Dylan Field - CEO of Figma | Podcast | In Good Company | Norges Bank Investment Management

Thank you for having me.

Yes. So, Figma is a platform that helps you go from an idea in your head to a production application in the software space, but also once you ship something, once you ship some software, you want to then market it. And we also help with that too. We help you get your brand out there and make it so you can create more collateral around it. And ultimately, it's not just some linear process where you have an idea and you get to finish product and you're done. Perhaps in the industrial design world, we were talking about that before we started, that's more of what it is, but in software, it's always a loop and you're always iterating and you're learning and you're trying to figure out how do I evolve this thing that I've created with my team and we try to make it very collaborative so designers can bring their entire team in to do that.

We have people that will maybe draw cups or maybe they will market their cups on Figma, but we're not a piece of software for 3D or CAD design. And so that's typically not what people use it for. But I'm always amazed when people will draw 3D assets like a beautiful cup with an amazing shadow and incredible lighting in Figma. Not what it's made for, but people do it. That said, CAD is an entirely different area and we really stick to digital design.

So I think going back a bit and speaking about digital product design, the history of design I think is interesting in the digital realm because for a long time there were very, very few designers. Almost none of them had a traditional art school background or very few did. And many of them randomly found their way into design. Sometimes from engineering, sometimes they were in a band and made a poster. It could come from any different place. But there's a period of time in, for example, 2000, the dot-com era, where the mantra was build it and they will come. And at that point, if you had a designer, which was rare, the sort of role of design was conceived to be what sometimes in America we call lipstick on a pig. You got a pig, but we're going to put some lipstick on it to make it pretty. And it was really about making it aesthetically pleasing, but not thinking about the function, the form, how it works. And that has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. First we got to the 2010 era where you not only have Apple evangelizing design and saying how it works matters, this is why you should buy this iPhone with Steve Jobs championing design. But also you have the advent of consumer applications like Facebook or Gmail and suddenly the expectations rise and at the same time things like AWS cloud computing are starting to pick up and we've moved from a world of managed servers to cloud, from box software to app stores and it's easier than ever to build software as well. Because developer tools are improving. And as all this is happening, what's happening to the distribution? Well, no longer are we in the world of build it and they will come. We're starting to transition out of that into a world where, well, if you build it and you have really great design and really great marketing, then you might have a chance because there's more software and it's not the case anymore that you're building something and it's the only thing like that that exists in the world. Competition is increasing and the value is moving up the stack.

Yeah. So when we started, I painted a pretty broad vision for where we could go, partially because I didn't know exactly where we were going to go. You know, we had a hammer that was WebGL. And I think that there's always this why now for great companies. Something's changed in the world. And the why now is something you can look back on and you can point at one or two or three of them and say this is why this company came to exist at this particular time. And for us, we thought, okay, let's look at technology that's changing. We're computer scientists. My co-founder Evan, he is beyond brilliant. He was my TA at Brown and he had done quite a lot of exploration into WebGL. Evan is not just a 10x better engineer than I am. He's like a 100x better engineer than I am.

Well, I did not call him Jesus. But that was his nickname in middle school was Computer Jesus, or CJ for short. I later learned, I called him Evan. But he is a brilliant man and I was very, very lucky to get to work with him. And I mean, design is some right brain stuff, right? But you have your background also in math and physics. So why is rigor so important here?

We have many. One is keep the simple things simple but make the complex things possible. So in Figma, as with any tool, especially software where you're constantly updating and you're adding more things to respond to the market, we're not talking about like a hammer. We're talking about something that is a complex ecosystem of operations and functionality and you want it to be a staircase where you can take that first step or the second step very easily but then if you keep going you can actually achieve mastery. And that mastery is so important. So we want to make it so that there's a balance between power and simplicity at all times. That balance is extremely hard to achieve. So we have to constantly remind ourselves and our users and our team of this, that we need to make those right trade-offs because approachability is I think a flip side of it, which is you come into Figma. Does it feel like an inviting environment? Are you welcomed or do you go, oh my gosh, this is like stepping into an airplane cockpit. I don't know how to fly. We want it to be that you're welcomed, of course.

So from the start, the community has been critical for Figma. We are so lucky to have an amazing design community around us and they gave us feedback and attention when frankly we had no reason for them to. You know, I would cold email designers that were my heroes at the start of Figma and just ask them to check out this thing I built and they would sit down with me. And I'd get them a coffee and they would give me like an hour-long master class on not just design but advice on how to go build the tool that they wanted.

Well, so many ways. We try to be very tapped into our community.

