Pod Insights Y Combinator Podcast The Future Of Design With Figma's Dylan Field About this episode Design isn’t just about making things work—it’s about how they work, says Dylan Field, the co-founder & CEO of Figma.
As AI transforms tech, he believes a designer's judgment, taste, and agency will matter more than ever.
Dylan sat down with YC's Garry Tan to discuss the evolving world of design in the age of AI, the challenging early days at Figma, and how his team forever changed the way designers and engineers collaborate.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 As software gets easier to build, design becomes more important.
0:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:04 Speaker 00 And there's going to be more designers hired because at the time, it felt like this tiny market. I think that so far, AI is very much in the tool category. You know, we talk a lot about lowering the floor, raising the ceiling, making it so that more people can participate in the design process, but also raising the ceiling of what you can do. The more time has gone on, the more that I'm confident in the designer's role and believe that that's going to be one of the critical roles in building software in the future.
0:36 Speaker 01 Today, we have a real treat. We have Dylan Field, the co-founder and CEO of Figma, which millions of people in the world use for collaborative design. Dylan, thanks for joining us.
0:47 Speaker 00 Thanks for having me, Yuri.
0:48 Speaker 01 So we're in the middle of this crazy AI revolution and design itself is also changing quite a lot. How do you view AI changing the face of design right now?
1:00 Speaker 00 It's definitely an incredible time that we're living through. Ever since we started Figma, the exponential curve we've been on is that there's just more software being created than ever before. It's kind of looked like this before, and now it seems to be going vertical.
1:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, which is exciting.
1:16 Speaker 00 I think it's super exciting. And my point of view is that design has the opportunity to differentiate software in this age of AI, where we'll see whole new workflows emerge, where designers, engineers, product will work together in different ways than maybe they're doing today, or at least different cadences. And it's been pretty neat to have a front row seat to that and with our platform, figure out how we can empower everyone to use Figma to be able to be on that journey of design. You know, if I think back to just even the earliest days of Figma, some of the metrics that have held constant, one is that we've always had this really strong international base of users. So even from the start, over 80% of our weekly active users
2:01 Speaker 00 were outside the United States. The second one is from the start, it's been like one-third designers consistently. And the other two thirds are non-designers.
2:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10 Speaker 00 All coming to the platform and making things, viewing things, giving feedback. I'm quite excited about how we can activate those users more. Make it so they're able to make more contributions to the product process.
2:21 Speaker 01 That sounds right. Does the capability go up and like, are you doing more? Or will AI take these things over? Like, what's your view so far?
2:29 Speaker 00 Oh, I think that so far AI is very much in the tool category.
2:33 Speaker 01 Totally.
2:33 Speaker 00 And whether it's designers, developers, others, people are using AI to just do more and to explore more. So the way that I see it is that, you know, we talk a lot about lowering the floor, raising the ceiling. Make it so that more people can participate in the design process, but also raising the ceiling of what you can do.
2:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:54 Speaker 00 And I always had this image in my head of like the idea maze you go down. All these different branching paths that you explore as you design and ideate your way through that product journey. My point of view is you get more breadth now in terms of the things that you can try. But it still requires a lot of depth to fully explore it.
3:13 Speaker 01 We're sort of in this uncanny valley still where, you know, you can do prompt to app. But prompt to app doesn't give you an app that is well-designed yet. So, you know, given that, like, how do you see this playing out?
3:25 Speaker 00 It's kind of interesting to like, look at the language people use around this stuff. You know, people talk about like, you're locked in, or I'm cooking, or they're cooking.
3:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:36 Speaker 00 And
3:37 Speaker 01 Vibe coding.
3:38 Speaker 00 Vibe coding, exactly. And for a while, I was just like, ah, you know, whatever, it's new language. And then at some point, I realized that maybe the reason people are using this language in particular is
3:53 Speaker 00 that's kind of the feeling you get as you're developing something really fast. Like, there's always this call and response you have with tools as you're trying to get the thoughts out of your head onto a screen and you're iterating quickly. And the faster you make that feedback loop, I think the more you can get into that flow state. And also, The more fun you can have, actually. And for Figma, one of our values as a company is play. We're always trying to make it so that whether it's as a culture or as a product, Figma is fun to use and is a tool that just lets you creatively express. I think that the opportunity here is how do you create even more of that feeling?
