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The a16z Show
Figma’s Dylan Field on the Future of Design
00:58:09
Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, a design software company that went public in July 2025. Founded in 2012, Figma transformed how people design, prototype, and build products together. After a $20 billion acquisition attempt by Adobe collapsed in 2022 because of regulators, Dylan helped Figma rebound stronger than ever. Just three years later, Figma listed its shares at nearly $20 billion and its stock price more than tripled on its first trading day. A few highlights: Expanding a sleepy market Merging of designers and product roles Counter-narrative to polarizing CEOs If models get better, we have to Remembering Brat Summer
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- [00:01]
A
We're going to get to a world we're already kind of there where good enough is not enough. Good enough is going to be mediocre and you're going to need to differentiate through design, through craft, through point of view, through brand, through storytelling and marketing. And I think the people that internalize that now, they're going to be winners. That's my point of view, is that this is what's going to matter, the stuff at the top of the stack. And if you don't internalize it now, you got an issue.
- [00:31]
B
Good enough isn't good enough anymore. As AI makes software easier to build, real differentiation is moving up the stack to design, craft, point of view and brand. In this episode, Jack Altman sits down with Dylan Field, co founder and CEO of Figma, to talk about what it takes to build enduring products in a faster, more competitive AI era. Dylan reflects on figma's long early build, why human taste and judgment still matter, and how AI fits into creative work without replacing designers. Let's get into it.
- [01:02]
C
Dylan, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for doing this, Jack.
- [01:04]
A
Thank you.
- [01:05]
C
Okay, I want to start by teeing up a contrast between Figma in the early days, which was like a multi year long build before you kind of got things going, and then the state of the world today where like AI startups are racing out of the gates and there's tons of competition and everything's frenetic.
- [01:25]
A
Thirteen years in.
- [01:26]
C
Thirteen years.
- [01:27]
A
And it's, it's a little different now, isn't it?
- [01:29]
C
Yeah. So you started in 2012.
- [01:31]
A
August 2012 was our official start.
- [01:34]
C
And then you got really kind of off to the races when like 4.
- [01:36]
A
Or 5 years later, closed beta was launched. December 2015. GA. October 2016. Didn't start charging until summer 2017.
- [01:45]
C
Jeez.
- [01:45]
A
Same day as our CFO now CFO started. Fun fact.
- [01:48]
C
CFO started the day you started charging.
- [01:51]
A
Yeah, he was like a biz ops guy then, but now he's cfo.
- [01:53]
C
Okay, so you had this five year period and I guess when you look back on it, you could, you could either sort of, I imagine, feel like that was a little too long.
- [02:03]
A
We should have been launching. If you're watching, don't do that.
- [02:07]
C
But on the other hand, you built some hard stuff like you put like, you know, a design product in the browser when people had never done it. You'd made like collaboration, which, you know, I've read is very, was a very difficult task and that had advantages too. So how do you sort of make sense looking back now in sort of the fullness of time on that five year period.
- [02:26]
A
Yeah, I think definitely there were ways we could have speedrun it, hiring faster, noticing that we had product market pull and that folks were like literally begging us to go do things. You know, when we got very long docs from people saying, I was so inspired by our last night together when we went through this very long user test where everything was not performant and it was, you know, the tool was in terrible shape. Then they followed up the next morning with like, you know, a 1314 page doc and it was like, here's all the stuff that I want you to build. I probably should have known that maybe people like cared and wanted this thing. But you know, I was also nervous. I kind of took the roadmap feedback and I was like, oh man, it's going to take forever to do all this stuff. In reality, I should have hired faster. I think we had the resources to do it. I was just still trepidatious. But beyond that, I think yeah, there was a lot of stuff to build and there were certain things we could have not done that we later pulled out. Evan, my co founder, loves sort of thinking about cross platform stuff, compilation and general programming language theory. And so he made a way to do cross platform targeting to not just web, but also as a backup in case something didn't work out, you know, desktop. And at some point I was like, yeah, this is all stuff we can rip out. We can move way faster without doing this. Yeah, so there's things that we could have done to speed it up, but not that much.
- [03:52]
C
Yeah, I mean there is this category of product I think about like airtables may be another example where I think it's like a hard product to build. I think like email is classically just like you can't. You just like can't ship a quick V1 that people will use. So maybe there's some element of that that you had.
- [04:07]
A
Yeah, and I think also is like, even after we launched in ga, we kept adding new features and every time we did or almost every time we would see just that retention would go up. And so it's also interesting, you know, there was folks in the beginning that were very minimalist and they liked the minimalism of the tool. We started adding everything people needed for their workflows and they're like, can we have the old Figma back please? So you always had to find that balance between adding and complexity and then simplicity, approachability. But also you got to make sure it's powerful.
- [04:41]
C
Did you have the sense when you were in those early innings that anything you built worked? In other words, like, were you like all of our ideas that we seem to build, they all make the product better. Like, were you sort of like, were you having to make hard calls between A, B and C and one was going to be good and one was going to be bad, or was it just all of these improvements were good because it was such strong product pull and it was just like the fast.
- [05:04]
A
G built better once we got out and once we had people using it, we kind of separated the work streams into two. So one was the blockers work stream. Whereas like these are things that are literally blocking people from adopting. We know this for a fact. What's the prioritization and rank order of, you know, which ones we remove first? And there's kind of like differentiators and we didn't call it that, but it was one project at a time. Mostly these are things like design systems and the ability to share components in a file across your entire team, you know, and we have to do both. We really had to go evolve the state of the world, but also make it somewhere people could try the thing.
- [05:42]
C
Yeah, when you think about that sort of experience and then you look around at AI tools now and you know, there was like a bit going around recently of an investor talking about how you got to get to, you know, a couple million of ARR in no time and you know, it's like a bit that you hear a lot and a lot of, I think founders feel self conscious if they're not going 1.
- [06:02]
A
To 10 million in like a month or something.
- [06:05]
C
Yeah, and there's like a lot of that and I think then, you know, investors I think are, you know, kind of helping, probably perpetuate it because the next, you know, round of investors are going to think about the same thing. And you know, it's like very, very different than the way Figma got started. And I'm just curious how you make sense of seeing that around you since you came up of the like slow build type of startups.
