‘Hard Fork’ Live, Part 2: Dylan Field on Standing Out in the A.I. Era

0:00Any AI developer tool can create a brand new project from scratch. That part's easy. The hard part is working with the code your business already runs on. IBM Bob is a new AI development partner that helps you do the hard job. Moving your technology into the AI age without losing the legacy code your business was built on. Let's create smarter business. IBM. This episode of Hard Fork is brought to you by our Hard Fork Live 2026 sponsors. Premier sponsor, IBM. Associate sponsors, Everpure, Pure Leaf, and the University of Notre Dame. And supporting sponsor, Atlassian.

1:00Welcome back, Hard Fork listeners. This week, we are bringing you more interviews from Hard Fork Live and a special musical performance. Today, we are featuring an interview with Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, as well as a musical performance by Dan Powell, one of the New York Times musicians and composers who works on the show and who was there in San Francisco at the live event as our DJ. Yeah, this is a really fun collection of segments, fascinating conversations with Figma's Dylan Field, and a just legendary performance from Dan Powell, who is one of our favorite people. And one of the most fun things about working here is getting to hear Dan's cool music.

1:41We'll be back with more Hard Fork Live on Friday, including a discussion with Daniel Cocotelo and Sayash Kapoor, a hang with Dwarkesh Patel, and we'll take questions live from the crowd. Now, have those been screened in advance? No. Okay. They're firing from the hip.

2:07Any AI developer tool can create a brand new project from scratch. That part's easy. The hard part is working with the code your business already runs on. IBM Bob is a new AI development partner that helps you do the hard job. Moving your technology into the AI age without losing the legacy code your business was built on. Let's create smarter business. IBM. I'm opening up crossplay. I've been playing against Dan, my colleague at the New York Times. I'm going to play stoop, S-T-U-P-E, across the triple board multiplier square. Kat's played another move. And she did have an S. She played stoop for 36 points.

2:46I've got a Z, which is 10 points. If I can put my X over there, I can make box. I have two A's, N's, and T's. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh. I don't know what tanga means, so I'm going to press down on the word. And oh, definition popped up. Former monetary unit of Tajikistan. Learn something every time I play this game. Even though I'm about 50 points ahead, one thing I've learned in crossplay is that the game is never over. I just got a notification and Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close, but I did win. New York Times game subscribers get full access to Crossplay, our first two-player word game.

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3:35Well, we have so much more to come tonight. I know it's hard to believe, but we are so excited for our next guest. Our next guest is the CEO of Figma, an AI and web-based design application founded in 2012. It's Dylan Field. Dylan, welcome. Thanks, guys. Hey, Dylan. So, Dylan, I want to start by reading you a Facebook message I got on August 5th, 2009. hey kevin i recently picked up your book at the library just wanted to let you know how much i enjoyed it anyway best of luck with your future endeavors i'm going to brown this fall who knows maybe i'll meet you in providence someday that message was sent by a teenage boy named dylan field and i want to just first of all apologize i never respond to that so you can fix this can you imagine you write a book and a college student emails you out of the blue and you're like yeah whatever it was you know a lot going on a lot going on in 2009 anyway i'm sorry for ghosting you and second of all it was a good book you shall read it how did your freshman year of college go it was awesome yeah and i got to meet you yeah because i don't know if you remember but uh for the acapella group that you were in you came back as a super senior uh to hang out with everyone i guess yeah including the new freshmen yeah well uh it was it went so well that you dropped out, and moved to Silicon Valley to seek your fortune here.

5:09And it's been quite a run for you. Figma went public last year, has had a wild ride. And I want to talk to you first about AI, because I have heard that you are quite AI-pilled, and I have seen on your social media accounts that you are constantly experimenting with AI, doing all these AI side projects. What are you doing, and do you have AI psychosis? I think it's best to front run the psychosis. Rather than have it sneak up on you, you just got to dive right in and you get it over with. But yeah, I ask myself sometimes, and I don't think so right now. I think I've got a pretty reasonable take on what models are good at, where they're not so great.