4:35 Speaker 00 Even if you're not an expert at Figma and have that rapid ideation loop going at all times. But to the point you made, it's like you also want to give people a way to not just get started and prototype rapidly, but also get to the finish line. And I think that's where the disconnect is. And I think that that disconnect is not just for design, but also for code. Like you can go and get locked in for three hours and make something cool. Will it be the design you want? Probably not, but also it will take some time to untangle the spaghetti mess of your codebase as it currently stands when you're going from start to prototype. And then get to something that's extensible and you can build off of.
5:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. The design part is very interesting because you can get something that works very quickly, but maybe it doesn't work well yet. There's sort of this increasingly lost art, I'm worried, that founders are not focused on design enough. Like, do you find that in some of your angel investing yet?
5:38 Speaker 00 What I'm seeing is that people seem to, year over year, and this has been true for a long time, care more about design than ever.
5:44 Speaker 01 Which is great.
5:45 Speaker 00 I might have some selection bias because, like, obviously, people are excited to talk to me as an angel or my capacity at Figma. But overall, my sense is that people just care much more about design and also understand the value of design.
5:58 Speaker 01 Totally.
5:58 Speaker 00 It's not just about, like, can you make it work? There's a lot of people that can make it work. And as people are able to make stuff faster, it's how it works that actually matters.
6:09 Speaker 01 Can you talk about like how you're thinking about the evolution of the actual models right now? Because there's sort of like two regimes, right? Image diffusion models, like Mid Journey and our friends, Su-Hell at Playground. They're doing image diffusion models. And then on the flip side, there's code gen. And the code gen methods, the large language models themselves, like, you know, they can't generate SVG, for instance. Do you think that one or the other is going to work? Or is it like both in tandem? And then way out in left field is, you know, the multimodal models coming from OpenAI and others. Is it just a matter of like, let's just wait a little bit and those will do it? Or is it some other combination?
6:51 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, it's almost goes back to the question of like, what is design? When you're asking the question of like, why aren't models better at design? Because they still kind of suck. There's so many definitions of design, but like, one I like is art as it applies to problem solving.
7:05 Speaker 01 Totally.
7:05 Speaker 00 It's, I think maybe the reason why these models are not great at design yet. It's like on the art side, you've got diffusion. On the problem solving side, you've got LMS. And it's not clear that people have figured out how to, you know, marry techniques together yet.
7:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:20 Speaker 00 And figure out how to go approach these problems in the right ways.
7:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:24 Speaker 00 And I think also just like, as you think about what a designer does, they're bringing all this context, you know, way more than just, okay, here's this like two liner problem I want to solve.
7:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:35 Speaker 00 They're doing, you know, a lot of research with the user, like you talked about, in order to like go into that iconic pie and figure it out.
7:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're in the IDMA is trying to figure out like, you know, from first principles, what is it that this person needs or wants? What are they feeling at any given moment?
7:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, and how do you take that all in? Also, the current culture moment, your cultural moment you're in, the flow you're in, the part of the brand experience you're in, how that all ties together.
8:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:01 Speaker 00 How it all maps. And then I just, yeah, I don't yet see models that have been able to figure out how to like bring all those different components in.
8:09 Speaker 01 They're lacking the empathy piece of being a designer.
8:12 Speaker 00 Maybe that's too, I don't know.
8:14 Speaker 01 For now, I don't know. Maybe not forever.
8:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm curious to see like how they'll evolve. But I also, the more time has gone on, the more that I'm confident in the designer's role.
8:24 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
8:25 Speaker 00 And believe that that's going to be one of the critical roles in building software in the future. And I think people that call themselves developers today, and they call themselves designers, you know, in the near future.
8:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:40 Speaker 00 Doesn't mean they're not writing code. It just means that they're going to be thinking more holistically about the product experience along with their colleagues.
8:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, that sounds right. There's this sense that the large language models are going to somehow become super intelligence through. Just getting smarter and smarter. But it doesn't seem like there's a lot of agency. Whereas what a designer, a large percentage of what a designer does is actually using their own agency to like create a thing on a canvas, basically.
9:11 Speaker 00 Agency and also judgment.
9:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:13 Speaker 00 And I think that it's super interesting to me because I think in the Grok 3 announcement, for example, you know, one of them was saying that a lot of the training is done on math problems and CS problems and that kind of transfers over to everything else. But then I think about the people I know in, as humans, that are like the best mathematicians I know or the best engineers. And like sometimes they're really good at having great judgment about product experiences and sometimes they're really not.
9:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:43 Speaker 00 And it seems like it's almost a different muscle, at least for humans.
9:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:46 Speaker 00 And so I'm curious if that transfers over or not.
9:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, my hope is that humans basically retain the agency bit. And I think we were hanging out with some AI researchers recently and they were sort of disappointed that the models are not, you know, but they don't demonstrate as much human-like agency, you know, even after all these innovations with, you know, climbing the scaling laws, it just hasn't popped up. The thing they said was the models are more like hyper-intelligent toasters. But I think that that's the opportunity here. It's like, you know, the human designer has to understand people and understand their
10:28 Speaker 01 needs and goals and their reward functions and, and then create UI, create user experiences that match like, you know, the jobs to be done.
10:40 Speaker 00 From there, it's about how do we equip them with the right tools.
10:42 Speaker 01 Totally.
10:43 Speaker 00 Remove tedium, make it so that they're able to like have that rapid feedback loop.
10:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. Do you think that people are going to do more and more chat-based interfaces? Or is it more visual design? Or is it even going to be like terminal and prompting? Which way? What are you seeing right now in terms of the cutting edge of?
11:01 Speaker 00 I'm seeing pretty much everything right now.
11:03 Speaker 01 Okay.
11:04 Speaker 00 Which is exciting.
11:05 Speaker 01 So way more variety then?
11:06 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:07 Speaker 01 It's not just?
11:07 Speaker 00 It feels like we're kind of exploding out the possibility space of how you actually can work.
11:11 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
11:12 Speaker 00 And that's been my prediction of what's going to happen for a long time. And I think it's going to actually go much further out from here for a while.
11:19 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
11:20 Speaker 00 In terms of people trying different patterns with their tools and different things. I think it's a really good thing. I think like prompting alone is sort of like we're in the telnet days of AI. You're able to just have, I think, so much more ability to work with tools through different interfaces. It doesn't mean that prompting is not important, but I think there's a lot more to try out there. And I'm excited to see people doing that.
11:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:43 Speaker 00 And also explore different design patterns and things like AR, VR, XR. You know, there's different windows where I think we're going to see entirely different dynamic interfaces start to pop up. Fundamentally, I love just how humans interact with machines. We don't have BCIs yet, but one day that'll be like the final frontier.
12:04 Speaker 01 Totally.
12:04 Speaker 00 You know, until we get there. Like, there's a lot of other stuff to explore.
12:07 Speaker 01 I guess the really wild thing is, once you have code gen, in theory, that might be something we see, like sort of custom-designed vertical software.
12:17 Speaker 00 You mean basically custom-designed for each user?
12:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:21 Speaker 00 This is one I'm a little skeptical of. Doesn't mean it's not going to happen or people will try it. But I think that, I remember like seeing Snapchat for the first time. And then, you know, years later, like started to use Snapchat more. That's an example of software that someone's going to teach you. It's like a consumer product and yet it's actually quite complex.
12:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:39 Speaker 00 You're not going to just like figure it all out if you land in Snapchat. You're going to learn it because you watched your friend use Snapchat. I think there's a lot of software that's like that. And the more you shift the interface around, the less someone's able to just natively learn and transfer over that learning to someone else.
12:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:56 Speaker 00 So I think there's like a trade-off there that's actually quite important.
12:58 Speaker 01 Snapchat and Minecraft are two of the more crazy examples of like?
13:04 Speaker 01 You know how in design, low bar, high ceiling is like a maxim? You just want anyone to be able to clear that low bar and then you want people to stick with you all the way through the high ceiling. There were like remarkable examples of like, actually, the low bar is optional.
13:21 Speaker 01 Let's take a step back and I mean, I love your story of starting Figma. How did you come up with the idea?
13:29 Speaker 00 It was a process. I guess going all the way back, we started talking about what would become Figma, Evan and I, in late 2011. I was at Brown at the time, Evan's MITA. We were kind of like asking the question of why now first? What are the technologies that are shifting? And will create all sorts of opportunities. And like late 2011, that was for us, drones and WebGL.
13:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:56 Speaker 00 And I was actually pushing a little bit harder on drones. And Evan very quickly vetoed that. He's like, look, I think drones will be very important, but I, they're going to be regulated or and/or defense. And I don't really want to do either of those. And also I'm a, like I prefer more, once you have the hardware component, the run debug loop, it's really slow.
14:17 Speaker 01 Totally.
14:18 Speaker 00 He's like, I don't want to deal with that. Okay, no drones.
14:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:21 Speaker 00 So that was, that was kind of his call. Instead it was, okay, WebGL, which Evan had a lot of expertise in in particular. He'd done a lot of prototyping and making sort of toy applications WebGL at the time. And we started to think about, okay, what do you do with that? So then I was like, okay, is it gaming? Or is it tools and software? And we kind of looked at that and said, okay, well, gaming is super hard. You have to have, it's like a hit based business. You got to make something awesome. It's got to really resonate. Like, let's not do gaming. Let's do tools and software. And then I went and left for a gap semester, what I thought was a gap semester.
14:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally.
14:58 Speaker 00 To work at Flipboard. Evan was finishing up in sort of spring 2012. We started to just kind of like tinker and explore and think about this together. Looked at stuff like 2D to 3D scene creation. Got the TIL fellowship. Then we started working full time, August 2012. My internship ended. Evan moved to the West Coast and. Export a lot of different stuff.
15:21 Speaker 01 I think you made like meme, meme creation.
15:23 Speaker 00 We did. Meme generation was one of them.
15:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:25 Speaker 00 Probably the low point of Figma. I was like very on it in terms of my thesis was correct. Memes the moon.
15:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:33 Speaker 00 Uh, yeah, I was like literally looking at the graphs for memes and meme generation and just looking at the search terms and stuff. And I'm like, oh, man, there's no good meme generator out there.
15:41 Speaker 01 Totally.
15:41 Speaker 00 Uh, we can make the best meme generator. And we spent a week and we made it. And it was like this, like, you know, moment of, but is this like really what we want to do?
15:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:51 Speaker 00 And I think Evan was ready to quit and I was ready to go back to school. And I was like, okay, this is a clear like sign that this is not it.
15:57 Speaker 01 Not it. Yeah.
15:58 Speaker 00 Um, but Evan, being the technical genius that he is, he made the text rendering in our meme generator like state of the art in the canvas. And then, uh, you know, later on, when we eventually got to Figma, uh, it would just kind of take that out and reuse it for our V1.
16:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:16 Speaker 00 And, uh, so it's kind of like this like hilarious moment of like our first text rendering in Figma came from the meme generator.
16:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. Do you remember, I guess, I mean, a lot of people were still using like, I guess even Photoshop or Illustrator for, you know, this type of, you know, high fidelity design.
16:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, fireworks as well.
16:35 Speaker 01 Fireworks, yeah.
16:36 Speaker 00 I'd use fireworks as a design intern at Flipboard.
16:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:38 Speaker 00 And it was a awesome tool in many ways, but also very buggy. And at some point it was killed. So I was looking at, we were looking at the photography space as well. Photo editing, built a really cool photo editor. But it was, um, just not something that made sense because we're doing the browser. And at some point we just kind of like picked our heads up and went, wait a second, like the best camera is the one that you have in your pocket.
17:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's on the phone.
17:02 Speaker 00 Like, why would we be making this browser based editor for the photos you're taking on your phone? It'll just be an app. And I went to the app market for photo editing. And I was like, no, this is totally crowded and this can be a commodity.
17:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:13 Speaker 00 So, uh, then we said, okay, can we do something else there? Storage or search or interesting machine learning stuff, computational photography. And it felt like either we'd go to the platforms or it'd be sort of too early while the computational photography. Stuff we're looking at was like in retrospect, quite a bit too early.
17:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:32 Speaker 00 Uh, you know, more than a dozen years too early.
17:35 Speaker 01 That's right.
17:35 Speaker 00 And then we, you know, saw fireworks, uh, get killed and went, wait a second, maybe there's an opportunity there. And started to form the thesis of as software gets easier to build, design becomes more important.
17:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:49 Speaker 00 And there's going to be more designers hired because at the time it felt like this tiny market.
17:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:54 Speaker 00 And what it was in retrospect was, um, a market that was rapidly growing.
17:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:59 Speaker 00 And so design ratios changed a ton. And even just the five years after we started focusing on building a design tool. And then, uh, thankfully we had made that call and, uh, it still took quite a while, you know, there. Year and a half, two years before we got to the point where we had people using it outside of Figma.
18:15 Speaker 01 I guess this is a very profound example of, uh, you shouldn't use like VC thinking to decide what to work on. Cause a lot of people might have looked at how many designers are there in the country? And then multiplied that out by like whatever they thought they could spend.
18:32 Speaker 00 Totally.
18:32 Speaker 01 And it's like, oh, that, you know, that number is too small. I shouldn't work on that. Whereas you looked at your users and looked at where things were going, like from a much larger perspective. And, you know, you made a bet. You didn't necessarily know you were going to be right, but it turned out to be super right.