Well, designers, like I said, come from all backgrounds, but we've got over 80% of our weekly active users outside the United States. And so it's not necessarily like just United States, it's everywhere in the world. And we have Friends of Figma chapters, user groups all over the place too that are community-led. We also try to gather people together in one place every year for our annual user conference, Config. We're free for education. So student communities are extremely important to us because they're the future and they are always teaching us about what we need to go do in order to meet their needs because they're always a little bit ahead of everybody else. But yeah, we also have online forums. We're always trying to monitor and respond and engage on social media and we also do a lot of qualitative and quantitative research and so all that along with just the standard sales process creates dialogue and creates conversation, lets us tap into the headspace of our customers.

Well, I think AI is a force that will change everything, of course, and exactly how much, that's what we're both trying to figure out all the time. But I believe that AI will both lower the floor, make it so that more people can come into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it so that creative professionals, designers will be able to do so much more than they ever could before and truly be able to lean into their craft because I think what AI does is it makes it so that you can explore an entire option space of what you can build, what you can design. And then from that option space, you can sample. You can see what resonates, what you think is great, what you think actually you shouldn't go into. You can use that to figure out a direction and then you can push further in that direction. Whereas if you were going to do it without AI, you could only sample a few points from that option space. AI lets you sample more. So that way you can have more intentionality about the path you choose.

I think it's incredibly important. Going back to the question earlier, design as a differentiator, I believe that is the world we are in and people don't fully appreciate yet. This has been my thesis for the past decade. It's not just an AI thing, but AI accelerates it because we're on an exponential curve of the amount of software in the world right now.

This is a whole podcast in itself. I think that taste is a loop that you're in where you are always trying to develop an understanding of what resonates with you and what doesn't. And based on that, you're trying to create frameworks to figure out what it is that you value, how it connects to your not just aesthetic values, but your personal inner values. And based on that, working to express that in a form that others can consume. And I think it's not just discriminating in terms of I like this, I don't like that, but also taste is an enabler of building amazing things and it is the hardest skill to develop to have good taste, but also it brings richness to your life in a way that I don't think everyone appreciates yet.

On what?

Well, I care a lot about complexity and being able to understand the world. So I think I've got a lot of taste when it comes to framework building, mental models. That applies to design as well. If you can clearly communicate a mental model to a user in a visual form, I think that's a great thing. And not everyone's able to do that properly because if you think about it, if I design the right chair for you, for example, that might not be the right chair for me. You know, we've got different bodies. And perhaps we could create something custom for both of us. And yet there's a reason why we create the same software for everyone. And there's a reason why beyond mass production we lean into how to create the same chair in a bigger run. It's this opportunity to actually apply craft and figure out what is it that you can do to as an expression of yourself put something into the digital or physical world. Does AI have taste? I think AI is still a pattern matching machine. And humans have taste and it's been trained in the data. And so if you can RLHF the right parts of AI, you can emulate taste. But that's only with advanced prompting that you can access it. And so perhaps prompters have taste and can pull it out of this pattern matching machine with a sophisticated large model. But I think that's not the end of the journey. I generally think the first prompt that people do is only the starting point and instead you need to keep going. That could be, you know, we have a product called Figma Make, prompt to working application. And one thing we do with Figma Make is make it so that you can go from the code output and copy it into Figma Design, which is a free form design tool not attached to code. The reason we do that is so that way you can explore in this more open way across a digital canvas that's infinite and you can riff and you can explore in a nonlinear way all sorts of variations to really figure out visually and reason visually about what it is that resonates with you, what feels right, what doesn't feel right, what solves your problems, how do you constraint solve for the different outcomes. And the more that you do that, the more you realize, okay, I have this path but it has this trade-off, I have this path, it has this other trade-off. You don't actually understand that until you see those branching paths of where things can go.

I think that the context that designers have is extremely hard, perhaps impossible to replicate. So, think about yourself. You have a lived context. You have your identity, but also all of your experiences. You have all sorts of things you've interacted with in the physical world across your life. You're part of various cultures that you intersect with and interact with. And you come with mental models informed by the languages that you've learned. And from there you're coming into an experience being used to other experiences. And then the designer's task is to create something for you that also applies to others. And it's a thing of the moment. It is related to the culture of the moment. And it also needs to achieve business goals. It needs to be something that's testable. And based on those tests, you can iterate on it. But you don't want to get to a local max. You want to get to the global max. And I just don't think that AI is very close to doing that task yet. It's definitely not close to the point of getting to where you can actually have AI do deep user research and understand the problems and the needs of the end customer.

