Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]

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My guest today is Dylan Field. Dylan is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, and last joined me on Invest Like the Best in 2020. A lot has changed since then, and we explore the evolving landscape of design and how Figma has been navigating AI while staying true to its founding vision of eliminating the gap between imagination and reality.

Despite Figma's incredible success in becoming the default design platform, Dylan remains deeply motivated by helping users achieve their goals. He shares fascinating insights about the underhyped aspects of AI reasoning capabilities, the future of design literacy, and why he believes truly great design will always require human craft and creativity. Please enjoy my discussion with Dylan Field.

Four years since we did this last, which is completely nuts. It terrifies me. I would love to get your state of the union on the world of technology today. What are you thinking about? What are you paying attention to? What do you think is going on?

It's funny. I can remember where we were the last time we had a conversation just for the podcast versus the last time we had a conversation. I remember being in this rental house with my wife and some of our friends, and it was total lockdown. Around the same time, NFTs were just starting to take off, if you were paying attention to them. I think we were pretty excited by the metaverse. The crypto bull cycle was just starting again, and we were all trying to figure out what COVID would do to the world, how that would change things, and what the decade of the '20s would be like. I feel like now we're midway through that decade.

That's gone.

There was some tweet—I think Scott Belsky wrote it—saying, "I think that the 2020s will be like the Roaring Twenties." There was this period with the COVID bubble in the public markets when everyone thought that might be the case, and then I feel like maybe we didn't think it was the case. Certainly, it feels like we're back in some strange bullish cycle right now, both with regard to public equities and tech in general, and what people are willing to support and bet on.

If you look at technology broadly, it feels like there's a lot of optimism about doing hard things right now. Perhaps that's on the back of all this progress with AI, and people knowing now that the predictions from not just 10 years ago, but 30 years ago, are pretty correct down to a T.

Kurzweil was right.

It's wild how some of these essays from the early '90s got it right on the money. I think that opens up the possibility for people to think a bit more long-term and be bolder, maybe. With that, it feels like people are willing to do things that are a bit less traditional as well. I feel like we broke out of the Overton window across the board, in social discourse but also in technology. Let's see where it goes.

The waters that you swim in include lots of these most ambitious people pushing those frontiers and windows. Can you say a bit more about what it feels like to engage with those people relative to the marginally talented entrepreneur you met in 2019 or something like that? How do they feel different?

I think that the best entrepreneurs have a level of certainty about them, and I think that same certainty exists in folks I was spending time with in 2020 and 2021 versus 2024 and 2025, most of whom I'm still in touch with. We're still trading emails, so it's not like these relationships fade.

I think that people starting things today, on average, are thinking a bit more long-term. It's less about what happens over the next 6 months and more about what happens over the next 6 years. That would be my macro observation.

Do you feel like that was something that you had really harnessed in the early days? I know it was 3 or 4 years that you were building before you launched. Maybe take us back to then. That's a decade ago, roughly.

Perhaps there's some selection bias with the story of Figma.

Yeah.

Folks are going, "Oh, man, I've got to hunker down for a few years. I should talk to Dylan."

I'm super curious about the hardest parts of building something in private for so long without tons of open-market feedback on the product or pricing feedback or whatever. How do you keep a team motivated when you have a strong vision for what something should look like, but you have to build for a long time before anyone can see it? That seems like a lot. There are a lot of those projects going on right now.

When I look back, I go, "Man, I wish that we had gotten out earlier," first of all. I tell everyone that it's like, what's the smallest increment of the idea that you could get out in an inspiring form? I definitely look back and wish that we had found that smaller bit sooner. It would have made everything a bit easier.

It's also way easier to say that now. We don't have the split test of what happens if we had launched with something very basic or incremental. Would it still have led to the Figma of today? We just don't know.

The hard parts were obviously motivating the team, setting milestones, and conveying product feedback. When I would give feedback to the team, it was often in writing. I'd write up notes from talking to customers I'd visit and put the product in front of, until I got to the point where I started literally recording user research sessions with people's consent, of course, and then playing those back to the team in group settings. We'd just sit there and awkwardly watch people struggle with the product for 5 minutes.

