First Time Founders with Ed Elson – Figma’s Founder on Post-IPO Life & the Road Ahead

Summary

Podcast Summary: First Time Founders with Ed Elson – Figma’s Founder on Post-IPO Life & the Road Ahead

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Host: Ed Elson (special monthly series)
Guest: Dylan Field, Co-founder & CEO of Figma
Date: December 7, 2025
Episode Focus:
Ed Elson interviews Dylan Field on Figma’s journey from its early, uncertain days to delivering one of the year’s most successful IPOs, the shifting role of design in tech, building in the age of AI, and key takeaways for fellow entrepreneurs.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode unpacks the inside story of Figma’s rise as a foundational tool for digital design—now used by millions, including the majority of Fortune 500 companies. Dylan Field discusses the pivotal cultural and technological shifts that made Figma’s “multiplayer” design paradigm possible, the daunting milestones on the road to IPO, and the evolving landscape with AI. It’s a candid, practical look at what it means to build, lead, and innovate as a first-time founder in a hyper-competitive, fast-changing field.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Changing Role of Design in Tech (03:23 – 06:09)

• Figma’s central thesis: Design is now how you win or lose in tech. The ratio of designers to engineers has shifted significantly, especially in leading companies (e.g., Airbnb’s 1:2-3 ratio vs. the historical 1:30+).
• “It used to be that design was an afterthought…Now design is more than form and function. Design is how you win or lose.” – Ed Elson quoting Field’s Founder letter (02:49)
• “The more people that took on [the Apple philosophy of design], the more people that tried to meet the market where they wanted to be met, those companies, I think, did so much better.” – Dylan Field (04:24)

Notable Quote

“With AI…you have to differentiate. How do you differentiate? Well, you need to have a point of view…but you also have to have great design, great user experience.”
— Dylan Field (05:15)

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2. Figma's Beginnings: Building With Technology Before Defining the Problem (06:09 – 10:40)

• Field and his co-founder, Evan, began exploring WebGL as a technology-first venture, experimenting with photo editing and face-swapping features that were ultimately ahead of their time.
• "We thought, okay, we’re technologists…Let’s start with tech…We’ve got our hammer, what’s our nail?" — Dylan Field (06:27-07:17)
• The pivotal realization: photo editing would move to mobile rather than browser, which pushed the team to pivot and focus on collaborative design tools instead.

Memorable Moment

• Field describes showing early prototypes to designers, only to be told, “I just don’t trust it.” That changed after a visual redesign: “Go figure that designers want a well designed tool visually.” (09:59)

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3. From Single-Player to Multiplayer: Redefining Digital Collaboration (11:01 – 15:39)

• Before Figma, digital design tools were single-player; users worked alone, passed files around, and struggled with version control.
• Figma’s multiplayer model enabled live collaboration, versioning, and made design a collective workspace.
• “People basically said...‘a camel is a horse designed by committee. If there’s a future of design, I’m changing careers.’ But a small set of people loved it and saw that vision.” — Dylan Field (11:01–12:02)
• The parallel to Google Docs revolutionizing documents: “Let’s just put it on a single page and let’s all just jump in the doc…And that’s basically what Figma is doing from a product and web design perspective.” — Ed Elson (14:23)

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4. Competing with Adobe: Niches vs. Giants (15:33 – 17:43)

• While Adobe dominated creative professional tools, Figma’s focus and differentiation came from targeting product design and enabling seamless teamwork.
• “It’s just two very different businesses at this point.” — Dylan Field (17:06-17:43)

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5. Going Public: The IPO, Shareholder Pressure & Leadership Philosophy (21:20 – 25:38)

• Ed Elson details the unexpected IPO pop (priced at $33, opening at $85, peaking at $150).
• “The number’s going to go up, the number’s going to go down. We do not control the number…the long term view always has to come first.” — Dylan Field (22:58-24:23)
• Bill Walsh’s wisdom applies: “The score takes care of itself.” (24:23)
• “My advice to anyone who’s looking at the stock is understand our company. Go read our S1, go watch the earnings calls…That’s how you understand.” (25:38)

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6. AI and The Future of Design (27:42 – 33:56)

• AI’s role: Instead of replacing designers, it unlocks more of the creative option space—tools like Figma Make enable rapid prototyping from prompts, but “having an opinion” is still hard for AI.
• “If I show you a very opinionated design, you’ll have a reaction, yes, you’re going to love it, you’re going to hate it, but you’re not going to be neutral. If I show you not a very opinionated design...you’ll be like, yeah, it’s all right.” (29:55-31:18)
• “It’s not just picking. I don’t think it’s a curation role. I think you have to explore the option space...and then when you find something that you like, it’s your job then to push and go way deeper.” — Dylan Field (33:39–33:56)

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7. Management & Leadership: Lessons Learned (34:07 – 38:00)

• Field’s candid about being an inexperienced manager: “I was not a very good manager when I started Figma…I had a lot to learn.” (34:14)
• Management can be learned: building relationships, creating context, clear goals, accountability.
• Key to improvement: “Hire people you can learn from…The worst thing you can do [is] to hire folks that might not be as skilled because you feel like…some control aspect.” (36:19)

