Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design

0:00Designers need to be founders. We need to have folks that are designers step into the founder role and start companies. It feels intuitively like we're in the MS-DOS era of AI right now. If you look back 10 years from now, everyone's going to go, can you believe that we just had this chat box?

0:20Awesome. Well, I want to welcome Dylan. I'm curious what the makeup of the audience is here. How many people have used Figma before? Wow. All right. How many people consider themselves to be designers? Okay. All right. Many of us. Yes, our people. And how many are currently founders? Awesome. Cool. Okay. That's a good mix of people in the audience. So we'll hear the Figma story. Then we'll talk about advice around AI and design. And then we'll get some advice on just being a founder from Dylan too. So I'm excited to jump in. Maybe to start, give us kind of a snapshot on where Figma is today. And then, you know, we can kind of go back to the beginning days.

1:05Yeah. Today we are many different places. We're hybrid. 1 ,700 people now, which is wild. I have to pinch myself on that number. We have eight products now. We just doubled our product lineup at our last config. So I'm very excited to hear your feedback if you got any on things like Figma make, sites, draw, buzz. But it's been a very exciting time. Lots of work we're doing as we explore all the things that we can do to help our audience. And now take us back to maybe 19-year-old Dylan getting started with the kernel of the idea that eventually became Figma, but it wasn't a straight line getting there.

1:45Tell us about the early days and kind of how you and Evan got started. Yeah, so in the early days of Figma, well, I guess before it was even Figma, And Evan and I were at Brown together. He was my TA. And we were asking ourselves the question of why now? Like, what's changing the world? And the two answers that we came up with that we also felt deep conviction in, one was drones and quadcopters. The other one was WebGL. And Evan, after about a month or so, said, hey, like, not into drones for all sorts of various reasons. That was kind of the one I was pushing for more at the time. Also except WebGL, of course.

2:23And then I was like, great, WebGL it is. And so WebGL, I think everybody probably here knows, but is what you use the GPU in your computer in the browser. WebGPU is its successor. And yeah, we started going really deep on like, what are all the things that we can build? And two main paths were games or tools. Pretty fast, we said, okay, not games, let's go tools. and then it was a deep exploration with many twists and turns as we explored all sorts of tools that we could build and uh you know it took uh we really started in earnest august 2012 uh whereas we started talking about it more december of 2011 so it took a while to get to the point where we started and then from there i would say it was at least june or july of 2013 before we went all in on, okay, let's build Figma as it is today.

3:16And even then, there was still a bit of a narrowing path to get to the product that exists now. And when you first started, were you thinking about this as a startup and a company that you wanted to build? Or were you thinking about it more as like a project that you wanted to do with your friend? No, it was definitely the hope of startup and startup that could scale. At the same time, my downside case was I get to work with Evan, who I considered then, consider now to be a hero. He's like the smartest guy I know. If you have any doubt about the statement, just look up his GitHub. He's an amazing man and an absolute genius.

3:51And I figured worst case scenario, I spent a few years working with Evan. I learned a lot and I go back to school. Same place I'm at now. Can't hurt. Upside case, we go build a cool company. All the problems that we were thinking about working on were very, very interesting to me. And so I didn't really see any risk to the scenario. and also to help that I had the Teal Fellowship. I would have done it without it, but having 100K over two years, I know now inflation, et cetera, probably sounds like less than it was net then. But yeah, I mean, to have actual cash and not have to dig into savings or go into debt, huge deal, not just because of the cash element, but also because it gives you time.

4:32If we had stopped six months in and that was our point where we made a call, Figma would not be here today. And so I think if you're a founder already going or you're thinking about founding, you got to give yourself time somehow. That's really important. Yeah, you spent a couple of years trying to, you know, do all the twists and turns and the thing that eventually became what Figma is today. Yeah. What kept you going in that time? A lot of times, you know, founders will get into this like pivot hell of jumping from idea to idea and motivation just keeps declining. And how did you keep yourselves motivated during that time and feel like you were on to something and you were on the right track?

