Uncapped #31 | Dylan Field from Figma

27:11And if you take it on VC money, then you know, you gotta keep going. It's like our friend, Adam Gill, building owner. You and I both obviously invested in our friends with him. Well, he's very passionate. He's very passionate. And he's building in a space that I think has been overlooked by tons of entrepreneurs. Yeah, I think he thinks it's the most interesting thing possible in the world. And you can't fake it. And a lot of other folks are of the opinion that this is very boring. Yeah. And I think it's an advantage to work in a space that other people consider boring. Yes. But to your point, you can't go just fake that.

27:40Nope. Because you've got to work on the thing for 10 years. Maybe 20, maybe 30. If you're lucky, you'll work on it forever. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm hoping for Figma. I think you will. I want to talk about the way that you show up as a CEO, because I think there's a somewhat widely held opinion, which might have grains of truth, but maybe not, which is that to be an unbelievable founder, unbelievable CEO, you kind of got to be rough and you got to be aggressive and you kind of got to be sharky and out for your company and yourself and all these other things. And obviously there are people who do it that way and who are very successful and that's fine.

28:17But you, Tamir, are an example of doing it the other way where it doesn't come from a place of like, you know, hate and revenge or winning or all these things, which again, there's nothing negative about building in those ways, but there is this other way to do it. And I'm just curious if you have reflected on this, because I'm guessing you also see that in yourself and you see this in other people. And I would just be curious to sort of like hear your musings on this topic of like, to be a world-class founder CEO, do you have to be a certain way here? Well, first of all, I think there's just like a bajillion ways to start a company.

28:54You know, you don't have to take VC funding at all. You can bootstrap it. You can take the VC funding. There's expectations attached to that. You can do it on your own. You can do it with a team. And all personalities can shine. I mean, for the founders that are in Silicon Valley right now that are scaling, I mean, you can find every personality, every kind of makeup of a founder that you can imagine, which is awesome. I think that some investors have this thesis of they've got to have a chip on their shoulder. It's got to be some mega trauma. I had a pretty amazing childhood. I'm very thankful to my parents.

29:33I do like to win. I'll say that. I hate losing. But otherwise, it's not like a big chip on their shoulder. I've got to go prove myself every day. It's more that I really enjoy building what I'm building. I think I found this amazing group of people to do that with and you know it's really fun that's what's interesting is you are extremely driven and motivated but it doesn't seem to come from any of that stuff that you'd often hear from a VC on a podcast about a chip on a shoulder or something that you know happened wrong in their life or somebody wronged them it seems like you just love what you do I mean I get to do the most awesome stuff ever which is like build tools for designers, creative people, and then go see what they make in the world.

30:20I can't imagine something more interesting or exciting to work on. Do you think this is an uncommon source of this type of motivation? In other words, do you think that this conception that a lot of investors, maybe founders, a lot of people have, do you think it's off base? Or do you think it is, in fact, the more common source that drives people? I don't know. I think I probably get a a sample that seemed not representative because I have a lot of friends that also are just really driven by mission. Some of them have chips on their shoulders, some of them don't. I guess the bigger thing is maybe just don't get so attached to the chip on your shoulder that you don't work through it.

31:07If you're excited about what you're doing and you heal a little bit, that's okay, trust me. I've seen friends go through that journey and they show up to their company the next day or a week or a month or a year or 10 years, however long it takes them to work through it. And yeah, they're kicking ass. So I don't think it's this thing where you should stigmatize something like therapy or introspection because you're trying to feed the VC capitalism machine. You can still feed the machine and you can work on your shit. It is funny. I don't know if you experienced it this way, but I experienced building a company form of therapy is probably too strong of a word, but it is a form of understanding yourself and working through a lot of stuff.

31:50It's something. Yeah. And, uh, well, don't get me wrong. Like, uh, I hope I'm not an asshole, but I definitely am intense in many meetings and oftentimes I reflect afterwards and go, Oh man, I should have shut up there better. Right. Uh, but yeah, you show up a certain way. People will tell you if you've got a good culture of communication and then you improve. Yeah. It also just forces so many weird psychological situations and then you have to reflect on those. Sometimes you do realize that behaving a way that I'm not the most proud of was effective and now how do I deal with that? I had a lot of those kind of things too where I was just like, wow, you're just put in these situations that force a lot of reflection and personal growth, I think, which is good.

