The Future Of Design With Figma's Dylan Field

Today, we have a real treat. We have Dylan Field, the co founder and CEO of Figma, which millions of people in the world use for collaborative design. Dylan, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Yuri. So we're in the middle of this crazy AI revolution, and design itself is also changing quite a lot. How do you view AI changing the face of design right now? It's definitely.

an incredible time that we're living through. Ever since we started Figma, the exponential curve we've been on is that there's just more software being created than ever before. It's kinda looked like this before and now it seems to be going vertical. Yeah. Which is exciting. I think it's super exciting.

And my point of view is that design has the opportunity to differentiate software at this age of AI. We'll see whole new workflows emerge where designers, engineers, product will work together in different ways than maybe they're doing today or at least different canvases.

And it's been pretty neat to have a front row seat to that and with our platform figure out how we can empower everyone to use Figma to be able to be on that journey of design. You know, if I think back to just even the earliest days of Figma, some metrics that have held constant, one is that we've always had this really strong international base of users.

So even from the start over 80% of our weekly active users were outside The United States. The second one is from the start it's been like one third designers consistently and the other two thirds are non designers Yeah. All coming to the platform and making things, viewing things, giving feedback.

I'm quite excited about how we can activate those users more, make it so they're able to make more contributions to the product process. That sounds right. Does the capability go up and like are you doing more or will AI take these things over? Like what's your view so far? Oh, I think that so far AI is very much in the tool category. Totally.

And whether it's designers, developers, others, people are using AI to just do more and to explore more. So the way that I see it is that, you know, we talk a lot about lowering the floor, raising the ceiling, making it so that more people can participate in design process but also raising the ceiling of what you can do. Yeah.

And I always had this image in my head of like the idea of maze you go down. All these different branching paths that you explore as you design and ideate your way through that product journey. My point of view is you get more breadth now in terms of the things that you can try, but it still requires a lot of depth to fully explore it.

We're sort of in this uncanny valley still where, you know, you can do prompt to app, but prompt to app doesn't give you an app that is well designed yet. So, you know, given that, like, how do you see this playing out? It's kind of interesting to, look at the language people use around this stuff. You know,.

people talk about like you're locked in or I'm cooking Mhmm. Or they're cooking. Yeah. Vibe coding. Vibe coding, exactly. For a while I was just like, you know, whatever, it's new language. And then at some point I realized that maybe the reason people are using this language in particular is that's kind of the feeling you get as you're developing something really fast.

Like there's always this call and response you have with tools as you're trying to get the thoughts out of your head onto a screen and you're iterating quickly. And the faster you make that feedback loop, I think the more you can get into that flow state And also the more fun you can have actually. And you know, for Figma one of our values as a company is play.

We're always trying to make it so that whether it's as a culture or as a product, Figma is fun to use and is a tool that just like lets you creatively express. I think that the opportunity here is how do you create even more of that feeling? Even if you're not an expert at Figma and have that rapid ideation loop going at all times.

But to the point that you made, it's like you also wanna give people a way to not just get started and prototype rapidly but also get to the finish line. And I think that's where the disconnect is. And I think that that disconnect is not just for design but also for code. Like you can go and get locked in for three hours Mhmm. And make something cool. Will it be a design you want? Probably not.

But also it will take some time to untangle the spaghetti mess of your code base as it currently stands when you're going from start to prototype and then get to something that's extensible and you can build off of. Yeah. The design part is very interesting because.

you can get something that works very quickly but maybe it doesn't work well yet. There's sort of this increasingly lost art I'm worried.

that you know founders are not focused on design enough. Like do you find that in some of your angel investing yet or? What I'm seeing is that people seem to year over year, and this has been true for a long time, care more about design than ever. Which is great. I might have some selection bias. Yeah.

Because like you know, obviously people are excited to talk to me as an angel or my capacity at Figma. But overall my sense is that people just care much more about design, also understand the value of design. Totally. It's not just about like, can you make it work? Yeah. There's a lot of people that can make it work. Yeah.

And as people are able to make stuff faster, it's how it works that actually matters.

Can you talk about like how you're thinking about the evolution of the actual models right now? Because there's sort of two regimes, right? Image diffusion models like Midjourney and our friends Suhel at Playground. They're doing image diffusion models. And then on the flip side, there's codegen. And the code gen methods, the large language models themselves, they can't generate SVG, for instance.

