Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. At the start of 2025, the IPO market felt like it had frozen in place. Then slowly, the tide began to turn. By the third quarter, deal flow picked up dramatically. 23 companies raised 9 figures or more, and five made headlines with blockbuster listings. One of those headlines came from a company whose tools have quietly become essential to modern digital design. At this point, the company has millions of users. It's used by 95% of Fortune 500 companies. Its platform is now central to nearly every digital team's workflow. That company went public in July and it is now filing its feet after one of the biggest IPOs of the year. This is my conversation with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan Field, thank you for joining me on First Time Founders.
Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here and to finally get to meet you.
Absolutely. So we're going to get into how you started Figma. Everyone's been talking about it. Biggest IPO of the year really. We've been talking a lot about it on our other podcast, Property Markets. But I want to start with a quote from your founder letter. In the internet boom of the late '90s, the ethos was build it and they will come. Today that could not be further from the truth. It used to be that design was an afterthought. Now design is more than form and function. Design is how you win or lose. You are a design company. What is different about the world today compared to 30 years ago that makes design so important?
I love that you read the founders letter first of all. So, thank you for reading it.
I put a lot of thought into it and so I've always been eager to get that reflected back and love that we're just diving right into it. Let's go. It's certainly been the case for Figma that from the beginning we had this intuition that design was becoming more important. I couldn't put into words what I can today, but design started to become more important around software.
It started to make it so that the expectations for everything increased and we started to see that in design hiring and design ratios. We went from having one designer for dozens of engineers, their job to put lipstick on a pig and make it pretty at the end of the process, to a different mindset into this more Apple philosophy of design is how it works.
And the more people that took on that philosophy, the more people that tried to meet the market where they wanted to be met, those companies I think did so much better and people were starting to realize that.
And so they started to hire more designers. We saw this ratio change tremendously. Suddenly it was going to, in extreme cases like Airbnb, one designer for every two or three engineers instead of one designer for every 30 engineers or none. And so as this wave of design hiring happened, we also saw the wave of software increase too. And all this started to come together into a thesis: design is how you win or lose. And that's a thesis we held before AI. With AI, it is absolutely unequivocally clear that that is true.
Because now that exponential is no longer flat; it's trending upward, even vertical. You can create software faster than ever. Not the best software yet, but more software. As software gets more competitive, you have to differentiate. How? You need a point of view on product and brand, plus great design and user experience. It has to be delightful, clear, useful. You also need to lean into brand and marketing. It's not enough to have great product design; you need great brand design and communicate that point of view across every customer experience.
So you create the company in 2012. Product design becomes more of a thing. From my understanding, you didn't fully release your product until several years after. What were those first years like? And what was the product that you brought to the world?
My co-founder and I were very excited about exploring WebGL, the ability to use the GPU in your computer in the browser. And we started with technology rather than a problem. Most companies that do well have some 'why now'. The 'why now' doesn't have to be technological; it can be social or regulatory. Figma had multiple 'why nows'. But we started with tech. We looked at all the tech that exists and WebGL stood out. We explored for a while, trying to find a nail for our hammer. That's not usually how people start a company, but that's the honest truth. We looked at things you might apply the verb 'photoshopped' to, distilling use cases for consumers. Things like face swapping — that was one of the first things we built.
But that's the way we started is the honest truth and we explored for quite some time. We looked at all sorts of things that you might apply the verb 'photoshopped' to in terms of taking that kind of verb and distilling to use cases that we thought were going to be interesting for consumers. Things like face swapping. That was one of the first things we built.
Yeah. So, it was 2012 and we could with face blending make it so that we could swap our faces and it looked credible. Or background removal, changing color gradients dynamically in a scene. What we found was that the tech wasn't ready yet — we could get 85% of the way there, maybe 90-95% for face swapping, but not 100%. It wasn't until deep learning that we got to 100%. So we built a photo editor in the browser because of WebGL. We never shipped it because we decided it wasn't the thing, but it informed Figma. Then we realized photo editing happens on your mobile phone, not a web browser, especially without RAW support. So we backed out and that's when we started on what is now Figma. That starting period took a while. If I had said we'd give ourselves six months, we would never have Figma today. After that we were on track, raised money, built a team, but it took a while. Professional tools are hard to build. We had aggressive timelines but missed them by a year or two. My favorite part was showing the tool to designers. They were intrigued but said they didn't trust it — they were worried about the browser. Those comments went away when we did a redesign and the visual design of the tool was improved. So we fixed that and did a closed beta in December 2015, GA in October 2016, and started pricing in mid-2017. That was almost five years after we started. It took quite a while to get off the ground.
