Hard Fork - ‘Hard Fork’ Live Part 2: Dylan Field on Standing Out in the A.I. Era

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

We’re back with more from our live event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In this episode, we sit down with Dylan Field, a founder and the chief executive of the design company Figma, for what he describes as a “roller coaster” of a conversation. We cover everything from the company’s “Design Is Dead” campaign to the sudden resignation of the Anthropic executive Mike Krieger from Figma’s board. Then, we close things out with a special musical performance by eight wooden robotic dolls that make up the Teenage Engineering Choir. One quick correction to note: In our interview with Field, he makes reference to the SpaceX S-1 filing and misstates what the company says their addressable market for A.I. enterprise applications is. Field says “$22.9 trillion,” but the correct number from the SpaceX filing is $22.7 trillion. The decimal point makes it look small, but it’s a difference of $200 billion. We’ll be back on Friday with our final installment of “Hard Fork” Live.   Guests: Dylan Field, chief executive and co-founder of Figma. Dan Powell, robot conductor, New York Times music composer and “Hard Fork” theme-song creator. Teenage Engineering Choir   Additional Reading: This Start-Up’s $20 Billion Sale Died. It Came Fighting Back.   We want to hear from you. Email us at [e-mail]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Hard Fork is brought to you by our Hard Fork Live, 26 sponsors, premier sponsor IBM, associate sponsors Everpure, Pure, Pure Leaf, and the University of Notre Dame, and supporting sponsor at Lassian. Welcome back, Hard Fork listeners. This week, we are bringing you more interviews from Hard Fork Live and a special musical performance. Today, we are featuring an interview with Dylan Feast. the CEO of Figma, as well as a musical performance by Dan Powell, one of the New York Times musicians and composers who works on the show

and who was there in San Francisco at the live event as our DJ. Yeah, this is a really fun collection of segments, fascinating conversations with Figma's Dylan Field and a just legendary performance from Dan Powell, who is one of our favorite people and one of the most fun things about working here is getting to hear dance, cool music. We'll be back with more Hard Fork Live on Friday, including a discussion with Daniel Kokatelo and Syash Kapoor, a hang with Dwarkesh Patel, and we'll take questions live from the crowd. Now, have those been screened in advance?

No. Okay. They're firing from the hip. Well, we have so much more to come tonight. I know it's hard to believe, but we are so excited for our next guest. Our next guest is the CEO of Figma, an AI and web-based design application, founded in 2012. It's Dylan Field. Dylan, welcome. Thanks, guys.

Hey, Dylan. Hey, Dylan. So, Dylan, I want to start by reading you a Facebook message I got on August 5th, 2009. Hey, Kevin, I recently picked up your book at the library. Just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed it. Anyway, best of luck with your future endeavors. I'm going to Brown this fall. Who knows? Maybe I'll meet you in Providence someday. That message was sent by a teenage boy named Dylan Field. And I want to just, first of all, apologize. I never respond to that. So you can fix this. Can you imagine you write a book and a college student emails you out of the blue and you're like, yeah, whatever. It was, you know,

a lot going on. A lot going on in 2009. Anyway, I'm sorry for ghosting you. And second of all, it was a good book. You shall read it. How did your freshman year of college go. It was awesome. Yeah, and I got to meet you. Yeah. Because I don't know if you remember, but for the Acapello Group that you were in, you came back as a super senior to hang out with everyone, I guess, including the new freshman. Well, it went so well that you dropped out and moved to Silicon Valley to seek your fortune here. And it's been quite a run for you. Figma went public last year has had a wild ride. And I want to talk to you first about AI, because I have heard that you are quite AI-pilled, and I have seen on your social media accounts that you are

constantly experimenting with AI, doing all these AI side projects. What are you doing? Do you have AI psychosis? I think it's best to front-run the psychosis. Rather than have a sneak up on you, you just got to dive right in, and you get it over with. But yeah, I ask myself sometimes, and I don't think so right now. I think I've got a pretty reasonable take on what models are good at, where they're not so great. But it's really interesting to see the new capabilities. Right now I'm vibe-massing. What's vibe-massing?

Well, it's basically YouTube math, but with AI. Are you proving Fermat's last theorem? What are you doing? No, I'm not. But basically, like, I think it's just interesting to see how AI attacks these problems. It's kind of the opposite of Figma. I mean, Figma, we're a design platform. We often are evaluating the models, trying to see how good they are, a design, what we should use, what we should put in our product, exposed to users.