Do you think that one or the other is going to work, or is it both in tandem? And then way out in left field is you know, the multimodal models coming from OpenAI and others. Is it just a matter of like, let's just wait a little bit and those will do it, or is it some other combination? Well, I mean, almost goes back to the question of like, what is design? When you're asking.

the question of like why aren't models better at design? Because they still kinda suck. There's so many definitions of design but like one I like is art as it applies to problem solving. Totally. It's I think maybe the reason why these models are not great at design yet.

It's like on the art side you've got diffusion, on the problem solving side you've got LMs and it's not clear that people have figured out how to you know marry techniques together yet Yeah. And figure out how to go approach these problems in the right ways. Yeah.

And I think also just like as you think about what a designer does, they're bringing in all this context, you know, way more than just okay here's this like two liner problem I wanna solve. Yeah. They're doing you know, a lot of research with the user like you talked about in order to like go into that iconic pie and figure it out. Yeah yeah yeah.

Idea maze is trying to figure out like, you know, from first principles. What is it that this person needs or wants? What are they feeling at any given moment? Yeah, and how do you take that all in? Also the current cultural moment in, the flow you're in, the part of the brand experience you're in, how that all ties together, how it maps.

And then I just, yeah, I don't yet see models that I've been able to figure out how to like bring all those different components in. They're lacking the empathy piece of being a designer. Maybe that's too. I don't know. For now. But Maybe not forever. Yeah. I'm curious to see like how they'll evolve, but I also, the more time has gone on, the more that I'm confident in a designer's role.

Mhmm. And believe that that's gonna be one of the critical roles in building software in the future. And I think people that call themselves developers today, they may call themselves designers, you know, in the near future. Yeah. Doesn't mean they're not writing code, it just means that they're gonna be thinking more holistically about the product experience along with their colleagues. Yeah.

That sounds right. There's this sense that the large language models are going to somehow become superintelligence.

through just getting smarter and smarter. But it doesn't seem like there's a lot of agency, whereas what a designer a large percentage of what a designer does is actually using their own agency to, like, create a thing on a canvas basically. Agency.

and also judgment. Yeah. And I think that it's super interesting to me because I think in the Grok three announcement for example, you know one of them was saying that a lot of the training is done on math problems and CS problems and that kind of transfers over to everything else.

But then I think about the people I know in as humans that are like the best mathematicians I know or the best engineers. And like sometimes they're really good at having great judgment about product experiences and sometimes they're really not. Yeah. And it seems like it's almost a different muscle at least for humans. Yeah. And so I'm curious if that transfers over or not. Yeah.

I mean my hope is that humans basically retain the agency bit.

And I think we were hanging out with some AI researchers recently, and they were sort of disappointed that the models are not know, but they don't demonstrate as much human like agency even after all these innovations with climbing the scaling laws. It just hasn't popped up. The thing they said was the models are more like hyper intelligent toasters. But I think that that's the opportunity here.

It's like, know, the human designer has to understand people and understand their needs and goals and their reward functions, And then create UI, create user experiences that match like you know, the jobs to be done. From there it's about how do we equip them with the right tools? Totally. Remove tedium, make it so that they're able to like have that rapid feedback loop. Yeah.

Do you think that people are going to do more and more you know chat based interfaces or is it more visual design or you know is it even gonna be like terminal and prompting?

Which way, you know what are you seeing right now in terms of the cutting edge of? I'm seeing pretty much everything right now. Okay. Which is exciting. So way more variety then. Yeah. It's not just It feels like we're kind of exploding out the possibilities based of how you actually can work. Mhmm.

And that's been my prediction of what's gonna happen for a long time and I think it's gonna actually go much further out from here for a while Mhmm. In terms of people trying different patterns with their tools and different things. I think it's a really good thing. I think like prompting alone is sort of like we're in the telnet days of AI.

You're able to just have I think so much more ability to work with tools through different interfaces. It doesn't mean that prompting's not important, but I think there's a lot more to try out there and I'm excited to see people doing that. Yeah. And also explore different design patterns and things like you know, AR, VR, XR.