18:51 Speaker 00 Well, yes and no, right? Like it's easier to say in retrospect.
18:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:54 Speaker 00 But, and looking back, I can be very crystal clear about, oh, here's what we're doing. Here's a thesis.
18:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:59 Speaker 00 I think in reality, you know, if you looked at the seed pitch for Figma in June, 2013. Uh, it was all over the place. Like we were saying, we're going to do like a million things. None of it made sense. It was all very murky. So yeah, I'm pretty impressed the Danny, uh, index. Cause like, yes, let's go. You guys will figure it out.
19:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:20 Speaker 00 Um, I don't know if I'd be that prescient today if I was looking at a seed stage company like that. I think that a lot of our framing up to investors at the time was sort of more what you're saying, oh yes, it's a small thing right now. We think it'll grow, but also there's like all these other things we expand into. And a lot of the things we decided were, you know, Creative tools at the time. And then what the irony of it is that like, that's not all the process we're in. We're in the process of creating software.
19:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:47 Speaker 00 It's like, how do you go from idea or brainstorming, diagramming and fig jam to, you know, thing with slides where you align to going to design where you're trying things and prototyping to getting development, shipping to production. We have a product demo for that. And, you know, then once you're in production, how do you learn? And how do you loop back to idea and make this loop continuous? Then do that other places too. You know, we were like, oh, we'll go think about the existing markets that are out there, not what's the new process needs to be created. And eventually we got there because that's what our users pull us into, you know, fig jam, brainstorming. It was a behavior people were doing in Figma. We saw it, especially as pandemic hit.
20:28 Speaker 00 It's like, okay, let's pull it out into its new product and slides. Like people are creating all these slides and Figma design. Okay, great. Let's make a new product. I mean, the team really drove that, to be honest. They just saw it and we're like, we're gonna go do this.
20:41 Speaker 01 When the users pull the product right out of you, that's a pretty powerful moment.
20:46 Speaker 00 Exactly. And demo, same thing, same thing too. It goes back to like the diversity of users that are in Figma and how do we like make better experiences for them?
20:53 Speaker 01 Can you go back to the first prototype to like the first V1 that was, you know, generally available, like, you know, when you're entering a space where, you know, fireworks existed, there's probably, you know, your spec or product feature list was like, you know, a hundred items long. What was that process like for you? You know, were you really methodical about it? Or was it, you know, we're gonna do two week sprints and see what we can get done? Like, what was the?
21:21 Speaker 00 Both, yeah. We had like a long list of things that we felt needed to be there. And some of them were like, maybe this is optional, maybe not. There was clearly table stakes. And when I look back at the first people that used Figma for real design work, they were minimalist because they liked how few features we had. So it's kind of interesting that there is like this group of designers that are minimalist out there that like like a minimal tool.
21:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:45 Speaker 00 And the second group maybe was people that, um, you know, like our first customers were. Notion and Coda. Coda was called Krypton at the time. And I remember going to Shashir's office, because Shashir's the CEO of Coda. I think that they resonated with the fact that it was like cloud-first, high-performance in the browser. Because they wanted that for their own teams, too. And I finally got, after like months of trying to get a team to adopt Figma for real, got Shashir and his designers to get excited about Figma. We got them like on-boarded. So I think it was a few meetings, once we were at that point of having table stakes features met. Mind you, this is not a point where like Figma is today. So there's no multiplayer now at this point.
22:30 Speaker 00 You know, and like, a lot was broken. So for example, I remember going to a meeting when they finally said, "We'll use it. Let's give it a try." And we walked out, we're so stoked. And then we're driving home from there in Palo Alto, we're going back to SF. Like 20 minutes into the drive, 30 minutes back, got this email that basically said, "Hey, thanks so much for coming by. The fonts broke." "We can't read the fonts on the local computer. That was a shitty thing that I built." And, you know, "Thanks so much, but we'll have to give it a try in a few months." And so we just kind of like turned the car around, went back. We're like, "No, no, we're back. We're still here. We'll set up for you."
23:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
23:09 Speaker 00 But we didn't tell them-
23:10 Speaker 01 That's the field install.
23:11 Speaker 00 Yeah. We didn't tell them at the time, Evan and I, that, you know, that was our, they were our first customer.
23:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:17 Speaker 00 And I remember Shashir came into Figma for all hands later, like years later. And Arusham was the first customer. He was like, "I am?"
