Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design

Designers need to be founders. We need

to have folks that are designers step into the founder role and start companies. It feels intuitively like

companies. It feels intuitively like we're in the MS DOS era of AI right now.

If you look back 10 years from now, everyone's going to go, can you believe that we just had this chat box?

[Music] Awesome. Well, um, want to welcome

Awesome. Well, um, want to welcome Dylan. Um, I'm curious what the makeup

Dylan. Um, I'm curious what the makeup of the audience is here. How many people um have used Figma before?

Wow. All right.

Awesome.

How many people consider themselves to be designers?

Okay. All right.

Many of us.

Yes. Our people. And uh how many are currently founders?

Awesome.

Cool. Okay. That's a a good mix of people in the audience. So, we'll hear the Figma story. Then we'll talk about um advice around AI and design. Um and

then we'll get some advice on uh just being a founder from Dylan too. So I'm

excited to jump in. Um maybe to start uh give us kind of a snapshot on where Figma is today and then you know we can kind of go back to the uh the beginning days.

Yeah. Uh today we are uh many different places. We're hybrid uh 1,700 people now

places. We're hybrid uh 1,700 people now which is wild. I have to pinch myself on that number. We have eight products now.

that number. We have eight products now.

We just doubled our product lineup at our last config. So um very excited to hear feedback if you got any on things like Figma make sites draw uh buzz. Um

but it's been a very exciting time. Uh

lots of work we're doing as we explore all the things that we can do to help our audience.

And now take us back to uh maybe 19year-old Dylan uh getting started with the the kernel of the idea that eventually became Figma, but it wasn't a straight line getting there. Tell us

about the early days and kind of how you and Evan got started. Yeah. So, in the early days of Figma, well, I guess before it was even Figma, Evan and I were at Brown together, uh, he was my TA

and we were asking ourselves the question of why now? Like what's

changing the world and the two answers that we came up with that we also felt deep conviction in, one was drones uh,

and quadcopters. Other one was WebGL.

and quadcopters. Other one was WebGL.

And uh Evan after about a month or so said hey like not into drones uh for all sorts of various reasons. That was kind of the one I was pushing for more at the time also except WebGL of course. And

then uh I was like great WebGL it is.

And so WebGL I think everybody probably here knows but is a way to use the GPU in your computer and the browser. Uh web

GPU is its successor. And yeah, we uh started going really deep on like what are all the things that we can build and two main paths were games or tools

pretty fast. We said okay not games

pretty fast. We said okay not games let's go tools and then it was a deep exploration with many twists and turns as we explored all sorts of tools that

we could build and uh you know it took uh we really started in earnest August 2012 uh whereas we started talking about it more December of uh 2011 so it took a

while to get to the point where we started and then from there I would say it was at least June or July of 2013 before we went all in on okay let's build Figma as it is today and even then

there was still a bit of a narrowing path to get to the product that exists now.

And when you first started, were you thinking about this as a startup and a company that you wanted to build or were you thinking about it more as like a project that you wanted to do with your friend?

No, it was definitely the hope was startup uh and startup that could scale at the same time. My downside case was I get to work with Evan who I considered

then consider now to be a hero. He's

like the smartest guy I know. Uh if you have any doubt about this statement, just look up his GitHub. Uh he he's an amazing man and an absolute genius. And

I figured worst case scenario, I spent a few years working with Evan. I learn a lot. Then I go back to school, same

lot. Then I go back to school, same place I'm at now, can't hurt. Uh upside

case, we go build a cool company. All

the problems that we were thinking about working on were very very interesting to me. And so I didn't really see any like

me. And so I didn't really see any like risk to the scenario. And also it helped that I had the Teal Fellowship. Uh, I

would have done it without it, but like having 100K over two years, I know now, you know, inflation, etc. probably sounds like less than it was then, but yeah, I mean to have actual cash and not

have to dig into savings or go into debt, huge deal. Not just because of the cash element, but also because it gives you time. Uh, if we had stopped six

you time. Uh, if we had stopped six months in and that was our point where we made a call, Figma would not be here today. And so I think if you're a

today. And so I think if you're a founder already going or you're thinking about founding, you got to give yourself time somehow. That's really important.

time somehow. That's really important.

Yeah. You spent a couple years trying to, you know, do all the twists and turns and the thing that eventually became what Figma um is today.

Yeah.

