First Time Founders with Ed Elson – Figma’s Founder on Post-IPO Life & the Road Ahead

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1:43Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. At the start of 2025, the IPO market felt like it had frozen in place. Then, slowly, the tide began to turn. By the third quarter, deal flow picked up dramatically. 23 companies raised nine figures or more, and five made headlines with blockbuster listings. One of those headlines came from a company whose tools have quietly become essential to modern digital design. At this point, the company has millions of users. It's used by 95 % of Fortune 500 companies. Its platform is now central to nearly every digital team's workflow. That company went public in July, and it is now finding its feet after one of the biggest IPOs of the year.

2:30This is my conversation with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan Field, thank you for joining me on First Time Founders. Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here and to finally get to meet you. Absolutely. So we're going to get into how you started Figma. Everyone's been talking about it. Biggest IPO of the year, really. We've been talking a lot about it on our other podcast, property markets. But I want to start with a quote from your founder, Letta. In the internet boom of the late 90s, the ethos was, build it and they will come. Today, that could not be further from the truth.

3:06It used to be that design was an afterthought. Now design is more than form and function. Design is how you win or lose. You are a design company. What is different about the world today compared to 30 years ago that makes design so important. I love that you read the founder's letter, first of all. So thank you for reading it. Absolutely. I put a lot of thought into it. And so I've always been eager to kind of get that reflected back and love that we're just diving right into it. Let's go. It's certainly been the case for Figma that from the beginning, we had this intuition that design was becoming more important.

3:45I couldn't put in the words that I could put in today. And design, I think, started to become this infectant around software. It started to make us the expectations for everything increased. And we started to see that in design hiring. And design ratios, you know, we're going from like, okay, we got one designer for, you know, dozens of engineers. And their job is to put lipstick on a pig and make it pretty at the end of the process. To a different set of mind, sort of shift of mindset into this more Apple philosophy of design is how it works. Yes. And the more people that took on that philosophy, the more people that tried to meet the market where they wanted to be met, those companies, I think, did so much better.

4:27And people were starting to realize that. Yeah. And so they started to hire more designers. We saw this ratio change tremendously over that time. Suddenly it was going to, you know, in extreme cases like Airbnb, you might have one designer for every two or three engineers. Right. Instead of one designer for every 30 engineers or no designers. And so then as this wave of design hiring happened, we also saw just the wave of software increase too. And all this started to come together into a thesis of design is how you win or lose. And that's a thesis we held before AI. With AI, it is like absolutely unequivocally clear that that is true.

5:07Because now that exponential is no longer just like this kind of, oh, it looked flat, now it's trending upwards. Is it linear or is it exponential? We're trying to tell. It's going vertical. Now you can create software faster than ever. I'm not saying it's going to be the best software yet, but what we do see is more software being created. And as software gets more competitive, you have to differentiate. How do you differentiate? Well, you need to have a point of view, first of all. That's on the product side and the brand. But you also have to have great design, great user experience. It has to be delightful.

5:40It has to be clear. It has to be useful. And I think that also you need to really be leaning on the brand and marketing and shining there too. It's not enough just to have great product design. You have to have great brand design. And you have to communicate that point of view across all of it in your brand, which stretches across every experience the customer has with your company. So you create the company in 2012. Product design becomes more of a thing. And from my understanding, you didn't fully release your product until several years after. What were those years, those first years like? And what was the product that you brought to the world?

6:20My co-founder and I were very excited about exploring WebGL, the ability to use the GPU in your computer in the browser. And we really started with technology rather than a problem. And I think that most companies that do well have some why now. And the why now doesn't have to be technological. It can be social. It can be regulatory. You know, there's any number of things that it can be. Some of them even have multiple YNOWs. I think Figma, looking back, we did have multiple YNOWs. But we thought, okay, we're technologists. You know, we're both studying computer science. Let's start with tech.

6:54And we looked at all the tech that exists in the world and WebGL stood out. We explored for a while, tried to figure out, okay, what are we going to do with WebGL? We've got our hammer. What's our nail? This is not usually when people start a company and have the ethos around. Usually they start with a problem. Usually people say it's the opposite. But that's the way we started, it's the honest truth. And we explored for quite some time. And we looked at all sorts of things that you might apply the verb Photoshopped to in terms of taking that kind of verb and distilling it into use cases that we thought were going to be interesting for consumers.

7:27Things like face swapping, that was one of the first things we built. Face swapping. Yeah, so it was like 2012 and we could, with Poisson Blending, and make it so that we could swap our faces, and it looked credible. Or background removal, changing color gradients dynamically in a scene. What we found with a lot of this was basically that the tech wasn't ready yet. And we were able to get like 85 % of the way there. In cases like face-swapping, maybe 90%, 95 % of the way there. But it just wasn't 100%. And I think it wasn't until deep learning that actually we got to the point where, yeah, you can get 100 % of the way there.

