Dylan Field on the “Permanent Underclass of Zero Taste”

Summary

Sourcery Podcast with Molly O’Shea

Episode: Dylan Field on the “Permanent Underclass of Zero Taste”
Date: July 2, 2026
Guest: Dylan Field, Co-founder & CEO of Figma

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between Molly O’Shea and Dylan Field at Figma’s flagship conference, Config, often called the “Coachella for design.” The two walk through the bustling venue as they discuss Figma’s evolution, the changing state of design in the AI era, the meaning of taste and creativity, the future of software, and Field’s personal journey. Field is candid, witty, and philosophical, delivering insights that range from product mechanics to the philosophical underpinnings of trust and creativity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Config Conference & Figma's Community

• [00:00-02:40] The event draws 10,000 attendees from every corner of the industry—tech, media, advertising, and beyond, with representation from ICs to chief design officers and students.

• Field shares that Config began as a way to unify Figma’s rapidly growing user groups, quickly expanding from a few hundred people to an international event.

  • “At first we're kicking around ideas like, oh, yeah, maybe a few hundred people. We decided, let's go big, like 800 people. And that sold out instantly.” [02:40]

• Pandemic timing: The first event happened just before the COVID-19 shutdown, allowing Figma to build momentum before moving to remote formats.

  • “We got so lucky the first time...Three weeks before the pandemic...Had the chance to bring everyone together...” [03:27]

2. The Value of Design in the Age of AI

• Responding to claims that "design is dead," Field refutes the idea and highlights the ongoing value and interplay of designers, engineers, and PMs, especially as teams experiment with AI:

  • “I think we're in a temporary phase of people really getting excited about what they can do with AI, but not yet realizing all the limitations...the value of a team is really important.” [04:00]

• Figma’s mission: democratizing design, making it accessible to more people—even engineers now engaging directly with the design process through Figma and its code integration.

• “If you want to build scalable real systems, ... it's really important to lean into design not just from a visual and aesthetic standpoint, but also from a user experience standpoint, from understanding the user, understanding the culture around you. Design is so much more than visuals and aesthetic.” [05:07]

3. Config's Content & Featured Speakers

• Field spotlights visionary artist Holly Herndon and math communicator Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) as standout speakers.
  • “Holly Herndon...people don't appreciate how far ahead she sees things. ...Grant Sanderson...does these explainer videos for math that are just incredible and really uses graphics and design to be really craft forward in his explanations.” [07:57-08:35]

4. Taste, AI, and Escaping the "Permanent Underclass of Zero Taste"

• Discussion of the challenge with generic output from LLMs and AI systems:

  • “If you just use an LLM for everything...you're going to get something that it wants to give you...You're going to get the average and it's not going to stand out. ...It takes not only human steering and human intent, but also it takes a point of view.” [16:06]

• Encouragement to take creative risks and avoid mediocrity in product, comms, and branding.

  • “It’s kind of scary to have a point of view ... but I think they're going to really unlock just this explosion of creativity and we're going to see so many things tried that haven't been tried before.” [17:30-18:26]

5. Brand, Trust, and Building a Platform

• On trust in AI and technology, and the role of consistency and value creation:

  • "In terms of just generally brand, I think it's consistency over time. ...Keep living your values, keep showing up the right way and really doing things with the customer's interests at heart. If you're not doing that, what are you doing?” [22:47]

• Field cites Tim O’Reilly’s mantra: “Create more value than you capture.” Platforms should enable greater value outside their walls.

  • “The definition of a platform is that you're creating even more value outside of the platform than you are from the platform itself.” [24:23]

6. Software, AI, and the Mechanics of Value

• Market narratives on software’s value in the AI age are oversimplified.

  • “I think a lot of software will do just fine or even amazing. Network effects matter...boring software is not to be undercounted.” [38:31–40:08]

• Data liquidity and context are becoming new flywheels for enterprise value.

7. Evolution of Figma as a Platform

• Figma is expanding from design to development and supporting more end-to-end workflows, especially as AI becomes more integral.
• “When you are leaning more into AI and generation, there's a huge opportunity in doing that in one place and not having to think about where do I start?...If we can do both of those and find ways to help people create their own tools on the platform...that'll be really awesome.” [40:34-41:23]

8. On SpaceX and Extreme Missions

• Field is bullish on SpaceX, citing the company’s missionary challenges and the magnitude of its ambitions as a model for others.
  • “People lack imagination when it comes to what they can do on Earth and also what they can do in the stars...I believe it could be a very, very important company, you know, for this century or the next. So I hope Figma can follow too.” [41:36-42:46]

9. Philosophy of Brand—Does a Great Product Need a Logo?

• Field echoes Musk’s sentiment, with a nuance:
  • “If the product is that special...it probably has enough brand characteristics that it kind of functions as a logo. ...There are many ways that brands can show up to people.” [42:52]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Design's Enduring Relevance:
  "Design is so much more than visuals and aesthetic. That's just the tip of the iceberg." — Dylan Field [05:07]

