We're no longer in this era where good enough is fine. Good enough is not enough; it's mediocre. If you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate through design. Craft matters. What are a couple lessons you learned for founders that are thinking about startup ideas?
We started the company August 2012, started working hardcore on Figma June 2013, and then summer 2017 we made our first money. Don't do that. Get to market faster. I wish we had.
Is there a counterintuitive decision you made along the journey of Figma?
Fig Jam, about a month before the launch of Fig Jam at Config. It was like, okay, we built the thing, it's just lacking something. The soul isn't there. Let's go differentiate by making Fig Jam fun. The team was like, what? We're going to make fun our differentiator. In retrospect, it was absolutely the right move.
Let's talk about Figma Make. The use cases that seem to be emerging in this world of AI app prototyping or prototypes for product teams.
PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into, and it allows anyone to kind of add to that first conversation of where should we go? Which function maybe is most in trouble? It all depends on the way that things play out from here. What you have to believe is your organization gets better as models get better. Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah. But that is not something that has made our new headcount we want for engineering go down. We're hiring today.
My guest is Dylan Field, CEO and co-founder of Figma. We discuss how he kept the company focused after the Adobe deal fell through, his evolution as a leader, his vision for Figma Make, product building in 5 years, product taste, launching new product lines, and why market size is the wrong way to think. Thanks to Mika Kapoor, Robert Bai, Yuki Yamashida, Ashai Cathari, and Zack Lloyd for suggesting topics. Subscribe and follow the podcast. With that, I bring you Dylan Field.
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Dylan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Hey Lenny, thank you for having me back. It's great to see you.
It's also great to see you too, Dylan. The last time we chatted, this was right after the Adobe deal didn't work out. Now you're a public company. Congrats on that. Specifically post Adobe deal falling through, the journey you guys have taken to IPO is quite unusual. You almost sold the company to Adobe for a lot of money and then the deal fell through. My understanding is it fell through because the UK government regulatory boards just didn't want it to happen. Is that why it fell through? What's the story there by the way?
Yeah, various regulators did not like the deal and had arguments against it. No need to go into those. It was a long process, 16 months. Adobe is an incredible company, lot of respect for that team. It was interesting to see them operate through the regulatory process. It was intense, and I'm really glad we kept our foot on the gas pedal and kept accelerating forward rather than grinding to a halt. We exited the deal that didn't work out and went into launching dev mode and pushing on how to expand our platform in a big way. It's been further acceleration of pace from there. I'm really proud of the team for how they handled that and how they remain focused now. It's a real honor to be on this team.
Let me ask you about that exact thing. Most leaders, most teams would get super discouraged and demoralized and distracted by something like this. Basically, there was a bunch of money ready to be wired to their bank accounts. This deal was going to sell. It's like, oh, amazing. And then doesn't happen. Easy for people just to get, oh no, what the hell is going on here? Why am I working here? Why all this news about us? How did you very specifically keep people focused and keep momentum up as you said, almost accelerate it to this very successful IPO?
Communication is obviously a big part of it. We had legal constraints in the regulatory process, but to whatever degree we legally could, we would do quarterly check-ins and updates on how things are going. At some point those became more frequent, every few weeks towards the end. At some point it was like, okay, the path is narrowing. I was able to share with people that the path is narrow. Not everyone picked up on that. Some people still thought it was going to go through. Tactically, one thing that was really important coming out of the process: we announced the company the day after we went on winter break. Friday we went on break, most of the company was on vacation for a week and a half to two weeks. The Monday after we reconvened, we established that this didn't happen and here's what's next. We also had a program called Detach, a Figma pun for detaching components. It was a way to say, look, maybe you joined thinking you were joining Adobe and surprise, you're at this hard charging startup, or maybe after a long time you're tired. If anyone wants to take three months of severance, it's not a forever goodbye, you can reapply in six months. A little bit over 4% of the company took us up on that. Along with that, we reinforced the pace we're going to operate at, the challenge in front of us, and the opportunity. If you're bought in, let's go. If not, that's okay. It was interesting to see for the folks that did take it, how many ended up doing career changes, some from sales to politics. It was a reset moment for the company and for some folks' lives and careers.
Wow, I didn't know you guys did that. A fork in the road, you might call it. Speaking of this hard charging concept, I want to get your insights on how you've been able to maintain the pace that you guys have maintained. You guys are over 10 years old at this point. How old is Figma at this point? We started in August 2012, so we just said 13. 13 years. Clearly things continue to move fast. From an outsider's perspective, it feels very much like a startup. And everyone I meet from Figma feels like they work at a startup. What do you do to keep that pace up?