That was the way to get people motivated: "Oh, we've got to solve these problems." But there was still a disbelief of, "Okay, if we actually solve them, will people care?" I think you don't know that viscerally until you get something out into the market, or at least announce it. If you make an announcement and it's big enough, then people will react to it, and that can motivate an internal effort. But even that is hard.

A lot of people without traction struggle to launch things in a way that's scaled. Gaining that reach and that scale, if you're doing something that's truly unique, is tough. So even then, gaining traction, you have to be pretty clear about what you're building and why to the team, and people have to be really fired up about the mission.

One of the things that obviously distinguished Figma in its early days was this leap in the ability to create things. The gap between one's imagination and a realized output was collapsed by Figma, and even the friction involved in using that tool in the browser was collapsed.

Again, it feels like you're in a very interesting position in that the enabling technologies coming out right now, and AI most specifically, are like this on steroids. They are further collapsing the potential gap between one's imagination and a realized output. How do you think about navigating that as one of the people running one of the big companies that does this as a service? Both the opportunities and the risks—it must be such an interesting time for you to think about both sides of the equation. I would love to hear about both of them in whatever order you want.

This was the founding vision: eliminate the gap between imagination and reality.

Was that literally the founding—

That was the vision statement at the start. At some point, we made it more concrete: "Make design accessible to all," because people were getting confused by "eliminate the gap between imagination and reality."

I'm looking at image-completion papers with my co-founder, Evan, and we're seeing how we can use Internet-scale data to fill in regions of a photograph—to basically do content fill—but do it in a way that is sourced from the internet rather than something clever. So we're looking at early machine-learning approaches as applied to creative tools, and we were getting excited.

We were also starting to think about the potential for something like a BCI in terms of human-computer interaction, and it felt like that was a vision statement that could last us a long time. The feedback we got was, "This is so abstract. What the heck are you guys talking about?"

At some point, we made it more concrete, and now it feels like it's time to make it a bit more abstract again. But yeah, I think that, in terms of how I think about what AI can do and the applications, it's both underhyped and overhyped at the same time somehow. I feel like the reasoning capabilities in o1 Pro Mode right now—we're recording this on January 10th—

Got it, timestamped.

Still underhyped.

Yeah.

Yeah. In a week, everything could be different. It's AI timelines. That still seems underhyped as of right now. I've felt that way for the past month.

I'm curious what you've experienced that makes you feel that way.

Well, there's a leap from o1 Preview to o1 Pro Mode in terms of just how much compute is used, I think, or perhaps it's something about the way they've trained it. The level of analysis and thoughtfulness that is now included in answers, and the level of intent that can be detected from your prompt, are both remarkable. You don't have to be as mechanical about prompting things, actually, and the outcomes are just quite good.

I use it for so many things now. It's the first time I've felt like there's something that resembles intelligence on the other end. I get to work a lot with lawyers, and with o1 Pro Mode, I can often get a sense of what the important things are to cover in a legal call before I have the call, so I can have a shorter billable hour.

Hmm. How do you prompt it?

If you can actually get conceptual material out in preparation for a conversation with somebody, it generates a lot of efficiency and lets you short-circuit to the things that matter. It's been excellent as a learning tool. I can deep-dive on concepts that are not ones I've encountered, and it has very good knowledge broadly and is much more accurate.

At the same time, I feel like it's overhyped, too—AI in general. It feels like there's still very much this outer loop that exists around AI. It's like it can do things for us much faster, and yet we have to help it maneuver. We have to give it guidance. Yes, it's getting better at predicting intent, but it's not all the way there at all.

And so, yeah, it's this interesting period where I think people see where things could go if everything were perfect, but it's just not perfect. I don't expect it to be for a very long time. I think in the context of Figma, we really thought about our AI efforts as lowering the floor but raising the ceiling.

One example of that is, how do we generate a first draft for you? This isn't going to be a system that's going to generate the final output. But if we can make a first draft that then you can go off of, build off of, iterate on, and explore the tree of possibilities with, then hopefully you can get to the point where you're able to deep-dive on one of those possibilities, understand the trade-offs, and bring even more craft to your design.