Notable Quote

“My mental test for an interview is, like, okay, I come out of this learning something.”
— Dylan Field (38:00)

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8. Strengths, Pattern Recognition, and Predicting the Future (41:05 – 44:32)

• Field credits curiosity, learning from mentors (like co-founder Evan T.A. Brown), and a formative experience at O’Reilly Media for his ability to “see around corners” and recognize tech trends.
• To get better at predicting trends: “Form hypotheses about the world, run down in a specific way that is testable…and when you don’t have a match, don’t get discouraged; that’s a learning opportunity.” (43:49–44:32)

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9. Role Models & Shaping the World (44:32 – 47:32)

• Cites tech leaders like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk for their bold, world-shaping technology.
• “I think that there are unequivocally things that will be good for the world…From there I go into, okay, what’s the role I can play to help?” (45:44–47:32)
• Sees his impact both in building Figma and in mentoring the next generation of founders.

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10. Advice to Aspiring Founders (47:32 – 49:43)

• “Don’t try to replicate stuff, try to understand what it is that you have unique insight on.” (47:47)
• Be humble and adaptable.
• Build the financial buffer you need to explore an idea deeply: “If we’d stopped at six months, that would have been it. There would have been no Figma.” (47:47–48:57)
• Be “greedy” in your problem selection: Don’t start something you can't see yourself working on in 10 or 20 years.
• “Treat it like a multi decade journey from the start.” (49:24)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:23 – Why design is central in modern tech
• 06:09 – Figma’s exploration years and technological pivots
• 11:01 – Single-player vs. multiplayer design and industry impact
• 15:33 – Competing with Adobe & product differentiation
• 21:20 – IPO rollercoaster and leadership philosophy
• 27:42 – Integrating AI, challenges and future role in design
• 34:07 – Lessons in management and leadership evolution
• 41:05 – Founder strengths and predicting the future
• 44:32 – Tech heroes and shaping the world
• 47:32 – Candid, practical advice to founders

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Go figure that designers want a well designed tool visually.” — Dylan Field (09:59)
• “A camel is a horse designed by committee. If there’s a future of design, I’m changing careers.” — Early user feedback (11:01)
• “My advice to everybody is make sure that [AI helps you]…as the model capabilities improve…you are getting better as a company.” — Dylan Field (27:42)
• “It’s not just picking…You have to explore the option space…and then when you find something that you like, it’s your job then to push and go way deeper.” — Dylan Field on the evolving designer’s role (33:39)
• “Hire people you can learn from.” — Dylan Field (36:19)
• “Treat it like a multi-decade journey from the start.” — Dylan Field (49:24)

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Tone & Takeaways

The conversation is candid, insightful, and low on bravado; Field unpacks lessons won through hard experience and places continual emphasis on humility, curiosity, and the importance of surrounding yourself with people you can grow with. He is optimistic about AI’s potential to amplify, rather than replace, human creativity—and for founders, hammers on the need for deep interest and long-haul commitment to one’s problem space.

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Summary

This episode is a masterclass in the art and realities of high-tech entrepreneurship. Field’s story highlights the nonlinear path from idea to breakthrough, the importance of technological and cultural inflection points (like the move from single- to multiplayer software), and delivers grounded advice for anyone aiming to build something lasting and impactful in a turbulent, opportunity-rich world.

Transcript

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[Dylan Field]

Success is never a given, especially in tech, where everything is evolving at breakneck speed.

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And if you're trying something that's never.

[Dylan Field]

Been done before, chances of success are even smaller. The difference between victory and catastrophe can.

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All come down to following a counterintuitive.

[Dylan Field]

Instinct or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision. That's what Crucible Moments, the podcast from Sequoia Capital, is all about. Crucible Moments is back with a new season telling the unlikely triumphs at tech giants like Supercell and Palo Alto Networks. New episodes are out now and available everywhere. You get your podcasts [e-mail] listen to crucible moments today.

[Ed Elson]

Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. At the start of 2025, the IPO market felt like it had frozen in place. Then, slowly, the tide began to turn. By the third quarter, deal flow picked up dramatically. 23 companies raised nine figures or more, and five made headlines with blockbuster listings. One of those headlines came from a company whose tools have quietly become essential to modern digital design. At this point, the company has millions of users. It's used by 95% of Fortune 500 companies. Its platform is now central to nearly every digital team's workflow. That company went public in July, and it is now finding its first fee after one of the biggest IPOs of the year. This is my conversation with Dylan Field, co founder and CEO of figma. Dylan Field, thank you for joining me on First Time Founders.

[Dylan Field]

Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here and to finally get to meet you.

[Ed Elson]

Absolutely. So we're going to get into how you started Figma. Everyone's been talking about it. Biggest IPO of The year, really. We've been talking a lot about it on our other podcast, Profit Markets. But I want to start with a quote from your Founder letter. In the Internet boom of the late 90s, the ethos was build it, and they will come today. That could not be further from the truth. It used to be that design was an afterthought. Now design is more than form and function. Design is how you win or lose.