5:55But it's really interesting to see the new capabilities. Right now I'm vibe mathing. What's vibe mathing? Well, it's basically YouTube math, but with AI. Are you proving Fermat's last theorem? What are you doing? No, I'm not. But basically, I think it's just interesting to see how AI attacks these problems. It's kind of the opposite of Figma. I mean, Figma, we're a design platform. We often are evaluating the models, trying to see how good they are at design, what we should use, what we should put in our product, expose users. And it's like the opposite of verifiable. You know, you and I could look at something and disagree or agree on the merits of it and the design merits of it.

6:38But, you know, there are some domains like math, some aspects of computer science where things are correct or they're not. And so I think it's really cool to see that range. And the verifiable domains models are very good at now. Casey vibed math his way through high school. They flunked him, but I'm glad it's going better for you. No, I don't have any results. Just be very clear. I want to hear a little bit more about like what direction you are taking in all of your AI use in as you sort of, you know, pursue these projects. This sounds like a lot of sort of like personal stuff that you're doing for fun.

7:08Is that just sort of like the curiosity of a lifelong learner? Or is there something specific that you're trying to find? I find that just in general, the more that you like export your technology, you don't know how it's going to pay off or what benefit we'll have, but ends up having some benefit in weird ways you can expect. I was very excited about NFTs early on, and then they became what they are now. They weren't called NFTs then. They were called crypto collectibles, because that was a cool phrase. But, you know, whether it's that or WebGL, which led to Figma, I just always try to explore stuff and go deep on it, figure out the capabilities, because you can find ways to use them.

7:45I have a theory that I want to run past you, which is that every startup founder, CEO in Silicon Valley is obsessed with VibeCoding. They're all doing it on the weekends. They come in on Mondays and they say, why aren't we building this thing? 50 people used to build this thing. I just built it in a weekend. It's driving their employees crazy. But my theory about this is that this is reminding CEOs of what it was like when their jobs were fun. Do you agree with that statement?

8:17You said you're fearful of that. No, that's my theory. Oh, theory. Okay, sorry. I misheard you. I think that people like to make things and they like design stuff and they like to actually put their ideas out in the world in a more tangible way. And I think we're just going to see more of it from everyone, not just CEOs trying to have fun on the weekend. Speaking of making stuff, Figma recently launched an ad campaign organized around the idea, sort of making fun of the idea that design is dead. It's sort of a more common sentiment maybe in the era of AI. Make that case for us that design is not dead in a world where I can just sort of type what kind of app I want into a box.

8:55This is a real roller coaster from my 2009 Facebook message, now it's design and thread. We're covering it all. It's taking a turn. No, I mean, look, I think that there's so many hot takes online. I'm sure you get a few of them an hour. Sure. And I think when new models drop, everyone's looking for something that they can say is dead because on social media now, it's like either you're so back or it's over. And I prefer to be back. But no, I mean, in terms of the case, I mean, look, like it's interesting to see folks catch up to the capabilities. And it's like, yeah, you do a lot. But the average sort of response from AI, whether it's the domain like writing, you know, my take, my hot take right now would be, I actually think that people that know how to write and actually engage in thinking, critical thinking around writing.

9:47and it's like, it's a good time for them. It's a good time for them. Yeah, well, you told me, but I think so. Yeah. It's like half the audience is applauding. They're like, I don't know, should we not? Is it too, like, are we sucking up? I think, like, you know, to the extent that writing is a showcase for your critical thinking abilities, like, yes, like, having great critical thinking skills are always, like, a boon. Like, is the... But it's also the style. It's the style of writing. Sure. Like, if you're funny, if you've got an actual, like, way you phrase things if you have voice and i i think it's especially true right now in a way that wasn't a few years ago like three five years ago i would have said oh man there's a lot of people on social media that are writing really interesting things and um we're in this world where like there's you know uh sub stack and like people are putting content there and it's really good and now i look at that and i'm like man it's a lot of clod uh you know maybe i'm over rotated even on identifying people that are basically using AI to write.