You know there's different windows where I think we're gonna see entirely different dynamic interfaces start to pop up. Fundamentally, you know, I love just how humans interact with machines. We don't have BCIs yet, but one day that'll be like the final frontier. Totally. You know, until we get there. Like there's a lot of other stuff to explore.

I guess the really wild thing is once you have code gen,.

in theory that might be something we see, like sort of custom designed vertical software.

You mean basically custom designed for each user? Yeah. This is one I'm a little skeptical of. Doesn't mean it's not gonna happen or people try But I think that I remember like seeing Snapchat for the first time and then you know years later like started to use Snapchat more. That's an example of software that someone's gonna teach you. Mhmm.

It's like a consumer product and yet it's actually quite complex. Yeah. You're not gonna just like figure it all out if you land on Snapchat. You're gonna learn it because you watched your friend use Snapchat. I think there's a lot of software that's like that.

And the more you shift the interface around, the less someone's able to just natively learn and transfer over that learning to someone else. Yeah. So I think there's like a trade off there that's actually quite important. Snapchat and Minecraft are two of the more.

crazy examples of like, you know how in design low bar high ceiling is like a maxim. You just want anyone to be able to clear that low bar, and then you want people to stick with you all the way through the high ceiling. There are remarkable examples of like, actually, the low bar is optional. Let's take a step back and I mean, I love your story of starting Figma. How did you come up with the idea?

It was a process. I guess going all the way back, we started talking about what would become Figma, Evan and I, in late twenty eleven. I was around the time Evan was my TA. We were kind of like asking the question of why now first. What are the technologies that are shifting and will create all sorts of opportunities. And like late twenty eleven that was for us drones and WebGL. Yeah.

And I I was actually pushing a little bit harder on drones and Evan very quickly vetoed that. Yeah. He's like, look, I think drones will be very important but I they're gonna be regulated or and or defense and I don't really wanna do either of those. And also I'm a I like I like software more. Once you have the hardware component, the run to bug loop, it's really slow. Totally.

He's like I don't wanna deal with that. Okay. No drones. Yeah. So that was that was kinda his call. And so it was okay, WebGL, which Evan had a lot of expertise in in particular. He'd done a lot of prototyping and making sort of toy applications with WebGL at the time. And we started to think about, okay what do you do with that?

So then I was like, is it gaming or is it tools and software? And we kinda looked at that and said okay, well gaming is super hard. You have to have, it's like a hit based business, you gotta make something awesome, it's gotta really resonate like let's not do gaming, let's do tools and software. And then I went and left for a gap semester, what I thought was a gap semester. Yeah totally.

To work at Flipboard. Evan was finishing up in sort of spring twenty twelve. We started to just kind of like tinker and explore and think about this together. Looked at stuff like two d to three d scene creation. I got the CHILL fellowship, then we started working full time August 2012. My internship ended. Evan moved to the West Coast and explored a lot of different stuff.

Think made like meme creation. We did. Meme generation was one of them. Yeah. Probably the low point of Figma. I was like very on it in terms of my thesis was correct. Memes to the moon. Yeah.

Yeah. Was like literally looking at the graphs for memes and meme generation and just looking at search terms and stuff. I'm like, oh man, there's no good meme generator out there. Totally. We can make the best meme generator. And we spent a week and we made it. And it was like this like you know moment of, but is this like really what we wanna do? Yeah.

And I think Evan was ready to quit and I was ready to go back to school. Was like okay, is a clear like sign that this is not it. This is not it. Yeah.

But Evan being the technical genius that he is, he made the text rendering in our Meme Generator like state of the art in the And then you know later on when we eventually got to Figma, would get us to kind of take that out and reuse it for our v one. Yeah. And.

so it's it's this hilarious moment of like our first text rendering in Figma came from the Moon generator. Yeah. Do you remember, I guess, I mean a lot of people were still using like I guess even Photoshop or Illustrator for you know, this type of.

you know, high fidelity design. Yeah. Fireworks as well. Fireworks. Yeah. I'd use fireworks as a design intern and flipboard. Yeah. And it was a awesome tool in many ways, but also very buggy.