You are a design company. What is different about the world today compared to 30 years ago that makes design so important?

[Dylan Field]

I love that you read the Founder's Letter, first of all, so thank you for reading it.

[Ed Elson]

Absolutely.

[Dylan Field]

I put a lot of thought into it, and so I've always been eager to kind of get that reflected back and love that. We're just diving right into it. Let's go. It's certainly been the case for Figma that from the beginning, we had this intuition that design was becoming more important. Now, I couldn't put in the words that I could put in today. And design, I think, started to become this infectant around software.

[Ed Elson]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

It started to make it so that the expectations for everything increased. And we started to see that in design hiring and design ratios, you know, we're going from like, okay, we got one designer for, you know, dozens of engineers, and their job is to put lipstick on a pig and make it pretty at the end of the process to a different set of mind, sort of shift of mindset into this more Apple philosophy of design is how it works.

[Ed Elson]

Yes.

[Dylan Field]

And the more people that took on that philosophy, the more people that tried to meet the market where they wanted to be met, those companies, I think, did so much better. And people were starting to realize that as they started to hire more designers, we saw this ratio change tremendously over that time. Suddenly it was going to. In extreme cases like Airbnb, you might have one designer for every two or three engineers instead of one designer for every 30 engineers or no designers. And so then, as this wave of design hiring happened, we also saw just the wave of software increase, too. And all this started to come together into a thesis of design is how you win or lose. And that's the thesis we held before AI. With AI, it is like absolutely, unequivocally clear that that is true.

[Ed Elson]

Yes.

[Dylan Field]

Because now that exponential, it's no longer just like this kind of, oh, it looked flat. Now it's trending upwards. Is it linear? Is it exponential? We're trying to tell it's going vertical. You know, now you can create software faster. Than ever. I'm not saying it's going to be the best software yet, but what we do see is more software being created. And as software gets more competitive, you have to differentiate. How do you differentiate? Well, you need to have a point of view, first of all, that's on the product side and the brand. But you also have to have great design, great user experience. It has to be delightful, it has to be clear, it has to be useful. And I think that also you need to really be leaning on the brand and marketing and shining there too. It's not enough just to have great product design, you have to have great brand design. And you have to communicate that point of view across all of it and your brand, which stretches across every experience the customer has with your company.

[Ed Elson]

So you create the company in 2012, product design becomes more of a thing. And from my understanding, you didn't fully release your product until several years after. What were those years, those first years like? And what was the product that you brought to the world?

[Dylan Field]

My co founder and I were very excited about exploring WebGL, the ability to use the GPU in your computer, in the browser. And we really started with technology rather than a problem. And I think that most companies that do well have some why now? And the why now doesn't have to be technological. It can be social, it can be regulatory. You know, there's any number of things that it can be. Some of them even have multiple why nows? I think Figma, looking back, we did have multiple why nows? But we thought, okay, we're technologists, we're both studying computer science. Let's start with tech. And we looked at all the tech that exists in the world and WebGL stood out. We explored for a while, tried to figure out, okay, what are we going to do with WebGL? We've got our hammer, what's our nail? This is not usually when people start a company and have the ethos around.

[Ed Elson]

Usually they start with a problem, say it's the opposite.

[Dylan Field]

But that's the way we started, is the honest truth. And we explored for quite some time and we looked at all sorts of things that you might apply the verb photoshopped to in terms of taking that kind of verb and distilling into use cases that we thought were going to be interesting for consumers. Things like face swapping. That was one of the first things we built.

[Ed Elson]

Face swapping.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah. So it was like 2012 and we could, with Poisson blending, make it so that we could swap our faces and it looked credible or background Removal, changing color gradients dynamically in a scene. We found with a lot of this was basically that the tech wasn't ready yet. And we were able to get like 85% of the way there in cases like face swapping, maybe 90, 95% of the way there, but it just wasn't 100%. And I think it wasn't until deep learning that actually we got to the point where, yeah, you can get 100% of the way there. Yeah. So then we explored, okay, we got a ship, something, built a photo editor, but it was in the Browser because again, WebGL that was the hammer. And I'm actually quite proud of that work. We never shipped it because we decided it wasn't the thing.

But did all sorts of things that later informed us at figma. And then we basically said, okay, wait a second.

Photo editing is going to happen on your mobile phone. It is not going to happen in a web browser, and definitely not if we don't support raw, which is an advanced image format for digital photographers. Why are we building the web browser when the curve around mobile phone adoption and megapixels per phone is just up and to the right in what is probably exponential way as well? So then we said, okay, we got to back out of this and do something else. And that's when we started to pay attention to what is now Figma. So even that starting period, it took a while. If I had said, may give ourselves six months and then we'll make a call, we would never have Figma today. Yeah, past that. Then we were on track and we started to raise money, build a team. But it took a while. Professional tools are hard to build. They have very complex workflows, a lot of mechanics that you have to get just right. And so, you know, we had an aggressive timeline that we communicated to people, investors, employees. We certainly did not hit it. We were pretty much in the right order of things, but basically offset by a year or two in each case. My favorite part of it was actually we kept putting in front of designers once we got to the point where we had theoretically met some subset of their needs we thought could get us to market. And there's an entire summer where I went out and just showed people the tool and they all were intrigued, but they all basically said, I just don't trust it.