- [06:28]
A
Yeah, and again, don't recommend slow build either. But I think first of all, if we had today's tools, like if I had Figma Make Today or Prompt App tool, could build a lot faster. Yeah, probably could build a lot faster. But I also think that maybe my hot take here is that there's a lot of really awesome companies right now that are not like really AI companies. And so first of all, I think if you're looking at only AI stuff, you're just missing a lot. It's like, actually there's some gems there. For example, recently did investments in companies like Ambrook, Ambrook's amazing company, trying to help farmers with their financial situation and figure out how to make it so that they can do taxes better and deal with all the compliance and forms that come along with it. And, and I think that they have a real opportunity in front of them. Another company invested in Laura Deming. Her company is called Until Labs. And they're a whole body reversible cryogenics company. That's their moonshot goal. But along the way, there's a real problem to solve where organs. You might have an organ come available, but you have a very limited time window to get it to a recipient. And if you're able to basically use that same tech to be able to vitrify the organ and then rewarm it as destination, then you have a longer period of time to go make that match. And that can save a ton of lives, especially combined with new emerging technologies. And you know, it's like, yeah, neither of them are really AI companies, but like, they're great businesses and I am strongly convicted.
- [08:21]
C
It's interesting when you have these like, trends as strong as AI now, maybe crypto some number of years ago, you know, obviously there's others. There's probably a dynamic where there becomes such a strong gold rush to that thing that the people who are not working on that thing are missionaries at a much higher rate also. And that's probably also the flip side trap is in the gold rush, there's a lot of people who are going to be, you know, very missionary about it, but there's also a lot of people who are, hey, I can go 0 to 10 next month. So.
- [08:50]
A
Well, I think the other thing that's interesting is that AI closes gaps. And so because it closes gaps and makes it so you can do things that might otherwise take like a very long time in a short amount of time, it also expands markets. And so I think that's probably implicit to assumptions here, is that there's a little hanging fruit all over. If we're able to identify these companies that are growing so fast, we're also identifying the big markets people haven't tapped yet. And I think that that might be true. It's certainly going to be true for some companies. But also there's a dynamic where, yeah, probably some of the companies that go straight up, go straight down, and it's a question of when. And then there'll be some amazing winners. I mean, you know, of course. But also it's just like this default of yeah, okay, if the why now is AI, you know, it's the same why now is kind of like everyone else's why now. Right. And you know, if your pure strategy is like, it's a gold rush, I'm going to get there fastest, then you have to be charging incredibly hard.
- [09:58]
C
Yep.
- [09:58]
A
And you have to be strategic. And I think, you know, first of all, you have to know if you got that in you.
- [10:05]
C
Yeah.
- [10:06]
A
Because not everyone does.
- [10:06]
C
Totally.
- [10:07]
A
You know, 99697. Whatever it is.
- [10:10]
C
Yeah.
- [10:11]
A
That people need to sign up for. Totally.
- [10:13]
C
It's also, besides the hours, it's also a set of business decisions that look a certain way. They look very different than the way.
- [10:21]
A
You built Sigma, for example, for sure. And I think also it's, it's like, okay, is this something that you think is long term defensible? Is there any reason for you to believe that? But also at the same time, if you get there first, it's often the case you can just kind of go all sorts of interesting places. So it's, it's, you know, all these companies, it's very hard to puzzle through what will happen. And I think that's like leading to the climate we're in where folks are just racing towards opportunities and then, yeah, they get there and people are lining up to go back them at very large valuations where we're seeing these mega seat deals before people even launch anything. And that's not a judgment on whatever is going on right now because some of them will be amazing companies. It's just a description of where we're at.
- [11:09]
C
Do you ever, I'm curious, do you ever think about like imagining building a company sort of like in the opposite ethos of the way you built Figma, and think about it and say like, ah, that actually sounds kind of fun. Like, does it sound fun to you or tiring to you to do like a very hard charging, you know, just like go for a really aggressive raise a ton, hire a ton, burn a ton, take a market which is very different than, you know, you obviously built this like super profitable, you know, high sort of, you know, focused company.
- [11:41]
A
I mean basically the first part of that, the hard charging part is what we are doing at figma. I think that the team is working incredibly hard right now, myself included, and we see massive opportunity in front of us. Figma make is one example. That's an industry where there's a lot of different Players, we think we have a differentiated approach where you can go from Figma design, pull context in, into figma, make use that to create a, a better designed application and then also go back to figma design, tweak and eventually it'll be, you know, hopefully a round trip, two sides of the same coin.
- [12:21]
C
Yep.
- [12:22]
A
And you'll be able to do, we've talked about this a little bit publicly, but be able to do more workflows, assistant type things in figma design where you can prompt there too. And just in general, like so excited about making it so that more people can create these designs that are consistent with their overall brand language, their design system and get their ideas out there. Because if like you scribble something on a napkin, it will not be treated seriously as if it looks the same as your usual ui.
- [12:56]
C
Yeah.
- [12:56]
A
Doesn't mean you don't need a designer. We're going to get to a world we're already kind of there where good enough is not enough. Good enough is going to be mediocre and you're going to need to differentiate through design, through craft, through point of view, through brand, through storytelling and marketing. And I think the people that internalize that now, they're going to be winners. That's my point of view, is that this is what's going to matter, the stuff at the top of the stack and if you don't internalize it now, you got an issue.
- [13:29]
C
This is one of the topics I wanted to ask you about is as far as you can see, I don't even know how many years that is today, but as far as you can see, do you think that the role of the human designer will flip somehow from maker to editor or something different like that? Or does it become, you know, only focus, you know, people on the most creative, most pivotal flourishes or, you know, most important integral parts of the pro? Where does this go, you know, if you look out, as far as you're able to look out.
- [14:02]
A
I think first of all, I think it's. I've been kind of in this place of maybe the roles are all merging together. And I was saying that before even AI was the topic. Yeah, you were, you know, even 10 years ago, five years ago has been something I've been kind of noticing just slow progression towards. And now I feel like the roles being sort of, oh, pm, engineer, designer, researcher, you know, the sort of typical roles you find in the product design development process. And I think that if you look at sort of like the general pull of AI, it makes everyone feel like they should be more generalist to keep up. And then also if you look at the way that things are actually playing out, I think it's this rules merging because the roles are still there. But it's the responsibilities, it's the things that people are doing every day those are starting to get more murky. It's like everyone has their specialization, but then they also have increased ability to have impact elsewhere outside their specialization. So now it's like, okay, as a designer I'll go commit some code or as a product manager I should go actually make a prototype from my idea rather than just a prd.
