Loading summary
Transcript220 lines
- [00:00]
Dylan Field
We're going to get to a world we're already kind of there where good enough is not enough. Good enough is going to be mediocre and you're going to need to differentiate through design, through craft, through point of view, through brand, through storytelling and marketing. And I think the people that internalize that now, they're going to be winners. That's my point of view, is that this is what's going to matter. The stuff at the top of the stack and if you don't internalize it now, like you got an issue.
- [00:34]
Jack Altman
Dylan, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for doing this, Jack.
- [00:36]
Dylan Field
Thank you.
- [00:37]
Jack Altman
Okay, I want to start by teeing up a contrast between Figma in the early days, which was like a multi year long build before you kind of got things going, and then the state of the world today where like AI startups are racing out of the gates and there's tons of competition and everything's frenetic.
- [00:56]
Dylan Field
13 years in 13 years. And it's, it's a little different now, isn't it?
- [01:01]
Jack Altman
Yeah. So you started in 2012.
- [01:03]
Dylan Field
August 2012 was our official start.
- [01:05]
Jack Altman
And then you got really kind of off to the races when like 4.
- [01:08]
Dylan Field
Or 5 years later, closed beta was launched. December 2015. GA October 2016. Didn't start charging until summer 2017. Jeez. Same day as our CFO now CFO started. Fun fact.
- [01:20]
Jack Altman
CFO started the day you started charging.
- [01:22]
Dylan Field
Yeah, he was like a biz ops guy then, but now he's cfo.
- [01:25]
Jack Altman
Okay. So you had this five year period and I guess when you look back on it you could, you could either sort of, I imagine feel like that was a little too long.
- [01:35]
Dylan Field
We should have been launching. If you're watching, don't do that.
- [01:38]
Jack Altman
But on the other hand you built some hard stuff like you put like you know, an a design product in the browser when people had never done it. You'd made like code collaboration which you know, I've read is very, was a very difficult task and that had advantages too. So how do you sort of make sense looking back now in sort of the fullness of time on that five year period?
- [01:58]
Dylan Field
Yeah, I think definitely there were ways we could have speedrun it hiring faster, noticing that we had product market pull and that folks were like literally begging us to go do things. You know, when we got very long docs from people saying, I was so inspired by our last night together when we went through this very long user test where the everything was not performant and it was, you know, the Tool was in terrible shape. Then they followed up the next morning with like, you know, a 1314 page doc. And it was like, here's all the stuff that I want you to build. I probably should have known that maybe people like cared and wanted this thing. But, you know, I was also nervous. I kind of took the roadmap feedback and I was like, oh man, it's going to take forever to do all this stuff. In reality, I should have hired faster. I think we had the resources to do it. I was just a little trepidatious. But beyond that, I think, yeah, there was a lot of stuff to build and there were certain things we could have not done that we later pulled out. Evan, my co founder, loves sort of thinking about cross platform stuff, compilation and general programming language theory. And so he made like a way to do cross platform targeting to not just web, but also as a backup in case something didn't work out, you know, desktop. And at some point it was like, yeah, this is all stuff we can rip out. We can move way faster without doing this. So there's things that we could have done to speed it up, but not that much.
- [03:23]
Jack Altman
Yeah, I mean, there is this category of product I think about, like airtables maybe another example where I think it's like a hard product to build. I think like email is classically just like you. You just can't ship a quick V1 that people will use. So maybe there's some element of that that you had.
- [03:38]
Dylan Field
Yeah, and I think also it was like, even after we launched in ga, we kept adding new features and every time we did or almost every time we would see just that retention would go up. And so it's also interesting, you know, there's folks in the beginning that were very minimalist and they liked the minimalism of the tool. We started adding everything people needed for their workflows and they're like, can we have the old Figma back please? So you always have to find that balance between adding and complexity and then simplicity, approachability. But also you got to make sure it's powerful.
- [04:12]
Jack Altman
Did you have the sense when you were in those early innings that anything you built worked? In other words, like, were you like, all of our ideas that we seem to build, they all make the product better. Like, were you sort of like, were you having to make hard calls between A, B and C and one was gonna be good and one was gonna be bad, or was it just all of these improvements were good? Cause there was such strong product pull and it was just like the Faster, you built better.
- [04:37]
Dylan Field
Once we got out and once we had people using it, we kind of separated the work streams into two. So one was the blockers work stream, whereas like these are things that are literally blocking people from adopting. We know this for a fact. What's the prioritization and rank order of, you know, which ones we remove first? And there's kind of like differentiators. We didn't call it that, but it was one project at a time. Mostly these are things like design systems and the ability to share components in a file across your entire team, you know, and we have to do both. We really had to go evolve the state of the world, but also make it so more people could try the thing.
- [05:14]
Jack Altman
Yeah, when you think about that sort of experience and then you look around at AI tools now and you know, there was like a bit going around recently of an investor talking about how you got to get to, you know, a couple million of ARR in no time. And you know, it's like a bit that you hear a lot and a lot of, I think founders feel self conscious if they're not going 1 to.
- [05:34]
Dylan Field
10 million in like a month or something.
- [05:37]
Jack Altman
Yeah. And there's like a lot of that and I think then, you know, investors, I think are, you know, kind of helping, probably perpetuate it because the next, you know, round of investors are going to think about the same thing. And you know, it's like very, very different than the way Figma got started. And I'm just curious how you make sense of seeing that around you since you came up through one of the like slow build type of startups.
- [06:00]
Dylan Field
Yeah, and again, don't recommend slow build either. But I think first of all, if we had today's tools, like if I had Figma Make Today or Prompt App Tool to build a lot faster. Yeah, probably could build a lot faster. But I also think that maybe my hot take here is that there's a lot of really awesome companies right now that are not like really AI companies. And so first of all, I think if you're looking at only AI stuff, you're just missing a lot. It's like actually there's some gems there. For example, recently, you know, did investments in companies like Ambrook, Ambrook's amazing company, trying to help farmers with their financial situation and like figure out how to make it so they can do taxes better and deal with all the compliance and forms that come along with it. And I think that they have a real opportunity in front of them. Another company invested in Laura Deming her company is called Until Labs and they're a whole body reversible cryogenics company. That's their moonshot goal. But along the way, there's a real problem to solve where organs. You might have an organ come available, but you have a very limited time window to get it to a recipient. And if you're able to basically use that same tech to be able to vitrify the organ and then rewarm it at assassination, then you have a longer period of time to go make that match. And that can save a ton of lives, especially combined with new emerging technologies. And you know, it's like, man, neither of them are really AI companies, but like they're great businesses and I am strongly convicted.