• On the "Permanent Underclass of Zero Taste":
  “People that are...‘yeah, design me the thing’—you're going to get the average and it's not going to stand out.” — Dylan Field [16:06]

• On What Builds a Trusted Brand:
  “Keep living your values, keep showing up the right way and really doing things with the customer's interests at heart. If you're not doing that, what are you doing?” — Dylan Field [22:47]

• On Creative Risk:
  "I think more people gotta do that. They just gotta take a big risk and a big swing and just go for it." [15:30]

• On Building Figma as a Platform:
  “Find ways to help people create their own tools on the platform, share them with their team and get value out of that—that'll be really awesome.” [41:23]

• On Continuous Learning:
  "If you're not always learning or finding a way to learn from any conversation, anything that you can encounter, it's like, well, why not?" — Dylan Field [32:39]

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|-----------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–03:45 | Conference overview, Config’s origins | | 04:00–06:30 | Is design dead? The role of teams in AI era | | 07:57–09:07 | Favorite speakers, Holly Herndon, 3blue1brown | | 13:22–15:30 | Human psychology, ambition, and taking big swings | | 16:06–18:26 | The zero taste meme, steering AI with intent | | 22:47–24:23 | Trust, value creation, and platform philosophy | | 38:31–40:19 | What makes enterprise AI software durable | | 41:36–42:46 | SpaceX, ambition, imagination | | 42:52–43:29 | The logo debate | | 43:53–45:22 | Mentorship, learning from everyone | | 45:26–46:56 | Alan Kay, interaction paradigms, and the future |

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Tone and Style

Dylan Field is earnest, deeply thoughtful, and balances technical insights with humility and humor. The conversation is fast-paced and peppered with personal anecdotes, giving listeners a unique view into how a top founder thinks about creativity, risk, and technology’s evolution.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in product, design, the intersection of AI and creativity, or the journey of a high-impact founder. Field offers both philosophical reflections ("create more value than you capture," "have a real point of view and take a risk") and pragmatic insights (team dynamics, product strategy, building trusted brands) while demystifying Figma’s unique position at the heart of creative software.

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Transcript

[Interviewer]

Dylan Field Co founder and CEO, Figma Figma Figma, figma. Heard this was the Coachella for design, but I'm literally seeing that. So there's 10,000 people that are expected to come. What kind of companies are representing the crowd?

[Dylan Field]

Pretty much all of them. It's international. People come from all over the world, not just tech or software. It's everything you can imagine. Any role you can imagine in terms of software and media, advertising and content. I mean, you know this better than anyone. Potential economy is real. Staying out's hard. I think that it takes not only human steering and human intent, but also it takes a point of view. It is not enough to wear a thinking cap. You have to actually think.

[Interviewer]

Elon Musk once said, if a product is special enough, it needs no logo. What do you think about that? Dylan Field.

[Dylan Field]

Thank you for having me.

[Interviewer]

Thanks for having me.

[Dylan Field]

Welcome to Config.

[Interviewer]

I mean, I've heard this was the Coachella for design, but I'm literally seeing that it hasn't started yet and it's already packed.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, this is day zero.

[Interviewer]

So what goes on today?

[Dylan Field]

Well, today we got config commons, most importantly. And it's a good time for you to get your badge so that we don't have a long line tomorrow. One time we had, like an hour keynote delay. It was very embarrassing.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Dylan Field]

Yeah. So we have a free reg thing now, but also try to give people food, hangout spaces, get them to mingle. I think it's really cool because, like, people are always reconnecting with, like, old friends here, but also they have a chance to just meet so many people in the design community, and it's a really special community. And that's not just for Figma. It's just for design more broadly.

[Interviewer]

So there's 10,000 people that are expected to come?

[Dylan Field]

Yep.

[Interviewer]

What kind of companies are representing this crowd?

[Dylan Field]

Pretty much all of them. But no, really, I mean, it's international. People come from all over the world and not just tech or software. It's everything you can imagine and, you know, any role you can imagine. IC to leadership. We have everybody from, like, the chief Design Officer to the students that are part of our student programs here. So, yeah, it's all over the place.

[Interviewer]

It's pretty exciting.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Okay, we're going to attempt to walk through the crowd.

[Dylan Field]

Let's go for it.

[Interviewer]

You already had some paparazzi on you, so we'll see how this goes.

[Dylan Field]

I think they're coming for you, you know.

[Interviewer]

No, they're not, Dylan. It's Literally the config, like FIGMA conference. Okay, so how many years have you been doing this and why start it in general?

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, so we started in 2020, right before the pandemic. And this is actually our 10th config because we've done international configs that are fast follows to the config nsf. But the reason it started, we had basically user groups starting to pop up all around the world. And then from there, as the user group started to really gain momentum, we wanted some way to bring everyone together. And at first we're kicking our ideas like, oh, yeah, maybe a few hundred people. We decided, let's go big, like 800 people. And that sold out instantly. So then from there we were planning to right afterwards, like, okay, next time's gonna be really big. Well, it actually ended up being even bigger because of the pandemic. And so it was like, this is gonna be a remote conference now.