5:08Well, I mean first of all just working with Evan was super fun You know, we're kind of thinking through ideas by building them It felt every week like we're kind of inventing the future in some way at some point I kind of went memes are gonna go to the moon and I convinced Evan. Hey, let's go build a meme generator And this is you know 2012 timeframe and we built a great fucking meme generator I think it was for sure would have been the best one the market And I'm my thesis was right by the way look at the exponential curve of memes since 2012 Yeah, we would have made some money there. At the same time, after a week of that, I think both of us were ready to quit.

5:41I was asking myself, like, why did I drop out of Brown for this? That was probably a pretty low point at the start. But other than that, there's the constant existential nature of asking yourself, like, what are we doing? What's the big goal here? When you're in that phase of really trying to discover what to work on. But I think if you've got a co-founder, you've got a collaborator, you're not just alone. You know, hopefully your highs and their highs, your lows, their highs cancel out somehow. And you can kind of feed off each other to keep each other going. That really helps. That's cool. Once you kind of came up with the idea for Figma, how did you get your first users?

6:16Yeah, really the first users of Figma, a lot of it was cold emailing and people in network. So folks that I'd either intern with, for example, I interned at Flipboard, LinkedIn, O 'Reilly Media. and from that there are people I could reach out to they could tell me others to talk with but also I just looked online like who are the designers that I think could be really helpful to us and I respect their work you know if they answer my email and they let me buy them a coffee like it'll just be like a personal moment for me because they're my hero and a lot of them replied like it's kind of wild that people reply to cold emails but they do and so uh yeah I went there And then it turns out designers give great feedback.

6:57So it wasn't just like meeting them and them saying, yeah, your product sucks. They'd be like, here's exactly why it's not great. And here's what you can do better. Here's what it would take for me to use this. And the more that I engaged and we worked through that, the better the product got. I'd follow up with them. And eventually they started converting, some of them. Took a while before a lot of them converted. Later on, we kind of went on tour. I met, at this point, we had venture investment. the venture firms that invested in us they invested in other companies too i had them make introductions to the companies you know for an entire summer i basically met with i don't know five six seven companies a week at least um sitting down with them sometimes several a day saying hey here's a demo will you use it if not why not and uh very low conversion rate I think like in the entire summer, maybe two of them went in for it and actually started using Figma.

7:55One was Notion. The other was the company that became Coda, then called Krypton. And kind of interesting, they're both, you know, these cloud-based document tools with very similar philosophies to us. But, you know, you then launch it and people start using it more. There's a lot of folks out there that resonate with the message. So it was a slow arc over time. but the constant was feedback, getting feedback to the team, making sure we understood what problems we need to solve. That's interesting because, you know, everyone tells you to launch early. And the reason to launch early is to get that feedback.

8:28And from the outside, it looks like you took a long time to launch. But behind the scenes, you were actually talking to tons of users and potential customers and getting feedback constantly. Like, how did you think about when was the right time to actually launch the product? First of all, I definitely echo the point of launch as soon as you can. If you take anything away from this, it's don't do what I did. Get your product out faster and charge money faster for the product to see if you actually can make money. Unless you have some genius galaxy brain consumer thing you're doing, in which case figure it out yourself.

9:02I don't know what to tell you. I think that the feedback is essential and you should launch as quickly as you can. For me, the feedback was very clear. It's not ready. And that made it so that we didn't feel comfortable launching yet. but looking back, we did have the capital. I should have scaled the team faster so we could move faster and get it out quicker. That was something that I now, looking back, have learned. And when a team at Figma comes to me with an epic roadmap that they think is perfection, the first question I always ask is, how do we slim that down? How do we make it more bite-sized and test this earlier with our users?