- [07:52]
Jack Altman
It's interesting when you have these like trends as strong as AI now maybe crypto some number of years ago, you know, obviously there's others. There's probably a dynamic where there becomes such a strong gold rush to that thing that the people who are not working on that thing are missionaries at a much higher rate also. And that's probably also the flip side trap is in the gold rush there's a lot of people who are going to be very missionary about it, but there's also a lot of people who are, hey, I can go 0 to 10 next month.
- [08:21]
Dylan Field
Well, I think the other thing that's interesting is that AI closes gaps. And so because it closes gaps and makes it so you can do things that might otherwise take like a very long time in a short amount of time, it also expands markets. And so I think that's probably implicit to the assumptions here.
- [08:42]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [08:42]
Dylan Field
Is that there's low hanging fruit all over.
- [08:45]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [08:45]
Dylan Field
If we're able to identify these companies that are growing so fast, we're also identifying the big markets people haven't tapped yet.
- [08:50]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [08:51]
Dylan Field
And I, I think that that might be true. It's certainly gonna be true for some companies. But also there's a dynamic where probably some of the companies that go straight up go straight down and it's a question of when. And then there'll be some amazing winners, of course. But also it's just like this default of, yeah, okay, if the why now is AI, it's the same why now as kind of like everyone else's why now. And if your pure strategy is like it's a gold rush going to get there fastest, then you have to be charging incredibly hard y and you have to be strategic. And I think, you know, first of all you have to know if that you got that in you.
- [09:37]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [09:37]
Dylan Field
Because not everyone does.
- [09:38]
Jack Altman
Totally.
- [09:39]
Dylan Field
You know, 996,997. Whatever it is.
- [09:42]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [09:43]
Dylan Field
That people need to sign up for. Totally.
- [09:44]
Jack Altman
It's also, besides the hours, it's also a set of business decisions that look a certain way. They look very different than the way you built Figma, for example, for sure.
- [09:54]
Dylan Field
And I think also it's, it's like, okay, is this something that you think is long term defensible? Like is there any reason for you to believe that? But also at the same time, if you get there first, it's often the case you can just kind of go all sorts of interesting places. So it's, it's, you know, all these companies, it's very hard to puzzle through what will happen. And I think that's like leading to the climate we're in where folks are just racing towards opportunities and then they get there and people are lining up to go back them at very large valuations where we're seeing these mega seat deals before people even launch anything. And that's not a judgment on whatever is going on right now because some of them will be amazing companies. It's just a description of where we're at.
- [10:41]
Jack Altman
Do you ever, I'm curious, do you ever think about like imagining building a company sort of like in the opposite ethos of the way you built figma and think about it and say like, ah, that actually sounds kind of fun. Like does it sound fun to you or tiring to you to do like a very hard charging, you know, just like go for a really aggressive raise a ton, hire a ton, burn a ton, take a market which is very different than, you know, you obviously built this like super profitable, you know, high sort of, you know, focused company.
- [11:13]
Dylan Field
I mean basically the first part of that, the hard charging part is what we are doing at figma. I think that the team is working incredibly hard right now, myself included, and we see massive opportunity in front of us. Figma make is one example. That's an industry where, you know, there's a lot of different players. We think we have a differentiated approach where you can go from Figma design, pull context in, into Figma make, use that to create a better design application and then also go back to figma design tweak and eventually it'll be hopefully a round trip, two sides of the same coin and you'll be able to do, we've talked about this a little bit publicly, but be able to do more workflows, assistant type things in Figma design where you can prompt there too and Just in general, so excited about making it so that more people can create these designs that are consistent with their overall brand language, their design system, and get their ideas out there. Because if you scribble something on a napkin, it will not be treated seriously as if it looks the same as your usual ui. Doesn't mean you don't need a designer. We're going to get to a world we're already kind of there, where good enough is not enough. Good enough is going to be mediocre and you're going to need to differentiate through design, through craft, through point of view, through brand, through storytelling and marketing. And I think the people that internalize that now, they're going to be winners. That's my point of view, is that this is what's going to matter, the stuff at the top of the stack. And if you don't internalize it now, like, you got an issue.
- [13:01]
Jack Altman
This is one of the topics I wanted to ask you about is as far as you can see, I don't even know how many years that is today, but as far as you can see, do you think that the role of the human designer will flip somehow from maker to editor or something different like that? Or does it become, you know, only focus, you know, people on the most creative, most pivotal flourishes or, you know, most important integral parts of the pro? Like, where does this go? You know, if you look out as far as you're able to look out.
- [13:34]
Dylan Field
I think, first of all, I think it's. I've been kind of in this place of maybe the roles are all merging together. And I was saying that before even AI was the topic.
- [13:48]
Jack Altman
Yeah, you were.
- [13:49]
Dylan Field
You know, even 10 years ago, five years ago, has been something I've been kind of noticing, just slow progression towards. And now I feel like the roles being sort of opm, engineer, designer, researcher, you know, the sort of typical roles you find in the product design development process. And I think that if you look at sort of like the general pull of AI, it makes everyone feel like they should be more generalist to keep up. And then also if you look at the way that things are actually playing out, I think it's this rules merging because the roles are still there, but it's the responsibilities, it's the things that people are doing every day, those are starting to get more murky. It's like everyone has their specialization, but then they also have increased ability to have impact elsewhere outside their specialization. So now it's like, okay, as a designer, I'll go commit some code or as A product manager. I should go actually make a prototype from my idea rather than just a prd.
- [14:49]
Jack Altman
Yeah. I mean obviously you've always had like full stack product builders at like a startup and like, you know, the co founder, CTO has always done all of that for since as long as software's.
- [14:59]
Dylan Field
Been going well, but oftentimes they go work with a product manager designer.