23:27 Speaker 01 That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. I love that story. I mean, basically, this is also a great example of like, don't take no for an answer. And, you know, basically going into your first customer's office is a very powerful moment.
23:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, and then showing that they will learn from them. And if they have lots of feedback, great, like, we'll prioritize it.
23:47 Speaker 01 I guess like some of the really banger features initially, I remember you guys had like really amazing sync, like multi-browser sync with like operational transforms.
23:57 Speaker 00 Yep.
23:57 Speaker 01 And I hadn't seen anyone else do that type of very fast updates across multiple browsers before. Was that like a moment that- You know, wowed the users or?
24:08 Speaker 00 Definitely. Um, I, so it's interesting because we launched our closed beta in December 2015. Our GA was on until October of 2016.
24:16 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. So it was a little bit.
24:17 Speaker 00 A good gap. And when we launched the closed beta, there was no multiplayer.
24:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:21 Speaker 00 It was just kind of like in the browser and here's this new design tool. High quality but minimum feature set. In the sort of months following, Evan started working on our real-time collaboration multiplayer engine. And it took a while to build out and I remember when we finally launched the GA, October 2016, I mean, the comments we got were like, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. You know, that person commented about it and said, a camel is a horse designed by committee. So it's like very much this reaction from the design community of, I'm like the designer that's going to be in the corner. I'm going to do this amazing work and I'll do the grand reveal, which is kind of the agency mindset versus the product team approach of we're all in together.
25:06 Speaker 00 We're going to like work through this and figure it out.
25:08 Speaker 01 That's fascinating.
25:09 Speaker 00 And then one of our early users that tried out Figma, I remember he tweeted at the time, like kind of making fun of us, but in a nice way. And said, oh, we're going to do a design party and like invited everybody to Figma file, where, you know, just like at the time, there was not many limits on how many people could be in the file. There's public link sharing. There was no, you can, there's no pain for Figma.
25:34 Speaker 01 Oh, crazy.
25:35 Speaker 00 For until like mid of 2017. And our servers like started breaking and I mean, like for the 48 hours after launch, you know, the team and Evan were just like firefighting, trying to like make sure this one file that was the design party didn't crash.
25:51 Speaker 01 That's hilarious.
25:52 Speaker 00 But it was like, started as people making fun of Figma and turned out to be like this great advertisement of, look at what you can do in Figma. And people started to jam it in and actually make stuff together that they didn't even know each other.
26:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:02 Speaker 00 It's like, this is powerful. There's something here. So it showed what we were trying to show, even though people were maybe not buying into the message at the time.
26:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's fascinating. Your story is very interesting, especially for a lot of startup founders today because.
26:18 Speaker 01 I feel like, you know, it's very common. I'm sure you run across founders that you've probably funded that, you know, three, six months in, you know, it's not working, you know, I'm only a quarter of the way through the list. Like, I want to pivot, I don't, you know, and then this is such a powerful example of, sometimes you have to work through the list. Like, it might take 18 months, it might take 24 months from like where you're at to a workable or usable thing, but in a way, like, that's the most.
26:45 Speaker 00 Both, right? I mean, we had, uh, from August 2012 to May, June 2013, that was a period where we were pivoting constantly, trying lots of things.
26:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:54 Speaker 00 But then, okay, we had a thesis, we went for it, felt like there was an opportunity, and started to build it out more.
27:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:01 Speaker 00 And then it was, uh, okay, it's gonna take a while. Respect, like, we had, we're lucky to have raised money and have resources. I should have hired faster once we started to get signal from the market around product market fit. So, I mean, I remember, uh, going to a user study with a friend at Coursera at the time. Shut up at 6 o'clock after he finished work, and offices were pretty empty. I brought a bottle of wine with me because, uh, the text editing experience and flow in Figma was so slow. And just writing things out took a long time. So I knew we'd have to, like, drink some wine to get to the user study. We finished the entire bottle.
27:38 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
27:39 Speaker 00 In that user study. And the next day, or two days later or something, he followed up with me and sent me like 12 pages of, uh, a doc. It's like, here's all the stuff I want you to build and why. I should have taken something like that and gone, okay, this is clear product market pull. Like, the market's pulling the product out of us.
28:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:01 Speaker 00 I should have then gone, okay, let's go higher faster. Let's, you know, figure out how to inflect growth of our internal team. I think instead I was still very cautious. And so that's something I wish that I, you know, if I could have gone back in time, I wish we could have, you know, gone a little faster there.
28:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, basically, when you catch lightning in a bottle, that's what it feels like then.