And at some point it was killed. I was looking at we were looking at the photography space as well, photo editing, built a really cool photo editor, but it was just not something that made sense because we're doing the browser and at some point we just kinda like picked our heads up and went, wait a second, like the best camera is the one that you have in your pocket. Yeah. It's on the phone.

Like why would we be making this browser based editor for the photos you're taking on your phone, it'll just be an app. And we looked at the app market for photo editing and it like, no this is totally crowded and this can be a commodity. Yeah. So then we said, can we do something else there? Storage or search or interesting machine learning stuff, combinational photography.

And it felt like either it would go to the platforms or it'd be sort of too early. Well the computational photography stuff we're looking at was like, in retrospect quite a bit too early. Yeah. You know, more than a dozen years too early. That's right. And then we, you know, saw fireworks get killed and went, wait a second, maybe there's an opportunity there.

And started to form the thesis of as software gets easier to build, design becomes more important. Yeah. And there's gonna be more designers hired. Because at the time it felt like this tiny market. Yeah. And what it was in retrospect was a market that was rapidly growing. Yeah. And so design ratios changed a ton and even just the five years after we started focusing on building a design tool.

And then thankfully we made that call and it still took quite a while. You know, they're a year and a half, two years before we got to the point where we had people using it outside of Figma. I guess this is a very profound example of you shouldn't use like VC thinking to decide what to work on.

Cause a lot of people might have looked at how many designers are there in the country and then multiplied that out by whatever they thought they could spend. Totally. And it's like, oh, number is too small. I shouldn't work on that. Whereas you looked at your users and looked at where things were going from a much larger perspective. And you made a bet.

You didn't necessarily know you were going to be right, but it turned out to be.

super right. Well yes and no, right? Like it's easier to say in retrospect. Yeah. But and looking back I can be very crystal clear about oh here's what we're doing, here's a thesis. Yeah yeah yeah. I think in reality, you know, if you looked at the seed pitch for Figma in June 2013, it was all over the place.

Like we were saying we're gonna do like a million things, none of it made sense, it was all very murky. So yeah I'm pretty impressed the Danny index was like I'm impressed. Let's go. You guys will figure it out. Yeah. I don't know if I'd be that prescient today if I was looking at a seed stage company like that.

I think that a lot of our framing up to investors at the time was sort of more what you're saying, oh yes it's a small thing right now. We think it'll grow but also there's like all these other things we expand into. And a lot of the things we decided were you know creative tools at the time. And then what the irony of it is that like that's not all the process we're in.

We're in the process of creating software. Yeah. It's like how do you go from idea or brainstorming, diagramming and FigJam to know, thingless slides where you align, to going to design where you're trying things and prototyping, to getting development, shipping to production. We have a product dev mode for that. And you know, then once you're in production how do you learn?

How do you loop back to idea and make this loop continuous? Then do that other places too. You know, we're like, oh we'll go think about the existing markets that are out there, not what's the new process needs to be created. And eventually we got there because that's what our users pull us into. You know, FigJam, brainstorming, it was a behavior people were doing in Figma. Mhmm.

We saw it especially as the pandemic hit. It's like okay let's pull it out into this new product and slides. Like people are creating all these slides in Figma Design. Okay great, let's make a new product. Mean the team really drove that to be honest. They just thought and were like we're gonna go do this. When the users pull.

the product right out of you Yeah. It's a pretty powerful moment. Exactly. And demos, same thing same thing too. It goes back to like the diversity of users that are in Figma and how do we like make better experiences for them. Can you go back to the first prototype to like the first v one that was, you know, generally available?

Like, When you're entering a space where fireworks existed, there's probably your spec or product feature list was like 100 items long. What was that process like for you?

Were you really methodical about it? Or was it, you know, we're gonna do two week sprints and see what we can get done? Like, what was the A bit of both. Yeah. We had like a long list of things that we felt needed to be there. And some of them were like, maybe this is optional, maybe not. There was clearly table stakes.

And when I looked back at the first people that used Figma for real design work, they were minimalists because they liked how few features we had. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting that there is like this group of designers that are minimalists out there that like like minimal tool. Yeah. And the second group maybe was people that, you know, like our first customers were Notion and Coda.

Coda was called Krypton at the time. And I remember going to Shashir's office because Shashir's the CEO of Coda. I think that they resonate with the fact that it was like cloud first high performance in the browser because they wanted that for their own teams too.