My sense is that the amount of software that will be created will continue to go up exponentially. We've been on an exponential curve, but it's going to go more vertical. And so then what's the differentiator? It's design, it's craft, and it's really important to make sure that you bring that if you want to stand out in the market.

How do you think about the ability to continue to bet on things that won't change in an era of hyperchange? What can you hang your hat on that will still be true 5 or 10 years from now and build around reliably, versus worrying that 2 iterations of the model forward, everything that Figma does becomes like a prompt, and I can just talk to o5 and there's a little screen and it just gets built? Not just the design, but the whole application. You start thinking about this crazy stuff. How do you navigate that strategically?

I saw a tweet recently, and I wish I remembered who posted it. I can't find it for the life of me, but sorry, whoever it was, I'm not attributing you. It was something like, “As a designer, I'm not worried about AI replacing my job because a product manager can't even prompt me the right way.” And I feel like that's super true.

Design incorporates so many different aspects of culture, user behavior, alignment, craft, and just knowledge about where people are in different flows and more. It's so much about the debate over how it should work, as well as the pixel perfection of what it looks like. It's something about creativity meeting problem-solving in an interesting way.

I feel like maybe design becomes much more accessible to people, which I think is a good thing. But if you work with a designer who is very new to the world of design versus somebody who is just incredibly experienced, knows deeply how every system works, and is able to keep incredible state in their head around a complex systems problem, the latter is rare. You will see the difference.

And I just feel like even as design is made more accessible, it doesn't mean that craft is made more ubiquitous. I suspect that there will be higher levels of craft that tools like Figma can help people reach, but the thinking around what to bring to market, when, how, and how exactly it should work—and navigating these really complex systems trade-offs that could unfold over years—is just nontrivial. I think those all remain constants.

Everyone's very focused on LLMs and their derivatives and things built upon them. Are there any other new technologies that you are watching, like you're watching those core models as they roll out, that you feel are enabling of what you do or what you hope to see others do?

Reasoning is a little bit different from LLMs. We're conflating them right now, but they seem to be 2 different things, and I think it's pretty exciting to imagine what progress in math and science can look like with the help of reasoning models that are able to think for extended periods of time on a task. It's very exciting to think about how that could create new technologies for everyone.

In the Figma context, I wouldn't say that there are necessarily new technical breakthroughs outside of the world of AI that I think are really changing a lot for us right now. That said, I think that markets and preferences are ever-shifting, and I think people are getting a lot more sophisticated about the way that they build applications and the way that they think about their internal systems. That's exciting and is something that we can think about as we work through our strategy.

What about technology advancements and tech trees? This is a term we were talking about before we hit record: what WebGL represented and why it was such a big deal, and the nature of the incrementality of this one.

With WebGL, something like Figma became possible for the first time. In the past, you had to be on desktop in order to do complex graphics in an application. And we were not sure where the limits of WebGL would be.

Originally, Evan spent a lot of time building something that was more cross-platform, honestly, and could target desktop as well as the web. We had to rip it all out later because WebGL worked out. But we even hedged our bets initially because we were believers, but it was like, “Oh man, there's some part of this that's not going to work out.”

And it turned out that you could do everything we dreamed of on the web and do it in a really production-ready way. Whereas WebGPU is awesome and will create all sorts of benefits, I'd say it's more of an extension of what you can do with a GPU than going from not being able to use the GPU to using the GPU.

What do you think about the role of these fancy reasoning engines being plugged in to make your product better? There's this abstract idea like, okay, now we have a reasoning engine, it can do whatever, and we can use it to do some stuff. How do you decide what stuff to try to have it do to make the product better? What's the framework for which you attack that opportunity?

It's maybe counterintuitive at this point, but despite my excitement about reasoning engines, I think there's so much low-hanging fruit to dive into before we use reasoning to make our product better with AI. And so we started off with the most basic of things, like, “Let's go make diagrams better in FigJam.”

