He's back, I'm back, he's back, Justin. I was like, 'Justin, let's do a selfie.' You know, he knows a thing or two about selfies. He's pretty good at them, and pretty good at streaming them 24/7, and turning that into a multi-billion dollar company. It's good to see you all. Thanks for coming out. Dylan, I thought it'd be fun to start with a personal story of how we first met. I think it explains how long relationships can be in Silicon Valley. This story comes from 11 and a half years ago when we were both young bucks. Dylan was a Thiel Fellow at the time and I was applying for the Thiel Fellowship. If you think I'm abrasive and wearing hats like this now, 11 years ago I was even less polished. Part of the Thiel Fellowship application was to go present on stage and talk about what you're working on. I decided to start my presentation with, 'Hi, my name is Delian, which is nailed backwards.' So it's a funny trope. But then, probably not the best move, at the end of this presentation I decided to end it by saying 'Nailed it!' and dropped the mic physically. Maybe not the perfect impression. Dylan comes up to me right afterwards, in the heat of me coming off stage, and he's like, 'Delian, interesting presentation. Just so you know, you're about to have a bunch of follow-up conversations. You came off as a huge asshole on stage.' I said, 'That's not exactly what I said. I said you came off as like a little bit of an asshole up there.' Clearly different memories. But it was valuable feedback. Afterwards, Delian said, 'Dude, you totally threw me off my game,' and I felt like an asshole. But he got the fellowship anyway. It's a good lesson in timely feedback: criticize in private, praise in public, but figure out the right time. 11 and a half years later, here we are back on stage. When I was thinking about what to chat about, I feel like we come from two very different worlds – software for designers vs. satellites. But one interesting parallel is that in satellite land, there's no such thing as an MVP. It took us two and a half years to launch our first satellite. In software, the prototypical approach is The Lean Startup, iterate quickly, throw something out the door. You guys took a very different approach – the Figma approach, the Notion approach. You focused inwards and built something super polished and ready to go, rather than small iterations. Why did you do that, especially in 2012-2014 when everything was 'move fast and break things,' ship on day one, do MVP? You did the opposite, the contrarian view.
Yeah, for us back then, it was all Lean Startup methodology. I think the reason Lean Startup caught on is because it mostly works – launch something fast, get an MVP out, iterate in public. That's the right advice most of the time. For us, we quickly found out it would be the wrong advice. We were testing, it wasn't like we were just sitting there building with no feedback. I would talk with designers and they would stare blankly and say, 'It's really impressive the science experiment you've done, but there are a lot of reasons I'm not going to use this.' I said, 'Great, list them off,' and it was a long list. So I brought that back to the team, and we got to work. We started August 2012 full-time, had been thinking since December 2011, and it wasn't until December 2015 that we launched a closed beta that didn't even have multiplayer. Not until October 2016 that we launched our GA where anyone could sign up with multiplayer, and not until summer 2017 that we started charging. I don't advise that path unless you have to take it. It really sucked. But for us, it created a moat, and with that moat we were set up to execute and build. I'm really grateful to no longer be in that phase of the company.
At the time, even taking that amount of time to build something, especially when there was a competitive set starting to eat up the vacuum of attention – you had Photoshop not explicitly designed for UI, but people were using it, Sketch was growing a strong community, and Benchmark led a meaningful round. Yet you had this patience. Obviously, most people in this audience have never heard of Sketch at this point, and you guys completely dominated. Why do you think the contrarian approach worked even where there were other people thinking about it and working on it?
First of all, let me say Sketch is an amazing company. I'm sure many people here know it and use it. I have a lot of respect for that team, and we've learned a lot from each other. But yeah, it was pretty terrifying. We saw Fireworks get killed – any Fireworks fans out there? Several of us, yes. When we saw Fireworks being killed by Adobe, we thought, 'This is a giant opportunity.' The market was still small, that was the other contrarian bet: we believed the market for design software would increase a lot. Sometimes it's helpful to start with a small market and expand. But then it was taking a long time, and meanwhile Sketch was growing. In our first deck, I had a competitor slide: Sketch was on it, and I referred to it as 'some buggy software out of Europe, lifestyle business.' I couldn't be more wrong. They were fixing stuff in market, growing, building a community, capturing market share, and becoming a key part of the workflow. It so happened that we had a paradigm shift with multiplayer web collaboration, and we were able to lean into that. If we had gone head-to-head with Sketch on features, that would have been a losing proposition.
They were a formidable competitor. They obviously maybe didn't immediately react to the paradigm shift the way you did. Today, in the startup ecosystem, we're going through another massive paradigm shift with AI tools. Some would argue, where is the point of UI design when someone non-technical can throw together an MVP and have AI sketch out all the pixels? How do you think about the Figma strategy and approach in this world where maybe it's as fundamental a shift as multiplayer was for you in 2014-2016? What is the 2024-2026 Figma strategy relating to this new AI paradigm?
This is the question of the moment, not just for Figma but for all software. The vantage point from Figma is that we need to both lower the floor and raise the ceiling. More people should be able to participate in the design process – that's lowering the floor. And we need to make it so that designers can explore the possibilities that the best designers today can explore – raising the ceiling. That's the really hard part because right now, everyone is lowering the floor, few are raising the ceiling. If we can do that effectively, that's where we'll really shine. Over time, the amount of software in the world has been exponentially increasing and will increase even faster in the age of AI. That means design becomes even more important. Design is the differentiator in a sea of software. If you don't have high craft and great design, you don't stand out. Design is the reason you'll win or lose. Our job as toolmakers is to empower customers to stand out, explore options, and bring a high degree of craft.
It seems like you're seeing a bifurcation similar to the coding space. There are AI coding tools trying to fully replace and lower the bar, like Cognition, and others like Cursor that are raising the bar. Your point is you want to dominate both sides – be the Cognition and Cursor equivalent on the design side.
I think even Cursor is still lowering the floor in some ways. It's not the tool you'll use to figure out the perfect software architecture or create amazing optimization for a rocket ship. But another important thing is that design lets you translate across abstractions. We think of the entire product building process with Figma – from brainstorming and ideation in FigJam, to slides for alignment, to design in Figma Design, to Dev Mode for translation to code. AI helps translate across those abstractions. You can go from a FigJam file to a deck now. How do you go from design to code in a way that's consistent with your codebase? That's the fundamental engineering principle: don't repeat yourself.
Zooming back to the early days of building Figma – both of us have relatively non-traditional backgrounds. You dropped out of Brown, I dropped out of MIT. We both decided to work on our first companies. Talk about the Thiel Fellowship community and how it helped give you a sense of grounding, purpose, and ambition in those early days. Now there's a strong community of dropouts building startups, but back then it was contrarian. How did that community shape you and Figma?
So I dropped out of Brown. I didn't know I dropped out at the time – I thought I was taking a break, that was a better pitch for my parents. I had this amazing community of friends at Brown, internships in Silicon Valley, friends back home in Northern California going to community college, and 30-year-old friends on different life tracks. I took the Thiel Fellowship, thought it would be a two-year stipend, but the real benefits were two things. First, the social connections – being around people like me was so special. Many of my Thiel Fellows are still my best friends today. Second, they pushed me to think bigger. There are so many startup ideas, small inefficiencies in the market. Our first idea was a meme generator. We built it in a week, it was the best online, but I looked at myself and thought, 'I did not drop out of Brown for this.' I faced existential despair. Tom Courier from the fellowship said, 'You have two years, you have the freedom to build anything you want. Go do something meaningful.' Conversations like that led to Figma. So go find people who force you to think bigger.
