Welcome to Bos to the Future, a podcast I started so that we could get a little deeper on a few topics because so often I find in our industry these conversations can be very surface deep and very broad. I am thrilled to be joined today with Dylan Field, the CEO and co-founder of Figma, a company he started when he was 19 years old. Now 13 years later, it's really the de facto design standard in our industry. You have a hugely impressive bio. I'm not going to get into it because I find people can go look it up. What do you think is the most important thing for people to know about you?
I really like the pursuit of craft and just finding it in different places and trying to figure out what the future holds, understanding where I get things right, where I get things wrong. So yeah, that's why I was excited to come on too.
Well, I'm so glad you did. I think it's funny that the audience will get from that a thing that everyone about you will know, which is you're incredibly humble about your approach to the world, and it shows in the work, the curiosity you approach everything with. We were just before this, we started rolling, I wish we'd been rolling already, we're talking about data centers in space and how they're going to manage the thermal energy in these environments. Every conversation I've ever had with you, tremendous amount of curiosity and also kind of optimism about where things can go if we design them carefully. You know, it's such an interesting thing to think about Figma. When you started this company, the world, certainly our industry, kind of considered the space you were in to have been, if not solved, at least fully colonized, right? There's a set of tools. There was Adobe. It was very established. A lot of times when you see these big shifts from an incumbent to an upstart, it's accompanied by a structural shift. What do you think it was that? And again, not that you're entirely competitive, obviously there's a lot of ways in which these tools all work together, and it's a kind of tremendous mélange, but you found a niche that very few people saw and have grown from that. I'm kind of curious to hear, and this is a prelude to a question about AI, kind of curious to hear your retrospective. What was it that you saw that maybe everyone else didn't see at the time that allowed you to get to where things are today?
Yeah. I'm curious where the prelude goes. So yeah, we'll get there next, I guess. I think that it started with my co-founder actually, so I got to give him all the credit. Really having an insight about WebGL, a WebGL ability to use the GPU on your computer in your browser. WebGPU is the successor technology. And Evan was really deep on WebGL very early, had shown that you could actually use it for real things. Now, showing that you could use it for a real big production application, that was different. We had to test that out. But then it was a question of, okay, if we're going to go into WebGL, and by the way, I was advocating for drones in 2011. Evan shut that down fast. Also very WebGL.
Two good ideas, by the way.
Yeah. Well, I think drones would have actually been too early. So, yeah, he was right. But for WebGL, I think the main question was, okay, where do we go with it? Ironically, I'd been interning at Flipboard the summer before on the design team and the summer before that as a sort of engineer data analyst type person, building recommendation engines and doing some old school ML. And with Flipboard, we were using a combination of tools, but mostly Adobe Fireworks, which was Macromedia Fireworks originally. That's right. And got acquired. I left Flipboard, started working on Figma. We started exploring all this stuff that was really cool, computational photography, but it was basically get 85% of the way there until we had deep learning and couldn't get all the way there, right? And eventually we said, okay, we got to ship something for real. It's been too long of making demos. And we started to really focus in on first photo editing in the browser. At some point, like wait a second, everyone's going to take photos on their phone. Why are we doing this in the browser if it's not supportive of RAW? And then Adobe actually killed Fireworks, right? And at that point I was like, well, this is a good starting point. We can go build out from there into other places. And at the time it was interesting because we were thinking it'd be all these other creative tools, very much in the Adobe platform world. What actually ended up happening is we ended up building into the product design development workflow. And so I think it was like we had two things wrong. First, we underestimated how big the market could get. We had an instinct that design and the number of designers and the amount of software being designed and the value of design, it was all growing at a potential rate, and we really couldn't back it up with data though. The Bureau of Labor Statistics had 250,000 designers in the world. That's not a big market. And we had a sense that people were hiring more, but it was just these small local examples. It wasn't like we had done some broad research survey.
You didn't hire McKinsey to come in and check it.
Yeah, we're already freaking out about our $3,000 or whatever it was for rent in Palo Alto. Maybe a little less than that. But anyway, that instinct turned out to be not just right, but really right. And the way that design hiring grew over the next decade ahead was wild. And also I think the instinct of WebGL led us to okay, cloud, and the instinct of collaboration, just like the native primitives we were used to totally when it came to multiplayer games, online communities, and Google Docs, and Wave, which I was a big fan of and unfortunately died way too soon. All those inputs that we've had through our lives, we came from that perspective made us go, oh yeah, multiplayer could make a lot of sense here. We don't know exactly how it'll be used, but that's native to the browser. It's probably something we'll have to do.
