Figma: Dylan Field

Summary

How I Built This with Guy Raz: Figma – Dylan Field

Release Date: June 16, 2025

In this captivating episode of How I Built This, host Guy Raz delves into the entrepreneurial journey of Dylan Field, the co-founder and CEO of Figma, a revolutionary design collaboration platform now valued in the billions. Raz uncovers the inception, challenges, and triumphs that shaped Figma into an indispensable tool for designers worldwide.

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Early Life and Foundations

Sonoma County Roots

Dylan Field grew up in Sonoma County, California, during the late 1990s and early 2000s. A prodigious talent in mathematics and computers from a young age, Dylan also dabbled in acting, securing roles in commercials and community theater. This blend of analytical prowess and creative expression laid the groundwork for his future endeavors.

Evan Wallace (Dylan's College Friend): “I think someone referred me to an agent... I got pulled in for a Windows XP commercial... It was a fun chain of events that led to that one.”
[05:03]

Academic Pursuits

Dylan pursued higher education at Brown University, initially focusing on computer science and mathematics. However, his interests gradually shifted towards design and art history, influenced by his internships and interactions with seasoned designers.

Dylan Field: “There’s something amazing about being part of the design process.”
[33:33]

The Birth of Figma

Inspiration and the Thiel Fellowship

Inspired by the inefficiencies in real-time design collaboration prevalent in 2012, Dylan and his friend Evan Wallace conceptualized Figma. Recognizing the potential for a browser-based design tool, Dylan secured a Thiel Fellowship at 19, allowing him to drop out of college and focus on his startup.

Evan Wallace: “We kept talking about ideas to prototype... exploring tools to democratize design.”
[16:52]

Seed Funding and Early Development

With a seed round of nearly $4 million raised in June 2013, Dylan and Evan embarked on building Figma. The early years were marked by intense development, team expansion, and refining the product based on user feedback.

Evan Wallace: “We had almost $4 million to work with, which was a pretty good Runway.”
[37:21]

Challenges and Growth

Initial Launch and Mixed Reception

Figma's initial launch in October 2016 garnered mixed reviews. While some designers embraced the collaborative approach, others were skeptical, accustomed to solitary design processes.

Evan Wallace: “A lot of designers at that point were coming from an agency culture... initial comments were stuff like, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers.”
[49:01]

Scaling Amidst Competition

As Figma grew, it faced competition from industry giants like Adobe, which launched Adobe XD in response. Despite these challenges, Figma's commitment to continuous improvement and user-centric features fueled its ascent.

Evan Wallace: “We just continued to push ahead to the things that we thought people really needed.”
[64:19]

Acquisition Attempt and Regulatory Hurdles

Adobe's $20 Billion Offer

In September 2022, Adobe made a landmark offer to acquire Figma for $20 billion. This deal underscored Figma's significance in the design industry and marked a pivotal moment for the company.

Evan Wallace: “The chance to continue our work at Figma there while also rethinking Creative Cloud was exciting.”
[68:28]

Antitrust Investigation and Deal Collapse

Shortly after the announcement, government regulators initiated an antitrust investigation, citing potential anti-competitive implications. Despite initial optimism and a substantial breakup fee agreement, the deal was ultimately blocked in December 2023.

Evan Wallace: “We included a breakup fee as part of the negotiation... I felt like Figma is all about software design development and Adobe was not.”
[70:25]

Navigating the Future

Continued Innovation and AI Integration

Post-acquisition fallout, Figma surged forward, embracing artificial intelligence to enhance its platform. The company's adaptability ensured it remained at the forefront of design technology, catering to an ever-expanding user base.

Evan Wallace: “The value of good design will actually go up even more in this environment.”
[75:32]

Personal Reflections and Resilience

Throughout the journey, Dylan and Evan exemplified resilience, balancing personal challenges with professional aspirations. Evan's departure from Figma to explore open-source projects marked a new chapter, while Dylan steered the company towards IPO considerations shortly after the interview.

Evan Wallace: “I left because I’m somebody that genuinely like, I have so much respect for.”
[76:28]

Key Takeaways and Insights

• Visionary Leadership: Dylan Field's ability to foresee the need for collaborative design tools revolutionized the industry.

• Adaptability: Figma's responsiveness to user feedback and market demands facilitated its rapid growth and sustained relevance.

• Resilience in Adversity: Overcoming regulatory challenges and competitive pressures highlighted the company's steadfast commitment to its mission.

• Future of Design: Embracing AI and fostering a culture of continuous innovation positions Figma to remain a leader in the design space.

Evan Wallace: “Human judgment is essential in navigating design processes, something AI hasn't fully replicated yet.”
[75:32]

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Conclusion

Dylan Field's journey with Figma is a testament to visionary thinking, relentless pursuit of innovation, and the ability to navigate complex challenges. Under his leadership, Figma has not only transformed how designers collaborate but has also set new standards in the design-tech landscape. This episode offers invaluable insights into building a tech-driven enterprise that prioritizes user collaboration and design excellence.

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Note: All quotes are attributed to respective speakers with their corresponding timestamps for reference.

Transcript

[Guy Raz]

Wondery subscribers can listen to How I Built this early and ad free right now. Join Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to our sponsor, American Express. Being a business owner means you are in control of your destiny and you get to be your own boss. With Amex Business Platinum, you can get a flexible spending limit that adapts with your business. Not all purchases will be approved. Plus you can earn 1.5 times Membership Rewards points on select business purchases. Points cap applies. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms apply. Learn [e-mail] AmExBusiness so here's something pretty.

[Dylan Field]

Cool to think about.

[Guy Raz]

Have you ever been lying in bed at night at an Airbnb, maybe scrolling through your phone when you realize, wait a minute, could I do this too? That was the question Giovanni asked about his house in Florence, Italy. And guess what? I got to stay in that magical palazzo for a few nights because it was on Airbnb. Find out how much your place is [e-mail] host if you've shopped online, chances are you bought from a business powered by Shopify. And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it. Because Shopify doesn't just make amazing buying experiences for customers, they're also the experts in helping small businesses grow big. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. Tackle all the important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. Get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com built go to shopify.com built shopify.com biltine.

[Evan Wallace]

They were just going, Dylan, you gotta be more commercial. And I'm like, what does that mean? They're like, you gotta be more commercial. And I'm like, do you mean, do I have to like say more sales terminology and stuff like that? Like, what are you getting at? And I think what they meant was price the product. And when this design leader came and said, we can't use it unless you price the product, I was like, oh everyone, we gotta go charge for the product as fast as we can. I was a little dense on it, but it got there eventually.

[Dylan Field]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

[Unknown]

I'm Guy Raz and on the show today how Dylan Field left college to figure out a better way for designers to collaborate and built a company called Figma, now worth billions. If you've ever booked a trip on Airbnb, watched something on Netflix, or joined a Zoom call, you've interacted with a product that was designed using Figma. Figma is the platform behind the platforms, a tool that lets teams of designers collaborate in real time from anywhere in the world. And while that might sound obvious Today, back in 2012, it was a pretty radical idea. At the time, real time design collaboration was clunky and slow. Most people still emailed files back and forth. Even designers were skeptical that something like Figma could work. But Dylan Field and his college friend Evan Wallace believed there was a better way. So much so that Dylan left Brown University at 19 after landing a Thiel Fellowship to give the idea a shot. He had never managed a never built a company and had never launched a product. It took four years of development before Figma officially launched, and even then, adoption didn't happen overnight. But eventually it clicked. And in 2022, Adobe, one of Figma's biggest competitors, offered $20 billion to acquire it. But as you will hear, the deal was blocked by government regulators. Today, Figma is used by some of the most recognizable companies in the world to design the and interfaces we use every day. But this story isn't just about software. It's about a young founder learning to build, lead, and grow up without a whole lot of experience to guide him. Dylan Field grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Sonoma County, California. He was into math and computers from an early age, but also he did a lot of acting, even some paying gigs.