- [15:17]
C
Yeah. I mean obviously you've always had like full stack product builders at like a startup and like, you know, the co founder CTO has always done all of that for since as long as software's been going well.
- [15:28]
A
But oftentimes they go work with a product manager designer.
- [15:31]
C
Yeah.
- [15:32]
A
And all of them just are doing it all.
- [15:35]
C
Totally.
- [15:35]
A
And I think though that now we're in a place where you should be hiring a designer right away. Came back to your question around what's the future of the designer role? I think design has kind of everything going forward. If you think of that as the top of the value stack and you think about all the things that can impact design and all the things you're trying to pull in, you're thinking about the business logic, you're thinking about the user problems, you're trying to get to the hard user problems. What is it they really want? Trying to think about the system and how it shows up in all these different places. The brand, the way that you're able to incorporate culture, the affordances you want to use, the style that you want to go with, but also the structure and all these decisions are at the root of how you'll win or lose the business.
- [16:21]
C
Yeah. And there's good AI tooling around a lot of what you just said. I mean even like getting user feedback, you know, used to be, and you know, to some extent still is, but it used to be like the way you had to do it was like go schedule 130 minute calls and now you can do it other ways.
- [16:37]
A
Yeah.
- [16:37]
C
And so it's like you think about a designer and they're able to get feedback scalably. They're probably able to like make at least good enough versions of designs that they can start playing with. They can probably start to get something into production like all from sort of like a cockpit.
- [16:52]
A
Yeah. I'm not saying that like in the next year or two years that designer will then be able to scale the country as one person.
- [17:01]
C
Yep.
- [17:01]
A
I actually think engineers are more needed than ever to be able to architect systems properly, to think through what is the right way to go and figure out how you should structure everything. Because if you just let these agents run right now, you're going to have a mess. And that's where we see security vulnerabilities and we see hacks going on and user data leaking and we see companies that start to scale and they break.
- [17:29]
C
Doing this as a moment in time issue or do you think that this is like a perpetual issue?
- [17:34]
A
I think it's for sure the issue right now, and I would expect it's an issue for a while longer. And I think the developer will still be in that outer loop even as these models improve, as will researchers. Like, it's kind of an interesting question for math as well. Like, I think math is probably underappreciated as one of the most deterministic areas where RL should shine the most, even more so than code. And it should be the case that I don't know how much it costs, but we have a ASI mathematician. Does that mean that mathematicians are out of a job? No, I don't think so. I think that the mathematicians will be prompting and reasoning through things and working with that asi and they're kind of going to be almost fishermen trying to fish for the theorems, the proofs.
- [18:23]
C
Do you think that we are. I think what you're describing is there's a future where we have potentially even more designers and engineers than we have now. But they're just much more productive, I.
- [18:33]
A
Think much more productive. But let's be clear about productivity. In the engineering context, productivity is building something. Well, in the design context, it might be that it is just further exploration of the option space sometimes. Because I think right now, oftentimes you're constrained by timeline. You can only explore so much. You might not be getting to the best solution. If you can explore even further, look at more options and figure out how those actually will work out in the decision tree, then from there you can figure out, okay, here's the option I want to go with, and then go even deeper and you can actually go and apply even more craft to that option. And I think that design is inherently non deterministic, unlike math. And so the role of AI and how it shows up in design will be very different than the more deterministic loops like code and math.
- [19:24]
C
Do you buy the argument that we'll have like lots of small Companies with a billion of revenue. Or do you think that instead what will happen is the level of competition is just going to rise and companies will be about the same size, but the software is just going to be, like, way sicker.
- [19:40]
A
You know, I think that there's already companies that are smaller than you would expect with large runs of revenue. And then the question is, how much will they scale before they just totally break? And I think we're going to find out. I'm sure that you and I both have mutual friends that are in this situation, and I talked to these founders and they're proud of how much they've accomplished. With so few people, it's like, oh, my God, I got to this revenue milestone, it's quite huge. And I've got 10 people. It's amazing.
- [20:13]
C
Wow.
- [20:13]
A
And they get all this positive reinforcement, but then they also say, you talk to them a little bit longer. I'm really trying to hire you. Got any referrals for me? Because they are desperate for more people to go help with all the problems they now have at scale. And so I don't know if it's true that team sizes will decrease a lot. There's a lot of problems to deal with. Yes. AI makes some roles more efficient, not all rules, because. Yeah. And as AI improves, we'll get more efficiencies, but there also is just more work to be done.
- [20:44]
C
Totally. I mean, to that point, it's like if the engineers get much more productive because of CodeGen, it's like, well, you're gonna start building a lot more product.
- [20:52]
A
Yeah, you need a lot. And testing a lot more product too.
- [20:54]
C
Probably need more designers. Yeah. So I do think it all kind of plays that way.
- [20:57]
A
And I think the competition aspect is really important if you have more software in the world. We've had this exponential curve so far.
- [21:04]
C
That's the part I've never understood. It's like company A is like doing the same with less now and then company B is like, well, I'll just do more with the same and we'll win.
- [21:13]
A
I see it. As for Figma, I mean, we just went through headcount planning, you know, it didn't really cross my mind to go, hey, let's reduce headcount or let's keep headcount flat. It's like, we got so much we want to do, we have so many ideas. Let's increase headcount, let's go hire people that are great and let's go do a lot of stuff, amazing stuff for our users. And I Think just like that's the mindset I think more companies will find themselves in is, oh my gosh, like there's more possibility I can do more and I need more people for it.
- [21:44]
C
Yeah.
- [21:44]
A
And then some companies will go, oh, maybe I can get more efficient. I think that might be a recipe for long term, you know, sort of. They might not be as effective as the companies that are trying to grow with this technology.