And then that also unlocked a lot of possibility.
There's so much there. It's actually worth getting into it. Three things that stand out. One that's interesting is how many pieces of the future you and Evan were thinking through that would eventually come to pass. Computational photography obviously had a tremendous rise and has hit unbelievable levels now. Drones have this huge arc. Even inside the design space, a bunch of pieces. But timing is everything. You point about Wave and a bunch of other pieces. There's quite a few people who've come in and tried to do these things in one way or another and probably did a good job, but the market wasn't ready for them. And there was this explosion of design that happened. You know, when we started early at Meta, Aaron Sittig and Cleo Quervo, our first designers, were kind of our only designers for a long time. And then Chad joined, a few other people, but it was a small, incredibly small team. Julie, of course, small, highly leveraged team. And you wanted to get time with them. That was gold, because they could unlock a huge amount. You could work for hours and hours if you could get a little bit of a vision from them. And at some point everyone figured out we should hire more. That seems like a good idea. I remember so vividly when we did get to the point where we had so many designers that actually the workflow, the collaborative workflow was a problem. And so you had people like Alex Ro going in and doing... and Figma didn't exist yet. Shout out to Dreamweaver, my first one before Fireworks. Shout out to early Macromedia Dreamweaver work when I was a teenager, really incredible. We started building these hacking together internal collab tools. Pixel Cloud. Remember that? Lee Byron was the dude. We looked at that. We're like, whoa. Actually didn't look at it because we couldn't see it, but we kept hearing about it. We kept talking about how everyone we talked to about it outside of Meta or Facebook then inside of Facebook, everyone's like, Pixel Cloud. So my point being, it's interesting to think about how much timing plays these important roles. You can have all the right ideas, but the timing also has to be right. And part of it again, in such a humble way of bringing it, you guys really executed beloved tools for a community that's frankly very tough on its tools. Like any community in the arts, photographers, painters, they have strong opinions about the tools that they're using and why they're using them and how they should be used. And to some degree, it's the highest calling inside of these disciplines to be the tool manufacturer. People like to have a relationship with the person making the tools. And you guys really built a suite of tools that very quickly took over. And so I think yeah, you're right. The internet native piece is a huge part of it too. So you're using experience from multiplayer gaming and these other online movements and thinking about how that affects tools development.
Yeah, I mean, I was playing Neopets a lot as a kid, so the idea of a community online that you could go interact with, or from World of Warcraft, or using other tools in multiplayer, absolutely. It just kind of for me and Evan, I think it made intuitive sense. Then we went to the market and everyone was very skeptical. I mean, it was like really I think one or two out of a hundred people we talked with actually leaned in and said that would be awesome. Everyone else was like, huh? Why would I want that? It was against the mental model, it wasn't their flow, they've been trained on, it wasn't what they've been doing professionally. And I remember the first two folks that really gave us a heck yes on it were Tim Vanam and Belinda Pino because they were doing pair design at Dropbox. So after leaving Facebook, went to Dropbox, hired both of them. That's right. And they're working together side by side and they're like, yeah, of course we want multiplayer. We're already doing it. That's awesome. They're the only ones. It's funny. And we launched and people basically were totally averse to the idea. I've said it many times, but I remember back for the comments for our first launch post, and some people were like, is this the future of design? I'm changing careers. Oh no. A camel is a horse designed by committee. Oh my goodness. But one of the engineers on our team, John SM, he always used to say, look, if you're getting a lot of love and a lot of hate, that's a good thing. Because that means that you can maybe take the haters and turn them into lovers and evangelists and make them advocates for you, and you just got to solve their problems. And then actually there's a designer who is quite amazing and he was having some fun on the internet. He was kind of trolling a little bit and he's like, oh, multiplayer, let's have a multiplayer party. And so he set up a Figma doc and everyone joined it making fun of us and did it together. They're making memes, they're drawing, they're doing whatever, and it went on for like three days. And we were just trying to make sure the servers don't melt. We never anticipated this much load on a single file. And it was this weird moment of people are making fun of the thing that they're using. And it's like, wait a second. They're introducing themselves to the use case, and I'm pretty sure this is really positive even though the tone is super patronizing. They're proving the point.