[Ed Elson]

Huh?

[Dylan Field]

Like, oh, no, what if it's like the browser element? We bet everything on this. Turns out, it. Those comments all went away when we did a redesign. And the visual design itself, the tool was not sufficient and that's why I didn't trust it. You know, go figure that designers want a well designed tool visually. So we fixed that and then we were off to the races truly. And did a closed beta launch in December 2015 and then a GA release in October 2016 and then finally started to price in mid 2017, which was almost five years after we started the company. So it took quite a while to get off the ground.

[Ed Elson]

Basically, anyone that I know who's starting a website or creating some app or user or creating some sort of digital product, everyone is using Figma or at least in my circles, how did designers, how did people build stuff before? Like, what were people using before Figma?

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, I mean it was single player and there's a culture that I think came out of agency culture where there's a lot of like, I'm going to show you three things. Like the first two are not going to be like just what you want. For the third one, everyone's going to go, oh, it's so good. And then I'll go back in my corner and I will do my work and we won't interact that much because I'm not sure I want to. And so that's completely different from the multiplayer experience of Figma. And I think that cultural shift was real. Like the first comments we got on the launch were, you know, it was controversial. People basically said in the launch comments stuff like, you know, a camel is a horse designed by committee. They said, if there's a future of design, I'm changing careers. But also there was a small set of people that loved it and saw that vision of what it could mean to make multiplayer design in the browser and with a tool that was high quality and a tool that could actually really meet their needs and be focused on their use case.

[Ed Elson]

What does single player versus multiplayer mean?

[Dylan Field]

Single player mean local to your file system. One person can use it at a time. You export something, an image, you send that image over, you've got version control issues. The web forced us to be multiplayer. We didn't initially try to do multiplayer. We had an instinct that multiplayer was important, but it was a complex thing to build. And so we thought, okay, let's not start there until we hear some validation. And no one validated it. I think out of 100 people, maybe two people, both of them were sitting next to each other and they we're doing this pair design sort of workflow. So they uniquely got it. Otherwise people told us, this is not what I want, like why would I want to interact with all these people, more stakeholders, I think that's bad. And so we didn't initially start there, but we got there because we were forced to. If I have, you know, Figma and I've got a tab and you've got the same tab open, and then I make an edit and your tab reloads and you make an edit and my tab reloads, it's a terrible user experience. So as soon as we started to get to the point where it was closer to production and we were doing that on the team, we knew we had to go build it. And the benefits were tremendous. Not only the ability for more people to be in the canvas at the same time, just like a Google Doc, but also a single source of truth, your versioning problem goes away. Instead of v2, 3, 5, final 3, you now have just a document, a space to go to. And it was also interesting, the behavioral change over time as people kind of got used to this world because they started to treat Figma like a space. And that was fascinating. Like, Slack went down one day during COVID and we started to see folks basically putting text boxes in a Figma canvas in order to go back and forth and chat. And we're like, this is not what we built Figma for, but there's something here. And so that led us to figjam, which is our way to basically brainstorm, Ideate, whiteboard, diagram. And it's a simpler product, it's really for that use case, but with it we tried to incorporate concepts that were really speaking to that idea of how do you create a space for people.

[Ed Elson]

It's similar to Google Docs. I think that's a good comparison. It's like we used to sort of write up a doc, you save it, you send it off. I mean, before that we would print it out and someone would put notes and edit it with a pen. And then you go through it again and then there's just this great idea where it's like, let's just put it on a single page and let's all just jump in the doc and we can comment on things and tag things. And that's basically what Figma is doing from a product and web design perspective. And it's been like this unbelievable success. Now, when I think about who you're up against, the first name that comes to mind is Adobe. Adobe is and has been the giant in digital design for many, many years. And it's almost like, or at least from a consumer perspective, it seems as if they have had historically almost a Monopoly, you are the first company that has really eaten into that and at least presented yourself as a real competitor to Adobe. How did you do that? Or it sounds like maybe you'll disagree with that characterization.

But how did you get to this point where I'm saying the word Figma in the same sentence as Adobe?

[Dylan Field]

We saw ourselves as going up against Adobe in the earliest days of Figma for sure. And over time what we found was that actually designers, they're our core audience. The core thing we do is make software for product designers. They work with teams and multiplayer shows that even more in terms of those workflows and if their teammates, the people around the designers are not successful, the designers are not successful. So that led us to go and both go sort of upstream in the workflow and downstream to things like figjam for ideation brainstorming to figma slides for alignment, but also downstream in the product design development workflow into okay, how do we go and make it so a developer, for example, can take the assets in Figma design and translate them to code in the most effective efficient way that they can and save time. And as we've kind of mapped out that process, we found ourselves building for anyone that wanted to go from idea to a polished application that they can deploy and get into production. But it was interesting because I think we thought of okay with small market for product designers, web designers, Fear of labor statistics said it was 250,000 people at the time when we started Figma we thought, okay, this is not going to be our long term market. It's growing. We don't know how much but.

