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0:02:07 Welcome to First Time Founders. I’m Ed Elson. At the start of 2025, the IPO market felt like it had
0:02:14 frozen in place. Then, slowly, the tide began to turn. By the third quarter, deal flow picked up
0:02:21 dramatically. 23 companies raised nine figures or more, and five made headlines with blockbuster
0:02:26 listings. One of those headlines came from a company whose tools have quietly become essential
0:02:34 to modern digital design. At this point, the company has millions of users. It’s used by 95% of Fortune 500
0:02:40 companies. Its platform is now central to nearly every digital team’s workflow. That company went
0:02:48 public in July, and it is now finding its feet after one of the biggest IPOs of the year. This is my
0:02:55 conversation with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan Field, thank you for joining me on
0:02:59 First Time Founders. Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here and to finally get to meet you.
0:03:06 Absolutely. So, we’re going to get into how you started Figma. Everyone’s been talking about it.
0:03:11 Biggest IPO of the year, really. We’ve been talking a lot about it on our other podcasts,
0:03:16 Profitry Markets. But I want to start with a quote from your founder, Letter.
0:03:22 In the internet boom of the late 90s, the ethos was, build it and they will come. Today, that could not
0:03:28 be further from the truth. It used to be that design was an afterthought. Now, design is more than form
0:03:37 and function. Design is how you win or lose. You are a design company. What is different about the
0:03:42 world today compared to 30 years ago that makes design so important?
0:03:45 I love that you read the founder’s letter, first of all. So, thank you for reading it.
0:03:46 Absolutely.
0:03:53 I put a lot of thought into it. And so, I’ve always been eager to kind of get that reflected back and
0:03:58 love that we’re just diving right into it. Let’s go. It’s certainly been the case for Figma that from
0:04:03 the beginning, we had this intuition that design was becoming more important. I couldn’t put in
0:04:08 the words that I could put in today. And design, I think, started to become this infectant around
0:04:14 software. It started to make us that the expectations for everything increased. And we started to see that
0:04:20 in design hiring. And design ratios, you know, we’re going from like, okay, we got one designer for,
0:04:25 you know, dozens of engineers. And their job is to put lipstick on a pig and make it pretty at the end of
0:04:33 the process to a different sort of shift of mindset into this more Apple philosophy of design is how it
0:04:38 works. And the more people that took on that philosophy, the more people that tried to meet
0:04:45 the market where they wanted to be met, those companies, I think, did so much better. And
0:04:49 people were starting to realize that. And so, they started to hire more designers. We saw this ratio
0:04:54 change tremendously over that time. Suddenly, it was going to, you know, in extreme cases,
0:04:59 like Airbnb, you might have one designer for every two or three engineers, instead of one designer for
0:05:07 every 30 engineers or no designers. And so then, as this wave of design hiring happened, we also saw just
0:05:15 the wave of software increase too. And all this started to come together into a thesis of design is how
0:05:22 you win or lose. And that’s the thesis we held before AI. With AI, it is like, absolutely unequivocally
0:05:24 clear that that is true.
0:05:24 Yes.
0:05:29 Because now that exponential is no longer just like this kind of, oh, it looked flat, now it’s
0:05:35 trending upwards. Is it linear? Is it exponential? We’re trying to tell. It’s going vertical. You know,
0:05:38 now you can create software faster than ever. I’m not saying it’s going to be the best software yet.
0:05:46 But what we do see is more software being created. And as software gets more competitive,
0:05:49 you have to differentiate. How do you differentiate? Well, you need to have a point of view,
0:05:55 first of all. That’s on the product side and the brand. But you also have to have great design,
0:06:02 great user experience. It has to be delightful. It has to be clear. It has to be useful. And I think
0:06:09 that also you need to really be leaning on the brand and marketing and shining there too. It’s not
0:06:13 enough just to have great product design. You have to have great brand design. And you have to communicate
0:06:17 that point of view across all of it in your brand, which stretches across every experience the customer
0:06:18 has with your company.
0:06:27 So you create the company in 2012. Product design becomes more of a thing. And from my understanding,
0:06:32 you didn’t fully release your product until several years after. What were those years,
0:06:37 those first years like? And what was the product that you brought to the world?
0:06:43 My co-founder and I were very excited about exploring WebGL, the ability to use the GPU in your computer
0:06:50 browser. And we really started with technology rather than a problem. And I think that most
0:06:55 companies that do well have some why now. And the why now doesn’t have to be technological. It can be
0:07:00 social. It can be regulatory. You know, there’s any number of things that it can be. Some of them even
0:07:06 have multiple why nows. I think Figma, looking back, we did have multiple why nows. But we thought,
0:07:10 okay, we’re technologists. You know, we’re both studying computer science. Let’s start with tech.
0:07:16 And we looked at all the tech that exists in the world and WebGL stood out. We explored for a while,
0:07:19 tried to figure out, okay, what are we going to do with WebGL? We’ve got our hammer. What’s our nail?
0:07:25 This is not usually when people start a company and have the ethos around. Usually they start with a
0:07:26 problem. People say it’s the opposite.
0:07:30 That’s the way we started. It’s the honest truth. And we explored for quite some time.
0:07:39 And we looked at all sorts of things that you might apply the verb photoshopped to in terms of taking
0:07:43 that kind of verb and distilling into use cases that we thought were going to be interesting for
0:07:46 consumers. Things like face swapping. That was one of the first things we built.
0:07:47 Face swapping.
0:07:52 Yeah. So, you know, it was like 2012 and we could, with Poisson blending, make it so that
0:07:55 you could, we could swap our faces and it looked credible.
0:07:55 Yeah.
0:08:01 Or background removal, um, changing, uh, color gradients dynamically in a scene.
0:08:02 Yeah.
0:08:06 What we found with a lot of this, uh, was basically that the tech wasn’t ready yet.
0:08:11 And we were able to get like 85% of the way there in cases like face swapping, maybe 90,
0:08:15 95% of the way there, but it just wasn’t a hundred percent. And I think it wasn’t until
0:08:18 deep learning that actually we got to the point where, yeah, you can get a hundred percent of
0:08:19 the way there.
0:08:19 Yeah.
0:08:25 So then, um, we explored, okay, we got to ship something, built a photo editor, uh, but it
0:08:31 was in the browser because again, WebGL, that was the hammer and, uh, I’m actually quite
0:08:37 proud of that work. We never shipped it because we decided it wasn’t the thing. Um, but did
0:08:42 all sorts of things that later informed us at Figma. And then we basically said, okay, wait
0:08:49 a second, like photo editing is going to happen on your mobile phone. It is not going to happen
0:08:54 in a web browser and definitely not if we don’t support raw, which is a, an advanced image
0:08:59 format for digital photographers. Why are we building the web browser when the curve
0:09:05 around mobile phone adoption and megapixels, uh, per phone is just up and to the right in
0:09:07 what is probably exponential way as well.
0:09:07 Yeah.
0:09:12 So then we said, okay, we got to back out of this and do something else. And that’s
0:09:17 when we started to pay attention to what is now Figma. So even that starting period, it took
0:09:21 a while. If I had said, let me give ourselves six months and then we’ll make a call. We would
0:09:21 never have Figma today.
0:09:22 Yeah.
0:09:27 past that. Then we were on track and we started to raise money, build a team, but it took a
0:09:33 while. Professional tools are hard to build. They have very complex workflows, a lot of mechanics
0:09:38 that you have to get just right. And so, um, you know, we had an aggressive timeline that
0:09:41 we communicated to people, investors, employees.
0:09:47 We certainly did not hit it. Uh, we were, um, pretty much in the right order of things, but
0:09:53 basically offset by a year or two in each case, you know, my favorite part of it was actually, we
0:09:56 kept putting it in front of designers. Once we got to the point where we had theoretically
0:10:01 met some subset of their needs we thought could get us to market. And there’s entire summer
0:10:06 where I went out and just showed people the tool and they all were intrigued. Uh, but they
0:10:08 all basically said, I just don’t trust it.
0:10:09 Huh?
0:10:13 Like, oh no, what if it’s like the browser element? We bet everything on this. Turns
0:10:19 out it, uh, yeah, those comments all went away when we did a redesign and the visual design
0:10:25 itself, the tool, uh, was not sufficient. And that’s why he didn’t trust it, you know, go
0:10:31 figure that designers want a well-designed tool, uh, visually. So, um, we fixed that and then
0:10:37 we were off to the races truly and, uh, did a closed beta launch in December, 2015, and then
0:10:45 a GA release in October, 2016. And then finally started to price in, uh, mid 2017, uh, which
0:10:49 was almost five years after we started the company. So it took quite a while to get off the ground.
0:10:55 Basically anyone that I know who’s starting a website or creating some app or use it or creating
0:11:02 some sort of digital product, everyone is using Figma. Um, or at least in, in, in my circles,
0:11:11 how did designers, how did people build stuff before? Like what, what were people using before Figma?