This happens so often in our space. Reminds me of News Feed when everyone hated News Feed but they were using the News Feed to find out that everyone hated News Feed. Exactly. The system works. It is such a powerful example because the conviction that you guys had, you're trying this new thing, people come in. The worst response you can get is no response. You would definitely rather have people debating you, maybe even somewhat viciously online, than just the news passes without comment.
Exactly. The worst outcome you can have is just no one cares. That's the thing you don't want to have happen.
Yeah. No, I think that's really true.
Yeah. I think the lesson I kind of extracted from it, especially with hindsight, at the time it was just like we got to make sure people know what we're doing. But now I look back and I'm like, oh, okay. We had a really clear point of view. And I think that's one of the most important things now. If you want to stand out, you have to have that point of view.
Yeah, in addition to craft and everything else. And when you do, you're going to have people who don't like it because your point of view, by definition of being interesting, can't be consensus. It can't be the thing that people already expect. Otherwise you wouldn't be creating any disproportionate value. So to some degree, you had these macro trends, then you're internet native in a way that I think was unexpected. You identified a key technology that you know, WebGL was kind of made fun of at the time when everyone was getting deep into that. That was like a technology, oh, what are we going to do, games in the browser? All this kind of stuff. And so you identified the key technology that was going to unlock that thing. But then you're absolutely right, the macro shifts, software engineering had already happened. We knew software was eating the world. Nobody drew the natural conclusion: if software's eating the world, someone has to design that software.
Well, and also if it were moving to the cloud, you now have instead of managed servers for most people, you've got AWS. And if you don't have box software, you've got app stores. Developer tooling is getting better. It's like the value is actually moving up the stack. And it's all about how do you make great software? And ironically, given there were very few designers at Facebook at the time, experiences like Facebook, Gmail, these good consumer experiences were starting to come into play. And expectations were changing. So it's like, wait a second, I'm going home and I'm using these products and they're great. Why isn't all the software I interact with great? And that was also driving the change too.
Yeah. It goes back, we briefly touched on this actually when we spoke on stage at Config, but you go back to Doug Engelbart and you think of him as one of the real pioneers of human interface design, computer mouse, all these different pieces. And he had this construct that he wanted humans, he actually didn't want the interface to be easy to use. He wanted the interface to be incredibly powerful and he wanted to train humans for dozens and dozens of hours to become capable of using the full power of the machine. And we didn't do that. That's not the path we took, and it's not that that path would have ever worked. Going and taking every human being and putting them through hundreds of hours of rigorous training to learn this specific capability, as opposed to what we've chosen to do as a society, which is let us bring this capability to people. There are counter examples of course, a smaller number of people that would go for them, but some people use Dvorak keyboards, the Wacom tablets are not easy to learn. There's plenty of examples of things that are very hard, but then you get some efficiency because of it and power.
Yeah. I'm a Vim wizard, although I don't know why it was so important to my professors that I learned Vim. It's to this day not entirely clear to me. The first time I opened Visual Studio and used that was my senior year. We had gotten, because we were students, a license to use Visual Studio and we were doing a web services thing. And I was honest to God outraged at my entire education to that point when the only editor I was allowed to use was Emacs or Vim. And I was like, I could have been tab completing this whole time. Are you kidding me? You see the drop down of all the objects. This is crazy.
This is exactly the transition I was hoping for. Because here we are, arguably poised for another shift, and it affects all of these pieces we've talked about. AI has this very interesting last mile capability to bring functionality to consumers where, hey, set aside Vim, even whatever complexities exist inside of Microsoft Word and formatting documents correctly, a bunch of these things that are still kind of arcane that the everyday consumer comes into interface with. Small aside, I can't help myself. You know that meme recently, the best meme of all time, where the woman is organizing her furniture and moves the coffee table one centimeter and the entire room is upside down, and it's like formatting documents in Word. The reason that became a widely popular meme is because every human has come across this, and it seems like, we know as computer scientists why layout is a hard problem. We understand why layout is a hard problem, and also that's totally insane. Any reasonable software would not do that thing. So I think of this all the time. AI stands to be this interesting bridge to unlock the full capability of the machine without causing the user to have to do elaborate things. They may not sometimes still benefit from it to your point, but they don't have to do it to unlock the full power. It also feels like a macro curve in the same way that the internet was this macro curve and social collaboration was its macro curve that you guys were riding. It's a technology enabler. It's a kind of crazy curve. So we've talked about the 13 years of past. Where do you see it going forward?
