All right, afternoon. I'm so excited for this one. I've known Dylan for 15 years now, that's about half his life, and proportion is yours as well, my friend, roughly. And so excited to do this. I think we're doing this for the first time. Yeah, and we thought we'll just have a conversation. I think a lot of people came to us and said what topic are you talking about and we decided we will hang out. He already gave a keynote earlier so I figured it'd be good to be more chill. But also thank you all for having me. It's good to see everybody. It's exciting, so many fans of both Figma and Notion here. So I'm going to take it all the way back. You grew up in Sonoma County, not too far. Not exactly the hotbed for tech. I'd love to just learn like how did you get introduced to tech?
Yeah, I was super interested in computers from a young age, probably like many people here, and didn't really have a way to figure out programming. Adults in my life were amazing, nurturing, but definitely not programmers. And I think first, probably through acting a bit, got a chance to kind of engage with people that were more technical. And then eventually, as I got to sort of later in middle school, high school, got to do more code. Eventually got an internship at O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly Media makes the books with the animals, the woodcut animals on the covers if you've seen those. And they threw a bunch of conferences as well. My friend's dad was the IT guy there, an amazing man, and helped me get inside that ecosystem. And from there I met a lot of people in tech, had a chance to interact with the community of technology in SF and realized that founders that are now like the Auris and DS of the world, those guys are cool and all, but they're not like that smart, you know? I could probably do that at some point. Not because I'm smarter or anything, just that I think the probably the smartest people in our organizations are not us. It's funny how you meet someone who you looked up to and then you hang out with them for 10 minutes and you're like, that's a normal person, I could do that too. So look forward to meeting you all later. But yeah, I also had a chance to do a research assistantship at Microsoft Research with someone who actually is brilliant, Merrie Dana, and she's beyond smart. And then got to intern at LinkedIn, Flipboard. And then the first place we met was actually before all that happened, right after high school. I was itching to get out of my parents' house and so like two days after I graduated from high school, I convinced some folks I'd met through one of the first, I think the first Startup Weekend event in SF that I met over Startup, convinced them to let me live with them for a summer in an exchange where I would do something useful for their startup. But basically, I think I started that summer as the CFO of the startup and ended as the intern.
So you know, I challenge you to have that journey as well if you're a student in the crowd. I still remember that internship so clearly. So this is 2009. We both had a grant from a venture firm, we got an office on Sand Hill Road. Dylan was in, you were living in Berkeley then, right? We were all living in Berkeley and I was, I think I was in Palo Alto, I was like biking up. You were a student? A student. I was a student then. You had like an exceptionally good idea.
I wish it continued. So I was working on, this is 2009, I was working on a texting startup. It was called ZapText where you don't have to type, you just click a button like you know, pass some pre-fixed messages and send it. And we gave up on that idea too early but when we look back I think there was an option where you could actually type and the kids were using it a lot because it was free text messaging. So if I just stayed with it maybe we would have invented like WhatsApp. Yeah, that didn't work out for me but AI was clearly amazing back then as well. And we spent a lot of time together, really not talking too much about our startups or the startups we're working on but just about life and stuff.
That's right. I still remember, you were interning after graduating high school and to me that was just something that took me a while to figure out. Like I don't know what I was doing after graduating high school and here you are interning at a tech startup.
Yeah, I learned a lot but I don't think they got much out of me to be fair. I definitely left with more skills than I joined with but I wish I had had more to offer that summer.
You talked a little bit about the different internships you did and one of the things I think, you know, I've picked up is that I think at each of these internships you were noticing sort of challenges with design and sort of in many ways like how it was happening. Wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, like when, how did this sort of idea shape in your head in terms of how to improve it?
Yeah, I mean the summer that we met the founder was working a lot in Photoshop and then we would use basically a slicing service to make the websites from there. Fast forward to LinkedIn, I was obsessed with the designers on our team, the work they were doing for data visualization, for UI design more generally, and the UX problems that we had at LinkedIn. It was a surprisingly complex product even then, back in 2010. And then from there the next summer I got to work at Flipboard and Flipboard was at the time like the cool hot iPad startup. And they were taking a lot of really interesting ideas from the worlds of magazines and bringing them to digital and trying to create what they called a social magazine, bring your feeds and display it like a magazine that you could flip, and whether it's the animation, the dynamism of that, the full bleed images, layouts, it was just really neat to actually be exposed to these more foundational ideas around typography and design at Flipboard. And they were kind enough to have me back again after that as a design intern or product intern or something, but on the design team. And I entered with very few skills but hopefully did something good. But I think the main thing I look back on the internships is really realizing that there's a lot of problems in the design process and that was input later for Figma.
From there you started Figma with your co-founder Evan. Could you talk a little bit about sort of how did you meet him and how did you two decide to work on this specific problem?
Yeah, backing up there's another cool parallel. While I was at Flipboard, Evan was making a very successful app called Puls that he later sold to LinkedIn. So there was some cool thing there too. Two summers when I was competing with Dylan. I'm glad I don't do that anymore. He was a CEO that was the intern to be clear. I'm most glad we're talking. Sorry, the question was Evan. Yeah, I met Evan at Brown, he was my TA. And one of the most brilliant people I've ever met in my life, still. It was immediately clear. I worked with legendary people at Flipboard, LinkedIn, and Evan was just sort of beyond even against the benchmarks that I had from these awesome internships. And so I really wanted a chance to work with him and work for him.
One of the things when I remember chatting with you about Evan is that I think the word that came up was like the creative partnership you feel with him. Can you take us back to the early days? I'm just curious like how did you all work together, how did you divide up the work, like what was 2012 at Figma look like?
Yeah, I think Evan was excited that I was someone that was willing to do the non-technical stuff but could still code. And I think maybe a week or two into the company we realized that it was completely inefficient for me to code because Evan was just such a multiplier of an engineer over me. I don't think 10x is a reasonable description there, it was more like 100x. I felt a bit insecure about that at the time, but then later on people I really respect joined the company and I realized that they were also insecure around Evan. That made me feel a little better. So yeah, I just did everything that was not engineering. But Evan and I would collaborate on design and product a lot too and he had amazing thoughts on both.
When I joined Notion like six years ago, Ivan used to tell me like so the way we built up is like I'm the interior designer and Simon is the architect. And so I used to wonder, so what am I? Like I might be the contractor. Had many, many different roles and many different hats. Yeah, but it's so fun to, I mean, I think you all, you, the two of you all started at hackathons before that, right? So you actually had worked with each other on different projects leading up to Figma. I guess reflecting back, was there a moment or challenge that you all sort of dealt with together that really profoundly shaped your partnership with him or just the direction of Figma?
I mean I think that over the course of the company's lifespan there's so many things that happen that are just super intense. In the early days, absolutely, there are times where we lacked direction or there were moments of adversity that are defining moments for anyone in the room to stare existentialism in the face or to have a really hard situation that you just don't know how to overcome and figure it out. So yeah, I mean there's sort of so many times that we both were like in the room and going, ah, [__], and you know eventually that's like a very catalyzing event.
I just realized we had some photos that I completely forgot to click. So I'm just going to go through. This was Dylan in the early days, bigger robotics. Heck yeah. And then this is Dylan with Evan and Jessica. Jessica was an amazing early engineer on our team as well. Have you think over the years, like one of the things I feel is like the challenges don't get any easier, they get harder, I think. But you get better at dealing with them. Like how do you think that?
