I think that designers have for a long time had a mentality of almost like this imposter syndrome. Then we kind of got into the Apple era and Steve Jobs really championing design. When we started Figma, we didn't know if Figma design was a big enough market because the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that there were 250,000 designers or something like that in the United States. Well, now design has a seat at the table.
That's Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, the collaborative design platform. Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after Adobe made a 20 billion dollar bid to buy the company that was then derailed amid regulatory issues. Dylan hasn't looked back. He engineered a splashy IPO this summer at nearly twice that valuation. In today's episode, we talk about that journey, what sets Figma apart from Adobe and Canva, and what it takes to level up your skills in an AI world. Dylan represents both a rising generation of technology CEOs and the increasing centrality of design for all industries and roles in a software-dominated economy. Plus, he offers some great practical insights on how to improve your AI prompting. So, let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.
I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan, thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me.
You first got on my radar because you were a Kleiner Perkins design fellow working at Flipboard. My son was also a Kleiner fellow who ended up working as a designer at Flipboard for a couple years, and he always raved about Figma. Now, since then, of course, this passion from the design community, you've moved past that to grow into broader audiences. It seems kind of tricky to build a product for a specialized audience and a general one, or is that part of the fun, like solving that challenge?
The challenge and the fun part is that design is so broad now and it's how you win or lose. It is the differentiator that's core to every software business. And so a lot of people, whether they're calling themselves designers, not calling themselves designers, they are now part of the design process. And I think looking ahead, what we're going to find is that more and more people really care about design since it's how you win or lose in a world of more and more software. But right now, the way we kind of wake up every day and think about it is how do we make it so that Figma is approachable but also it is powerful. And that is a constant tension that we wrestle with. You were trying to go from an idea in your head to a shipped product. That's awesome. And we're seeing not just designers, but product managers, developers, and more people in the organization. About two-thirds of our users are those non-designers. And so, how do we help them succeed in Figma as well, even though that designer persona is the core of what we do?
For those who aren't using Figma, and I know Figma is used by almost all the Fortune 500 companies, what makes Figma different from Adobe, Canva?
Yeah. So Figma is focused on digital product design. We're trying to get you from idea to product. How do we eliminate the gap between imagination and reality? We've got not just Figma Design and Make, but also whiteboarding, brainstorming, diagramming, ideation tools with FigJam, tools for illustration, tools for graphic creation and scale with Figma Buzz, Figma Sites, a way to go build, design, ship websites. And we have Dev Mode to bring people from design to code. Canva is an amazing platform if you're trying to make templated graphics, especially for consumer use cases. Like if you want to make a birthday card, Canva is probably going to have a great template or set of templates for you. And Adobe on the other hand, if you're making a movie, they're awesome. We're not trying to make movies. We're not trying to make birthday cards. We're trying to make software.
I should congratulate you because you had a blockbuster IPO this summer. The stock settled a bit, but you still got nearly a 30 billion dollar valuation, which is double what Adobe tried to buy you for a couple years ago. Going public with so much fanfare and attention and success, has that been fun? How much do you look at it as sort of a distraction in some ways for you and your team versus let's ride this wave as long as it'll go?
This is great. I've been really proud of the team. I think nothing's really changed in terms of our focus. I think the day itself was not just a celebration of Figma, but a celebration of design and for design to go public in that way. I just felt very honored to be able to be part of that. The slogan of the day, what we had hanging from the walls of the New York Stock Exchange was the words 'design is everyone's business.'
I mean, I thought about you a lot and the whiplash you had to go through with the Adobe merger getting blocked. And I'm curious how the company's different because of that experience. Are you different? Are your products different? There were strategic reasons you wanted to become part of Adobe initially.
The company that's acquiring, in this period between sign and close, they can't direct activities. And that's something I think people don't really know. And so we had a road map going into the deal and that was our road map during the deal. It didn't change and our foot, I think, was on the gas throughout. And the more that we started to have to ask ourselves, with regulatory being what it was, whether or not that was a correct assessment, we'll leave it to history to tell. But I think that throughout, as we saw that regulatory risk was real, that gave us even more impetus to say, okay, foot on the gas even more. I was like, 'Okay, if we're part of Adobe, great. We're going in strong. And if we're not, we should definitely be keeping our foot on the gas.' It was hard. As you're talking with regulators all over the world, that's almost a full-time job in itself. And to do that while also keeping the company going at full speed and then some. And the team was incredible through that period.
