Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, the collaborative design platform that has revolutionized how product teams work. In my first-ever live podcast, recorded at Figma Config, Dylan and I dig into:• How intuition and product taste drive Dylan’s decision-making• The challenge of keeping things simple• Dylan’s thoughts on the future of product management• Lessons from Figma’s early days• How Figma built their initial user base• Dylan’s journey from intern to CEO of a 1,000+-person company• The future of design tools and AI—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Anvil—The fastest way to build software for documents• User Testing—Human understanding. Human experiences.—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/dylan-field-live-at-config—Where to find Dylan Field:• X: https://x.com/zoink?lang=en• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction(01:11) Welcoming Dylan Field(02:36) Highlights and surprises from Config(06:58) The philosophy of design(08:01) Raccoon feet and muffin hands(09:57) Building and refining intuition and product taste(12:50) How to influence leadership(16:14) The role of product managers(21:12) The future of product management(22:20) The importance of simplicity in design(26:10) The long road to Figma’s launch(27:44) Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs(29:07) Knowing when it’s time to ship(30:39) Early user acquisition strategies(35:50) Spotting trends and future innovations(39:20) Reflections on leadership and growth(43:16) Lightning round—Referenced:• Mihika Kapoor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihikakapoor/• Rick Rubin on the Creative Act—60 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE1teB5bN-w• Figma pages: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038511293-Create-and-manage-pages• Leading through uncertainty: A design-led company—Brian Chesky (Config 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkfijg7s76o• An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-how-figma-builds• Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/vision-conviction-hype-mihika-kapoor• An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-figmas-unique-bottom• Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-30-years-of-building• Nadia Singer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadiasinger/ • Sho Kuwamoto on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shokuwamoto/• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/• Tim Van Damme on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-van-damme-maxvoltar/• Coda: https://coda.io/• Shishir Mehrotra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shishirmehrotra/• Websim: https://websim.ai/• eToys.com commercial (from Dylan’s childhood acting career): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Y92aCmmbU—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Today, I'm excited to bring you a very special episode, which was recorded live at Figma Config with Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field in front of a live audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the first ever live recording of this podcast, and it was so much fun. If you watch this on YouTube, you can see the epic stage that they built specifically for us to recreate my podcast studio. I could not be more thankful to the config team for making this happen. In my conversation with Dylan, we dig into how he builds and refines his personal.

product taste and intuition, how intuition is a hypothesis generator, the future of product management, how Dylan attempts to operationalize keeping Figma simple and to continue simplifying the experience, a bunch of stories from the early days of Figma that I've never heard before. Also, he shares his favorite AI tool called WebSim, which is wild. And if you wait till the very end, you can see a very young child actor Dylan Field in a clip that I found online. That was hilarious. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes,

and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Dylan Field. Dylan, thank you so much for joining me, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, honey. Hi, all. Is this your first live podcast? This is my first ever live podcast.

Also, a big thank you to the config team who set up this crazy studio. I had no idea this was going to happen. I feel like I'm in my studio here with a thousand people watching us. It's very impressive. I very much dig the background and also the mics that may or may not be wired. That's right. Don't say that.

Don't tell people. Sorry. There's no wires coming out of them. There's no one behind the curtain either. Okay. So, Dylan, I want to start by just checking in on how you're doing. So config is about to wrap up. We've been out of two days now.

I know how much Lyft goes into doing these sorts of things. I imagine you've been thinking about this for a long time. now. I'm just curious how you're doing. Any surprises? Any highlights? Any low lights? The highlight is the community and just the incredible, incredible people here at config. Yeah. Y'all are awesome. I don't know why I keep talking the mic like this. It's instinctual. But seriously, it's just the most amazing community to be part of. And I feel so lucky. And then in terms of how I'm doing this exact moment, like, exhaust.

but riding on caffeine and whatever this really cool probiotic drink is. Any surprises from the past couple days? Anything that's like, oh, wow, that went a lot better than I thought, maybe less well? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, demo definitely things I would have improved. But also, like, the Emil and Mexica were phenomenal. And it was just, like, so awesome to see them do their demos and present materials. and then, yeah, I was just really pleased with the conversation, I think that's getting started at Config around AI.