I think first of all, the exponential curve we're on, the reason we're talking about data centers in space was because you're saying, oh man, if we keep going four or five years from now, we'll be using all the power of a sun or multiple suns. That's right. If it's like we have to get to Alpha Centauri in order to build another Dyson sphere. That's right. Of course, there'll also be tons of research improvements along the way, new architectures that are more efficient, but at the same time, there's obviously some ceiling of power that could be consumed. And so I think it's unclear to me exactly where things tap out a bit. I think the next year or two, that exponential on the power consumption side is clear. On the progress side, is it possible we'll hit a wall somewhere or start to see diminishing returns? You probably know better than I do. But I think that even with today's technology, it is incredible what can be done. And that's applied to language, to images, to media. And I think that's just obviously the start. There's so many more domains to apply it to. There's so much that you can do even just by prompting. If you're really good at prompting, you can actually do incredible stuff that others are completely wowed by. That's just literally not even doing post-training or fine-tuning. It's just a good prompt. And then when you get into actually, okay, what will be the application of all this? You start to get to a world where not only is there more efficiency on all sorts of tasks that are really laborious and burdensome, the drudgery right now. But I think you also go so much further in terms of what people can make, what they can create, the systems that they can cause to exist in the world, the agency that any individual has. And I think what's critical is the mindset of it can't be a crutch. It's so easy, especially as the systems get really good. I'm always reminded of this dinner I was at with a family that are sort of family friends and their neighbor. I was at this dinner, two parents, two teens, and the son was talking about how he uses AI to basically help a lot with his homework. By that I mean it's mostly writing it for him. Mostly the homework. And then the daughter's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have it drill me on problem sets so I can be really prepared for my exam. I think it really encapsulates the difference in one dinner table. You've got both sides of it. And I'm just like, I think this is literally the dichotomy of how people will use AI. If you're using it as a crutch, I don't think you're using it to max potential. What you should be doing is trying to figure out how it could be a source of inspiration, a way to actually think further, to learn more. And with that, you can go so many places.
Yes. So you end up with a stratification where for some people you can get the minimum viable bar faster. And that's all they were going to do anyways. They're just getting there faster. The minimum viable bar doesn't necessarily change, but the effort required to get there does. But for the other people, it raises the actual ceiling. The ceiling goes up because they can do more. It's interesting. We talked a little bit about the market for designers growing so much. It has two nice properties, of course. One of which is you got a bigger customer base to appeal to. The second one is the new ones are more likely to adopt the new tools. They're not dogmatically attached to the old tools, and there's a disruptive force there. But there's been this interesting trend as well, kind of interdisciplinary work. So when I was early at Meta, when it was like I knew I wasn't going to design the feature, we certainly had some very design-oriented engineers, Jerry Morgan, Stern, Eddie, and a few others, but we really wanted to have Aaron say this was good, you really wanted to have the state of approval to feel really great about it. But over time, because I worked with them for so long, I started to gain a greater instinct in the space of design and be able to get a lot further on my own. And likewise, that was a generation of designers where they really would do basic coding because they really understood that. And at the time, interactive design tools were pretty important. And also you took on Quartz Composer, turned to Studio, and that was a really interesting thing to be pushing on. And also investments people forget, like Paper for example. Which I thought, you play with it and it was like this is an alien interface from the future, and it became, I mean what Mike Matas was doing there was just amazing. And that became, while Paper itself didn't proliferate as such, a lot of those design pieces both at our company and other companies became a stake in the ground. It was like this is the future. What this could be. So I think one of my concepts here is that things get more interdisciplinary over time. And so you had designers who were coding, you had coders who are starting to design, and that seems like it's accelerating a lot. And the LLMs help with that because it's a lot easier for me to feel like I'm getting inside of an iterative distance of a credible design with the help of a model. And I really see that a lot in how I've approached working places like Figma. There's some other new kind of fun companies like Korea and a few others that do different pieces. And I think it's pretty interesting. I'm curious for you, is this a threat? Is it an opportunity? Is the bigger market a lot more people playing the game and that's cool? There's also kind of a muddling of who the market was before. How do you guys look at the growth of people for whom these tools are relevant?