- [15:03]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [15:03]
Dylan Field
And all of them just are doing it all. Totally. And I think though that now we're in a place where you should be hiring a designer right away. Came back to your question around what's the future of the designer role? I think design is like kind of everything going forward. If you think of that as the top of the value stack and you think about all the things that can impact design and all the things you're trying to pull in. You're thinking about the business logic, you're thinking about the user problems, you're trying to get to the hard user problems, like what is it they really want? You're trying to think about the system and how it shows up in all these different places. The brand, the way that you're able to incorporate culture, the affordances you want to use, the style that you want to go with, but also the structure. And all these decisions are at the root of how you'll win or lose the business.
- [15:52]
Jack Altman
Yeah. And there's good AI tooling around a lot of what you just said. I mean even like getting user feedback, you know, used to be, you know, to some extent still is, but it used to be like the way you had to do it was like go schedule 130 minute calls and now you can do it other ways.
- [16:08]
Dylan Field
Yeah.
- [16:09]
Jack Altman
And so it's like you think about a designer and they're able to get feedback scalably. They're probably able to like make at least good enough versions of designs that they can start playing with. They can probably start to get something into production like all from sort of like a cockpit.
- [16:23]
Dylan Field
Yeah. I'm not saying that like in the next year or two years that designer will then be able to sell the company as one person.
- [16:32]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [16:33]
Dylan Field
I actually think engineers are more needed than ever to be able to architect systems properly, to think through what is the right way to go and figure out how you should structure everything. Because if you just let these agents run right now, you're gonna have a mess. And that's where we see security vulnerabilities and we see hacks going on and user data leaking and we see companies that start to scale and they break.
- [17:00]
Jack Altman
Seeing this as a moment in time issue, or do you think that this is like a perpetual issue?
- [17:06]
Dylan Field
I think it's for sure the issue right now, and I would expect it's an issue for a while longer. And I think the developer will still be in that outer loop even as these models improve, as will researchers. Like, it's kind of an interesting question for math as well. Like, I think math is probably underappreciated as one of the most deterministic areas where RL should shine the most. Like even more so than code. And it should be the case that like, I don't know how much it costs, but we have a ASI mathematician. Does that mean that mathematicians are out of a job? No, I don't think so. I think that the mathematicians will be prompting and reasoning through things and working with that asi and they're kind of going to be almost fishermen trying to fish for the theorems, the proofs.
- [17:55]
Jack Altman
Do you think that we are. I think what you're describing is there's a future where we have potentially even more designers and engineers than we have now, but they're just much more productive.
- [18:05]
Dylan Field
I think much more productive. But let's be clear about productivity. In the engineering context, productivity is building something. Well, in the design context, it might be that it is just further exploration of the option space sometimes. Because I think right now, oftentimes you're constrained by timeline. You can only explore so much. You might not be getting to the best solution. If you can explore even further, look at more options and figure out how those actually will work out in the decision tree, then from there you can figure out, okay, here's the option I want to go with and then go even deeper and you can actually go and apply even more craft to that option. And I think that design is inherently non deterministic, unlike math. And so the role of AI and how it shows up and design will be very different than the more deterministic loops like code and math.
- [18:55]
Jack Altman
Do you buy the argument that we'll have like lots of small companies with a billion of revenue? Or do you think that instead what will happen is the level of competition is just going to rise and companies will be about the same size, but the software is just going to be like way sicker?
- [19:12]
Dylan Field
You know, I think that there's already companies that are smaller than you would expect with large runs of revenue, and then the question is how much will they scale before they just totally break? And I think we're going to find out. I'm sure that you and I Both have mutual friends that are, are in this situation. And, you know, I, I talk to these founders and they're proud of like, how much they've accomplished. With so few people, it's like, oh my God, I got to this revenue milestone. It's like quite huge. And I've got like 10 people. Amazing. Wow. And they get all this positive reinforcement, but then they also say, we talked a little bit longer. I'm really trying to hire you. Got any referrals for me? Because they are desperate for more people to go help with all the problems they now have at scale. And so I don't know if it's true that team sizes will decrease a lot. There's a lot of problems to deal with. Yes. AI makes some roles more efficient, not all rules. Yeah. And as AI improves, we'll get more efficiencies, but there also is just more work to be done.
- [20:16]
Jack Altman
Totally. I mean, to that point, it's like if the engineers get much more productive because of code gen, it's like, well, you're going to start building a lot more product.
- [20:23]
Dylan Field
Yeah, you need a lot. And testing a lot more product too.
- [20:25]
Jack Altman
Probably need more designers. Yeah. So I do think it all kind of plays that way.
- [20:29]
Dylan Field
And I think the competition aspect is really important. If you have more software in the world and we've had this exponential curve.
- [20:35]
Jack Altman
So far, that's the part I've never understood. It's like company A is like doing the same with less now and then company B is like, well, I'll just do more with the same and we'll win.
- [20:44]
Dylan Field
I see it as for Figma, I mean, we just went through headcount planning. You know, it didn't really cross my mind to go, hey, let's reduce headcount or let's keep headcount flat. It's like, we got so much we want to do, we have so many ideas. Let's increase headcount, let's go hire people that are great and let's go do a lot of stuff, amazing stuff for our users. And I think just like that's the mindset I think more companies will find themselves in is, oh my gosh, like, there's more possibility I can do more and I need more people for it.
- [21:16]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [21:16]
Dylan Field
And then some companies will go, oh, maybe I can get more efficient. But I think that might be a recipe for long term, you know, sort of, they might not be as effective as the companies that are trying to grow with this technology.
- [21:28]
Jack Altman
On this competition point, one of the things I wanted to ask you about that might come off as, you know, ignorant or annoying. So sorry in advance, but it's a good.
- [21:38]
Dylan Field
We done.
- [21:38]
Jack Altman
I always read Figma as having somewhat low competition relative to being such a big market. And obviously you had, you know, other products that you were competing with and there was Adobe and there was Sketch. And that's not to minimize any of it. But it seemed to me like the market didn't catch on around you as fast as I thought it might have versus in other markets that seem smaller. There's many, many more companies working on it. Is that right or am I misreading it?