My assumption in some ways was that part of the appeal for Adobe of having Figma was like future tools that they didn't have and a future way of operating. Where they want to go is where you are, and to a certain extent maybe where they are is some of the places you want to go.
We still don't really see Adobe as competitive. I think it's the easy framing maybe. We have so much to cover on this journey from idea to product. And I think that the focus for us right now is on a lot of the AI stuff that's opportunities to make it so we can lower the floor, bring more people into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it so designers can do more. It's easy to say those words. It's a lot to execute on, to actually make that really good and up to the standards of designers, because ultimately all of us humans, we expect more from AI than we expect from a human. If you say, 'Okay, here's a small prompt to change my spacing in a file,' Figma better get it right. Otherwise people will dismiss it out of hand. I'm not saying that we have to do the work of a world-class designer because we won't. There's a need for designers to lead the charge and AI will only get you so far. But the drudgery, how do we remove that from the design process? How do we give more access to more people? Bring more people into the world of creating prototypes and software. Those are big things to bite off.
I've noticed that the word design and the definition of what a designer is is often misunderstood by people in the business community, often by investors and the Wall Street community. People think, 'Oh, designer, they're deciding what color the curtains are going to be.' And I've had these conversations before with Mark Parker when he was the CEO of Nike, who was a designer, Brian Chesky at Airbnb. Designer CEOs are still sort of a small club. What do people not understand about design? What makes a designer CEO different?
There's a million definitions of design. But I always like to think of it as, at its core, problem solving. And I think that people kind of go on this design journey and maybe the first step is, 'Does it even matter? I made something cool. Why do I need a designer?' And then I think at some point people go, 'Okay, well, I should at least make it pretty.' And then from there people go, 'Wait a second, maybe that's not enough because I'm putting this in front of people, my product, my software, my app, and they don't know how to use it. They're getting stuck.' And then from there, they kind of think about, 'Okay, well, what's the overall system? How do I think through how this entire thing should work? What's the brand? What's my point of view as a business? What are the business constraints? What's the culture right now? How does that affect everything?' You can kind of go out in these outer rings and just keep going. And I think that designers have for a long time had a mentality of almost like this imposter syndrome. If you think about the way that design has evolved as a career, there were almost no designers in the 1990s, early 2000s. Very few in number. They were often times misunderstood, and yet they did incredible work despite it. Then we kind of got into the Apple era of 'design is how it works,' and Steve Jobs really championing design. You started to see this rapid growth in the number of designers being hired. When we started Figma, we didn't know if Figma design was a big enough market because the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that there were 250,000 designers or something like that in the United States. And the reality was that there's this total exponential trend of how many designers were being hired and how design-to-engineer ratios were changing. Through that growth, there were new challenges that were introduced. How do I keep everything consistent when all these different design voices have all sorts of creative ideas they want to explore? And also, how do I be efficient on a team with many designers around the table? How do I bring my voice as a designer to the highest levels? How do I have a seat at the table? And that was kind of the meme then. Well, now design has a seat at the table in the era of today. People recognize the importance of design. They might not always understand it, but everyone's trying to understand it. So now I think it's like, how do we lead? How does design bring people along? And how do more designers step into roles where they can guide their organizations? Because the design process of thinking through different ways things can work, diverging and then being able to converge on a solution and deliver it to customers and iterate, that is the business process that you go through for everything. And that's what everyone needs to be thinking through as they adapt.
In this new age of software that we're in, there's this expression like 'stay in your lane.' And for a lot of corporate roles, you're a marketer, you stay in your lane. And as you're talking about the history, there was a certain point where people pushed designers to stay in a certain kind of lane. But I've always found that design is most effective because it crosses over between different disciplines, and it finds that connection in that problem solving.