- [21:57]
C
On this competition point, one of the things I wanted to ask you about that might come off as, you know, ignorant or annoying. So sorry in advance, but that's a good lead on. I always read Figma as having somewhat low competition relative to being such a big market. And obviously you had, you know, other products that you were competing with. And there was Adobe and there was Sketch and that's not to minimize any of it. But it seemed to me like the market didn't catch on around you as fast as I thought it might have versus in other markets that seem smaller. There's many, many more companies working on it. Is that right or am I misreading it?
- [22:38]
A
I think it's changed over different periods of time. I mean, in the beginning of Figma, when we first started, I remember looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics because I wanted to know the market size. Like you should know if you're reading any business book. And the answer was 250,000 designers. There's 250,000 designers in the United States. I'm like, shit like that. That's not the market that we can use to go get VC funding. So my pitch was basically like, we'll start with design, we're going to broaden out. And then what I think was actually happening is my intuition, but I can't articulate it very well all the time was everything else was getting easier. Like you didn't have to host servers anymore, you could just use the cloud, you didn't have to go make box software, you could go use app stores. Dev tools were getting better. And as all these things were changing, whereas value accrue top the stack to designs and people are, whether they're able to articulate that or not, they're hiring more designers. And the ramp we saw in terms of number of designers in the world over the first decade of Figma was tremendous. That market got so much bigger. So yeah, when we started off, I mean, Adobe had just killed Fireworks because they thought it was not, you know, it's kind of a mess, I think maybe on the code side and acquired through Macromedia and they thought, okay, this is not worth our efforts right now. That's my sense. And basically then people switched to Sketch, and our main competitor was Sketch. And then Vision as a combination, there are other tools that start to appear like, abstract. All these companies founded by really amazing, impressive people with really cool, you know, strategies and marketing and tech. And some of the people that, you know, have worked these companies are at Figma, some are not. But, you know, Sketch was really the competitor.
- [24:29]
C
Yeah.
- [24:29]
A
And is today still a competitor. They keep going on and they're a really, really cool company. The Envision aspect was fascinating because I remember their marketing was just so good. And at some point they put out basically a teaser of their next product, Envision Studio. I was trying to raise the time, and I remember there are VCs that told me, hey, I just cannot reconcile your positioning with Envision Pass. I'm like, but they haven't even launched the thing yet. Are you sure? As a founder, you're like, come on.
- [25:06]
C
Of course.
- [25:08]
A
But also, I think because, you know, it was teams that were distributed in, like, weird ways across time zones, and they were always racing for the next milestone. They just had so much tech debt, and it really slowed them down, which I also think is a potential issue for all the companies that are moving so fast right now and doing so in a way that's not, like, well thought out.
- [25:29]
C
Yes.
- [25:30]
A
So anyway, I think that the competition felt very real. Then Adobe XD came along. We were really worried about it, and then it kind of faded away. They put it into, like, a sunset mode and just kind of went, hey, this is not working. And then, you know, you compare that to now.
- [25:48]
C
Yeah.
- [25:48]
A
And I think this is the most exciting time ever. I mean, the reason we got into this space. Yes. Was that we could create more tools for people building products. And now I think we've validated that there's a market there. People are excited about that, and there's a lot of people that are trying all these cool, different approaches. And I think it's awesome, like, so much for people to try and learn from, like, the option spaces can be fully explored of how we build products and software. And I think it's great.
- [26:17]
C
I think what I heard in there is, besides the fact that there was competition, maybe one of the, like, learnable things for founders is you started and it was not the market size that it is right now.
- [26:28]
A
Yeah.
- [26:29]
C
And so, you know, you started in a thing that was 250,000 users. Maybe people thought you could charge 20 bucks a month. So some VC is probably sitting There thinking, well, like, geez, that's not like a ton of revenue possible. You're not going to get the whole thing. So you probably have a lot of people passing over market size. And so one of the flip sides of being in a sort of illegible market is you might get a little bit more time to build and grow.
- [26:51]
A
Definitely true in the past. Is it true today? Maybe. I think is the thing that would.
- [26:58]
C
Be different today because there's just so much more of everything.
- [27:01]
A
Yeah. I think the amount of software, again, going back to that exponential graph, it's like it's been exponential since Mark Henderson wrote that essay. Was it 2011 of like, you know, software Z in the world? You look back to that time and it's like the exponential increase has been real, now it's like vertical.
- [27:15]
C
Yeah.
- [27:15]
A
But I also think there's an opportunity that is underappreciated to go build in boring spaces. It's like as long as you're passionate about it, don't do something you're not passionate about. If you're a founder and you're waking up in 10 years and going, why the heck am I working on this? Like, let's be real, you didn't even make it 10 years. You probably made it a few and you burnt out and you like, either try to flip it didn't work, or did work and you're stuck with this thing. If you didn't and if you take it on VC money, then you know, you got to keep going.
- [27:44]
C
It's like our friend Adam Gilt, building owner. You and I both obviously invested in our friends with him and well, he's very passionate. He's very passionate and he's building in a space that I think has been overlooked by tons of entrepreneurs.
- [27:53]
A
Yeah. I think he thinks it's the most interesting thing in the possible in the world. And you can't fake. A lot of other folks are of the opinion that this is like very boring.
- [28:02]
C
Yeah.
- [28:03]
A
And I think it's an advantage to work in a space that other people consider boring.
- [28:06]
C
Yes. But to your point, you can't go just like fake that.
- [28:09]
A
Nope.
- [28:09]
C
Because you got to work on the.
- [28:10]
A
Thing for 10 years, maybe 20, maybe 30. Like if you're lucky, you'll work on it forever.
- [28:14]
C
Yep, exactly.
- [28:15]
A
That's what I'm hoping for. Figma.
- [28:16]
C
Yeah, I think you will. I want to talk about the way that you show up as a CEO, because I think there is a somewhat widely held opinion which might have grains of truth, but maybe not, which is that to be an unbelievable founder, unbelievable CEO, you kind of got to be rough and you got to be aggressive and you kind of got to be sharky and out for, you know, your company and yourself and all these other things. And obviously there are people who do it that way and who are very successful and that's fine. But you to me, are an example of doing it the other way, where it doesn't come from a place of like, you know, hate and revenge or winning or all these things, which again, there's nothing negative about building in those ways, but there is this other way to do it. And I'm just curious if you have reflected on this because I'm guessing you also see that in yourself and you see this in other people. And I would just be curious to sort of like hear your musings on this topic of like, to be a world class founder CEO, do you have to be a certain way here?