[Interviewer]

Oh, my God.

[Dylan Field]

We got so lucky the first time because we were able to. Three weeks, I think, before the pandemic started in full in the us the world shut down. Had the chance to bring everyone together and I can't imagine what it would be if it was three weeks earlier. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

That's insane.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So the big headline right now, which I think you have pretty much disproven, is that design is dead.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Why is design not dead?

[Dylan Field]

Look around you. No, I mean, I think that the weird thing right now is everyone is kind of putting down all the other roles. So, like, you know, I'm seeing way too much of engineers saying, I don't know that either PM and designer and the PMs like, I don't need the engineer, designer. And the designer's going, maybe I don't need the PM or the engineer. And so, like, why is that happening? And I think that we're in a temporary phase of people really getting excited about what they can do with AI, but not yet realizing all the limitations that they have. And. Hey. And yeah, so I think that there's. It's truly exciting what you can do, but also the value of a team is really important. And I think we're hitting the line here.

[Interviewer]

We're in a lot of traffic. Is this for food?

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I heard that you guys, not to deviate too much, but I heard you guys are going to sell out of merch in like five seconds.

[Dylan Field]

I hope not. Hopefully it lasts a little longer, but yeah, so I think it's like very lonely, the idea that you're just going to work alone on Everything forever. And I think that if you want to build scalable real systems, explore broadly, build the right thing, not just something fast, then I think it's really important to lean into design not just from a visual and aesthetic standpoint, but also from a user experience standpoint, from understanding the user, understanding the culture around you. Design is so much more than visuals and aesthetic. That's just the tip of the iceberg. But what I think is really promising is how I'm seeing so many engineers now that are. I hope our cameraman did not trip. We're seeing so many engineers now just get interested in Figma, and as that happens, they're starting to really pick it up because you go build something really fast. That's awesome. But then you're like, okay, can I actually now make it great?

[Interviewer]

Right. I mean, what I thought was interesting is like, Figma not only unlocked design for just normal people who, like, just didn't really know how to design anything, but your software is really easy to use, it's very intuitive. But now you're involving code into it. And so now engineers are literally coding design.

[Dylan Field]

Yep. And I think that the aspects of, like, what we're launching tomorrow will be even more in that direction. Really, I'm really excited about that. Go for it. Thank you.

[Interviewer]

Thank you.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, so now we're inside, so that'll

[Interviewer]

be a little while we're inside. Let's do a little 360 here. Come around.

[Dylan Field]

This is the emptiest it'll be.

[Interviewer]

So how is it all set up? Where do people really mingle and all that kind of stuff?

[Dylan Field]

The mingling will occur everywhere, but downstairs is going to be more like main stage keynote, and that's like, where there's a lot of activations and area to explore. Is that your favorite part, the main stage keynote? Yeah, I don't usually remember it, so once I get past it, then I'm like, blackout. Yeah, it's a little bit of a blackout experience.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I get that.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah. But you can watch it later online and then you're like, oh. I said, what?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I was talking to Michael about this before, but I was like, watching all of the previous config videos and I was like, shit, this is really cool.

[Dylan Field]

Well, the content that we're doing is so much. Yeah, the content on all the tracks are, are amazing. And we've had such incredible speakers and, like, at legendary times too. I, I actually one of my favorite ones was Jesper from Teenage Engineering. I don't know if you saw that one. No, I got to interview him. And yeah, he is a character. Definitely watch that one later.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Are there any speakers this year you're excited about?

[Dylan Field]

So, so many speakers that I'm excited about, but two that I'm like off the wall excited about. One is Holly Herndon. She's total visionary artist who I think people don't appreciate, like how far ahead she sees things. She was into very specific quirky ways of using NFTs or we weren't called it then early on she open sourced her voice with AI early on. You know, this is back in like 2021 or something. 2020. I mean it's just like the timescale that she's operating on is different than the rest of us.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

Grant Sanderson, three blue and brown on YouTube is another person that I think will give a great talk and I can't wait to watch it. He's someone that I've been following for a long time, I'm lucky to call a friend. And he does these explainer videos for math that are just incredible and really uses graphics and design to be really craft forward in his explanations and he puts so much care into them and just has been a teacher for so many years.

[Interviewer]

That's why you're vibe mathing.

[Dylan Field]

That's just for fun.

[Interviewer]

What does that mean?