We'Ll have to go into other use cases around creative tools. Instead we found ourselves really focused at our core on the product design development workflow and building software and how to help people build the most well designed software. But overall it's not like we see Adobe. There's a period where they tried but then they son said the product and they decided they're going to focus on their core which is the creative professional and also I think compete on the down market. And so it's just a very two very different businesses at this point.

[Ed Elson]

We'll be right back.

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[Dylan Field]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Dylan Field]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Dylan Field]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Dylan Field]

See chime.com for details and applicable terms.

[Ed Elson]

We're back with first time founders. Let's just move to you going public. It's kind of fascinating to hear those first five years and how messy it really did sound.

[Dylan Field]

It's always messy. Every startup is.

[Ed Elson]

And now you are a public company. Biggest IPO of the Year we were looking at the IPO pricing and we said on our podcast we were like, this is a buy. It was originally priced at 25, then it was repriced at 30. We said it was a buy at 30. Then it was 33.

[Dylan Field]

33 years ago we said it was.

[Ed Elson]

A buy and that's what it went out at the IPO price and then it opens in the market and it's 85 and then it goes up to 150. You know, we thought that you guys would see a big pop. I didn't see it being that crazy. And then it's really interesting. You know, a lot of our listeners, I've heard people saying like, hey.

It'S come down a lot since 100. And if I keep wanting to tell me, like I was saying buy at 33. That's what I was talking about. The point being, now that you're a public company, there is a lot of pressure on you to return value to shareholders. Even I was receiving that pressure as someone who just talked about the stock. So I could imagine that that would be kind of a different paradigm where everyone's watching you, everyone's asking questions. People like me asking you, what do you think of the stock? How do you feel about the pricing? How has that changed your overall experience as a CEO?

[Dylan Field]

What I told the company before we went public during the ipo, literally on listing day, before we saw any signals in the market and after, and then also after ipo, then I just showed up about it is look, the number's going to go up, the number's going to go down. We do not control the number. The only thing we've got control over is the inputs. And so we have to keep our eye on the prize and we gotta do everything we can to drive those inputs. Yeah. And we have to take the long term view. You know, the irony is of course, that as a public company you have to report earnings every quarter. And I think that one reaction that is to take a quarterly view. Of course we, we care about our results and also you have to take the long term view. And the long term view always has to come first. And so I spend my energy thinking, not about, okay, what is the stock price doing on any given day? Some days I literally forget to look because I'm so focused on what we're trying to do for the long term. And you only get one shower thought a day. There's a great Paul Graham essay on that. Your shower thought needs to be on what are the long term things we can do to make our customers lives better. Value will follow.

[Ed Elson]

There's the great Bill Walsh quote, which is score takes care of itself, which is a very similar dynamic. It's like if we focus on our inputs, on driving value, on our fundamentals, the score is going to take care of itself, the stock price is going to take care of itself. But I could also imagine now as a public company CEO, that at the same time you kind of take care of the stock price as well as the, the vibe setter as the leader of the narrative. And you know, we talk a lot on our podcast about the narrative versus the numbers. There's the numbers that can drive a stock and then there's the narrative that what, what do investors think is happening? Do you feel any pressure? It sounds like you, you don't want to think too much about this is the story we're telling people. You want to think about are our numbers good, our inputs high quality. But do you feel a pressure now to show up on that earnings call and capture the imaginations of people, to set a narrative that investors are really excited about? Is that something that you feel is incumbent on you? Now, as a public company CEO, I.

[Dylan Field]

Think what's most important, and this is the same perspective I had when we were a private company, is to make sure that people understand what the company is doing and to make sure that people are educated. And so that's most my focus. That's why I do demos on earnings calls, at least so far. Maybe at some point I don't do them. I don't know. I feel like I can't commit to that. Forever. But I like doing that. I like to show people what are we actually improving. And I think without that, it's so easy to get lost in sort of, whether it be narrative or numbers or whatever for people. And my advice to anyone who's like looking at the stock is understand our company. Yeah, it's very simple, like, go read our S1, go watch the earnings calls, go look at our filings, go look at what we're doing. Like, that's how you understand. Now on narrative, of course there's an importance to narrative. This is different than narrative for markets. This is a narrative for the business. If you don't have a narrative about what is going to occur in the world, you don't have a vision, you don't have a point of view on where you're headed. And so to me, it's very important to storytell there, to show people and unpack the context that's in my head about where we're headed for our employees, for our customers. And that's something that I feel a lot of pressure on because otherwise we don't have a North Star. And then I think the fundamental question that maybe is related to markets and is deep related to strategy. The question that everyone seems to be asking these days for any company, private or public, is this an AI winner or an AI loser? And this is a very important question to answer. Obviously, if you care about the long term, you gotta be on the right side of AI.

