom to make that happen. Zoom lets you connect and do business across town or around the world. Zoom ties together all of your communication needs into one easy platform for video conferencing, for phone calls, group chat, webinars, and your conference rooms. And connect easily from anywhere, your mobile phone, your laptop or your conference room. Zoom is how business gets done. Get your free account at zoom.com today. Meet happy with Zoom. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible episode this coming Thursday with David Su at Reteal.
Previous 20VC: Hopin, The Breakout Startup of 2020 on Scaling from 10 to 230 People and $174M in Funding in just 13 Months, The 3 Phases of Startup Scaling, How To Lead Remote Teams Effectively, The Future of Events Post-COVID and more Next 20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