0:11:15 Yeah. I mean, it was single player and there’s a culture that I think came out of agency culture
0:11:22 where there’s a lot of like, I’m going to show you three things. Like the first two are not going to
0:11:27 be like just what you want, but the third one, everyone’s going to go, Oh, it’s so good. And then
0:11:33 I’ll go back in my corner and I will do my work and we won’t interact that much because I’m not sure I
0:11:39 want to. And so that’s completely different from the multiplayer experience of Figma. And I think that
0:11:45 cultural shift was real. Like the first comments we got on the launch were, you know, uh, it was
0:11:52 controversial. People basically, uh, said in the launch comments, stuff like, uh, you know, a camel
0:11:57 is a horse designed by committee. They said, if this is the future of design, I’m changing careers,
0:12:02 but also there was a small set of people that loved it and saw that vision of what it could mean to make
0:12:08 multiplayer design in the browser. And with a tool that was high quality and a tool that, um, could
0:12:14 actually really meet their needs and be focused on their use case. What does a single player versus
0:12:20 multiplayer mean? Single player mean, uh, local to your file system. Uh, one person can use it as a
0:12:28 time you export something, an image, send that image over, you got version control issues. You know,
0:12:33 the web forced us to be multiplayer. We didn’t initially try to do multiplayer. We had an instinct that
0:12:38 multiplayer was important, but it was a complex thing to build. And so we thought, okay, let’s not start
0:12:44 there until we hear some validation and no one validated it. Like, I think out of a hundred
0:12:49 people, maybe two people told both of them were sitting next to each other and they were doing this
0:12:57 pair design, uh, sort of workflow. So they uniquely got it. Otherwise people pulled us, uh, this is not what
0:13:02 I want. Like, why would I want to interact with all these people? Yeah. More stakeholders. I think that’s bad.
0:13:08 And so, uh, we did initially start there, but we got there because we were forced to,
0:13:15 if I have, you know, Figma and I’ve got a tab and you’ve got the same tab open and then I make an
0:13:20 edit and your tab reloads and you make an edit and my tab reloads, it’s a terrible user experience.
0:13:25 So as soon as we started to get to the point where it was, um, closer to production and
0:13:32 we’re doing that on the team, we knew we had to go build it. And the benefits were tremendous,
0:13:38 not only the ability for more people to be in the canvas at the same time, just like a Google doc,
0:13:41 but also a single source of truth. Your versioning problem goes away.
0:13:48 Okay. Instead of, you know, V2 underscore three, five, final, final three, you know,
0:13:54 you now have just a document, a space to go to. And it was also interesting, the behavioral change
0:13:59 over time as people kind of got used to this world because they started to treat Figma like a space.
0:14:06 And that was fascinating. Like Slack went down one day during COVID. And, um, we started to see folks
0:14:12 basically putting text boxes in a Figma canvas in order to go back and forth and chat. And we’re
0:14:18 like, this is not what we built Figma for, but there’s something here. And so that led us to FigJam,
0:14:24 which is our, uh, way to basically brainstorm, ideate whiteboard diagram. And it’s a simpler product.
0:14:29 It’s really for that use case, but with it, we tried to incorporate concepts that were really
0:14:34 speaking to that idea of how do you create a space for people? It’s similar to Google docs. I think that’s
0:14:40 a good comparison. It’s like, we used to sort of write up a doc, you save it, you send it off.
0:14:44 I mean, before that we would print it out and someone would put notes and edit it with a pen,
0:14:48 and then you go through it again. And then there’s just this great idea where it’s like,
0:14:53 let’s just put it on a single page and let’s all just jump in the doc and we can comment on things
0:14:58 and tag things. And that’s basically what Figma is doing from a product and web design perspective.
0:15:07 Um, and it’s been like this unbelievable success. Now, when I think about who you’re up against,
0:15:16 the first name that comes to mind is Adobe. I mean, Adobe is and has been the giant in digital
0:15:24 design for many, many years. Um, and it’s almost like, or at least from a consumer perspective,
0:15:29 it seems as if they have had historically almost a monopoly. You are the first company that has
0:15:36 really eaten into that and at least presented yourself as a real competitor to Adobe. How did
0:15:44 you do that? Or it sounds like maybe you’ll disagree with that characterization. Um, but why,
0:15:48 how did you get to this point where I’m saying the word Figma in the same sentence as Adobe?
0:15:53 We saw ourselves as, uh, going up against Adobe in the earliest days of Figma for sure.
0:16:01 And over time, what we found was that actually designers, uh, they’re our core audience. The
0:16:08 core thing we do is make software for product designers. They work with teams and multiplayer
0:16:14 shows that even more in terms of those workflows. And if their teammates, the people around the designers
0:16:20 are not successful, the designers are not successful. So that led us to go and both go
0:16:25 sort of upstream in the workflow and downstream to things like FigJam for ideation brainstorming to
0:16:30 Figma slides for alignment, but also downstream in the product design development workflow into,
0:16:37 okay, how do we go and make it so that developer, for example, can take the assets in Figma design
0:16:42 and translate them to code in the most effective, efficient way that they can and save time.
0:16:50 And as we’ve kind of mapped out that process, we found ourselves building for anyone that wanted to go
0:16:59 from idea to a polished application that they can deploy and get into production. But it was interesting
0:17:04 because I think we thought of, okay, with small market for product designers, web designers,
0:17:10 fear of labor statistics that it was 250,000 people at the time when we started Figma. Uh, we thought,
0:17:14 okay, this is not going to be our long-term market. It’s growing. We don’t know how much, but
0:17:18 you know, uh, we’ll have to go into other use cases around creative tools.
0:17:25 Instead, we found ourselves really focused at our core on the product design development workflow and
0:17:30 building software and how to help people build the most well-designed software.
0:17:37 But overall, it’s not like we see Adobe. There’s a period where they tried, but then they sunset the
0:17:42 product and they decided they’re going to focus on their core, which is the creative professional,
0:17:48 and also, I think, compete on the down market. Yeah. And so it’s just a very, two very different
0:17:57 businesses at this point. We’ll be right back.
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0:21:36 Marc Thiessen: We’re back with First Time Founders. Let’s just move to you going public. It’s kind
0:21:40 of fascinating to hear this, those first five years and how messy it really did sound.
0:21:43 Marc Thiessen: It’s always messy. Marc Thiessen: Yes. Marc Thiessen: Every startup is.
0:21:50 Marc Thiessen: And now you are a public company, biggest IPO of the year. We were looking at the IPO
0:21:56 pricing. And we said on our podcast, we were like, this is a buy. It was originally priced at 25.
0:22:02 Then it was repriced at 30. We said it was a buy at 30. Then it was, I think, 33.
0:22:06 Marc Thiessen: 33 years. Marc Thiessen: We said it was a buy. And that’s what it went out at the IPO price.
0:22:14 And then it opens in the market and it’s 85. And then it goes up to 100. And, you know, we thought
0:22:20 that you guys would see a big pop. I didn’t see it being that crazy.
0:22:24 Marc Thiessen: And then it’s really interesting, you know, a lot of our listeners, I’ve heard
0:22:32 people saying like, hey, it’s come down a lot since 100. And I keep wanting to tell me like,
0:22:40 I was saying buy at 33. That’s what I was talking about. The point being, now that you’re a public
0:22:49 company, there is a lot of pressure on you to return value to shareholders. Even I was receiving that
0:22:54 pressure as someone who just talked about the stock. So I could imagine that that would be kind of a
0:22:58 different paradigm where everyone’s watching you. Everyone’s asking questions. People like me asking
0:23:05 you, what do you think of the stock? How do you feel about the pricing? How has that changed your overall
0:23:07 experience as a, as a CEO?
0:23:13 Marc Thiessen: Well, I told the company, uh, before we went public during the IPO, literally on listing
0:23:22 day, uh, before we saw any signals in the market and after, and then also after IPO, and then I just
0:23:29 showed up about it, uh, is look, the number’s going to go up, the number’s going to go down. We do not
0:23:36 control the number. The only thing we’ve got control over is the inputs. And so we have to keep our eye on
0:23:43 the prize and we got to do everything we can to drive those inputs. And we have to take the long-term
0:23:49 view. You know, the irony is, uh, of course that as a public company, you have to report earnings every
0:23:58 quarter. And, uh, I think that one reaction that is to take a quarterly view. Of course, we, we care
0:24:04 about our results and also you have to take the long-term view and the long-term view always has to come
0:24:13 first. And so I spend my energy thinking not about, okay, what does the stock price do on any given day? Some days I
0:24:18 like literally forget to look, uh, because I’m so focused on what we’re trying to do for the long-term.
0:24:23 And, you know, you only get one shower thought a day. There’s a great Paul Graham essay on that.
0:24:30 Your shower thought needs to be on what are the long-term things we can do to make our customers’
0:24:36 lives better. Yeah. Value will follow. There’s the great Bill Walsh quote, which is,
0:24:42 score takes care of itself, which is a very similar dynamic. It’s like if we focus on our inputs, on
0:24:47 driving value, on our fundamentals, the score is going to take care of itself. The stock price is
0:24:56 going to take care of itself. But I could also imagine now as a public company CEO that at the same time,
0:25:04 you kind of take care of the stock price as well as the, the vibe setter, as the leader of the
0:25:11 narrative. And, you know, we talk a lot on our podcast about, um, the narrative versus the numbers.
0:25:15 There’s the numbers that can drive a stock and then there’s the narrative. What do, what do investors
0:25:22 think is happening? Do you feel any pressure? It sounds like you, you don’t want to think too much about,
0:25:27 this is the story we’re telling people. You want to think about, are our numbers good? Are our inputs
0:25:34 high quality? But do you feel a pressure now to, you know, show up on that earnings call and like
0:25:41 capture the imaginations of people to set a narrative that investors are really excited about? Is that
0:25:47 something that you feel is incumbent on you now as a public company CEO?
0:25:51 I think what’s most important, and this is the same perspective I had when we were a private company,
0:25:56 is to make sure that people understand what the company is doing.
0:26:01 yeah. And to make sure that people are educated. And so that’s most of my focus. That’s why I do
0:26:06 demos on earnings calls. Probably so far, maybe at some point I don’t do them. I don’t know. I feel
0:26:11 like I can’t commit to that forever, but the, um, but I like doing that. I like to show people what
0:26:18 are we actually improving? And I think without that, it’s so easy to get lost in sort of whether it be
0:26:26 narrative or numbers or whatever for people. And my advice to anyone who’s like looking at the stock is
0:26:33 understand our company. Yeah. It’s very simple. Like, go read our S1. Go watch the earnings calls.
