Post Earnings with Figma CEO Dylan Field

0:00Let's bring him into the TV panel show. Dylan, how are you doing? Hey, good. How are you guys doing? Oh, salute back. We're doing great. Great to see you. Did you hear the news? America just won in overtime. We beat the Canadians. I did not hear that news. In hockey. In the Olympics, in hockey. Yeah. Oh, wow. It's great. There's a lot to celebrate. Yes. But give us the news in your world. How are things going? It's good. We're working hard, having fun. But yeah, we just did our earnings and really strong results. We're super excited. uh 2025 was just a massive year for us and the fourth quarter uh was our best quarter yet so we 40 year over year growth right you got it uh we did uh 304 304 million in revenue wow and then uh also yeah we i mean look at the whole year i mean we just shipped so much went from four to eight products launched over 200 features uh and most recently uh earlier this week on tuesday we launched a quad code to Figma design pathway where you can go from code to the Figma canvas.

1:09And I'm really excited about how we can do this entire round trip and make it possible so that wherever you start, we can give you a way to go anywhere on the Figma platform. Do you think people are sort of under appreciating that loop because so many of the experiences with with agentic coding systems like Cloud Code, or very toy projects. The first time I used Codex on desktop, I just remade the TVPN homepage to look like Berkshire Hathaway's website. It's like, I just took a screenshot. I didn't need to do any real work. It was a five minute thing. And I think a lot of people are amazed by the toy projects, but then they don't really think about what's happening when there's a design system.

1:51This is a large organization. This is an enterprise. This is gonna be something that's enduring. And so can you share a little bit more about that flywheel and what it takes to actually put these tools to use in a serious way? You know, I think it's actually really important even when you're, maybe it's my mindset, I'm a perfectionist. But even for the toy projects, I want to go figure out like, what is the best expression of my fun toy project? Sure. You know, maybe something like a Berkshire Hathaway website is a fairly constrained form factor. and so maybe that's not the best example. It's like HTML3.

2:27I recently made, for example, my friend was like, I want to go viral in this year and it was a birthday. My goal for this year of my life is to go viral. Well, that's kind of weird but cool. And so I made them a website. A lot of space to explore there. There's a lot of ways to go viral. Some can be good. Go on an airplane, yell at people. What I probably should have done is said, hey, go talk to these guys. But instead, I made them a website with Figma Make and made it really beautiful and tried a few different directions out. And yeah, very quickly got to, okay, here is sort of with some custom prompting, like a list of ways for them to go viral given who they are.

3:16And then it was all collected together in a nice way. But even for a fun project like that, it's just like, you know, I'm going to send to them. They're going to do whatever they do. I don't know if they're going to look at it more than a few times or even a few times. But I don't know. For me, I want to go explore wide enterprise. Yeah, you absolutely need to go think deeply about what's going to make the best product experience for your customers. And that's not going to be just a we're going to go code it up and we're going to do whatever we come up with first. You're going to go actually think through the options space and try to figure out what it is that you want to go steer towards.

3:54That is critical. And if you don't think about that as a system, if you don't actually use all the components you've standardized on the styles, then you're not going to appear the same way to your customer throughout the entire user journey. and it has to really tie together with brand as well as your product as well as your point of view and your marketing your messaging so it's super important to make it so that you're able to have all that come together and uh just being in code i think is very linear it might be running fast but it might be running towards the wrong direction yeah uh what's driving the figma make growth.

4:32Is that the same archetype as the Figma user? Does it diverge in any interesting ways? What can you share about how interesting ways people are using Figma Make and also how you're thinking about growing that product? Yeah. When you look at Figma Make, I think what's really cool is to see how many non-designers are using it. And that is something that we've really picked up on is not just designers that are going in and making really amazing prototypes through Figma design, but also folks are coming in and making these files and prototypes and actually full working web apps and experiences. I mean, 60 % of files created in Figma make are non-designers at this point, which is amazing.

5:22Yeah. I mean, that was a big part of the original Figma thesis was that there were going to be non-designers using this tool from day one. Yeah, basically if you looked at the TAM of the business purely on a product designer basis, it didn't look like it would be the business today. I don't think you ever had a job as a designer, right? Yeah, and yet I've used Figma every day for a decade. Yeah, that's interesting. How do you think about the growth of that product in terms of adding plugins, features, hosting, deployment, uptime, edge distribution? That could grow into its whole thing, right? Yeah, or maybe a more simple question is like, where do you want to partner?

6:05Where do you want to build yourself? Yeah. I mean, I think that we're going to see tons of partnerships for things like Figma Make, where you need to be able to pull in context from whatever systems people use. And then with that, use it to help create and help access data. But more importantly, I think that it's really key that we both create a simple surface that if you're just getting started, you can use. And also we figure out how do we make it so that you're able to go above and beyond and go really professional and do things that basically require a skill ladder to traverse. But visual first, that's the thesis is visual first.