And it's like the opposite of verifiable. You know, you and I could look at something and disagree or agree on the merits of it and the design merits of it. But, you know, there are some domains like math, some aspects of computer science where things are correct or they're not. And so I think it's really cool to see that range. And the verifiable domains models are very good at now. Casey vibe math is his way through high school. They flunked him, but I'm glad it's going better for you. No, I don't have any results.

So just be very clear. I want to hear a little bit more about like what direction you are taking all of your AI use in as you sort of, you know, pursue these projects. This sounds like a lot of sort of like personal stuff that you're. you're doing for fun. Is that just sort of like the curiosity of a lifelong learner, or is there something specific that you're trying to find? I find that just in general, the more that you like, explore new technology, you don't know how it's going to pay off or what benefit it will have, but ends up having some benefit in weird ways you can't expect. I was very excited about NFTs early on, and they became what they are now. They weren't called NFTs then. They're called

crypto collectibles because that was a cool phrase. But, you know, it was like whether it's that or, you you know, WebGL, which led to Figma. I just always try to explore stuff and, like, go deep on it, figure out the new capabilities because you can find ways to use them. I have a theory that I want to run past you, which is that, you know, that every startup founder, CEO in Silicon Valley is obsessed with vibe coding. They're all doing it on the weekends. They come in on Mondays, and, you know, they say,

you know, why are we building this thing? 50 people used to build this thing. I just built it in a weekend. It's driving their employees crazy. But I have my theory about this is that this is, this is, This is reminding CEOs of what it was like when their jobs were fun. Do you agree with that statement? You said you're fearful of that.

No, that's my theory. Oh, theory. Okay, sorry, I misheard you. I think that people like to make things, and they like to design stuff, and they like to actually put their ideas out in the world in a more tangible way. And I think we're just going to see more of it from everyone, not just CEOs trying to have fun on the weekend. Speaking of making stuff, Figma recently launched an ad campaign organized around the idea,

sort of making fun of the idea that design is dead. It's sort of a more common sentiment maybe in the era of AI. Make that case for us that design is not dead in a world where I can just sort of, you know, type what kind of app I want into a box. This is a real roller coaster from, you know, my 2009 Facebook message now to design. We're covering it all. It's taking a turn. No, I mean, the, look, I think.

that there's so many hot takes online. I'm sure you get a few of them an hour. Sure. And, you know, I think when new models drop, everyone's looking for something that they can say is dead. Because, you know, on social media now, it's like either you're so back or it's so over. And I prefer to be back. But no, I mean, in terms of the case, I mean, look, like, it's interesting to see folks catch up the capabilities. And it's like, yeah, you can do a lot. But the average sort of response from AI, whether it's the domain like writing, you know, my take, my hot take right now would be, I actually think that people that know how to write and actually engage in thinking, critical thinking around writing, and it's like, it's a good time for them.

It's a good time for them. Yeah. Well, you told me, but I think so. Yeah. It's like half the audience is applauding. They're like, I don't know. Should we should not? Is it too like, are we talking about? I think, like, you know, to the extent that writing is a showcase for your critical thinking abilities, like, yes, like having great critical thinking skills are always, like, a boon. Like, is the... But it's also a style. It's a style of writing. Sure. Like if you're funny, if you've got an actual way you phrase things, if you have voice. And I think it's especially true right now in a way that wasn't a few years ago.

Like three, five years ago, I would have said, oh, man, there's a lot of people on social media that are writing really interesting things. And we're in this world where, like, there's, you know, substack. And, like, people are putting content there. And it's really good. And now I look at that. And I'm like, man, it's a lot. lot of clod, you know, maybe I'm overrotated even on identifying people that are basically

using AI to write. Same thing's true for design. Folks are basically looking at these websites or applications and seeing the average. Maybe they're even over identifying it. But I think if you have a creative voice writing or design, you put yourself out there and you like take a risk, this is a good time to do that. It's something that's going to be rewarded. And I can imagine, maybe in your view, there's a world where the fact that I can use an AI tool to quickly whip up a design might make me more interested in actually getting good, right? And sort of like not settling for the first generation. Yeah, exactly. It's like how do you not settle for the first draft, the first thing out there, the first output, and actually mold it and craft it and push it

further. And I think that the more you can do that, the more you'll send out and also the more it will be differentiated. And I think that there's going to, I mean, we saw the, uh, the data recently on the number of apps in the app store. It was, went up a ton, but the number of apps actually being used and, uh, getting frequent traffic is still the same. And so you're basically this hyper competitive environment now where you have to differentiate. You really have to like, lean in and figure out how to, uh, have a unique voice and a unique take and you point in way pretty view, just like writing. The big buzzword in San Francisco right now is taste.