0:26:39 Uh, go look at our filings. Go look at what we’re doing. Like, that’s how you understand.
0:26:46 Now on narrative, of course, there’s an importance to narrative. This is different than narrative for
0:26:52 markets. This is a narrative for the business. If you don’t have a narrative, uh, about what is going
0:26:55 to occur in the world, you don’t have a vision. Yeah. You don’t have a point of view on where you’re
0:27:01 headed. And so to me, it’s very important to story tell there and to show people and unpack the context
0:27:07 that’s in my head about where we’re headed for our employees, for our customers. And that’s something that,
0:27:12 uh, you know, I feel a lot of pressure on because otherwise we don’t have a North star.
0:27:17 Yeah. And then I think, uh, the, the fundamental question that maybe is related to markets
0:27:22 and is deeper related to strategy. Uh, the question that everyone seems to be asking these days for
0:27:30 any company, private or public, is this an AI winner or an AI loser? Yeah. And, uh, this is a very important
0:27:34 question to answer. Obviously, if you care about the longterm, you gotta be on the right side of AI.
0:27:41 Yes. So what’s that mean? Uh, to me, it means that you have to be in a place where as the model
0:27:49 capabilities improve and come online, you are getting better as a company. It’s that simple. And so my
0:27:51 advice to everybody is make sure that that is true for your company.
0:27:58 How does AI play into Figma’s business and Figma’s product? I guess let’s hear the answer to that question.
0:28:04 Yeah. Well, one of the products we have right now that it’s, you know, a pure AI product in many ways
0:28:12 is Figma make, which is our, uh, basically prompt to working app product. We see it used for prototyping
0:28:19 use cases by designers to make it so that they can go explore prototypes that are more interactive. Uh,
0:28:26 we see it used for people that are shipping websites or web apps publicly and, uh, even internal tools
0:28:32 use cases. And Figma make is, is fascinating because there’s so much that we can do on the application
0:28:38 level to make it better all the time. And also, yeah, you get a new model in there, uh, that’s got better
0:28:44 functionality, more power, and it makes the product better. Like literally we see that with all the
0:28:50 model releases. Yeah. Overall for our entire ecosystem. I think that, you know, we’ve publicly
0:28:54 said about how we’re introducing prompting and Figma design, that’s still a work in progress.
0:29:00 You know, we’re in early alpha stage there, lots to do, but Figma design and Figma make,
0:29:04 you know, those should be two sides of the same coin. You should really go back and forth rapidly.
0:29:08 Right now you can copy from Figma make to Figma design. You can copy from Figma
0:29:13 design to Figma make that’s very powerful. You can use design systems that you’ve built
0:29:17 up in Figma’s platform and convert them into a form that you can then use in Figma make.
0:29:24 But, you know, there’s all this room to be more seamless across it and to make it so this is all
0:29:30 feels very integrated. Yeah. And, um, we are working hard on that and figuring out the best way to
0:29:36 unify and to make it so that, uh, the entire platform is AI native in a way that fits that criteria.
0:29:41 And, um, the last thing I’d say is just, it might actually be true that
0:29:48 ironically, you know, design is non-verifiable. There’s no way to know, uh, other than, you know,
0:29:55 rigorous debate, A/B testing is design A or design B better for my audience.
0:30:01 And even with A/B testing, you could hit local maximums, uh, and not the global maximum.
0:30:05 And you might be missing sort of the forest for the trees.
0:30:05 Yeah.
0:30:11 And so there’s so many different inputs to design, whether it be product design, visual design,
0:30:19 brand design that are just kind of beyond the context that you have, uh, in a tool or in a model.
0:30:23 You know, there’s just sort of like, what is the culture right now?
0:30:27 What’s the system we’re trying to create? What’s the brand we’re going for? What’s the ethos we stand
0:30:32 for? What’s the point of view we have? What are the business constraints? Like I can keep going.
0:30:38 And also what are the flows? What’s the before and after of these states? And how do we want to manage
0:30:43 our complexity? And how do we want to make it so that we’re able to have progressive disclosure?
0:30:48 What’s our philosophy and viewpoint on all of us? And like, this is a lot of context to go gather.
0:30:54 And it should lead to many outputs if you put, give it to an LM. Uh, and I don’t even think it’s
0:31:01 possible right now to give a lot to an LM. But the better that the models get at generative capabilities
0:31:09 that are highly opinionated, I think it’s, um, actually better for the conversation around design.
0:31:14 Because if I show you a very opinionated design, you’ll have a reaction.
0:31:14 Yes.
0:31:17 You’re going to love it. You’re going to hate it, but you’re not going to be neutral.
0:31:22 If I show you a not very opinionated design, you know, something that’s kind of like the average
0:31:26 of averages, you will be more neutral. Like, yeah, it’s all right.
0:31:27 Yeah.
0:31:33 As the craft increases, as the aesthetic increases for these models, as they get better at that,
0:31:37 it’s almost like you’re planting all these different flags in a potential option space.
0:31:42 And it’s your job as a designer, as a team, to go figure out where in that option space to want
0:31:46 to go even deeper, push harder and explore further. Yeah.
0:31:48 And so I think it actually amplifies the role of designers.
0:31:53 It is interesting when you talk about having an opinion. I found that that is
0:32:00 the worst trait of AI right now, is that it’s so good at aggregating, it’s so good at collecting,
0:32:06 it’s got the best memory of all time. But it’s so bad at having an opinion, saying something
0:32:14 interesting, novel, new. Even when I push it, I’m like, you must have an opinion on this subject that
0:32:19 I’m bringing to you. And it says, well, there are both sides, which ultimately leads to,
0:32:27 I imagine, in the design space, bad design. Because as you say, design, you say non-verifiable.
0:32:35 Another word for that would be subjective. It’s about taste. And AI has kind of bad taste. So,
0:32:43 what is AI going to do to design? Is it going to, I mean, the classic question,
0:32:50 replace designers? Or would you say that this space is a little bit more protected in that sense?
0:32:56 If you’re at a company that values design, the opportunities will be even bigger than they are
0:33:01 today. If you’re not at a company that values design, you already have some problems. So that’s
0:33:05 that’s a problem that maybe you should already look at. But every company that wants to win
0:33:13 should value design right now. And again, there are ways to actually prompt models to make them
0:33:19 more opinionated. It’s just that the range with models that are currently released, you can’t get
0:33:26 that far. I think that’ll change. We’ll get to a place where with clever prompting, you’ll be able
0:33:31 to go further on aesthetic. That does not mean it’s the thing you’re going to ship. The more that you
0:33:40 can explore, currently limited by human toil, is, and I’m not saying that’s not enjoyable work for a
0:33:45 lot of people too, but that’s all stuff that limits how much of that option space you can explore.
0:33:49 And it will be on the human to pick which is the right one.
0:33:52 I actually think it’s not just picking. I don’t think it’s a curation role. I think it’s pushing.
0:34:00 And I think you have to explore the option space. You need tools that help you. And then
0:34:05 when you find something that you like, it’s your job then to push and to go way deeper there.
0:34:06 Yeah.
0:34:09 And that’s what’s going to lead you to a truly differentiated
0:34:16 design level of craft and expression. That’s our philosophy across all the products at Figma.
0:34:21 I have a quote from an interview that you did in 2021.
0:34:23 I’m so curious now.
0:34:27 You said, I was not a very good manager when I started Figma.
0:34:28 No, I wasn’t.
0:34:35 I was an intern before that, so I had a lot to learn. What were you bad at from a management perspective?
0:34:43 How have you improved? And now that you’ve improved, what does it take to be a good manager of people?
0:34:50 Management and leadership are different. And you can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa.
0:34:58 For me, I think I’d always, you know, been a leader in terms of leading different initiatives
0:35:06 I’ve been a part of or trying to help whoever was the leader really do their best. And from that,
0:35:11 I kind of came into starting Figma and just thinking I was good to go. But it turns out there’s this whole
0:35:17 new skill set around management that I definitely did not know. And the good news is if you’re a
0:35:23 first-time manager, like it’s all very learnable. It’ll feel like muscle memory eventually, but it’s
0:35:29 knowing where your team is at, building great relationships. The tactics are things like one-on-ones,
0:35:35 creating context, making sure that people know what their goals are, holding them accountable to those
0:35:41 goals, making sure that you’re able to keep good cadences for your team.
0:35:44 And you were bad at all of this.
0:35:45 Oh, for sure.
0:35:54 Yeah, I had no memory. And so I just kind of like, and I think also, you know, you take on VC money,
0:35:59 you’re trying to get this into market. It’s not a market for like ever. By the way,
0:36:05 I want to be clear too, for anyone listening, don’t do what we did. Like if you have any way not to,
0:36:10 go build faster. The best is to get something out rapidly. Like that’s the question I’m always
0:36:14 asking in my product reviews. How do we go faster here? What can we stage? What can we,
0:36:19 what assumptions do we have that we can maybe cut? So please don’t take away that you should take five
0:36:24 years to launch a company. You’ll be dead. Like we are the outlier and from a different time.