Yeah. I think like we both saw AI coming. And well before ChatGPT, I was in my head. Totally. And I'm like, okay, is this a 10x, 100x for Figma? Is it a 1/10th, 1/100th? Like which direction is it headed? And I think where I got to eventually is just the framework has to be okay. As the models get better and as what you can do with the models gets better, you have to get better too. And that's the basic rule. And so if there's some place in the business where that's not true or could not be true, if model capabilities improve, you have to fix it. And so, I think though that it's really exciting if people can get their ideas out. I mean, that's like the entire premise we started with. That's the point of Figma, right? Bret Victor was a huge inspiration. And one of the things he said was that when an idea goes undiscovered or falls by the wayside because someone can't bring it to life, that's a moral wrong. And I really thought that was an interesting proposition. And now we're in a world where you can go from imagination to something being real very quickly. And you can have your idea evaluated on its merits rather than, okay, does it meet the visual style that we're going for. That does not mean that your output is going to be the thing that you're going to want to ship. If anything, the role of designer is greater because again, going back to the start, the thesis for the last decade for us has been value moving up the stack. Design matters more. That was the thesis before AI. That's the thesis now with AI too. And I think it's so true. And you go look at something like Paper where you put that stake in the ground, this is the future, and then the ideas percolated. That caused your products to stand out, right? It made it so that people used them and they were delighted. You had a point of view. You had impeccable visual craft and execution. It was dynamic. And I see that across many of the products that you pushed over time. That attention to detail and making sure it's a great experience.
Yeah. And I think the investment in that craft and that design, that point of view, but also brand, and overall how you show up in the world, it only increases right now because that's how you stand out. And I think it's a really important moment to be leaning into that.
Yeah. And that's across creative disciplines. I think a lot of creatives, rightfully so, have been very spooked by the models getting better. But I think what will end up happening as we look back 10 years from now is that actually the model outputs are really more of a new medium, and you can shape that medium like clay. And you can create, just like in origami studio, you can create these processes to make it so that you're able to transform and mutate these outputs in order to get to an output that you think is really incredible. And the first prompt should not be the final destination. You should push it to the final destination and add your own feedback, add your own thought. And one product we recently acquired, it's called Weevi. We now are calling it Figma Weave. And it's something we're really excited about because it basically creates that node-based workflow in order to make it so you can really chain together different models, different outputs, transform them, and get to the final destination. I think that's really what's needed, that process and creating those pipelines for the future of creativity.
Yeah, there's a bunch of interesting pieces here. First of all, the beauty of founder companies like yours is you have a value system that is the product. The product is an expression of the value system that you and the team who heard you talk about it and decided yes, this is the effort I want to join, are aligned upon. And in that world, it's hard to have a thing be a threat because the thing is either useful or it's not useful. And if it's useful, we're going to use it. And so you're able to not disrupt yourself, that's the wrong word, but to embrace. Oh, this could be scary new technology, but no, we're going to embrace because you have a value system which is a belief in empowering people, building tools that let them achieve the visions that they have. And this is obviously a tool that helps that. You can't question that AI isn't a tool that helps people need less outside help to achieve a vision that they have. Doesn't mean it's free. Doesn't mean it's not work. That's a whole piece there. And you can't fight it. Fighting it is futile because if people want to achieve their vision and you want to be the place that is the best way for them to do it, this is the alignment you have. At the same time, there is a tremendous degree that you show care for the craft, and that is one of the things that people are worried will be lost with AI because craft is not a consensus. It's not the averages of 10 things seen. Craft is very specific. And we think of a well-crafted design object. We love the little details that are not obvious, maybe not even evident, but upon a close inspection, you realize, ah, this curve is because when you grab it here, it's just going to gently guide your hand to the right grip. There are just little pieces that are not immediately evident. I do expect the AI to keep getting better and more interesting. Here's an interesting point, too. My prediction would be that as you get to AI systems, models that can show higher craft, if you think back to the design reviews and product reviews you've been in where you've seen something that's truly opinionated, my guess is that not everyone in the room got it right away. That's right. Instead, it actually created a lot of conversation. Just like Figma and like News Feed and other things. And so I think that as you put out outputs from a model that actually show a high degree of craft, we're not there at all yet. Let's say we get there, I think it actually just elicits more thought from everyone.