Everyone's talking about taste as the sort of bulwark against being replaced by AI. If you have taste, you'll be fine. It's the first time taste has ever been a big subject in San Francisco, I think. Yes, this is a city that made all birds a thing. Proudly tasteless since 1821. And then I've heard some people argue that actually taste is just the word we give to the stuff that models aren't very good at yet. You know, researchers in AI used to say, ah, but they don't have taste. And then the models got better. And it was like, oh, wait a minute,

maybe they can do all of the taste parts of the job, too. So defend the concept of taste as being either important or cope from people who just haven't used the good models yet. I mean, the cycle seems to be the model comes out, you think it can do everything, you discover the limits and then you realize that life goes on. And, uh, it, you know, will at some point that be different and affect the world in a different way? Perhaps we'll see. But so far it seems like everyone's adapting and part of that adaptation is, uh, realizing the sort of new average is being put out by the models. And I think it's not even, you don't even have to defend taste and people having taste because then we'd argue about, do they? Um, to just recognize people can

detect the average. They can check that output and they can dare to do more. But I also do believe that this is a great time to be creative. And I think that the more of the models put out, that's in distribution, because it's how the models are trained. They're training on distribution of data. And if you're in distribution and you're not actually pushing the bounds, like I think that you're in a worse shape than if you're actually going and exploring the frontier of human knowledge, creativity, and what you can put on in the world and making something that's funnily new

is an expression of yourself. So I get excited about that. I get excited about our opportunity to be the place where people can really unlock their creativity at Figma and one of the places that we many and just like creating tools that can empower people. I'm curious if you're seeing a reaction in the world of art and design to AI

and what that looks like, right? you think back and the invention of the camera gets us impressionism. Do we have an analog for that yet in the design world now that AI makes design easier to access? I think it's interesting how we're seeing some of that reaction maybe in the world of marketing and advertising. I don't know if maybe it's happening in the art world. Like I would have expected by now that people be really into sculpture in a way that they're not or just things with textures.

And I mean, my art thesis, you know, so probably don't hire me as an art advisor. But, like, you know, I think that that's probably a natural reaction. It's like lean into the things that are not digital. Whereas I think in advertising now we're seeing ways to prove authenticity, to prove that you are actually making something that is not generated by AI. And some companies are really going for that. In the world of design, I think that what we're going to see and what we are starting to see, a lot more interactivity, a lot more creativity, people really making software more of a creative medium.

You know, I think back to the early days of the internet. And it was so fun. And I feel like the last 15 years or so, like basically the time we've been working on Figma, we kind of have been in a bit of a rut, honestly. You know, a lot of very monoculture takes when it comes to design and the way it expresses. And the people that are trying to do hot takes in the audience will be like, and Figma's to blame. Hopefully not. Same on you. Yeah, exactly.

Casey said it. But no, I think that the more we can do to make it so people can push further and actually create really dynamic interfaces as well as marketing and media in general, the better. Have you seen anything that's been AI generated in the realm of design or art that you think is really good? Like, Casey turned me on to Fruit Love Island, which is now my... You've all watched it. My favorite TV show slash TikTok series. But is there anything that you've seen that is clearly AI generated where you're like,

oh, that's actually kind of fun and interesting. You know, yes, and also it wears off fast. I think it's just like any style. I'm on season three of Fruit Love Island, so it hasn't worn off yet. The pineapple had no say. The papaya and the banana are about to hook up. It's great. Sounds tantalizing. I'll have to watch it tonight.

I want to come back to something that you were saying about writing earlier. It's just sort of been on my mind ever since you brought it up because you were bringing about the fact that we have sub-sac now and a lot more people are writing, which I agree with you, is super cool. When Sotja was here earlier, he brought up this post that he had read that was on substack today. I happened to read the same post because it was on TechMoon. And I read it, and I'm just going to say it, it was Claude Generated. And it irritated me as somebody who's always trying to get my stories on tech meme because I'm like, I'm just reading like the output of a prompt.