Then we went into, “Okay, how do we get it so that you can do stuff like name your layers automatically or create a first draft of a design? Or can we help you rewrite text in Figma Slides to match tone better and create an interface to explore that?”

Without talking more about where we're going next on our roadmap, I still think that there's so much low-hanging fruit that we can explore, and that's super obvious before we get to fancy stuff like reasoning engines. And I think that there aren't many examples in the market as of today that are using reasoning at the product level yet, and I think the few that are trying are still struggling to productize it.

It doesn't mean it's not coming. I think it's probably harder to create a great experience around it, given the nature of where that tree can branch out, versus an LLM. If you conceptualize it as an LLM thinking and talking to itself for a long time and ending up in interesting spots down the logic tree, it's even less deterministic.

I actually think it could be even more interesting, honestly, to expose the tree of possibilities rather than try to hide it from somebody. I think a lot of reasoning is an LLM basically traversing that tree itself and then figuring out, “What do I tell the user?” Personally, I think that a lot of the value in design is actually seeing the tree.

I think that's probably true elsewhere—exposing the tree—

Probably.

—as a general idea.

Maybe, yeah. It depends on the domain, probably, and also the use case.

Does it worry you—the notion that these things could get so good that…

You already mentioned the thing about the designer and the product manager, but if I imagine a perfectly designed, funded competitor whose only mission in life was to kill Figma, they would approach it this way: It's going to be the same thing, but the thing you design in Figma works. It's a fully functional app at the end. All the underlying code is written. It's not just a prototype; it's a live production app.

Is that a ridiculous notion? Do you think that will happen? Could Figma just be the one that does that? How do you think about that brain-stretching possibility where everyone's a software developer now?

I have a few reactions. I think that the amount of software created will go vertical. I think that a lot of people will make a lot more software. That doesn't mean it's good software. And I think that designers and people who are able to bring more craft to the equation bring that temporal, emotional, and cultural context that can really differentiate something.

And yes, I also believe that there's more we can do to improve software development in general. That's why we, with Figma, have really tried to map out the process of software development. We start with FigJam for brainstorming and ideation. Then we go to Figma Slides for alignment. We have Figma Design for design, and then Dev Mode for design to development and how to translate to developers.

I definitely think that there's way more we can do to make it so that people are able to achieve even more and go through that loop of software development even faster. That excites me a lot.

Are there things that you're counting on happening, that you expect to happen, that you think to the average person would seem outlandish?

A Dyson sphere by 2100.

Say more.

The transition to the next type of civilization that we might encounter would probably involve harnessing the energy of the sun by 2100. Or maybe it's not our sun; maybe we harness the energy of a neighboring sun. No need to mess with ours. But then you can do all sorts of interesting things. I think if you set that as the goal, maybe it becomes a lot sooner. But certainly by 2100, we should be able to get there.

What about in the next 10 years? Is there anything that you expect to happen in the next 10 years that you think other people might think is outlandishly bullish or something?

The beauty of digital right now is that it feels like anything is possible. I think that's the outlandish thing, period: we're getting to a place where I've always felt that the approach should be that you can build anything that's not violating the laws of physics, given enough time. And now, the time portion of that is even decreasing on the digital side. Digital is certainly not usually violating the laws of physics, so that's pretty exciting.

If you were giving a graduate-level seminar presentation or something on the future of design, how would you think about structuring your slides? Built in Figma, of course.

Whenever you're speaking to folks, I think you have to think about the audience. I would probably try to make this presentation for as general an audience as possible. By definition, it wouldn't necessarily be graduate-level in the first place, pushing us back into the premise. Sorry, I'm not your LLM to prompt.

I'll keep trying.

I would try to basically encourage everyone to build design literacy and figure out how to get better and increase their abilities in the field of design. And I think that if you look at the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders, certainly in software but also in hardware, they are becoming so much more design-literate.

Again, maybe it's selection bias. I hear so many founders tell me they start in Figma, and they're in Figma Design a lot of the time. They might not even have a designer on the team. They aspire to, but they don't yet because they're just starting off. That's where a lot of folks live now: on this digital canvas, trying to figure out how something should work.