[Evan Wallace]

You know, at five, five and a half, whatever. I was like, I could read, I could sit still. And I think in comparison to how I am now, I was actually a very, I was a cute kid. You know, that's to change to puberty. We can get to that later. But the but as a kid, you know, was, was cute. And so I guess someone referred me to an agent and no major roles or anything, but lots of auditions and some commercial work, a little bit of TV work.

[Dylan Field]

So you were really, I mean, you were on this kind of path to becoming a child actor. I mean, I know you said that you didn't really land any major roles, but I read that you were, I mean, which is kind of crazy. You were in like a Windows XP commercial as a kid.

[Evan Wallace]

That was a funny one because there is a performance of Tommy the who that the original actor who was going to play young Tommy fell through for. Because she refused to shave her head or cut her hair, rather. They needed someone else. And so I got pulled in, and this is a.

[Dylan Field]

This is a performance. Where. Where was the. Where was it?

[Evan Wallace]

It was at SRJC. Santa Rosa Jr College.

[Dylan Field]

Santa Rosa Junior College.

[Evan Wallace]

Okay.

[Dylan Field]

Yep.

[Evan Wallace]

And then after that, I got to be Michael and Peter Pan, also there.

[Dylan Field]

At Santa Rosa Junior College, also Santa.

[Evan Wallace]

Rosa Junior College, but during their summer program, which is really cool. It's actually my most embarrassing moment in acting as a kid was during that production because I fell asleep on stage in that scene where in Peter Pan, where all the kids are asleep and Wendy is talking to Peter, and the actress playing Peter Pan gave me my cue, and I was still asleep, and she gave me my cue again, still asleep. And then she gave me a kick, and then I leapt up and gave my line. But, yeah, it was like Dylan didn't get up anyway. But due to that production, I had the experience with stunt flying. And then that was what they're looking for for the XP commercial. So it was kind of a fun chain of events that led to that one.

[Guy Raz]

So how did it.

[Dylan Field]

I mean, so you're doing all this community theater.

[Guy Raz]

What happened?

[Dylan Field]

Why aren't. Why am I not talking to an adult actor today?

[Evan Wallace]

I mean, first of all, I was very thankful that, that my parents, especially my mom, who was the one who was driving me all these places, was willing to do that, but also that she was never pushing me to do it. And I think at some point, the combination of becoming a teenager, acne, braces, awkwardness in general, plus gain more interest in math, computers, I was like, okay. And then, hey, math and computers is pretty fun. So I started diving in on that instead of Dylan.

[Dylan Field]

There's an article that was written about you, and we're going to talk about why later on in 2012 in the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, which I still read, I still subscribe to, Just if anyone's listening from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. And your dad, Andy, is quoted in it, and it was on the occasion of you winning an award, which we're going to talk about later. And he said, you know, when Dylan was six, he was already solving algebra problems. And, you know, by the time he was in middle school, he was hanging out with a janitor who was kind of a math savant, helping him learn more advanced mathematics. First of all, were your parents kind of doing math problems with you as a kid? Were they mathematicians? Was that Something that they were kind.

[Guy Raz]

Of exposing you to or. Or how did you come to just.

[Dylan Field]

Become really fascinated with math.

[Evan Wallace]

My mom was an elementary school teacher, and so I would press her for. While we're waiting for things, I'd press her for, hey, give me more problems to solve.

[Dylan Field]

Who was the. I mean, apparently in middle school there was a janitor. It sounds like. I mean, it sounds like Good Will Hunting almost, right?

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. So he was really cool. Yeah, he was very cerebral, very into math and physics. And I think the reason he took the janitor job was very much to just kind of think about stuff all day long and be in his head. And so I try to always cultivate friendships with people who are older than me. I think now that I'm sometimes the older one, it's like, okay, you're straight out of college. Like, there's a lot I could probably learn from you, you know, and he would tell me about different ideas and concepts that he was learning about and studying himself. And at some point he said, well, look, the really cool stuff isn't proofs. You should really learn a little bit of set theory. And so. But he was super sweet.

[Unknown]

I know that you also got really into computers when you were a kid, and then when it came time to go to college, you went to Brown in Rhode island to study computer science and, I believe, mathematics. And tell me a little bit about your time there, because from what I read, you went through a bunch of different. Like, you were interested in computer science, but you were actually more interested in, like, art history classes. And I think you even explored, like, political science, maybe, thinking at a certain point, maybe law school, you know, which is.

[Guy Raz]

Which is great, right?

[Unknown]

That's like what college is for. But did you start to kind of, I don't know, get more interested in other things and less interested in computer science or computer programming.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, I've always been curious about most everything. And at Brown, one of the best parts is there's no formal requirements for the school other than technically a writing requirement. You need to make sure that you can write. And, yeah, I kept getting pulled back into sort of Silicon Valley startups as something that I felt very engaged with.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, you get, as you say, you kept getting pulled back because I think the first summer of your freshman year, you go and work for LinkedIn, you do a summer internship there in. Back in California.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, I. I met DJ Patel, who later on became the Chief Data science Officer of America under the Obama administration. And DJ contacted me pretty early in my freshman year and said, hey, what are you doing this summer? It was pretty informal at the time. That was kind of the process. DJ was great. @ the start of the internship, he said, hey, everyone at LinkedIn on this team, they all do something. The first three months, they do something that's really incredible and foundational, so you gotta figure out how that is for you. And I was like, oh, okay. And you know, it's in the back of my head, I'm kind of searching for that challenge as well. And there was an in day, which is kind of like a hack day. And I kind of noticed that people were really excited about this idea of LinkedIn for good, like, see if we.

[Dylan Field]

Can harness the power of LinkedIn to do good, whatever that means.

[Evan Wallace]

Exactly. So that was kind of the idea is, is there a non profit aspect that we can explore, etc. In the meantime, I saw a lecture from someone who was talking about the work he had done to translate text messages for victims of the Haiti earthquake. But the issue was they didn't have enough crayol speakers, so they couldn't translate to the emergency responders the text messages of people that were stuck in rubble. It was horrible. And I'm sitting there and going, my gosh, we've got all the data to know who the speakers of Cradle are. And so it kind of spawned this idea of, okay, maybe there's some way to connect people to nonprofits based on skills.

[Guy Raz]

So you.

[Dylan Field]

So you ended up working on this project called LinkedIn for Good, which basically aggregated all the skills that were available on the site. I guess it even caught the attention of the CEO of Jeff Weiner.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, the real effort started after to develop it started after I left my internship. Jeff Weiner certainly came out to me after I presented about the project at All Hands. And yeah, after the All Hands, he goes, hey, so do you want to keep going at LinkedIn? And I said, well, I think I want to go back to school. Thank you, though. And Tia, so are you thinking about starting something someday? I said, maybe. He said, well, if you do, call me. At least that's my recollection. His recollection is slightly better or a better story. His recollection is saying, hey, Dylan, are you going to start something someday? Maybe, I don't know. Well, if you do, I'll fund it. And I got to say, I like his version better, but I don't remember it quite that way.

[Dylan Field]

And foreshadowing a little bit. We'll get to it. But a few years later, he did become one of your earliest Investors in Figma.

[Evan Wallace]

He has been an incredible advisor and mentor and investor and figment supporter from day one.

[Dylan Field]

Wow. All right, so you go back to Providence, Rhode island, and start your sophomore year and really getting into. More into design. Right. Because you'd done a lot of, you know, you'd been interested in web design, but you were a programmer, but you.