- [22:10]
Dylan Field
I think it's changed over different periods of time. I mean, in the beginning of Figma, when we first started, I remember looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics because I wanted to know the market size. Like you should know if you're reading any business book. And the answer was 250,000 designers. There's 250,000 designers in the United States. I'm like, shit, that's not the market that we can use to go get VC funding. So my pitch was basically like, we'll start with design, we're going to broaden out. And then what I think was actually happening, it's my intuition, but I can't articulate it very well all the time, was everything else was getting easier. Like you didn't have to host servers anymore, you could just use the cloud, you didn't have to go make box software, you could go use app stores. Dev tools are getting better. And as all these things were changing, whereas value accrue top the stack to designs and people are, whether they're able to articulate that or not, they're hiring more designers. And the ramp we saw in terms of number of designers in the world over the first decade of Figma was tremendous. That market got so much bigger. So yeah, when we started off, I mean, Adobe had just killed Fireworks because they thought it was not, you know, it's kind of a mess, I think maybe on the code side and acquired through Macromedia. And they thought, okay, this is not working for efforts right now. That's my sense. And basically then people switched to Sketch and our main competitor was Sketch. And then Vision as a combination, there are other tools that start to appear like abstract. All these companies founded by really amazing, impressive people with really cool strategies and marketing and tech. And some of the people that have worked at these companies are at Figma, some are not. But Sketch was really the competitor and is today still a competitor. They keep going on and they're a really, really cool company. The invision aspect was fascinating because I remember their marketing was just so good. And at some point they put out basically a teaser of their next product in Vision Studio. I was trying to raise the time, and I remember there are VCs that told me, hey, I just cannot reconcile your positioning with Envision Pass. I'm like, but they haven't even launched the thing yet. Are you sure? As a founder, you're like, come on.
- [24:38]
Jack Altman
Yeah, of course.
- [24:39]
Dylan Field
But also I think because it was teams that were distributed in weird ways across time zones and they were always racing for the next milestone. They just had so much tech debt and it really slowed them down, which I also think is a potential issue for all the companies that are moving so fast right now and doing so in a way that's not well thought out.
- [25:00]
Jack Altman
Yes.
- [25:01]
Dylan Field
So anyway, I think that the combination felt very real then. And Adobe XD came along. We were really worried about it, and then it kind of faded away. They put it into like a sunset mode and just kind of went, hey, this is not working. And then you compare that to now, and I think it's the most exciting time ever. I mean, the reason we got into this space was that we could create more tools for people building products. And now I think we've validated that there's a market there. People are excited about that. There's a lot of people that are trying all these cool, different approaches. And I think it's awesome, like, so much for people to try and learn from, like, the option spaces can be fully explored of how we build products and software. And I think it's great.
- [25:48]
Jack Altman
I think what I heard in there is, besides the fact that there was competition, maybe one of the, like, learnable things for founders is you started and it was not the market size that it is right now.
- [26:00]
Dylan Field
Yeah.
- [26:00]
Jack Altman
And so, you know, you started it in a thing that was 250,000 users. Maybe people thought you could charge 20 bucks a month. So some VC is probably sitting there thinking, well, like, geez, that's not like a ton of revenue possible. You're not going to get the whole thing. So you probably had a lot of people passing over market size. And so one of the flip sides of being in a sort of illegible market is you might get a little bit more time to build and grow.
- [26:23]
Dylan Field
Definitely true in the past. Is it true today? Maybe. I think another take is the thing.
- [26:29]
Jack Altman
That would be different today because there's just so much more of everything.
- [26:32]
Dylan Field
Yeah. I think the amount of software Again, going back to the exponential graph, it's like it's been exponential since Mark Henrysson wrote that essay. Was it 2011 of like, you know, software Z in the world? You look back to that time and it's like the exponential increase has been real. Now it's like vertical.
- [26:46]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [26:47]
Dylan Field
But I also think there's an opportunity that is underappreciated to go build in boring spaces. It's like, as long as you're passionate about it, don't do something you're not passionate about. If you're a founder and you're waking up in 10 years and going, why the heck am I working on this? Like, let's be real, you didn't even make it 10 years. You probably made it a few and you burnt out and you, like, either try to flip it, didn't work, or did work and you're stuck with this thing if you didn't. And if you take it on VC money, then, you know, you got to keep going.
- [27:16]
Jack Altman
It's like our friend Adam Gilt, building owner, you and I both obviously invest in our friends with him.
- [27:20]
Dylan Field
Well, he's very passionate.
- [27:21]
Jack Altman
He's very passionate, and he's building in a space that I think has been overlooked by tons of entrepreneurs.
- [27:25]
Dylan Field
Yeah. I think he thinks it's the most most interesting thing in the possible in the world. And a lot of other folks are of opinion that this is like, very boring.
- [27:34]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [27:34]
Dylan Field
And I think it's an advantage to work in a space that other people consider boring.
- [27:38]
Jack Altman
Yes. But to your point, you can't go just like, fake that.
- [27:41]
Dylan Field
Nope.
- [27:41]
Jack Altman
Because you got to work on the.
- [27:42]
Dylan Field
Thing for 10 years, maybe 20, maybe 30. Like, if you're lucky, you'll work on it forever.
- [27:46]
Jack Altman
Yep, exactly.
- [27:47]
Dylan Field
That's what I'm hoping for. Figma.
- [27:48]
Jack Altman
Yeah, I think you will. I want to talk about the way that you show up as a CEO, because I think there is a somewhat widely held opinion, which might have grains of truth, but maybe not, which is that to be an unbelievable founder, unbelievable CEO, you kind of got to be rough and you got to be aggressive and you kind of got to be sharky and out for, you know, your company and yourself and all these other things. And obviously there are people who do it that way and who are very successful, and that's fine. But you, to me, are an example of doing it the other way, where it doesn't come from a place of like, you know, hate and revenge or winning or all these things, which, again, there's nothing negative about building in those ways, but there is this other way to do it and I'm just curious if you have reflected on this because I'm guessing you also see that in yourself and you see this in other people. And I'd just be curious to sort of like hear your musings on this topic of like, to be a world class founder CEO, do you have to be a certain way here?
- [28:50]
Dylan Field
Well, first of all, I think there's just like a bajillion ways to start a company. You don't have to take VC funding at all. You can bootstrap it, you can take the VC funding. There's expectations attached to that. You can do it on your own, you can do it with a team, and all personalities can shine. If you look at the founders that are in Silicon Valley right now that are scaling, I mean you can find every personality, every kind of makeup of a founder that you can imagine, which is awesome.