[Dylan Field]

It's just a form of LMP psychosis until it's not. But we'll see. I think that the models are really decent at math, like pure math. And it's a bit of an antidote to the non verifiable domains that I'm usually in. So for figma, I mean it's all vibes. Right? Like you're trying to figure out. Sometimes it's very clear. Okay, like literally you didn't center the div. Learn to center div's AI. But I think more often it's more like, okay, well actually you're giving a lot of styles that are very similar here. You're not as broad in your range as you could be. If an LLM provider is asking us for feedback or we're trying to steer it and the evals we're running on stuff, we're doing stuff others are doing. Like a lot of it is inherently non verifiable. It's like gotta be human judged at the end of the day and you can set up more automatic methods for that, but you still have that human intent. Whereas formal domains like math, I mean that's as formal as it gets. If you set up the formal systems correctly, which are really Easy to mess up. And I think it's kind of just a nice antidote in contrast to Figma experience.

[Interviewer]

I love that it's very unexpected. So you're talking about some of the speakers. Were there anybody else that you're excited about?

[Dylan Field]

So many. I think that. Well, I'm in keynote brain right now and I think the keynote will be really awesome. So we're going to have a bunch of figmas that are showing just incredible stuff.

[Interviewer]

I know, I love that. It's like we were start. We started by the big sign and then all of a sudden you got swarmed.

[Dylan Field]

Oh, well, those are all people I see all the time. Yeah, we have a great team actually. Ian, who you met. I was in a class in my senior year of high school. We were in a real analysis class together and since where I first met him and then he randomly applied to Figma at some point and didn't even tell me. I was like, why didn't you tell me? And I found out as soon as I found out. I'm like, this is the smartest guy, like, I've ever. One of the smartest people I've ever met. Like, please, can we get him in?

[Interviewer]

Oh, my God.

[Dylan Field]

He still went through the full loop. Of course.

[Interviewer]

Shout out to Ian. All right, so we're gonna head over and sitone lounge down for the Pantone Lounge. It's super exclusive.

[Dylan Field]

There's a just two of us.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. All right. Dylan Field, we are in the Pantone Lounge.

[Dylan Field]

We're in the Pantone Lounge. We made it through.

[Interviewer]

We made it through the crazy crowd who was screaming your name and taking. Taking pictures.

[Dylan Field]

Maybe exaggerated a little bit. I'm not exaggerating. It's a great group out there, so I'm glad you got to be there.

[Interviewer]

So how did you convince all of them or their bosses that they should take the day off?

[Dylan Field]

I think if you convince them and their bosses to come, it helps. So that's more of, I think, what's happening.

[Interviewer]

So they're all having a lot of fun. Because we're in the Pantone Lounge. I want to ask you a very pressing question.

[Dylan Field]

Okay.

[Interviewer]

What is your favorite color? I'm not going to ask about ref number purple.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, I'm a purple guy. But purple has a broad range and so it's very hard to define exactly where in purple. I kind of like the range, you know, and sometimes it's like more of a reddish purple, something more bluish. But yeah, I. I also think it's amazing when people are great at Color theory. I am not. No, I. I know enough to know that I'm not amazing at color theory, but I have the utmost respect for those that are.

[Interviewer]

You haven't gotten your color waves checked? You know, that's like a thing too.

[Dylan Field]

Like, if I'm, what, tetrachromatic or something?

[Interviewer]

Like, if you're like, it's a. I think it's like a Korean thing where they, like, color theory. You and, like, see what your aura is and what colors you should be wearing.

[Dylan Field]

They're yours? No, I don't think so, but. No, I mean, I think that composition and color, it's like a real skill. And a bunch of people really try and train for this. And some people have got it to the degree that others don't. And it's amazing.

[Interviewer]

When you find them, we're gonna take it even more serious. Okay. You were recently on Mafia.

[Dylan Field]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

You made it to game three. You're now the star of the show. Dylan, how does it feel to be

[Dylan Field]

killed on the first try, to be specific. So there's game one, where I was killed by the Mafia the first night. Game two, where I was the Mafia and definitely did not play my best game. I'll be real. And then game three made a decent argument, but not my best work either, and got killed by the village first night. So, yeah, not the best showing, but it was a lot of fun. And I was rewatching the third episode, and I think the star is actually Palmer until the very end when he smirks. Sorry, spoilers for your listeners. But at the very end, he kind of smirks when he's like, almost one. That was the first time I was going, oh, I would have figured it out. The other two I would have figured out because they had tells. The Palmer, there was, like, nothing. He was just the same energy throughout. So I was pretty wowed watching it.

[Interviewer]

What have you learned about human psychology from that?

[Dylan Field]

From Mafia? I think there's not much to learn about human psychology from Mafia. I played a decent amount of Mafia or werewolf, you know, same game. People have religious wars around what to call it. But yeah, I think that probably that people's attention spans are short, that you can diverge and kind of divert conversation. At some point, I stopped playing the game, actually, because I figured out that it was a lose, lose. Either you actually do well and you've, like, lost. Because people afterwards oftentimes are like, how could you? I trusted you. Just like, I feel terrible, or you've, like, literally lost. Like, I did those games. And so I prefer to moderate and definitely out of practice. But it's a fun one. It's super fun and it was really cool that Solana did that. I think he's had that vision for a long time and I just give him all the credit for like making it happen that way.