[Guy Raz]

Were getting more into design.

[Dylan Field]

And I guess the summer after your second year, you go work for this company called Flipboard, which I think. I think they're still around.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, they are.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah. And they basically created this way to look at the Internet, the web, look at a webpage, but, like, you were flipping through a magazine.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. So Flipboard was one of the first iPad apps that really took advantage of the iPad. Surface. To the iPad.

[Dylan Field]

Yes.

[Evan Wallace]

And so good.

[Dylan Field]

It looks so, so good. Yeah.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. And you.

[Dylan Field]

And you ended up going to work there. They're also in California, in the Bay Area.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, they were in Palo Alto. And, you know, it was a very buzzy company at the time, and it was just a absolutely gorgeous product. And, yeah, I just started to get to hang out with the designers, and I'd always been really interested in design. And, you know, one thing that I got to learn at Flipboard was just really the more about the history of typography, of layout. And I'd always been surrounded by magazines growing up. My. My dad found some ways to, like, get crazy discounts and magazines through some coupon codes online or something like that. And so there's always just, like, endless magazines around the house.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And I guess the next year, you go back to Flipboard to work there again for a while, I think, this time in design. And then in your third year at Brown, you decide to apply for the Thiel Fellowship, which is this fellowship where the winner gets, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars to basically drop out of college and start a business. So did you have an idea in your mind of what you might want to do or even who you might want to do it with?

[Evan Wallace]

Well, I thought to myself, okay, there's no way I'm gonna go start something if I'm not doing it with someone that I think is amazing. And I thought, okay, the only person I'd start a company with, and whatever way it goes, I'll learn from them, and it'll be an amazing experience, because just being with them will be, you know, a gift into itself, is Evan Wallace.

[Dylan Field]

Evan Wallace, who's a year older than you at Brown and just somebody you really respected and admired.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, Evan was my TA for a computer vision class. At the time, I said, hey, do you want to get dinner? We got dinner. And I said, you know, you're about to graduate next semester. What are you going to do? And he goes, well, I've got offers from. He lists all the places he had interned. Microsoft, Pixar. And he goes, you know, I just think that I'll be probably not as challenged in those environments, but it could be cool. We'll see. And by the way, Evan's not a super cocky guy. He is as humble as humble gets. But also, he was very clearly the most genius person I'd ever met. His nickname was CJ Computer Jesus, because Evan was basically on the computer every chance he got. And it turns out if you spend 10, 12 hours a day programming from a young age, every single day, you are a really good programmer.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Evan Wallace]

But, yeah, Evan and I got dinner and, you know, we started talking about, okay, well, would you ever start a company with me? And he goes, yeah, I consider that that'd be. That might be more fun than joining a bigger company. And I always said, great, well, let's meet up some more and see if there's any ideas we like.

[Dylan Field]

And so what did you guys start to bat around? What kind of ideas?

[Evan Wallace]

Kind of everything. The question that we were trying to answer was, why now? What is the change that's happening in the world that would make an idea interesting? I had a huge list, passed it, he and kind of merged them and then started striking them out. And at the end, we had two that we thought were kind of interesting. One was one that I was more bullish and excited about. One was something that he was more excited about, but we're both kind of interested in the other one, too. And the two were drones and WebGL.

[Dylan Field]

WebGL, which is basically a way to do 2D and 3D graphics in a web page. Right. And so this just made it. This is going to factor into what he would eventually create because this was a revolutionary change. WebGL introduced this frictionless ability to see like 3D renderings in a webpage, which today we take for granted. But in 2011, that was still quite radical, revolutionary.

[Evan Wallace]

So, yeah, so one of the directions, WebGL, which Evan was way ahead of everybody else on, and I was also a fan of too. I thought that there's so much you could do with it, But I also had some concerns. And the other one was drones. I looked at the world in late 2011 and said, okay, still need to figure out the use cases, but I'm Pretty sure that quadcopters and sort of what will come out of that will be huge. And I think we were both right.

[Dylan Field]

I want to go back to what made you compelled you to apply to this fellowship in the fall of. In 2011. I mean, because they want you to drop out of school. But why did you decide to do this when you were absolutely convinced that you were going to graduate from college?

[Evan Wallace]

Well, it wasn't necessarily like a dropout situation. You can always go back, right?

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Evan Wallace]

And plenty of people take leave of absence. So I think that was my mindset, first of all, like, even if the startup flames out, I learned a lot from Evan, had some savings from the acting days, and at the same time, I thought that the probability of this happening was very low. Will I get the Thiel Fellowship? Almost certainly not. Will Evan decide to do this with me? Who knows? But it'll be fun to explore and, you know, put an application in just in case.

[Dylan Field]

So you get the application in just, you know, an hour or two before the deadline you submit. They have all these questions about you. They want to know what publications you've been in. So, of course, you were written about in the Brown student newspaper a couple times. You were also in an NPR story in 2011, which was about one of your mentors, D.J. patel. And he. In this article, he's quoted as saying, oh, this kid is just phenomenal. I've known him since he was 16. And so that's a pretty great endorsement to have that guy saying in this article. But the other thing that I noticed about your application, because there are 500 people who applied for this that year, there's a question that they ask, which is something like, tell us something counterintuitive like what the world strongly believes in that most people think is true, but that you just disagree with to something that you completely think is wrong. Your answer is, I'm going to just read a little bit of it. It says, tell us what you think is true, but that most people think is not true. And you write, chocolate is repulsive. And then you go into a whole essay about why you hate chocolate. You think it's horrible, you can't stand the smell of it. And then you include the fact that apparently 2% of the population doesn't like chocolate, and that Nestle did research into this and they found that maybe there's.

[Evan Wallace]

A small end, but y.

[Dylan Field]

Maybe there's an imbalance of gut bacteria that cause to most people, you're thinking, chocolate is repulsive.

[Guy Raz]

This is insane.

[Dylan Field]

Who thinks that Everybody knows chocolate is delicious, but this is truly a counterintuitive idea. And I have to think that that really caught their eye. Cause all of a sudden it's just like a left turn. Totally not connected to technology.

[Evan Wallace]

You know, it's funny, I was really proud of that essay and I had a lot of fun writing it because I really don't like chocolate. And people have always thought that was the weirdest thing ever. So I thought I was answering the question the purest way possible and maybe even being a bit Mediterranean.

[Dylan Field]

But I think that they want counterintuitive thinkers. And, I mean, you're competing against 500 of the smartest kids in the country under 20. And I guess your parents initially were not psyched about you really pursuing this because they wanted you to finish school, but your mom and dad wanted you to finish college.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, they were, you know, savers. And I had my own savings as well. But they were not rich.

[Dylan Field]

They had solid, you know, middle class.

[Evan Wallace]

Careers and they had put a ton of resources into my education. So the idea of, you know, potentially squandering that is like, what are you doing? And with Evan, we would talk every weekend, even as this process was ongoing and just kind of keep moving forward, talking about ideas to prototype. And the thing we were exploring then was using WebGL, but it was because, again, that's the hammer and everything was a nail. So basically we were exploring how do you take a photograph and convert it into a 3D scene. And so we thought maybe there's a way to go and explore many different tools that will let people do the sort of things that you can accomplish in high end programs such as Photoshop or 3D tools, but do them in a way that anyone can access and really democratize that.

[Dylan Field]

All right, so you guys are batting around ideas and you really kind of land on this idea of web using WebGL to create something that will give, that will sort of empower people to, to be designers. Somehow you're not really sure what it's going to be. And then you, you become a finalist for this fellowship. You get, you get to the final round, 40 people under 20, and you get it. You're, you're picked, you present, you're sent to San Francisco, you fly to San Francisco, you present. And my parents, your parents came and.