When I look at the future of people who'll work in technology or folks who are going to be founders, and when we look at the students that we reach with Figma through our EDU efforts, it's just incredible to see how advanced they are and how much they are deep-diving on design as a discipline. And I think that, more than we ever could have imagined, it's becoming a skill that I hope one day will be more like listing Microsoft Word on your resume.

Right now, people put Figma on their resumes. If you put Microsoft Word on your resume, it's a red flag, and I hope we get to that status, because it's so obvious that you should know how to design things. That doesn't mean you're going to be a writer, but everyone should be able to engage with the discipline of design.

If I did an 80/20 analysis of design principles, what are the most important things to really grok and understand for someone new to the discipline?

Design principles span UX, but also visuals. They're very different when you're thinking about product versus branding, and so it depends a lot on what context we're talking about right now.

If you're talking more on the software UX side, I would say the first things I see people mess up are when to reuse versus when to be inventive. There are plenty of patterns that users already know, and sometimes it's very useful to be inventive and create new patterns. That's why something can catch on, and sometimes it doesn't. I would say that people fail to consider flows, so a lot of times they don't think about where a user is coming from.

They think only about a certain state that someone's in right now, and that context, if they lack it, can hurt them and hurt their experience. I think that they often are too indirect, so they have complex ways of manipulating data where you have to manipulate it on maybe one screen over here, and you have to go to a different screen to be able to see the effect, or it's not all in one place. You can't get that call-and-response, that immediate feedback loop.

That doesn't mean that you have to use direct manipulation like a tool such as Figma, but the closer you can get the manipulation to the effect, I think, is better. And then, more in the 20%, there's the stuff that we try to memeify inside of Figma: “Make the simple things simple, the complex things possible.” That's not an original Figma-ism. It goes back a long way; it's a famous design quote.

I would say that it's easy to endlessly do what users want, add more power to applications, and then end up with something super-complex that's not useful or approachable. It's one of the biggest risks for Figma that we're always trying to counterbalance: how to make sure that we're not too power-user despite people using us for powerful things. That's something that we work on a lot as an organization.

Do you find yourself curious about the next layer of non-flat digital-screen design interfaces? How do you think about the other potential spaces in which we might interact with systems? I guess that would be radically different design environments and new patterns.

Now I'm annoyed if something on my phone doesn't work the way that I'm used to a hundred other things using it, or something in a similar design pattern. What do you think about new interfaces? Are there any that are interesting enough to you to spend some real time thinking about?

I love new interfaces, so all of them. VR, for me, is something that I've deeply enjoyed exploring because I think that it's an example of so many new patterns being created and tried.

I still think that mobile, whether it's an iPhone-size screen or an iPad-size screen, has so many more patterns and interactions that could be explored than are being explored. It's really limited by how much people can learn. Just think about how hard it was for Apple to teach people how to long-press on an iPhone in order to select text. There's unlimited potential for how many of those interactions can exist, but there's only a limited attention span to teach the consumer.

But when you have something like VR, where you have a bunch of early adopters and you can teach them through game mechanics, because it's mostly a gaming platform at this point, then you have this awesome ability to go and experiment. A lot of the experiments won't work, but just like with early computing interfaces, some of them will, and some of them will be really fascinating.

Maybe we'll see that with other platforms, like more augmented-reality-type glasses or eventually BCIs. BCIs are kind of like the ultimate interface, and if you can get it to the point where your intent is an input and then you're creating something, it's kind of the grail. And so it's very exciting to be—

You strike me as open-minded and optimistic about all these things, and curious about them all. Are there any dark patterns in all this that have you concerned, or parts of this proliferation that you're worried about?

The obvious dark pattern for BCIs, if you are a true believer, is wireheading, where you basically have the fentanyl button and you just keep pressing it in a dark room in the corner.

That's a bad one.

Yeah. That's as dark as you can go.

I've never heard that term before, so maybe I'll be the late majority on BCI or something.

It's not an original idea. This is something that people have talked about for a long time.