And I finally got after like months of trying to get a team to adopt Figma for real, got Shashir and his designers to get excited about Figma. We got them like onboarded. So I I think it was a few meetings once we were at that point of having table stakes features met. Mind you this is not a point where like Figma is today. There's no multiplayer now at this You know, and and like a lot was broken.

So for example, I remember going to a meeting when they finally said, we'll use it, let's give it a try. And we walked out and we're so stoked and then we're driving home from there in Palo Alto, we're going back to SF. Like twenty minutes into the drive, thirty minutes back, got this email that basically said, hey, thanks so much for coming by. The fonts broke. Uh-huh.

We can't read the fonts local computer. That was a shitty thing that I I built. And it was thanks thanks so much, but we'll have to give it a try in a few months. And so we just kinda like turned the car around, went back. We're like, no no, we're back. We're still here. Yeah. We'll set up for you.

Yeah yeah yeah.

But we didn't tell The guild install.

Yeah. We didn't tell him at the time, Evan and I, that you know, that was our they were our first customer. Yeah. And I remember just here came in to Figma for all hands later, like years later, and I used to be the first customer, he was like, I am? That's awesome.

Yeah yeah. I love that story. I mean basically this is also a great example of like, don't take no for an answer, and you know, basically going into your first customer's office is a very powerful moment. Yeah. And showing that they will learn from them and if they have lots of feedback, great. Like, we'll prioritize it.

I guess like some of the really banger features initially, I I remember you guys had, like, really amazing sync, like, multi browser sync with, like, operational transforms. Yep. And I hadn't seen anyone else do that type of very fast updates across multiple browsers before. Was that like a moment that wowed the users or Definitely.

So it's interesting because we launched our closed beta in December 2015. Our GA was done until October of twenty sixteen. Oh wow. So it was a little bit gap. And when we launched the closed beta, there was no multiplayer. Yeah. It was just kinda like in the browser and here's this new design tool. High quality but minimum feature set.

In the sort of months following, Evan started working on our real time collaboration multiplayer engine. And it took a while to build out and I remember when we finally launched the GA October twenty sixteen, I mean the comments we got were like, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. Know, that person commented about it and said a camel is a horse designed by committee.

So it's like very much this reaction from the design community Interesting. I'm like the designer that's going to be in the corner. I'm gonna do this amazing work and I'll do the grand reveal, which is kind of the agency mindset Mhmm. Versus the product team approach of we're all in together. We're gonna like work through this and figure it out. That's fascinating.

And then one of our early users that tried out Figma, I remember he tweeted at the time like kind of making fun of us but in a nice way. Mhmm. And said, oh we're gonna do a design party and like invited everybody to Figma file where you know, just like at the time there was not many limits on how many people could be in the file. There's public link sharing.

There was no, you can, there was no paying for Figma Oh crazy. For until like mid of twenty seventeen. And our servers like started breaking and I mean like for the forty eight hours after launch, know, the team and Evan were just like firefighting trying to like make sure this one file that was the design party didn't crash. That's hilarious.

But it was like started as people making fun of Figma and turned out to be like this great advertisement of look at what you can do in Figma. Mhmm. And people started to jam it and actually make stuff together that they didn't even know each other. Yeah. It's like this is powerful. There's something here.

So it showed what we were trying to show even though people were maybe not buying into the message at the time. Yeah, that's fascinating.

Your story is very interesting especially for a lot of startup founders today because I feel like, you know, it's very common. I'm sure you run across founders that you've probably funded that, you know, three, six months in, you know, it's not working. You know, I'm only a quarter of the way through the list. Like, I wanna pivot. I don't you know?

And then this is such a powerful example of sometimes you have to work through the list. Like, it might take eighteen months. It might take twenty four months from, like, where you're at to a a workable or a usable thing. In a way, that sets the both. Right? We had.

from August 2012 to May 2013, that was a period where we were pivoting constantly trying lots of things. Yeah. But then okay we had a thesis, we went for it, felt like there was an opportunity and started to build it out more. Yeah. And then it was okay it's gonna take a while. In retrospect, we had, we're lucky to have raised money and have resources.