[Ed Elson]

Yes.

[Dylan Field]

So what's that mean to me? It means that you have to be in a place where as the model capabilities improve and come online, you are getting better as a company. It's that simple. And so my advice to everybody is make sure that that is true for your company.

[Ed Elson]

How does AI play into figma's business and figma's product? I guess let's hear the answer to that question.

[Dylan Field]

For figma, one of the products we have right now that it's a pure AI product in many ways is Figma make, which is our basically prompt to working app product. We see it used for prototyping, use cases by designers to make it so they can go explore prototypes that are more interactive. We see it used for people that are shipping websites or web apps publicly and even internal tools, use cases. And figure make is fascinating because there's so much that we can do on the application level to make it better all the time. And also, yeah, you get a new model in there that's got better functionality, more power, and it makes the product better. Like literally we See that with all the model releases overall for our entire ecosystem, I think that we've publicly said about how we're introducing prompting and figment design, that's still a work in progress. You know, we're in early alpha stage there, lots to do. But figma Design and figma make, you know, those should be two sides of the same coin. You should be able to go back and forth rapidly. Right now, you can copy from figma make to figma Design. You can copy from figma Design to figma Make. That's very powerful. You can use the design systems that you've built up in figma's platform and convert them into a form that you can then use in figma Make. But there's all this room to be more seamless across it and to make it so this all feels very integrated and we are working hard on that and figuring out the best way to unify and to make it so that the entire platform is AI native in a way that fits that criteria. And the last thing I'd say is just it might actually be true that ironically, design is non verifiable. There's no way to know other than, you know, rigorous debate. A B testing. Is Design A or Design B better for my audience?

[Ed Elson]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

And even with a B testing, you could hit local maximums and not the global maximum. And you might be missing sort of the forest for the trees.

[Ed Elson]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

And so there's so many different inputs to design, whether it be product design, visual design, brand design, that are just kind of beyond the context that you have in a tool or in a model. There's just sort of like, what is the culture right now? What's the system we're trying to create? What's the brand we're going for? What's the ethos we stand for? What's the point of view we have? What are the business constraints I can keep going. And also what are the flows, what's the before and after of these states? And how do we want to manage our complexity and how do we want to make it so that we're able to have progressive disclosure? What's our philosophy and viewpoint on all this? This is a lot of context to go gather and it should lead to many outputs if you give it to an LLM. And I don't even think it's possible right now to give a lot to an LLM. But the better that the models get at generative capabilities that are highly opinionated, I think it's actually better for the conversation around design because if I show you a very opinionated design, you'll have a reaction, yes, you're going to love it, you're going to hate it, but you're not going to be neutral. If I show you a not very opinionated design, something that's kind of like the average of averages, you will be more neutral. You'll be like, yeah, it's all right.

[Ed Elson]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

As the craft increases, as the aesthetic increases for these models, as they get better at that, it's almost like you're planting all these different flags in a potential option space. And it's your job as a designer, as a team, to go figure out where in that option space do you want to go even deeper, push harder and explore further? Yeah. And so I think it actually amplifies the role of designers.

[Ed Elson]

It is interesting. You talk about having an opinion. I found that that is the worst trait of AI right now is that it's so good at aggregating, it's so good at collecting, it's got the best memory of all time, but it's so bad at having an opinion, saying something interesting, novel.

Even when I push it, I'm like, you must have an opinion on this subject that I'm bringing to you. And it says, well, there are both sides. Which ultimately leads to, I imagine, in the design space, bad design. Because as you say, you say non verifiable. Another word for that would be subjective. It's about taste. And AI has kind of bad taste. So what is AI going to do to design? Is it going to, I mean, the classic question, replace designers, or would you say that.

This space is a little bit more protected in that sense, if.

[Dylan Field]

You'Re at a company that values design, the opportunities will be even bigger than they are today. If you're not at a company that values design, you already have some problems. So that's the problem that maybe you should already look at. But every company that wants to win should value design right now. And again.

There are ways to actually prompt models to make them more opinionated. It's just that the range, with models that are currently released, you can't get that far. I think that'll change. We'll get to a place where, with clever prompting, you'll be able to go further on aesthetic. That does not mean it's the thing you're going to ship. The more that you can explore. Currently limited by human toil is. And I'm not saying that's not enjoyable work for a lot of people too, but that's all stuff that limits how much of that option space you can.

[Ed Elson]

Explore and it will be on the human to pick which is the right one.

[Dylan Field]

I actually think it's not just picking. I don't think it's a curation role. I think it's pushing.

[Ed Elson]

Pushing.

[Dylan Field]

And I think it's. You have to explore the option space. You need tools that help you and then when you find something that you like, it's your job then to push and to go way deeper there.

[Ed Elson]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

And that's what's going to lead you to a truly differentiated design level of craft and expression. That's our philosophy across all the products at figma.

[Ed Elson]

I have a quote from an interview that you did in 2021.

[Dylan Field]

I'm so curious now.