What about in the traditional current AI world? Is there any part of that proliferation that you think is really important for us to watch carefully?

Yeah, I do. I think there's a bunch of ways you can break down the safety argument, and the one that I think is the highest risk, in terms of lack of visibility and transparency and also the potential for it to escalate quickly, is if you remove a human in the loop in the military context.

I think there'll be a great temptation to do that, and I think it could be very dangerous.

How do we deal with these problems?

I don't know, but I hope smarter people than me can figure them out.

It seems like the historical lesson is that really bad things will happen, and then we'll backfill protective mechanisms. The protective mechanisms will come from a response to bad things happening and public outcry, or just some version of that. I don't know. That seems to be the pattern of history. Very rarely do we thoughtfully design it ahead of time.

Yeah. I think there's also a pattern, though, of people becoming immune to things over time. If you look at the history of humanity, there have been times when broad swaths of the population have become addicted to things, and yet we've gotten through them. The wireheading case, I would not be as fearful of. And I think for the military side, there are very thoughtful people there, too, so I'm actually very optimistic. But you asked me to go into the dark spot. I'm shining some light on them.

Do you feel your competitive juices flowing in any different way in the last year-plus of these amazing new technologies relative to times prior? Does it kick off anything new in you, like the role of competition in your motivation in life?

I think it's important to do things from the perspective that you want them to exist. But in any situation, if it's a game, then it's a game I want to win. It doesn't have to be business. It could be a board game. I like to win those, too. I think it's fun to have that gamer mentality, especially when you're on a team. I was never a team-sports guy because I'm not very good at sports, but I really liked robotics club. We were all together and trying to figure out, in this more intellectual activity, how do we win? My team didn't always win, but it was a lot of fun. And coming into Figma, I feel like we have the best team, so I feel very blessed.

You mentioned at the beginning that you've been using o1 Pro a lot more personally. Is there anything that you've used it for that you think is most novel to you, or where the output or interaction has surprised you so far? I'm trying to collect these things and then share them with people to just get them trying this stuff. Does anything in that category come to mind?

Actually, my favorite prompt was not my own, unfortunately, but it was from my friend, who's an elementary-school teacher. Her prompt was, “Write a story about a dinosaur for a six-year-old using only the first 10 letters of the alphabet.” That was a really wild prompt. It thought for a long time on that one, but it actually did give a result in the end. If I told you to do that right now, it'd be hard.

I'm really interested by your point about our standards for these things already being much higher than any reasonable human, except maybe the number-one person in the world in the field that you're querying about, or something like that. Does that mean to you that we're already past all these benchmarks of intelligence, general intelligence, maybe even superintelligence? Do you care about these things at all, or are they just stupid-

I think it's kind of funny how everyone's like, “Oh, is it AGI? Is it not AGI?” No one seems to have a shared definition of what AGI is. I feel like being able to talk to someone at the level of depth that o1 Pro can answer—that feels pretty general and pretty intelligent to me. Is it doing work yet? Not just yet, but it feels like to me it's functionally AGI, and plenty of people would debate me on that one.

But when I said online, I said, “Everyone, it's time to put down your definitions of AGI.” Some people feel like it's already here; some people say we can keep putting the definitions out there. We skated right past the Turing test, and I feel like the default is just to keep pushing on what that definition could be.

When it comes to superintelligence, I actually get pretty excited because I think we'll see a lot of superintelligence first in research domains. I think math in particular. We're going to see novel theorems proven, maybe not in the most elegant of ways, but they will be proven, and then maybe from there people find the elegant proof because they know it's possible. It's just like someone runs a fast mile, and then everyone else tries to one-up them because they know it's possible. I think it's going to be really interesting to see the ways that humans and AI work together in these research domains.

It seems to me that there's always been an incredibly high return on vision, drive, and motivation for people. Inertia reigns. Unless those 3 things come together and someone pushes something new into existence, these things aren't, at least to my understanding, driven or motivated. Does that mean that the returns to those things go up in this world, and that people should just focus on the areas where they're the most energized, motivated, and driven? How do you think about that part of this equation, that progress happens through those things and these machines don't have those things?

