I'm very honored to be here and just like see some of the products coming out. It's incredible. I know many of you have like not slept at all. So, good morning. We'll keep it as high energy as we can. And before we get started, can I actually ask you a question?
Just thought I'd reverse the interview for a sec. Alex, I don't know if everyone knows Alex is one of the co-founders of Calhacks. Can you tell us about the story of how it got started? Were you or were you not the first big hackathon before Stanford and anything you learned from it?
Absolutely. So, back when I was a sophomore at UC Berkeley, I was a part of a bunch of student groups, and we would go on these trips to other schools, like MHacks in Michigan, PennApps at University of Penn, and LA Hacks. And we went to the LA Hacks one with a bunch of our friends. And I was like, why is this happening at UCLA but not happening up in the Bay Area? We have so many amazing hackers at UC Berkeley. And I'm like, I feel like there's so much untapped potential. And so we started, we got a group together. It was in the basement of Wheeler and we decided to one name the event and then also like find the right venue for it. It was really the very first event was really actually a hack. We didn't really know how many people would show up, if it would work or not, if the Wi-Fi would be working. And it all came together in the span of about like I'd say about six months. I initially had an internship lined up over the summer. I decided to cancel that and put that on the side so that I could actually focus on just delivering for this event. And it ended up being bigger than any of us ever imagined. It was a true celebration of like UC Berkeley hacking culture and we ended up setting up the student group and kind of keeping the flame alive past that.
And you beat Stanford to being the first Mac hackathon barrier.
Yes, we beat Stanford to the punch. Tree Hacks was started by some really good friends of mine. Great hackathon as well, but I'm obviously a little partial to the one here at UC Berkeley.
Awesome. Well, I have lots more questions for you, but I'll let you get started.
Awesome. So, I want to actually start pretty far back. So you, back when you were in high school, you were building robots and websites. And I'm actually curious how some of those like early experiences you had, like led you to like pursue computer science at Brown and like your interest in general in making.
Yeah, I mean, I was interested in programming from basically a young age. Never had access to all the tools I wanted. But as I started to get access in elementary school with a basic compiler, middle school with Lego robots, and LabVIEW, which amazingly has not changed since I was in middle school. And then you know high school, having the chance to get like a virtual private server, started to share that with my friends and I got into PHP, probably learned bad habits, but also got to be in part of the local robotics club where I did a lot of other stuff that was not programming as well. Other folks in the team were taking a lot of the mantle on there, but went on to study CS at Brown and it was an incredible experience. Didn't stay there unfortunately the entire time, ended up going to Figma after two and a half years but the foundations from Brown were really instructive and inform me every day.
Absolutely. And when you were at Brown you actually I heard started a hackathon yourself. Could you tell me a little bit about like why you did that but also like how that went in general?
So, this is a pretty embarrassing story and I don't think I've ever told this in public. So yeah, here we go. You know, people say, comedy is like tragedy plus time. And this is like 2011, so 14 years have passed. I hope it's funny now. Basically, you know, I was starting to see hackathons come up. It was 2011. So, I know now hackathons are just like a part of the tech vernacular. Obviously, there's hackathons, but back then it was like a cool new thing and very few people were doing them and really wanted to do one for the local area and so I wanted to organize like a regional hackathon for New England and so I came up with that plan. I was part of a student group called the CS department undergraduate group at Brown. Tried to get my friends involved. They all were like yeah but I didn't really delegate anything to them. So it's basically like you know me doing a hackathon like I don't know six weeks or something from start to finish and it was a hackathon. We called it the New England College Hackathon without realizing that the word neck sounded really bad. So like definitely the brand was off. Got a sponsor to host us. Big deal. Microsoft, their New England research development facility, they host us in their beautiful office. Did not realize that would mean that the first hour of the hackathon was everyone was going to be locked in a room to listen to a tech talk about like an obscure Microsoft technology that never would be used. But that happened. So that was the first thing that was like, oh, this might not be going right. And then the person that actually was sponsoring us, he was walking down the stairs at like midnight and he tripped and broke his teeth. Had to go to emergency dental care and then you know we ran out of food at like 4 a.m. Turns out in New England everything's closed. And then you know at some point during the night I got comfortable. I was like ah maybe things are you know the dental surgery it's like he's in the surgery now it's okay. And all settled in and just kind of like work with a team and hack on something and be fun. And so helped out some friends. We later wanted to show off what we had done. Did not inform the judges because I was totally sleep deprived after an all-nighter that like of course they should not judge us because I was part of the team. I thought that was obvious and then was surprised when they gave us the first place award for the hackathon that I organized and obviously did not accept that award but all these hackathon attendees that trust me thought that I had. So yeah, that sucked. And turns out, bottom line, these events are super hard to organize. And you should definitely thank the Calhacks team because they did an amazing job.
Yeah, we definitely had some, you know, hopefully not real fires, but, you know, near misses like in the very first event. So, I fully appreciate just how like out of left field some of these problems can be.