0:36:32 Uh, but yeah, I think I was bad at all of it. Uh, what was tremendously helpful was hiring our first
0:36:38 manager. Uh, he came in as director of engineering, his name is Sho. And he was someone that came from
0:36:45 this amazing history of companies who worked at General Magic, uh, Macromedia, Adobe, Medium,
0:36:52 as well as starting his own thing a few times. Deep history and knowledge of our space. Also just a great
0:36:57 human and just like a incredibly smart human, but also deeply empathetic. And yeah, I mean,
0:37:04 he came in and, uh, instantly went, okay, there’s a bunch of stuff to change and improve. And you know,
0:37:10 we talked every day for quite a long time and I learned a ton from him. Uh, and I learned a ton
0:37:14 from the next people we hire that were leaders and managers as well. In general, I think your mindset
0:37:20 has to be hire people you can learn from. One of the biggest traps, the biggest mistakes is sometimes
0:37:26 people try to hire folks that they, uh, will just like look up to them and revere them. I think a lot
0:37:32 of times they, they look for people that might be not as skilled because they feel like there’s some
0:37:38 control aspect there or something. And I think that’s like the worst thing you can do. You need to find
0:37:44 people that will push you further the company for further, uh, that are aligned with you in terms
0:37:53 of where you want to go, but also, uh, they will add new skills and new possibilities to the company,
0:37:57 the organization. Yeah. So that’s what I’m always looking for is ways to level up our team
0:38:04 and people to learn from. I think I can learn from anyone. That’s how I do interviews too. When I’m
0:38:09 on the other side of the table, uh, and I’m asking questions, you’re looking for, can this person teach
0:38:14 me something? Yeah. I mean, my mental test for interview is like, okay, I come out of this learning
0:38:22 something among others, but that’s one of the things that I care about. We’ll be right back.
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0:40:22 So, we’re back with First Time Founders. What are your core strengths, would you say? I mean,
0:40:28 I’m sure there are plenty of companies that have tried to do what you did. And you won,
0:40:34 for lack of a better word. What are you really good at? What did you do differently that you think
0:40:37 other companies didn’t do? Well, first of all, there’s a lot of the story to be written. So,
0:40:45 you know, the bigger the ambition, the more there is to tackle. And that’s definitely my mindset. I
0:40:52 never feel like we’ve won. But I would say that, you know, the first great decision I made was working
0:40:58 with Evan. He was my TA at Brown, smartest guy I knew. And I felt like, okay, if this thing works out,
0:41:03 great. But if it doesn’t, I’ll learn more by working with Evan than doing anything else in the world.
0:41:10 And so, it’s the easiest call. For me, I guess, you know, I have a hard time talking to myself this
0:41:15 way. But curiosity is definitely a strength. I’m always trying to make sure that it stays a strength.
0:41:24 And I love learning about new things, new spaces, patterns. Sometimes you even are teaching people
0:41:29 something and they ask you a question and you give them an answer and you realize, wait a second,
0:41:33 that answer I just gave, like, that applies to the situation I’m in right now.
0:41:36 So, ironically, you can learn by mentoring, too.
0:41:36 Yes.
0:41:43 I think in addition to that, I think that early on in my sort of tech career,
0:41:50 being at O’Reilly Media, which for those who don’t know is they do many things, but they hosted
0:41:56 conferences, they publish technical books. They’re the ones that the animals would cut on the covers.
0:41:59 Their entire business was basically seen around corners and understanding tech trends.
0:42:09 And being able to really project in the future and understand what’s going to happen or what’s sort of the tech tree going forward.
0:42:19 And how we’ll unlock what’s too early, what’s on time, what will be later on, and just the different
0:42:25 stages of technology development and being able to kind of be able to track that in my head and
0:42:28 have, like, global state there. I think that’s a strength.
0:42:35 You do have a history of recognizing what the trend is going to be at a very large level, starting as early as 2012,
0:42:41 when you realize there’s this big problem, which is that design is not good enough on the internet,
0:42:50 on your mobile phone, et cetera. For someone who wants to be better at that, at understanding and predicting
0:42:55 what the future is going to be, what the large trends are going to be, how can we be better at that?
0:43:01 What are some of it? Is that just talent? Or is there a way to kind of coach yourself?
0:43:07 Absolutely. A loop you can be in that’ll help you. It’s very simple. You form hypotheses about the world,
0:43:14 run them down a specific way that is testable, and make sure you kind of set a timeline to it.
0:43:20 And then, yeah, see how things play out. See what happened in the system that did not match your mental
0:43:25 model. Yes. See what happened that did. And when you don’t have a match,
0:43:31 don’t just get discouraged. Like, that’s a learning opportunity. Use any delta to inform
0:43:33 how to enrich your mental model of the world. Yeah.
0:43:39 Or models. You know, the best case is that you actually have many frameworks and you’re able to
0:43:44 try on different ones at different times according to the situation rather than just having one rigid
0:43:50 framework that you see the world through. Who do you look up to? And this could be partial precedent.
0:43:54 Who are your heroes? Who are your role models? Who are the kinds of people that you’re like,
0:43:55 “Yeah, that’s the kind of person I want to be?”
0:44:05 In technology, I think, whether it be Larry or Sergey or Zuck or Satya, Elon, in some ways,
0:44:11 the people that have found a way to kind of bend the world and find a way to create technology that
0:44:18 serves many, many people, like, and do it at scale. You know, you can analyze it from all sorts of
0:44:24 lenses. But yeah, you look at Elon, for example, and plenty of people will say negative things,
0:44:30 but then you look at SpaceX. And SpaceX is an incredibly, incredibly important company.
0:44:33 And what they’ve done there is remarkable.
0:44:42 So do you want to bend the world in that way? Do you feel like you want to shape the world in some
0:44:48 way? I mean, I think of sort of Steve Jobs, who talked a lot about that, the idea that you can
0:44:53 make things just happen. You can shape, if you have an idea for how the world could be, you can actually
0:44:56 just shape it to become that. Do you think about that a lot?
0:45:00 I think that less from like a me perspective and more of an enabling perspective.
0:45:06 So I think that there are unequivocally things that will be good for the world. And you have to
0:45:10 be willing to say that there are things that will be good for the world in order to have this point
0:45:15 of view. People that might come from different moral philosophies will disagree with me on that,
0:45:21 but I’ll put that out there. That’s my starting point, is that you can say, okay, like,
0:45:25 if we cure cancer, for example, that’s good for the world. It’s a harder one to debate.
0:45:29 But if anyone has a debate, I’d like to hear it.
0:45:34 You know, or if we can make it so that more people are able to find meaning,
0:45:41 find joy. That seems good. So I kind of start from, you know, the sort of unequivocally
0:45:47 obvious places. And then from there, I go into, okay, what’s the role I can play to help?
0:45:56 And whether it be Figma, where I’m able to be this amazing musician to create a platform that helps
0:46:04 people achieve their dreams, put food on the table, make it so that our society has better design and
0:46:12 better ways to interact with technology, or be trying to help by investing or by mentoring
0:46:19 next generation founders who, like me, are coming from a background where they didn’t yet have exposure
0:46:24 to business. But now they’re finding themselves in a situation where they can’t just do the technology,
0:46:29 they can’t just do the product and the design. They actually have to go figure out how to go and,
0:46:34 you know, build forward. And if they can’t get the capitalist loop working,
0:46:38 they’re not going to be able to get the scale that will actually transform
0:46:43 the world into a better place, then those are ways that I find that I can have impact is
0:46:44 through that empowerment.
0:46:52 You’ve been massively successful. You’re a first-time founder. What is your advice to founders?
0:46:55 What is your advice to young people who are building their own companies today,
0:46:59 who see the success you’ve had and want to replicate it?
0:47:01 first, don’t try to replicate stuff.
0:47:01 Okay.
0:47:07 Try to understand what it is that you have unique insight on. So, have some self-awareness,
0:47:12 be humble. There’s a lot that you’re going to get punched in the face over. If you don’t have
0:47:19 the humility, you won’t get through it. And be willing to adapt. But also, yeah, I think get started.
0:47:22 If you’re not already on the track and you just got this great idea in your head,
0:47:29 what’s stopping you? If it’s financial, how do you get to the buffer that you need to go thoroughly
0:47:33 explore something? And again, if we’d stopped in six months, that would have been it.
0:47:34 Yeah.
0:47:39 There would have been no Figma. It took at least nine to 12 months before we really
0:47:43 felt like we had the real shot there. So, that space, which was afforded to me through the Teal
0:47:50 Fellowship, I’m very, very grateful for that. That’s an example of, for me, how I had that buffer. I
0:47:55 also had savings that I could dip into from internships. That’s the problem you have to solve first,
0:48:02 is to give yourself that buffer. And then I also just say, there are ironically a lot of ways to go
0:48:07 make businesses that make money. People don’t think that, but it’s actually true. I’m not saying they’re
0:48:16 all going to be like giant scale, but at least in the small scale, there’s a ton. And so, be greedy in
0:48:20 your selection of a problem to work on in the first place. Do not start something that you can’t see
0:48:25 yourself working on in 10, 20 years. I have plenty of friends who’ve done that or are doing that.
0:48:31 And it just inevitably, it leads to burnout. It leads them being kind of negative on the world,
0:48:38 cynical, and you will lose something of yourself if you find yourself in a place where you just don’t
0:48:44 yet have the problem that like gets you excited every day to go work on. You got to find that thing
0:48:48 that just gets you up in the morning every day and you’re so psyched to work on. And you will,
0:48:52 if you project out in the future, that’s not going to change. You’re still so excited
0:48:55 and treat it like a multi-decade journey from the start.
0:49:00 David Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan, this was awesome. Thanks for your time.
0:49:00 Thank you for having me.
0:49:08 David Field: This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research
0:49:13 associates are Dan Shallan and Chris O’Donoghue. And our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for
0:49:17 listening to First Time Founders from ProfG Media. We’ll see you next month with another Founders
0:49:28 story.