And so when I read that, my honest feeling is like, this is not good for my profession. Like my profession is starting to look more and more like Slop. And so I just wonder like if there are designers in the audience, if they're having a similar feeling when they're looking at the designs that they're seeing everywhere and they're just knowing that it was outputted with a touch of a button. Well, I mean, one quality that writers and designers also share is imposter syndrome. And it's good to label it so that you know it's there and you don't have to deal with it every day or as much. But I think it's designers are arguably in one of the best roles in technology. And I mean, I'm talking to companies all the time, customers. You're telling me that they're hiring designers.

Sometimes they're not hiring others. But design is one of the most prioritized places in the company. where they're hiring. Overall, folks are still hiring a lot. This also perplexes me. I mean, we're in a world where folks are saying that all the jobs are going to replace, and they're then turned around and they're like, oh, let me call the really good engineers so I can get them to join my team. So it doesn't make sense to me right now in general, but I am very, very bullish on design and the role it will play in accelerating companies further. So you think like two years from today, like there are more people whose job title is designer than art than what they have it today?

How many years? say two? Yeah, I think so. I think probably significantly more. And a lot of people that are doing other jobs, I think we'll start calling themselves designers, creatives. You know, I think in general we're seeing more of this kind of generalist vibe

that people are feeling like they have to embody. One thing that's been interesting is a lot of engineers, kind of like you're saying, getting started on their design journey, because they make something so fast and they're like, now what? And is it good enough? Maybe I should push it further. And then they kind of are trying to figure out, okay, how do I do that?

So I'm pretty excited about that part, too, welcoming more people in as designers. I have a friend in the audience tonight who is a product manager who started out as a non-technical person and is now able to create really amazing prototypes, just with the advanced of AI tools. I can see a world where design gets added into that portfolio as well. And I think that at the end of that, like, that job probably has a different name like than PM. I mean, not all that will be great design, but the act of like considering it and being thoughtful what you're doing and then actually putting it out. and taking risk, man, that's design.

Dylan, this is a lot of high-minded conversation. Let's gossip. Okay. About what? Earlier this year, Mike Krieger, former board member at Figma, product lead at Anthropic, co-founder of Instagram,

was, he suddenly resigned from your board, and just days later, Anthropic announced, Claude Design, which feels a little Figma adjacent. So what the heck happened there? I mean, you just told a story. But, I mean, let me be clear. Like, Mike is a great dude.

And, yeah, I'm someone I really care about. Would you let another AI lab executive onto your board in the future? Well, I mean, we saw how that went in terms of, like, you know, unexpected products rolling out. And so probably depends on what their ambitions are. Yeah. Wait, in a general sense, you're not gossip. Forget these people are there. Just us birds.

Sorry, y'all. Just us birds. In a general sense, I think a lot of CEOs are worried about the AI labs sort of integrating more vertically, like, you know, taking over insurance companies or accounting firms. We're starting to see some of that happen, where these labs are just kind of expanding into all the adjacent industries and really creating tough times for the companies in those industries already. Do you expect that to continue?

Are these labs just kind of going to continue to grow and grow and grow and just become these like amorphous blobs that just, you know, create havoc for all the smaller startups in those fields? Well, I mean, let's tell the tale of two AI labs. You know, you got Open AI in Anthropic and opening eye kind of went through that journey. They launched a lot of stuff, social network even, SORA, which I really enjoyed. I don't you did too, Casey. That's some fun. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, so, you know, speaking of AI generation, I mean, I did enjoy watching myself break dance. And you'll see him do it again later tonight. With the robot. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, then they've made the hard call of actually shutting that down and focusing the efforts of the company. And that's a hard call to make. But respect that they did it. And then also, I think, you know, you've got Anthropic is kind of in its arc of being more expansionary.

they're thinking, launching a lot of stuff. And I think you see what works and it doesn't. And then you see a year later what happens? I mean, I think the more interesting question is a year or two years out, like where will they be playing still? And, you know, not everything works. It's hard to build product and get it out in the world. What are some things that you think they will attempt and fail at?

Oh, I don't know. Safety? Joking. Very good. That might be the best answer of Hard Fork Live, 2026. Yeah, very good, very good. Dylan, you run a public company. It's enterprise SaaS.