And I think that, you know, I was looking online on social media, and I think people are already kind of like zeroing in the right conversation, which is, okay, in a world of, you know, more software being created by AI, what does that mean? And, you know, the impact on craft, and the impact on quality and the need to have more unique design and how design is a differentiator

and I think some people are saying I agree with that some people are saying that I disagree with that and that's exactly the bounds of what the conversation I kind of imagined would emerge from yesterday. You know, it was funny, the make design feature, you know, anything I said on the keynote, I was like,

this is going to give you the most obvious thing in the most obvious form possible. And then people online are like, it's just going to give you some obvious thing. I agree. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like Samo authentication and skim provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add Enterprise Features. features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS,

including ones you probably know, like Vercell, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the Fine Grain Authorization Service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at WorkOS.com to learn more. That's WorkOS.

This episode is brought to you by Anvil. Their document SDK helps product teams build and launch software for documents fast. Companies like Carda and vouch insurance use Anvil to accelerate the development of their document workflows. Getting to market fast is a top priority for product teams. And the last thing that you or your developers want is to build document workflows from scratch. It's time consuming expensive and distracts from core work. You could stitch together multi- tools and manage those integrations, or you can use an all-in-one document SDK. Most product managers will tell you, paperwork sucks. Anvil's document SDK helps teams get to market fast, incorporate your brand style, and give you back time to focus on your company's core differentiated features. For your users, paperwork often starts with an AI-powered web form styled and embedded in your application. From there, you can route data to your backend systems and to the correct fields in your PDF via API.

Complete the process with a white labeled e-signature. The best part about Anvil is the level of customization their SDK provides. Non-technical folks love Anvil's

Dragon Drop Builder and developers love their flexible APIs and easy to understand documentation. Build documents software fast with Anvil. That's useanvill.com

slash Lenny to learn more or start a free trial. That's use anv-v-I-L-com slash Lenny. Let's keep talking about design. You once said that the definition of design is art applied to problem solving. Can you just add a bit more to that?

What do you mean by that? Because that's an amazing line. Well, I don't think it's my original line. I think someone else said it. But there's a lot of definitions of design out there, too. I mean, there's also design as dialogue or design as problem solving. You just go straight there. I can go with like 10 more.

But yeah, I like art applied to problem solving because I think that, design is often, there is some component of creativity to it, and unique expression that you're trying to provide and create and put out into the world, but you are also trying to do it and match it to a user need, a problem that needs to be solved. And I think that it's not pure art. And if you lose the art and you're just solving the problem, like it's totally utilitarian, and it has,

It lacks soul. And so the combination of those two things is, to me, really beautiful. I'm going to pivot to a very hard-hitting question. I hope your PR people don't kill me for asking you this. Many people ask me to ask you this question. Okay. Very important.

Please explain a Figma tradition called Raccoon Feet and Muffin Ham. Okay. I should probably just leave this interview now. Okay, so this is a conversation. I'm not sure exactly where it started, but it started early Figma. And basically we had these lunch tables at Figma where we would just kind of all gather

and have very long, interesting, meandering conversations before we got back to work. And one of the questions that was, would you rather, was would you rather have raccoons for feet or muffins for hands? And I think this is a deeply philosophical question. I've honored it since I've heard it. I still don't have one answer.

If you've got an answer, I'm curious what it is. I've got follow-up questions. Do the raccoon, can you control where the raccoon take you, or are they just deciding on their own what's happening? I think that raccoons probably wouldn't even agree with each other where to go. Okay, that's complicated. I mean, if you had raccoons for feet right now, do you think that it would interfere with this podcast?

But muffin hands would also interfere with my newsletter, and I feel like I'd be out of work. I don't know if you can type. I need a special keyboard. Okay, this is very difficult. You haven't even thought about the upsides this yet. Yeah, what are the upsides? We can get there.

Maybe you could eat some of the muffins. There's a case for optimism. Cupcakes? Yeah, if you have muffins for hands, you know, maybe if you're hungry. Do they regenerate after size you eat them? That's a good question. Okay. There's no answers here, just questions.

Do your nails grow? Yeah. Oh, okay. Interesting. It's deeper than you might think. Okay. Okay, I'm going to play a short clip with Rick Rubin, and then I have a question about it, okay? So we'll see if that plays.

But exactly what he does and how is difficult to describe. Do you play instruments? Barely. Do you know how to work a soundboard? No. No technical ability. And I know nothing about music. You must know something.