The editorial role is the key piece. It's like, hey, of these controversial, high-craft directions, we edit, we decide, and ultimately you get to a place where you're not just seeing one thing that's high craft, you're seeing multiple points in this very complex option space. And then it's your job as a designer or as someone that wants to think about how can I improve the design of my idea, how do I navigate this option space, this latent space that's hyperdimensional, in order to figure out the right places to go and explore and push.
This is one of my constructs for the history of technology and the human species. We keep thinking that we know what we are as a species and then inventing things that do that thing and then finding out actually what we are is this other thing. And it's a dialogue too. We're not fixed. As the tools get better, we evolve in some ways. Modern art was a repercussion of photography putting pressure on painters who were doing realistic looking landscapes. It didn't eliminate those painters. The best ones are still unbelievable and continue to thrive, but a lot of people went in different directions and actually we found an entire new way of expressing emotion and energy and thought, and it was tremendously fascinating. Either way, it was something that people got excited about because it was newer.
Yeah. And if you think about art right now, I think actually there's a chance that the reactions to AI and the ability to output things and not be able to distinguish exactly when it was prompted versus when it was crafted, in the physical realm of art, I think it'll lead to new art movements that we have not leaned into historically, natural materials, whether it be living materials like wood, or for example, a friend that's doing a lot of work with wool, stuff that's sculptural. Those are the things that I think people start leaning into more. There's also always the reaction to what's going on and what people are going to seek and the novelty. And I think that's going to be really fun in the realm of design because the creativity explosion we're going to see, we've been in this world of Swiss minimalism for so long. I'm fine with Swiss minimalism. I think it has its place, but should all of software be Swiss minimalism? That seems intuitively wrong. And I think back to the Flash era of the internet and how much rampant creativity there was. People trying all these things, GeoCities, man, just max it out. But there's also the connotation from GeoCities or the Flash era of, oh yeah, my computer crashed or it was actually not high craft. What if you had high craft and the explosion of creativity? This could be an amazing era ahead.
Yeah. It is interesting. I've seen more and more of that movement online. I'm loving it. Like, hey, what about maximalist software design? What if we just went, this thing can do so much, what if we just went for it? I really like that idea. And this is my kind of about dialogue exactly. It's not a static thing. Once you introduce a new media, and I think AI art is going to come to be in its own media type. There's a reaction to it, and people rebalance it, and they find new and different ways to create, and the audiences want to continue to find new and different things. At some point, a thing that becomes readily present collapses on its own weight, and we seek the craft at the edge. And there's always an edge. You're always pushing it. That's the nature of artists. It's the nature of design and creativity in general, engineering, I mean it's all of it. What are the things that you see as unchanged? So in the current moment, it does feel like everything is askew and generative AI is going to eat everything. And we talked a little bit about some of these pieces of the intention and the craft and the expression. Those things don't change maybe, but as a what are the pieces of the workflows that you're seeing where it's like there's just no shortcut right now? There's no way out of this piece. AI isn't coming to save you.
Yeah. I mean, I guess maybe I'll build up to it. If you kind of think about just what is unchanging from a human perspective first. We've had how many millennia of evolution to get here. A good thing for Meta. What I think we're going to still be seeking is social connection. I think so. That's right. I sure hope so. At least. That not everyone's just talking all the time, that satiates them. I think that, look, Farmville was something that went rampant on Facebook at some point. But people had a sort of antibody reaction to that, right? It didn't take over their life. And maybe these feed tweaks help too. A little bit. A little calm, a little comfort. But I think that people will be seeking social connection, that'll matter. And then I think about just what does it mean to be human? You're looking to make some impact on the world. Whether it be a small scale, large scale, any kind is fine. It could be just helping people in your local community. But that pursuit of craft and that pursuit of creating things I think is intrinsic to being human. And I don't think that stops. And I think that people react to the systems around them by trying to explore the edges. We're a species that likes to explore the frontier. In all domains, I believe that will still happen.