[Ed Elson]

You said I was not a very good manager when I started figma.

[Dylan Field]

No, I wasn't.

[Ed Elson]

Yeah, I was an intern before that, so I had a lot to learn. What were you bad at from a management perspective? And how have you improved? And now that you've improved, what does it take to be a good manager of people?

[Dylan Field]

Management and leadership are different. And you can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa. For me, I think I'd always.

Been a leader in terms of leading different initiatives I've been a part of or trying to help whoever was the leader really do their best. And from that I kind of came into starting FIGMA and just thinking I was good to go. But turns out there's this whole new skill set around management that I definitely did not know. And the good news is if you're a first time manager, like it's all very learnable. It'll feel like muscle memory eventually, but it's knowing where your team is at, building great relationships. The tactics are things like one on ones, creating context, making sure that people know what their goals are, holding them accountable to those goals, making sure that you're able to keep good cadences for your team. Um, and.

[Ed Elson]

And you abated all of this?

[Dylan Field]

Oh, for sure.

[Ed Elson]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

I had no memory and so I just kind of like. And I think also, you know, you take on VC money, you're trying to get this thing to market. It's not in market for like ever by the way. I want to be clear too. For anyone listening, don't do what we did. Like if you have any way not to go. Build faster.

[Ed Elson]

Yes.

[Dylan Field]

The best is to get something out rapidly. Like that's the question I'm always asking in my product reviews. How do we go faster here? What can we stage? What assumptions do we have that we can maybe cut. So please don't take away that you should take five years to launch a company. You'll be dead. We are the outlier and from a different time. But yeah, I think I was bad at all of it. What was tremendously helpful was hiring our first manager. Ikeman's director of engineering. His name is Sho, and he was someone that came from this amazing history of companies. He worked at General Magic, Macromedia, Adobe Medium, as well as starting his own thing a few times. Deep history and knowledge of our space. Also just a great human and just like an incredibly smart human, but also deeply empathetic. And yeah, I mean, he came in and instantly went, okay, there's a bunch of stuff to change and improve. And, you know, we talked every day for quite a long time, and I learned a ton from him and I learned a ton from the next people we hired that were leaders and managers as well. In general, I think your mindset has to be hire people you can learn from. One of the biggest traps, the biggest mistakes is sometimes people will try to hire folks that they will just like, look up to them and revere them. I think a lot of times they. They look for people that might be not as skilled because they feel like there's some control aspect there or something. And I think that's like the worst thing you can do. You need to find people that will push you further the company for further that are aligned with you in terms of where you want to go, but also they will add new skills and new possibilities to the company, the organization. So that's what I'm always looking for, is ways to level up our team and people to learn from. I think I can learn from anyone. It's how I do interviews too. When I'm on the other side of the table and I'm asking questions, you're.

[Ed Elson]

Looking for, can this person teach me something?

[Podcast Host / Sponsor Announcer]

Yeah.

[Dylan Field]

I mean, my mental test for an interview is like, okay, I come out of this learning something. Yep, among others. But that's one of the things that I care about.

[Ed Elson]

We'll be right back. Foreign.

[Podcast Host / Sponsor Announcer]

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[Ed Elson]

We're back with first time founders. What are your core strengths, would you say? I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of companies that have tried to do what you did and you won. For lack of a better word, what are you really good at. What did you do differently that you think other companies didn't do?

[Dylan Field]

Well, first of all, there's a lot of the story to be written, so, you know, the bigger the ambition, the more there is to go tackle. And that's definitely not my mindset. I never feel like we've won. But I would say that, you know, the first great decision I made was working with Evan. He was my TA Brown, smartest guy I knew. And I felt like, okay, if the things works out great, but if it doesn't, I'll learn more by working with Evan than doing anything else in the world. And so it's the easiest call for me, I guess. I have a hard time talking to myself this way, but curiosity is definitely a strength. I'm always trying to make sure that it stays a strength. And I love learning about new things, new spaces, patterns, sometimes even are teaching people something and they ask you a question and you give them an answer and you realize, wait a second, that answer has gave. Like that applies to the situation I'm in right now. So ironically, you can learn by mentoring too.

[Ed Elson]

Yes.

[Dylan Field]

I think in addition to that, I think that early on in my sort of tech career being at O'Reilly Media, which for those who don't know is they do many things, but they hosted conferences, they publish technical books, they're the ones the animals would cut on the covers. Their entire business was basically seen around corners and understanding tech trends and being able to really project in the future and understand what's going to happen or what's sort of the tech tree going forward and how would unlock what's too early, what's on time, what will be later on.

And just the different stages of technology development and being able to kind of.

Be able to track that in my head and have global state there, I think that's a strength.

[Ed Elson]

You do have a history of recognizing what the trend is going to be at a very large level, starting as early as 2012, when you realize there's this big problem, which is that design is not good enough on the Internet, on your mobile phone, et cetera. For someone who wants to be better at that, at understanding and predicting what the future is going to be, what the large trends are going to be, how can we be better at that? What are some of. Is that just talent or is there a way to kind of coach yourself?