When you're looking at timelines or thinking about what to work on, first of all, the selection of problems is really important and making sure they're well motivated. But then after you get into that, if things are not converging, dragging out, you have to be willing to move on and move to other projects. If timelines are not well reasoned through from first principles and perhaps there's padding intentionally added, you have to understand the assumptions of how long things will actually take and what is padding, and then work through that with the team. Also, keeping a flatter org is helpful. Path dependency is super important. A lot of times folks assume there's some requirement that actually is not a requirement, or they won't assume something is required and it actually is super required and we have to slow down. Lastly, you always have to keep in mind tech debt. There might be systematic reasons for moving slow. You need the right balance between addressing tech debt and quality but also pushing new things forward.
This is awesome. Okay, so let me follow up on a couple of these. This point about finding padding and where people may be overestimating how long something might take. How does that look? Is that you going in and just like this feels way longer than it should? Is it you finding a deputy of just like hey can you just make sure this estimate looks reasonable? How do you actually approach that generally?
I think it's just coming from a place of curiosity. The more you can understand about the underlying work being done, the better decisions you can make, but also the more you can challenge and say, 'Okay, is it really going to take this long? And if so, why? Is there something I'm missing?' Oftentimes there are things I'm missing. Things are either harder because we have additional constraints I don't know about, or sometimes assumptions are being made that are not quite correct, or maybe we're understaffed and need to resource an area better. It's not always just me; plenty of others on the team will dig into things too. Most of the people on my team are much more expert in their area than I am, so I always lean on folks to learn.
You made this other point about people moving on to other projects. What does that mean? Is it just like, okay, this investment is not worth our time anymore, let's just put all these resources on a different project, or is it more this person is not right for this initiative, let's have them work on something else?
Both. There are a lot of people who, when you put them on the thing they are super interested and fired up about, will outperform your wildest imagination of what's possible. Put them in the wrong effort where they're not motivated, they will be fine. If you can understand what people care about and then map them with their interest to the right projects, it is just so helpful. It sounds obvious, but people don't always do it. We're not perfect at this either; we're always trying to learn and understand folks and what they care about.
Something that I always feel also about Figma is the culture is incredibly fun and interesting and unique and just good. I imagine a lot of people just join Figma because the culture is so good. It's really hard to maintain a strong consistent culture over time. You said you've been around for 13 years now. I remember at Airbnb there was a lot of things that the founders did to maintain that culture and evolve it over time. I'm curious what you do to maintain that culture, keep it strong, and also adjust as the company grows.
I think the first thing that's most important is just the people. What is a culture? It's a collection of people and their rituals and the way they engage, the informal and formal ways that people organize. But it all starts with people. Consistently, possibly because of the problem domain we tackle and how creative and design forward the product is, we attract an extremely creative group of folks who are very maker oriented. They like to build things and create things, across all functions. We reinforce that, but we also look for people that excel at their craft, have a growth mindset, self-awareness, humility, high integrity. We care about people that want to push their craft forward. We celebrate that with Maker Week, a week-long company hackathon where the only prompt is make Figma better in some way. That could be clearing your inbox, but the more interesting stuff is teaming up with others and pushing the frontiers. Many of our products and most important features have come out of Maker Week, like Figma Slides. The demos at the end fire us all up and show a comprehensive picture of what we can do.
We have an awesome guest post by Mika that I'll point to in the show notes where she describes the whole process of building Figma Slides. Also an awesome podcast episode with her. I talked to Mika and a bunch of other people preparing for this conversation. The co-founder of Notion, Akshay Kothari, had a really good quote: 'Dylan is among the nicest humans, probably has an NPS of 100. He's incredibly warm and yet he's got this crazy drive energy underneath. He's a total killer. Just look at the success of Figma. This combination is quite rare.' How does he manage to do both?
Well, it's very kind. I don't think my NPS is 100, but it's very kind. I've always loved competition and games. I definitely self-select into games that I think I can win. For that reason, I was never very athletic and stayed away from team sports as a kid because nothing drives me more crazy than playing a game I cannot win. Apply that to Figma. I definitely care very much about doing well for that own sense of competition, but also for the company. All the competitors I've met along the way are wonderful people. They have the same change they want to make in the world, empowering folks and advocating for design. They're almost entirely an amazing set of humans. There's no reason you can't have good sportsmanship while being competitive.