[Evan Wallace]

They get more excited now because they met all these other finalists and went, oh. Or as my dad put it, he goes, I always thought you were weird, but these people are weird too.

[Dylan Field]

And so you find out at the end of your junior year May of 2012 that you get the fellowship, Evan is about to graduate and he's going to join you. You're going to move to California, back home and you're going to start working on this. So you took, technically, I think you took a leave of absence. You did not drop out of Brown, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean there's a. And you know, these fellowships get so much attention because it's such a big deal. I mean, you know, Peter Thiel is encouraging people under 20 who have great ideas to, to pursue them.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, I was excited about the fellowship and also the other people that were taking the fellowship were or applying were just so cool. And the chance just to have this community around, people that like literally knew what I was going through and spent time with them, it was just socially very helpful and also very inspiring. People would push you and say, hey, like, why are you thinking small? Think bigger. And that actually I think was a big input to why we got to where we eventually headed for figma.

[Dylan Field]

All right, so you, in article, an article written about that time, I think the Press Democrat wrote a piece about you. You were still, don't want to say vague, but you were still like working out what this is going to be because you're starting to work on this. And it was described at the time as like Photoshop in a browser. Journalists. And I say this as somebody who was a journalist, I think for well intentioned reasons, like to simplify things so people can understand, so they can visualize what it is. And that was kind of initially how people described it. And I guess that summer it was just you and Evan kind of working together. And what were you. Tell me what you guys were literally doing every day.

[Evan Wallace]

Well, so first of all, we didn't start till August because Evan want to graduate, of course. And we got started a bit later than when we received the fellowship. And the start coincided with media that the fellowship had kind of offered up. And so the actual first or second day of doing the fellowship, starting to work with Evan, I flew out to New York with my mom to be on the Today show. And I had no idea what we're doing yet because we hadn't barely started.

[Dylan Field]

And they probably were like, and today.

[Guy Raz]

We'Re going to introduce you to Wizkid genius Dylan Field.

[Dylan Field]

Welcome to the Today show. And they were saying, and tell us.

[Guy Raz]

What are you going to do? How are you going to change the world?

[Evan Wallace]

I gave him a very vague answer because we really didn't know.

[Unknown]

When we come back in just a moment Dylan and Evan launch a tool that will change how designers work, only to learn that a lot of designers don't really want to change how they work.

[Dylan Field]

Stay with us.

[Unknown]

I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built this.

[Guy Raz]

My favorite vacations have been to towns and cities where I could also just enjoy living like a local shopping in the markets, cooking in my own kitchen, or spending a lazy afternoon looking out the window and reading a book. And all of this has been possible because I usually stay at Airbnbs. Maybe you're planning a trip for a long weekend, or maybe you want to book a stay somewhere warm while you're away. You could Airbnb your home and make some extra money toward the trip. Whether you could use a little extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home or spare room might be worth more than you think. Find out how [e-mail] host how I built this is supported by Ring. With Ring, you can be there from anywhere with doorbells and cameras that help you see more to exciting features that help you know more to the app that lets you connect more See more at the front door, up high and down low with battery doorbell's head to toe video capture it all all day and all night and get smarter alerts that know the difference between a person and a package right in the Ring app. I use Ring to check in on my dog when I'm out of the house or running errands just to make sure everything's okay. It's awesome because I can see her wherever she's in the house. With Ring, you can check in and be there from anywhere. Some features require a subscription and are available only on select Ring devices. Exclusions apply. Learn [e-mail] what does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Rates will rise or fall. Inflation's up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. As a business owner myself, I love the idea of Having this much clarity and control, whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com built netsuite.com built.

[Unknown]

Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the summer of 2012, and Dylan and his partner Evan are gearing up for the Thiel Fellowship, working on an idea that has something to do with design.

[Evan Wallace]

The first thing we looked at was 2D face swapping. So basically, you know, I got your face, I got my face. How can I take your face and swap it onto my face? Kind of a cool party trick, but with something called Poisson blending, which Evan found a way to do very fast in real time in the browser with, you know, some graphics wizardry, we were able to make it so that we had an amazing demo in just like a week.

[Dylan Field]

And so bait just to interrupt for a sec, you weren't necessarily, like, playing around with these ideas. Sounds like you weren't going for, like, the serious designer crowd, maybe like more like people who wanted to make memes.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, I mean, it was that first one. Yes. I think we were also looking at more consumer cases that were not as meme oriented as well. At some point later on, we literally created a meme creator. That was the darkest week of Figma. You know, I was pitching Evan saying, look, I've done the research, I've looked at the data. This meme thing, you know, we're just used to it because it's Internet culture and we see it online all the time and we share them with our friends. But, like, most people haven't discovered it yet. Like, it's a very early part of an exponential trend around memes. Memes are going to be way bigger than we could ever possibly imagine. We should make a meme creator. And Evan's like, are you serious? And so he kind of humored me for a week or so, like, five days. We made a meme generator, and it was a very good meme generator. And at the end of the week, we just kind of looked at each other and I'm like, going, man, I dropped out of brown for this. And Evan's going, I think I'm going to quit. It was a good sign of we're going to work on some more serious stuff.

[Dylan Field]

So you guys are working on this and just So I can understand this today. Oftentimes, Figma is kind of described in shorthand as Google Docs, but for images, for graphics, for design. When did that idea start to converge? Was it in 2013 when the two of you thought, well, what if we build a collaboration tool like Google Docs, but for, for design, for graphics, for images?

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. So I think that that experience of working at Flipboard, working with the designers there, it always been my mind as something that was amazing to be part of this design process. And Flipboard was way ahead of its time. And the collaboration didn't exist. It was, you know, emailing files, or at best, you put them in a Dropbox folder.

[Dylan Field]

But, you know, and oftentimes if you were a designer working collaboratively, you might start to work on something that was emailed to you, fix it up, but then only to realize that like, this is like already two days old and.

[Evan Wallace]

People, yeah, people already done other stuff with it. And I, you know, Evan and I both grew up using Google Docs, you know, playing multiplayer games. And so the nature of real time collaboration, that was native to us and just kind of like, obviously the way that things should work. That said, we weren't sure about the market size for design. I looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and it said there is something like 200,000 designers in the United States, or web designers. It is. And so that's obviously like a pretty small number. And at the same time we felt like there's something there. We felt like maybe this is a starting point, we go broader afterwards into other areas. But let's try it out.

[Dylan Field]

And just to clarify, you looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers and saw that in 2013 there were only 200,000 web designers in the US which is kind of hard to believe because that's a small market if that's who your target audience was. But you had a hunch that given the tools that were available, which were clunky and there were plugins and they weren't really, they didn't make collaboration easy, you felt like there was a real opportunity here. Did you get, I mean, and this is still, you're still miles away from having a product ready to go.

[Guy Raz]

But did you hear that from people where you.

[Dylan Field]

Did you have an opportunity to interview designers or to talk to them and ask them what they wanted?

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, so both. I had been working as a designer at Flipboard or Design intern. I went and talk with other designers that I knew. I also started talking and researching and learning about how companies were growing their Design teams. And there's something that was, like, seemed very off because these companies were investing a lot in design. You know, Facebook was acquiring entire design agencies to try to make their design team bigger. And it was like, wait, how is it the case that all this hiring is going on yet there's only a few hundred thousand web designers in the United States? Like, either the number's wrong, or it's growing so fast that it doesn't matter. In either way, we can go into other areas later. So I think, let's go. Let's go do this. And at first, we were very focused on what are the things that we can just do so much better from the tool standpoint, not the collaborative standpoint, but as an individual user. You know, what are the breakthroughs we can introduce? Can we make a better way to create grids and guides? Also, how do we honestly build a project of this magnitude on the web? That was something that, you know, we had a lot of technical work to do to figure out what was possible.

