Dylan Field on the “Permanent Underclass of Zero Taste”

0:00Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO. Figma.

0:07Heard this was the Coachella for design, but I'm literally seeing that. So there's 10 ,000 people that are expected to come. What kind of companies are representing the crowd? Pretty much all of them. It's international. People come from all over the world. It's not just tech or software. It's everything you can imagine. Any role you can imagine in terms of software and media, advertising and content. I mean, you know this better than anyone. retention economy is real. Staying out is hard. I think that it takes not only human steering and human intent, but also it takes a point of view. It is not enough to wear a thinking cap.

0:41You have to actually think. Elon Musk once said, if a product is special enough, it needs no logo. What do you think about that?

0:57Dylan Field. Thank you for having me. Thanks for having me. Welcome to config. I mean I've heard this was the Coachella for design but I'm literally seeing that. It hasn't started yet and it's already packed. Yeah this is day zero. So what goes on today? Well today we got config commons most importantly and it's a good time for you to get your badge so that we don't have have a long line tomorrow. One time we had like an hour keynote delay. It was very embarrassing. Really? Yeah, so we have a pre-reg thing now. But also try to give people food, hangout spaces, get them to mingle. I think it's really cool because people are always reconnecting with old friends here.

1:34But also, they have a chance to just meet so many people in the design community. And it's a really special community. And that's not just for Figma. It's just for design more broadly. So there's 10 ,000 people that are expected to come. Yep. What kind of companies are representing this crowd? Pretty much all of them. But no, really, I mean, it's international. People come from all over the world. And not just tech or software, it's everything you can imagine. And, you know, any role you can imagine, IC to leadership. We have everybody from like the chief design officer to the students that are part of our student programs here.

2:15So yeah, it's all over the place. Pretty exciting. Okay, we're gonna attempt to walk through the crowd. Okay, let's go for it. And you already had some paparazzi on you, so we'll see how this goes. I think they're coming for you, you know. No, they're not Dylan. It's literally the config like Figma conference. Okay, so how many years have you been doing this and why start it in general? Yeah, so we started in 2020, right before the pandemic. And it was actually our 10th config, because we've done international configs that are fast follows to the config in SF. But the reason it started, we had basically user groups starting to pop up all around the world.

2:59And then from there, as the user group started to really gain momentum, we wanted some way to bring everyone together. And at first, we're like kicking around ideas like, oh, yeah, maybe like a few hundred people. We decided, let's go big, like 800 people. And that sold out instantly. So then from there, we were planning to, right afterwards, like, okay, next time it's going to be really big. Well, it actually ended up being even bigger because of the pandemic. And so it was like, this is going to be a remote conference now. Oh, my God. We got so lucky the first time because we were able to, three weeks I think, before the pandemic started, in full in the US, the world shut down, had the chance to bring everyone together.

3:39And I can't imagine what it would be if it was three weeks earlier. Yeah, that's insane. Yeah. So the big headline right now, which I think you have pretty much disproven, is that design is dead. Why is design not dead? Look around you. No, I mean, I think that the weird thing right now is everyone is kind of putting down all the other roles. So like, you know, I'm seeing way too much of engineers saying, I don't know, either PM and designer. And the PM is like, I don't need the engineer or designer. And the designer is going, maybe I don't need the PM or the engineer. And so like, why is that happening?

4:27And I think that we're in a temporary phase of people really, you know, getting excited about what they can do with AI. Yeah. But not yet realizing all the limitations that they have. and hey uh and yeah so i think that there's um like it's truly exciting what you can do but also the value of a team is really important and i think we're we're in a line here we're in a line what is is this for us for food yeah okay i heard that you guys not to deviate too much but i heard you guys are going to sell out of merch in like five seconds i hope not hopefully it lasts a little longer um but the uh but yeah so i think it's like very lonely the idea that you're just going to work alone on everything forever um and i think that you know if you want to build scalable real systems explore broadly build the right thing not just like something fast then i think it's really important to lean into design um not just from a visual and aesthetic standpoint but also from a user experience standpoint, from like understanding the user, understanding the culture around you, like design is so much more than visuals and aesthetic.