I feel like the Dylan we're seeing in this conversation and in every conversation is the Dylan that everyone sees internally. There's not like another hardcore Dylan that everyone hates. That's what Akshay's quote tells us.
Well, I hope so. I definitely get into intense mode sometimes as we all do, but try to keep it level when I can.
I'm curious how your leadership style has evolved over the years. Figma has been around 13 years. If you were to compare say Dylan 10 years ago to the Dylan of today, what would you say is most different?
There's a lot of zero to one on management that I needed to learn. I came in never having managed a team and turns out you just call yourself a CEO. I had a lot to learn on the management side. Until Sho came on as first director of engineering, then moved into product leader, he taught me a ton about management. Many of the people I've hired as leaders I've learned so much from. On the leadership side, it's the same lessons over and over again, and I keep learning them and then forgetting and learning them again. One is how to unpack context, how to get the context in your head and really unpack it for a group. Another is how to make sure you're showing up in a way that folks know we're all working towards the same goal. I can get into intense mode asking questions, but it's always from a place of trying to understand. Clarity is the thing I circle back to the most right now. Clarity around where we are all going as a company, and for any individual team. If there's a lack of clarity, how do I help clear the way, and how do I teach others to be as direct as possible to create clarity themselves.
There's so many threads I'd love to follow here. Maybe just this last one on clarity is such an important skill for leaders, for product builders. Is there anything specific there that you try to do to improve your clarity?
There's always these areas where things feel kind of murky. Sometimes it's because you just haven't done the work to understand them yet fully, and sometimes it's because no one's done the work to understand them fully. It's your job as a leader to always try to investigate those areas, push on them, and if something's not adding up, really ask the hard questions and not shy away from them. Too many people have this instinct of rah rah, we always got to be positive. It's not about positive or negative; it's about do we understand it? Have we had the hard conversations? Have we thought through the hard trade-offs? I just try to keep pushing through until we get to a point where we at least know what we're trading off, we have unpacked, and now we know where we're going and everyone's on the same page, even if we don't all agree.
It's interesting how this connects to the answer you gave around how you kept everyone focused and not demoralized during the whole Adobe thing. Communication, keeping people aware of what's happening, being clear about where things are at. And to be clear, we can always improve. So, as my team listens to this, yes, tell me where I can improve, too.
It's interesting you talked about Sho and other folks helping you learn these things. It reminds me I had Ben Horowitz on the podcast and he had this really hot take that CEOs should never hire people that they mentor, that CEOs should only hire folks that make them better. This is such a good example of that where the leaders you hired helped you improve in these areas. I'm curious how else you improved, like what else helped you as an emerging juggernaut of a CEO? So it sounds like execs, is there anything else that was really helpful like a coach, other CEOs?
Plenty, but I do want to double click on the Ben Horowitz comment. I've had so many relationships where it starts off they think I'm a mentor and then before I know it they're mentoring me, or through the process of mentorship I'm learning because they're facing different challenges and have different frameworks. Mika is a great example. She came in as a junior PM on paper. We think very differently, and I learned a good amount about how to approach different things from conversations where we had fierce debates because we come from very different mental models. Hopefully she got something out of that too. I never assume that I'm the mentor; I assume it's two-way all the time.
It's clear in the way you answer these questions that you're very curious, open-minded, very interested in learning other people's perspectives. Something I often hear about you and can clearly see is you're a very original thinker, some call first principles thinker.
Curious. It feels like it's something everyone's trying to aspire to be. I'm wondering if this question will help us uncover a bit of this. Is there a counterintuitive decision you made along the journey of Figma? Something that was very unpopular and unconventional and controversial, let's say, that people were like, 'No, why are we doing this?' And then proved out to be really really important to the success of Figma.
Looking back, one thing that was definitely unpopular and controversial at the time and now we look back on and it's like duh, Fig Jam. Fig Jam is a whiteboarding, diagramming, brainstorming tool. It's basically a digital whiteboard. The entire process of getting Fig Jam out to market, going from one product to two products, was hard. I had been noticing the diagramming whiteboarding use case in Figma design for years and kept pushing that we need to make a simpler product surface. People would correctly ask me all the why questions: why now? We haven't made Figma design everything it needs to be yet. I had a lot of intuition but not a lot of reasoning. Then COVID hit and suddenly the use case of bringing people together in an infinite canvas spiked. Feedback went from maybe we should do this to obviously we should do this. We sprinted and built Fig Jam in about six months. About a month before the launch at Config, we realized the product was lacking something, the soul wasn't there. We argued about different ways to differentiate. I had a meeting with the team and the board to create clarity. We came out of that meeting deciding to differentiate by making Fig Jam fun. The team was like, what? We're going to make fun our differentiator? In retrospect, it was absolutely the right move. We did a design sprint and came up with about 20 ideas, a few of which made it to Fig Jam, like cursor chat. It showed the team how fast we can move with the right goal defined and built the muscle that we can go build a second product, a third product, and expand the platform.