[Dylan Field]

All right, so you have. So you guys are really focusing, doubling down on this idea. And because of the Thiel Fellowship, I'm sure there are a lot of people who are interested in, you know, maybe even blindly investing in whatever you're. I'm sure there are people who are like, I'm just going to put, you know, half a million dollars down on every single one of these people. You had already had a relationship with Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn. He had told you, like, two years.

[Guy Raz]

Before, hey, if you ever start something.

[Dylan Field]

Get in touch with me. And in fact, you guys went to him and a group of other people to raise some money for seed funding, which you did. You raised almost $4 million in June of 2013. So about a year after you got the Thiel Fellowship, what did you. What was the. I mean, at that point? Was it a fully formed idea? Was it. Were you able to articulate what this was going to be?

[Evan Wallace]

You know, not. Not yet. You know, I. I honestly, I've looked back at that pitch, and I don't know if I would invest in myself if I saw it. You know, back in 2013. It was very vague. It was not clear yet what we were going to do exactly. And exactly the strategy was. I think that came very shortly afterwards. But we raised just a bit ahead of being concrete on our direction.

[Dylan Field]

There was one guy you really wanted to be involved with this, and this was a guy named John Lilly, who was. He had been the CEO of Mozilla and was now Partner Greylock. And I imagine you wanted him involved because of his experience with Mozilla running a browser business, but he decided he was not going to invest at the seed level, that he didn't feel like you guys really knew what you were going to do.

[Guy Raz]

And normally not normally.

[Dylan Field]

Oftentimes people just move on and it's like, okay, he doesn't want to do it, but you wanted him involved. And I guess you felt like you had to figure out a way to get him to convince him that this was going to be something. What? Tell me a little bit about that relationship.

[Evan Wallace]

Well, I mean, John is just a excellent human. And immediately I was just so impressed. Like, not only was he super high integrity, it was just very clear and principled, but he was also his. His belief, his care about design, it was off the charts. And then said, hey, I'm down to keep in touch. I like you guys. Let's just keep talking. At some point, maybe a year and a half or so later, John said, if you're ever thinking about raising another round, let me know.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Dylan Field]

So it would be another year and a half before he would factor in again financially. But during that year and a half, you had almost $4 million to work with, which is a pretty good Runway. And now you begin to build something right in your mind. When did you expect to have a product ready for at least for some people to play with?

[Evan Wallace]

Oh, I was totally unrealistic. I'd have to check the deck. But I think we probably expected it to be like, you know, a year or so, maybe a year and a half. But yeah, we thought it would be a pretty straight shot. It was not. It took a while.

[Dylan Field]

So just to kind of put this in context, and I want to dig into this, it would take about two years before you had something that you could let designers play with. And you had a team, I think around 10 people that you were able to bring on to help you and Evan build this thing. Now you're the CEO, right? Evan was the cto, Technically or officially?

[Evan Wallace]

Yes.

[Dylan Field]

Okay. And both of you are like, I mean, he's a little bit older, but you're what, I don't know, 21, maybe by this point. 20. And your only experience? Only experience, but it was as an intern, basically a paid intern. You had been an intern for a bunch of companies and now you're 20. And you are a very nice guy, but zero experience as a leader or a manager, understandably. Who would 20 year olds have that experience? You weren't even a camp counselor. Right. Like you, I've been ra. But yeah, okay, sorry.

[Guy Raz]

You've been a resident advisor on your dorm.

[Dylan Field]

Right. But now you're running a business of 10 people, probably a bunch of them older than you, if not all of them.

[Evan Wallace]

And I think everyone was older than me at some point.

[Dylan Field]

And you were also building this product. So tell me a little bit about. About being a manager, running a team.

[Guy Raz]

How did you.

[Dylan Field]

How did that work out?

[Evan Wallace]

Well, I think that we had a very clear product roadmap and we all felt that there was something here, but I could have done a better job of helping people see it through, like conversations with customers and whatnot. I was having those conversations. You know, I'd kind of come back, share all my notes. But what I found is that if employees are not talking with user directly, they just don't see it the same way. And they don't understand the pain that people have unless they can actually interact with folks and hear about it firsthand. I think there's plenty of things that could do on the manager's side to be better, but I think it didn't really, like, blow up, per se, until a little later.

[Dylan Field]

And what was the blow up about? Because at some point, everybody on the team, like 10 people that confronted you and they were like, I don't know, what did they say to you?

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, so at that point, we had raised our A round from John Lilly and we moved to San Francisco.

[Dylan Field]

December of 2015. Okay. Yep, yep.

[Evan Wallace]

And moved to San Francisco. And, you know, also I was like, definitely going through a hard time personally. You know, my dad had been diagnosed with. With cancer, and I certainly was not an experienced manager. I was still kind of getting the mechanics right around. How do you just set goals and motivate people? And. And we still hadn't shipped anything, you know, and now people are kind of looking at the clock and going, is this ever going to ship? Is this just, like endless?

[Dylan Field]

What would you, Dylan, what would you do? Because I don't think you were yelling at people or you were mistreating people. Were you micromanaging? Were you slowing the process down? Were you. Tell me what you were doing that was causing frustration among your team.

[Evan Wallace]

Micromanaging is a good way to describe it, perhaps even a mild way. I think I had for quite a while thought about every aspect of the product experience we wanted to build, and I felt a lot of pressure to get something out there. And so I would just kind of come in and say, hey, this is the way we're going to do it. Turns out when you hire smart people, they have ideas too. And also turns out that sometimes those ideas are like, really, really excellent. But I think the time urgency combined with having thought about it a lot made me lean into, you know, we just got to do it this way. Let's go. And that was not a fun environment to be in.

[Dylan Field]

I think when you say people are getting frustrated because a product wasn't, wasn't ready to be shipped, was that because of you? You kept saying, it's just not ready, it's not good enough yet.

[Evan Wallace]

Well, we validated that. So we went out and found all these companies in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco especially, and we talked with, you know, I don't know, must have been dozens of companies. We'd show them Figma and just kind of like a flat response. They were not too interested. They're just kind of like, oh, cool.

[Dylan Field]

So you were basically trying. I mean, you had tested this and people were based. The feedback wasn't great, so you couldn't put it out there yet. And when your team came to you, I mean, what did they say? Did they say, dylan, you know, you're not managing well.

[Guy Raz]

Like, how do they confront you?

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, I mean, people were clearly not happy. They felt like I needed help. They were right. I actually did need help. I needed someone to help on the management side. We were not going to be able to scale fast enough without bringing someone else on to, to help run a part of the company. I just kind of like felt offended though, I think, because I obviously poured my heart and soul into this. And yeah, I felt bad because at some point that mean, I did raise my voice, I mean, just in response to one of the kindest guys in our team who was saying something that was actually quite constructive.

[Dylan Field]

And probably you were under a lot of pressure because you had now raised money and there's real money on the table. And you probably felt like personally, you know, this was on you to make something. How did you start to take in that feedback and criticism and, I don't know, maybe change the way you operated?

[Evan Wallace]

Well, I first called John Lilly, we talked about it and said, hey, something happened. And, you know, I'm. I'm taking a few days away from the office. I gotta clear my head. And John's like, whoa, okay. You know, he knew I'd been going through stuff with my dad and that things were getting pretty tough medically. And, you know, he went into the office and, you know, talked with folks and I think his sort of sense was, okay, this is salvageable. Don't raise your voice, but we just gotta get this thing shipped and we can get this back on track, huh?