I would argue that regardless of AGI or AI progress, that's already where you should be. If you're so lucky to get to choose what you do, then, yeah, you should already be focused on the areas where you're driven and motivated and have vision and hope to map to your 3.

But I would already argue that it's so easy to find something that's novel. That doesn't mean it's something that you're going to be driven and motivated by over time. Sadly, a lot of entrepreneurs fall into this trap: they find something, they go build that thing, and they're making some money from it, so they just keep going. But it almost always leads to burnout because it's not what they're truly motivated by.

And I think long-term, probably the highest-agency people will deliver the best results in the age of AI. Yes, currently agents don't have agency, despite the words being very similar.

What this far into Figma is still the most motivating to you? I think everyone sets out to build the default platform, and you did that. It's now the thing that people put on their résumés. Hopefully, you're post-IPO soon; maybe that's motivating. But what are the really hot, burning core fuel sources for you still, despite having built the platform of record for your world?

It's super simple. And by the way, I think we're far away from what you're saying, although it's very generous. I would say it's just any time that we can help a user achieve their goals. Any time I get user feedback, whether it's constructive—“I didn't like this thing”—I'm like, “Oh, man, we've got to improve the thing.” Or it's, “Man, I was able to do X because of Figma,” any part of the product. That is the eternal fuel for me, and I just love interacting with customers.

Where was that rooted in your life? Were you wired this way? Did it kick into gear when you were young?

I think it's probably hardwired. I have notebooks from when I was a little kid about, “How would you go make the best bathroom?” That was something I was really interested in as a 5- or 6-year-old, whatever. By the way, there's still a lot of improvements we can make to bathrooms.

Lay it on me. What would you do?

I'm less germaphobic now than I used to be, but as a kid who was a little bit of a germaphobe, I remember going to SFO for the first time, and it was just this magical experience that you could put your hands under the faucet and the water would automatically come out. For 5-year-old Dylan, automatic sinks everywhere were a big deal. One clever affordance is the ability to open a door with your foot. Everyone's coming into the bathroom and going out of the bathroom; their hands may or may not be dirty coming in or coming out, and opening it with your foot is a really good move. That should probably exist everywhere. TOTO toilets are great. I'll stop there.

When you think about your role now at the business, you're a CEO, a traditional CEO. There are lots of things you have to worry about. How much do you force yourself to just do the stuff where you have special energy and farm out other things, versus feeling that it's your responsibility to own the different parts of the business because you're the leader of the business?

Yeah, it's my responsibility to make sure that everything's going well at Figma. There are some areas where I'm going to bring zero level of expertise. Our compliance function—do I have any unique insight on compliance? No. Just that it should be done and done well. When it comes to design or the way that our products are built, my level of insight might go up a bit.

I try to be self-aware of what I'm bringing to a conversation, but ultimately, yeah, I have to have ownership of everything. In some areas, you know you've got the right leaders and you check in on them very infrequently. In other areas, whether you have very high confidence in your leaders or not, the stakes are so high that you have to be always involved.

And my point of view is design is like that for everyone across the board if you're building software. You need to be deeply, intimately working with your design team, or anyone doing design on your product, because otherwise you might lose the business. This is the way you'll win or lose, and certainly I treat it that way for Figma.

If you think back on the business's history now, it's been around for a decade-plus, what has gone the most wrong in the business's history?

I mean, look, it all comes back to people when you're talking about that. I think when you maybe don't hire correctly or don't set the standard the right way, and you have to reset a bit, that's always tough, but it's something you can work through.

And I feel like as long as you hire people who have that self-awareness, they'll help you work through it. That's the positive part.

If you think about the next chapter of Figma, however defined, I'm curious what chapter title you would put on it and a little bit of a description of the chapter.

Maybe something like “Make design bigger than design.” How do you take it so that design is not thought of just as pixel pushing, but also is something that people are really considering and doing at all parts of the process of building a company? And how do you make it so that they have the tools to do that and they're able to be intentional about that?