Basically anyone that I know who's starting a website or creating some app or using it or creating some sort of digital product, everyone is using Figma. Or at least in my circles.
How did designers, how did people build stuff before? Like what were people using before Figma?
Yeah, I mean it was single player and there's a culture that I think came out of agency culture where there's a lot of like 'I'm going to show you three things, the first two are not what you want but the third one everyone's going to love, and then I'll go back in my corner and do my work and we won't interact that much.' That's completely different from the multiplayer experience of Figma. And I think that cultural shift was real. The first comments we got on launch were controversial. People said things like 'a camel is a horse designed by committee' and 'if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers.' But there was a small set of people that loved it and saw the vision of multiplayer design in the browser with a high-quality tool.
What does single player versus multiplayer mean?
Single player means local to your file system. One person can use it at a time, you export an image, send it over, version control issues. The web forced us to be multiplayer. We didn't initially try to do multiplayer. We had an instinct it was important but it was complex. We started without it until we heard some validation. Out of 100 people, maybe two told us they were doing pair design and uniquely got it. Others said it's not what they wanted. But we got there because we were forced to. If you have a Figma tab and I have the same tab open, and I make an edit and your tab reloads, it's a terrible experience. So as we got closer to production, we knew we had to build it. The benefits were tremendous: more people can be in the canvas at the same time, like a Google doc, and you get a single source of truth. No more v2_35_final_final_3. You have just a document. It was also interesting to see behavioral change over time as people treated Figma like a space. Slack went down one day and folks started putting text boxes in a Figma canvas to chat. That led to Fig Jam, our way to brainstorm, ideate, whiteboard, and diagram. It's a simpler product for that use case, incorporating concepts of how to create a space for people.
It's similar to Google Docs. That's a good comparison. We used to write a doc, save it, send it off, or before that print it and put notes with a pen. Then there's this great idea: let's put it on a single page and let's all jump in the doc and comment and tag. And that's what Figma is doing from a product and web design perspective. And it's been an unbelievable success. Now, when I think about who you're up against, the first name that comes to mind is Adobe. Adobe has been the giant in digital design for many years. It seems like they have had historically almost a monopoly. You are the first company that has really eaten into that and presented yourself as a real competitor to Adobe. How did you do that? Or maybe you disagree with that characterization. But why how did you get to the point where I'm saying Figma in the same sentence as Adobe?
We saw ourselves as going up against Adobe in the earliest days for sure. Over time we found that designers are our core audience. We make software for product designers. They work with teams and multiplayer shows that even more. If their teammates are not successful, the designers are not successful. That led us to go upstream in the workflow to Fig Jam for ideation, to Figma slides for alignment, and downstream into the development workflow to help developers take assets from Figma and translate them to code efficiently. As we mapped out that process, we found ourselves building for anyone who wanted to go from idea to polished application and get into production. But it was interesting because we thought of a small market for product designers — Bureau of Labor Statistics said 250,000 people when we started. We knew that wasn't our long-term market. But we found ourselves focused on the product design and development workflow. Overall, we don't see Adobe. There was a period where they tried to compete but then they sunset the product and decided to focus on their core creative professional and also compete on the down market. So now it's two very different businesses.
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We're back with First Time Founders. Let's just move to you going public. It's kind of fascinating to hear those first five years and how messy it really did sound.
It's always messy. Every startup is messy.
And now you are a public company. Biggest IPO of the year. We were looking at the IPO pricing and we said on our podcast we're like this is a buy. It was originally priced at 25. Then it was repriced at 30. We said it was a buy at 30. Then it was I think 33. We said it was a buy and that's when it went out at the IPO price. And then it opens in the market and it's 85 and then it goes up to 100. We thought you guys would see a big pop, but I didn't see it being that crazy. And then it's really interesting. A lot of our listeners I've heard people saying, 'Hey, it's come down a lot since 100.' And I want to tell you like I was saying buy at 33. That's what I was talking about. The point being now that you're a public company, there is a lot of pressure on you to return value to shareholders. Even I was receiving that pressure as someone who just talked about the stock. So I could imagine that would be a different paradigm where everyone's watching you, everyone's asking questions, people like me asking you, what do you think of the stock? How do you feel about the pricing? How has that changed your overall experience as a CEO?