Um what kept you going in that time? A

lot of times, you know, founders will get into this like pivot hell of jumping from idea to idea and motivation just keeps declining. And how did you keep

keeps declining. And how did you keep yourselves motivated during that time and feel like you were on to something and you were on the right track? Well, I

mean, first of all, just working with Evan was super fun. You know, we're kind of thinking through ideas by building them. It felt every week like we're kind

them. It felt every week like we're kind of inventing the future in some way. At

some point, I kind of went, "Memes are going to go to the moon." And I convinced Evan, hey, let's go build a meme generator. And this is, you know,

meme generator. And this is, you know, 2012 time frame. And we built a great [ __ ] meme generator. I think it was for sure would have been the best one in the market. Uh, and my thesis was right,

the market. Uh, and my thesis was right, by the way. Look at the exponential curve of memes since 2012. Yeah. uh we

would have made some money there. At the

same time, after a week of that, I think both of us were ready to quit. I was

asking myself like, why'd I drop out of Brown for this? That was probably like a pretty low point at the start. But other

than that, there's the constant existential nature of asking yourself like, what are we doing? What's the big goal here? when you're in that phase of

goal here? when you're in that phase of really trying to discover what to work on. But I think if you've got a

on. But I think if you've got a co-founder, you got a collaborator, you're not just alone, you know, hopefully your highs and their highs, your lows, their highs cancel out somehow and you can kind of feed off

each other to keep each other going.

That really helps.

That's cool. Once you kind of came up with uh the idea for Figma, how did you get your first users?

Yeah. Um really the first users of Figma uh a lot of it was cold emailing and uh people in network so folks that I had either interned with for example I entered at Flipboard, LinkedIn uh

O'Reilly Media and from that there were people I could reach out to. They could

tell me others to talk with but also I just looked online like who are the designers that I think could be really helpful to us and I respect their work.

you know, if they answer my email and they let me buy them a coffee, like it'll just be like a personal moment for me because they're my hero. And a lot of them replied. Like, it's kind of wild

them replied. Like, it's kind of wild that people reply to cold emails, but they do. And so, uh, yeah, I I went

they do. And so, uh, yeah, I I went there and then it turns out designers give great feedback. So, it wasn't just like meeting them and them saying, "Yeah, your product sucks." They'd be like, "Here's exactly why it's not

great, and here's what you can do better. Here's what it would take for me

better. Here's what it would take for me to use this." And uh the more that I engaged and we worked through that, the better the product got. I'd follow up with them and eventually they started

converting. Some of them took a while

converting. Some of them took a while before a lot of them converted. Later on

we kind of went on tour. I met at this point we had venture investment the venture firms that invest in us. They

invested in other companies too. I had

them make introductions to the companies. You know for an entire summer

companies. You know for an entire summer I basically met with I don't know five, six, seven companies a week at least.

um sitting down with them, sometimes several a day, saying, "Hey, here's a demo. Will you use it? If not, why not?"

demo. Will you use it? If not, why not?"

And uh very low conversion rate. I think like in that entire summer, maybe two of them went in for it and actually started using Figma. Uh one was Notion, the

using Figma. Uh one was Notion, the other was the company that became Kota, then called Krypton. and uh kind of interesting they're both you know these cloud-based document tools with very

similar philosophies to us but you know you then launch it and people start using it more there's a lot of folks out there that resonate with the message so it was a it was a slow arc over time but the the constant was feedback getting

feedback to the team making sure we understood what problems we need to solve that's interesting because you know everyone tells you to launch early and the reason to launch early is to get that feedback

and from the outside it looks like you took a long time to launch but behind the scenes you were actually talking to tons of users and potential customers and getting feedback constantly like how did you think about when was the right

time to actually launch the product?

First of all I like definitely echo the point of launch as soon as you can. If

you take anything away from this it's don't do what I did. Uh you know get your product out faster and charge money faster for the product to see if you actually can make money. Uh, unless you

have some genius galaxy brain consumer thing you're doing, in which case figure it out yourself. I I don't know what to tell you. I think that the feedback is

tell you. I think that the feedback is essential and uh you should launch as quickly as you can. For me, the feedback was very clear. It's not ready and that

made it so we didn't feel comfortable launching yet. But looking back, we did

launching yet. But looking back, we did have the capital. I should have scaled the team faster so we could move faster and get it out quicker. That was

something that I now looking back have learned. And when a team at Figma comes

learned. And when a team at Figma comes to me with a epic road map that they think is perfection, the first question I always ask is how do we slim slim that down? How do we make it more bite-sized

down? How do we make it more bite-sized and test this earlier with our users?