8:02So then we explored, okay, okay, we got to ship something, built a photo editor, but it was in the browser. Because again, WebGL, that was the hammer. And I'm actually quite proud of that work. We never shipped it because we decided it wasn't the thing, but did all sorts of things that later informed us at Figma. And then we basically said, okay, wait a second. Like photo editing is going to happen on your mobile phone. it is not going to happen in a web browser and definitely not if we don't support raw which is an advanced image format for digital photographers why are we building the web browser when the curve around mobile phone adoption and megapixels per phone is just up and to the right in what is probably exponential way as well yeah so then we said okay we got to back out of this and do something else and that's when we started to pay attention on what is now figma So even that starting period, it took a while.

9:00If I had said, let me give ourselves six months and then we'll make a call, we would never have Figma today. Past that, then we were on track. And we started to raise money, build a team. But it took a while. Professional tools are hard to build. They have very complex workflows. A lot of mechanics that you have to get just right. And so, you know, we had an aggressive timeline that we communicated to people, investors, employees. We certainly did not hit it. we were pretty much in the right order of things, but basically offset by a year or two in each case. Yeah. You know, my favorite part of it was actually we kept putting it in front of designers once we got to the point where we had theoretically met some subset of their needs we thought could get us to market.

9:42And there's an entire summer where I went out and just showed people the tool. And they all were intrigued, but they all basically said, I just don't trust it. Like, oh no, what if it's like the browser element? We bet everything on this. Turns out it, those comments all went away when we did a redesign. And the visual design itself, the tool, was not sufficient. And that's why I didn't trust it. You know, go figure that designers want a well-designed tool visually. So we fixed that and then we were off to the races, truly. And did a closed beta launch in December 2015. And then a GA release in October 2016.

10:23and then finally started to price in mid-2017, which was almost five years after we started the company. So it took quite a while to get off the ground. Basically, anyone that I know who's starting a website or creating some app or use it or creating some sort of digital product, everyone is using Figma, or at least in my circles. How did designers, how did people build stuff before? Like, what were people using before Figma? Yeah, I mean, it was single player. And there's a culture that I think came out of agency culture where there's a lot of, like, I'm going to show you three things. Like, the first two are not going to be, like, just what you want, but the third one, everyone's going to go, oh, it's so good.

11:10And then I'll go back in my corner, and I will do my work, and we won't interact that much because I'm not sure I want to. And so that's completely different from the multiplayer experience of Figma. And I think that cultural shift was real. Like the first comments we got on the launch were, you know, it was controversial. People basically said in the launch comments, stuff like, you know, a camel is a horse designed by a committee. They said, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. But also there was a small set of people that loved it and saw that vision of what it could mean to make multiplayer design in the browser.

11:46and with a tool that was high quality and a tool that could actually really meet their needs and be focused on their use case. What does single player versus multiplayer mean? Single player mean local to your file system. One person can use it at a time. You export something, an image, send that image over. You've got version control issues. The web forced us to be multiplayer. We didn't initially try to do multiplayer. We had an instinct that multiplayer was important, but it was a complex thing to build. And so we thought, okay, let's not start there until we hear some validation. And no one validated it.

12:25Like, I think out of 100 people, maybe two people, both of them were sitting next to each other. And they were doing this pair design sort of workflow. So they uniquely got it. Otherwise, people told us, this is not what I want. Like, why would I want to interact with all these people? More stakeholders. I think that's bad. And so we didn't initially start there, but we got there because we were forced to. If I have Figma and I've got a tab and you've got the same tab open, and then I make an edit and your tab reloads and you make an edit and my tab reloads, it's a terrible user experience. So as soon as we started to get to the point where it was closer to production and we're doing that on the team, we knew we had to go build it.

13:13and the benefits were tremendous. Not only the ability for more people to be in the canvas at the same time, just like a Google Doc, but also a single source of truth. Your versioning problem goes away. Instead of, you know, V2 underscore three, five, final, final, three, you know, you now have just a document, a space to go to. And it was also interesting the behavioral change over time as people kind of got used to this world because they started to treat Figma like a space. and that was fascinating. Slack went down one day during COVID, and we started to see folks basically putting text boxes in a Figma canvas in order to go back and forth and chat, and we're like, this is not what we built Figma for, but there's something here, and so that led us to FigJam, which is our way to basically brainstorm, ideate, whiteboard, diagram, and it's a simpler product.

14:07It's really for that use case, but with it, we tried to incorporate concepts that were really speaking to that idea of how do you create a space for people? It's similar to Google Docs. I think that's a good comparison. It's like we used to sort of write up a doc, you save it, you send it off. I mean, before that, we would print it out. Someone would put notes and edit it with a pen, and then you go through it again. And then there's just this great idea where it's like, let's just put it on a single page and let's all just jump in the doc and we can comment on things and tag things. And that's basically what Figma is doing from a product and web design perspective.