The thing I'm inspired by in your “make design bigger than design” is, to use a personal example, with the AI tools, I've never made a recipe in my life. I'm not a cook. I suck. But with these tools, I'm able to say, “Here's the kind of stuff that I like. Here's ingredients I like. Here's what I have available. Here's how much time I have. Make me a recipe.” I can express a lot of intent and context, and then I have a recipe that I make that I really like that no one's ever made before.

I didn't think of the recipe; the thing did. But it seems like maybe there's an analog in design. In design, I have never designed software applications, but I have lots of intent and context and desire and constraints. Is that the right way to think about it—that maybe Figma might make someone like me expand the market by making me a designer?

I think that if you've got a point of view in the world and you're able to articulate it, how can we empower you with the tools so that you can create something? And then also, how do we empower you with the tools for you to make it great? That, to me, is super exciting.

If you look at the number of people that use Figma and label themselves as designers today, it's like one-third of the people that come into Figma label themselves as a designer. The other two-thirds do not. But my belief is that those two-thirds will get into the design process in various ways.

Are there any other trends around design that matter directly or indirectly to your business that you're most on top of and curious about in the world right now?

I think that we're always curious about design systems, and the more that you've got people in the organization who are deeply thinking about user problems through the lens of design, you also have the problem of consistency at scale. That's where design systems come in. How do you make sure that your product is speaking the same language as multiple people with multiple perspectives are working on it?

I think that the interplay between design systems and creativity is something that we're always fascinated by at Figma. How do you both help people standardize while also giving them the room to innovate and be creative? Those two things are somewhat in tension sometimes, but are both objectives that Figma should hold.

I'm so curious to think about the 1-, 3-, 5-, and 10-year-hence versions of what you might make possible for people. I'm asking you to speculate here just for fun. How long do you think it is until someone like me can effectively work with Figma to create the thing in my head with more or less complete fidelity? I don't have to compromise on what I'm imagining to get it prototyped on the screen or something like that, with basically no design training or talent.

I would hope within 3 years, and if we can do it within 1 year, then we should do another podcast on that.

What's it like building with these things, with AI tooling?

What we're seeing right now is the earliest tools, and the way that you build with them will evolve a lot. I also think that as you build with them in the context of design, people realize that it's not enough just to get out what's in your head at full fidelity, but you'll want to improve what's in your head, too.

You'll start to appreciate the work of professional designers even more, and you'll be on your own journey to becoming one.

How much of good design do you think comes after the initial draft? All of it?

All of it. That's the beauty of software products versus physical products. With a physical product, it's so hard to be in an iterative loop. Industrial design is all about, okay, you do a lot of the iteration up front, and then you ship something. The thing you ship is gonna be around forever.

You make your table, someone buys a table, and you don't get to update the table. In digital design, we ship A/B tests all the time. We're constantly trying new things, seeing if they work. If they don't, you roll them back, no big deal. Completely different mindsets.

Anything that you would leave people with in terms of a challenge to go try some of this stuff? One of the things that I feel like you're always at the forefront of is thinking about trying this stuff. You're an edge tinkerer and are always aware of new platforms, new tools, new trends, and that so much of the power of these things is just giving them a try. Is there any favorite way that you've prompted friends or relatives or whatever to just get involved as a tangible way forward?

My prompt on the design side would just be to make anything. If you don't have an original idea, literally go recreate something that you already know to get comfortable and familiar with the tools. If you have an idea, go try it.

I think when it comes to more of the AI side, this is the time to lean into your curiosity and to use these models to learn as much as you can about all the areas you've always wondered about but never had a personalized tutor for. That'd be my prompt.

I was thinking about our conversation this morning and looking forward to it, and how cool it must be for you to think about all the things that have been created with the platform that you created. What a cool—

It's amazing.

—and that the era that we're entering, maybe, or have been in, this era of new general-purpose technologies that enable people to make stuff without having to ask for your permission. That must be a cool feeling for you to have, to look back on and to look forward to, to spread design beyond designers. I'm thankful you did it, and it's so fun as always to catch up and hear your view on the world. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

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