[Interviewer]

Totally.

[Dylan Field]

I think more people gotta do that. They just gotta take a big risk and a big swing and just go for it.

[Interviewer]

I mean, I think that that'll be kind of like a through line of most of our conversation because there's like so many attempts right now of like building a brand in the abyss of like templated AI literally everywhere. And so whether it's like comms, marketing, media, brand, product, like we're kind of like stuck in this like bell curve, the middle. And so how should people, especially with figma like escape what I kind of call like the permanent underclass of zero taste

[Dylan Field]

as a perfect like meme fusion there I'll have to steal it for our marketing. I think basically, first of all, there's a taste and there's sort of the distribution common. They're very separate. I think that first it's important to acknowledge if you just use an LLM for everything and have it literally tell you how it wants to go build a thing, how to go design a thing, you're going to get something that it wants to give you. And it's kind of diverged that point from whatever's in your head to however it processed it. I do think through workflows and we have something called figma Weave, for example, where you can take model outputs and you can pass them through a workflow and really steer it along the way. And that can get you closer to, I think, non deterministic generative workflows that get closer to intent and are systematic. But in general, yeah, people that are, um, just like, yeah, design me the thing. You know, you're going to get the average and it's not going to stand out. And in a world where there's just more than ever in terms of software and media and advertising and content, I mean, you know this better than anyone. Potential economy is real, staying out's hard. And I think that it takes not only human steering but and human intent, but also it takes a point of view. And I think that is something that people fall down on all the time because it's kind of scary to have a point of view. It's like a real point of view and to be bold and to take a risk. And so I'm hopeful and actually I think there's good early signs this everywhere right now that folks are already internalizing this even if they can't speak about it in the same words yet. And they're already kind of from the market teaching them, realizing they have to go take these bolder bets, bigger swings. And as they do that, I think they're going to really unlock just this explosion of creativity and we're going to see so many things tried that haven't been tried before. And so that's something that I cannot wait for.

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[Interviewer]

R Y There was a tweet that you posted retweeting a graph of like number of apps that are being released and then the actual usage of those apps. We actually just like I talked about that with Mark Pincus, he's super product guy. He, he definitely pays attention to that. But in that point you were saying execution is cheap but design and creativity are actually very very important and separates the wheat from the chaff. But in terms of that like what kind of risks should people be taking? Like what do you see is kind of like overlooked right now.

[Dylan Field]

I think so much is overlooked. I mean everything from like what problem are you even tackling to how do you brand, what positions do you take as a company, how do you connect with people and what emotions are you trying to bring through your brand and marketing, but also through the application software. And then for the software side, I think, you know, I'm just eager to see not only more interaction patterns tried, but really folks understanding like what is the core thing that people need and pushing all the way to get there. It's so much easier to apply patterns that you've already seen. But I think that there's just this huge unexplored space out there of stuff that it takes a long time to get right. And that is a risk because you might not actually hit. But if you can actually go all the way and think through the system really well and hold it in your head and hold it in your team's head, which is even harder to communicate it, you kind of have to memeify it inside your company sometimes. But if you can do that and you can come up with more novel ways for people to interact with systems, that's where I think it'll really be amazing. And example is I'm still shocked that we're in a prompting age. It's been what, five years since GPT3 now? I think it's 2021, June 2021. GPT3.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Dylan Field]

I think so.

[Interviewer]

That's crazy.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah. And we're still prompt in a way. There are other ways to explore light in space. I just think that the interfaces for how you interact with models will evolve so much and to the degree that models are part of software, we will see a ton of exploration there.

[Interviewer]

When we're talking about brand and personality and forming trust, AI has really stopped a lot of trust in technology and just kind of like mainstream media, it's like, I think it's like literally worse than ice. So what builds a trusted brand?

[Dylan Field]

Well, AI, first of all, I would say is really bimodal case, right? Because you've got folks that are literally, in the case of, you know, a 40 or quad, like in love with the model. And I don't just mean like they really like its outputs, like they have affection for the model. I would say that's trust. And then you've got people that are like this taken. It could take my job. I'm listening to things people are saying about how it's going to destroy the world or the economy or whatever and doom. And so that is couldn't be further apart, like the super fans versus the super detractors. But in terms of just generally brand, I think it's consistency over time. And how do you actually show up in a way that people can expect can model in their Heads and, you know, keep living your values, keep showing up the right way and really doing things with the customer's interests at heart. If you're not doing that, what are you doing?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