Well, I told the company before we went public, during the IPO, literally on listing day, before we saw any signals from the market, and after, and then after IPO I just shut up about it: look, the number's going to go up, the number's going to go down. We do not control the number. The only thing we've got control over is the inputs. So we have to keep our eye on the prize and do everything we can to drive those inputs. And we have to take the long-term view. The irony is that as a public company, you have to report earnings every quarter. One reaction is to take a quarterly view, but you also have to take the long-term view and that always has to come first. So I spend my energy not on what the stock price is doing any given day. Some days I literally forget to look because I'm so focused on what we're trying to do for the long term. You only get one shower thought a day. There's a great Paul Graham essay on that. Your shower thought needs to be on what are the long-term things we can do to make our customers' lives better. Value will follow. There's the Bill Walsh quote: 'Score takes care of itself.' If we focus on our inputs, on driving value, on our fundamentals, the score will take care of itself. The stock price will take care of itself.
But I could also imagine now as a public company CEO that you kind of have to take care of the stock price as well as be the vibe setter, the leader of the narrative. We talk a lot on our podcast about the narrative versus the numbers. There's the numbers that can drive a stock and then there's the narrative: what do investors think is happening? Do you feel any pressure? It sounds like you don't want to think too much about the story we're telling people. You want to think about are our numbers good, our inputs high quality. But do you feel a pressure now to show up on that earnings call and capture the imaginations of people, set a narrative that investors are really excited about? Is that something that you feel is incumbent on you now as a public company CEO?
I think what's most important, and this is the same perspective I had when we were a private company, is to make sure that people understand what the company is doing. And to make sure that people are educated. That's why I do demos on earnings calls, at least so far. Maybe at some point I don't do them, I don't know. But I like doing that. I like to show people what we are actually improving. Without that, it's so easy to get lost in narrative or numbers or whatever. My advice to anyone looking at the stock is: understand our company. It's very simple. Go read our S1, go watch the earnings calls, go look at our filings, go look at what we're doing.
Doing. Like that's how you understand. Now on narrative of course there's an importance to narrative. This is different than narrative for markets. This is a narrative for the business.
If you don't have a narrative about what is going to occur in the world, you don't have a vision.
You don't have a point of view on where you're headed. And so to me it's very important to storytell there and to show people and unpack the contexts in my head about where we're headed for our employees, for our customers. And that's something that I feel a lot of pressure on because otherwise we don't have a north star.
And then I think the fundamental question that maybe is related to markets and is deeply related to strategy. The question that everyone seems to be asking these days for any company private or public is this an AI winner or an AI loser?
And this is a very important question to answer. Obviously if you care about the long term you got to be on the right side of AI.
Yes. So what's that mean? To me it means that you have to be in a place where as the model capabilities improve and come online, you are getting better as a company. It's that simple. And so my advice to everybody is make sure that that is true for your company.
How does AI play into Figma's business and Figma's product? I guess let's hear the answer to that question.
Yeah. For Figma. One of the products we have right now that it's a pure AI product in many ways is Figma make which is our basically prompt to working app product. We see it used for prototyping use cases by designers to make it so they can go explore prototypes that are more interactive. We see it used for people that are shipping websites or web apps publicly and even internal tools use cases. And Figma make is fascinating because there's so much that we can do on the application level to make it better all the time. And also yeah, you get a new model in there that's got better functionality more power and it makes the product better, like literally we see that with all the model releases.
Overall for our entire ecosystem. I think that we've publicly said about how we're introducing prompting in Figma design. That's still a work in progress. We're in early alpha stage there. Lots to do. But Figma design and Figma make, those should be two sides of the same coin. You should go back and forth rapidly. Right now, you can copy from Figma Make to Figma Design. You can copy from Figma Design to Figma Make. That's very powerful. You can use the design systems that you've built up in Figma's platform and convert them into a form that you can then use in Figma make. But there's all this room to be more seamless across it and to make it so this all feels very integrated.
And we are working hard on that and figuring out the best way to unify and to make it so that the entire platform is AI native in a way that fits that criteria. And the last thing I'd say is it might actually be true that ironically, design is non-verifiable. There's no way to know other than rigorous debate AB testing is design A or design B for my audience.
And even with AB testing, you could hit local maximums and not the global maximum and you might be missing sort of the forest for the trees.