Well, I know what I like and what I don't like. and I'm decisive about what I like and what I don't like. So what are you being paid for? The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists. Okay, so I'm not going to say this as you. You need to grow the beard.

But I think this is a little bit you because what I've heard from a number of your colleagues is that one of your superpowers is intuition and product taste. And someone said that you have the sixth sense for what's going to work when you're designing Figma and you're making decisions in the product. So I'm curious how you've built and refined your intuition and product taste when it comes to Figma and then even broadly. That's a lot kinder than I thought you're going to be.

I thought you're going to be like, you don't know how to code or you don't know how to design. No. But, no, I mean, I think here, Here's my framework for it. I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator. And you're constantly generating these hypotheses, and others are generating hypotheses as well. And you then take these hypotheses and you put them forward and you debate them and you try to find data to support them or negate them. And then you winnow it down into like what is our working hypothesis? And from

that you move forward. I heard that you read every tweet that mentions Figma and share them with folks and there's a Slack channel repaste them. I imagine that is a part of this where you're just constantly watching what people are saying about Figma, what people are complaining about. I mean, I definitely look everywhere trying to constantly ingest information about Figma and it's not just

like Twitter slash X, whatever that's called now, but you know, anywhere in the internet, support channels, etc. And yeah, I'm always trying to understand And I also ask a lot of questions, and I try to get to root problems and understand where people are coming from and what are they actually trying to solve.

Sometimes people are saying, hey, I need X, but they really want Y or Z. And trying to do that myself and kind of engage and dive deeper there, but also to encourage our team to do that, I think leads to really good outcomes in terms of what we ship. Is there something you've changed your mind about, kind of building on that, either based on customer feedback or some employee just like making a case and like, okay, you're right. Is there something that comes to mind if something you've changed the mind about recently? Somebody said flies. Someone started out flies. I have not.

It's a thing with slides. Well, it's not recent, but one good example of me changed my mind is that you all have pages. in Figma. You're welcome. But like, I think I have deep skepticism about pages still. Like, I'm not sure they're like, if you could freeze time and I could just go and with my team work on Figma for a very long time, I'm not sure we'd come to the same implementation of pages that we are at today. I just don't think it's like the most elegant solution in the context of like the entire system of product design that you could create. The world told me and our team that that did not matter and they needed pages. And don't worry, we're not unshipping pages.

But yeah, I'm still very skeptical of them. And I think that in general, probably my team would tell you that I don't always change my mind. But I also, I like build trust with people in deep ways. And I think across our organization, if things are not going to be fatal, then if I hear from someone, hey, I really think we should do X, then I'll say, okay, just go with it. And here's my feedback. Here's what I'm skeptical of. Let's see what happens. And then, you know, sometimes they come back to me and they're like, yeah, I was right. But usually they're pretty polite about it. Just to build on that, something a lot of people try to work on is being good at influencing leadership, execsios. What do you find helps you, works to change your mind? What do people come to you with that helps you like, okay, you're actually right? I think the more concrete

an artifact is, or the more you can debate something, the better. I like ask for examples a lot. I try to ask follow of questions about things and make sure I fully understand. understand it. And I think where I get stuck sometimes is if I like ask for all of questions and we don't have answers yet. And then my response might be let's go find the answer to these questions and then let's go back to this conversation if I think it's something that's really important. And I think for some people they might go, okay, this is actually really obvious. Like, I can't believe you're so dense and you don't get it yet. And sometimes they're right and they come back and they're like, okay, here's the data. Now can we move on? And we move on and they're

right. And yeah, I just think that it's important, though, to just really understand something from first principles for a lot of decisions. And maybe it's just a perfectionist quality, but repeat it over time, I think it leads to good outcomes as long as you make sure it's not bottlenecking the organization. Okay, so kind of following up on that, let's talk about product management. Okay. So last year, you had Brian Chesky here, I think maybe on this stage, maybe a bigger stage. And he kind of said that they got rid of product management at Airbnb, and everyone

cheered, and all the PMs were very sad. And he didn't actually mean they got rid of product management. They changed the function and evolved it. I'm curious just to get your take. Yeah. It's funny. Let's see, we have you here, Lenny, so, you know, that's your answer, no. Yeah, I had them on the podcast.

It's important after all. Surprise. We're still here. We're still here. I want to get your take on product management. You all have amazing product managers at Figma. I've had three of them on the podcast already. I'm curious just what value you find the best product managers bring to Figma.

