TBPN Live - LIVE FROM CONFIG: Jeremy Hindle, Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian, Andrew Reed, Elliot Jay Stocks, John LePore, Marty Ringlein

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

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You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, May 7th, 2025. We are live from the Dojo of Design, the gridiron of grid layouts and the Valhalla of vibe coding. It is FigmaConfig 2025. We are here in San Francisco in a pod. We are podding in the pod. We're very excited about it. Very excited to be here. Did you expect the scale of this event? No, the sheer magnitude. I mean, I met Dylan camping years ago. He's not the most boisterous of CEOs. He doesn't walk around with a swagger of someone who takes over San Francisco with something that is absolutely massive.

Potentially future mayor. I don't know if we can go to that camera and show just the scale of everyone walking around, but he was on stage. I mean, it felt like it was the Super Bowl of design. It did. It felt like- The Woodstock of generative AI. Many people have been saying this. The gladiatorial games.

It feels like the- The Woodstock moment. Like a Roman Colosseum moment. That's right. Like something you see in Gladiator, but for designers and vibe coders. That's right. That's right. But it's amazing.

There's so many different builders, designers, agencies, other SaaS companies. And yeah, I wish we could honestly be out watching a lot of the keynotes. But we're going to be in here talking with some of the people doing keynotes. And we have somewhat of a live audience here. We're basically in a fishbowl.

It's great. And so if you're here at Config, just come by. Yeah. Say hello. Wave. But you're here at config, just come by. Yeah. Say hello. Wave. Anyway. But we're very excited to be here. And we have a stacked lineup of guests for the day.

Yeah. So we're going to run through some designers, some venture capitalists, some friends of the show, all sorts of people. Some people we just met a few minutes ago. That's right. Who stopped by, took some pictures, and we said, hey, come on the show. So we're going to be doing some interviews over the next few hours, hanging out,

talking about Figma, talking about what they're launching today. Should we kick it off with what they launched, and then maybe we can go back and do some history on Figma? You found some interesting data points to share. I thought it'd be interesting to take people through, since that's the business side. This is not a business conference.

They're not pitching the company. They're pitching the product But we focus on the business and technology side. Yeah, and so I thought it'd be interesting to go through some Yeah, so I can talk briefly about the new products that are launching today Absolutely massive and then we get into we should really run through the back story of the company early years of Dylan field There's some crazy Dylan feel lore lore the lore break down. But the things that are launching today, so the big one I already posted about this, Figma Sites. It sounds like what it is. I've wanted this feature since the very first day that I ever used

Figma in college. So if you've ever designed a website in Figma, you usually hit this point where you're like, great, we have a beautiful website. Now we want to turn it into a functional website that anybody can visit. And at that point, you would have to go off platform and build your own site or host it elsewhere. Now you can effectively design a site and publish it all within Figma.

And it's basically taking the time from design to live site down to effectively zero, right? Just publishing in the platform. So that's one of the ones I'm most excited about. And there was always like a tension point there with the designers and the engineers where the designers want a pixel perfect design. They export, you know, this amazing PNG usually.

And then the front end engineers like, well, I got close enough yeah they have to completely rebuild it yeah this is a game changer yeah it gives more and more control to the person that's actually designing the website yep and enables them yeah effectively to go allows the designer and the user in figma to ship even if you're not a designer yeah I'm not a I'm not a classically trained designer. I basically learned design through using Figma back in the day.

And this just is so effectively just empowering, right? So I don't have to make something myself and then wait for somebody to dev it out. How do you think about this product positioned in terms of like enterprise versus prosumer? I could imagine this is all part of a funnel to get individuals like yourself who are doing work in design,

and then they publish their site, and then as they scale, they stay on Figma until they're massive. Or do you think this is something that will be vended into enterprises for even huge sites? Because you imagine at a certain point, there's going to still be that fine grain control that comes from building something from scratch,

but even for front end landing pages, marketing pages, all these things, it was always better to have something that was a little bit more whizzy wig, right? Something that you just design. No, I think you just look at the journey of a company, right? If this is something that you can use,

if you just have an idea for a company, something is simple or you're creating an event, you wanna get something out there, this allows you to go in Figma, design something in a few seconds, publish it and get it live, and so that can be the starting point for a company and you can, I imagine, grow on it.