5:44That's just the tip of the iceberg. But what I think is really promising is how I'm seeing so many engineers now that are, I hope our cameraman did not trip. We're seeing so many engineers now just get interested in Figma. and as that happens uh they're starting to really pick it up because you go build something really fast that's awesome but then you're like okay can i like actually now make it great right i mean what i thought was interesting is like figma not only unlocked design for just normal people who like just didn't really know how to design anything but your software is like really easy to use it's very intuitive, but now you're involving code into it.

6:26And so now engineers are literally coding design. Yep. And I think that the aspects of like what we're launching tomorrow will be even more in that direction. Really? I'm really excited about that. Go for it. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Okay. Yeah, so now we're inside. So now we're inside. Let's do a little 360 here. Yeah. Come around. This is the emptiest film. So how is it all set up? Where do people really mingle and all that kind of stuff? The mingling will occur everywhere. But downstairs is going to be more like main stage keynote. And that's like where there's a lot of activations and area to explore.

7:09Is that your favorite part? The main stage keynote? Yeah. I don't usually remember it. So once I get past it, then I'm like... Do you black out? Yeah, it's a little bit of a blackout experience. Yeah, I get that. Yeah. but you can watch it later online and then you're like oh I said what yeah I was talking to Michael about this before but I was like watching all of the previous config videos and I was like shit this is really cool well the content that we're doing is so much yeah the content on all the tracks are amazing and we've had such incredible speakers and like at legendary times too uh I actually one of my favorite ones was um Jesper from teenage engineering I don't know if you saw that one no I got to interview him and uh yeah he is a character definitely watch that one later okay yeah are there any speakers this year you're excited about so so many speakers um that I'm excited about but two that I'm like off the wall excited about um one is Holly Herndon she's total visionary artist who I think people don't appreciate like how far ahead she sees things um you know she was into very pacific like quirky ways of using nfts or they won't call it then uh early on she open sourced her voice with ai early on you know this is back in like 2021 or something 2020 i mean it's just like the the time scale that she's operating on is different than the rest of us yeah um grant sanderson three blue and brown on youtube is another person that i I think will give a great talk and I can't wait to watch it.

8:45He's someone that I've been following for a long time. I'm lucky to call a friend. And he does these explainer videos for math that are just incredible and really uses graphics and design to be really craft forward in his explanations. And he puts so much care into them and just has been a teacher for so many. Is this why you're vibe mapping? That's just for fun. What does that mean? It's just a form of LM psychosis. Okay. Until it's not, but we'll see. I think that the models are really decent at math, like pure math. And it's a bit of an antidote to the non-verifiable domains that I'm usually in.

9:31So for Figma, I mean, it's all vibes, right? Like you're trying to figure out, sometimes it's very clear. Okay, like literally you didn't center the div. like learn to center divs AI but I think more often you know it's more like okay well actually you're giving a lot of styles that are very similar here you're not as broad in your range as you could be if an LM is providers asking us for feedback or we're trying to steer it and the evals were running on stuff we're doing stuff others are doing like a lot of it is inherently non fire verifiable it's like got to be human judged at the end of the day.

10:09And you can set up more automatic methods for that, but you still have that human intent. Whereas formal domains like math, I mean, that's as formal as it gets if you set up the formal systems correctly, which are really easy to mess up. And I think it's kind of just a nice antidote in contrast to like Figma experience. I love that. It's very unexpected. So you're talking about some of the speakers, were there anybody else that you're excited about? uh there's so many i think that um well i'm in keynote brain right now yeah and i think the keynote will be really awesome so we're gonna have a bunch of figmates that are showing just incredible stuff i know i love that it's like we were start we started by the big sign and then all of a sudden you got swarmed oh well those are all people i see all the time yeah we have a great team um actually uh ian who you met uh i was in a class in my senior year of high school we were in a real analysis class together.

11:08And since where I first met him, and then he randomly applied to Figma at some point and didn't even tell me. I was like, why didn't you tell me? And I found out, as soon as I found out, I'm like, this is the smartest guy I've ever, one of the smartest people I've ever met. Like, please, can we get him in? Oh my God. He still went through the full loop, of course. Shout out to Ian. All right, so we're going to head over and sit down for the Pantone Lounge. Let's do it. It's super exclusive. Just two of us. Yeah. All right. Dylan Field, we are in the Pantone Lounge. We're in the Pantone Lounge.