It was really funny last year after that interview. So Yuki, our chief product officer, had invited me to a dinner for our PM team. And, you know, it took a while to get out of config at the end of the day. and I eventually made the dinner, but I was like 40 minutes late. And I walk in, and Mahika, who was on stage yesterday, was, I didn't slides, figma slides. Slides, slides. She was, like, standing up and doing a mock Brian Chesky impersonation.

And she's, like, sitting up in front of the entire Pride team, And she goes, and then Brian Chesky's like, they don't need to be any PMs. And Dylan's like, ooh. And I'm like, hi, Mika. And I never seen her so red. And then I gave like a, you know, like quick, hey, PM team, I believe in you.

Thank you for your hard work. But seriously, I think that if you kind of zoom out, it's always tricky whenever, you're asked to formally define, what is the separation between a product manager, a designer, and an engineer? It's always hard to actually create those clear lines. And I think in many organizations, they're blurry. But at the end of the day, you know, a PM and designer, they need to have some technical expertise, or at least understand how systems work, to probably create the best things they can possibly make. You know, a designer, engineer,

they should probably have some sense of the business objectives. They should have some sense of what users want. An engineer and a product manager, they should have taste and craft and some sense of the option space and some ability to care about or desire to care about the visual implementation. And I think you can include research in there too if you want to make it four legs of the stool rather than the trio. And you can talk about all three probably should have exposure to users

and be talking in in dialogue with users. So I think that if you think about sort of that group holistically, each is important. If you think about a team, there's all these qualities that you have to have to make a great product. And that said, I think for product managers and the product function, And what I think it, sometimes when you see people that fall down on that function, is because they treat it too much like process, which is very important too.

Don't be wrong. Good process can help support good outcomes. But I think that you can't lose sight of the problems that you're solving. You have to go talk to users and you have to actually have a strategy. And if you're really good, you should have a point of view. and some point of views are going to lead to good outcomes and some point of views aren't. And there's some some sense of taste.

And you also have to bring everyone together and make sure that they get to the objective that it's celebrated and that at the end of the project, or when you complete a milestone, everyone's stoked. Otherwise, it's not going to be a team that gels. You're not going to get to the next outcome.

even if you get to an outcome and, you know, it's a milestone, but if everyone's unhappy, like, you kind of failed. And so somehow good product people are able to do all this and they're able to create great frameworks that bring everyone along with them. And so everyone's able to have a shared headspace around what it is they're trying to get to. So when one said that if a PM, if PM's disappeared, or if a PM goes on vacation, everything's okay for like a week or two or three,

and then things start to crumble a little bit. because they kind of glue everything together. Do you, I don't know, do you find that sort of thing? Let me actually ask a different question along those lines. Are you bearish or bullish on the future of product management? Do you think PMs will continue the way they are? Do you think PMs will dwindle? Any sense of the future of product management?

I think probably everyone's learning to do a bit more of everyone else's job in this current moment. That said, I definitely think there's still immense value. in product, immense value in design, immense value in engineering. And so I think those roles will continue to exist. So maybe just, I just want to come back to the question of just the, what the best PMs that you work with, do you find what value do they most bring? I guess, is there anything that's like, here's what would be gone if we didn't have these PMs?

The best PMs, I think, again, create those frameworks that bring everyone else along, and those frameworks also have a point of view and a strategy associated with them. So you're able to kind of like take the strategy, take the point of view, wrap it all up in a framework, and then make it so that everyone knows what the destination is and how to get there. Awesome.

Okay, so kind of along these lines, something I've heard you're really big on is simplification. Somebody told me that when you're in a designer view and things just feel too complex to you, quote, you furrow your brow and insist there must be something simpler. Why simplification is so top of mind for you? Why is it so important for you?