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0:02:07 Welcome to First Time Founders. I’m Ed Elson. At the start of 2025, the IPO market felt like it had
0:02:14 frozen in place. Then, slowly, the tide began to turn. By the third quarter, deal flow picked up
0:02:21 dramatically. 23 companies raised nine figures or more, and five made headlines with blockbuster
0:02:26 listings. One of those headlines came from a company whose tools have quietly become essential
0:02:34 to modern digital design. At this point, the company has millions of users. It’s used by 95% of Fortune 500
0:02:40 companies. Its platform is now central to nearly every digital team’s workflow. That company went
0:02:48 public in July, and it is now finding its feet after one of the biggest IPOs of the year. This is my
0:02:55 conversation with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan Field, thank you for joining me on
0:02:59 First Time Founders. Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here and to finally get to meet you.
0:03:06 Absolutely. So, we’re going to get into how you started Figma. Everyone’s been talking about it.
0:03:11 Biggest IPO of the year, really. We’ve been talking a lot about it on our other podcasts,
0:03:16 Profitry Markets. But I want to start with a quote from your founder, Letter.
0:03:22 In the internet boom of the late 90s, the ethos was, build it and they will come. Today, that could not
0:03:28 be further from the truth. It used to be that design was an afterthought. Now, design is more than form
0:03:37 and function. Design is how you win or lose. You are a design company. What is different about the
0:03:42 world today compared to 30 years ago that makes design so important?
0:03:45 I love that you read the founder’s letter, first of all. So, thank you for reading it.
0:03:46 Absolutely.
0:03:53 I put a lot of thought into it. And so, I’ve always been eager to kind of get that reflected back and
0:03:58 love that we’re just diving right into it. Let’s go. It’s certainly been the case for Figma that from
0:04:03 the beginning, we had this intuition that design was becoming more important. I couldn’t put in
0:04:08 the words that I could put in today. And design, I think, started to become this infectant around
0:04:14 software. It started to make us that the expectations for everything increased. And we started to see that
0:04:20 in design hiring. And design ratios, you know, we’re going from like, okay, we got one designer for,
0:04:25 you know, dozens of engineers. And their job is to put lipstick on a pig and make it pretty at the end of
0:04:33 the process to a different sort of shift of mindset into this more Apple philosophy of design is how it
0:04:38 works. And the more people that took on that philosophy, the more people that tried to meet
0:04:45 the market where they wanted to be met, those companies, I think, did so much better. And
0:04:49 people were starting to realize that. And so, they started to hire more designers. We saw this ratio
0:04:54 change tremendously over that time. Suddenly, it was going to, you know, in extreme cases,
0:04:59 like Airbnb, you might have one designer for every two or three engineers, instead of one designer for
0:05:07 every 30 engineers or no designers. And so then, as this wave of design hiring happened, we also saw just
0:05:15 the wave of software increase too. And all this started to come together into a thesis of design is how
0:05:22 you win or lose. And that’s the thesis we held before AI. With AI, it is like, absolutely unequivocally
0:05:24 clear that that is true.
0:05:24 Yes.
0:05:29 Because now that exponential is no longer just like this kind of, oh, it looked flat, now it’s
0:05:35 trending upwards. Is it linear? Is it exponential? We’re trying to tell. It’s going vertical. You know,
0:05:38 now you can create software faster than ever. I’m not saying it’s going to be the best software yet.
0:05:46 But what we do see is more software being created. And as software gets more competitive,
0:05:49 you have to differentiate. How do you differentiate? Well, you need to have a point of view,
0:05:55 first of all. That’s on the product side and the brand. But you also have to have great design,
0:06:02 great user experience. It has to be delightful. It has to be clear. It has to be useful. And I think
0:06:09 that also you need to really be leaning on the brand and marketing and shining there too. It’s not
0:06:13 enough just to have great product design. You have to have great brand design. And you have to communicate
0:06:17 that point of view across all of it in your brand, which stretches across every experience the customer
0:06:18 has with your company.
0:06:27 So you create the company in 2012. Product design becomes more of a thing. And from my understanding,
0:06:32 you didn’t fully release your product until several years after. What were those years,
0:06:37 those first years like? And what was the product that you brought to the world?
0:06:43 My co-founder and I were very excited about exploring WebGL, the ability to use the GPU in your computer
0:06:50 browser. And we really started with technology rather than a problem. And I think that most
0:06:55 companies that do well have some why now. And the why now doesn’t have to be technological. It can be
0:07:00 social. It can be regulatory. You know, there’s any number of things that it can be. Some of them even
0:07:06 have multiple why nows. I think Figma, looking back, we did have multiple why nows. But we thought,
0:07:10 okay, we’re technologists. You know, we’re both studying computer science. Let’s start with tech.
0:07:16 And we looked at all the tech that exists in the world and WebGL stood out. We explored for a while,
0:07:19 tried to figure out, okay, what are we going to do with WebGL? We’ve got our hammer. What’s our nail?
0:07:25 This is not usually when people start a company and have the ethos around. Usually they start with a
0:07:26 problem. People say it’s the opposite.
0:07:30 That’s the way we started. It’s the honest truth. And we explored for quite some time.
0:07:39 And we looked at all sorts of things that you might apply the verb photoshopped to in terms of taking
0:07:43 that kind of verb and distilling into use cases that we thought were going to be interesting for
0:07:46 consumers. Things like face swapping. That was one of the first things we built.
0:07:47 Face swapping.
0:07:52 Yeah. So, you know, it was like 2012 and we could, with Poisson blending, make it so that
0:07:55 you could, we could swap our faces and it looked credible.
0:07:55 Yeah.
0:08:01 Or background removal, um, changing, uh, color gradients dynamically in a scene.
0:08:02 Yeah.
0:08:06 What we found with a lot of this, uh, was basically that the tech wasn’t ready yet.
0:08:11 And we were able to get like 85% of the way there in cases like face swapping, maybe 90,
0:08:15 95% of the way there, but it just wasn’t a hundred percent. And I think it wasn’t until
0:08:18 deep learning that actually we got to the point where, yeah, you can get a hundred percent of
0:08:19 the way there.
0:08:19 Yeah.
0:08:25 So then, um, we explored, okay, we got to ship something, built a photo editor, uh, but it
0:08:31 was in the browser because again, WebGL, that was the hammer and, uh, I’m actually quite
0:08:37 proud of that work. We never shipped it because we decided it wasn’t the thing. Um, but did
0:08:42 all sorts of things that later informed us at Figma. And then we basically said, okay, wait
0:08:49 a second, like photo editing is going to happen on your mobile phone. It is not going to happen
0:08:54 in a web browser and definitely not if we don’t support raw, which is a, an advanced image
0:08:59 format for digital photographers. Why are we building the web browser when the curve
0:09:05 around mobile phone adoption and megapixels, uh, per phone is just up and to the right in
0:09:07 what is probably exponential way as well.
0:09:07 Yeah.
0:09:12 So then we said, okay, we got to back out of this and do something else. And that’s
0:09:17 when we started to pay attention to what is now Figma. So even that starting period, it took
0:09:21 a while. If I had said, let me give ourselves six months and then we’ll make a call. We would
0:09:21 never have Figma today.
0:09:22 Yeah.
0:09:27 past that. Then we were on track and we started to raise money, build a team, but it took a
0:09:33 while. Professional tools are hard to build. They have very complex workflows, a lot of mechanics
0:09:38 that you have to get just right. And so, um, you know, we had an aggressive timeline that
0:09:41 we communicated to people, investors, employees.
0:09:47 We certainly did not hit it. Uh, we were, um, pretty much in the right order of things, but
0:09:53 basically offset by a year or two in each case, you know, my favorite part of it was actually, we
0:09:56 kept putting it in front of designers. Once we got to the point where we had theoretically
0:10:01 met some subset of their needs we thought could get us to market. And there’s entire summer
0:10:06 where I went out and just showed people the tool and they all were intrigued. Uh, but they
0:10:08 all basically said, I just don’t trust it.
0:10:09 Huh?
0:10:13 Like, oh no, what if it’s like the browser element? We bet everything on this. Turns
0:10:19 out it, uh, yeah, those comments all went away when we did a redesign and the visual design
0:10:25 itself, the tool, uh, was not sufficient. And that’s why he didn’t trust it, you know, go
0:10:31 figure that designers want a well-designed tool, uh, visually. So, um, we fixed that and then
0:10:37 we were off to the races truly and, uh, did a closed beta launch in December, 2015, and then
0:10:45 a GA release in October, 2016. And then finally started to price in, uh, mid 2017, uh, which
0:10:49 was almost five years after we started the company. So it took quite a while to get off the ground.
0:10:55 Basically anyone that I know who’s starting a website or creating some app or use it or creating
0:11:02 some sort of digital product, everyone is using Figma. Um, or at least in, in, in my circles,
0:11:11 how did designers, how did people build stuff before? Like what, what were people using before Figma?