- [29:19]
A
Well, first of all, I think there's just like a bajillion ways to start a company. You know, you don't have to take VC funding at all. You can bootstrap it, you can take the VC funding, there's expectations attached to that. You can, you know, do it on your own, you can do it with a team. And all personalities can shine. If look at the founders that are in Silicon Valley right now that are scaling. I mean, you can find every personality, every kind of makeup of a founder that you can imagine, which is awesome.
- [29:46]
C
Yep.
- [29:48]
A
I think that, you know, some investors have this thesis of like, they gotta have a chip on their shoulder. It's gotta be like some like mega trauma. Yeah, I had a pretty amazing childhood. I'm very thankful to my parents. Like, you know, I do like to win. I'll say that I hate losing, but otherwise it's not like, yeah, big chip on the shoulder that, you know, I gotta go prove myself every day. It's more that I really enjoy building what I'm building. I think I found this amazing group of people to do that with and, you know, it's really fun.
- [30:23]
C
That's what's interesting is you are extremely driven and motivated, but it doesn't seem to come from any of that stuff that you'd often hear from a VC on a podcast about a chip on a shoulder or something, something that you know, happened wrong in their life or somebody wronged them. It seems like you just love what you do.
- [30:41]
A
I mean, I get to do the most awesome stuff ever, which is like build tools for designers, creative people, and then go see what they make in the world. Like, I can't imagine something more interesting or exciting to work on.
- [30:53]
C
Do you think this is like an uncommon source of this type of motivation? Or do you think like. Like, in other words, do you think that this conception that a lot of investors, maybe founders, a lot of people have. Do you think it's off base or do you think it is in fact the more common source that drives people? I don't know.
- [31:12]
A
I think I probably get like a sample that seemed not representative because I have a lot of friends that also you attract people. Like, you are just really driven by mission. Some of them have chips on the shoulder, some of them don't. But I guess the bigger thing is maybe just like, don't get so attached to the chip on your shoulder that you don't work through it. Like, if you're excited about what you're doing and you like heal a bit, that's okay. Trust me, I've seen friends go through that journey and they show up at their company the next day and. Or a week, or a month or year, or 10 years, however long it takes them to work through it. And yeah, they're kicking ass. So, like, I don't think it's this thing where, you know, you should stigmatize something like therapy or introspection because you're trying to feed the sort of VC capitalist machine.
- [32:04]
C
Yeah.
- [32:05]
A
Like, you can still feed the machine and you can like work on your.
- [32:08]
C
It is funny. I don't know if you experience it this way, but I experience building a company. A form of therapy is probably too strong of a word, but it is a form of understanding yourself and working through a lot of stuff. It's something.
- [32:20]
A
Yeah. And, well, don't be wrong. Like, I hope I'm not an asshole, but I definitely am intense in many meetings and oftentimes I reflect afterwards and go, oh, man, I should have showed up there better. Right? But yeah, you show up a certain way, people will tell you if you got a good culture of communication and then you improve.
- [32:41]
C
Yeah. It also just forces so many, like, weird psychological situations and then you have to reflect on those. And, you know, sometimes you do realize that, like, behaving a way that I'm not, you know, the most proud of was effective. And now how do I deal with that? You know, I had a lot of those kind of things too, where I was just like, wow, you're just put in these situations that force a lot of reflection and personal growth, I think, which is good. But. But yeah, anyway, I just thought this was interesting because, like, you're often cited as, like, an example, as in the counter to this thing, and I just, like, want there to be more of that in the world, so. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Well, changing gears to another topic, you and I, I think, first got to know each other. This wasn't how, but around the time we got to know each other, when we were younger, we had this group of other friends and people I think even younger than us, who are, like, smart engineers. We called it Toad Chat, for whatever reason.
- [33:39]
A
You called it Toad Chat, I called it Toad. You made the group. Just be clear.
- [33:41]
C
I made the group, but you let.
- [33:42]
A
Me join as an honorary Toad.
- [33:43]
C
You were an honor Toad.
- [33:44]
A
So I was very.
- [33:45]
C
You were like, I'm not a toad, but I'm here to be. I'm here to. I'm here.
- [33:48]
A
I was honored to be there.
- [33:49]
C
And looking back, there were, like, a lot of people in that group. You know, there was you, Alex Wang, Ari and Conrad. Like, there was.
- [33:58]
A
And many others.
- [33:59]
C
Many others. Yeah, it was awesome. And I look back at that and I don't know, we must have been mid or late 20s. You know, people in their early.
- [34:06]
A
They were early 20s, early 20s.
- [34:08]
C
And I often think about that as, like, the importance of being connected to young people as a founder, as an investor, as just anybody in tech, because I do think there's so much just raw sort of effort, understanding. You're at the front of so much stuff there. And, you know, I think about this now as we're like. And getting into, like, mid-30s and, you know, like, how does that change over time? And I don't know, I'm just curious your own experience, because you're somebody who yourself started as a young person. You started the company as a young person. You've been connected to young people throughout. You still are, of course, but, like, how has that journey changed for you?
- [34:46]
A
Yeah, I fear sometimes I'm not as connected to the youth as I once was. And I think that when you're young, me starting Figma, Evan as well, we'd grown up, like, you know, playing World of Warcraft multiplayer games, using Google Docs at school. So it just gave us a mindset because of the tech stack we've grown up in and the culture we'd grown up in, that seemed to us obvious native. And then I would go talk to an investor and be like, oh, yeah, like Google Docs. And they're like, wait, like, you use Google Docs? Like, it's 2012, it's 2013. Like, who doesn't use Google Docs. They're like, we're on Word and Outlook here and simultaneous collaboration. I'm not sure I've ever experienced it. I'm like, what? This is my life. Uh, yeah. So the generational divides can sometimes be very real. And yeah, I always try to educate myself by like understanding what it is that people are surrounded by. I think that social media can be one way to do that, but it's hard to reconstruct an algo feed world. Same context now. I think just talking to people and like understanding their frame is always important. And also just making friends across age groups. I've got friends that are younger than me, older than me, you know, I've got friends that are 80. The other day I was talking to this incredibly precocious, amazing 16 year old who like I got off the call, I'm just like, oh my God, how do I hire you? Is that legal? Like, please come work at figma.