11:38We made it through. We made it through the crazy crowd who was screaming your name and taking pictures. Maybe exaggerated a little bit. I'm not exaggerating. It's a great group out there. So I'm glad you got to be there. So how did you convince all of them or their bosses that they should take the day off? I think if you convince them and their bosses to come, it helps. So that's more of, I think, what's happening. So they're all having a lot of fun. because we're in the Pantone Lounge I want to ask you a very pressing question okay what is your favorite color I'm not gonna ask about ref number purple yeah I'm a purple guy but purple has a broad range uh and so it's very hard to define exactly where in purple I kind of like the range you know and sometimes it's like more of a reddish purple uh more bluish but yeah I I also think it's amazing when people are great at color theory i am not no i i know enough to know that i'm not amazing at color theory but i have the utmost respect for those that are you haven't gotten your color waves checked you know that's like a thing too uh like if i'm what tetra chromatic or something like if you're like it's a i think it's like a korean thing where they like color theory you and like see what your aura is and what colors you should be wearing they're yours No, I don't think so.

12:59But no, I mean, I think that composition and color, it's like a real skill. And a bunch of people really try and train for this. And some people have got it to the degree that others don't. And it's amazing when you find them. We're going to take it even more serious. Okay. You were recently on Mafia. Oh, yeah. You made it to game three. You're now the star of the show. So Dylan, how does it feel to be killed on the first try? To be specific. So there's game one where I was killed by the mafia the first night. Game two where I was the mafia and definitely did not play my best game. I'll be real.

13:41And then game three made a decent argument, but not my best work either. And got killed by the village first night. And so, yeah, not the best showing, but it was a lot of fun. and I was re-watching the third episode and I think the star is actually Palmer. Yeah. Until the very end when he smirks, sorry spoilers for your listeners, but at the very end he kind of smirks when he's like almost one. That was the first time I was going, oh, I would have figured it out. The other two I would have figured out because they had tells. But Palmer, there was like nothing. He was just the same energy throughout.

14:20So I was pretty wowed watching it. What have you learned about human psychology from that? From Mafia? I think there's not much to learn about human psychology from Mafia. I played a decent amount of Mafia or Werewolf, you know, same game. People have religious wars around what to call it. But, yeah, I think that, you know, probably that people's attention spans are short, that you can diverge and kind of divert conversation. at some point I stopped playing the game actually because I figured out that it was a lose-lose either you actually do well and you've like lost because people afterwards oftentimes are like how could you I trusted you just like I feel terrible or you've like literally lost like I did those games and so I prefer to moderate and definitely out of practice but it's a fun one it's super fun And it was really cool that Solana did that.

15:23I think he's had that vision for a long time. And I just give them all the credit for making it happen that way. Totally. I think more people got to do that. They just got to take a big risk and a big swing and just go for it. I mean, I think that'll be kind of like a through line of most of our conversation because there's so many attempts right now of building a brand in the abyss of templated AI. Literally everywhere. And so whether it's like comms, marketing, media, brand, product, like we're kind of like stuck in this like bell curve of the middle. And so how should people, especially with Figma, like escape what I kind of call like the permanent underclass of zero taste?

16:06That's a perfect like meme fusion there. I'll have to steal it for our marketing. I think basically, first of all, there's a taste and there's sort of the distribution common. They're very separate. I think that first it's important to acknowledge, like if you just use an LM for everything and have it literally tell you how it wants to go build a thing, how to go design a thing, you're going to get something that it wants to give you. and it's kind of diverged that point from whatever's in your head to however it processed it. I do think through workflows and we have like something called Figma Weave for example where you can take model outputs and you can pass them through a workflow and really steer it along the way and that can get you closer to I think non-deterministic generative workflows that get closer to intent and are systematic but in general yeah people that are just like yeah design me the thing, you know, you're going to get the average and it's not going to stand out.

17:11And in a world where there's just more than average in terms of software and media and advertising and content, I mean, you know this better than anyone. Potential economy is real. Staying out's hard. And I think that it takes not only human steering and human intent, but also it takes a point of view and I think that is something that people fall down on all the time because it's kind of scary to have a point of view it's like a real point of view and to be bold and to take a risk and so I'm hopeful and actually I think there's good early signs this everywhere right now that folks are already internalizing this even if they can't speak about it like in the same words yet and they're already kind of from the market teaching them realizing they have to go take these bolder bets bigger swings and as they do that I think they're going to really unlock just this explosion of creativity and we're gonna see you know so many things tried that haven't been tried before and so that's something that like I cannot wait for This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite.