32:39But yeah, anyway, I just thought this was interesting because you're often cited as an example in the counter to this thing. And I just want there to be more of that in the world. So, okay. Thank you. Yeah. Well, changing gears to another topic, you and I, I think, first got to know each other. This wasn't how, but around the time we got to know each other, when we were younger, we had this group of other friends and people, I think, even younger than us, who were like smart engineers. We called it Toad Chat for whatever reason. You called it Toad Chat. I called it Toad Chat. You made the group, just to be clear.

33:12I made the group. But you let me join as an honorary Toad. You were an honorary Toad. Which I was very... You were like, I'm not a Toad, but I'm here to be... I'm here to participate. I was honored to be there. And looking back, there were like a lot of people in that group. You know, there was you, Alex Wang, Ari and Conrad. And many others. Many others. Yeah, it was awesome. And I look back at that and I don't know, we must have been mid or late 20s. These are people in their early 20s. They were early 20s. Early 20s. And I often think about that as like the importance of being connected to young people as a founder, as an investor, as just anybody in tech.

33:49Because I do think there's so much just raw sort of effort, understanding. You're at the front of so much stuff there. And I think about this now as we're like getting into like mid-30s and like how does that change over time? I don't know, I'm just curious your own experience, because you're somebody who yourself started as a young person, you started the company as a young person, you've been connected to young people throughout, you still are of course, but like how has that journey changed for you? Yeah, I fear sometimes I'm not as connected to the youth as I once was. And I think that when you're young, maybe starting Figma, Evan as well, we've grown up like, you know, playing World of Warcraft, multiplayer games, using Google Docs at school, so it just gave us a mindset.

34:36because of the tech stack we had grown up in, the culture we had grown up in, that seemed to us obvious, native. And then I would go talk to an investor and be like, oh, yeah, like Google Docs. And they're like, wait, like you use Google Docs? Like it's 2012, it's 2013. Like who doesn't use Google Docs? They're like, oh, we're on Word and Outlook here. And sometimes collaboration, I'm not sure I've ever experienced it. I'm like, what? Like this is my life. Yeah, so the generational divides can sometimes be very real. and I always try to educate myself by like understanding what it is that people are surrounded by.

35:12I think that social media can be one way to do that but it's hard to reconstruct in an algo feed world same context now. I think just talking to people like understanding their frame is always important and also just making friends across age groups. I've got friends that are younger than me, older than me, you know I've got friends that are 80. The other day I was talking to this incredibly precocious, amazing 16-year-old who like a guy off the call and was like, oh my God, how do I hire you? Is that legal? Like, please come work at Figma. Isn't it amazing when you talk to somebody who's like those ages and you're just like, I can't believe it.

35:48Yeah. I mean, you know, talking to this person, I was just like, you're more mature than a lot of 30-year-olds I know. And it's just incredible. The drive was so amazing. I was talking to a founder that I would have guessed just by the way he was talking, I would have guessed was 30 and there was 20. And I was just like, man, I was not like that when I was 20. I think that the generational divide and the notion of generations is real. Like millennials have one outlook. And we're raised in a time where, I mean, who are the most famous millennials? Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg. I don't actually know who the most famous people in Gen Z are.

36:28I mean, you do. I don't know. Like who are the role models? I don't know who the role models are. I mean, I could probably. But then there's like the shift in philosophy too. I mean, for Gen Z, I think there's a very different view and framework through which people that are in that generation roughly, I'm not saying for everyone, but for a lot of them, they look through the world and see the world. And for folks that went through COVID and had to be locked up and antisocial and not see other humans for a few years. Totally. Instead of going to school. I mean, what effect does that have on you?

37:00a lot of effect. Also imagine if you graduated, you know, and came into the workforce in 2020, like right as COVID is happening, right as, you know, we have plenty of people that did it. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, but, but then you, you know, you start Zerp or imagine coming in in 2022 and everything's tough. And then imagine coming in 2025 and everything's AI. It's just like a few years make a big difference. Huge. Yeah. And I think the mindsets, uh, the also just approach. I mean, I think there's a lot of emergence right now of nihilism. Yeah. I don't think it's like a permanent thing maybe, but if you look at it and you're like, okay, well, if you're told that AI is going to take all entry-level jobs, I like a lot of media, and you're told that climate change is going to fuck the world, and you believe that you have no economic prospect long-term, you'll never own a house, you'll never be able to support kids in America, like that'll change your outlook on things yes and that's like the media narrative for a lot of people right now i don't think it's quite right uh i'm more optimistic than that yeah but like well i think you get both i'm optimistic too i think there's a lot of people who don't succumb to that but i think you can also sort of empirically see it in you know i think there's great parts of crypto but there's parts of crypto that reflect nihilism there's great parts of sports card and collectibles and there's parts that are nihilism you know there's probably good parts of well I think often the arc is like you know for example in crypto I mean I got excited about NFTs really early before they called it NFTs we call them crypto collectibles usually I remember on clubhouse you had that big that that yeah well that was years later yeah but like I went from this era where it was all idealism and all this energy around like this just kind of like tension of the like idea of digital scarcity.