So, it's it's absolutely the case that I try to push people internally towards, you know, a one month or three month cadence uh at most. You know, if someone comes to me with a 9 month, a 12 month,

two-year cadence, it's like, what the [ __ ] are you doing, man? Yeah, that's

such an important point, especially for small teams, which is a lot of times people are like, well, I have all this stuff I have to build, so I need to go hire a bunch of people to be able to do it. But it seems like usually the right

it. But it seems like usually the right answer is like, how can you scope it down and do fewer things really well?

Like it sounds like is that part of your culture as you're building things? Yeah,

it's constraints can actually really help. But I also think the startup

help. But I also think the startup equation or not equation, but the cycle that you're always in is something along the lines of if you're the leader of a startup, you need to be identifying what

you're doing the most of. Uh figuring

out how to get someone else to help you with do that or maybe in the future it's AI, who knows? But then from there, okay, how do you like go find that person? And if you don't have enough

person? And if you don't have enough resources, how do you get the resources?

Right? Right. That's a cycle that you're always in. It just turns out that

always in. It just turns out that actually having constraints, it breeds creativity. It breeds interesting ways

creativity. It breeds interesting ways to solve problems. And so, yeah, I think they're useful.

What was the inflection point? I don't

know. Was it shortly after you launched?

Was it years later? Was it a few weeks ago when you actually believed this was going to be a huge company?

Oh man. I think uh the point at which I started to believe that actually this might be real was way later than our users did. People were telling me, "This

users did. People were telling me, "This is amazing. I'm really excited. Here's

is amazing. I'm really excited. Here's

my 12-page doc on all the things that I want you to do for Figma." Uh, I should have known then, even though our product was really bad, that there was something there. But in reality, it took until

there. But in reality, it took until Microsoft told us, "Hey, this is spreading like wildfire, and we're asking ourselves, should we shut it down or uh, you know, should we keep going?"

And the reason we're asking ourselves that is because you're not charging us.

Maybe you should actually charge for the product.

That was the moment that I was like, "Oh, I think something might be working.

We should probably charge people." And

that was like five years in. So, yeah,

don't do that. Um, and also listen for when people are uh pulling the product out of you. Like, I think everyone talks about product market fit, but product

market pull is really important. And

you'll see signs of it when people are highly engaged, when they are obsessive about what you're doing, when they see the future of the vision that you're

planting, uh that is a sign that you should really double down and in whatever way you can. And so many people interpreted instead as, oh man, if only we had all these things that they're

asking for, then we might have product market fit. Guess we got to grind for a

market fit. Guess we got to grind for a long time and who knows if it'll work.

the right mindset is, oh my god, they actually care enough to give us this feedback. This is huge. Uh, and I think

feedback. This is huge. Uh, and I think that people misinterpret that too much.

It seems even your feedback seeking early on in the early days, I think a lot of people are nervous to do that because they don't want to hear that it's not good enough and, you know, they don't want to hear the thing that they

poured so much time and energy into um, is not good yet and I would not use it and I would not pay you for it and so you want to just hide from that. How did

you shift your perspective to actually want to seek that? I

I think maybe it's just like childhood for me. When I was growing up, I was a

for me. When I was growing up, I was a child actor. Uh not like a a child actor

child actor. Uh not like a a child actor that got into like anything really cool that you know about like commercials and some TV and stuff. But as part of that, you audition constantly. Uh and

basically you constantly get rejected.

Uh for me that was not a big deal. Like

I was used to rejection and I had fun with the process of it. So yeah, I think for me it's just maybe a different mental equation than others. But yeah,

if you're not there yet, like seek rejection, it's got interesting data in it. Don't you want to know the data?

it. Don't you want to know the data?

Switch gears. Talk about design for a little bit. It's been a really great

little bit. It's been a really great month for design. It feels like been pretty wild.

Yeah. I mean, we've had some popular redesigns from Airbnb and Netflix. Yep.

We've had um Apple's new liquid glass UI, which seems to be somewhat controversial. I'm sure there are

controversial. I'm sure there are opinions out here. at least there was opinions on X or Twitter or whatever.