[Dylan Field]

Absolutely. A loop you can be in that'll help you. It's very simple. You form hypotheses about the world, run down in a specific way that is testable and make sure you kind of set a timeline to it. And then. Yeah, see how things play out. See what happened in the system that did not match your mental model.

[Ed Elson]

Yes.

[Dylan Field]

See what happened that did. And when you don't have a match, don't just get discouraged, like that's a learning opportunity. Use any delta to inform how to enrich your mental model of the world or models. You know, the best cases that you actually have many frameworks and you're able to try on different ones, different times, according to the situation, rather than just having one rigid framework that you see.

[Ed Elson]

The world through, who do you look up to?

And this could be past or president. Who are your heroes? Who are your role models? Who are the kinds of people that you're like, yeah, that's the kind of.

[Dylan Field]

Person I want to be in technology, I think, whether it be Larry or Sergey or Zuck or Satya Elon, in some ways, the people that have found a way to kind of bend the world and find a way to create technology that serves many, many people and do it at scale. You can analyze it from all sorts of lenses. But yeah, you look at Elon, for example, and plenty of people will say negative things. But then you look at SpaceX, and SpaceX is incredibly, incredibly important company, and what they've done there is remarkable.

[Ed Elson]

So do you want to bend the world in that way? Do you feel like you want to shape the world in some way? I mean, I think of sort of Steve Jobs, who talked a lot about that. The idea that you can make things just happen, you can shape. If you have an idea for how the world could be, you can actually just shape it to become that. Do you think about that a lot?

[Dylan Field]

I think that's from like a me perspective and more of an enabling perspective.

[Ed Elson]

Okay.

[Dylan Field]

So I think that there are unequivocally things that will be good for the world. And you have to be willing to say that there are things that will be good for the world in order to have this point of view. People that maybe come from different moral philosophies will disagree with me on that, but I'll put that out there. That's my starting point, is that you can say, okay, if we cure cancer, for example, that's good for the world. It's a harder one to debate, but if anyone has that abate up instead, I'd like to hear it.

Or if we can make it so that more people are able to find meaning, find joy, that seems good. So I kind of start from the sort of unequivocally obvious places. And then from there I go into, okay, what's the role I can play to help? And whether it be figma, where I'm able to be in this amazing position to create a platform that helps people achieve their dreams, put food on the table, make it so that our society has better design and better ways to interact with technology, or be trying to help by investing or by mentoring next generation founders who, like me, are coming from a background where they didn't yet have exposure to business, but now they're finding themselves in a situation where they can't just do the technology, they can't just do the product and the design. They actually have to go figure out how to go and build forward. And if they can't get the capitalist loop working, they're not going to be able to get the scale that will actually transform the world into a better place. Then those are ways that I find that I can have impact is through that empowerment.

[Ed Elson]

You've been massively successful.

You're a first time founder. What is your advice to founders? What is your advice to young people who are building their own companies today who see the success you've had and want to replicate it first?

[Dylan Field]

Don't try to replicate stuff, try to understand what it is that you have unique insight on. So have some self awareness, be humble. There's a lot that you're going to get punched in the face over. If you don't have the humility, you won't get through it and be willing to adapt. But also, yeah, I think get started if you're not already on the track and you just got this great idea in your head, what's stopping you? If it's financial, how do you get to the buffer that you need to go thoroughly explore something? And again, if we'd stopped at six months, that would have been it. There would have been no figma. It took at least nine to 12 months before we really felt like we had the real shot there. So that space which was afforded me through the Till fellowship, I'm very, very grateful for that. Yeah, that's an example of for me, how I had that buffer. I also had savings that I could dip into from internships. That's, that's the problem you have to solve first is to give yourself that buffer. And then I also just say there are ironically a lot of ways to go make businesses that make money. People don't think that, but it's actually true. I'm not saying they're all going to be like giant scale, but at least in the small scale there's a ton. And so be greedy in your selection of a problem to work on in the first place. Do not start something that you can't see yourself working on in 10, 20 years. I have plenty of friends who've done that or are doing that and it just inevitably it leads to burnout. It leads to them being kind of negative on the world, cynical and you will lose something of yourself if you find yourself in a place where you just don't yet have the problem that gets you excited every day to go work on. You got to find that thing that just gets you up in the morning every day and you're so psyched to work on and you will if you project out in the future. That's not going to change. You're still so excited and treat it like a multi decade journey from the start.

[Ed Elson]

Dimfield is the co founder and CEO of figma. Dylan, this was awesome. Thanks.

[Dylan Field]

Thank you for having me.

[Ed Elson]

This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research associates are Dan Shalon and Kristen o' Donoghue and our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for listening to first time founders from Proftry Media. We'll see you next month with another founder story.

[Dylan Field]

Foreign.

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[Dylan Field]

Visit Atlassian.com Jira to learn more. That's a T L-A-S-S-I-A-N.com Jira Atlassian.com Jira.

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[Dylan Field]

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[Dylan Field]

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[Dylan Field]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Dylan Field]

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