9:39So it's absolutely the case that I try to push people internally towards, you know, a one month or three month cadence at most. You know, if someone comes to me with a nine month, a 12 month, two year cadence, it's like, what the fuck are you doing, man? Yeah, that's such an important point, especially for small teams, which is a lot of times people are like, well, I have all this stuff I have to build. So I need to go hire a bunch of people to be able to do it. But it seems like usually the right answer is like, how can you scope it down and do fewer things really well? Like, it sounds like, is that part of your culture as you're building things?

10:10Yeah, it's constraints can actually really help. But I also think the startup equation, or not equation, but the cycle that you're always in is something along the lines of, if you're the leader of a startup, you need to be identifying what you're doing the most of, figuring out how to get someone else to help you do that. Or maybe in the future, it's AI, who knows. But then from there, okay, how do you go find that person? And if you don't have enough resources, how do you get the resources? Right, that's the cycle that you're always in. It just turns out that actually having constraints, it breeds creativity.

10:43It breeds interesting ways to solve problems. And so, yeah, I think they're useful. What was the inflection point? I don't know. Was it shortly after you launched? Was it years later? Was it a few weeks ago when you actually believed this was going to be a huge company? Oh, man. I think the point at which I started to believe that actually this might be real was way later than our users did. People were telling me this is amazing. I'm really excited. Here's my 12-page doc on all the things that I want you to do for Figma. I should have known then, even though our product was really bad, that there was something there.

11:20But in reality, it took until Microsoft told us, hey, this is spreading like wildfire. And we're asking ourselves, should we shut it down? Or, you know, should we keep going? And the reason we're asking ourselves that is because you're not charging us. Maybe you should actually charge for the product. that was the moment that I was like, oh, I think something might be working. We should probably charge people. And that was like five years in. So yeah, don't do that. And also listen for when people are pulling the product out of you. Like I think everyone talks about product market fit, but product market pull is really important.

11:56And you'll see signs of it when people are highly engaged, when they are obsessive about what you're doing, when they see the future of the vision that you're planting, that is a sign that you should really double down in whatever way you can. And so many people interpret it instead as, oh man, if only we had all these things that they're asking for, then we might have product market fit. Guess we got to grind for a long time and who knows if it'll work. The right mindset is, oh my God, they actually care enough to give us this feedback? This is huge. And I think that people misinterpret that too much.

12:33It seems that even your feedback seeking early on in the early days, I think a lot of people are nervous to do that because they don't want to hear that it's not good enough. And, you know, they don't want to hear the thing that they poured so much time and energy into is not good yet. And I would not use it and I would not pay you for it. And so you want to just hide from that. How did you shift your perspective to actually want to seek that? I think maybe it's just like childhood for me. When I was growing up, I was a child actor, not like a child actor that got into like anything really cool that you know about, like commercials and some TV and stuff.

13:07But as part of that, you audition constantly and basically you constantly get rejected. For me, that was not a big deal. Like I was used to rejection and I had fun with the process of it. So, yeah, I think for me, it's just maybe a different mental equation than others. But yeah, if you're not there yet, like seek rejection, it's got interesting data in it. Don't you want to know the data? Switch gears talk about design for a little bit. It's been a really great month for design, it feels like. Been pretty wild. Yeah. I mean, we've had some popular redesigns from Airbnb and Netflix. We've had Apple's new liquid glass UI, which seems to be somewhat controversial.

13:48I'm sure there are opinions out here. At least there's opinions on X or Twitter or whatever. You guys had some incredible launches. at Config recently. And at YC, we have kind of a call for more design founders. And then maybe the most surprising and impressive thing was OpenAI acquiring Johnny Ive and his company for more than$6 billion, which is pretty crazy. So I'm curious, why now? What is happening in this moment where it seems like design is really a part of the conversation in a lot of the tech world? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think that in some ways it's new. In some ways, it's not new.