You guys had some incredible launches um at um at config recently and you know at YC we have kind of a call for more design founders and then maybe the most um surprising and impressive thing was

uh OpenAI acquiring Johnny Ivan his company for more than $6 billion which is pretty crazy. So I I'm curious like why now? Like what is happening in this

why now? Like what is happening in this moment where it seems like design is is really a part of uh the conversation in a lot of the tech world.

Yeah. I mean I first of all I think that in some ways it's new, in some ways it's not new. Design has I think been growing

not new. Design has I think been growing in importance exponentially over the past decade. At Figma we see it up close

past decade. At Figma we see it up close every day. Uh more designers being

every day. Uh more designers being hired. design going from, you know,

hired. design going from, you know, lipstick on a pig, make it pretty at the end of the process to let's deeply think about how it works every step along the way. That's been a mindset shift that's

way. That's been a mindset shift that's been ongoing. But now, I think in this

been ongoing. But now, I think in this age of AI, if you really believe that development gets easier and it's more simple to create software, it's faster

to create software. Then like what is your differentiator? It's design, it's

your differentiator? It's design, it's craft, it's attention to detail, it's point of view. What we're seeing is recognition of that. I mean, Airbnb, they literally said our differentiator is design. Yeah,

is design. Yeah, I think Brian said that. I believe that, you know, there's lots of takes on Open AI and uh this more than $6 billion transaction. Uh some people are like

transaction. Uh some people are like this is the stupidest thing in the world. Other people are hailing it as

world. Other people are hailing it as like absolute genius. I guess my mental model is there are some people out there who when they do something you don't

understand uh it's easy to go into an attack mode and just dismiss it. But over enough time, sometimes you see patterns and

you're like, "Okay, I've consistently not understood what this person's saying over the course of like years." And

uh you know, years later, I go back to it and I'm like, "Oh, what I said in response to what they did was just wrong." And then you kind of do this

wrong." And then you kind of do this mental flip of, okay, assume that there's something to learn from whatever they're doing. assume you're missing

they're doing. assume you're missing something. And I think that I look at

something. And I think that I look at something like OpenAI and some part of I understand. Design is differentiator.

understand. Design is differentiator.

Some parts I don't understand. Like

that's a really big transaction. Uh but

Sam is one of those people that, you know, he's he's right about a lot of stuff. So I I would encourage you if you

stuff. So I I would encourage you if you just dismissed it outright to ask yourself what you might be missing. And

you guys launched some uh really cool AI focused products at uh your conference config about a month ago which has been really cool to see the reception there.

Um really positive from a lot of your users and the design community. Um I'm

curious if you can share more about those and and your motivation for building some of those.

If you look historically at the products we've launched for Figma, the pattern is we notice behavior happening in Figma Design. We take it out of Figma Design

Design. We take it out of Figma Design and make it its own product. And

therefore, Figma design is able to be what Figma design wants to be, a product design tool. And you know, whether it's

design tool. And you know, whether it's Fig Jam or whiteboarding brainstorming tool, the first new product we launched that we can make a dedicated space for and make it be everything it needs to be

or it's slides where we saw, okay, 5% of files created uh in Figma Design or slides. So great, pull that out, make a

slides. So great, pull that out, make a slide tool because there's all the stuff you need for slides that if you put it in Figma design now you've got a complicated UI and oneplus 1 is not equal to three is more equal to like

1.5. A lot of the things you saw launch

1.5. A lot of the things you saw launch at configure in that category. So uh

draw for example which is a way to do more uh vector tasks we made a separate mode for uh so that users can go deeper because again if you believe the craft is differentiator more people want to be

more expressive. How do we enable our

more expressive. How do we enable our customers and designers everywhere to do that on the Figma platform buzz same thing you have all these people that want to create uh mass exports and

figure out ways to create production graphics. So, if you got a brand team

graphics. So, if you got a brand team and they've created templates, uh, how do you make it so that you're able to then empower a marketing team to go use those templates and do mass creation of

assets? That's like a core workflow we

assets? That's like a core workflow we see all the time. But we didn't want to uh make Figma design more complicated or dumb it down. And so, instead, you make a new surface. Uh, sites, we see people

designing websites all the time in Figma Design, but they have to go somewhere else to actually build the site and get it out there. So, how do we get that so that they can actually ship it? And then

make, uh, we're so excited about make.

This is a tool that lets you go from prompt to app. And it's already changed a lot of how we do work at Figma in terms of quickly prototyping and being able to get to the point where you throw

ideas away faster. And with Figma make, there's so much more that we want to explore and are really excited to explore there. So, yeah, stay tuned on

explore there. So, yeah, stay tuned on that one.