0:11:15 Yeah. I mean, it was single player and there’s a culture that I think came out of agency culture
0:11:22 where there’s a lot of like, I’m going to show you three things. Like the first two are not going to
0:11:27 be like just what you want, but the third one, everyone’s going to go, Oh, it’s so good. And then
0:11:33 I’ll go back in my corner and I will do my work and we won’t interact that much because I’m not sure I
0:11:39 want to. And so that’s completely different from the multiplayer experience of Figma. And I think that
0:11:45 cultural shift was real. Like the first comments we got on the launch were, you know, uh, it was
0:11:52 controversial. People basically, uh, said in the launch comments, stuff like, uh, you know, a camel
0:11:57 is a horse designed by committee. They said, if this is the future of design, I’m changing careers,
0:12:02 but also there was a small set of people that loved it and saw that vision of what it could mean to make
0:12:08 multiplayer design in the browser. And with a tool that was high quality and a tool that, um, could
0:12:14 actually really meet their needs and be focused on their use case. What does a single player versus
0:12:20 multiplayer mean? Single player mean, uh, local to your file system. Uh, one person can use it as a
0:12:28 time you export something, an image, send that image over, you got version control issues. You know,
0:12:33 the web forced us to be multiplayer. We didn’t initially try to do multiplayer. We had an instinct that
0:12:38 multiplayer was important, but it was a complex thing to build. And so we thought, okay, let’s not start
0:12:44 there until we hear some validation and no one validated it. Like, I think out of a hundred
0:12:49 people, maybe two people told both of them were sitting next to each other and they were doing this
0:12:57 pair design, uh, sort of workflow. So they uniquely got it. Otherwise people pulled us, uh, this is not what
0:13:02 I want. Like, why would I want to interact with all these people? Yeah. More stakeholders. I think that’s bad.
0:13:08 And so, uh, we did initially start there, but we got there because we were forced to,
0:13:15 if I have, you know, Figma and I’ve got a tab and you’ve got the same tab open and then I make an
0:13:20 edit and your tab reloads and you make an edit and my tab reloads, it’s a terrible user experience.
0:13:25 So as soon as we started to get to the point where it was, um, closer to production and
0:13:32 we’re doing that on the team, we knew we had to go build it. And the benefits were tremendous,
0:13:38 not only the ability for more people to be in the canvas at the same time, just like a Google doc,
0:13:41 but also a single source of truth. Your versioning problem goes away.
0:13:48 Okay. Instead of, you know, V2 underscore three, five, final, final three, you know,
0:13:54 you now have just a document, a space to go to. And it was also interesting, the behavioral change
0:13:59 over time as people kind of got used to this world because they started to treat Figma like a space.
0:14:06 And that was fascinating. Like Slack went down one day during COVID. And, um, we started to see folks
0:14:12 basically putting text boxes in a Figma canvas in order to go back and forth and chat. And we’re
0:14:18 like, this is not what we built Figma for, but there’s something here. And so that led us to FigJam,
0:14:24 which is our, uh, way to basically brainstorm, ideate whiteboard diagram. And it’s a simpler product.
0:14:29 It’s really for that use case, but with it, we tried to incorporate concepts that were really
0:14:34 speaking to that idea of how do you create a space for people? It’s similar to Google docs. I think that’s
0:14:40 a good comparison. It’s like, we used to sort of write up a doc, you save it, you send it off.
0:14:44 I mean, before that we would print it out and someone would put notes and edit it with a pen,
0:14:48 and then you go through it again. And then there’s just this great idea where it’s like,
0:14:53 let’s just put it on a single page and let’s all just jump in the doc and we can comment on things
0:14:58 and tag things. And that’s basically what Figma is doing from a product and web design perspective.
0:15:07 Um, and it’s been like this unbelievable success. Now, when I think about who you’re up against,
0:15:16 the first name that comes to mind is Adobe. I mean, Adobe is and has been the giant in digital
0:15:24 design for many, many years. Um, and it’s almost like, or at least from a consumer perspective,
0:15:29 it seems as if they have had historically almost a monopoly. You are the first company that has
0:15:36 really eaten into that and at least presented yourself as a real competitor to Adobe. How did
0:15:44 you do that? Or it sounds like maybe you’ll disagree with that characterization. Um, but why,
0:15:48 how did you get to this point where I’m saying the word Figma in the same sentence as Adobe?
0:15:53 We saw ourselves as, uh, going up against Adobe in the earliest days of Figma for sure.
0:16:01 And over time, what we found was that actually designers, uh, they’re our core audience. The
0:16:08 core thing we do is make software for product designers. They work with teams and multiplayer
0:16:14 shows that even more in terms of those workflows. And if their teammates, the people around the designers
0:16:20 are not successful, the designers are not successful. So that led us to go and both go
0:16:25 sort of upstream in the workflow and downstream to things like FigJam for ideation brainstorming to
0:16:30 Figma slides for alignment, but also downstream in the product design development workflow into,
0:16:37 okay, how do we go and make it so that developer, for example, can take the assets in Figma design
0:16:42 and translate them to code in the most effective, efficient way that they can and save time.
0:16:50 And as we’ve kind of mapped out that process, we found ourselves building for anyone that wanted to go
0:16:59 from idea to a polished application that they can deploy and get into production. But it was interesting
0:17:04 because I think we thought of, okay, with small market for product designers, web designers,
0:17:10 fear of labor statistics that it was 250,000 people at the time when we started Figma. Uh, we thought,
0:17:14 okay, this is not going to be our long-term market. It’s growing. We don’t know how much, but
0:17:18 you know, uh, we’ll have to go into other use cases around creative tools.
0:17:25 Instead, we found ourselves really focused at our core on the product design development workflow and
0:17:30 building software and how to help people build the most well-designed software.
0:17:37 But overall, it’s not like we see Adobe. There’s a period where they tried, but then they sunset the
0:17:42 product and they decided they’re going to focus on their core, which is the creative professional,
0:17:48 and also, I think, compete on the down market. Yeah. And so it’s just a very, two very different
0:17:57 businesses at this point. We’ll be right back.
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0:21:36 Marc Thiessen: We’re back with First Time Founders. Let’s just move to you going public. It’s kind
0:21:40 of fascinating to hear this, those first five years and how messy it really did sound.
0:21:43 Marc Thiessen: It’s always messy. Marc Thiessen: Yes. Marc Thiessen: Every startup is.
0:21:50 Marc Thiessen: And now you are a public company, biggest IPO of the year. We were looking at the IPO
0:21:56 pricing. And we said on our podcast, we were like, this is a buy. It was originally priced at 25.
0:22:02 Then it was repriced at 30. We said it was a buy at 30. Then it was, I think, 33.
0:22:06 Marc Thiessen: 33 years. Marc Thiessen: We said it was a buy. And that’s what it went out at the IPO price.
0:22:14 And then it opens in the market and it’s 85. And then it goes up to 100. And, you know, we thought
0:22:20 that you guys would see a big pop. I didn’t see it being that crazy.
0:22:24 Marc Thiessen: And then it’s really interesting, you know, a lot of our listeners, I’ve heard
0:22:32 people saying like, hey, it’s come down a lot since 100. And I keep wanting to tell me like,
0:22:40 I was saying buy at 33. That’s what I was talking about. The point being, now that you’re a public
0:22:49 company, there is a lot of pressure on you to return value to shareholders. Even I was receiving that
0:22:54 pressure as someone who just talked about the stock. So I could imagine that that would be kind of a
0:22:58 different paradigm where everyone’s watching you. Everyone’s asking questions. People like me asking
0:23:05 you, what do you think of the stock? How do you feel about the pricing? How has that changed your overall
0:23:07 experience as a, as a CEO?
0:23:13 Marc Thiessen: Well, I told the company, uh, before we went public during the IPO, literally on listing
0:23:22 day, uh, before we saw any signals in the market and after, and then also after IPO, and then I just
0:23:29 showed up about it, uh, is look, the number’s going to go up, the number’s going to go down. We do not
0:23:36 control the number. The only thing we’ve got control over is the inputs. And so we have to keep our eye on
0:23:43 the prize and we got to do everything we can to drive those inputs. And we have to take the long-term
0:23:49 view. You know, the irony is, uh, of course that as a public company, you have to report earnings every
0:23:58 quarter. And, uh, I think that one reaction that is to take a quarterly view. Of course, we, we care
0:24:04 about our results and also you have to take the long-term view and the long-term view always has to come
0:24:13 first. And so I spend my energy thinking not about, okay, what does the stock price do on any given day? Some days I
0:24:18 like literally forget to look, uh, because I’m so focused on what we’re trying to do for the long-term.
0:24:23 And, you know, you only get one shower thought a day. There’s a great Paul Graham essay on that.
0:24:30 Your shower thought needs to be on what are the long-term things we can do to make our customers’
0:24:36 lives better. Yeah. Value will follow. There’s the great Bill Walsh quote, which is,
0:24:42 score takes care of itself, which is a very similar dynamic. It’s like if we focus on our inputs, on
0:24:47 driving value, on our fundamentals, the score is going to take care of itself. The stock price is
0:24:56 going to take care of itself. But I could also imagine now as a public company CEO that at the same time,
0:25:04 you kind of take care of the stock price as well as the, the vibe setter, as the leader of the
0:25:11 narrative. And, you know, we talk a lot on our podcast about, um, the narrative versus the numbers.
0:25:15 There’s the numbers that can drive a stock and then there’s the narrative. What do, what do investors
0:25:22 think is happening? Do you feel any pressure? It sounds like you, you don’t want to think too much about,
0:25:27 this is the story we’re telling people. You want to think about, are our numbers good? Are our inputs
0:25:34 high quality? But do you feel a pressure now to, you know, show up on that earnings call and like
0:25:41 capture the imaginations of people to set a narrative that investors are really excited about? Is that
0:25:47 something that you feel is incumbent on you now as a public company CEO?
0:25:51 I think what’s most important, and this is the same perspective I had when we were a private company,
0:25:56 is to make sure that people understand what the company is doing.
0:26:01 yeah. And to make sure that people are educated. And so that’s most of my focus. That’s why I do
0:26:06 demos on earnings calls. Probably so far, maybe at some point I don’t do them. I don’t know. I feel
0:26:11 like I can’t commit to that forever, but the, um, but I like doing that. I like to show people what
0:26:18 are we actually improving? And I think without that, it’s so easy to get lost in sort of whether it be
0:26:26 narrative or numbers or whatever for people. And my advice to anyone who’s like looking at the stock is
0:26:33 understand our company. Yeah. It’s very simple. Like, go read our S1. Go watch the earnings calls.