[Unknown]

And I guess, fortunately, right. Right around this time, you were able to hire someone, a lead engineer named Sho Kuamoto, who was a guy who'd worked at a lot of other companies like Adobe, and. And he was identified as somebody who could, I guess, kind of help steady.

[Dylan Field]

The ship a bit.

[Evan Wallace]

Well, he was identified as someone who had just like, really unique experience that was relevant to what we're doing. And, yeah, I think he came in and week one was like, man, what company I just joined, this is some weird stuff going on here. But very quickly, he kind of got a sense of where people are at and said, dylan, we gotta ship this thing. Let's figure out what it is. It's wrong, why people are not resonating with it. But my sense is there's only a few features missing. We already know that we need to redesign it visually. And he did a presentation to the team, end of week, first week, about kind of rallying cry of, y' all have been working so hard so long. We're really close. Here's what's going to take. Here's the gap. And we rallied. We got it out.

[Dylan Field]

This is in December of 2015. Just to clarify, you say you got it out, but this was in. This is closed. It was just for Beta users, right?

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, we made sure that. We had a really great early blog post, formed a press strategy, created a launch date, got out there and it was controversial, Honestly.

[Dylan Field]

It was not. Well. It was not universally well received.

[Evan Wallace]

No, no, it was.

[Dylan Field]

It was very mixed reviews.

[Evan Wallace]

Very mixed. So I think. And again, it was closed. So it's not like everyone's using it and giving it mixed reviews. It was mixed reviews to the perception of what it could be.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Evan Wallace]

And, you know, there are some people that immediately got it, but a lot of people went, why would I want to design collaboratively?

[Dylan Field]

Right. Because I've seen as a very kind of solitary thing, like, this is my vision, I'm to design it. You can maybe make some improvements, but this is my thing.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. A lot of designers at that point were coming from an agency culture where, you know, you go explore, you come up with a few solutions for the client, you present, you know, three solutions, and then you have a grand reveal of, like, here's the big amazing thing that you should obviously do. And that's just not the way that product development should work on a team internally. Instead, there's a wide range of things to consider you collaboratively need to work through them. But people were so used to that agency method of working that some of the initial comments in the launch were stuff like, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers.

[Dylan Field]

A lot of the early comments were like, and this is interesting because this is 2015, this idea that design being a collaborative thing was not a thing necessarily. Like, one comment was, a camel is a horse designed by committee.

[Evan Wallace]

Yep.

[Dylan Field]

Essentially saying, like, right, if you design things by committee, it's going to suck.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. I mean, I think that that was maybe the mainstream view of the design culture then, but there were also a lot of people that signed up for the wait list. And then we started to, every week let more people off the waitlist into the product. And we saw right away that people were using it even without everything we knew that they needed. And then every time we added additional functionality to the product, we saw that conversion of people going from, okay, you're off the wait list to you're actually using it. It would go up. So early customers like Coda Notion, Microsoft, Uber, mindbody, there's a bunch that started to really use the platform.

[Dylan Field]

Did you find that people were starting to use this in ways that you didn't anticipate? Because initially it was for web design, software design, but eventually people would use it. Designers and agencies would use it for restaurant menus or even the interface on a screen on an airplane. Did you anticipate that or did that happen organically by users?

[Evan Wallace]

So much happened organically. It was kind of like anything visual that could be created ended up being created at some point in Figma.

[Dylan Field]

All right, Dylan, that year, I just want to ask you, because we're talking about you professionally focused on this, trying to put this out there, but this is a tough year. I mean, your dad is very sick. How are you balancing this? Really intensive development, but also going back and forth to see him?

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, I mean, I was doing everything I could to try to be there for him. And also at the same time, I mean, he. He did really want me to be, you know, progressing figma. He was really excited for what we were doing. Yeah, it was definitely back and forth. There were days where things were really dark and I would just not be in the office and I'd go up and see him. It was unclear, sort of like, how long he had. He was in just such immense pain, but his body was. You know, he was a athlete his entire life. So he's a strong dude. And even with the immense amounts of pain that Comes with cancer, spread everywhere, including bone. He was, his body was just holding on. And yeah, so that launch happened, you know, he was, he was very proud to see it. But yeah, he passed quite soon after.

[Dylan Field]

He was able to see the beginnings of what you would go on to become very well known for, which is amazing. Meantime, you guys are building this thing. You launch it to general use in October of 2016. And it was free, right? Initially it was free and you really wanted, I think you guys wanted to keep it free as long as you could. You knew eventually you had to have some business model, right? Because you raised money, you had a series a, you raised $14 million in that Series A in December of 2015. But eventually you had to figure out a plan. What I mean, did you was that thinking that, okay, we're going to make this free for as long as we can, but we will eventually have to charge for it, or was that not the plan?

[Evan Wallace]

We definitely were planning to charge, but knowing what to charge, how to charge, you know, we wanted to kind of watch people use the product first. And also I personally, after all this time of being told it's not ready by a lot of people, I was not in the mindset of like, it's working right. I just had in my head, there's so much more we gotta build.

[Unknown]

When we come back in just a moment, Figma gains more traction than loses an acquisition worth $20 billion.

[Dylan Field]

Stay with us.

[Unknown]

I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built this.

[Guy Raz]

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[Unknown]

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[Dylan Field]

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[Unknown]

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[Evan Wallace]

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent.

[Unknown]

To $15 per month required new customer.

[Evan Wallace]

Offer for first three months only.

[Unknown]

Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra.

[Evan Wallace]

See mintmobile.com.

[Unknown]

Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy raz. So it's October 2016 and Dylan and Evan have finally released Figma to the general public. They're not charging for it yet, but they soon discover that they probably should.

[Dylan Field]

You found out that Microsoft, they had designers there who were, who were really using it. But I guess corporate said hey, you can't keep using this product because it's a free product and it's not, you know, it's not reliable enough. We if you really, we can't trust it. It's not, who knows what's going to happen to it. But the idea was that because it was free, it was somehow not, not fully baked. And that was sort of a kick.

[Guy Raz]

In your butt, right?

[Dylan Field]

You thought well we better Start charging for it or we're going to lose Microsoft.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, Microsoft was actually really cool about the way they did this. One of their design leaders came to our office and spent some real time with me and he, I think, was sussing out, like, are they serious or not? And at the end he goes, you know, your tool is free. I said, I know, we gotta make some improvements, I think before we pay. He goes, well, we're gonna have to probably rip it out at Microsoft if you don't charge us soon because we gotta make sure you stay in business.

[Unknown]

So crazy.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. And you know, at that point, you know, I just had a conversation with our board where they took me out to lunch. It was like a pretty hard conversation, I think, for them. And they were just going, dylan, you gotta be more commercial. And I'm like, what does that mean? They're like, you gotta be more commercial. And I'm like, do you mean, do I have to like say more sales terminology and stuff like that? Like, what are you getting at? And I think what they meant was price the product. And then that didn't really break through. But when this design leader came and said, we can't use it unless you price the product, I was like, oh, everyone, we got to go charge for the product as fast as we can. So I was a little dense on it, but it got there eventually.

[Dylan Field]

So you start charging for this and meantime you guys are presumably working on ways to make it better. You start in August of 2012 and you're shipping something out in December of 2015.

[Guy Raz]

So that's a long time.

[Dylan Field]

Just for a moment during that time, that three year period when you didn't have anything yet to show for, were you feeling anxious? Were you feeling like, did you have a lot of sleepless nights?

[Evan Wallace]

I think the sleepless nights were more because I was just so excited about what was possible to build. At least once we got on the track of what would become Figma. I think between when we started and when we got to we're going to go build a design tool. That period I had sleepless nights because we didn't know what we were doing. Yeah, but once we were on that track and we had it validated and I talked to people and I knew what they needed. No, I mean, like, it was more just my head was spinning about there's so much that's possible.