Cool. Yeah, I mean you just touched on it there, but it feels like a lot of the line between design and development is getting blurred and they used to be very distinct phases in a product development process or

parts of an iterative cycle and now it feels like you know they're almost being combined into one. How do you think about that with the tools that you're making and and I'm also curious um maybe how that process has changed like how your own development process has changed

within Figma?

I'll start with Figma. Uh, I think that for us it's all about speed of iteration, speed of testing ideas and tools like make really help with that.

It helps to have ways to rapidly prototype and to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work and make that as low cost cost as possible.

And then there's tools I can't talk about and things we're developing that uh have been pretty instrumental to how our development process is changing. Um,

so yeah, can't wait to talk about you with them, but not today sadly. Yeah,

when you go back to just the way that design and development are blurring more, um I think it there's a lot of stuff going on there. I think product is also blurring with design and

development and potentially even parts of research. All this is becoming less

of research. All this is becoming less distinct and uh it's all kind of coming together more. I think this is happening

together more. I think this is happening before AI, but it's happening even more with AI. There's something about AI that

with AI. There's something about AI that empowers generalist behavior. I will say that I think that the models today are better at the earlier phases of development than

they are at like late stage code bases.

Um, so if you have an established codebase, I think you're going to get less out of uh AI development tools as they currently exist than if you're at the very start. So I think that everything's better suited for

prototyping and sort of like zero to one than it is from one to 100 uh at this current moment. But you know, in a week

current moment. But you know, in a week this could change. Yeah, it changes so fast.

Yes.

Um I mean related to that, how do you expect user interfaces to change uh over the next couple years? And feels like chat has kind of become a lot of the dominant uh interface paradigm, but I don't know, it feels like there's got to

be something better that comes along, right?

Yeah. I think that it feels intuitively like we're in the MS DOS era.

Yeah.

Uh of AI right now. and that you know if you look back 10 years from now everyone's going to go can you believe that we just had this chat box and yet I think the problem of how do you show

users all the things that are possible to do with these models is a very hard challenge and um there's something about the experiments that have worked there

that's very interesting so for example look at midjourney you know they started off in discord where you can rapidly see all the other things that people are doing and that was in many ways is a way

to show people what's possible or even Meta's new AI app. Uh there's been a lot of press cycle and whatnot about the public aspect of people sharing

accidentally things that are quite private. But the flip side of that is

private. But the flip side of that is you actually learn what you can do and so I think that's been underexplored uh in the media. So I I I think that there's this problem that people have

not solved of like how do you expose capabilities of of these models and there's so much that needs to be developed and worked through there.

Yeah, I think it there's a lot to come.

On top of that, everything will be more contextual uh AI as you blend it in to different applications. That's a really

different applications. That's a really interesting layer to think about and on top that we're going to have so many new surfaces as well. the surfaces that will exist are not going to be just like your

phone and your laptop and your tablet and the thing you know it's going to be glasses uh we're going to see much more um in terms of uh different types

displays that exist throughout your life so the surfaces are going to multiply AI will have context all of it will be a layer you have to intersperse and that is a a really interesting challenge for

design of how do you reconcile all that keep it consistent and actually be able to navigate that whole broad spectrum that people expect you to show up on.

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back to the video.

How many of you um consider yourselves to be researchers or have done research work?

Yeah, it's a it's a lot of people in this audience here. And I know you've done this internally, you know, at Figma and and building your own models. Um,

what is the role of design um in in research and the research work that you've done? Um, and you know, what are

you've done? Um, and you know, what are some of the design decisions that go into actually like making them better and and making them work really well? I

mean I think that a lot of researchers uh are sort of trained in an academic environment and come at problems as abstractions and they try to think very

generally and I I think if in some research like if you're doing pure math like keep going that is definitely the way to approach it if you're doing more research that's applied uh for example

in AI I I really do think that thinking like a designer can be helpful and working with designers can be helpful We found for example that embedding designers into our research teams

because obviously we're doing a lot of work on how do we make better AI tools for designers uh is been critical

because researchers need that intuition of how designers think and without actually having that close collaboration it really doesn't work. Now you might

say in response well yeah that's nice but you're building for designers. My

maybe response back would be well uh it's it's the case that designers have this mindset of you're building for an audience. Maybe it's a general audience.

audience. Maybe it's a general audience.