- [29:18]
Jack Altman
Yep.
- [29:19]
Dylan Field
I think that, you know, some investors have this thesis of like, they gotta have a chip on their shoulder. It's gotta be like some like mega trauma. Yeah, I had a pretty amazing childhood. I'm very thankful to my parents. Like, you know, I do like to win. I'll say that I hate losing, but otherwise it's not like a big chip on the shoulder that I gotta go prove myself every day. It's more that I really enjoy building what I'm building. I think I found this amazing group of people to do that with and it's really fun.
- [29:54]
Jack Altman
That's what's interesting is you are extremely driven and motivated, but it doesn't seem to come from any of that stuff that you'd often hear from a VC on a podcast about a chip on a shoulder or something that you know, happened wrong in their life or somebody wronged them. It seems like you just love what you do.
- [30:13]
Dylan Field
I mean, I get to do the most awesome stuff ever, which is like build tools for designers, creative people, and then go see what they make in the world. Like, I can't imagine something more interesting or exciting to work on.
- [30:24]
Jack Altman
Do you think this is like an uncommon source of this type of motivation or do you think like, like in other words, do you think that this misconception that a lot of investors, maybe founders, a lot of people have. Do you think it's off base or do you think it is in fact at the more common source that drives people?
- [30:43]
Dylan Field
I don't know, I think I probably get like a, a sample that seems not representative because I have a lot of friends that also you attract people like, you are just really driven by mission. Some of them have chips on their shoulders, some of them don't. But I guess the bigger thing is maybe just, like, don't get so attached to the chip on your shoulder that you don't work through it. Like, if you're excited about what you're doing and you, like, heal a bit, that's okay. Trust me, I've seen friends go through that journey and they show up to their company the next day or a week or a month or year or 10 years, however long it takes them to work through it. And yeah, they're kicking ass. So, like, I don't think it's this thing where, you know, you should stigmatize something like therapy or introspection because you're trying to feed the sort of VC capitalist machine.
- [31:36]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [31:36]
Dylan Field
Like, you can still feed the machine and you can, like, work on your shit.
- [31:40]
Jack Altman
It is funny. I don't know if you experienced it this way, but I experience building a company form of therapy is probably too strong of a word, but it is a form of understanding yourself and working through a lot of stuff. The mirror, it's something.
- [31:52]
Dylan Field
Yeah. And, well, don't get me wrong, like, I hope I'm not an asshole, but I definitely am intense in many meetings and oftentimes I reflect afterwards and go, oh, man, I should have showed up there better. Right? But, yeah, you show up a certain way, people will tell you if you got a good culture of communication and then you improve.
- [32:13]
Jack Altman
Yeah. It also just forces so many, like, weird psychological situations, and then you have to reflect on those. And, you know, sometimes you do realize that, like, behaving a way that I'm not, you know, the most proud of was effective. And now how do I deal with that? You know, I had a lot of those kinds of things too, where I was just like, wow, you're just put in these situations that force a lot of reflection and personal growth, I think, which is good. But. Yeah. Anyway, I just thought this was interesting because, like, you're often cited as, like, an example, as in the counter to this thing. And I just, like, want there to be more of that in the world, so. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Well, changing gears to another topic. You and I, I think, first got to know each other. This wasn't how, but around the time we got to know each other, when we were younger, we had this group of other friends and people, I think even younger than us, who are, like, smart engineers. We called it Toad Chat, for whatever reason.
- [33:10]
Dylan Field
You called it Toad Chat? I called it Toad, you made the group. Just be clear.
- [33:13]
Jack Altman
I made the group, but you let.
- [33:14]
Dylan Field
Me join as an honorary Toad.
- [33:15]
Jack Altman
You were an honor Toad.
- [33:15]
Dylan Field
So I was very.
- [33:16]
Jack Altman
You were like, I'm not a Toad, but I'm here to be. I'm here to. I'm here.
- [33:20]
Dylan Field
I was honored to be there.
- [33:21]
Jack Altman
And looking back, there were like a lot of people in that group. You know, there was you, Alex Wang, Ari and Conrad. Like there was.
- [33:29]
Dylan Field
And many others.
- [33:30]
Jack Altman
Many others. Yeah. It was awesome. And I look back at that and I don't know, we must have been mid or late 20s people in their early 20s.
- [33:38]
Dylan Field
They were early 20s, early 20s.
- [33:40]
Jack Altman
And I often think about that as like, the importance of being connected to young people as a founder, as an investor, as just anybody in tech. Because I do think there's so much, just raw sort of effort, understanding. You're at the front of so much stuff there. And, you know, I think about this now as we're like. And getting into like mid-30s and you know, like, how does that change over time? And I don't know, I'm just curious your own experience, because you're somebody who yourself started as a young person. You started the company as a young person. You've been connected to young people throughout. You still are, of course, but like, how has that journey changed for you?
- [34:18]
Dylan Field
Yeah, I fear sometimes I'm not as connected to the youth as I once was. And I think that when you're young, me and me starting Figma Evan as well, we'd grown up like, you know, playing World of Warcraft multiplayer games using Google Docs at school. So just gave us a mindset because of the tech stack we had grown up in, the culture we had grown up in that seemed to us obvious native. And then I would go talk to an investor and be like, oh yeah, like Google Docs. And they're like, wait, like you use Google Docs? Like it's 2012, it's 2013. Like, who doesn't use Google Docs? They're like, oh, we're on Word and Outlook here. And simultaneous collaboration. I'm not sure I've ever experienced it. I'm like, what? This is my life. So the generational divides can sometimes be very real. And I always try to educate myself by understanding what it is that people are surrounded by. I think that social media can be one way to do that, but it's hard to reconstruct in an Algo Feed world. Same context now. I think just talking to people, understanding their frame is always important and also just Making friends across age groups. I've got friends that are younger than me, older than me. You know, I've got friends that are 80. The other day I was talking to this incredibly precocious, amazing 16 year old who like, I got off the call, I'm just like, oh my God, how do I hire you? Is that legal? Like, please come work at figma.
- [35:44]
Jack Altman
Isn't it amazing when you talk to somebody who's like those ages and you're just like, I can't believe it.
- [35:48]
Dylan Field
Yeah. I mean, you know, talking to this person, I was just like, you're more mature than a lot of 30 year olds.