14:26Design has, I think, been growing in importance exponentially over the past decade. At Figma, we see it up close every day. More designers being hired, design going from, you know, lipstick on a pig, make it pretty at the end of the process to let's deeply think about how it works every step along the way. That's been a mindset shift that's been ongoing. But now I think in this age of AI, if you really believe that development gets easier and it's more simple to create software, it's faster to create software, then like, what is your differentiator? It's design, it's craft, it's attention to detail, it's point of view.

15:06What we're seeing is recognition of that. I mean, Airbnb, they literally said our differentiator is design. I think Brian said that. I believe that there's lots of takes on OpenAI and this more than$6 billion transaction. some people are like this is the stupidest thing in the world other people are hailing it as like absolute genius I guess my mental model is there are some people out there who when they do something you don't understand it's easy to go into an attack mode and just dismiss it but over enough time sometimes you see patterns and you're like okay I've consistently not understood what this person's saying over the course of like years.

15:55And, you know, years later, I go back to it and I'm like, oh, what I said in response to what they did was just wrong. And then you kind of do this mental flip of, okay, assume that there's something to learn from whatever they're doing. Assume you're missing something. And I think that I look it up, something like OpenAI and some part of it I understand, design is differentiator. Some parts I don't understand, like that's a really big transaction. But Sam is one of those people that, you know, he's right about a lot of stuff. So I would encourage you, if you just dismissed it outright, to ask yourself what you might be missing.

16:32And you guys launched some really cool AI-focused products at your conference, Config, about a month ago, which has been really cool to see the reception there. Really positive from a lot of your users and design community. I'm curious if you can share more about those and your motivation for building some of those. If you look historically at the products we've launched for Figma, the pattern is we notice behavior happening in Figma Design. We take it out of Figma Design and make it its own product. And therefore, Figma Design is able to be what Figma Design wants to be, a product design tool.

17:04And whether it's FigJam or whiteboarding brainstorming tool, the first new product we launched, that we can make a dedicated space for and make it be everything it needs to be. or it's slides where we saw, okay, 5 % of files created in Figma design are slides. So great, pull that out, make a slide tool because there's all this stuff you need for slides that if you put it in Figma design, now you've got a complicated UI and one plus one is not equal to three, it's more equal to like 1.5. A lot of the things you saw launch at configure in that category. So draw, for example, which is a way to do more vector tasks.

17:41We made a separate mode for so that users can go deeper. Because again, if you believe that craft is differentiator, more people want to be more expressive. How do we enable our customers and designers everywhere to do that on the Thigma platform? Buzz, same thing. You have all these people that want to create mass exports and figure out ways to create production graphics. So if you've got a brand team and they've created templates, how do you make it so that you're able to then empower a marketing team to go use those templates and do mass creation of assets. That's like a core workflow we see all the time, but we didn't want to make Figma Design more complicated or dumb it down.

18:20And so instead you make a new surface. Sites, we see people designing websites all the time in Figma Design, but then they have to go somewhere else to actually build the site and get it out there. So how do we get that so that they can actually ship it? And then Make, we're so excited about Make. This is a tool that lets you go from prompt to app and it's already changed a lot of how we do work at Figma in terms of quickly prototyping and being able to get to the point where you throw ideas away faster. And with Figma Make, there's so much more that we want to explore and are really excited to explore there.

18:53So yeah, stay tuned on that one. Cool. Yeah, I mean, you just touched on it there, but it feels like a lot of the line between design and development is getting blurred. And they used to be very distinct phases in a product development process or parts of an iterative cycle. and now it feels like they're almost being combined into one. How do you think about that with the tools that you're making? And I'm also curious maybe how that process has changed, like how your own development process has changed within Figma. I'll start with Figma. I think that for us, it's all about speed of iteration, speed of testing ideas, and tools like Make really help with that.