- [36:12]
C
Isn't it amazing when you talk to somebody who's like those ages and you're just like, I can't believe it.
- [36:16]
A
Yeah. I mean, you know, talking to this person, I was just like, you're more mature than a lot of 30 year olds. I know.
- [36:23]
C
Yeah.
- [36:23]
A
And it's incredible.
- [36:24]
C
I drive. Yeah. I was talking to a founder that I would have guessed, just by the way he was talking, I would have guessed was 30 and it was 20 and I was just like, man, I was not, I was not like that when I was 20.
- [36:36]
A
But I think that, you know, the generational divide and the notion of generations is real. Like millennials outlook and you know, we're raised in a time where who are the most famous millennials? Taylor Swift. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg.
- [36:53]
C
Yeah.
- [36:54]
A
I don't actually know who the most famous people in Gen Z are. Maybe you do.
- [36:59]
C
I don't know.
- [36:59]
A
Like, who are the role models?
- [37:01]
C
I don't know who the role models are. I mean I could probably.
- [37:04]
A
But then there's like the shift in philosophy too. I mean for Gen Z, I think there's a very different view and framework through which people that are in that generation, roughly not saying for everyone, but for a lot of them, they live through the world and see the world. And for folks that went through Covid and had to be locked up and antisocial and not see other humans for a few years totally instead of going to school, I mean, what effect does that have on you? A lot of effect.
- [37:30]
C
Also imagine if you graduated, you know, and came into the workforce in 2020 like right as Covid's happening. Right. As you know, we have plenty of.
- [37:38]
A
People that did it. Figma.
- [37:39]
C
Yeah. Or you know, and, but, but then you like, you know, you start ZIRP or imagine coming in in 2022 and everything's tough and then imagine coming in 2025 and everything's AI. It's just like a few years make a big difference.
- [37:51]
A
Huge.
- [37:51]
C
Yeah.
- [37:52]
A
And I think the mindsets, the also just approach. I mean, I think there's a lot of emergence right now of nihilism.
- [38:00]
C
Yeah.
- [38:01]
A
I don't think it's like a permanent thing maybe. But if you look at it and you're like, okay, well if you're told that AI is going to take all entry level jobs. I like a lot of media. And you're told that climate change is going to fuck the world and you believe that you have no economic prospect long term.
- [38:18]
C
Yeah.
- [38:18]
A
You'll never own a house, you'll never be able to support kids in America. Like that'll change your outlook on things.
- [38:25]
C
Yes. And you see it and that's like.
- [38:27]
A
The media narrative for a lot of people right now. I don't think it's quite right. I'm more optimistic than that. Yeah, but like.
- [38:34]
C
Well, I think you get both. I'm optimistic too. I think there's a lot of people who don't succumb to that. But I think you can also sort of empirically see it in. You know, I think there's great parts of crypto, but there's parts of crypto that reflect nihilism. There's great parts of sports card and collectibles and there's parts that are nihilism. You know, there's probably good parts of.
- [38:53]
A
Well, I think often the work is like, you know, for example in crypto. I mean, I got excited about NFTs really early, before they called NFTs. We call them crypto collectibles usually.
- [39:03]
C
I remember on Clubhouse you had that big. That, that sort of.
- [39:06]
A
Yeah, well that was years later. Yeah. But like I went from this era where it was all idealism and all this energy around like this just kind of like tension of the.
- [39:18]
C
Yeah.
- [39:18]
A
Like idea of digital scarcity. How can something digital be scarce? That's so cool.
- [39:22]
C
Early crypto was this very like romantic missionary thing.
- [39:25]
A
Yeah. Well, and then there's early crypto and early bitcoin which was like, you know, libertarian philosophy and hard money and people that really didn't believe in state and thought ed should all be de bundled. That was a totally different mindset. I was there because I thought this notional digital scarcity and art was cool and like.
- [39:43]
C
But then it evolved. Yeah.
- [39:46]
A
And as it picks up, a lot of crypto becomes degenerate gambling.
- [39:51]
C
Yes.
- [39:52]
A
And NFT space was no different. I think I missed the tradition at some point where it became that and I was still in the idealistic frame. And then the frame emerged of like, no, no, no. This is how you make like a lot of money really fast and get rich quick.
- [40:04]
C
Yeah.
- [40:04]
A
And it's kind of interesting actually. I feel like right now with vibe coding, there's been almost like that same arc of, you know, for me, I think of things like schema make and I'm like, okay, great. Like now everyone can go make prototypes and make production apps faster and ship them. That's so cool. Like, you can just do all this stuff that used to take so long so fast and then you can improve it. You can iterate. I think a lot of people also see it as like, I can finally build a piece of software and get rich quick. And of course there's stuff in the middle too.
- [40:40]
C
Yeah.
- [40:41]
A
But I, I don't know. I mean, it takes a long time to go build a company. It's not like, yeah, it's just an overnight thing. And I, I think a lot of the folks that are just of this, like, I will spend an hour on my app and I'll ship it.
- [40:53]
C
Yeah.
- [40:53]
A
Like, they're probably, you know, gonna eventually phase out. And I think that the folks that remain will be the ones that are using as a tool.
- [41:02]
C
I think it's interesting because I think this, this whole rise of apathy, nihilism, whatever, is, is very real. And I feel like you sort of, you know, opened it up with this. But you can't blame people because it's like, yeah, homes, you know, you know, like we're sitting here in San Francisco, like, homes seem like ridiculously unaffordable if you're 22 and just getting started there' these reasons why it's like, well, I got to do something like a little divergent to get something to happen. So like, why not gamble? And I think a lot of this same sort of mindset applies in sort of just like, it's not just me gamble, like, it's also in people building, you know, companies and doing venture and all of that. I think you get to see sort of the range of just like going for it for, you know, sort of the, the long term reasons versus like, what can I, what can I flip this year?
- [41:48]
A
And then there's a lot of people who are also, like, extremely long term, have a thesis about the world. They're optimistic and they're trying to inflect the world for the better. And they're mission driven, not monetarily driven.
