Transcript
A (0:01)
Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody. Welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And today we have the founder and CEO of Figma visiting us, Dylan Field. Now, quite incredibly, Dylan founded Figma when he was 19 years old. And now 14 years later, Figma had one of the biggest IPO IPOs of 2025. So warm welcome.
B (0:32)
Thank you for having me.
A (0:34)
So, Dylan, we have to start. What does Figma do?
B (0:37)
Yes. So Figma is a platform that helps you go from an idea in your head to a production application in the software space. But also once you ship something, once you ship some software, you want to then market it. And we also help with that too. We help you get your brand out there and make it so you can create more collateral around it. And ultimately it's not just some linear process where you have an idea and you get to finished product and you're done. Perhaps in the industrial design world, we were talking about that before we started, that's more of what it is. But in software it's always a loop and you're always iterating and you're learning and you're trying to figure out, how do I evolve this thing that I've created with my team? And we try to make it very collaborative so that designers can bring their entire team in to do that.
A (1:25)
Why is design such an important differentiator?
B (1:29)
So I think going back a bit and speaking about digital product design, the history of design, I think is interesting in the digital realm because for a long time there were very, very few designers. Almost none of them had a traditional art school background or very few did. And many of them randomly found their way into design, sometimes from engineering, sometimes they were in a band and made a poster. They could come from any different place. But there was a period of time, in, for example, 2000, the dot com era, where the mantra was build it. And they will come at that point, if you had a designer, which was rare. The role of design was conceived to be what sometimes in America we call lipstick on a pig. The you know, you've got a pig, but we're going to put some lipstick on it to make it pretty. And it was really about making it aesthetically pleasing, but not thinking about the function, the form, how it works. And that has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. First we got to the 2010 era where you not only have Apple evangelizing Design and saying how it works matters. This is why you should buy this iPhone. With Steve Jobs championing design, but also you have the advent of consumer applications like Facebook or Gmail and suddenly the expectations rise. At the same time, things like AWS cloud computing are starting to pick up and we move from a world of managed servers to cloud, from box software to app stores. And it's easier than ever to build software as well because developer tools are improving. And as all this is happening, what's happening to distribution? Well, no longer are we in the world of building. They will come. We're starting to transition out of that into a world where, well, if you build it and you have really great design and really great marketing, then you might have a chance because there's more software and it's not the case anymore that you're building something. That's the only thing like that that exists in the world. Competition's increasing and the value is moving up the stack.