0:26:39 Uh, go look at our filings. Go look at what we’re doing. Like, that’s how you understand.
0:26:46 Now on narrative, of course, there’s an importance to narrative. This is different than narrative for
0:26:52 markets. This is a narrative for the business. If you don’t have a narrative, uh, about what is going
0:26:55 to occur in the world, you don’t have a vision. Yeah. You don’t have a point of view on where you’re
0:27:01 headed. And so to me, it’s very important to story tell there and to show people and unpack the context
0:27:07 that’s in my head about where we’re headed for our employees, for our customers. And that’s something that,
0:27:12 uh, you know, I feel a lot of pressure on because otherwise we don’t have a North star.
0:27:17 Yeah. And then I think, uh, the, the fundamental question that maybe is related to markets
0:27:22 and is deeper related to strategy. Uh, the question that everyone seems to be asking these days for
0:27:30 any company, private or public, is this an AI winner or an AI loser? Yeah. And, uh, this is a very important
0:27:34 question to answer. Obviously, if you care about the longterm, you gotta be on the right side of AI.
0:27:41 Yes. So what’s that mean? Uh, to me, it means that you have to be in a place where as the model
0:27:49 capabilities improve and come online, you are getting better as a company. It’s that simple. And so my
0:27:51 advice to everybody is make sure that that is true for your company.
0:27:58 How does AI play into Figma’s business and Figma’s product? I guess let’s hear the answer to that question.
0:28:04 Yeah. Well, one of the products we have right now that it’s, you know, a pure AI product in many ways
0:28:12 is Figma make, which is our, uh, basically prompt to working app product. We see it used for prototyping
0:28:19 use cases by designers to make it so that they can go explore prototypes that are more interactive. Uh,
0:28:26 we see it used for people that are shipping websites or web apps publicly and, uh, even internal tools
0:28:32 use cases. And Figma make is, is fascinating because there’s so much that we can do on the application
0:28:38 level to make it better all the time. And also, yeah, you get a new model in there, uh, that’s got better
0:28:44 functionality, more power, and it makes the product better. Like literally we see that with all the
0:28:50 model releases. Yeah. Overall for our entire ecosystem. I think that, you know, we’ve publicly
0:28:54 said about how we’re introducing prompting and Figma design, that’s still a work in progress.
0:29:00 You know, we’re in early alpha stage there, lots to do, but Figma design and Figma make,
0:29:04 you know, those should be two sides of the same coin. You should really go back and forth rapidly.
0:29:08 Right now you can copy from Figma make to Figma design. You can copy from Figma
0:29:13 design to Figma make that’s very powerful. You can use design systems that you’ve built
0:29:17 up in Figma’s platform and convert them into a form that you can then use in Figma make.
0:29:24 But, you know, there’s all this room to be more seamless across it and to make it so this is all
0:29:30 feels very integrated. Yeah. And, um, we are working hard on that and figuring out the best way to
0:29:36 unify and to make it so that, uh, the entire platform is AI native in a way that fits that criteria.
0:29:41 And, um, the last thing I’d say is just, it might actually be true that
0:29:48 ironically, you know, design is non-verifiable. There’s no way to know, uh, other than, you know,
0:29:55 rigorous debate, A/B testing is design A or design B better for my audience.
0:30:01 And even with A/B testing, you could hit local maximums, uh, and not the global maximum.
0:30:05 And you might be missing sort of the forest for the trees.
0:30:05 Yeah.
0:30:11 And so there’s so many different inputs to design, whether it be product design, visual design,
0:30:19 brand design that are just kind of beyond the context that you have, uh, in a tool or in a model.
0:30:23 You know, there’s just sort of like, what is the culture right now?
0:30:27 What’s the system we’re trying to create? What’s the brand we’re going for? What’s the ethos we stand
0:30:32 for? What’s the point of view we have? What are the business constraints? Like I can keep going.
0:30:38 And also what are the flows? What’s the before and after of these states? And how do we want to manage
0:30:43 our complexity? And how do we want to make it so that we’re able to have progressive disclosure?
0:30:48 What’s our philosophy and viewpoint on all of us? And like, this is a lot of context to go gather.
0:30:54 And it should lead to many outputs if you put, give it to an LM. Uh, and I don’t even think it’s
0:31:01 possible right now to give a lot to an LM. But the better that the models get at generative capabilities
0:31:09 that are highly opinionated, I think it’s, um, actually better for the conversation around design.
0:31:14 Because if I show you a very opinionated design, you’ll have a reaction.
0:31:14 Yes.
0:31:17 You’re going to love it. You’re going to hate it, but you’re not going to be neutral.
0:31:22 If I show you a not very opinionated design, you know, something that’s kind of like the average
0:31:26 of averages, you will be more neutral. Like, yeah, it’s all right.
0:31:27 Yeah.
0:31:33 As the craft increases, as the aesthetic increases for these models, as they get better at that,
0:31:37 it’s almost like you’re planting all these different flags in a potential option space.
0:31:42 And it’s your job as a designer, as a team, to go figure out where in that option space to want
0:31:46 to go even deeper, push harder and explore further. Yeah.
0:31:48 And so I think it actually amplifies the role of designers.
0:31:53 It is interesting when you talk about having an opinion. I found that that is
0:32:00 the worst trait of AI right now, is that it’s so good at aggregating, it’s so good at collecting,
0:32:06 it’s got the best memory of all time. But it’s so bad at having an opinion, saying something
0:32:14 interesting, novel, new. Even when I push it, I’m like, you must have an opinion on this subject that
0:32:19 I’m bringing to you. And it says, well, there are both sides, which ultimately leads to,
0:32:27 I imagine, in the design space, bad design. Because as you say, design, you say non-verifiable.
0:32:35 Another word for that would be subjective. It’s about taste. And AI has kind of bad taste. So,
0:32:43 what is AI going to do to design? Is it going to, I mean, the classic question,
0:32:50 replace designers? Or would you say that this space is a little bit more protected in that sense?
0:32:56 If you’re at a company that values design, the opportunities will be even bigger than they are
0:33:01 today. If you’re not at a company that values design, you already have some problems. So that’s
0:33:05 that’s a problem that maybe you should already look at. But every company that wants to win
0:33:13 should value design right now. And again, there are ways to actually prompt models to make them
0:33:19 more opinionated. It’s just that the range with models that are currently released, you can’t get
0:33:26 that far. I think that’ll change. We’ll get to a place where with clever prompting, you’ll be able
0:33:31 to go further on aesthetic. That does not mean it’s the thing you’re going to ship. The more that you
0:33:40 can explore, currently limited by human toil, is, and I’m not saying that’s not enjoyable work for a
0:33:45 lot of people too, but that’s all stuff that limits how much of that option space you can explore.
0:33:49 And it will be on the human to pick which is the right one.
0:33:52 I actually think it’s not just picking. I don’t think it’s a curation role. I think it’s pushing.
0:34:00 And I think you have to explore the option space. You need tools that help you. And then
0:34:05 when you find something that you like, it’s your job then to push and to go way deeper there.
0:34:06 Yeah.
0:34:09 And that’s what’s going to lead you to a truly differentiated
0:34:16 design level of craft and expression. That’s our philosophy across all the products at Figma.
0:34:21 I have a quote from an interview that you did in 2021.
0:34:23 I’m so curious now.
0:34:27 You said, I was not a very good manager when I started Figma.
0:34:28 No, I wasn’t.
0:34:35 I was an intern before that, so I had a lot to learn. What were you bad at from a management perspective?
0:34:43 How have you improved? And now that you’ve improved, what does it take to be a good manager of people?
0:34:50 Management and leadership are different. And you can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa.
0:34:58 For me, I think I’d always, you know, been a leader in terms of leading different initiatives
0:35:06 I’ve been a part of or trying to help whoever was the leader really do their best. And from that,
0:35:11 I kind of came into starting Figma and just thinking I was good to go. But it turns out there’s this whole
0:35:17 new skill set around management that I definitely did not know. And the good news is if you’re a
0:35:23 first-time manager, like it’s all very learnable. It’ll feel like muscle memory eventually, but it’s
0:35:29 knowing where your team is at, building great relationships. The tactics are things like one-on-ones,
0:35:35 creating context, making sure that people know what their goals are, holding them accountable to those
0:35:41 goals, making sure that you’re able to keep good cadences for your team.
0:35:44 And you were bad at all of this.
0:35:45 Oh, for sure.
0:35:54 Yeah, I had no memory. And so I just kind of like, and I think also, you know, you take on VC money,
0:35:59 you’re trying to get this into market. It’s not a market for like ever. By the way,
0:36:05 I want to be clear too, for anyone listening, don’t do what we did. Like if you have any way not to,
0:36:10 go build faster. The best is to get something out rapidly. Like that’s the question I’m always
0:36:14 asking in my product reviews. How do we go faster here? What can we stage? What can we,
0:36:19 what assumptions do we have that we can maybe cut? So please don’t take away that you should take five
0:36:24 years to launch a company. You’ll be dead. Like we are the outlier and from a different time.