The access for Figma sites will be rolling out after today, so I haven't been able to use it directly yet, but it's very kind of like everything else with Figma sites will be rolling out after today. So, you know, I haven't been able to use it directly yet, but it's very kind of like everything else with Figma. I imagine it'll be super intuitive. But yeah, over time, you know, companies of all sizes from one person freelance operations to, you know, companies with thousands and thousands of people, I'm sure we'll be using this product.

You have to imagine it's amazing for agencies that want to just share a link with the client and say, hey, here, here's our iteration, we built you a design in Figma, but you can actually just go play with it at this URL as opposed to needing to go into Figma, and there's all these different tools, and even if you're in the view-only mode,

you're still kind of as a client saying, well, I'm in a design software, this doesn't feel like the final product, it allows an agency. So, we should talk some agency folks in. The big thing, I mean, the amazing part of where design is going, where generative AI is going, is that it takes the time from rough idea in your head

to real product, in this case, in the form of website, it's just compressing that. The second product that they're announcing is Figma Make, allows you to turn natural language prompts or imported designs into working prototypes or apps with AI. So this is what you're alluding to on the sort of vibe coding side. You can go in and effectively prompt your way to working products and prototypes. And again, this idea of taking, effectively compressing the time from that initial spark of an idea to something that you can actually use, right? And we've talked with Kari from Linear on the show a week ago, a couple weeks ago, about this idea that with engineering costs dropping dramatically, Everybody's expectation is let's not just, let's not spend hundreds of hours planning

and iterating, spending all this time iterating if we can get, basically get to something that's maybe even 60, 70% as good as what the final product will be so that we can feel it, use it, and really evaluate it from there. The third product, Figma Buzz, this allows you to create visual assets at scale without compromising

brand consistency with built-in AI. This is an obvious one, oftentimes, historically, I've built sort of like brand books, brand identity guides in Figma, and then, you know, any number of people on the team are gonna to go in there and sort of distort it and turn it into different assets. Even for us, we post a silly meme or something like we want to overlay the TBPN logo on a paparazzi photo,

for example. And it's different every time. And it's different every time. I actually use a different app on my phone for that and then don't have version control as our logo's evolved. They're still using the old logo and stuff. So yeah, makes sense. The idea with Figma Buzz is any person in an organization

can come in and generate assets for a variety of needs, whether you need to generate an email for retention marketing, an ad for meta, if you need to generate, you know, design for some type of event, you can do that all within Figma. I do wonder how much that becomes just a true consumer product, because you can imagine something that is designed

for these brand assets can also be used to make, you know, a invitation to a wedding or something like that. And a lot of those, like, you know, consumer products that you want to go in and not just have a blank canvas, but you want to be able to build off a template, make something look nice, then export it. Like, you could imagine that this allows them to go in and not just have a blank canvas, but you want to be able to build off a template, make something look nice, then export it. You could imagine that this allows them to go even further, I guess, down market into the consumer

who might wind up making a design software choice in the future. Totally. I mean, the line between consumer and prosumer and B2B enterprise is just blurring. I mean, it's the story of Gmail, right? You get everyone on Gmail account, eventually they're going to walk into the enterprise and say, hey, is just like blurring. I mean it's the story of like Gmail, right? Like you get everyone on Gmail account, eventually they're gonna walk into the enterprise and say hey I wanna use Gmail at work

and then all of a sudden Google Workspace becomes a huge business. So anyways, I expect this to be big in the enterprise specifically if you have hundreds, thousands of people at your company that you wanna keep assets consistent. If you are a creative director, VP of design, or CMO, there's nothing more frustrating than watching people sort of take the brand and just kind of do their own thing

with it, and so this provides guardrails. And also, like, uniquely empowered by Generative AI, like the example that they have is this national park kind of invitation, and then they're able to publish this template and then have a different design for every animal that you can find in the National Park kind of like what Ryan Peterson did with those Chachipiti images in Chachipiti. He made a poster for every single Flexport location and was able to say, oh, Flexport Sydney, and it has this beautiful Sydney background. And so you can imagine that that's normally so much grunt work, even just to go find the stock image that fits with that,

but all of a sudden you have a, you're creating a template that can then have the Eastern Grey Wolf and the alpaca and all the different elements that you'd want to actually have a flow of assets as opposed to just like, okay, I made one, now it's just as much work to make the second one. Just as much work to make the third one.