And just why is it so hard to do? Oh, gosh. Well, I think probably anyone here who's like worked on product knows how hard it is. It's, I think the more that you add, the harder it is to create something that's coherent. You know, one essay that Evan, my co-founder, introduced me to early on in famous history,

I think from Stevie's drunken blog grants or something like that it contains the term irreducible complexity and it's based on this idea that like one plus one does not equal three it sometimes equals like one and a half and the more that you add

and the more that you continue to put in something the more complex it gets and the worse it gets and I think this is definitely true for tools so in the context of Figma we can make that more power powerful, but to do that in a way that's not making it more complex at the same time is extremely hard. And we have to always be paid attention to how complex or how simple things are, because if we don't,

it just kind of becomes a mantra surestasy really fast. And there's parts of our product that, like, I don't want to dive into that part of the conversation, the self-cartique, but definitely, like, as I'm in conversation with a bunch of our product leaders at Figma, there's parts where it's like, okay, this thing is too complex as a system. And we made like all the right local decisions. And yet together they're too complex and they're not working anymore. And let's go revisit the system now. This episode is brought to you by user testing.

Transform how you build products and experiences with user testing. Get fast feedback throughout the development process so that you can build the right thing the first time. Make better decisions that lead to better business outcomes. Companies are being asked to do more with less. They need to move quickly to build experiences that meet changing customer expectations and do so faster than ever, all while minimizing risk and costly rework. With user testing, you have a trusted partner in experience research.

They empower user research, product, and design teams to make higher confidence decisions with human insights. Learn more today at usertesting.com slash Lenny. I know you just redesigned Figma. I imagine part of that came from. Things are just getting too complicated, not as simple as we want. Is there anything that's been like the bugging you in the old figma, but like, oh, this is way too complicated.

I really want to simplify this thing. Yes, okay. What's that? We'll move on, but I... Many things. Sounds good. Okay, and in terms of how to keep things simple, so I had Darmesh Shaw on the podcast.

He's the co-founder of HubSpot. And the way he described it is that you're always fighting the second law through more dynamics of entropy, just the product getting more complicated. And he kind of sees himself as part of the solution. If you top down, you have to be on top of that. Is that the way you see it? That's kind of your role to keep things simple.

Do you think people further down the ladder can do that? Absolutely, yeah. Everyone's responsible for simplicity. And I think another quote that is not mine, but is a really good one is, you know, keep the simple things simple, make the complex things possible. I think that's a really important principle to hold as your design tools. And I'd say that it's really easy to make the simple things complex, unfortunately.

Okay, I want to pivot to talking about early days Figma. Sure. So I don't know how many people know this, but it took three and a half years to launch Figma from when you're beginning to work on it. Wait too long. Don't do that. Okay, this is my question. So it took three and a half years to launch

and then five years to get your first customer. Dylan, what the hell were you doing all that time? I don't think it takes five years for first, well, okay, paid customers check, okay, fine. Slightly less, but approximately five years. It gets if you round up. I mean, I think that, you know, if I had been probably better at hiring and recruiting, I see Nadia in the audience making eye contact with her the entire time for some reason.

She's our chief people officer. If she had been at Figma from day one, we would have hired probably faster. and we would have gotten to market faster. But I think that, yeah, it was a hard product to build and to get everything to come together with. I also see Show. And I think for show is joined us as a director of engineering. He's a VP of product now.

Again, people can wear many hats. And he was someone that joined Figma and said, hey, y'all need to ship this thing. You're really close. And he really helped catalyze us to ship in that moment. And I think week one, he gave a presentation. It was like, here's what we got to do. Here's the gap.

Everyone agrees on it. Let's go. And so you already said that you wish you shipped earlier. Is there any advice there for just people building something today of just get it out as fast as you possibly can? Like everything they tell you about, you know, making sure that you get a product out really quick. is totally true.

The faster you get out, the more feedback you get, that is a positive thing. And now I index on that when we try to build. And Fig Jim is a great example. That we shipped it incredibly fast. And it helped us get to market and get feedback faster. Fickness slides, great example that too. Dev mode for what it's worth.

It took us longer. We just had to keep iterating and building it and building it again, you know, certain directions we tried didn't work out. And we really had to get to a place where we were able to really believe that we were adding value and really understood the developer's user. And it just didn't happen for a long time. So it's interesting because I think people could deb mode and sometimes they go,

oh, this is quite simple. To the point about simplicity. You know, Figma, like, like, is as simpler than fig jam? You know, the reality was it took, like, at least three times as long. So your advice is ship quickly. There's also this kind of push that... But hold a bar for sure.