So I also go back to a line that Tim O'Reilly would always say. My first internship professionally was like, O'Reilly Media, and I loved it there. They were amazing to me, and I'm so grateful to them. Tim O'Reilly would always talk about create more value than you capture. And I think that is extremely important. And when you're perceiving singletons for AI folks that you perceive might want to become monoliths, and they're not saying that they're not going to want to do that, there's going to be a black hole and suck it all up, which I'm sure that that's not going to be what ends up happening. I think that they're all going to get a lot smarter than that. And I think most don't even want to do that in the first place. But yeah, the definition of a platform is that you're creating even more value outside of the platform than you are from the platform itself. This is also the Microsoft definition. It's like, what's the GDP of everything created on Windows? Back when Windows was the top priority of Microsoft, they wanted that sort of GDP of stuff built on Windows to be greater than the revenue of their Windows line. And I think that's a really special way to think about ecosystem. And yeah, overall, the more that I think we lean into that kind of mindset as an industry and AI companies are vocal about that and show that, then I think people have more trust. But the doomerism has to stop as well. And it has to stop with good rationale. We have to come up with the best arguments we can for not what can go wrong, but how we're going to go address it and paint an optimistic future vision for humanity.

[Interviewer]

Right. I've been seeing a shift in sentiment towards productivity, not job loss. And so while I guess it's weird, but kind of the new North Star is to have more agents than employees because they'll help equip your employees and you'll run faster, you'll be able to do more as an organization. You can be more on the offensive side, which I think you and Figma have been doing really well. And then, I mean, you could also see this with like figure AI, like they now have more humanoid robots at their office than employees. Obviously they're going to sell them, but still.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, it's a little different.

[Interviewer]

It's a little bit different. But I'm curious, from your standpoint, as the proliferation of AI agents increase, like how does that change the internal dynamics of software and how you're selling and the products you're creating and all that?

[Dylan Field]

I think that there's a bunch of ways this could play out and so we'll have to see. But overall, first I think it's not even clear how do you define the unit of an agent. So that's kind of a difficult one. But yeah, in general, it should be the case that there's great services that you offer. If folks are trying to do inference and use AI with your software and your platform, that should result in like value to the customer. And it should be the case that that's driven, I think, by humans. Overall, I think that humans being the loop will be the way that you steer towards the best outcomes. And I think that all my experience with AI so far have shown that on formal domains, things that are verifiable, you can get to amazing outcomes with enough IQ points. And yet judgment is somehow not purely correlated with just adding IQ points to the model. Design certainly does not seem to be correlated with adding IQ points to the model. These seem to be other capabilities that you have to figure out how to train. And judgment I'm really curious about in particular because, yeah, just intuitively the folks that are really good at strategy, I have not even found with humans the common characteristic of how to go find them in design. I think how do you teach a model true empathy for a user? How do you make it so that they can not just read a transcript of a user interview, but understand the relationships that user has, the inflections in their voice when they're talking about the problems they have and how it matters and connect that with like their world and actually have that empathy for their worldview and where they're coming from to build for them? I think it's really hard.

[Interviewer]

What is the biggest question right now that people should be asking?

[Dylan Field]

Actually, I think that, you know, for recording this on Tuesday, maybe I haven't looked at the news this morning, maybe it's already a different question. But as of right now, we've got a live situation with US government anthropic where they're discussing a jailbreak. I'm not even sure if jailbreak is the right word, but the use case they're concerned about seems important. But I would say that jailbreaking is something that is understudied. And I actually think that there needs to be a kind of different posture towards trying to get people to break jailbreak models in order to battle test them the same way that we do with HackerOne. There are programs that are being run by the labs, of course, but I think that there needs to be way more incentive out there to do that and we need to find what it means. Jailbreaks are very wide in terms of the spectrum of what they do, you know, and I don't think we can have a conversation like this without even like defining what a jailbreak is. So that's one question I would say is what's a jailbreak?

[Interviewer]

You seem to be doing some jailbreaking yourself.

[Dylan Field]

So what are you? I don't know. I don't know what is a jailbreak. So no, I mean I think that there's a period of time where I enjoyed just like trying to figure out how models worked, reasoned from the outside in. I'm more enjoying now just like with open weight models, looking at interpretability research and whatnot, when you can actually get access to compute for that, it's pretty fun. But overall, I think just talking with models long enough leads to states that you could call a jailbreak for basically to model. But again, what is jailbreak? It's not like you have to do some fancy JSON thing. That's what people like to popularize it online with. But I mean you can just talk to them and ask them questions.

[Interviewer]

Are you token maxing?

[Dylan Field]

I think that yes and no. I try to have for stuff that I'm working on. Like oftentimes I'm trying to get the agent running longer as long as it's got a defined goal. But yeah, I mean I could be running like an agent swarm or something and I'm not doing that. We have plenty of people at FIGMA that are and are getting great results though and it's amazing how much we can do there. When you have folks that really understand the infrastructure that they're trying to build and they go and you know, they're already 10x and they can 10x themselves again by having agents really break up tasks properly.