Instead, you're thinking at this like higher level abstraction And so you're getting way more leverage out of your yeah, whoever's on that project, right? I'm a percent cool the last product figma draw This is a product that allows you to express yourself with enhanced vector editing and illustration tools right and figma design so this is a product people have wanted forever much like the others and in Figma design. So this is a product people have wanted forever, much like the others. And historically, people would have

to go outside of Figma to do this more complex illustration work. And so now you can do that in-house. And so again, Figma is a company that historically wants to spend the necessary time to make truly great products. And so again, the full suite here are things that, again, the full suite here are things that,

again, the users and the people that are here at Config have been asking for for years. And so it's really making a statement to come out and launch these four massive products. So we should talk about some of the early history. Should we dive in there? Yeah, I just want to make sure that John Lepore is ready because we could maybe bring him in and do that

if there's a gap later in the show. But if he's ready to go, let's bring him in. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for joining us. Grab some headphones. Good to see you, good to meet you in person. Yes. What's happening fellas?

Not too much, have a great time. Welcome to the pod. We're podding in the pod. Welcome to config, man. This is wild, right? Yeah. Is this your first one? This is my first time coming here.

It's massive, right? I knew it was a big deal, but my face was melted when I got here. Like the street was shut down. The block was taken over. It's a block party. Yeah, a block party. Yeah, you kind of expect it with Apple

because they've been doing these big releases for decades now. But it's not every year that we see a company graduate to this scale. And so it's really shocking in that way. And then of course, I was talking to Jordy about this, like Dylan is not the type to be like, oh, it's all about me. I got to throw this massive thing. It just kind of clearly happened because there was demand and there's partners and there's

lots of people. It's a community here too. Like it's an epic scale community. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's crazy. So can you give us a little bit of background, introduce yourself for the stream for those who might not know. Sure, so my name is John Lepore.

I'm the co-founder of a practice called Black Box Infinite. Cool. So I'm here at Figma to present in about an hour upstairs on the mezzanine stage. And I'm gonna be talking about my weird little corner of the world, which is this bizarre journey that I took towards working in tech and product design,

which actually started through working in film. And I had this background of making the fake gadgets and technologies that you would see in science fiction and superhero movies and things like that. Is that specifically like FUI, like futuristic UI, or product design that would be done by the art department? So for me, it started as FUI, which was typically implemented into the film

as a visual effect after the fact, but also started evolving into like really rich world building and creating deep technology concepts that might affect the plot of the story and help to move the narrative along in any of these films. And I love that space. I thought it was a really fascinating world to work in. And then I got really excited because at a certain point, pretty early on, real world tech brands started popping up and saying,

hey, can you help us close the gap between these aspirational visions of technology that we see in film that sometimes are just they're just sort of beautiful images on screen or stuff that like doesn't make sense if you know anything about tech like real tech doesn't say access denied from one side to another is being hacked. There's a hacker and all the code is spewing out. They're in my computer.

Yep. But you get to do these other fun things where you're like, you find yourself prototyping different concepts that are a little more applicable to the real world. And so two years ago, I started my practice because we had hit this inflection point where it felt like the real-world technology was not just like catching up to science

fiction but in some ways it's fully surpassing it. Yeah. And science fiction is still just showing us the same glowing blue, bleepy blueps and there's this whole other world of things that you can get into and so what I'm gonna be talking about is this concept of what it takes to design a positive future and how you do everything that you can to not get too caught up in the science fiction of it all. Especially-

No, I've talked, I mean, if you wanna change the future, one of the best ways would be to travel back, you know, maybe to the 50s and make a bunch of, you know, really positive science fiction. Like solar punk over cyber punk. It doesn't always have to be, you know, these dark, you know, glows. Sometimes it can be a more, I don't know,

grounded in nature vibe, even for the future. I mean, we know that the near term is gonna be pretty disruptive on a technological perspective or landscape, but we also have been seeing nothing but the future portrayed as like mega dystopian. Always. It's the darkest shit imaginable all the time.