- [35:54]
Jack Altman
I know. Yeah.
- [35:55]
Dylan Field
And it's incredible.
- [35:56]
Jack Altman
I drive so amazing. I was talking to a founder that I would have guessed, just by the way he was talking, I would have guessed was 30 and it was 20 and I was just like, man, I was not, I was not like that when I was 20.
- [36:08]
Dylan Field
I think that, you know, the generational divide and the notion of generations is real. Like millennials have one outlook. And you know, we're raised in a time where who are the most famous millennials? Taylor Swift.
- [36:23]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [36:23]
Dylan Field
Mark Zuckerberg.
- [36:24]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [36:26]
Dylan Field
I don't actually know who the famous, famous people in Gen Z are. Maybe you do. I don't know, like, who are the role models?
- [36:32]
Jack Altman
I don't know who the role models are. I mean, I could probably.
- [36:35]
Dylan Field
But then there's like the shift in philosophy too. I mean, for Gen Z, I think there's a very different view and framework through which people that are in that generation, roughly, I'm not saying for everyone, but for a lot of them, they look through the world and see the world. And for folks that went through Covid and had to be locked up and antisocial and not see other humans for a few years, totally instead of going to school, I mean, what effect does that have on you? A lot of effect.
- [37:01]
Jack Altman
Also imagine if you graduated, you know, and came into the workforce in 2020, like right as Covid's happening. Right as, you know, we have plenty.
- [37:10]
Dylan Field
Of people that did it figure.
- [37:11]
Jack Altman
Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, but then you, you know, you start ZIRP or imagine coming in, in 2022 and everything's tough. And then imagine coming in 2025 and everything's AI. It's just like a few years make a big difference.
- [37:22]
Dylan Field
Huge.
- [37:23]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [37:24]
Dylan Field
And I think the mindsets, the also just approach. I mean, I think there's a lot of emergence right now of nihilism.
- [37:31]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [37:32]
Dylan Field
I don't think it's like a Permanent thing. Maybe. But if you look at it and you're like, okay, well, if you're told that AI is going to take all entry level jobs. I like a lot of media. And you're told that climate change is going to fuck the world and you believe that you have no economic prospect long term.
- [37:50]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [37:50]
Dylan Field
You'll never own a house, you'll never be able to support kids in America. Like, that'll change your outlook on things.
- [37:57]
Jack Altman
Yes. And you see it and that's like.
- [37:59]
Dylan Field
The media narrative for a lot of people right now. I don't think it's quite right. I'm more optimistic than that.
- [38:04]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [38:05]
Dylan Field
But like.
- [38:06]
Jack Altman
Well, I think you get both. I'm optimistic too. I think there's a lot of people who don't succumb to that. But I think you can also sort of empirically see it in. You know, I think there's great parts of crypto, but there's parts of crypto that reflect nihilism. There's great parts of sports card and collectibles and there's parts that are nihilism. You know, there's probably good parts of.
- [38:25]
Dylan Field
Well, I think often the work is like, you know, for example, in crypto, I mean, I got excited about NFTs really early, before they called NFTs, we call them crypto collectibles usually.
- [38:35]
Jack Altman
I remember on Clubhouse you had that big. That, that sort of.
- [38:38]
Dylan Field
Yeah, well, that was years later. Yeah. But like, I went from this era where it was all idealism and all this energy around, like this just kind of like tension of the.
- [38:49]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [38:50]
Dylan Field
Like idea of digital scarcity. How can something digital be scarce? That's so cool.
- [38:54]
Jack Altman
Early crypto was this very like romantic missionary thing.
- [38:57]
Dylan Field
Yeah. Well, and then there's early crypto and early bitcoin, which was like, you know, libertarian philosophy and hard money and people that really didn't believe in state and thought it should all be debundled. That was a totally different mindset. I was there because I thought, yeah, this notion of digital scarcity and art was cool and like.
- [39:15]
Jack Altman
But then it evolved. Yeah.
- [39:18]
Dylan Field
And as it picks up, a lot of Crypto becomes degenerate gambling.
- [39:23]
Jack Altman
Yes.
- [39:23]
Dylan Field
And NFT space was no different. I think I missed the tradition at some point where it became that and I was still in the idealistic frame and then the frame of merge of like, no, no, no. This is how you make a lot of money really fast and get rich quick.
- [39:36]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [39:36]
Dylan Field
And it's kind of interesting, actually. I feel like right now with vibe coding, there's been Almost like that same arc of, you know, for me, I think of things like Figma make and I'm like, okay, great. Like now everyone can go make prototypes and make production apps faster and ship them. That's so cool. Like you can just do all this stuff that used to take so long so fast and then you can improve it, you can iterate. I think a lot of people also see it as like, I can finally build a piece of software and get rich quick. And of course there's stuff in the middle too.
- [40:12]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [40:12]
Dylan Field
But I don't know, I mean it takes a long time to go build a company. It's not like it's just an overnight thing. And I think a lot of the folks that are just of this, like, I will spend an hour on my app and I'll ship it.
- [40:24]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [40:25]
Dylan Field
Like they're probably, you know, gonna eventually phase out and I think that the folks that remain will be the ones that are using as a tool.
- [40:34]
Jack Altman
I think it's interesting because I think this, this whole rise of apathy, nihilism, whatever is, is very real. And I feel like you sort of, you know, opened it up with this. But you can't blame people because it's like homes, you know, you know, like we're sitting here in San Francisco, like homes seem like ridiculously unaffordable if you're 22 and just getting started. Yep. There's just like all these reasons why it's like, well, I got to do something like a little divergent to get something to happen. So like why not gamble? And I think a lot of this same sort of mindset applies and sort of just like it's not just in the gamble, like it's also in people building, you know, companies and doing venture and all of that. I think you get to see sort of the range of just like going for it for, you know, sort of the, the long term reasons versus like what can I, what can I flip this year?
- [41:20]
Dylan Field
And then there's a lot of people who are also like extremely long term, have a thesis about the world. They're optimistic.
- [41:27]
Jack Altman
Yep.
- [41:28]
Dylan Field
And they're trying to inflect the world for the better. And they're mission driven, not monetarily driven.
- [41:31]
Jack Altman
Yeah, I mean, hopefully more of those than ever. Like as tech grows, hopefully it's more than ever.