38:51How can something digital be scarce? That's so cool. Early crypto was this very like romantic missionary thing. Yeah, well, and then there's early crypto and early Bitcoin, which was like, you know, libertarian philosophy and hard money and people that really didn't believe in state and thought it shall be de-bundled. That was a totally different mindset. I was there because I thought, there's no such a digital scarcity and art was cool and like, But then it evolved. And as it picks up, a lot of crypto becomes degenerate gambling. And NFT space was no different. I think I missed the transition at some point where it became that.

39:27And I was still in the idealistic frame. And then the frame of marriage of like, no, no, no. This is how you make a lot of money really fast and get rich quick. And it's kind of interesting, actually. I feel like right now with vibe coding, there's been almost like that same arc of, you know, for me, I think of things like Figma Make and I'm like, okay, great. Like now everyone can go make prototypes and make production apps faster and ship them. It's so cool. Like you can just do all this stuff that used to take so long, so fast. And then you can improve it. You can iterate. I think a lot of people also see it as like I can finally build a piece of software and get rich quick and of course there's stuff in the middle too but I don't know, I mean it takes a long time to go build a company it's not like it's just an overnight thing and I think a lot of the folks that are just with this like I will spend an hour on my app and I'll ship it like they're probably going to eventually phase out and I think that the folks that remain will be the ones that are using as a tool.

40:34I think it's interesting because I think this whole rise of apathy, nihilism, whatever, is very real. And I feel like you sort of opened it up with this, but you can't blame people because it's like homes, you know, like we're sitting here in San Francisco, like homes seem like ridiculously unaffordable if you're 22 and just getting started. There's just like all these reasons why it's like, well, I got to do something like a little divergent to get something to happen. So like, why not gamble? and I think a lot of this same sort of mindset applies and sort of just like it's not just in the game but like it's also in people building you know companies and doing venture and all of that I think you get to see sort of the range of just like going for it for you know sort of the long-term reasons versus like what can I flip this year and then there's a lot of people who are also like extremely long-term have a thesis about the world they're optimistic and they're trying to inflect the world for the better and they're mission driven, not monetarily driven.

41:31I mean, hopefully more of those than ever. Like as tech grows, hopefully it's more than ever. Those are the folks that inspire me. Yeah. One of the things that I thought was very impressive among many on the Figment journey is the company seemed to get stronger through the Adobe acquisition and, you know, sort of it falling apart. And I would imagine that would be the kind of thing that could like spiritually break a lot of companies culturally, a lot of founders who are like, oh man I was like right there and now I got to do this whole like emotional and cultural reset so like um how'd you how did you navigate that I guess starting with your own psychology yeah um that was probably the hardest amount of psychology uh because and everything else is downstream of that and if you're not like right in your own head then how can you lead yeah uh or make good decisions even.

42:26And for me, I think, you know, the start, it was kind of like, oh, 95 % certainty will go through. No worries. Just kind of every time we checked in, the certainty went down. And eventually, you know, at the end, it's like, oh, this may be a 5 % chance, you know, in that arc. You know, at some point very quickly, we're just like, okay, this is not a sure thing. Keep the foot in the gas, keep building. That's the best outcome, whether we join Adobe or we're independent and you know it's like you can't be in this constant state of we're you know we're so back it's over and it's just rapid cycling through that like just your brain falls apart and turns to mush in my opinion it's for me and so the word of the year for me then was like equanimity I think I said equanimity more times that year uh than I ever will say the rest of my life probably but it's just like okay how do you find peace in every option and know that everything's gonna be okay we're building a great company for amazing customers and we have a lot of stuff to do let's go do it and uh whatever happens we're gonna put our best foot forward it's the contract we sign with adobe and we're gonna make sure that we do everything we can to close this if it doesn't work out we'll have a great independent path and then you know you get to the end of it and uh I think the relief the team felt at knowing an answer and having just like this, you know, superficial state collapse into, okay, we know we're going to be independent.

43:59Like that was real relief. It was the end of the year. You know, we found out as I was about to fly out to my in-laws and I think I was like hashing through all the details of how to communicate with the team on like a Saturday night and a Sunday, then Monday we announced that it was not going through. And people had already gone on break starting on that Friday. Sent a message to this team on Slack, like at channel, you know, FYI, press release and details about what it meant for them. And said, hey, no pressure. If you want to join though, here's a Zoom call and we'll be talking about this then.