Maybe it's a specific audience. That

audience has a problem or a set of problems they're trying to solve. And

that sort of thinking I think is very useful to bring into the research context. And also qualitative research

context. And also qualitative research needs to pair with uh more deep AI research as well. the more that you can actually surface through qualitative

methods what people are actually trying to do and how they perceive and think, the more uh you can advance. So yeah, I guess my push for anyone who's coming from more of a research background would

be go get in the field, go talk to people because you'll learn from it and it'll actually make you go faster and some of the ways that designers have learned and some of the tools that

designers have are likely useful for you. Yeah, it's it's like that Steve

you. Yeah, it's it's like that Steve Jobs quote that, you know, design isn't just how it looks, it's how it works.

Yep.

Um it feels like, you know, when you're building models and doing research, you're trying to make a thing like that is the how it works. You know, you're trying to define that and that is the core function of a designer that may not

be obvious to how people view them from the outside.

I'm curious what you think the role of designer looks like over the next decade. It seems like it's shifting a

decade. It seems like it's shifting a lot and you know design and development seems to be you know drawing closer together and there's all this research where design can be involved. How do you think that role changes?

I'm really excited about how this will evolve. I think that designers uh will

evolve. I think that designers uh will have far more leverage in the future and the value of design will only continue

to go up. I mean your RFP uh request for proposal for designer founders I think embodied this. You said uh designers

embodied this. You said uh designers need to be founders. We need to have folks that are designers step into the founder role and start companies. I know

that it's been uh looking back you know you got Brian Chesy, you got Ki at linear. We have so many designer

linear. We have so many designer founders that you can point to now and say wow uh these folks are really successful and are are killing it. But I

think that the number of designer founders will multiply. I think the number of designers that are leading large areas and sort of GMs will grow as

well. And in general, uh designers will

well. And in general, uh designers will be looked to as experts inside of companies that in sort of the same way that you might have a writer today who

is the expert and like the best writer in the company or the best editor uh but everyone has a word processor and can write. You'll have a designer who might

write. You'll have a designer who might be the best at problem solving and thinking through how do I actually craft a solution and explore this idea maze and figure out which direction to go

create a system around it. But I think most everyone in the company will be contributing to that process of design and so there will be a lot of curation involved and a lot of leadership will be needed from designers. So they have to

step up.

I'm curious what are some of the most interesting ways you guys are using uh AI internally at Figma? Yeah, I mean can't talk about it all like I said uh since some of it is like products that we'll be releasing. But maybe one thing

I'll say is on the designer embedded in the research side point uh it's been fascinating to see just how important it is for designers to uh contribute on

evals. So if you think about it uh as

evals. So if you think about it uh as you're you know doing a developing a model or you're developing research ideas you have to have good evals and usually the researchers are the ones

building those and I think that's kind of just the wrong model for us at least designers my point of view is that they should be contributing to eval product people they should be contributing to evals it's not something that you need

your engineers and your researchers to do because they probably have less understanding of the end user less contact with end user than your designers do your product people do. So,

uh, as you design these models, I think eval has become more important, too.

And I guess if you were in your 20s today, um, what are some of the skills or tools that you would focus on becoming great at in this, you know, to be successful in this new AI world?

The setup of the question is that it's like you should kind of do different things than you did in the past. And

that's probably true. But I guess I'd start by saying that I think that the stuff that you know folks have done historically in order to get really good

at thinking and work through problems with critical thought uh and learn broadly so they can make mental connections, those are still important.

So, I think learning about as many different areas as you're curious about deeply, uh, and trying to experience the world, uh, making sure you're still

relating to people, like those are pretty core things that you should still do. One thing that I'm worried about is,

do. One thing that I'm worried about is, you know, I I think, uh, a lot of people in their 20s these days, uh, apparently, according to the stats, are dating less.

Maybe that's true, maybe it's not true.

Y'all can tell me later. Uh, but if you think about the future, it'd be so easy to just go talk to your AI model all day. Maybe that gives you a sense of

day. Maybe that gives you a sense of social connection. Like, I would highly

social connection. Like, I would highly advise you don't do that. Uh, I would highly advise that y'all date uh if you're in that cohort. Um, and I even go

so far as to say this is less a comment about the products that are in this category of the past, but more about what the future could hold. Um I I think AI boyfriends and girlfriends if

developed and allowed to exist uh is a societal self-own. I I think it's like

societal self-own. I I think it's like actively poisonous to society if um this becomes the primary a a primary mode of relationship. There's a lot of things

relationship. There's a lot of things that we need to talk about there and have a pretty broad society level discussion about.