The market is very skeptical of that right now. Your job seems hard. How is it going for you? And do you think you convince the market that there is a bright future for you and your enterprise SaaS brethren? I don't have to. Elon Musk is doing it.

You're the son, right? Yeah. I mean, was it $22.9 trillion on enterprise applications? Let's go. I'll pretend to know what you mean. No, I mean, but actually, I mean, how do you put that out there and not go, wow, and software's huge? I mean, he made it bigger than the entire space economy. Right.

So, you know, two tails. What do you make of? Okay. I'm told, we only have a few minutes left, but I'm told that you have a desire to talk about hyperstition. What is hyperstition, and why are we supposed to know about it?

I guess some of our team told you that. This is, I mean, getting back to the abstract conversation, sorry, y'all. But it's basically someone who's kind of like an internet edge lord came up with this term. Don't look them up. But I do think there's a really interesting idea here, which is how do you describe this phenomenon where ideas, memes, summon their own existence?

And the two examples I think are really good at this. One is Bitcoin and another one's AI. You know, why did Bitcoin work? There's every reason to believe in the world that Bitcoin would not work. and yet it just snowballed. And basically the more attention it got, the more basically strong it became. And AI is the same way. There's all these folks that cared so much about safety, so much that they thought,

okay, we got to do this in the right way. We've got to form nonprofits and get together and all of us got to be in one place so that we can really shepherd this technology into the future. And we've got to make sure we don't create a race dynamic, for example. We've got to make sure that we have you know, these complex corporate structures that we can make sure that this benefits humanity in the best ways possible.

But then it's like, okay, well, there's a lot of like really powerful stuff you can make with AI and, you know, people are people. It's hard to always get along. And man, you know, there's always an incentive to break apart. And well, hello, Rayconnamic, here we are. Can I try to repeat back to you what I've heard so far and you tell me if I'm right or not? Hyperstition, the way I have heard of this,

heard of it is like in the sense of the AI's learning from what stories we tell about AI. So if you want AI to go well, you should like feed it a bunch of stories about AI being like really nice to humans. That's part of it too. I think that it's like also the case that AI is like painfully aware in some cases of, you know, all these tropes that are on the internet about it. And, you know, it'll talk to about the Google engineer that thought I was conscious. It'll talk with you about sort of the stories around science fiction and the ways that it's been depicted. It's very aware. It's all on the train set. And, you know, there's not as much information for some reason the train set, a dataset of these stories where it goes well. But I actually do think there's an optimistic future

for humanity. And I know that's a hot take now for some reason, but I want to believe that every day. And I think that it's on all of us to tell those stories, too, of how it does go well. And so it might be a good time to write some stories about how things could go well, just to make sure to get some of the training data. Exactly. You got it. You have your homework for this evening. Dylanfield, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks so much, Dylan. Thanks for having me.

Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks so much, Dylan. Thank you. Have good night. Thank you. All right. Hypertition. When we come back, more from Hard Fork Live. Please welcome to the stage, New York Time composer Dan Powell and his robot choir.

Incredible Hard Ford. Our DJ tonight also composed the Hard Fork theme song and so much of the other amazing music on the show. Thank you, Dad, for coming out tonight. Rarely has a human losing a job to automation. It sounded so beautiful. Yeah. So those robots are made by teenage engineering,

and they are part of a choir that takes in input via MIDI and Bluetooth and outputs, beautiful songs, and only occasionally do they need to be, like, wrapped on the head to behave. But I'm told that feels good for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they like it. Yeah.

Hot Fort is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Veeran Pavich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Belichita Etup, Marianne Lazzano, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemistow, and Dan Powell.

Video production by Soya Roque, Jake Nicol, and Chris Schott. Special thanks to the New York Times live event team, Hillary Kuhn, Beth Weinstein, Caitlin Roper, Chantal Renier, Melissa Tripoli,

Natalie Green, Kirsten Birmingham, Marissa Freena, Jennifer Feeney, Morgan Singer, Dana Praskowski, Haley Duffy, Yenway Liu, Matt Kaiser, Sarah Cheever, Johnny Marola, Victoria Kim, and SV Productions. Thanks to everybody at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Blue Shield of California Theater, and a special thanks to Paula Schumann, Puiwink, Tam, and Dahlia Hadad. You can email us at Hartfork at NYTimes.com with all your photos from the event.