- [41:35]
Dylan Field
Those are the folks inspire me.
- [41:36]
Jack Altman
Yeah. One of the things that I thought was very impressive among many on the Figma journey is the company seemed to get stronger through the Adobe acquisition and you know, sort of it falling apart and I would imagine that would be the kind of thing that could, like, spiritually break a lot of companies culturally, a lot of founders who are like, oh, man. I was like right there and now I got to do this whole, like, emotional and cultural reset. So, like, how did you, how did you navigate that? I guess starting with your own psychology.
- [42:11]
Dylan Field
Yeah, that was probably the hardest man psychology, because everything else is downstream of that and if you're not right in your own head, then how can you lead or make good decisions even? And for me, I think the start, it was kind of like, oh, 95% certainty will go through, no worries. Just kind of every time we checked in, the certainty went down. And eventually at the end, it's like, there's maybe a 5% chance in that arc at some point. Very quickly we were just like, okay, this is not a sure thing. Keep the phone, the gas, keep building. That's the best outcome whether we join Adobe or we're independent. And it's like, you can't be in this constant state of we're so back, it's so over and just rapid cycling through that your brain falls apart and turns to mush, in my opinion, at least for me. And so the word of the year for me then was equanimity. I think I said equanimity more times that year than I ever will say the rest of my life, probably. But she's like, okay, how do you find peace in every option and know that everything's gonna be okay? We're building a great company for amazing customers and we have a lot of stuff to do. Let's go do it. And whatever happens, we're gonna put our best foot forward. It's the contract we signed with Adobe and we're going to make sure that we do everything we can to close this. If it doesn't work out, we'll have a great independent path and then, you know, you get to the end of it. And I think the relief the team felt at knowing an answer and having just like this superficial state collapse into, okay, we know we're going to be independent, like, that was real relief. I bet it was the end of the year, you know, we found out as I was about to fly out to visit my in laws and I think I was like hashing through all the details of how to communicate with the team on like a Saturday night and a Sunday. Then Monday we announced that it was not going through and people had already gone break starting on that Friday, sent a message to this team on Slack, like at Channel you know, FYI, press release and details about like, what meant for them and said, hey, if you want, no pressure. If you want to join though, here's a Zoom call and we'll be talking about this then. And you know, just the relief on the Zoom call was like palpable over Zoom, which was pretty wild. And the chat was.
- [44:50]
Jack Altman
It makes sense though.
- [44:51]
Dylan Field
It's like a big relief to know. And then, you know, the break is going and I'm like, okay, not everyone is in that place. And so we made a program called Detach, which is a Figma fund. You can detach a component. It's like something that some people frown on, but like it's also a necessary task sometimes. And the idea was just, hey, look, if you don't want to be at Figma, we don't want to trap you. Here's three months of pay. If you decide to leave, leave. And you're still like, cool with us, we're cool with you, Everything's fine. And if you decide to reapply, you can't reapply for six months, but then you're welcome to reapply after that. And yeah, you're like, there's no issue if you decide to take this and if you don't like, FYI, we are a hard charging startup. It's going to be intense. We got a lot to do. And so we rolled this out, you know, kind of a nervous few weeks as people made their calls and then a little over 4% of people took us up on it.
- [45:54]
Jack Altman
What year was that again?
- [45:55]
Dylan Field
That would have been, I think 2023. I have to double check that. I get the dates all confused sometimes.
- [46:02]
Jack Altman
Was there any element coinciding there too, of like, there was like something in the water in tech at that time where like a cultural reset was happening at a lot of companies. And did that play in, in any way? Did it help in any way that that was going on in other places or did it just have.
- [46:19]
Dylan Field
I don't think it factored in. Just be clear. I think it was end of 2023 that we communicated for the first time, but like early 2024, that it was the Detach program, if I'm accurate there. And I think that really what we looked at, what people were doing, why they decided, I mean, a lot of it was just like, you know, I, I'm tired, I need a break.
- [46:43]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [46:44]
Dylan Field
And I want a lot of people making career changes. Like, it was really interesting. I got like early stage or, sorry, early career sales reps moving over to like, politics, stuff like that. It's also total domain hopping.
- [46:59]
Jack Altman
I bet you for a lot of people it's, you know, when you like flip a coin and you don't know what you want and you like flip a coin, you get tails and then you're like, sad and you wish it was heads or vice versa. And there's probably also some people going through that experience. Oh, wow. I was actually really hoping that we could put a bow on this because I was ready for my next thing.
- [47:15]
Dylan Field
Well, I mean, or people got attached to the idea and yeah, there's definitely a few people who were, you know, amazing. And of course you go talk to the folks that you're like, okay, I know you said this, but like, are you sure?
- [47:27]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [47:27]
Dylan Field
And their headspace was one of, okay, like, I get it, you're done. At least for now. Some people boomerang back.
- [47:35]
Jack Altman
It's a really great move though, because basically you just like took the situation like on the front foot and rather than just being like, oh, let's just see how we do, you're like, hey, if you want this, like, you got to sign up. Yeah.
- [47:47]
Dylan Field
I feel like it's best in general to deal with things and move on. So I try to be direct my communication with people, make sure I'm setting clear expectations.
- [47:55]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [47:56]
Dylan Field
You know, for friends, like, you know, like, give very clear feedback.
- [48:01]
Jack Altman
You're always telling me bad stuff.
- [48:03]
Dylan Field
Oh, my gosh. It's not true. There's not much, not much to critique. But the. But yeah, I mean, then from there it was like, because we had put our foot on the gas the entire time, we were able to launch a bunch of product. I mean, we doubled our product offering at config recently due to the work we did in that period of time. We, right after the deal was dissolved, launched in GA dev mode. And that was really, really exciting to watch that take off as well as just like countless other product updates. The velocity only increased. The momentum was real.
- [48:38]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [48:38]
Dylan Field
I think leaning into it and just acknowledging it and starting that conversation was part of it.
- [48:43]
Jack Altman
Yeah. Okay. On that note, I want to go to sort of like the final area, which is how you're thinking about just AI impacting sort of your roadmap and your product and maybe you could just even talk about like the things that you've been working on over the last six or 12 months that, you know, AI related that I think are sort of most important for Figma so much.