[Interviewer]

So one thing that was really interesting, I had an interview with Daniel Strachman from previous from Teal Fellowship like maybe a year ago now. And the one thing wonderful, by the way, so cool, that was a really fun interview. The one thing that she brought up and she named you I think a couple of times in the interview, but you were an early teal fellow. She said that you were hyper fluent. I mean even you talking about LLMs right now. And like, AI, like, you're definitely more in the weeds than I think, common folk. So, like, why, why do you think it's important to have that trait of like, deep curiosity and hyperfluency? And how did that develop?

[Dylan Field]

I just think the world's like, amazing. And yeah, I, I don't know. I, I kind of just look at anything and I'm pretty much interested in it. Um, so I, I don't have a great answer, but definitely, like, if you're not always learning or finding a way to learn from any conversation, anything that you can encounter, it's like, well, why not? You know, there's just so much interesting stuff out there in the world. And so, yeah, I feel like we get such a limited time on earth, like, let's make the most of it and try to learn and connect the dots and figure out how to create some frameworks around what's happening and then break them. It's just a great mystery that we're alive and what's out there.

[Sponsor/Host Voice]

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[Interviewer]

Sorcery what did you learn the most While you were Teal Fellow, what was that like?

[Dylan Field]

It was a really special experience. Overall, I was second year of the Thiel Fellowship. So 2012, or sorry, rather I started. Yeah, started in 2012 and it's a two year fellowship. So the class I was with, I got to know well and they're doing amazing stuff and still some of them are really dear friends. And there's also folks from the first class too who have stayed in my life as close friends and people who have been mentors and people I've looked to for advice on all sorts of things. You know, the amount of learning from that group, off the charts. But also I think it's just so lonely to start a company when you're younger. Like I was doing an internship at Flipboard before the Thiel Fellowship and at Flipboard, it was awesome. My co workers were great. I hung out with them. But they're like in their 30s and I was 20.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

And just, you know, my friends hadn't graduated yet. I grew up in the Bay Area, but my friends in the North Bay, they were doing their own thing and it kind of was further to go. The chance to just be with this group of people and socialize with them, like for me was very important. Some people probably don't need that, but I don't know, like once a week seeing a human. And other than my co founder, you know, who I loved dearly, but his preference in the weekend was to work on his compiler project. That's how he unwound. He was special, special brain, total genius. But yeah, for me that was like the biggest value that I did not even expect from that program. 100k over two years, amazing. But the community was just even more special.

[Interviewer]

We're going to go for a curve ball right now. Okay, I know all of that is super fun, but we have this urgent question from Elad Gil. Yeah, Or Elad, I don't know how you like to pronounce it.

[Dylan Field]

It's a great controversy itself.

[Interviewer]

It really is. I started my interview with it and I'm pretty sure I mispronounced it both times. Like I guess there's four ways to

[Dylan Field]

say he's very accepting is the good news.

[Interviewer]

So are you ready for this?

[Dylan Field]

I don't know.

[Interviewer]

I'm like laughing and I haven't even said it yet. Okay. Composure, Dylan. How can a man who is so skinny live a life so fat? P H A T with that.

[Dylan Field]

With great mentorship from a lot Gill.

[Interviewer]

What sparked that question?

[Dylan Field]

What is the question? I don't Know what that means?

[Interviewer]

I genuinely don't know. But he sent it, so I asked it.

[Dylan Field]

I think it's a compliment. I'm gonna take it as a compliment.

[Interviewer]

I think you're living well. I love that. Okay, and then we have some from Christian Garrett too.

[Dylan Field]

Okay,

[Interviewer]

well these aren't as, no offense,

[Dylan Field]

Christian, these aren't as fun as that one.

[Interviewer]

So Figma is on its error. Last earnings really proved it. We talked about this with Mark Pincus too. What are people missing about AI and enterprise software?

[Dylan Field]

I think that first of all, like there's, you know, markets snap to narratives right now the narrative seems to be like software is, you know, can put

[Interviewer]

good time to buy, not investment advice.

[Dylan Field]

But I think that a lot of software will do just fine or actually even amazing. And so then it's like, what are the properties of that software? Well, I think that network effects matter. I think network effects can show up not just in social and human situations, but in collaboration or social networks, but also in marketplace liquidity that is its own network effect. I think the distribution of customer base matters. And I would say that boring software is not to be undercounted or things that people would call boring. I wouldn't call it boring, but probably there are just so many things that you can find where the folks who are living the problem every day don't have that default impulse to go build software for it. And yet it's a huge problem. And finally I would say that the data liquidity that you can establish and how that can create context, how that context can create capability in a system that is its own flywheel and if you get that flywheel right, I think it's very value accruing to the customer in a way that can be extremely useful. So that's a lot of the stuff that I'm thinking about.

[Interviewer]

And everyone is your customer.

[Dylan Field]

That's what I've learned. I'm not sure everyone, but we're lucky to have a lot of great software companies and companies around the world using figma.

[Interviewer]

So let's talk about the evolution a little bit. This is another one of Christian's questions. But Figma evolved to platform from design to code to development and now multi product expansion. So where's a platform going next?