0:36:32 Uh, but yeah, I think I was bad at all of it. Uh, what was tremendously helpful was hiring our first
0:36:38 manager. Uh, he came in as director of engineering, his name is Sho. And he was someone that came from
0:36:45 this amazing history of companies who worked at General Magic, uh, Macromedia, Adobe, Medium,
0:36:52 as well as starting his own thing a few times. Deep history and knowledge of our space. Also just a great
0:36:57 human and just like a incredibly smart human, but also deeply empathetic. And yeah, I mean,
0:37:04 he came in and, uh, instantly went, okay, there’s a bunch of stuff to change and improve. And you know,
0:37:10 we talked every day for quite a long time and I learned a ton from him. Uh, and I learned a ton
0:37:14 from the next people we hire that were leaders and managers as well. In general, I think your mindset
0:37:20 has to be hire people you can learn from. One of the biggest traps, the biggest mistakes is sometimes
0:37:26 people try to hire folks that they, uh, will just like look up to them and revere them. I think a lot
0:37:32 of times they, they look for people that might be not as skilled because they feel like there’s some
0:37:38 control aspect there or something. And I think that’s like the worst thing you can do. You need to find
0:37:44 people that will push you further the company for further, uh, that are aligned with you in terms
0:37:53 of where you want to go, but also, uh, they will add new skills and new possibilities to the company,
0:37:57 the organization. Yeah. So that’s what I’m always looking for is ways to level up our team
0:38:04 and people to learn from. I think I can learn from anyone. That’s how I do interviews too. When I’m
0:38:09 on the other side of the table, uh, and I’m asking questions, you’re looking for, can this person teach
0:38:14 me something? Yeah. I mean, my mental test for interview is like, okay, I come out of this learning
0:38:22 something among others, but that’s one of the things that I care about. We’ll be right back.
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0:40:22 So, we’re back with First Time Founders. What are your core strengths, would you say? I mean,
0:40:28 I’m sure there are plenty of companies that have tried to do what you did. And you won,
0:40:34 for lack of a better word. What are you really good at? What did you do differently that you think
0:40:37 other companies didn’t do? Well, first of all, there’s a lot of the story to be written. So,
0:40:45 you know, the bigger the ambition, the more there is to tackle. And that’s definitely my mindset. I
0:40:52 never feel like we’ve won. But I would say that, you know, the first great decision I made was working
0:40:58 with Evan. He was my TA at Brown, smartest guy I knew. And I felt like, okay, if this thing works out,
0:41:03 great. But if it doesn’t, I’ll learn more by working with Evan than doing anything else in the world.
0:41:10 And so, it’s the easiest call. For me, I guess, you know, I have a hard time talking to myself this
0:41:15 way. But curiosity is definitely a strength. I’m always trying to make sure that it stays a strength.
0:41:24 And I love learning about new things, new spaces, patterns. Sometimes you even are teaching people
0:41:29 something and they ask you a question and you give them an answer and you realize, wait a second,
0:41:33 that answer I just gave, like, that applies to the situation I’m in right now.
0:41:36 So, ironically, you can learn by mentoring, too.
0:41:36 Yes.
0:41:43 I think in addition to that, I think that early on in my sort of tech career,
0:41:50 being at O’Reilly Media, which for those who don’t know is they do many things, but they hosted
0:41:56 conferences, they publish technical books. They’re the ones that the animals would cut on the covers.
0:41:59 Their entire business was basically seen around corners and understanding tech trends.
0:42:09 And being able to really project in the future and understand what’s going to happen or what’s sort of the tech tree going forward.
0:42:19 And how we’ll unlock what’s too early, what’s on time, what will be later on, and just the different
0:42:25 stages of technology development and being able to kind of be able to track that in my head and
0:42:28 have, like, global state there. I think that’s a strength.
0:42:35 You do have a history of recognizing what the trend is going to be at a very large level, starting as early as 2012,
0:42:41 when you realize there’s this big problem, which is that design is not good enough on the internet,
0:42:50 on your mobile phone, et cetera. For someone who wants to be better at that, at understanding and predicting
0:42:55 what the future is going to be, what the large trends are going to be, how can we be better at that?
0:43:01 What are some of it? Is that just talent? Or is there a way to kind of coach yourself?
0:43:07 Absolutely. A loop you can be in that’ll help you. It’s very simple. You form hypotheses about the world,
0:43:14 run them down a specific way that is testable, and make sure you kind of set a timeline to it.
0:43:20 And then, yeah, see how things play out. See what happened in the system that did not match your mental
0:43:25 model. Yes. See what happened that did. And when you don’t have a match,
0:43:31 don’t just get discouraged. Like, that’s a learning opportunity. Use any delta to inform
0:43:33 how to enrich your mental model of the world. Yeah.
0:43:39 Or models. You know, the best case is that you actually have many frameworks and you’re able to
0:43:44 try on different ones at different times according to the situation rather than just having one rigid
0:43:50 framework that you see the world through. Who do you look up to? And this could be partial precedent.
0:43:54 Who are your heroes? Who are your role models? Who are the kinds of people that you’re like,
0:43:55 “Yeah, that’s the kind of person I want to be?”
0:44:05 In technology, I think, whether it be Larry or Sergey or Zuck or Satya, Elon, in some ways,
0:44:11 the people that have found a way to kind of bend the world and find a way to create technology that
0:44:18 serves many, many people, like, and do it at scale. You know, you can analyze it from all sorts of
0:44:24 lenses. But yeah, you look at Elon, for example, and plenty of people will say negative things,
0:44:30 but then you look at SpaceX. And SpaceX is an incredibly, incredibly important company.
0:44:33 And what they’ve done there is remarkable.
0:44:42 So do you want to bend the world in that way? Do you feel like you want to shape the world in some
0:44:48 way? I mean, I think of sort of Steve Jobs, who talked a lot about that, the idea that you can
0:44:53 make things just happen. You can shape, if you have an idea for how the world could be, you can actually
0:44:56 just shape it to become that. Do you think about that a lot?
0:45:00 I think that less from like a me perspective and more of an enabling perspective.
0:45:06 So I think that there are unequivocally things that will be good for the world. And you have to
0:45:10 be willing to say that there are things that will be good for the world in order to have this point
0:45:15 of view. People that might come from different moral philosophies will disagree with me on that,
0:45:21 but I’ll put that out there. That’s my starting point, is that you can say, okay, like,
0:45:25 if we cure cancer, for example, that’s good for the world. It’s a harder one to debate.
0:45:29 But if anyone has a debate, I’d like to hear it.
0:45:34 You know, or if we can make it so that more people are able to find meaning,
0:45:41 find joy. That seems good. So I kind of start from, you know, the sort of unequivocally
0:45:47 obvious places. And then from there, I go into, okay, what’s the role I can play to help?
0:45:56 And whether it be Figma, where I’m able to be this amazing musician to create a platform that helps
0:46:04 people achieve their dreams, put food on the table, make it so that our society has better design and
0:46:12 better ways to interact with technology, or be trying to help by investing or by mentoring
0:46:19 next generation founders who, like me, are coming from a background where they didn’t yet have exposure
0:46:24 to business. But now they’re finding themselves in a situation where they can’t just do the technology,
0:46:29 they can’t just do the product and the design. They actually have to go figure out how to go and,
0:46:34 you know, build forward. And if they can’t get the capitalist loop working,
0:46:38 they’re not going to be able to get the scale that will actually transform
0:46:43 the world into a better place, then those are ways that I find that I can have impact is
0:46:44 through that empowerment.
0:46:52 You’ve been massively successful. You’re a first-time founder. What is your advice to founders?
0:46:55 What is your advice to young people who are building their own companies today,
0:46:59 who see the success you’ve had and want to replicate it?
0:47:01 first, don’t try to replicate stuff.
0:47:01 Okay.
0:47:07 Try to understand what it is that you have unique insight on. So, have some self-awareness,
0:47:12 be humble. There’s a lot that you’re going to get punched in the face over. If you don’t have
0:47:19 the humility, you won’t get through it. And be willing to adapt. But also, yeah, I think get started.
0:47:22 If you’re not already on the track and you just got this great idea in your head,
0:47:29 what’s stopping you? If it’s financial, how do you get to the buffer that you need to go thoroughly
0:47:33 explore something? And again, if we’d stopped in six months, that would have been it.
0:47:34 Yeah.
0:47:39 There would have been no Figma. It took at least nine to 12 months before we really
0:47:43 felt like we had the real shot there. So, that space, which was afforded to me through the Teal
0:47:50 Fellowship, I’m very, very grateful for that. That’s an example of, for me, how I had that buffer. I
0:47:55 also had savings that I could dip into from internships. That’s the problem you have to solve first,
0:48:02 is to give yourself that buffer. And then I also just say, there are ironically a lot of ways to go
0:48:07 make businesses that make money. People don’t think that, but it’s actually true. I’m not saying they’re
0:48:16 all going to be like giant scale, but at least in the small scale, there’s a ton. And so, be greedy in
0:48:20 your selection of a problem to work on in the first place. Do not start something that you can’t see
0:48:25 yourself working on in 10, 20 years. I have plenty of friends who’ve done that or are doing that.
0:48:31 And it just inevitably, it leads to burnout. It leads them being kind of negative on the world,
0:48:38 cynical, and you will lose something of yourself if you find yourself in a place where you just don’t
0:48:44 yet have the problem that like gets you excited every day to go work on. You got to find that thing
0:48:48 that just gets you up in the morning every day and you’re so psyched to work on. And you will,
0:48:52 if you project out in the future, that’s not going to change. You’re still so excited
0:48:55 and treat it like a multi-decade journey from the start.
0:49:00 David Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan, this was awesome. Thanks for your time.
0:49:00 Thank you for having me.
0:49:08 David Field: This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research
0:49:13 associates are Dan Shallan and Chris O’Donoghue. And our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for
0:49:17 listening to First Time Founders from ProfG Media. We’ll see you next month with another Founders
0:49:28 story.
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Ed Elson speaks with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. They discuss the future of design in the age of AI, how his management style has changed over time, and what it was like to go public.
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