44:43and just the relief on the Zoom call was palpable over Zoom, which was pretty wild. Just the chat was like a big relief to know. And then the break is going and I'm like, okay, not everyone is in that place. And so we made a program called Detach, which is a Figma pun. You can detach a component. It's like something that some people frown on, but it's also a necessary task sometimes. And the idea was just, hey, look, if you don't want to be at Figma, we don't want to trap you. Here's three months of pay. If you decide to leave, leave. And you're still like, cool with us. We're cool with you. Everything's fine.

45:27And if you decide to reapply, you can't reapply for six months, but then you're welcome to reapply after that. And yeah, you're like, there's no issue if you decide to take this. And if you don't, like FYI, we are a hard charging startup. It's going to be intense. We got a lot to do. And so we rolled this out, you know, kind of a nervous few weeks as people made their calls. And then a little over 4 % of people took us up on it. What year was that again? That would have been, I think, 2023. I have to double check that. I get the dates all confused sometimes. Was there any element coinciding there too of like, there was like something in the water in tech at that time where like a cultural reset was happening at a lot of companies and did that play in in any way did it help in any way that that was going on other places or did it just have nothing i don't think it factored in just be clear i think it was end of 2023 that uh we communicated for the first time but like early 2024 that it was the detached program um if i'm accurate there and i think that But really, we looked at what people were doing, why they decided.

46:37I mean, a lot of it was just like, you know, I'm tired and I'm in a break. And I want a lot of people making career changes. I think it was really interesting. I got like early stage, or sorry, early career sales reps moving over to like politics, stuff like that. It's also probably - It's like total domain hopping. I bet you for a lot of people, you know when you flip a coin and you don't know what you want and you flip a coin and you get tails and then you're sad and you wish it was heads or vice versa? There's probably also some people going through that experience where they're like, oh wow, I was actually really hoping that we could put a bow on this because I was ready for my next thing.

47:14Well, I mean, or people got attached to the idea and yeah, there's definitely a few people who were amazing and of course you go talk to the folks that you're like, okay, I know you said this, but are you sure? and their headspace was one of, okay, I get it, you're done. At least for now, some people boomerang back. It's a really great move though because basically you just took the situation on the front foot and rather than just being like, oh, let's just see how we do, you're like, hey, if you want this, you've got to sign up. Yeah, I just feel like it's best in general to deal with things and move on.

47:50Totally. And so I try to redirect my communication with people, make sure I'm sending qualifications expectations, for friends, give very clear feedback. You're always telling me bad stuff. Oh my gosh, it's not true. There's not much to critique. But yeah, I mean, then from there, it was like because we had put our foot on the gas the entire time, we were able to launch a bunch of product. I mean, we doubled our product offering at Config recently due to the work we did in that period of time. Right after the deal was dissolved, launched in GA dev mode. And that was really, really exciting to watch that take off.

48:32As well as just like countless other product updates. The velocity only increased. The momentum was real. I think leaning into it and just acknowledging it and starting that conversation was part of it. Yeah. Okay. On that note, I want to go to sort of like the final area, which is how you're thinking about just AI impacting sort of your roadmap and your product. And maybe you could just even talk about the things that you've been working on over the last six or 12 months that, you know, AI related that I think are sort of most important for Figma. So much. I think that, first of all, you know, it's not just designers in the process, although they're the heart of it.

49:09They're working with developers, they're working with product managers and more, researchers, marketers. and I think that if you can give developers a good way through MCP to pull context from design so they can be able to make things faster, it's a win. So we introduced DevMode MCP and folks are able to use that with well-structured design files to go build the front end experience so much faster. It's really wild to see how this works when you actually experience it live. You know, you get a lot of the fun built for you by the AI that can interpret what we send over and do inference. And it can be just extraordinarily fast.

49:51We're also thinking a lot about, of course, how do we make sure that you're able to have great prompting experiences in both Figma Make, but also Figma Design. And Figma Design, we've teased it, but it's not out yet, but we're really excited about that. But in general, I'd say it feels like we're kind of in this MS-DOS era of AI, where we're going to look back in some number of years and go, it's kind of wild that we're just typing text all the time. There will be some amount of dimensionality collapse into interfaces. And it's also the case, I think, for any AI company, the strategic question you have to be positive on is, as models get better, do we get better?