So, I went to China in 2016. I've only been there once. Amazing culture, the most hospitality I've ever found in the world. And the people I met were just incredible. You ride the subway there and you look at the way that people use mobile applications and the way they're designed and they're just completely different in the United States. The density of the typography, the bias towards a super app and the way that people are in general interacting with technology there. It's just completely different. So I think the divergence already exists first of all. I think the counter example would be Hollywood where somehow we've got this American export of media that has become a global phenomenon. And even in today's age where more content is being created bottoms up across the world, Hollywood and the sort of American media complex has incredible enormous reach and ability to influence culture. And so I think that perhaps for the lowest common denominator of taste, that's something that is pervasive and more uniform. But I think as you start to go into any given niche, which I think we'll see a lot more of those niches going forward, we already are, then I think that those subcultures create their own aesthetic, their own point of view and sort of their own language and sometimes around what they are valuing and how they see the world.

Yeah, we have seen it continue to grow. And for Figma, I think that the opportunity to help in the B2B context, designers, product managers, anyone adjacent to design, be able to prototype in an easier way as well as get things into production or make an internal app, that is a use case that's just starting. So, I think it's bifurcated. There's a consumer aspect too and we care about that of course. I mean getting people the access to design, their ability to create and express, that's so so important to us. And also I believe that our focus right now and the thing that we are really trying to make sure that we are world class at is more of that B2B side because I think it transfers over the consumer side later on.

Chat is a learning moment for us still. So we are exploring that in the context of FigJam, our whiteboarding, diagramming, brainstorming product. And it's been really cool to see how people are using the context they create in these chatbot sessions in order to then bring into FigJam with our Figma app on ChatGPT and we're learning a lot. It's too early to really give an answer there.

So I think that it's really important that not just our R&D team but the company in general have AI fluency. And this doesn't just mean like cost cutting because I think there's sort of two frameworks people come from when it comes to AI. And I always think back to this dinner I was at maybe nine months ago, 10 months ago with a neighbor. And they have two teenagers, a boy and a girl, both in high school. And the question at the dinner table was, 'How do you use AI?' And the son says, 'Well, I get to hang out with my friends more. I get to work out more. Love AI. It's doing a lot of my homework for me. It's great.' The daughter goes, 'Yeah, it's been really, really helpful. I have used it to generate 3x the problem sets so I can really study for the tests ahead. And it's been amazing as a learning assistant for me.'

Yeah, I'm much more in the like I want to learn as much as possible from everything, but I think it's applicable to companies, too. I'm not saying it's an either or. You can do both. But are you going to be exclusively focused on cost cutting or are you going to look for the new opportunities that AI enables? Well, so I think if you focus in on cost cutting too early, you're just going to slow down the whole process because people don't want to be cut. But I also think that there's an opportunity to make it that people are more productive but also doing their job in a better way.

So you know how many people? You are 1,800 now. So what does it mean for who you hire? You know, I think this is one of the critical debates that the software industry is going through right now is does AI mean that you should hire senior people or middle level or junior or are all the jobs going to go away because AI will replace them all. I've heard that one, the last one, a bunch of times and then it hasn't come true yet. All the people that have said that they continue to hire. So my bias actually is a lot more towards the junior folks. And I think that people that are younger are AI native in a way that folks that are older have to learn. And that doesn't mean that we don't hire a mix. We do. We've always had a mix of seniority levels at Figma. But I think that it is important that people come in first of all knowing that we're pushing full steam ahead into the AI era. So if you have a bias against AI, that's a great dinner table conversation between us, but we're very focused on making sure that we build for this AI age.

I don't have that number off hand.

I would guess about 35, 36.

The pool we're hiring from has only grown wider over time. It's been kind of incredible to see that growth because I think back to the earliest days of Figma and recruiting was so hard.

No, we don't. I made sure that we don't look at degrees as part of the hiring process. So, perhaps there's bias that slips in somewhere, but my point of view is that it shouldn't matter whether you've graduated college or not because coming from my own perspective, I didn't graduate from college. And I think that unfortunately the value of a college degree will be plummeting in terms of external perception, not necessarily the value of the college education. I think that college will be an amazing place if you can afford it. But that said, I think that going back to that dinner table conversation, how do you know that someone actually learned all the things they said they did from their diploma?

It just depends on the dimension you're talking about. The counterfactual is always hard, right? But when you hire, you don't care about what kind of degree they have, whether they are like a doctor or scientist or economist. I mean, how do you... I mean look, we've had one of our first data science hires, for example, he came out of a chemistry PhD.

We look for the skill, right? And one indicator of that skill can be formal education, but also projects you've done, job experiences you've had, the way that you spend your time. These are all things that also indicate. And I think what's most important and something that I'm always pushing for at Figma is how do we find the people that are showing tremendous slope? They're improving at a rapid rate. And if you extrapolate out, yes, it's high beta. There's some risk involved. You don't know if they're going to be A++ or actually they are really junior and this is the ceiling.