14:42And it's been like this unbelievable success. Now, when I think about who you're up against, the first name that comes to mind is Adobe. I mean, Adobe is and has been the giant in digital design for many, many years. And it's almost like, or at least from a consumer perspective, it seems as if they have had historically almost a monopoly. You are the first company that has really eaten into that and at least presented yourself as a real competitor to Adobe. How did you do that? Or it sounds like maybe you'll disagree with that characterization. But how did you get to this point where I'm saying the word Figma in the same sentence as Adobe?

15:31We saw ourselves as going up against Adobe in the earliest days of Figma, for sure. and over time what we found was that actually designers they're our core audience. The core thing we do is make software for product designers. They work with teams and multiplayer shows that even more in terms of those workflows and if their teammates, the people around the designers are not successful, the designers are not successful. So that led us to go and both go sort of upstream in the workflow and downstream to things like FigJam for ideation brainstorming to Figma slides for alignment, but also downstream in the product design development workflow into, okay, how do we go and make it so the developer, for example, can take the assets in Figma design and translate them to code in the most effective, efficient way that they can and save time.

16:25And as we've kind of mapped out that process, we found ourselves building for anyone that wanted to go from idea to a polished application that they can deploy and get into production. But it was interesting because I think we thought of, okay, it was a small market for product designers, web designers. Fear of Labor Statistics said it was 250 ,000 people at the time when we started Figma. We thought, okay, this is not going to be our long-term market. It's growing. We don't know how much, but we'll have to go into other use cases around creative tools. And instead we found ourselves really focused at our core on the product design development workflow and building software.

17:09And how to help people build the most well-designed software. But overall, it's not like we see Adobe. There was a period where they tried. But then they sunset the product. And they decided they're going to focus on their core, which is the creative professional. And also, I think, compete on the down market. And so it's just two very different businesses at this point. We'll be right back.

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21:13We're back with First Time Founders. Let's just move to you going public. It's kind of fascinating to hear this those first five years and how messy it really did sound it's always messy every startup is um and now you are a public company uh biggest ipo of the year we were looking at the ipo pricing and we said on on our podcast we're like this is a buy it was originally priced at 25 uh then it was repriced at 30 we said it was a buy at 30 then it was um i think 33 33 years. We said it was a buy. And that's what it went out at the IPO price. And then it opens in the market and it's 85. And then it goes up to 100.

21:55And, you know, we thought that you guys would see a big pop. I didn't see it being that crazy. And then it's really interesting. You know, a lot of our listeners, I've heard people saying like, hey, it's come down a lot since 100. I was saying buy at 33. That's what I was talking about. The point being, now that you're a public company, there is a lot of pressure on you to return value to shareholders. Even I was receiving that pressure as someone who just talked about the stock. So I can imagine that that would be kind of a different paradigm where everyone's watching you, everyone's asking questions, people like me asking you, what do you think of the stock uh how do you feel about the pricing how has that changed your your overall experience as a as a ceo well i told the company uh before we went public during the ipo literally on listing day uh before we saw any signals in the market and after and then also after ipo then i just showed up about it uh is look the number's going to go up the number's going to go down we do not control the number.

23:14The only thing we've got control over is the inputs. And so we have to keep our eye on the prize and we got to do everything we can to drive those inputs. Yeah. And we have to take the long-term view. You know, the irony is, of course, that as a public company, you have to report earnings every quarter. And I think that one reaction that is to take a quarterly view. Of course, we care about our results. And also, you have to take the long-term view. And the long-term view always has to come first. And so, I spend my energy thinking not about, okay, what is the stock price doing on any given day?

23:55Some days I literally forget to look because I'm so focused on what we're trying to do for the long-term. And you only get one shower thought a day. There's a great Paul Graham essay on that. your shower thought needs to be on what are the long-term things we can do to make our customers' lives better value will follow there's the great bill walsh quote which is score takes care of itself which is a very similar dynamic it's like if we focus on our inputs on driving value on our fundamentals the school is going to take care of itself the stock price is going to take care of itself. But I could also imagine now as a public company CEO that at the same time, you kind of take care of the stock price as well as the vibe setter, as the leader of the narrative.

24:48And, you know, we talk a lot on our podcast about the narrative versus the numbers. There's the numbers that can drive a stock, and then there's the narrative, what do investors think is happening. Do you feel any pressure? It sounds like you don't want to think too much about, this is the story we're telling people. You want to think about, are our numbers good, are our inputs high quality? But do you feel a pressure now to show up on that earnings call and capture the imaginations of people to set a narrative that investors are really excited about? Is that something that you feel is incumbent on you now as a public company CEO?

25:30I think what's most important, and this is the same perspective I had when we were a private company, is to make sure that people understand what the company is doing. Yeah. And to make sure that people are educated. And so that's most of my focus. That's why I do demos on earnings calls. Always so far. Maybe at some point I don't do them. I don't know. I feel like I can't commit to that forever. But I like doing that. I like to show people what are we actually improving. And I think without that, it's so easy to get lost in sort of whether it be narrative or numbers or whatever for people. And my advice to anyone who's like looking at the stock is understand our company.