I should have hired faster once we started to get signal from the market around product market fit. So I remember going to a user study with a friend at Coursera at the time. Showed up at 06:00 after he finished work, offices were pretty empty, I brought a bottle of wine with me Oh nice. Because the text editing experience in Flow and Figma was so slow. And just writing things out took a long time.

So I knew we'd have to like drink some wine to get to the user study. We finished the entire bottle Oh wow. In that user study. And the next day or two days later or something, he followed up with me and sent me like 12 pages of a doc. It's like here's all the stuff I want you to build and why. I should have taken something like that and gone okay, this is clear product market pull.

Like the market's pulling the product out of us. Yeah. I should have then gone okay, let's go higher faster. Let's you know, figure out how to inflect growth of our internal team. I think instead I was still very cautious. And so that's something I wish that I, you know, if I could have gone back in time I wish we could have you know, gone a little faster there. Yeah.

I mean basically when you catch lightning in a bottle, that's what it feels like then. Yep. That's a great reminder. That was early before we even shipped it, so we didn't Oh interesting. Yeah. But I think now I look back at them like there were signs Yeah. That there was fit here even if the product wasn't ready. The second part of your story is super interesting in that.

you did it, you built it, you put it out there, you made it collaborative, and then the initial reaction was we hate it. Or a skepticism at least. Yeah. Or yeah, I mean basically they didn't understand what it was yet. And I don't know. I feel like that's a common human trait period. Like you see the future and you're like, no, it's not for me. Did you have to do anything actively to undo that?

Or was it just a matter of time? Like you know, everything that is different will be hated on and you just have to ignore it and you like relentlessly seek the people who love it and they're, you know, your best net promoters. I think a bit of both. I mean, we knew from before we even launched the closed beta, we were dog feeding Figma internally.

And we knew from just using it ourselves every day to design Figma, very meta Yeah. What we needed to do just to make a better design tools for us.

Part of that we discovered through the dog feeding phase, through the closed beta phase was it really sucks if I'm in a browser tab, you come into the same link, you edit something, I have a forced reload, I edit something, you have a forced reload, that's just a terrible experience. Yeah. Or if you lock files, know, having to request an unlock, it's just not good. Yeah.

And that was the default back then for every other And for us we were like, okay, at minimum we have to fix that so that you don't have this horrible user experience. And at best we hope to unlock all these new workflows but what they'll be exactly, it's unclear. Yeah. We have ideas of what it could be but we'll have to see.

And so I I think we we had deep conviction in at least to meet table stakes and make it a good UX, we've gotta do this. Mhmm. And then everyone sort of showed us the way of like how they could use Figma to do all these amazing things.

Yeah. It's funny how often I end up using a product that is not ready for prime time or not quite right. And then it's just full of bugs. And then you sort of wonder, do the developers actually use this product? And if you dig a little bit deeper, it's like, oh no, they actually don't dog food and they don't use it themselves. And then how could you actually make a good product without doing that?

It's not possible I.

think that's probably the case, yeah. I mean everything we want in Figma always goes through a period of us really testing out internally until something like reaches, you know, the environment that we use to try things.

Like that's for me when the clock starts, before then. Can I ask you about like I guess design culture inside Figma and how you developed You know, is it as simple as at some level like if this is crap I'm gonna say it and we're not shipping this? What went into that culture, like, you know, early on that built this thing that can, like, consistently create excellence?

First of all, we've had the blessing of working with, like, amazing designers. I don't think it's ever been like, oh this is crap. Like it's almost never a reaction I have to work because like we got a great team. Yeah.

That doesn't mean that like everyone's considering the full system or you know, I think that some of the things that come up a lot are like how complex are we willing to make it to give users functionality they want. Mhmm.

And that interplay between okay, Figma's gotta be approachable, which we still have more work to do on approachability, we're always trying to make it more approachable, but also powerful. Yeah. And you know, you're not just serving you know, the power design user, you're also serving the user who is up in Figma like once in their life or never. Yeah.

And how do you get them to be able to create something and have that experience right away? So we have to balance both. That's one tension that comes up in design culture. How do you make the simple things simple with the complex things possible? I think, yeah, plenty of other tensions that come up too and usually it's just like for lack of context or having to reason through a very hard problem.