I just talk to people about their backgrounds, their history, how they've approached different decisions in life and understand what it is that they value and how they've pushed themselves to grow. And I think that the decisions people make historically and the consistency of that tells you a lot about their growth mindset and the way that they like to level up and how they challenge themselves. So, I always want people with a growth mindset because we're always growing at Figma. We're always encountering new problems. We need people that are adaptable. And I think that, yeah, it's unfortunately such a bias on the human side. This is for all humans to really look at somebody as a point in time and it's just not a very helpful framework. Instead, you want to think about, okay, where have they been and where are they going? And also, if you meet someone two years after you met them the first time, it's another bias to think back and go, okay, my first impression, that is who they are in my mind, and they're always going to be that way. You really need to be able to update. I've certainly been guilty of that and missed the opportunity to work with people that I would have loved to work with because I didn't update fast enough. So, I think that's something I'm hyper aware of too is just making sure that you really do update your priors there.

There are several of us now.

You know, I didn't. I had conviction that I needed to go explore design. And so I had signed up to go work at Flipboard a second time. First time I was a software engineering intern and doing some data science work and recommendation engines, machine learning, very basic machine learning, let me be clear. And then they were willing to have me back and have me on the design team. I had really no formal design background, so I didn't really know why they were open to it, but I was, I didn't want to say no. It was a gift and the chance to work with them for six months. I thought this will inform my studies. Maybe I'll take more classes at RISD, which is across the street from Brown, and perhaps this will help me inform where I want to go with the year and a half left.

It's an incredible place. And I wanted to just make sure I was informing my studies right. And so I decided I'll take a semester off from Brown. I'll graduate, you know, instead of 2013, 2013.5. And at the same time, right before I was about to leave Brown, I started talking with Evan, who later became my co-founder. And he was the smartest person I'd ever encountered. And I had worked with some incredible people in my internships. People that have gone on to start publicly traded companies that were then engineers who had run in the office, run into the office at 2 am, Jarraps, for example. That's who I'm thinking of there, LinkedIn. And I met people that had done things like created Java, the programming language. And at 22, 23 years of age, Evan was up there. He has genius level talent and insight. And I thought, okay, if there's a chance to work with Evan, I will learn more from that than from anything else I can do in my life. This would be the most unique opportunity I could ever have. And so I asked him, would you ever want to think about starting a company? And I was very surprised that he was interested. And from there, we started to explore. And I didn't know if it would converge, but I applied for the Thiel Fellowship just in case. And then as we started to, every weekend talk about ideas, prototype things, pretty quickly I was like, 'Okay, well, whether or not we get the Thiel Fellowship, let's go do this. I have a little bit of savings. Maybe we're going to live on ramen and live in a bad apartment, but we'll make it happen.' And then with the Thiel Fellowship and the ability to actually have that support, $100K over two years, that made it a nice apartment with Whole Foods.

Yeah, so the Thiel Fellowship, I think of it as a way to empower young people to make it so they can go explore ideas and get off of sort of the traditional tracked existence that many folks have earlier in life. And I've really started to frame it in my mind as more of a life accelerant than anything else. I haven't done like a study of it, but I actually think that Thiel Fellows on average get married faster, they have kids faster. They end up in the place that they're going to go anyway, but just on a much quicker pace. So there are Thiel Fellows who dropped out of undergrad, they worked on their own for two years and they actually went back to academia but in a PhD program. They just never did the undergrad thing.

Well, there's 20 per year. It's been going since 2011.

Yeah, that was actually a critical part of the fellowship. The social experience I had after leaving Brown was weird. Like I had my friends back home who were amazing. I grew up in Sonoma County, so it wasn't that far away from Palo Alto where I was living, a few hours away, but they were all on very different tracks trying to figure out their lives and all their lives were going in divergent directions. And I had my friends back at Brown, mostly computer science friends, some that were in the liberal arts as well and sciences, and they were all trying to figure out what's my job after college. I had my friends from Flipboard. They were all trying to figure out their careers. And then I had the Thiel Fellows, and they were all trying to figure out how to build something from nothing. And that was a very different energy. And I think that was really important for me to have that peer group.

They were all a decade older than me or more, and they had very different lives than I did.

Yeah, I was running a company.

Not even 10 then. It was just me and Evan at the start. And it's existential at that point in time. It took us nine months of sort of existential looking into the void and really kind of absurdist thought to figure out what we were doing. We were trying to figure out which direction we go. We've got this hammer of WebGL. What's the nail? And we just kept trying things.

It was August 2012 we started. We launched our closed beta December 2015 and the GA release in October 2016. Didn't start charging till summer 2017.

Oh yeah, of course.

Well, we always had something. The question was, was it good enough?

And were you just a perfectionist? Didn't want to launch until...?

We did have the capital.