[Dylan Field]

I think both there's the impulse and the like quest of how do you take these surfaces and bring them more together. When you are leaning more into AI and generation, there's a huge opportunity in doing that in one place and not having to think about where do I start? And so that's something that I've always wanted to accomplish with Figma. It's extremely hard. And then there's also the question of how broad can you go in terms of serving all the needs of a designer, which are growing and vast. I mean, designers are giving us the feedback that we see from developers now. And so I think that if we can kind of do both of those and find ways to help people create their own tools on the platform, share them with their team and get value out of that, that'll be really awesome.

[Interviewer]

Lastly. Yeah, well, not really lastly, but from Christian, why are you so bullish on SpaceX?

[Dylan Field]

Let's talk about SpaceX and the Pantone Lounge.

[Interviewer]

SpaceX in the room with us right now.

[Dylan Field]

Are they? Well, first of all, I think there's tons to be seen on AI and their cloud business. I guess I really don't know how to read that. So let me just remove all that for a moment, the xai part of it, and instead just talk about the non xai part of it. I mean, SpaceX is a great example of a company where you've got amazing talent who are, I think, really missionary. And that talent, you know, goes and quests and conquers after challenge after challenge after challenge. And I think that people lack imagination when it comes to what they can do on Earth and also what they can do in the stars and how important space can be in the long term. And I think that there's many categories that folks don't think, think of them going into, which they will go into probably. And I, I believe it could be a very, very important company, you know, for this century or the next. So I hope figma can follow too.

[Interviewer]

Elon Musk once said, if a product is special enough, it needs no logo. What do you think about that?

[Dylan Field]

I actually think that that's right. But also if the product is that special, that I think it's probably got enough brand characteristics that it kind of functions as a logo. And so for example, a Tesla car, like, can you take the Tesla logo off of a Tesla car? Sure. But like, you probably still know it's a Tesla and if you don't, that's a problem for Tesla. So. And also they have a logo. Yeah, but yeah, I think that overall brand systems, you can do a lot with them and there are many ways that brands can show up to people. It's just a part of it.

[Interviewer]

As we close out, Sorcery is proud to be sponsored by Brex and they're all about performance and spending smarter, moving faster As a startup or a large enterprise, I think performance really comes down to who you surround yourself with and like who you get inspired by. Maybe who's mentored you along the way? Are there anybody in your circle or like on your career path of building out Figma that's really inspired you?

[Dylan Field]

So many. How long do we have? I mean, look like there are people that have mentored me and have no idea because it's from before Figma times and maybe we didn't interact as much during the building of figma, but like there are voices in my head, you know, so folks from O'Reilly, LinkedIn, you know, Microsoft Research. I think that during Figma, the folks that I've got on the board have been incredible and I'm very thankful for them. But also our employees, you know, our first manager hire, Sho, director of engineering at the time, he really taught me management. I didn't know anything. I was an intern before Figma. And just in general, I mean we've had interns that have taught me stuff. We've had folks from anywhere in the org that I think you can learn from and also the community and just the folks that have surrounded us with great feedback. I mean, I'm so grateful early on, but today as well for the designers have sat down with me and given me that gift of feedback. We are very lucky as a design company to have designers as users and customers because they are trained to give good feedback. So the feedback we get is so much better than your average feedback that a company gets. And I never take that for granted and I always count as a blessing. But yeah, I look for mentorship everywhere and I'm very, very grateful for it.

[Interviewer]

Amazing. I think Michael mentioned that you really like Alan.

[Dylan Field]

Alan Kay is awesome and there's many other HCI and sort of design thinkers that I also think are incredible looking back. But also I think that we need to get back to the sort of work that was done, you know, back by, you know, sort of 60s through 80s time frame in terms of just what are the fundamental ways to think about using a computer in the first place and what are the possibilities? I think the only place we're seeing it right now is kind of in VR where it's really seen in a gaming context. But there are new interaction paradigms being created there and that can exist in software too. Like probably the last big one that people reference if you just gotta look for the consensus opinion is pull to refresh, like we can go further. And if you look at an iPad, like why is it a big iPhone. You know, I think that there's so much more you can do with touch technology, but also with just more pervasive computing and also as you go beyond that into the world of AI and you know, different devices, different form factors, I think the future of design and interactivity is really going to be fun.

[Interviewer]

Like Snap specs.

[Dylan Field]

We'll see. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Dylan. I know you're so, so busy right now. There's 10,000 people waiting to come in the doors.

[Dylan Field]

This is the emptiest we'll see it. But it's, it's a lot of fun and I'm excited for the config and I'm thankful that you're here.

[Interviewer]

Thank you.

[Dylan Field]

Enjoy.

[Interviewer]

Appreciate it.

[Sponsor/Host Voice]

Hey, it's Molly.

[Interviewer]

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[Sponsor/Host Voice]

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