6:55But yeah, make users grew 70 % quarter over quarter. I mean, we're seeing great adoption. I think people are really resonating with the product and finding all sorts of fun and awesome use cases for it. And I think there's such opportunity given the way that our active users of make are also using Figma design to bring new services closer together, which I think is back to that divergent point because make is still too linear for my taste. Oh, interesting. What feature requests are you prioritizing and most thinking about and what are some maybe more wild feature requests that Figma may not get to?

7:38Well, I mean, there's a feature request in this conversation to go do edge computing i don't think it's gonna happen okay uh you know uh all of our all of the the folks out there working on edge computing you know come partner with us hardware we're not in your space don't worry hardware i want a hardware device um you you mentioned taste how have you been reacting to the taste discourse is taste a new how many different cycles of taste discourse This is the first time I've ever heard of taste. Have happened since Figma was started. I think about companies like Linear who, to me, exemplify a taste-driven company and how many of these cycles where they're like, oh, they care about this again.

8:21Great.

8:25I mean, look, I think that from the start of Figma, the goal was not just to get everyone doing design or making design software usable by everybody and expanding the market that wasn't the way we thought about it it was like how do we get people started on this journey where they can actually go and be more expressive more creative uh and you know really start to solve problems and you know maybe it was a bit of like projection but for me at least uh i wake up in the morning i'm like i want to go create software i want to go build stuff and so how do i make it so that anyone with that impulse can just do that.

9:04That doesn't mean they're all going to have like taste and craft and epic design skills. I mean, I think for the rest of my life, I can work on that. And many designers have made that a lifelong pursuit. Yeah. Yeah. There's something, there's something that's very real where you start on this creative journey and your taste level can be way above your skill level. And it's incredibly frustrating. And some people start and they just stop because they feel like I have this idea for what I want something to look like or be like, and I'm kind of trying to make things that match that, and I can't. And that's part of why AI in general is incredibly exciting because it can help you close that gap faster and potentially help you close that gap almost instantly in some circumstances.

9:50But you might create 100 different outputs before getting to the one that actually meets that level. Yeah, I think that the key thing is that you really have to go wide and explore and then challenge yourself. If you find areas where you're going, hey, actually, I don't feel like I am liking this enough. I'm not happy enough with a solution. Then you got to go keep pushing. But the more you can sample the possibility space and see some things that you like and you don't like, it gives you something to react to. And I think that the constant thing is you need to be constantly critiquing and thinking about what is it that you like, you don't like, etc.

10:37And people talk about agents all the time. And I'm obsessed with agents too. We all are, right? Agents are cool. How many Mac Minis do you have? No comment. No comment. He's the reason that Mac Minis are sold out. There's a line item in the 10K. I swear I am not Claude Bod. But anyway, but yeah. But like, I think that the bigger point, going back to taste is, you know, if an agent can do it for you, then unless you've got some amazing, sophisticated prompting that's super unique, like an agent can do it for someone else. And so I think that this discourse on like, agents are just going to do all the things.

11:18Well, what is different about your setup than others? you we just have to have something different there in order to not think that you're gonna get the same thing else they're gonna get yeah well even then I don't know if it's gonna get you sick extraordinary yeah yeah we were in a post yesterday that was sort of trying to quantify the the background that leads to taste and he was basically saying that like Steve Jobs was incredibly high IQ but also had like varied training data in that he had like been homeless and like traveled the world and like got all these like bizarre experiences. And I'm wondering if that like resonates with you or you think that it's, it's like too difficult to even quantize what makes for a great designer or great taste.

12:06You know, I think that the great designers I've met through my life, um, have come from so many different backgrounds. You know, a lot of, a lot of folks have come through rigorous design training. Like they just, just went through a system and other people, wow. they went and created their band poster and that got them into graphic design. And then somehow they showed up at the right house and crashed on someone's couch and then they became a product designer and then everyone went back. So everything in between. There's not really a pattern. Some people have traveled the world and gone on the meditation retreats and some people are as buttoned up as you could get and just totally straight-laced.

12:50I think that the nice thing about designers is they're so unique and there's no pattern matching. Yeah. How do you think about variability of design going forward? Are we at sort of a narrowing period because most people come with just a generic prompt? Because I saw your Figma make examples and I was like, I didn't even know that was possible. I would never have gotten there. So are there going to be tools to maybe help people be inspired by your background, which has a whole bunch of variation on it? I don't know. Yeah, I'm just wondering because we were just talking about a company that it feels like the prompt was like, copy Jordy's website.