- [49:03]
Dylan Field
I think that first of all, you know, it's not just designers in the process, although they're the heart of it. They're working with developers, they're working with product managers and more researchers, marketers. And I think that if you can give developers a good way through MCP to pull context from design so they can be able to make things faster, it's a win. So we introduced dev mode MCP and folks are able to use that with well structured design files to go build a front end experience so much faster. It's really wild to see how this works when you actually experience it live. You get a lot of the front end built for you by the AI that can interpret what we send over and do inference and it can be just extraordinarily fast. We're also thinking a lot about of course, how do we make sure that you're able to have great prompting experiences in both figma make but also figma Design and figma Design and we've teased it but it's not out yet. But we're really excited about that. In general, I'd say like it feels like we're kind of in this Ms. DOS era of AI where we're going to look back in some number of years and go, it's kind of wild that we're just typing text all the time. There will be some amount of dimensionality collapse into interfaces. And it's also the case I think for any AI company. The strategic question you have to be positive on is as models get better, do we get better? And their answer has to be yes. If it's no in some way you got to readjust strategy. In late October as we announced we weavy now figma Weave and this is an acquisition we've made that I think really meets these attributes and I am so excited about basically it makes it so you can use all these different generative models for image video, but also to transform across modalities like image to 3D for example and you can then connect them in a node based workflow, use it to creatively explore or also create a pipeline, make a process in. And the things we're seeing people do with it are just so cool and wild and expressive. And I guess like overall it's also made me reflect a lot because a lot of people call the output of these models slop. It's almost like a derogatory term. And you know, without making any comment on slop versus not slop, I mean some things I see as outfits, I'm like wow, it's amazing. But I think the more important point is like whatever you start with, it's a starting point, and you can use that in a workflow to get to something amazing for your own craft. And I think with Weave, that's what we're seeing is just this incredible way that artists and creatives can go and create all sorts of different types of multimedia generation and then also use it across the Figma platform. And so I'm really, really excited about what we're doing there and just the fact that they trusted us to join up and what we can do in the future.
- [52:02]
Jack Altman
As you add more and more AI into the product, what do you think is the final bastion of human designers? Will it be taste coordination? What will the set of things be that you're most confident in will always be just like human tasks.
- [52:20]
Dylan Field
I think that we are so far away from AI replacing designers, and if you actually look at the designs generated, I think it's very easy to tell that. But even if the design generation, from an aesthetic standpoint gets better. Like, it's not considering the entire system. It's not considering all the constraints. You're not exploring the full option space. You're not thinking about, like, the context culturally. You're not thinking about the business problems you have to solve or the greater system that connects everything. That's all these different targets across all these different experiences you're trying to create. You're not thinking about the emotional qualities you're trying to create and the brand and how that gets pulled in. It's just so much. And the best designers are able to take all these different inputs and then be able to explore out very dense and deep trees of possibility to figure out what is the best approach systematically and then go build on it. And I don't know, it's like one example, I go through a lot that resonates with the Gen Z people, but not the millennials or folks that are older. Always is Brad Summer. You know Brad Summer, right?
- [53:35]
Jack Altman
No. Oh, Brad Summer.
- [53:37]
Dylan Field
Yes. Brad Summer.
- [53:38]
Jack Altman
Brad Summer. Of course.
- [53:39]
Dylan Field
See, you're good.
- [53:40]
Jack Altman
Brad Summer. I was like, who's Brad Summer?
- [53:42]
Dylan Field
Yeah, no, Brad. Yeah, we can talk about Brad Summer later.
- [53:44]
Jack Altman
Yeah, Brad Summer.
- [53:45]
Dylan Field
School. Anyway, Brat Summer. And, you know, I use Brat Summer as an example a lot because, well, think about it, right? Like the album cover, obviously not just the album cover, but as a design artifact. Lime green square. I think it was. What, Comic Sans or something that was written in. Yeah, what Asi, you know, designer would create Brat Summer.
- [54:09]
Jack Altman
I don't know. I mean, or if they did, it would be one out of 100,000 and no weight would be thrown behind it. Because I think that's the other piece of design is it's not just the artifact. It's knowing this is good and, you know, we're going to put the right sort of message behind it.
- [54:24]
Dylan Field
And so for aesthetic, I mean, the ability to go think of all the possibilities in the world and end up on that album cover like, you put me in a room for 100 years. I don't think I would have come up with that.
- [54:36]
Jack Altman
Well, I definitely wouldn't. Yeah.
- [54:37]
Dylan Field
And on the other hand of it other extreme, it's like, okay, what about usability? What about hierarchy? What about the ability to think about the different permutations of the way you take a data model, express it through UI and allow people to actually control an interface and what affordances to use and which ones to get rid of and innovate on and go find new ways to do something that are out of distribution.
- [54:58]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [54:58]
Dylan Field
Like, I think that the role of a designer is going to be one where AI makes it so that they are able to get rid of the drudgery. They won't have to engage with repetitive tasks anymore. Instead, they'll be able to be like, really thinking more holistically, thinking further and going. Going to beyond. And I think it'll lead to an explosion of creativity, explosion of really interesting, amazing outputs. And I'm pretty excited for it.
- [55:27]
Jack Altman
You know, I think the same thing that you just described is true with music, where obviously AI music sounds pretty good. But I still think, like, these albums that like, take over a summer or just like a song that captures everybody, like, I just. There's something like more like soulful that has to be captured that I just don't think we're there yet.
- [55:48]
Dylan Field
Well, I also think it's possible that, like, on the music side, AI generated music can inspire an artist to go and riff on that. And inspiration can come from anywhere for sure. Like, I think AI is a great inspiration tool. It's also a great tool to figure out, what do you not want to do? Like, I never use AI for writing. Personally, I find it doesn't capture voice. But I love asking AI, what are the 10 cliche ways to say this? So I can go, like, push beyond it and figure out the actual new way to say the thing that I'm trying to say.
- [56:20]
Jack Altman
Yeah.
- [56:21]
Dylan Field
And I don't know, I think that just like, the more we capture the distribution that exists today, the more we can think outside of it. And that's human creativity.
- [56:31]
Jack Altman
Yeah, I love it. Dylan. This is super fun.
- [56:33]
Dylan Field
Thanks for having me. Great to see you, as always.
- [56:36]
Jack Altman
You too.