Yeah. No, I really agree with you. I kind of think in my head, we get a little bit because there's now a global news structure which we didn't used to have. It can feel hard for people to feel like they're making a difference in a way that it didn't used to. If previously your effective world was your town, there was a construct there that you felt big inside of. But really it is the case, whether you're just raising a family and supporting a family, that's key business. You're going to church, you're going to your local community, and you're supporting whatever. It is interesting how much we let the unbelievable noise of the internet and even AI, as enthusiastic as I am about what I think it will unlock for us as a species, get away from like at the end of the day, we're eating food, we're sleeping, we're creating family units, we like to be entertained. We're crafting society. We're finding out how to spend our time. And those pieces are the evergreen fonts of all the value. You can't create value in any other way than those ways. There's the only known ways to do it. And so we're just approaching those things with different, how can we be more useful? How can we be more entertaining? That's all we can do. I am constantly struck with this. And also the inertia of human society is a real thing. On stage at Config, you and I also talked about new interface designs. We talked about the neural interfaces that we're working on, which are amazing by the way. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I was playing with that beforehand. You were very kind to show it to me a few times in advance, too. And just the advancements that are coming there and the way that you have the haptic feedback, I mean, it literally is something that you take it off and it feels like you're now missing something. It's almost like a prosthetic limb in some way. It's really wild. Well, I applaud your kind words. The check is in the mail, as we say. We got a chance to try the better displays just beforehand, but you've gotten to try quite a few prototypes before that. There's all these new and exciting things. AI is this new exciting thing. Then there's just some rate at which this stuff can infiltrate society. There's just some natural inertia that's very hard to move. So the rate of change of society large, I'm not going to say it's fixed, but there are bandwidth limits to how fast those things change. And so the other thing I think we're afraid of sometimes as a society is rapid change. Change is scary, especially for those of us over the age of 35. But is it the cutoff? That's right. It is. Douglas Adams said it right. Before 25, that's the way the world works. Between 25 and 35, it's a wonderful invention and I might make money off it. After 35, it's an abomination. That's Douglas Adams. And I found it to be, I'm 43 now, I found it to be upsettingly accurate. I have to really fight when a new thing comes up to not be like, I don't need new things. Get this new thing out of here. So perhaps my days as CTO are limited now, but so far I've been able to fight to keep my mind open, but it is actual effort now for me. My point being, there's this inertia in society that has an effect on these things, and we do have time to shape them. So they don't just hit in their final form. They react. And so you create it, and then humans react in the way that humans do, and that creates a second wave that's better than the first wave. So you come in heavy with a Farmville, and you balance it out with other mechanics that give people greater longevity and a greater balance, they feel better out in the long term. And we do take, I'm not going to pretend we don't take missteps as a society, as an industry, as a company, but you adapt to those. And it does feel like we have the ability to adapt. And the people I want guiding our adaptation to AI are very much in your community in Figma. These are people who are absolutely trying to think about the meta machine, the system. They're thinking at the societal level. They're thinking at the individual effect. It is the community of people in our industry that takes on the responsibility for that. And so it's very exciting that you guys are kind of on the cutting edge of this thing because I think that is the community that we need guiding the shape of it.
I couldn't agree more. And I think that if you look forward, my hypothesis is that we're just going to see so many more designer leaders. And at least it's what we need.
Yeah, totally. And I hope designers at large will step up to the challenge.
Yeah, totally. Because whether it be on the societal level, whether it be on the industry company level, in every part of the equation, this is what we need. We need systems thinkers who are really trying to come from a place of values and understanding, okay, how do I shape this future? And for every dystopic scenario that you can come up with, you can come up with an optimistic one. How do we bend that curve of progress towards optimism? That's right. And it's work. It's not free. No one's pretending that it naturally happens. But we just have faith in one another to some degree that causes us to believe that on net, far more of us will bend it in the right direction than not.
And there's an element of faith I think that is at play there. You cannot assume that it just all happens automatically, and it also takes faith to believe in the bad scenarios. And I think that people miss that. Pessimism and optimism are both faith. But you can choose.
That's right. And you can play a role. You can pick up a shovel and you can guide the thing the right way. And also I think that the interface of the future, going back to your original point, and the ways that we'll interact with technology, I'm very, very excited about. I think it's going to look tremendously different in 10, 20 years than it does today. And our original vision as a company is how do you go from imagination to reality, and at some point we narrowed in on make design, and we expanded back out. That's the right one. Age of AI. People get it now. And I think that now we're in a world where we're approaching, okay, I've got a thought in my head and I can get it onto a screen, into the real world. But then how do you get that feedback loop? And eventually we'll get to BCI, non-invasive and invasive interfaces. I know invasive freaks people out understandably, but I think it's going to be a very important part of the tech tree. And I think what we'll see is just an even bigger explosion in what humans can do, and how they can impact and how they can create. And overall, I'm just very, very excited for how we can unlock human potential.