28:20 Speaker 00 Yep.
28:20 Speaker 01 That's a great reminder.
28:21 Speaker 00 That was early before we even shipped it, so we didn't know.
28:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:25 Speaker 00 But I think now, looking back on it, like, there were signs that there was fit here, even if the product wasn't ready.
28:30 Speaker 01 The second part of your story is super interesting in that, you know, you did it, you built it, you put it out there, you made it collaborative, and then the initial reaction was, "We hate it."
28:40 Speaker 00 Or skepticism, at least.
28:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. Or, yeah, I mean, basically, they didn't understand what it was yet. And I don't know, I feel like that's a common human trait, period. Like, you see the future and you're like, "No, it's not for me." Did you have to do anything actively to undo that? Or was it just a matter of time? Like, you know, everything that is different will be hated on, and you just have to ignore it, and you relentlessly seek the people who love it, and they're, you know, your best net promoters.
29:09 Speaker 00 I think a bit of both. I mean, we knew from, before we even launched the closed beta, we were dog fooding Figma internally. And we knew from just using it ourselves every day to design Figma, very meta,
29:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:22 Speaker 00 what we needed to do just to make a better design tools for us. Part of that, we discovered through the dog fooding phase, through the closed beta phase, was it really sucks. If I'm in a browser tab, you come into the same link, you edit something, I have a forced reload, I edit something, you have a forced reload, that's just a terrible experience.
29:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:42 Speaker 00 Or if you lock files, you know, having to request and unlock, it's just not good.
29:47 Speaker 01 Yeah. And that was the default back then for every other product.
29:50 Speaker 00 And for us, we were like, "Okay, at minimum, we have to fix that so that you don't have this horrible user experience." And at best, we hope to unlock all these new workflows, but what they'll be exactly, it's unclear.
30:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:04 Speaker 00 We have ideas of what it could be, but we'll have to see. And so I think we had deep conviction in, at least to meet table stakes, making a good UX, we've got to do this. And then everyone sort of showed us the way of like, how they could use Figma to do all these amazing things.
30:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's funny how often I end up using like a product that is not ready for prime time or not quite right. And then it's just full of bugs. And then you sort of wonder, like, do the developers actually use this product? And if you dig a little bit deeper, it's like, "Oh, no, they actually don't dog food, and they don't use it themselves." And then how could you? Actually make a good product without doing that. It's not possible, probably.
30:46 Speaker 00 I think that's probably the case, yeah. I mean, everything we want to Figma always goes through a period of us really testing out internally. And until something like reaches, you know, the environment that we use to try things. Like, that's for me when the clock starts, not before then.
31:00 Speaker 01 Can I ask you about, like, I guess, design culture inside Figma and how you developed it? You know, is it as simple as, at some level, like, if this is crap, I'm gonna say it and we're not shipping this? What went into that culture, like, you know, early on that built this thing that can like consistently create excellence?
31:18 Speaker 00 First of all, we've had the blessing of working with, like, amazing designers. I don't think it's ever been like, oh, this is crap. Like, it's almost never a reaction I have when I look at the work because, like, we got a great team.
31:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:32 Speaker 00 That doesn't mean that, like, everyone's considering the full system. Or, you know, I think that the, some of the things that come up a lot are like, how complex are we willing to make it to give users functionality they want? And that interplay between, okay, Figma's gotta be approachable, which we still have more work to do on approachability. We're always trying to make it more approachable, but also powerful.
31:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:53 Speaker 00 And, you know, you're not just serving, you know, the power design user. You're also serving the user who has been in Figma like once in their life or never.
32:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:03 Speaker 00 And how do you get them to be able to create something and have that experience right away? So we have to balance both. That's one tension that comes up in design culture. How do you make the simple things simple with the complex things possible? I think, uh, yeah, plenty of other tensions that come up too. And usually it's just like, for lack of context, or having to reason through a very hard problem. One of the best parts about building something where you've got hard design and engineering challenges is you get to work with the best people.
32:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:28 Speaker 00 So I'm very thankful for the folks that work on the Figma team.
32:31 Speaker 01 The top level answer might just be have an amazing hiring process.
32:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, but also seek out like the best people in the world relentlessly.
32:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:40 Speaker 00 To work with because you're gonna learn so much from them and they'll inspire whole new ways of thinking about the problem space. Like a lot of the innovations of Figma do come from our team. Um, it's not like I'm sitting going, hey, like think about this thing and you know, come up with it like we've got internal things, uh, culture, rituals. For example, we have a hack week concept. We call it Maker Week because more than just the developers and engineers are doing stuff.
33:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:07 Speaker 00 Is really the whole company and it's the only rule is make Figma better in some way. Figma slides is a great example. I came out of Maker Week.
33:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's amazing.
33:14 Speaker 00 But many of our, our best features, our best aspects of our platform, they've also kind of similar situations.
33:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. Earlier we were sort of talking about like that zero to one and then, you know, one to scaling. You know, do you have any advice for people who basically they made it to zero to one? And then, you know, how do you nail the one to ability and you know, like, did, did your day to day change? Like you guys, you and your co-founder were probably in the weeds, building a lot of the key features. Yourself with your own hands. And then at some point you were saying like, actually, I wish I started scaling or, you know, I wish I started hiring people. And build, you know, sort of care and feeding of the organization feels like the salient feature of like that second phase. You know, how did you navigate that?
34:01 Speaker 01 What would you tell the people who, you know, yeah, like it's happening, like the users are pulling it out, you know, pulling the product out of us and things like that.
34:08 Speaker 00 My main reflection, I was gonna abstract it all the way to be useful to everyone's watching this.
34:13 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
34:13 Speaker 00 Is uh, sort of the loop you're always in is be self-aware. What are you doing the most of right now? And then go replace yourself with that task if you've got the resources. If you don't have the resources, like figure out how to get them either by being profitable, by raising funding or uh, by being really clever.
34:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:34 Speaker 00 Uh, and if you can kind of keep doing that loop, that's a sort of loop that'll lead to team building. Or lead to figuring out the way to delegate work properly.
34:44 Speaker 01 Like an OODA loop, I guess, that you can just stay on. And if you can do that, like it'll lead you to do the right things.
34:50 Speaker 00 And I think the danger is you just get so reactive that like you never get to that sort of loop and you're never able to self-improve the organization, which is, you know, easy to get to that state because there's always more to do. And as a founder, especially when it's just a few people, you're going to be doing, you know, a ton yourself as well. And not just taking this like, you know, galaxy brain, bird's eye perspective. Like it's never like actually what headspace you're in.
35:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:18 Speaker 00 But you have to figure out how to zoom out a little bit, too.
35:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. So Figma, you know, in this moment, like, what are you most excited about? And where does it go from here?
35:27 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, I'm super excited about that loop we talked about. And how do we make it so that you're able to develop software with your team? And I think that's, you know, two different aspects, right? There's the how do I get started and prototyping quickly with new concepts? But also there's, I've got existing system I have to be in. How do I create that loop and iterate quickly as well? And how do you make that accessible to more people?
35:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:50 Speaker 00 So there's so much improvement we can do for both of those. And I'm, I'm super psyched about like what we can do to enable people there.
35:58 Speaker 01 Obviously, Figma came up in a moment when LLMs and code gen were not happening yet. Do you think that's changed then? You know, for the founder who's starting out right now, what would you say to them?
36:08 Speaker 00 I think that even without, you know, the speed at which you can work now with new models and whatnot, I would definitely tell people move as fast as you can.
36:20 Speaker 01 And you can move faster, a lot faster right now.
36:22 Speaker 00 I mean, I think the speed at which folks are operating is incredible. I don't know if that's what you're witnessing every day.
36:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, definitely.
36:29 Speaker 00 It feels like a moment where we're able to build in a really quick way. And I definitely, you know, when my team comes to me and says, hey, we've got like a nine month roadmap on this feature. I'm like, what the fuck?
36:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, let's squish that down.
36:41 Speaker 00 What can we do to de-scope or figure out how to get us out faster to start talking to people and showing it to people? It's funny because a lot of people come to me and say, I think I should do this two year build on something. As someone who did one, what do you think? And I'm like, don't, if you don't, if you don't have to, don't do that.
36:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:56 Speaker 00 Like, do it faster.
36:58 Speaker 01 Very few people have to do that at this point.
37:00 Speaker 00 Like there's hard tech companies, you know, it's been really cool to see YC investing there and backing stuff that's, you know, like Boom or something like that, or these companies that are going to take a long time to get the thing out there.
37:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:14 Speaker 00 As a giant, like mega project. But yeah, I think that that most things don't have to be that. And if there's a way to move quicker, you should do it.
37:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. Dylan, thank you so much for spending time with us. You know, your story is a true inspiration to designers, engineers and founders out there. So thanks for sharing it.
37:32 Speaker 00 Thank you, Gary.
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