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19:10It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Bye. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces. the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. There was a tweet that you posted retweeting a graph of like number of apps that are being released and then the actual usage of those apps.

20:03We actually just like, I talked about that with Mark Pincus. He's a super product guy. He definitely pays attention to that. But in that point, you were saying execution is cheap, but design and creativity are actually very, very important and separates the wheat from the chaff. But in terms of that, like what kind of risks should people be taking? Like what do you see is kind of like overlooked right now? I think so much is overlooked. I mean, everything from like what problem are you even tackling to how do you brand? What positions do you take as a company? how do you connect with people and what emotions are you trying to bring through your brand and marketing, but also through your application software.

20:49And then for the software side, I think, you know, I'm just eager to see not only more interaction patterns tried, but really folks understanding like what is the core thing that people need and pushing all the way to get there. it's so much easier to apply patterns that you've already seen but um i think that there's just like this huge unexplored space out there of stuff that uh you know it takes a long time to get right and that is a risk because you might not actually hit but if you can actually uh go all the way and think of the system really well and hold it in your head and hold it in your team's head which is you know even harder um to communicate it like you kind of have to memefy it inside your company sometimes uh but if you can do that and you can come up with like more novel ways for people to interact with systems that's where i think uh you know it'll really be amazing and the example is uh i'm still shocked that we're in a prompting age like it's been what five years since gpt3 now I think it's 2021, June 2021, GP3.

22:04Really? I think so. That's crazy. Yeah. And we're still prompting LA. There are other ways to explore latent space. I just think that the interfaces for how you interact with models will evolve so much. And to the degree that models are part of software, we will see a ton of exploration there. When we're talking about brand and personality and forming trust, AI has really stopped a lot of trust in technology and just kind of like mainstream media. It's like, I think it's like literally worse than ice. So what builds a trusted brand? Well, AI, first of all, I would say is really bimodal case, right?

22:52because you've got folks that are literally in the case of you know a 4-0 or Claude like in love with the model uh and I don't just mean like they really like its outputs like they have affection for the model uh I would say that's trust uh and then you've got people that are like this taking it could take my job I'm listening to things people are saying about how it's going to destroy the world or the economy or whatever and doom and so that is couldn't be further apart like the super fans versus the super detractors but in terms of just generally brand I think it's consistency over time and how do you actually show up in a way that people can expect and model in their heads and you know keep living your values keep showing up the right way and really doing things with the customer's interest at heart if you're not doing that what are you doing yeah so i i also go back to um a line that uh tim o'reilly would always say i my first internship professionally was like at O 'Reilly Media and I loved it there.

24:07They were amazing to me and I'm so grateful to them. Tim O 'Reilly would always talk about create more value than you capture. And I think that is extremely important. And when you're perceiving, you know, singletons for AI, folks that, you know, you perceive might want to become monoliths and they're not saying that they're not gonna wanna do that. There's gonna kind of be like a black hole and suck it all up, which I'm sure that that's not gonna be what ends up happening. I think that they're all gonna get a lot smarter than that. And I think most don't even wanna do that in the first place.

24:46But yeah, you know, the definition of a platform is that you're creating even more value outside of the platform than you are from the platform itself. This is also the Microsoft definition. It's like, what's the GDP of everything created on Windows back when Windows was the top priority of Microsoft? They wanted that sort of GDP of stuff built on Windows to be greater than the revenue of their Windows line. And I think that's a really special way to think about ecosystem. And yeah, overall, the more that I think we lean into that kind of mindset as an industry and AI companies are vocal about that and show that, then I think people have more trust.

25:33But the doomerism has to stop as well. And it has to stop with good rationale. You know, we have to come up with the best arguments we can for not what can go wrong, but how we're going to go address it and paint an optimistic future vision for humanity. Right. I've been seeing a shift in sentiment towards productivity, not job loss. And so while like, I guess it's weird, but kind of the new North star is to have more agents than employees, because they'll help equip your employees and you'll run faster. You'll be able to do more as an organization. You can be more on the offensive side, which I think you and Figma have been doing really well.