[Guy Raz]

Weren't you getting impatient?

[Evan Wallace]

Oh, yeah, for sure, impatient. I mean, I've always been impatient about like, how fast can we build this thing? That's just my Default state. But anxious is the wrong word. I was very confident in our approach. No one else was doing it the way we're doing it. It was just like, how do we get this to market? How do we get this in front of people and how do we build a great product?

[Dylan Field]

I mean, it's not, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that from the time you've released it to general availability, it was a hit. I mean, people really adopted it. Designers really began to adopt it. I mean, the, the parallel I can think of, it's not the best parallel. It's a little bit, it's a little bit. Is Instagram or Snap. I mean, not obviously the same kind of virality because that appeals to just a mass consumer audience, but for designers. And your intuition about companies hiring more designers was true. It proved correct. So were you. I mean, when people start to adopt this pretty quickly in large numbers, were you like, yep, I knew it.

[Evan Wallace]

Well, it's more about like, what's the next thing to go do? How do we go and make sure that we, you know, there's, there's still. Even as people were adopting, there was a lot of things that they told us they needed and those were the same things that would cause people not to adopt. And then separately we started to see that our assumptions about the ways teams work were maybe correct for small teams, but not as correct for large teams. Larger teams needed different ways to organize their work. They need different security things. And so we needed to meet the needs of these larger teams as well.

[Dylan Field]

Meantime, as you started to really explode in growth and usage, and I mean, we're going to. Can't talk about every funding round, but you do another. I mean, 2015 was the last round and then there's a series B in 2018 and then a series C in 2019, which valued the company at half a billion dollars. Were you, I mean, did you start to see competitors come out? I mean, you must have by that point started to attract the attention of the Adobes of the world.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, no, literally, Adobe came out with Adobe xd, which was their offering. Not web based, but a very solid and interesting desktop application. We also saw, and this is probably the one that for me felt more concerning at the time, there was a company called InVision which had been around.

[Dylan Field]

Since we started, because Envision was started in 2011 and they had put out a competing product. What, by when?

[Evan Wallace]

I believe it was around 2017 was when they announced it, but it was.

[Dylan Field]

And that to you felt Like a real threat.

[Evan Wallace]

We were pretty worried because the mindshare they had was so huge. And they made this huge announcement and said, we're coming out with Envision Studio. And I remember, for our Series B round, even with all the traction we were starting to get and how inevitable it was starting to seem, There were certain VCs that take the meeting, but then they go at the end of the meeting, look very impressed with what you've done, and great job, but I just cannot reconcile this with the work Envision's doing. I'm sorry.

[Dylan Field]

I mean, just to jump ahead. Envision eventually shut down in 2024. They don't exist anymore. But it is amazing, right? Because at the time, they could have been the Figma killer. Right. And that was the prediction by some people. But how did you guys. You had an advantage because you'd been working on it longer. But were you looking at what they were doing to make sure you were staying ahead of the curve?

[Evan Wallace]

Well, I mean, yeah, we looked at, of course, their product and why people were resonating with it, but at the end of the day, it was like, no, I think our roadmap is correct. And we just continued to push ahead to the things that we thought people really needed. And I feel like that was the right strategy.

[Dylan Field]

All right, so you guys are just moving forward and you're growing at a pace, and by 2020, you raise a Series D at a. At a $2 billion valuation. Now, again, you know, you started this in 2012, so kind of. Right. So this is eight years on, and by 2020, you guys have really. I mean, you're growing.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. The start of 2020, about 100 employees. End of 2020, we were 2:30, 240. Wow. And so we're growing at pretty rapid speed, and we're also opening up presences internationally. At the start of 2020, we put into motion opening our first office outside the United States in London. We created a leader for that, and it kind of opened right as Covid started and everyone went home.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Evan Wallace]

But the thing that happened I definitely didn't anticipate, which was because of the multiplayer aspect of being in this infinite canvas, people started to hang out in Figma.

[Dylan Field]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

You didn't need to be in an office anymore.

[Dylan Field]

You could do this all. You could basically collaborate, but you didn't.

[Guy Raz]

Have to be in the same room.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. It was pretty wild to see this behavior emerge. And at first it was like, across companies, people were illustrating virtual cities together to have a sense of community. And then it was within teams. We started hearing about how people were brainstorming together and using it as like a hangout space or. I remember one day Slack went down and people were typing in text boxes in Figma for their Slack replacement comms for the day. Obviously it's not made for that and it's kind of like we're watching all this behavior and going, wow. We've always seen whiteboarding, diagramming, brainstorming cases in figma. I think we need to go build like a virtual whiteboard and diagramming tool. And we started to dig into how are people using figma and the thing that kind of kept coming back for this use case of ideation. Brainstorming in a remote way was fun. Like people wanted to have fun while they're doing it. That was the way they were drawing out the best ideas. There's something about the Figma setting that was enjoyable and that element of fun became the differentiator. You know, doing things like if you wave your cursor around a lot, it turns into a giant hand. You can high five somebody or how do you make it so you can, you know, put stamps on things or have emoji reactions.

[Dylan Field]

Covid, of course this was the perfect product for Covid because all of us and remote work, because all of a sudden you could do. You had this collaborative tool that could be done remotely and so adoption increases. You come out of COVID you know, just a really well placed product. And for a brief moment you guys had. Not brief, but for a moment you had considered going public but decided against it. And then September of 2022, Adobe announces they are going to acquire Figma for $20 billion. So $10 billion over your last fundraise and that's a big deal. I mean this was a, you know, arguably, certainly more than arguably a competitor. They were going to acquire you for $20 billion, which was, I'm sure, extremely exciting, you know, to get that kind of validation.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah, I mean, I think the validation was less what we cared about. You know, there's lots of validation from the world, but yeah, it was obviously like something that kind of came out of left field for a lot of people at the company. That that was not what they expected us to go do. But what made us excited about this Adobe acquisition was first of all, we have a lot of respect for Adobe, always have, and the chance to continue our work at Figma there while also doing a lot to help them rethink what could Creative Cloud. You know, all their traditional products look like an age of AI In a way that, you know, really was design centric. That was so exciting to me personally.

[Dylan Field]

Part of that agreement was that if for any reason it didn't happen, they would, you know, pay you a billion dollars. I have to imagine that that on your side, there was maybe some concern that the government would not approve it. But immediately after it was announced, the Department of Justice, you know, European Commission, UK regulatory bodies announced that they were going to investigate this as an antitrust violation, violation of antitrust law. And they begin this investigation, which would now last for over a year. Were you nervous? I mean, I, I mean, you know, we did a story about Harry's Razors here a few years ago on the show and similar thing happened, you know, they, they were going to be acquired by a bigger brand. There was an antitrust investigation that was launched and eventually it unraveled. Did you feel like you guys would be able to withstand this?

[Evan Wallace]

Well, first of all, obviously I never would have agreed to an acquisition by Adobe if I thought it wouldn't go through.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Evan Wallace]

So the breakup fee was something that I was advised that we should have so we included as part of the negotiation. But honestly, it was a pretty fast part of the negotiation. You know, we were focused much more on, you know, the amount of time I spent talking through Adobe. How exactly will the setup work? Will we have figma.com emails or will we have adobe.com emails? That part of it was probably 100x longer not joking than a conversation about a breakup fee because I just didn't think there's any reason why that would be an issue. Our lawyers said that it'd almost certainly go through. And so I also felt like Figma is all about software design development and Adobe was not. So it's just, to me, it was despite some of the earlier aspects of the company, when we first started thinking about some of the creative use cases, it just felt very complimentary to me.