50:32And their answer has to be yes. If it's no, in some way, you've got to readjust strategy. In late October, as you know, we announced Weavey, now Figma Weave. And this is an acquisition we've made that I think really meets these attributes and I am so excited about. Basically, it makes it so you can use all these different generative models for image, video, but also to transform across modalities, like image to 3D, for example. And you can then connect them in a node-based workflow, use it to creatively explore or also create a pipeline, make a process. And the things we're seeing people do with it are just so cool and wild and expressive.

51:13And I guess like overall, it's also going to reflect a lot because a lot of people call the output of these models slop. It's almost like a derogatory term. And, you know, without making any comment on slop versus not slop. I mean, some things I see as outputs, I'm like, wow, it's amazing. But I think the more important point is like, whatever you start with, it's a starting point. And you can use that in a workflow to get to something amazing for your own craft. And I think with Weave, that's what we're seeing is just this incredible way that artists and creatives can go and create all sorts of different types of multimedia generation.

51:51And then also use it across the Figma platform. And so I'm really, really excited what we're doing there and just the fact that they trusted us to join up and what we can do in the future. As you add more and more AI into the product, what do you think is like the final bastion of like human designers? Will it be taste, coordination? What will the set of things be that you're most confident in, like will always be just like human tasks? I mean, I think that we are so far away from AI replacing designers. And if you actually look at the designs generated, I think it's very easy to tell that. But even if the design generation from an aesthetic standpoint gets better, like it's not considering the entire system.

52:42It's not considering all the constraints. You're not exploring the full option space. You're not thinking about like the context culturally. You're not thinking about the business problems you have to solve or the greater system that connects everything. That's all these different targets across all these different experiences you're trying to create. you're not thinking about the emotional qualities you're trying to create and the brand and how that gets pulled in i'm just so much and the best designers are able to take all these different inputs and then be able to explore out very dense and uh deep trees of possibility to figure out what is the best approach systematically and then go build on it and i don't know it's like um one example i go through a lot that resonates with the gen z people but not the millennials or folks that are older always is Brat Summer.

53:33You know Brat Summer, right? No. Oh, Brat Summer. Yes, Brat Summer. Brat Summer, of course. See, you got it. He's like Brad Summer. I was like, who's Brad Summer? Yeah, no. Yeah, we can talk about Brad Summer later. Yeah, Brad Summer's cool. Anyway, Brat Summer. And I use Brat Summer as an example a lot because, well, think about it, right? Like the album cover, obviously not just the album cover, but as a design artifact, Lime Green Square, I think it was what, Comic Sans or something that Brat was written in? Yeah. What ASI designer would create Brat Summer? I don't know. I mean, or if they did, it would be one out of 100 ,000 and no weight would be thrown behind it.

54:14Because I think that's the other piece of design is it's not just the artifact, it's knowing this is good and we're going to put the right sort of message behind it. And so for aesthetic, I mean, the ability to go think of all the possibilities in the world and end up on that album cover. Like, you put me in a room for 100 years. I don't think I would have come up with that. Well, I definitely wouldn't, yeah. And on the other hand of it, the other extreme, it's like, okay, what about usability? What about hierarchy? What about the ability to think about the different permutations of the way you take a data model, express it through UI, and allow people to actually control an interface?

54:51And what affordances to use and which ones to get rid of? and innovate on and go find new ways to do something that are out of distribution. I think that the role of a designer is going to be one where AI makes it so that they are able to get rid of the drudgery. They won't have to engage with repetitive tasks anymore. Instead, they'll be able to be really thinking more holistically, thinking further, and going to beyond. and I think it'll lead to an explosion of creativity, explosion of really interesting, amazing outputs. And I'm pretty excited for it. You know, I think the same thing that you just described is true with music, where obviously AI music sounds pretty good, but I still think like these albums that like take over a summer or just like a song that captures everybody, like I just, there's something like more like soulful that has to be captured that I just don't think we're there yet.

55:47Well, I also think it's possible that like on the music side, AI generated music can inspire an artist to go and riff on that. And inspiration can come from anywhere. For sure. Like I think AI is a great inspiration tool. It's also a great tool to figure out what do you not want to do? Like I never use AI for writing personally. I find it doesn't capture voice. but I love asking AI, what are the 10 cliche ways to say this? So I can go like push beyond it and figure out the actual new way to say the thing that I'm trying to say. And I don't know. I think that just like, we're, the more we capture the distribution that exists today, the more we can think outside of it.

56:29And that's human creativity. Yeah. I love it. Dylan, this was super fun. Thank you for having me. Great to see you as always. You too.