13:38Maybe it wasn't, maybe it's just coincidence, but it felt like, okay, there wasn't a twist here where it was like oh just do something completely different that's never been applied to this particular category at least like steal from a different niche instead of from the one that's like very very similar um but i'm wondering how you're how you're seeing like variation in design uh take take take hold in in the world yeah this is the moment i think uh where we're gonna see the pendulum go from i mean let's look back right so we had the flash era geocities like I'm not saying it was high quality era, but there was a lot of variation.

14:17And then iPhone comes out as skeuomorphism and then Swiss minimalist design. And nothing wrong with Swiss minimalist design. That is a really cool and storied field and lineage. But it is just one part of the greater aesthetic realm. And we can go into such interesting places and try so many interesting patterns on the UX side, too. It's not just UI and the visuals. It's also the structure, the IA, the way that people navigate through these things and interaction patterns. And I think there's innovation that's going to be flourishing on all of it. I'm just so excited to see the Internet get really dynamic and really visual.

15:04and people try things that we haven't seen in a while and things that people haven't seen ever. Because I think that that's what it's going to take to stand out now. There's so much there. The exponential curve of software is just taking off in a way that it's always been exponential, but now it's vertical. We talked about this before. And in order to stand out, you guys have a show that you're managing to actually break through and get people to be watching this um like this is not normal right like but you have worked very hard very diligently to create the conditions under which you have this audience well um this is the thing that everyone has to figure out now is how are you going to actually get any attention in a world where there's constantly new information even beyond America winning the ice hockey match.

16:01Yeah, I've been thinking about how Gen.AI is impacting marketing. It's allowing somebody has like a unique idea, and then it used to be like you had like at least a month to kind of like run with that unique idea, maybe three months if it was like a specific campaign or something like that. And now somebody can literally fast follow you and your idea almost immediately. So good ideas always get copied, but they get copied even faster now. Another thing that I was thinking about when you were talking about kind of the explosion of UI, John had a post yesterday that he was sort of jokingly making like a BuzzFeed style listicle, like five features that could explode your LLM usage or something like that.

16:49and one of them was like caching and people have had this idea of like generative UIs, UIs that's being made like on the fly and I feel like we may get, we may like have products where that's happening, right? Like you're in an LLM and a UI is being generated but it will still make sense like if there's something that happens all the time like thousands millions of times a day, billions, like it does not, it really stops making sense to just generate it on the fly. It's like, hey, this happens a lot. Let's make the best version of this and we don't need a light light. I had a poster on this actually, exactly this topic.

17:27I can send it to you if you want. Basically the post was about how the length of time that an artifact will exist for is inversely proportional to the likelihood it's going to be generated. And I think this is true across media. So basically if you are writing a book, unlikely that you're going to have like ai just generate your book yeah uh amazon booksellers would like the word yeah you just you can just say you don't read adult romantic fiction we got it uh no no no i think i think i think i think uh yeah but like i think um you know something that's like a ad that will live for you know a few hours totally like yeah probably you're going to have an agent that's going to generate that.

18:15Yeah, the difference is like you're making an asset to respond with a meme format to news. Makes a lot of sense to like put that through a Nano Banana or ChatGPT. But if you're putting and making a billboard, maybe you're still using AI to some degree, but you're going to invest like significantly more time. I think if you're going to make a billboard that's going to cost money and it's going to be up for a month and a lot of people are going to see it, I think you're going to have a human touch. We actually, with Weavey, now Figma Weave, we've been looking a lot at these kinds of use cases. And one thing that just we think about a lot is how you have this first prompt, but then you actually want to go and have it go through a process where you can transform and mutate it in almost like clay that's being shaped.

19:04You can treat it like a medium to get to a final output that's amazing. So like in our earnings call, we talked about how NVIDIA, which they've actually done this as a public case study, they put the entire making of this keynote online and they used Weevy with it. And what they did was they had all these robots and they needed to basically get to a 20K image of this whole scene. Like how do you create a 20K image with perfect lighting throughout. I mean, it's really tough. So they had a whole custom pipeline with Weeby they did. And just like the amount of work to go do that at scale of that pixel density is immense.

19:46And I thought their workflow was super cool as all. I'll share that with you too. I love it. Yeah, please send us that. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Thank you for having me. Always a good time. We were so fired up seeing the results from yesterday. Really a testament to how locked in the team. The team is amazing. Yeah. They're working so hard, and it's just an incredible team. I'm so grateful. Yeah. And I think it's a proof point. I mean, I think that we're going to see it over and over again, whether it's the taste discourse, just customers with Figma. But design is a differentiator.

20:24Like, figure it out. Go learn design. Hire your designer. Otherwise, you're going to have a hard time. That's my last message. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Great to see you. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.