- [42:00]
C
Yeah, I mean, hopefully more of those than ever. Like, as tech grows, hopefully it's more than ever.
- [42:03]
A
Those are the folks that inspire me.
- [42:04]
C
Yeah. One of the things that I thought was very impressive among many on the FIGMA journey is the company seemed to get stronger through the Adobe acquisition and, you know, sort of it falling apart. And I would imagine that would be the kind of thing that could, like, spiritually break a lot of companies culturally. A lot of founders who are like, oh, man, I was like, right there. And now I got to do this whole, like, emotional and cultural reset. So, like, how do you, how did you navigate that? I guess starting with your own psychology.
- [42:40]
A
Yeah, that was probably the hardest amount of psychology because everything else is downstream of that. And if you're not bright in your own head, then how can you lead or make good decisions even? And for me, I think the start, it was kind of like, oh, 95% certainty will go through, no worries. Just kind of every time we checked in, the certainty went down. And eventually at the end, it's like, there's maybe a 5% chance in that arc at some point very quickly where it's like, okay, this is not a sure thing. Keep the foot on the gas, keep building. That's the best outcome whether we join Adobe or we're independent. And it's like, you can't be in this constant state of we're so back, it's so over and just rapid cycling through that your brain falls apart and turns to mush, in my opinion, at least for me. And so the word of the year for me then was equanimity. I think I said equanimity more times that year than I ever will say the rest of my life, probably. But she's like, okay, how do you find peace in every option and know that everything's going to be okay? We're building a great company for amazing customers and we have a lot of stuff to do. Let's go do it. And whatever happens, we're going to put our best foot forward. That's the contract we signed with Adobe, and we're going to make sure that we do everything we can to close this. If it doesn't work out, we'll have a great independent path. And then, you know, you get to the end of it. And I Think the relief the team felt at knowing an answer and having just like this, you know, superficial state collapse into okay, we know we're going to be independent, like, that was real relief. I bet it was the end of the year, you know, we found out as I was about to fly out to visit my in laws and I think I was like hashing through all the details of how to communicate with the team on like a Saturday night and a Sunday. Then Monday we announced that it was not going through and people had already gone break starting on that Friday, sent a message to this team on Slack, like at channel, you know, FYI, press release and details about like, what meant for them and said, hey, if you want, no pressure, if you want to join though, here's a Zoom call and we'll be talking about this then. And you know, just the relief on the Zoom call was like palpable over Zoom, which was pretty wild. Just the chat was.
- [45:19]
C
It makes sense though.
- [45:19]
A
It was like a big relief to know. And then, you know, the break is going and I'm like, okay, not everyone is in that place. And so we made a program called Detach, which is a Figma pun. You can detach a component. It's like something that some people frown on, but like it's also a necessary task sometimes. And the idea was just, hey, look, if you don't want to be at Figma, we don't want to trap you. Here's three months of pay. If you decide to leave, leave. And you're still like, cool with us, we're cool with you, everything's fine. And if you decide to reapply, you can't reapply for six months, but then you're welcome to reapply after that. And yeah, you're like, there's no issue if you decide to take this and if you don't like, FYI, we are a hard charging startup. It's going to be intense. We got a lot to do. And so we rolled this out, you know, kind of a nervous few weeks as people made their calls and then a little over 4% of people took us up on it.
- [46:22]
C
What year was that again?
- [46:23]
A
That would have been, I think 2023. I have to double check that. I get the dates all confused sometimes.
- [46:30]
C
Was there any element coinciding there too? Of like, there was like something in the water in tech at that time where like a cultural reset was happening at a lot of companies. And did that play in, in any way, did it help in any way that that was going on in other Places or did it just have.
- [46:47]
A
I don't think it factored in. Just to be clear. I think it was end of 2023 that we communicated for the first time, but like early 2024, that it was the detached program, if I'm accurate there.
- [46:58]
C
Yeah.
- [46:59]
A
And I think that really what we looked at, what people were doing, why they decided, I mean, a lot of it was just like, you know, I. I'm tired, I need a break.
- [47:11]
C
Yeah.
- [47:12]
A
And I want a lot of people making career changes. Like, it was really interesting. I got like early stage or, sorry, early career sales reps, moving over to like politics, stuff like that. It's also total domain hobby.
- [47:27]
C
I bet you for a lot of people it's, you know, when you like, flip a coin and you don't know what you want, you like flip a coin, you get tails. And then you're like, sad. You wish it was heads or vice versa. There's probably also some people going through that experience with like, oh, wow. I was actually really hoping that we could put a bow on this because I was ready for my next thing.
- [47:43]
A
Well, I mean. Or people got attached to the idea and yeah, there's definitely a few people who were, you know, amazing. And of course, you go talk to the folks that you're like, okay, I know you said this, but, like, are you sure?
- [47:55]
C
Yeah.
- [47:56]
A
And their headspace was one of, okay, like, it's. I get it. You're done. At least for now. Some people boomerang back.
- [48:03]
C
It's a really great move though, because basically you just like took the situation like on the front foot. And rather than just being like, oh, let's just see how we do. You're like, hey, if you want this, like, you gotta sign up. Yeah.
- [48:15]
A
I just feel like it's best in general to deal with things and move on. Totally. So I try to be direct my communication with people, make sure I'm setting clear expectations.
- [48:23]
C
Yeah.
- [48:24]
A
You know, for friends, like, you know, like, give very clear feedback.
- [48:29]
C
You're always telling me bad stuff.
- [48:31]
A
Oh, my gosh. It's not. There's not much. Not much to critique. But the. But yeah, I mean, then from there it was like, because we had put our foot on the gas the entire time, we were able to launch a bunch of product. I mean, we doubled our product offering at config recently due to the work we did in that period of time. We, right after the deal was dissolved, launched in GA Dev mode. And that was really, really exciting to watch that take off as well as just like countless other Product updates, the velocity only increased, the momentum was real. Yeah, I think leaning into it and just acknowledging it and starting that conversation was part of it.
- [49:11]
C
Yeah. Okay. On that note, I want to go to sort of like the final area, which is how you're thinking about just AI impacting sort of your roadmap and your product and maybe you could just even talk about like the things that you've been working on over the last six or 12 months that, you know, AI related that I think are sort of most important for figma so much.