Wow, that is such a cool story. So many things I want to talk about. I guess on this thread of fun, a lot of people talk about making things fun, delightful. Most people are like no we don't have time for that, we got to sell deals, close deals, ship features. What have you learned from that experience? Because that is a super cool use case of just making it more fun helped prove that it made it successful.
I think Fig Jam is in particular a great place to emphasize fun and play because what are you trying to do during a brainstorm? You're trying to get people to speak up and add their thoughts. It was during COVID, an era where people were going inside themselves while locked inside their homes, sheltering in place, withdrawing, videos were off. How do we draw out their ideas and creative spirit? One way is to have a fun welcoming experience. I don't think all the things we've done in Fig Jam apply to Figma Design. Figma Design is like, we don't want to get in your way. So it's been a cool place to experiment with fun and playful concepts. In Fig Jam, we can do more on the play side. In Figma Design, if we get in people's ways with some quirky thing, they might get annoyed. In Fig Jam, they're like, cool. So context matters.
By the way, I love that you were the person being like, 'Guys, I think we should make Fig Jam. Come on, let's do it.' And everyone like, 'No, no, no. This is terrible.' I love that you wanting to do this did not make it happen, that people were pushing back on you that hard.
Yeah. There are certainly things that I've pushed through over time. Some have gone well, others wrong time. But for a second product, it's very hard to go from one to two. Going from two to n is much easier, but going one to two is hard.
Well let's follow that thread. I wanted to talk about this. So you have so many products now: Fig Jam, Slides, Sites is a separate product I believe. Okay. And then Make which we're going to talk about, Buzz, Draw. Wait wait wait what else?
Draw is a way to lean more into vector illustration and vector editing. Buzz is a production graphics workflow, so you can go from a template, keep on brand, and make lots of assets. That's been really cool to see how people have been using that. Dev mode of course, going from design to code, and also Dev Mode MCP now where you can use context from Figma via Dev Mode MCP in your IDE or agent development environment. Lots to improve, but it's really cool to see this many products.
So even better to ask this question: a lot of companies are thinking about when should we launch our first expansion, when do we go beyond that? What are a couple lessons you learned from going through that that might be helpful to other founders?
I think for us we had a framing of we're going to trace a workflow. If you've got an idea, go express it through Slides or hop in Fig Jam and brainstorm with your team. What's next? Go design, hop in Figma Design. If you need to go to development, Dev Mode will help. For Draw, there's a thesis that there was an era where everything was Flash on the internet, things were more dynamic and wild, but then we had Swiss Minimalism and Steve Jobs declared Flash dead. I think we're going to swing back to being way more expressive, and Draw is part of that story. Buzz is an example of following the workflow. What are people doing in Figma Design and what are they asking for that is probably best to take out of Figma Design and make its own surface? In the case of Buzz, brand and marketing are collaborating, brand wants to create a way for marketing to stay on track, marketing wants to do bulk creation of assets. You could try to pack that in Figma Design, but it would be complex. Just like we noticed slides made in Figma Design, pulled it out and made Figma Slides; whiteboarding pulled out into Fig Jam; same for Buzz, Dev Mode, Sites. With Make, it's interesting because it stretches across the entire journey. You can give a prompt and get a working app. The challenge is how to make it something people can be really proud of. AI won't get you there alone; AI is still in the realm of law of averages. Better prompting can help, but we need to allow users, not just designers but product managers, developers, people outside the product process, to come in and explore the options base of ideas through Make. Many people now want to take a prototype into a conversation, not just a PRD. In my product reviews, prototypes beat static mocks, and static mocks beat lots of words. So it's very welcome to figure out how to do that, and also how to get to a working app and internal tools.
I love this strategy of following the workflow as a way to think about where to expand to. And then it's just a question where's the biggest market, what's the easiest next segment to get on board, I imagine.
I would say you can't constrain by always sorting by TAM. We learned that very much from Figma Design. There is no data that said there are enough designers in the world for Figma Design to be a big market. But we got the trend right and the number of designers rapidly increased. The number of people that care about design increased because design is now the differentiator. It's how you win or lose. So more people care to be part of the design process, expanding the market for Figma Design. You have to do what is right, go from strength to strength, and not always be obsessed with the next biggest TAM.