That's kind of the question I have, is there's also a lot of talk of just, like, the bar has risen. You need, especially BDB software or craft is really important. You need, like, Linear talks a lot about this, just like the bar is very high for people to switch from something out there. Is there anything? I don't know. I don't think you'll have like, here's the answer when you're ready to ship, but just any advice of just like, here's good enough versus like, no, you should probably wait. Well, another thing that Evan taught me was that for a new launch, you got quality features, deadline, choose, too. And I think that the beautiful thing about software is you can keep iterating on it. So it's not like a physical product where you have to always have quality in there.

Otherwise, it's never going to have quality. You can ship it with features and deadline and then improve it. iteratively over time. I'm not saying you should always do that. Sometimes you need to at least have a minimum bar of quality for the things you have and you're going to ship less features maybe. So you choose quality and deadline and sometimes you say, actually, here's the minimum feature set and we're going to have this quality bar and you're willing to push it out. But I think you have to know when you're introducing a new thing, what it's going to take, and then to make that minimally awesome product, but also when you're, um, Yeah, I think that when you're iteratively improving it,

you shouldn't just be focused on the features. You had to focus on the quality, too. I like this term. It is minimally awesome product. Love it. Okay, so the way you got your early users for Figma is quite fascinating. I don't know how many people know this story, but you basically wrote a script to scrape Twitter

and create a graph of the most influential designers on Twitter, and then you made it your mission to convince them to use Figma and make them evangelists. Is there anything more to the story? there and then I have a question about kind of along those lines. Yeah, I mean, you can't do this anymore, first of all, because the Twitter API doesn't exist anymore. Rest and peace, Twitter API.

But, I mean, look, I was internet LinkedIn, and when I was there, I saw some really cool work people had done with Geffey, which was a sort of network visualization tool. And based on that, I thought it would be interesting to try to, like you said, look at who the design network was, who the central nodes were, which you can just run page rank on and see. And you can do that for other communities too, which I have done in the past, just because I'm curious about social network dynamics and social network analysis. And you could just, like, do those things back in 2012, 2013 when Figma started.

So, yeah, so I kind of construct to this list of, like, here are the most central designers in the graph, but also then I, like, to their work. And the ones that I was really inspired by, and like as a total fanboy, and someone who, like, wanted to learn as much as I could about design, was inspired by these folks. The ones I was inspired by I reached out to and said, hey, you can't buy you a coffee, and most them were really kind. The design community is amazing. And they said yes. And then from there was able to learn from them, show them Figma, get their feedback. And I think it started, honestly more as like me fanboy and me getting feedback. I mean, one example is Tim Van Dam.

You know, I saw him on dribble, you know, Max Voltaar. I'm like, oh my God, this guy is just genius. These icons are incredible. Like I think the first time I met Tim was a Dropbox. And like I had this total fanboy moment. I'm like, I've been tracing your icons. It's like, hi. And I had been working on vector networks with a team, and my test cases were like a lot of his icons. And because they were just like beautiful and I liked looking at them and studying them. And, you know, to now have Tim on the team and have him like doing the icons for UI3 is like such an honor and like privilege to work with someone of that craft. But yeah, so reaching out to your hero sometimes works. It's interesting because when people hear that story,

when I've heard that story many times, it was always like, here's a growth hack, find the most influential people in your field, try to convince them to use your product. And the way you're describing it is you were using it more as feedback. I just want to show you the product, get your feedback, make this better, and then ended up working. They're like, oh, I love Figma, I'm going to use it.

Well, I think it especially works for designers that way because designers are really good at giving feedback. It turns out that not everyone is good at giving feedback, But yeah, designers are awesome at that. So we're really lucky. And I mean, literally, you know, early on in Figma's existence, folks, I think Paiom or Jabi is here somewhere. I'm not sure if he's in this room,

but I was hoping to see him before the end of config. You know, Pym wrote, like, a very long doc for us about all the things that he wanted to see in Figma after we did like a user research study with him with a bottle of line because our text editing didn't work very well. Then. Sorry, right, I'm through the user study.

I knew we'd need a bottle of wine to finish. It took like hours because the type of sentence in Figma was so slow. That reminds me of a story. I've heard where one of your first customers was Koda, sponsor, I think of config. It used to be called Krypton. And there's a story where you installed Figma, you helped them get set up, you drove home. And then they called you like, hey, Figma's not working anymore. And you drove back, like yourself to help fix them.

ended up their Wi-Fi was down, right? Or there was a Wi-Fi issue. Is that the story? I don't remember what the solution was, but... That's what I heard. But, yeah, it was like... We were, like, halfway home, and somehow I saw... I'm sure I was not looking at my email while driving.