One of the best parts about building something where you've got hard design and engineering challenges, you get to work with the best people. Yeah. So very thankful for the folks that work on the Figma team. The top level answer might just be have an amazing hiring process. Yeah, but also seek out like the best people in the world relentlessly Yeah.

To work with because you're gonna learn so much from them and they'll inspire whole new ways of thinking about the problem space. Like a lot of the innovations at Figma do come from our team. It's not like I'm sitting going, hey, like think about this thing and you know, come up with it. Like we've got internal things, culture, rituals.

For example, we have a hack week concept, we call it maker week because more than just the developers and engineers are doing stuff Yeah. Is really the whole company. And it's, the only rule is make Figma better in some way. Figma slides is great example, I came out of Maker Week. Yeah. That's amazing.

But many of our our best features, our best aspects of our platform, they've also kind of similar situations. Yeah. Earlier we were sort of talking about like that zero to one and then, you know, one to scaling.

You know, do you have any advice for people who basically they made it to zero to one, and then how do you nail the one to a billion? Did your day to day change? You guys, you and your co founder were probably in the Weeds Building a lot of the key features yourself with your own hands. And then at some point, you were saying, actually, I wish I started scaling.

Or I wish I started hiring people and build care and feeding of the organization feels like the salient feature of that second phase. How did you navigate that? What did you tell the people who, yeah, it's happening. The users are pulling.

the product out of us and things like that. My main reflection, was going to abstract it all away to be useful to everyone that's watching this Absolutely. Is sort of the loop you're always in is be self aware. What are you doing the most of right now? And then go replace yourself with that task if you've got the resources.

If you don't have the resources, like figure out how to get them either by being profitable, by raising funding, or by being really clever. Yeah. And if you can kind of keep doing that loop, that's a sort of loop that'll lead to team building or lead to figuring out the way to delegate work properly. Like an OODA loop I guess. Yeah.

You can just stay on and if you can do that like it'll lead you to do the right things. And I think the danger is you just get so reactive that like you never get to that sort of loop and you're never able to self improve the organization which is you know, easy to get to that state because there's always more to do.

As a founder, especially when it's just a few people, you're gonna be doing, you know, a ton yourself as well. And not just taking this like, you know, galaxy brain, bird's eye perspective. Like it's never like actually what headspace you're in. Yeah. But you have to figure out how to zoom out a little bit too. Yeah.

So Figma, you know, in this moment, like what are you most excited about and where does it go from here? Yeah. I mean I'm super excited about that loop we talked about and how do we make it so that you're able to develop software with your team and that I think that's, you know, two different aspects. Right?

There's the how do I get started and prototyping quickly with new concepts, but also there's I've got existing system I have to be in. How do I create that loop and iterate quickly as well? And how do you make that accessible to more people? Yeah. So there's so much improvement we can do for both of those and I'm I'm super psyched about like what we can do to enable people there.

Obviously Figma came up in a moment when LLMs and cogen were not happening yet. Do you think that's changed then? You know, for the founder who's starting out right now, what would you say to them? I think that even without, you know, the speed at which you can work now with new models and whatnot, I would definitely tell people move as fast as you can.

And you can move faster, a lot faster right now. I mean I I think the speed at which folks are operating is incredible. I don't know if that's what you're witnessing every day. Yeah. Definitely. It feels like a moment where we're able to build in a really quick way.

And I definitely, you know, when my team comes to me and says hey, we've got like a nine month roadmap on this feature, I'm like what the fuck? Yeah, let's squish it What can we do to descope or figure out how to get us out faster to start talking to people and showing to people?

It's funny because a lot of people come to me and say, hey I think I should do this two year build on something as someone who did one, what do you think? And I'm like, don't, if you don't if you don't have to, don't do that. Yeah. Like do a Very few people have to do that at this Very few. Some. Like there's hard tech companies, you know, it's been really cool to see YC investing there.

And backing stuff that's you know like like Boom or something like that or these companies that are going to take a long time to get the thing out there. Yeah. It's a giant like mega project. But yeah I think that that most things don't have to be that.

and if there's a way to move quicker you should do it. Yeah. Dylan, thank you so much for spending time with us. You know, your story is a true inspiration to designers, engineers, and founders out there. So thanks for sharing it. Thank you, Gary.