That is such a good insight and it comes from exactly what you said: no one thought Figma was a large TAM and you proved them wrong.
Yeah. We looked to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the start of Figma. It said 250,000 designers in the world. Probably wrong at the time, but also it was a point in time and the industry was about to change.
It's so interesting. What's the lesson there for founders that are thinking about startup ideas? Because obviously this doesn't always work. You can't just create a market always. Is there something there about design that you saw that like, okay, we can actually make this a massive market?
I can definitely describe it all looking backwards. But if I'm going to be totally honest, at the time it was more intuition. I had an intuition that the value was moving up the stack. Now looking back, I can describe it more. We went from managed servers to AWS and cloud, box software to app stores. Developer tools were getting better. All of this combined with people getting access to better consumer experiences that were better designed, like iPhone apps, Facebook, Gmail. Expectations were rising for all software. The game theory just makes sense: you have to make your product better and improve your design. That led to design hiring. Then problems emerged that we had to solve: how to keep design consistent at scale, efficiency at scale. This is happening now even more in the age of AI. The value is moving up the stack even more. Design is the differentiator more than ever because you can create a lot of code really fast. In the zero to one case it's extraordinary. In the one to 100 case with an established codebase, productivity gains are modest to moderate, not exceptional yet, but improving all the time.
I want to talk about Make and all this stuff that you talked about because it connects really well, but I have another question I want to get to before we do that, which is around this idea of time to value. I heard this a lot when I was talking to people that work at Figma that you're obsessed with this idea of time to value, especially when a product is about to launch. You're just like, let's increase time to value. What is time to value? Why is it so important?
I think it is important to get someone into a product and very quickly have them experience something special to us, something amazing about the product. If they're not able to, for example, you go into Figma Design and see a blank canvas, how do we get you to create something as fast as possible? If you go into Figma Make, how do we get you to prompt and have an awesome experience very quickly? Shortening the time to seeing that incredible moment and seeing the true value of the product. For example, in Figma Design, can we get you to have a collaborative multiplayer moment? Same with Fig Jam. That's super important to see what this could unlock for you.
Here, I'll read you a quote from Zach Lloyd, founder of Warp. You guys, I think you're an investor in the company. I'm very honored to be, Zach's amazing, and Warp is a great product. I love Warp. You get a year free of Warp if you become an annual subscriber of Lenny's newsletter. Check it out. Click product pass. I included it because Warp is incredible, a magical experience. My wife uses it. She's got all her different agents running, doing development with it. I use it for shell stuff. Anyway, go Warp. Okay, so here's what Zach said because I asked him what he learned from Dylan. He said specific things that he's encouraged us to focus on are not just innovative features, but a consistent emphasis on fixing and blocking on the blocking issues that might prevent a user from adopting Warp. There's a lot of blocking and tackling that isn't always the most fun part for the team to work on. But from Figma, I think he's learned that removing the blockers is as important for retaining users as adding cool new stuff.
Absolutely agree. That's one I deeply resonate with and talk about all the time with my teams. The journey of making Figma Design was a lot of table stakes features had to be built as well as the shiny cool new stuff. We literally at some point had a team called Blockers, and they just went and one by one struck them down. Each time we saw improvement in retention and activation metrics. You could literally see the change in the graph. It was pretty wild.
Amazing. Okay, so this is connected to this whole idea of time to value: if something is keeping you from even using the thing and finding value, it often makes sense to prioritize that above something new and cool.
Yeah. You have to have a balance. If you only do the table stakes features, you don't have a cool product and you don't have something amazing. You have to sprinkle in at least something around why this is exciting, where it's going, what people can believe in. You have to have a vision for the product that you can communicate to users when they're first trying to use it, even for early releases. It's not enough to have the MVP; you got to have something that's a little bit awesome at least.
Yeah, you guys took a long time to launch your MVP. How long was it before you guys launched?
Too long. Uh, we started the company
August 2012. Started working hardcore in Figma June 2013. Closed beta was December 2015. Didn't do GA with multiplayer until October 2016. And then summer of 2017 we made our first money. Don't do that. Go faster. The lesson is not 'how do I make the awesome thing? I'm going to sweat every detail and I'm never going to ship.' The lesson is you just got to get something that people can see the vision of where you're going. But don't do what we did. Get to market faster. I wish we had. There's the sound bite.