19:28It helps to have ways to rapidly prototype and to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work and make that as low cost as possible. And then there's tools I can't talk about and things we're developing that have been pretty instrumental to how our development process is changing. So, yeah, can't wait to talk about you with them, but not today, sadly. Yeah, when you go back to just the way that design and development are blurring more, I think there's a lot of stuff going on there. I think product is also blurring with design development and potentially even parts of research.

20:02all this is becoming less distinct and it's all kind of coming together more I think this is happening before AI but it's happening even more with AI there's something about an AI that empowers generalist behavior I will say that I think that the models today are better at the earlier phases of development than they are at like late-stage code bases so if you have an established code base I think you're gonna get less out of AI development tools as they currently exist than if you're at the very start. So I think that everything's better suited for prototyping and sort of like zero to one than it is from one to a hundred at this current moment.

20:41But, you know, in a week, this could change. Yeah, it changes so fast. Yes. I mean, related to that, how do you expect user interfaces to change over the next couple of years? And it feels like chat has kind of become a lot of the dominant interface paradigm, but I don't know, it feels like there's got to be something better that comes along, right? Yeah, I think that it feels intuitively like we're in the MS-DOS era of AI right now. And that, you know, if you look back 10 years from now, everyone's going to go, can you believe that we just had this chat box? And yet I think the problem of how do you show users all the things that are possible to do with these models is a very hard challenge.

21:24And there's something about the experiments that have worked there that's very interesting. So, for example, look at Midjourney. They started off in Discord where you can rapidly see all the other things that people are doing. And that was, in many ways, a way to show people what's possible. Or even Meta's new AI app. There's been a lot of press cycle and whatnot about the public aspect of people sharing accidentally things that are quite private. But the flip side of that is you actually learn what you can do. And so I think that's been underexplored in the media. So I think that there's this problem that people have not solved of like, how do you expose capabilities of these models?

22:04And there's so much that needs to be developed and worked through there. Yeah, I think there's a lot to come. On top of that, everything will be more contextual. AI, as you blend it in to different applications, that's a really interesting layer to think about. And on top of that, we're going to have so many new surfaces as well. The surfaces that will exist are not going to be just like your phone and your laptop and your tablet. It's going to be glasses. We're going to see much more in terms of different types of displays that exist throughout your life. So the surfaces are going to multiply.

22:42AI will have context. All of it will be a layer you have to intersperse. And that is a really interesting challenge for design of how do you reconcile that, keep it consistent, and actually be able to navigate that whole broad spectrum that people expect you to show up on. YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. How many of you consider yourselves to be researchers or have done research work? Wow. It's a lot of people in this audience here.

23:20And I know you've done this internally, you know, at Figma and building your own models. What is the role of design in research and the research work that you've done? And, you know, what are some of the design decisions that go into actually like making them better and making them work really well? I mean, I think that a lot of researchers are sort of trained in an academic environment and come at problems as abstractions. And they try to think very generally. And I think if in some research, like if you're doing pure math, like keep going, that is definitely the way to approach it. If you're doing more research that's applied, for example, in AI, I really do think that thinking like a designer can be helpful and working with designers can be helpful, too.

24:07We found, for example, that embedding designers into our research teams, because obviously we're doing a lot of work on how do we make better AI tools for designers, has been critical. Because researchers need that intuition of how designers think. And without actually having that close collaboration, it really doesn't work. Now, you might say in response, well, yeah, that's nice, but you're building for designers. My maybe response back would be, well, it's the case that designers have this mindset of you're building for an audience. Maybe it's a general audience, maybe it's a specific audience.

24:47That audience has a problem or a set of problems they're trying to solve. And that sort of thinking, I think, is very useful to bring into the research context. And also qualitative research needs to pair with more deep AI research as well. the more that you can actually surface through qualitative methods, what people are actually trying to do and how they perceive and think, the more you can advance. So yeah, I guess my push for anyone who's coming from more of a research background would be go get in the field, go talk to people, because you'll learn from it and it'll actually make you go faster.