Definitely is not something anyone here should do. But, yeah, somehow found out that they had an issue, and we turned the car around. Yeah. And they were... Cheshire is amazing, by the way. and has been a mentor for a long time to me and many people on our team. And he, I think, at the time, did not know he was the first customer. And later on, he came over to Figma's office, and I introduced him without really thinking about that.

And I was like, yeah, this is Shishir. He's the first, you know, his team was really the first user of Figma as a team. And he goes, wait a second, I am. Amazing. Okay, I want to talk about something totally different. Something I've noticed you are good at is you spot trends ahead of other people. So obviously, WebGL you're on early, and that's what allowed figment to exist, building it in the browser.

I saw you tweeting about Cryptopunks way before they were worth millions of dollars. You're just like, like, crypto puns. Look, I got a few. They're really cool. They're super cool, little pipe. I'm curious if there's anything these days you're really excited about that might become bigger in the future. Well, we talk about WebSIM.

I mean, we're just talking about them backstage, and I think before this conversation, too. Yeah. And that's an example of something where it's so interesting because it's like there's a generative UI component, and yet it's not what we're going for for Figma. It's totally different. So we actually invest in WebSim with Figma Ventures. Amazing. Maybe explain what WebSim is for folks.

Yeah, WebSim is like a hallucinated internet, basically. If you go to WebSim.AI, you can use different models like Cloud or GPT 4.0. And you can do that either through their defaults or you can use OpenRouter to get a bigger context window. And the more that you use it, the more you construct this context window of this almost universe that you're building up in WebSim. And as you do it, it's almost like your world building. and I just have gone deep and geeked out on this when I've had time and they've evolved the platform a lot so like we were back there and they were showing me some new functionality

that's really cool too but yeah it's I think so interesting to see it as like this like almost lean forward entertainment tool using the internet so I thought you would answer this and so we're going to have a picture come up here that I tried WebSim and played around with it and hopefully a photo comes up somewhere.

Okay, so all I typed here was Gmail.com slash Dylanfield. So this is an invented Gmail. Just came up with this using AI of what your inbox should look like. And it looks pretty accurate. I don't know. There's like Adobe stuff.

DOJ not FTC. Financial. This is not actual information. Nobody buy stock based on this. So it's pretty common on 75% year over year. Yeah, so like the way it works. I had I never tried Gmail before. Yeah.

You try you? What was your inbox like? I didn't do me. I don't think it wouldn't have anything. It'd be like, where are you? So yeah, the way it works is just you type a URL or a prompt in the URL field and it'll just invent what that website looks like. It's hilarious. It's awesome.

It's awesome. So I think they're going to get a lot of traffic right. One time someone posted in our random channel on Slack, they said, I had a dream last night. It's always a good start for the random channel. I had a dream last night that I was working on fig jam, but it wasn't fig jam, it was frog jam. And so I, I, in WebSim was like, figma.com slash frog jam. And it came up with a whole marketing website, complete with like toad puns for frog jam. The sticky notes were lily pads.

And you were supposed to, like, it had this whole metaphor of hopping from glipad to lily pad to to generate new ideas. It's awesome. This is genius. Okay, so, interestingly, before Figma, your only other job was an intern at three different companies,

and now you're leading this juggernaut of a business, a thousand plus people. I imagine there's a lot you've had to learn over this time. So I'm not going to ask you what you've learned because I think it's probably a lot. I'm curious just what does most help you scale and learn.

Is it exec coach? is, is it CEO friends, is it hiring execs? Like, what's most helped you scale with the business and become the leader you are today? I think all the above. And also just having a mindset of you have to constantly adapt and grow and change and adapt. But yeah, I would say that mentors can come from anywhere. It can come from the community, all of you. Mentorship can come from the people you hire.