Turns out when no one sleeps, it gets a little chaotic.
Yeah, absolutely. So, you mentioned that you were at Brown for two years. And you had this really great Twitter thread just the other day with Paul Graham talking about so Paul Graham said that you probably shouldn't drop out of college, but you responded with some ideas can't wait. What gave you the conviction to stop out of Brown and pursue Figma?
Yeah, I think first of all it's a good use of the phrase stopout because my point of view at the time was I can always go back. Brown's going to be there and still there. And I expect in a hundred years Brown will be there too as will Cal. And I figured I can always, you know, revisit this. And Brown has a great policy of like five years go by that's when you have to reapply. Before that, it's very easy to take a break. And I had an amazing TA, Evan Wallace. If you doubt me, check out his GitHub. github.com/evanw and you'll see his greatness and genius. And I thought I'll learn more working with Evan for any amount of time he'll give me than I'll learn anywhere else in the world. And whether this works or doesn't work, it'll be amazing. And so then I was talking with Evan about would you ever start a company together? He said I'd be down to explore it and we basically were like okay what tech trends are we excited about? This is late 2011 now. and we talked about drones, WebGL and we have a lot of other stuff but those are the two we focused on. Evan was like no to drones, did not like defense, was concerned about the regulatory challenges and so WebGL here we go and we started exploring and just the process of hacking together on stuff with Evan and seeing how brilliant he was, learning from him, that was just like built my conviction even more and I was applying for the Thiel Fellowship in parallel at that point. It took a long time to apply and it was like a six-month process. And at some point though, it's like, okay, whether we get this or not, either way, we should go do this. We'll figure it out.
So, like meeting Evan was really one of the critical like kind of inflection points. It sounds like.
Yeah, I think right now it's like y'all are surrounded by so many brilliant people and you probably all can think of one person that you've met at Cal or through your time in the Bay Area and you're just like, "Wow, if that person I had a chance to work with them, holy it would be like totally life-changing." Probably everyone has that person in mind. I'm seeing some nods. And it turns out you can just go work with them on stuff like what's stopping you? Maybe you did at this hackathon, maybe you're gonna do it the next hackathon, or maybe you're gonna just like find a weekend to spend together next weekend or something. Like there's nothing stopping you from going like doing cool stuff. So yeah, I'd say if you're a student, you know, at this point more than ever, the notion of a degree is pretty arbitrary. It's a bundle that is supposed to point to your basically ability to persist through whatever number of years it took you to get it. It's supposed to point to you know a bunch of knowledge you accumulated along the way. And I think that what's actually important is the student experience. And what's actually important is whatever you're learning from your classes. If you've got a class you're taking that you're not actually learning from, like, drop that like it's hot. If it's a requirement, question the requirements. And I would argue that in a few years, you're not going to care about the degree. And what you will care about are the people you've met and the knowledge you got to learn. And some knowledge is hard to learn outside of university than other knowledge. So, you know, pick and choose wisely. Like I definitely have not been able to figure out how to study pure math after leaving Brown. Like maybe if you're smarter than I am, you'll figure that out. But for me that was tough. Other stuff you can just like look it up now. It's so easy. So, you know, don't wait if you got a great idea. It won't be around forever. The opportunity will pass and you're the judge of that. It's amazing.
So in 2016 you said that the next decade was going to be the decade of design and we're now here about nine years later and I think you know I would love to one hear like your refreshed take on that but also what the next decade ends up looking like now with AI making software easier than ever to create.
Yeah, I mean I think that first of all, we were definitely right in that if you look at the job growth for designers over the past 10 years, it's been absolutely incredible. And then the question is why? Why was that true in 2016 and is it true today? If it is, why? And I think that in 2016 already we saw the value moving up the stack towards design, towards craft, towards great experience. And today with AI, we're now in a world where the growth of software is just absolutely exponential. You know, it used to be in the dotcom era that if you built it, they would come. That was the phrase because it was really hard to build. You had to go and actually figure out how to get like managed servers somewhere and you had to go figure out how to box up your software and send those boxes to distributors, right? Like this was not easy. There's a lot of like problems you had to solve and developer experiences around creating software were not very good like now you know you can create software so fast so what is the reason that you win well it's design it's point of view it's craft it's brand it's marketing you have to get those things right if you want to win and that's why I think the downstream effects of AI and software development becoming faster are that you actually have to focus more on the user experience more on the craft more on why it's going to be delightful. And you have to have a point of view. I think for any company now, if you're going in with a point of view that's just like obviously everyone will agree with, you're doing it wrong. So your point of view has to be like a kind of spicy take. And if it doesn't like register as spicy when you talk to people about it, if some people don't agree, if everyone agrees with you, if you don't have some people going, "Oh, you're totally wrong. You're like an absolute idiot for working on this." Then you should question if you're on the right thing.