- [49:31]
A
I think that first of all, you know, it's not just designers in the process, although they're the heart of it. They're working with developers, they're working with product managers and more researchers, marketers. And I think that if you can give developers a good way through MCP to pull context from design so they can be able to make things faster, it's a win. So we introduced dev mode, MCP and folks are able to use that with well structured design files to go build a front end experience so much faster. It's really wild to see how this works when you actually experience it live. You get a lot of the front end built for you by the AI that can interpret what we send over and do inference and it can be just extraordinarily fast. We're also thinking a lot about, of course, how do we make sure that you're able to have great prompting experiences in both Figma make but also Figma Design and Figma Design and we've teased it but it's not out yet. But we're really excited about that. In general, I'd say it feels like we're kind of in this Ms. DOS era of AI where we're going to look back in some number of years and go, it's kind of wild that we're just like typing text all the time. There will be some amount of dimensionality collapse into interfaces and you know, it's also the case, I think for any AI company, the strategic question you have to be positive on is as models get better, do we get better? And their answer has to be yes. If it's no, in some way, you got to readjust strategy. In late October, as you know, we announced Weavy now figma Weave and this is an acquisition we've made that I think really meets these attributes and I am so excited about. Basically it makes it so you can use all these different generative models for image video, but also to transform across modalities like image to 3D for example, and you can then connect them in a node based workflow, use it to creatively explore or also create a pipeline, make a process. And the things we're seeing people do with it are just so cool and wild and expressive. And I guess overall it's also made me reflect a lot because a lot of people call the output of these models slop. It's almost like a derogatory term. And without making any comment on slop versus not slop, I mean, some things I see as outputs, I'm like, wow, it's amazing. But I think the more important point is like, whatever you start with, it's a starting point and you can use that in a workflow to get to something amazing for your own craft. Yeah. And I think with Weave, that's what we're seeing is just this incredible way that artists and creatives can go and create all sorts of different types of multimedia generation and then also use it across the FIGMA platform. And so I'm really, really excited about what we're doing there and just the fact that they trusted us to join up and what we can do in the future.
- [52:30]
C
As you add more and more AI into the product, what do you think is like the final bastion of human designers? Will it be taste coordination? What will the set of things be that you're most confident in? Will always be just like human tasks.
- [52:47]
A
I mean, I think that we are so far away from AI replacing designers. And if you actually look at the designs generated, I think it's very easy to tell that. But even if the design generation from an aesthetic standpoint gets better, like it's not considering the entire system, it's not considering all the constraints. You're not exploring the full option space. You're not thinking about like the context culturally. You're not thinking about the business problems you have to solve or the greater system that connects everything. That's all these different targets across all these different experiences you're trying to create. You're not thinking about the emotional qualities you're trying to create and the brand and how that gets pulled in. There's just so much. And the best designers are able to take all these different inputs and then be able to explore out very dense and deep trees of possibility to figure out what is the best approach systematically and then go build on it. And I don't know, it's like one example I go through a lot that resonates with the Gen Z people, but not the millennials or folks that are older. Always is Brad Summer, you, you know Brad Summer, right? No.
- [54:04]
C
Oh, Brad Summer.
- [54:05]
A
Yes, Brad Summer.
- [54:06]
C
Brad Summer. Of course.
- [54:07]
A
See, you're going Brad Summer.
- [54:09]
C
I was like, who's Brad Summer? Yeah.
- [54:10]
A
No, Brad. Yeah. We can talk about Brad Summer later.
- [54:12]
C
Yeah, Brad Summer's cool.
- [54:13]
A
Anyway, Brat Summer. And, you know, I use Brat Summer as an example a lot because, well, think about it, right? Like the album cover, obviously not just the album cover, but as a design artifact. Lime green square, I think it was, what, come of Sands or something that was written in.
- [54:30]
C
Yeah.
- [54:30]
A
What asi, you know, designer would create Brat Summer.
- [54:37]
C
I don't know. I mean, or if they did, it would be one out of 100,000 and no weight would be thrown behind it. Because I think that's the other piece of design is it's not just the artifact. It's knowing this is good and, you know, we're going to put the right sort of message behind it.
- [54:52]
A
And so for aesthetic, I mean, the ability to go think of all the possibilities in the world and end up on that album cover like, you put me in a room for 100 years. I don't think I would have come up with that.
- [55:04]
C
Well, I definitely wouldn't. Yeah.
- [55:05]
A
And on the other hand of it, the other extreme, it's like, okay, what about usability? What about hierarchy? What about the ability to think about the different permutations of the way you take a data model, express it through UI and allow people to actually control an interface and what affordances to use and which ones to get rid of and innovate on and go find new ways to do something that are out of distribution.
- [55:26]
C
Yeah.
- [55:26]
A
Like, I think that the role of a designer is going to be one where AI makes it so that they are able to get rid of the drudgery. They won't have to engage with repetitive tasks anymore. Instead, they'll be able to be like, really thinking more holistically, thinking further and going to beyond. And I think it'll lead to an explosion of creativity. Explosion of really interesting, amazing outputs. And I'm pretty excited for it.
- [55:55]
C
I think the same thing that you just described is true with music, where obviously AI music sounds pretty good. But I still think, like, these albums that like, take over a summer or just like a song that captures everybody. Like, I just. There's something like more like soulful that has to be captured that I just don't think we're there yet.
- [56:16]
A
Well, I also think it's possible that, like, on the music side, AI Generated music can inspire an artist to go and riff on that, and inspiration can come from anywhere for sure. Like, I think AI is a great inspiration tool. It's also a great tool to figure out what do you not want to do? Like, I never use AI for writing. Personally, I find it doesn't capture voice. But I love asking AI what are the 10 cliche ways to say this so I can go like push beyond it and figure out the actual new way to say the thing that I'm trying to say. Yeah. And I don't know, I think that just like we're the more we capture the distribution that exists today, the more we can think outside of it. And that's human creativity. Yeah.
- [57:00]
C
I love it. Dylan. This is super fun.
- [57:02]
A
Thank you for having me. Yeah, great to see you as always. You too.
- [57:07]
B
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating, or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and it may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.