10:47Same thing's true for design. Folks are basically looking at these websites or applications and seeing the average. Maybe they're even over-identifying it. But I think if you have a creative voice, writing or design, you put yourself out there and you take a risk, this is a good time to do that. It's something that's going to be rewarded. And I can imagine maybe in your view, there's a world where the fact that I can use an AI tool to quickly whip up a design might make me more interested in actually getting good, right? And sort of like not settling for the first generation. Yeah, exactly. It's like, how do you not settle for the first draft, the first thing out there, the first output, and actually mold it and craft it and push it further?

11:31And I think that the more you can do that, the more you'll send out, and also the more you'll be differentiated. And I think that there's going to, I mean, we saw the data recently on the number of apps in the App Store. It went up a ton, but the number of apps actually being used and getting frequent traffic is still the same. And so you're basically in this hyper-competitive environment now where you have to differentiate. You really have to lean in and figure out how to have a unique voice and a unique take at a unique point of view, just like writing. The big buzzword in San Francisco right now is taste.

12:07Everyone's talking about taste as the sort of bulwark against being replaced by AI. If you have taste, you'll be fine. It's the first time taste has ever been a big subject in San Francisco, I think. Yes, this is the city that made all birds a thing. Yeah, proudly tasteless since 1821. And then I've heard some people argue that actually taste is just the word we give to the stuff that the models aren't very good at yet. You know, researchers in AI used to say, ah, but they don't have taste. And then the models got better and it was like, oh, wait a minute, maybe they can do all of the taste parts of the job too.

12:43So defend the concept of taste as being either important or cope from people who just haven't used the good models yet. I mean, the cycle seems to be the model comes out, you think you can do everything, you discover the limits, and then you realize that life goes on. and uh it you know will at some point that be different and affect the world in a different way perhaps we'll see but so far it seems like everyone's adapting and part of the adaptation is uh realizing the sort of new average is being put out by the models and i think it's not even you don't even have to defend taste and people having taste because then we'd argue about do they um to just recognize people can detect the average they can detect that output and they can dare to do more.

13:32But I also do believe that this is a great time to be creative. And I think that the more the models put out, that's in distribution, because that's how the models are trained. They're trained on distribution of data. And if you're in distribution, and you're not actually pushing the bounds, like, I think that you're in a worse shape than if you're actually going and exploring the frontier of human knowledge, creativity, and what you can put on the world, and making something that's fundamentally new as an expression of yourself. So I get excited about that. I get excited about our opportunity to be the place where people can really unlock their creativity at Figma.

14:09And we're one of the places, there'll be many, and just creating tools that can empower people. I'm curious if you're seeing a reaction in the world of art and design to AI and what that looks like, right? You think back and the invention of the camera gets us impressionism. Do we have an analog for that yet in the design world now that AI makes design easier to access? I think it's interesting how we're seeing some of that reaction maybe in the world of marketing and advertising. I don't know if maybe it's happening in the art world. I would have expected by now that people would be really into sculpture in a way that they're not, or just things with textures.

14:53And that'd be my art thesis, so probably don't hire me as an art advisor. But like, you know, I think that that's probably a natural reaction is like lean into the things that are not digital. Whereas I think in advertising now, we're seeing ways to prove authenticity, to prove that you are actually making something that is not generated by AI. And some companies are really going for that. In the world of design, I think that what we're going to see and what we are starting to see, a lot more interactivity, a lot more creativity, uh people really making software more of a creative medium you know i think back to the early days of the internet and it was so fun and i feel like the last 15 years uh or so like basically the time we've been working on figma we kind of been in a bit of a rut honestly um you know a lot of very monoculture takes when it comes to design and the way it expresses and uh i you know and the people that are trying to do hot takes in the audience will be like and figmas to blame uh hopefully not on you yeah exactly casey said it uh but um no i i think that uh the more we can do to make it so that people can push further and like actually create really dynamic interfaces as well as uh marketing and media in general the better have you seen anything that's been ai generated in the realm of design or art that you think is really good like casey turned me on to fruit love island uh which is now my you've all watched it My favorite TV show slash TikTok series.