Well, I don't want to leave it on that before we open up to questions. But

maybe um you know before uh we can open up some questions here as people kind of line up. I'm curious um what was the

line up. I'm curious um what was the most fun period in the history of building Figma for you?

Uh you know maybe is like the answer everyone's expecting but it's true. It's

right now. Uh we have like so many things we can do the most brilliant people around to do them with. I love my team. I love the problem set that we

team. I love the problem set that we have. Uh some companies they go uh

have. Uh some companies they go uh forward and they kind of tap out and they don't have any more ideas. Like the

number of ideas that we have right now has grown so much. There's so much we can do and there's so much people are asking of us and it's more about okay how do we make sure we do the right things and that's a fascinating and

really fun place to be.

Cool. Let's open up some questions. I'm

a founder, product engineer, solo engineer, everything solo entrepreneur at the same times and recently I have started using cursi to handle both coding and design even like down to

pixel level details. So what do you think about cursi? Is this cursi can become your one of your competitors and at the same times uh I just recently

discover a tools called penpod or giving like developers more control through open source uh self-hosted options. What

do you think Figma should uh move towards being more open and developer friendly to catch up with the trend of many so engineer become product engineer in the future and more and more solo

entrepreneur using cursi to create product in the future.

Yeah, I think it's a great question. Um

and actually just was uh able to run into Michael backstage that was good to see him. Uh I think that when it comes

see him. Uh I think that when it comes to AI generation, you know, if you take a step forward from okay, I generated something, the next question is okay,

how to make it good? And you know, there's different ways to do that. Uh

you can be writing code and going into your browser and kind of having that loop. That's a very structural way to

loop. That's a very structural way to think. Um other people prefer to think

think. Um other people prefer to think in a more free form way. uh with make we're trying to enable that uh in a way that's visual first rather than code first. You can still get to the code. Um

first. You can still get to the code. Um

but I really don't think of cursor as a competitor. Uh I think of them as

competitor. Uh I think of them as someone that we we just launched our MCP server to explicitly make it so that you can get your designs into cursor and windsurf and all these other NVS code you know all these great tools faster.

So I think there's just going to be new workflows that are established and like I said if the differentiator is design then your first generation your oneshot is probably not the thing that's going to win. So I'd encourage you to think a

to win. So I'd encourage you to think a little bit further than that. In terms

of open source we actually just announced today uh the acquisition of payload uh CMS which is an open source uh project and uh I'm really excited about what we can do there and how we

can support open source more.

Thank you. Hi Dylan. Um my name is Charlie Fearborn. Uh, I'm a game

Charlie Fearborn. Uh, I'm a game designer here at a startup in San Francisco. Um, and I graduated last year

Francisco. Um, and I graduated last year from USC in computer science and game design. Best major ever. So, it's cool

design. Best major ever. So, it's cool to hear about the games roots of Figma.

Yeah, we cut it off early. But Evan is also like really was really deep in game design and it's a hard hard industry, but it's a hard industry. Yeah.

It's awesome that you're doing it.

Um, I have kind of a more personal question for you. Um, uh, what is the meaning of life? um mean of life I think uh you know seek

out how to explore consciousness, learn as much as you can uh uh share love with others and make sure that um you feel

fulfilled and the other people around you uh are fulfilled and happy um at the end of the day. And I think that uh that can be something you do on a micro level

in your local community, a macro level at scale, doesn't matter. Uh as long as you're living true to your internal values, I think that uh you're leading a fulfilling life.

Hey Dylan, thank you so much. Um I was wondering as a designer, are there any specific design principles that you love and use which you think a lot of like builders or companies get wrong or like sometimes even completely ignore? I

think the biggest one that I repeat all the time at Figma, uh, which is not my own. It's, you know, has existed for

own. It's, you know, has existed for decades is keep the simple things simple and make the complex things possible.

Uh, there's always a wide range of things that you want to be able to enable. But if you try to do all of them

enable. But if you try to do all of them and that's the expense of your product not being approachable uh, and not being

obvious or intuitive how to use, you're you're kind of messing up. So, I think you have to figure out how to do both, but you start with making the simple things simple.

Thank you.