[Dylan Field]

The deal, basically by mutual agreement, you guys decided to abandon this. In December of 2023, it became clear that the government would not allow this at the time. Maybe it would be different today, who knows? It all depends on who's running the Justice Department. And that was it. I mean, they paid you a breakup fee. It was a billion dollars.

[Guy Raz]

But here's the thing I'm curious about.

[Dylan Field]

I mean, you know, Adobe was a competitor.

[Guy Raz]

All of a sudden they were an acquirer and I think rightly so.

[Dylan Field]

You were all in.

[Guy Raz]

You were Mr. Team Adobe, as I would be if.

[Dylan Field]

I was in that position. Adobe's a Great company, they make great products, but they were very well aware. I mean, they'd been in your data room, they'd really looked at your product, they knew how it worked, they knew what you were doing. Now no longer could you, could you join forces. So they're once again a competitor. And how does that.

[Evan Wallace]

It's like they're really not, I mean they're not.

[Dylan Field]

Okay.

[Evan Wallace]

They're very focused on other aspects of their business and that was made abundantly clear in the antitrust process to all the regulators too. I don't know if they believed Adobe, but that was what they said and that's how they behave.

[Dylan Field]

Since the regulators believed this is going to be anti competitive, your argument is that they're not competing against your product at all.

[Evan Wallace]

Correct. But what was good was we kept accelerating and coming out of it. You know, obviously, you know, it's a hard thing for the team to absorb that. Okay. We thought it was going to be one thing and we're going to all work at Adobe and actually no, we're still in hard charging startup mode and if anything we got to prove ourselves even more now. And the team, I think just, there's really a sense of relief, not because people weren't excited about Adobe, but because we finally had certainty and then we just rallied. Like the launch of dev mode came a few months later, but yeah.

[Dylan Field]

And this basically allows you to take designs and translate them into code.

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. And also make it so that you can help designers explain to developers how to go build products in the right ways. And that was a huge launch for us. It made it so that the 30% of our users who are developers, we could provide them with a much better experience in Figma. And we really just started to invest in our platform so that we could go build more products and also improve the stuff we have.

[Dylan Field]

I'm curious, I mean, you guys are a much bigger company, I think 1600 employees, right?

[Evan Wallace]

That's far now.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, in cities around the world. But we are entering and we're already seeing it every single day. A really just a rapid pace of sort of innovation around artificial intelligence. I mean we're talking now, you know here, by the time this airs, who knows what, what's going to be available. Just a couple weeks ago, you know, chatgpt said, oh, you can, you can turn anything into a Stage Studio, Ghibli or a Simpsons thing. And you know, everyone was doing that. And now you're seeing people animate whole, you know, Tom and Jerry cartoons based on what they're Writing into an AI platform, products like Figma, even this podcast, right, they develop, they depend on the creativity of people like me talking into a microphone. But I can tell you right now, within five years, years, AI generated podcasts will be, they already are pretty good. They will be so good that people will make money off of them. And my value will probably be going doing things live or people trusting that it's really me and not an AI that just sounds like me and mimics my voice and my mannerisms and the questions I ask. I have to imagine that this is something that is also top of mind because if it requires teams of really smart designers to collaborate and put something together now, it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination, a figment of our imagination, so to speak, to imagine that with a couple of sentences, people will be able to generate the things that they're generating in Figma now that take days or weeks or months.

[Evan Wallace]

I think what becomes differentiated a differentiator is design. It's craft, it's how it works, it's brand. And as we look at the future, that's what I believe will still be the differentiator for software. It's going to be that craft. And I think that the value of design, of good design, will actually go up even more in this environment. And can you create a piece of software that has some design with a prompt? Absolutely. Can you explore the entire option space and figure out what it is that you should ship? I think that requires human judgment to go navigate that and to figure out what is the right approach. And I think we're still very early in any level of AI being applied to that process. So I'm actually more bullish today than I've ever been on the role of design in the software process.

[Dylan Field]

Dylan, Evan left the company. We didn't mention this. I think shortly after the pandemic he was sort of wanted to just kind of move on and understandable is a lot of, you know, it's probably a really hard work, you know, to get to where the company got to and. And are you guys still in regular touch?

[Evan Wallace]

Yeah. Evan is still one of the people that I look up to most in the world and that was why I was so sad. He left because he's somebody that genuinely like, I have so much respect for. So yeah, he's an amazing, amazing guy and the work he's done after Figma 2 on the Open source side has been incredible.

[Dylan Field]

No surprise, I'm sure over certain various rounds you were able to take some money off the TABLE and you did not grow up wealthy, but certainly you are and certainly will be even more so. I mean, the company's last $20 billion acquisition offer from Adobe is quite significant. And you're, you know, you're young, very young. You're, gosh, how old are you? 30.

[Evan Wallace]

33.

[Dylan Field]

33, yeah. Many founders we talked to on the show don't even start until they're 33. You know, really get things going at 33, 40, 45. If you could, I don't know, look out into the first of all into the future. You know, what do you, yeah, what do you think you want to be? I mean, do you imagine in 15 years you're still going to be running this company that you started?

[Evan Wallace]

You know, I think that the chance to work on a platform like Figma and to impact an industry like this, it's truly once in a lifetime opportunity. And the more that I get to know other companies and whether it's through investment or just friendship, watch other founders, the more I appreciate how unique this experience and opportunity is for us. And I just think about the vision that we started with. Like, I can't think of a better thing to work on.

[Dylan Field]

When you think about, you know, the journey you took and where you are now. I mean, so many things happened because you sort of manifested them. But also there was a lot of really just fortunate encounters. You know, getting to LinkedIn and managing to meet the CEO and, you know.

[Guy Raz]

All these different things.

[Dylan Field]

And you know, all those connections over the years would play out, you know, these characters would come back into your life, in and out of your life. And here you are, you're just 33 and overseeing a company that's, you know, multi billion dollar value valued, you know, billions of dollars and by a neat, by some Accounts does over $600 million in revenue a year. You know, when you think about where you got to now, how much do you attribute it to luck? How much do you attribute it to the work you put in?

[Evan Wallace]

Oh, wow. There's a lot of luck, not just in the connections along the way and the ways that folks have helped and I really care to pay that forward and tried to. But also I think the timing, I mean, if we had started this a few years earlier, we wouldn't have had WebGL a few years later. Maybe someone else would have already been at it. And that timing is truly lucky. That chance to, to interact and intersect with Evan and the fact that we're the same place at the same time, that was luck for sure.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Evan Wallace]

But also I think, yeah, I, you know, there's always the question in your back, your mind of like, with an incredibly talented team of people, how much am I adding versus how much is this amazing group of humans around me adding? I I think I look back at the acting from childhood and whatnot and just not being afraid of failure. And even the days where we get punched in the face, it's like, great. You get back up and you keep running at the same thing.

[Dylan Field]

What do you think was the key factor in making you not afraid of failure?

[Evan Wallace]

Looking back as a kid, I went on all these auditions. There are so many that you get rejected right away and then sometimes you get to the final audition for a big, big part and it's actually two or three people in the room and they actually look just like you. Then it's kind of hard to blame it on look. But it's like, okay, well, for whatever reason, they had what they're looking for and I didn't this time. But it always felt like there's another one ahead. It's about playing over a long period of time and the more that you can keep going, the more you can win.

[Unknown]

That's Figma CEO and co founder Dylan Field. Shortly after we did this interview, and about a year after after the deal with Adobe fell through, Figma filed for an ipo. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the Follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my [e-mail] or on substack. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with Music Computer, composed by Ramtino Bluei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Casey Herman. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, JC Howard, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, John Isabella, Andrea Bruce, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built this.

[Dylan Field]

If you like How I Built this.

[Guy Raz]

You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey.

[Unknown]

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