Garry's Channel: Figma's $20B, 10 year overnight success

Here's Dylan Field ten years ago when he was 19. If you're an artist, you can just sketch something out and draw it, and it's beautiful. But if I sketch something out, I'm not an artist, the idea loses a lot of its luster. Creative tools like Photoshop or Autodesk are very expensive,.

and they're also very hard to use as well. I mean to train yourself to use Photoshop is a very long arduous process. Dylan went on to create Figma which replaced Photoshop as the dominant design tool and that's what made this company so important Adobe had to buy it And it didn't come for free. Dylan and his team overcame 10,000 landmines, a lot of which you will encounter if you start a company.

Today, we're looking at just a few of those landmines on that path and how he overcame them. Let's get started. In 2011, version one point o of WebGL came out. This was a new way for websites to draw and render graphics inside a web browser. And this is kinda common starting with some sort of technology. Instagram started as experiments around new APIs. HTML five meets social locations sharing.

So that's actually one of the reasons why Dylan and his cofounder started out with what was a new platform that was yet unexploited.

You know, for context, I started Figma with my cofounder Evan, who is a total genius and much much smarter than I am, in August 2012. And for the first, I don't know, until basically until, like, June 2013, we were very much in more of an exploration mode and trying to figure out, like, how do we you know, what are we gonna build and, you know, what makes sense from a business perspective.

And I think we knew we wanted to do WebGL, something about WebGL, is a way to use the cheap computer in the browser. We knew we wanted to probably do creative tools. We knew we cared a lot about accessibility of tools and making it so that, you know, more people could use those tools.

We thought kind of agree with a statement that Fred Victor made, which is that if you can't use a tool because it's too complex,.

it's a moral wrong. And it is today as it was ten years ago. As they say, go west, young person. Go west. Go to the frontier. Explore as Dylan explored. If in 2010, it was JavaScript and in 2012, it was WebGL, Today, might find frontiers in large language models like GPT three, stable diffusion, or others like it. You might find it in ZK Starks or l two blockchains.

You might find it in computer vision models since computers can now see. But technology is not really enough. Dylan also knew he had to walk in a particular useful direction, in his case, design tools and hyperusable design tools. They saw a need, not merely the technology itself. Out of new technology, yet unexploited, not fully understood, will you find teams exploring and building.

And as physicists learned to understand the atom, so too did they discover the periodic table of elements. In startups, new elements are being discovered all the time, usually by engineers who are seeking the frontier just like this. What will your element be? Now the danger with seeking technology for its own sake is that you accidentally work on something that you realize just doesn't matter.

And we've seen this before, time and again. Meaningless products that don't solve real world problems, but seem adjacent to hot buzzwords like real time AI blockchain or social. The buzzwords exist for a reason but not every buzzword startup has a reason to exist. In this case, Dylan and his cofounder found themselves building a meme generator with WebGL.

After like a week of working on this meme generator, you know, I remember looking at the mirror and being just going, holy shit. Like, I dropped out of brown for this? What what what am I doing with my life? You know, oh my god. And then I walked out of the bathroom after sharing the mirror for a while and just feeling really depressed.

And then, you know, an hour later, my cofounder Evan takes his headphones off,.

and he's like, Dylan, you know, like, I just can't do this. Now meme generators are certainly useful for some people on the Internet, but this space was just not meaningful for Dylan and Evan. Knowing yourself matters a lot. Other people might find that space to be their life's work, but if that's not yours, you won't be able to recruit, build, and do what it takes to create day in and day out.

And this is a big reason for any person who wants to make something that really stands the test of time. The ten year overnight success does not happen if you and your cofounders can't see yourselves spending a large chunk of your time, perhaps the next decade, perhaps the next couple decades of your time working towards that mission.

I remember back in 02/2008, '2 thousand '9 when I was working on my startup, Posterous, I had reached a point where I needed to switch into a people manager. And I wish I could say at that moment I succeeded at that. But in fact, I ran away from it and I just coded harder. It was the wrong move for Posterous. It was the wrong move for me.

And it's one of the reasons why I think Posterous didn't make it to the promised land the way Figma has. Figuring out how to become a manager is an impossibly hard situation because a, you might not want to and b, you might find that you suck at it initially.

In fact, that's the norm. What's crazy is Dylan's journey as founder almost ended because of this problem even before Figma launched. You know, leadership is a skill you're probably all aware of. You know, you're in clubs, you're, you know, you're you're maybe you're in sports teams and you can experience leadership through those areas.

But I think it's very rare before you get into professional settings to really experience management as a skill. And it's actually a very different skill from leadership. They're related, but they're different. And management is a skill that you have to build just like any other skill. And there's muscles and sort of different things you have to figure out about it.

And a year into Figma, I was figuring out how to be a CEO. I was figuring out, you know, what direction to take the product, and I was also figuring out how to hire people. But most of all, I was trying to figure out how manage people, and it wasn't going so well. I made some hires that probably were, you know, not the right fit in retrospect culturally. And I also wasn't empowering people enough.

You know, when you hire smart people, you gotta give them a way to to really contribute and to blow you away and to let you to do things that you would never think of. And if you micromanage and if you give people all the sort of, you know, here's exact the recipe for what to do, they're not gonna appreciate that if they're the right people to hire.

And between all that, I think, like, at the same time, you know, this is yeah. A few years in actually. But at the same time, my dad was actually dying of cancer and so there's a lot of emotional stress that I was going through, which I think, you know, exasperated things even further.

And at some point, like, there was a conversation with, you know, this basically, our my employees and, you know, because there's so many things that were happening. And I was like, let's just all get together and talk about it. And it it turned out kinda bad. It was you know, people were really unhappy with me. And it was a moment where, you know, they're like, okay.

We really need to you need to really need to get help to to help make this work. And eventually, we did. We hired our first outside manager and actually learned a lot from him. But that was a moment where, you know, I was like, oh god. Like, it might all, like, collapse at this point. Like, people might everyone might leave. You know, this might this might be the end.

And I think the other part of it was that we hadn't launched yet too. Dylan went through it all. Today, he's at the top of the mountain, but the most valuable lessons were learned early in the journey at Base Camp where a lot of us are.

Every highly talented technical founder who starts, who wants to stay in that CEO position for the long haul, will end up having to learn what Dylan learned, how to be a manager. And it's not something you can learn without people who have been there. Get an executive coach, Hire great managers to work with you to build systems and processes.

And if you're lucky, try to find investors who actually have really helped in that way, like Jen Wolff at Initialized. A lot of founders might get hung up here. Isn't process and management the opposite of moving fast? But as the Navy SEALs say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Reducing chaos, helping your executive team be as productive as possible, all of these things make things smooth.

And only then can you create something for a billion people. And don't forget, it'll still take ten years or more, just like what Dylan and his team had to go through. Dylan and Figma showed us one very powerful path towards how these things come together. There are a thousand landmines before every founder, and he navigated everyone to this incredible outcome. What he saw was not unique to him.

Every founder will pass through these gates. But what was unique is that he did overcome every single one to get here. All the world is changing with code, with technology, the kind that you and your friends can build. What will your line of code be? Thanks for watching all the way to the end. If you like this, please be sure to share this video on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever you're at.

And also, you can find some of the best clips from my episodes now on the Initialized Capital channel. Link in the description for that. Subscribe to that channel right now. And I wanna hear from you. Please leave a comment to tell me more about what you would like to see on this channel. I will see you next week.