16:28But is there anything that you've seen that is clearly AI generated where you're like, oh, that's actually kind of fun and interesting? You know, yes, and also it wears off fast. I think it's just like any style. I'm on season three of Fruit Love Island, so it hasn't worn off yet. The pineapple had na fere. The papaya and the banana are about to hook up. It's great. Oh, wow. Sounds tantalizing. I'll have to watch it tonight.

16:57I want to come back to something that you were saying about writing earlier. It's just sort of been on my mind ever since you brought it up because you were bringing about the fact that, you know, we have Substack now and a lot more people are writing, which I agree with you, is super cool. When Satya was here earlier, he brought up this post that he had read that was on Substack today. I happened to read the same post because it was on TechMeme. And I read it, and I'm just going to say it, it was claw-generated, okay? And it irritated me as somebody who's always trying to get my stories on TechMeme because I'm like, I'm just reading like the output of a prompt.

17:26And so when I read that, my honest feeling is like, this is not good for my profession. Like my profession is starting to look more and more like slop. And so I just wonder like if there are designers in the audience, if they're having a similar feeling when, you know, they're looking at the designs that they're seeing everywhere and they're just knowing that it was outputted with a touch of a button. Well, I mean, one quality that writers and designers also share is imposter syndrome. and it's good to label it so that you know it's there and you don't have to deal with it every day or as much.

17:59But I think designers are arguably in one of the best roles in technology. And I mean, I'm talking to companies all the time, customers. They're telling me that they're hiring designers. Sometimes they're not hiring others. But design is one of the most prioritized places in the company where they're hiring. Overall, folks are still hiring a lot. This also perplexes me. I mean, we're in a world where folks are saying that all the jobs are going to get replaced, and they're then turning around and they're like, oh, let me call the really good engineers so I can get them to join my team. So it doesn't make sense to me right now in general, but I am very, very bullish on design and the role it will play in accelerating companies further.

18:39So you think like two years from today, like there are more people whose job title is designer than they have it today? How many years? Say two? Yeah, I think so. I think probably significantly more. And a lot of people that are doing other jobs, I think will start calling themselves designers, creatives. You know, I think in general, we're seeing more of this kind of generalist vibe that people are feeling like they have to embody. One thing that's been interesting is a lot of engineers, kind of like you were saying, getting started on their design journey because they make something so fast and they're like, now what?

19:12And is it good enough? Maybe I should push it further. And then they kind of are trying to figure out, okay, how do I do that? So I'm pretty excited about that part too, welcoming more people in as designers. I have a friend in the audience tonight who is a product manager who started out as a non-technical person and is now able to create really amazing prototypes just with the advance of AI tools. I can see a world where design gets added into that portfolio as well. And I think that at the end of that, that job probably has a different name than PM. I mean, not all of it will be great design, but the act of considering it and being thoughtful about what you're doing and then actually putting it out and taking a risk in man's design.

19:49Dylan, this is a lot of high-minded conversation. Let's gossip. Okay. About what? Earlier this year, Mike Krieger, former board member at Figma, a product lead at Anthropic, co-founder of Instagram, he suddenly resigned from your board. And just days later, Anthropic announced Claude Design, which feels a little Figma-adjacent. So what the heck happened there? I mean, you just told a story. But I mean, let me be clear. Mike is a great dude. And yeah, he's someone I really care about. Would you let another AI lab executive onto your board in the future? Well, I mean, we saw how that went in terms of unexpected products rolling out.

20:38And so probably depends on what their ambitions are. Wait, in a general sense, you're not gossiping. Forget these people are there. Just us birds. Sorry, y 'all. Just us birds. In a general sense, I think a lot of CEOs are worried about the AI labs sort of integrating more vertically, like, you know, taking over insurance companies or accounting firms. We're starting to see some of that happen where these labs are just kind of expanding into all the adjacent industries and really creating tough times for the companies in those industries already. Do you expect that to continue? Are these labs just kind of going to continue to grow and grow and grow and just become these amorphous blobs that just create havoc for all the smaller startups in those fields?