I'm Michael. I study HCI and computer science at Colombia. Um, say there's a founder you really respect and you finally landed an enterprise contract and have a decent amount of traction on

the project that you've been building with a bunch of friends. What would be the most polite way to show them the product and ask them to be an angel investor? I would send them a a Loom

investor? I would send them a a Loom over email. Um, so that way, you know,

over email. Um, so that way, you know, it's got an async component since time is sometimes hard to find. Uh, they can watch it. Um, and if you want to really

watch it. Um, and if you want to really peique their interest, mutual connections help. Uh, but like I said

connections help. Uh, but like I said earlier, cold emails work, too.

Expect a cold email. Thank you.

Okay, I'm looking forward to it. And

honored too.

Hey, Dylan. Um, I love your shoes, first of all, but um, thank you.

Of course. Um, but you said you noticed behaviors when deciding what to productize. And I can very clearly see

productize. And I can very clearly see that. I was using slides for classes. I

that. I was using slides for classes. I

using Figma for slides for classes before you guys dropped slides made it easier. Using lock layers for social

easier. Using lock layers for social media graphics for my Fred and then Buzz made that so much easier. So I guess my question is how do you watch how people repurpose the tools and what kind of structure do you use for these emerging

use cases?

It's always a mix of signals, right? You

have to do everything from like watching support requests to qualitative interviews, sitting with people and watching how they work, looking at the data and you know actually doing data science analysis on it, you know,

looking at what people are saying on social media and more. But it's kind of you digest all those signals and you build some intuition around it and hypotheses you can test. So yeah, it's

kind of art plus science but you have to combine a lot of methods I think.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi. Uh thanks very much for the talk. Um

so right now you're helping designers in a huge breath of industries. When you

just started with the cold emailing etc. How did you go about with defining rise?

Was it very broad as today or did you start focused on one industry?

No, we really started focused on product design and uh for digital products uh where and I think even more narrowly where people cared about design uh if

I'm going to be totally honest rather than like you know the broad world. uh

it seemed like it'd be an easier cell.

But yeah, I think it required um a lot of sort of slimming down of our ambition to be able to state that clearly. You

know, I started off saying we're going to do everything and thankfully the team pushed back and so it got us to here with the ambition of later on doing everything, but I'm glad we started more

narrowly.

Hi. Um, so my background besides being like a CS major and whatnot is also in traditional art.

Cool.

Um, where perhaps AI is not necessarily as popular as the moment. Um, so I guess my question is just how is Figma

navigating like ethical challenges of AI and design and like incorporating AI into the products that you are you have available. Yeah, there's so many

available. Yeah, there's so many different ethical challenges you could consider, you know, everything from, uh, okay, you're doing some inference, is it

heating up the planet, uh, to the questions of, um, okay, are these models regurgitating something they've seen elsewhere, uh, and beyond. And so I think you have to be very clear about

like what you're trying to solve for.

But yeah, it's a maybe a sort of escape answer. right now a lot of the work we're doing uh is actually with thirdparty models and so that's

something that we have less control over um as we do more things in house I think these questions are very relevant and things that we'll have to wrestle with like the art world has Dylan uh I'm an

HCI researcher and a design founder and as we've been kind of like thinking about interfaces and how we talk to AI it seems that we tend to anthropomorphize things it tends to be that these are probabilistic and we

can't design explicitly how we did with like previous hardware. Do you think of AI human interaction as necessarily a tool or how do you kind of like build a mental model around this?

I think that there's uh sort of where things are at now, where they're going and you have to kind of consider both. I

think that uh there's an interesting split maybe between people that come from a materialist worldview and by that I don't mean like they're going and buying stuff all the I mean the

worldview of materialism is one of uh consciousness arises from matter and then on the opposite side of the spectrum is like religious mindsets where people go of course that's wrong

like there's god god is great everyone has a soul doesn't have a soul obviously it's like a computer um and so those are like fundamentally at odds and uh my

prediction is that we'll probably see an increase in people projecting consciousness onto AI whether or not that's the right uh thing that you know you agree with or don't agree with. I

think that the number of people that'll do that will increase. Um and I think it leads to some uh very hard to wrestle with territories. And so yeah, I've been

with territories. And so yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that. And then in terms of what that means for HCI or uh whatever you want to call it, I I think that that's a very underexplored

question and I'm excited to see what you do with it. I think we're at time sadly.

Um, but I just want to thank everybody for coming and uh wish you all the best of luck with whatever path you pursue.

Thank you, Dylan.

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