It can come from, you know, folks that you actively seek out as investors or explicit. mentorship and mentors. It can come from people that call themselves coaches. And, you know, what's interesting, too, is it can come from people you mentor as well. Like, there have been plenty of people where they asked me a question at some point, and I give them an answer, and they think it's insightful for whatever reason. And then years later, where we're talking again, and I asked them a question, and they're like, well, years ago, you told me. And they, like, repeat back, but I told them, like, that's a really good point. or they've grown and they've changed and they've learned and they tell me something completely

different. They give me a new framework. And so I think that when you're, like a lot of times when I talk with new founders, they teach me things that are totally things that I've just never thought about. Or interns at Figma have been mentors to me in many ways. So you really have to have a learning mindset and just always be ready to absorb new information, I think. When you were just tinkering around with Figma 12 years ago, I think, at this point, did you ever imagine you'd be running a thousand-person company and audience just spellbound by what you're building. There's like people lining up to take photos with your logo in the lobby. Like, that doesn't happen. That's very rare. Just to give you a chance to reflect on just how it feels to have

built that over time. How does that feel? I'm sitting here right now. I feel very, very lucky, but also very humbled by just the community that is around Figma. I mean, I mentioned the keynote, but just like the people that are in the Figma community are the people that are shaping the world's technology and the chance to serve them and to make software for them and hopefully improve their life in some little way is such a privilege. It's a responsibility. And when I don't take lightly, but also I try not to carry that as a weight, but rather as like pump me up and get me excited to go build for them. Yeah, when we were talking about this idea earlier, the first thing you said is it's a responsibility, which I don't expect.

Is there anything more there just like, wow, I really have to help. Well, again, it's, you know, going back to the simplification point, you know, it's very important that we continue to make Figma more and more simple. We make Figma as powerful as we can for the people that are in our community, that we figure out what people's needs truly are, and that we advance the state of the craft, make it set, we do that in a responsible way, and that we champion design and champion quality.

So we're trying to do all those things. We sometimes mess up, but people have been very patient with us, and we're very thankful for that, and thankful for the support of just everyone here and in our community that are giving us a chance to make this impact. Is there anything else you want to, oh yeah, there's some applause. I love that. applause break.

Is there anything else you want to share, anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to a very good lightning round, very quick lightning round? Well, no, I just, I think one thing I'll share is, I think we're so early on this journey of computing in general. And in our lifetimes, we're going to have the chance to just build such incredible technology

and incredible products. And I'm really excited to see what everyone in this room builds, but also this everyone in the internet that's what's need maybe also builds, and send me cool stuff. So if you build something cool, like message me somewhere and share it with me. What's the best way to message you? Email is good. You can probably figure out my email if you work for it for like five seconds or use websim. And Twitter slash X is good. Those are two places at least. You can find me. Dylan, with that, we reached our very exciting.

late around, we only have a couple minutes left. It's a very short one. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love other than WebSim? Well, I'll say that, it's not like a favorite product, but I will say that if you get, like, not to,

I'm trying to hesitate if I should say this or not. We'll cut it out in post, don't worry, but. It's so fast, I'll say this, it's so fascinating to look at, all the different LMs out there right now, and what each one is uniquely good at. And it's really fun if you can hack them the right way and get them in the right mood, what they'll do.

That's what I'll say? Whoa. What does that mean? Okay, it's my diplomatic answer. Okay, interesting, okay. Do you ever favorite life motto that you come back to, repeat to yourself, share with friends or family that you find really useful? I don't know if I've got a life motto, but,

One piece of advice I've always appreciated is when people give you advice, they're not giving you advice. They're giving themselves advice in your shoes. I think that's an interesting one. So if I gave you advice here, giving myself advice in your shoes. Final question. Not many people know this, but you're an actor, a child actor when you're five years old. Do you think you made the right career move? Do you feel like you sometimes regret acting?

Yeah, definitely. that's my mom my mom's in the audience and she says yes no I mean like like we've been talking about a product if you're an actor you're a product in some way and that's not to disparage actors actors are awesome

acting is awesome I loved it but my differentiators when I was five five and a half I think was that I could read and I could sit still and I was decently cute. And I hit puberty, and those things were no longer differentiators. And then it was like, let's do some computer science. So to close, we're going to play a...

Oh, yeah, applause. We're going to play a clip, something I found on YouTube to close, and enjoy. 30 seconds clip. The world of ideas for your child, only at E-Toys. From Barbie to Brio to Swimways. E-toys, where great ideas come to you. That was a good find. Thank you.

Dylan, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. Can I make one comment about that commercial? Okay, one comment. Okay, one comment before we end. That commercial made that company go bankrupt. Thank you all for joining in. Thank you for having me on E!

Good lesson. Thanks, Dylan. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.