21:24Well, let's tell a tale of two AI labs. You know, you got OpenAI, Ananthropic, and OpenAI kind of went through that journey. They launched a lot of stuff, social network even, Sora, which I really enjoyed. I know you did too, Casey. That's some fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so, you know, speaking of AI generation, I mean, I did enjoy watching myself breakdance. And you'll see him do it again later tonight. With the robot. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, then they've made the hard call of actually shutting that down and focusing the efforts of the company. And that's a hard call to make, but respect that they did it.

22:07And then also I think, you know, you've got Anthropic is kind of in its arc of being more expansionary. They're thinking, launching a lot of stuff. And I think you see what works and what doesn't. And then you see a year later what happens. I mean, I think the more interesting question is a year or two years out, like where will they be playing still? And, you know, not everything works. It's hard to build product and get it out in the world. What are some things that you think they will attempt and fail at? Oh, I don't know. Safety? Joking.

22:47Very good. That might be the best answer of Hard Fork Live. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Dylan, you run a public company. It's Enterprise SaaS. The market is very skeptical of that right now. Your job seems hard. How is it going for you? And do you think you convince the market that there is a bright future for you and your Enterprise SaaS brethren? I don't have to Elon Musk is doing it you're the sun right yeah I mean was it 22.9 trillion on enterprise applications let's go

23:27I'll pretend to know what you mean no I mean like but actually I mean how do you put it out there and not go wow and software is huge I mean he made it bigger than the entire space economy right so you know what do you make of okay I'm told we only have a few minutes left but I'm told that you have have a desire to talk about hyperstition what is hyperstition and why are we supposed to know about it um I guess someone from our team told you that uh this is I mean getting back to the abstract conversation sorry y 'all uh but I mean it's basically someone who's kind of like an internet edgelord came up with this term don't look him up but um but i do think there's like a really interesting idea here which is how do you uh describe this phenomenon where ideas memes summon their own existence and uh the two examples i think are really good at this one is bitcoin and the other one's ai uh you know why did bitcoin work there's every reason to believe in the world that Bitcoin would not work.

24:34And yet it just snowballed. And basically the more attention it got, the more basically strong it became. And AI is the same way. You know, there's all these folks that cared so much about safety, so much that they thought, okay, we got to do this in the right way. We got to form nonprofits and like get together. And like all of us got to be in one place so that we can like really shepherd this technology into the future. And, you know, we've got to make sure we don't create a race dynamic, for example. We got to make sure that, you know, we have, you know, these complex corporate structures that we can make sure that this benefits humanity in the best ways possible.

25:10But then it's like, OK, well, there's a lot of like really powerful stuff you can make with AI. And, you know, people are people. It's hard to always get along. And, man, you know, there's always an incentive to break apart. And, well, hello, Race Dynamics. Here we are. Can I try to repeat back to you what I've heard so far and you tell me if I'm right or not? You can make it better than me. Well, hyperstition, the way I have heard of it is like in the sense of the AI is learning from what stories we tell about AI. So if you want AI to go well, you should like feed it a bunch of stories about AI being like really nice to humans.

25:45That's part of it, too. I think that it's like also the case that AI is like painfully aware in some cases of, you know, all these tropes that are on the Internet about it. And, you know, it'll talk to you about the Google engineer that thought it was conscious. It'll talk with you about sort of the stories around science fiction and the ways that it's been depicted. It's very aware. It's all in the training set. And, you know, there's not as much information for some reason in the training set, data set, of these stories where it goes well. But I actually do think there's an optimistic future for humanity.

26:20And I know that's a hot take now for some reason, but I want to believe that every day. And I think that it's on all of us to tell those stories, too, of how it does go well. And so it might be a good time to write some stories about how things could go well just to make sure it gets into the training table. Exactly. You got it. You have your homework for this evening. Dylan Field, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks so much, Dylan. Thank you. Have a good night. Thank you. All right. Hyperstition.

26:53When we come back, more from Hard Fork Live.

27:02Thank you.