26:15And then, I mean, you could also see this with like figure AI, like they now have more humanoid robots at their office than employees. Obviously they're going to sell them, but still. Yeah, it's a little different. It's a little bit different, but I'm curious from your standpoint, as the proliferation of AI agents increase, like how does that change the internal dynamics of software and how you're selling and the products you're creating and all that? I think that there's a bunch of ways this could play out, and so we'll have to see. But overall, first, I think it's not even clear how do you define the unit of an agent.

26:54Yeah. So that's kind of a difficult one. But yeah, in general, it should be the case that there's great services that you offer if folks are trying to do inference and use AI with your software and your platform, that should result in value to the customer. And it should be the case that that's driven, I think, by humans. Overall, I think that humans being the loop will be the way that you steer towards the best outcomes. and I think that all my experience with AI so far have shown that on formal domains, things that are verifiable, you can get to amazing outcomes with enough IQ points and yet judgment is like somehow not purely correlated with just adding IQ points to the model.

27:53design certainly does not seem to be correlated with adding IQ points to the model these seem to be other capabilities that you have to figure out how to train and judgment I'm really curious about in particular because yeah just intuitively you know the folks that are really good at strategy like I have not even found with humans the common characteristic of how to go find them. In design, I think, you know, how do you teach a model true empathy for a user? How do you make it so that they can not just, you know, read a transcript of a user interview, but understand the relationships that user has, the inflections in their voice when they're talking about the problems they have and how it matters.

28:46and connect that with their world and actually have that empathy for their worldview and where they're coming from to build for them, I think it's really hard. What is the biggest question right now that people should be asking? Actually, I think that, you know, for recording this on Tuesday, maybe I haven't looked at the news this morning, maybe it's already a different question. But as of right now, we've got a live situation with U.S. government, Anthropic, where they're discussing a jailbreak. I'm not even sure if jailbreak is the right word, but the use case they're concerned about seems important.

29:27But I would say that jailbreaking is something that is understudied. and I actually think that there needs to be a kind of different posture towards trying to get people to break jailbreak models in order to battle test them the same way that we do with like HackerOne. There are programs that are being run by the labs of course but I think that there needs to be way more incentive out there to do that and we need to find what it means like jailbreaks are very wide in terms of the spectrum of what they do you know um and I don't think we can have a conversation like this without even like defining what a jailbreak is so that's one question I would say is what's a jailbreak you seem to be doing some jailbreaking yourself so uh what well I don't know I don't know what is a jailbreak so um no I mean I think that But there's a period of time where I enjoyed just trying to figure out how models worked, reasoned from the outside end.

30:32I'm more enjoying now just like with open weight models looking at interpretability research and whatnot when you can actually get access to compute for that. It's pretty fun. but overall I think you know it's I mean just just talking with models long enough leads to states that you could call a jailbreak for basically the model yeah but again what is a jailbreak it's not like you have to do some fancy JSON thing like that's what people like to popularize it online with but I mean you can just talk to them and ask them questions are you token maxing? I think that yes and no. I try to have the first stuff that I'm working on, oftentimes I'm trying to get the agent running longer as long as it's got a defined goal.

31:33But yeah, I mean, I could be running like an agent swarm or something and I'm not doing that. We have plenty of people that think about that are and are getting great results though. And it's amazing how much we can do there when you have folks that really understand the infrastructure that they're trying to build and they go and, you know, they're already 10x and they can 10x themselves again by having the agents really break up tasks properly. So one thing that was really interesting, I had an interview with Daniel Strachman from previous, from Teal Fellowship, like maybe a year ago now and the one thing wonderful she's so cool that was a really fun interview um the one thing that she brought up and she named you i think a couple of times in the interview but you were an early teal fellow um she said that you were hyperfluous i mean even you talking about loms right now and like ai like you're definitely more in the weeds than i think common folk so like why why do you think it's important to have that trait of like deep curiosity and hyperfluency well how did that develop I just think the world's like amazing and uh yeah I I don't know I I kind of just look at anything and I'm pretty much interested in it um so I I don't have a great answer but uh definitely like if you're not always learning or finding a way to learn from any conversation uh anything that you can encounter it's like well why not you know there's just so much interesting stuff out there in the world.

33:09And so, yeah, I feel like we get such limited time on earth, like, let's make the most of it and try to learn and connect the dots and figure out how to create some frameworks around what's happening and then break them. You know, it's just like a great mystery that we're alive and what's out there. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before.