I refuse to watch the new Black Mirror. I'm just not going to put it in my brain. I still love that stuff. I enjoy it and I appreciate appreciate cyber cyberpunk aesthetics. Yes, cool I mean we got some cyberpunk going on here, but we should we shouldn't be making our real Products to our real experiences, you know, they shouldn't be influenced or driven by that. Yeah, because it's like yeah Yeah, yeah that would look perfect after the apocalypse. Yeah,, it's like, well, in order to get there, we have to live through the apocalypse.

So, maybe we could avoid that. Yeah, I'm interested to know, back on the FUI thing, what was the typical software stack back then? Was it a lot of like After Effects? And like, were you getting into like Cinema 4D and Houdini? I went to Seagraph a couple of years ago and there was a ton of cool like FUI projects. But, and then I want to know, like, how has that evolved

as we get into more generative projects, and there's just so many more things you can do. Even robust tools are more accessible, just because you can search for what you want to do easier. Yeah, absolutely. So you nailed it when I started out with this stuff. It was After Effects, it was Cinema 4D, it's Houdini and Nuke and Blender and a lot of these traditional platforms.

And even when not working in film, our team finds ourselves using some of those tools and those approaches just to kind of like pre-prototype certain concepts or ideas. But also I'm seeing now there's a lot more new tools and approaches and of course there's all the generative stuff, there's designing things but designing things while you're in VR or in Apple Vision Pro or whatnot

so that you have this sense of scale. And you get this very different way. Like I've been obsessed with Vision Pro since that came out, just as this thing where... How many hours a week have you used it since launch? So I know where you're going with this. I'm legitimately interested. I'm not trying to do a gotcha, but I'm genuinely

curious around, is it an hour here or there sporadically or? It is at times, like it's a very intentional choice to be like, I'm gonna get it out of the drawer, yeah, blow a little bit of the dust off of it, you know, put it on and go in. But I also find particularly being creative in that space, it reminds me of the first time that I ever started using 3D tools

or learning how to design on a computer. Because it's almost like I've got the world's fastest 3D printer in front of me that can just like, you know, I was designing a swag for our company and making a design that goes on a hoodie and then viewing the hoodie at human scale and immediately being like, oh, well now that I see it in my space, as if it's hanging on a hanger in front of me, I'm going to change this, I'm going to tweak this, I'm going to adjust this. There's something about being in that virtual world that just makes the blank canvas more accessible.

I remember I had, this was before Apple Vision Pro, I think I had a Quest, and went into one of the modeling softwares that you could kind of just 3D draw whatever you wanted, exported that as OBJ, brought it into Houdini, and then it was so much easier to kind of tinker with and add all the details on top, as opposed to having to start fresh

with just a blank canvas. And to me, so much of the excitement that I have around specifically Gen.AI is taking the timeline from that high level idea down to genuinely feeling what the end product could be like. Maybe it's not 100% what it will be, but yeah, it's, once you can see something and interact with it, whether it's a digital product or even, again, like some type of 3D render in VR. And coming from a background in animation, the process would be, you set your keyframes,

you set everything up, and then you hit the render button. And then you wait. And then you're like, I'm gonna play the render now. And then you watch it, and you're either excited, or you're like, there's 15 things I've got to change right now, but it's going to be even better. And it's really interesting that feedback loop that you get. And now that feedback loop is getting to be almost immediate.

And having things be more the notion of spatial computing, it makes things a bit more intuitive or just natural at a certain point. We, our practice got on everybody's radar early last year because we put together this prototype for what it would be like to watch a Formula One race. Oh yeah, you did that? Yes. Oh, that went super viral, I saw that, it was amazing. I had no idea that was you. It went unbelievably viral for us.

That was incredible, yeah. It was a wonderful experience for us. But it also, it inspired a lot of people that are working in this space. There was a few different groups of developers who jumped in and started making their own prototypes based on that initial concept. So that was basically the spec work for you. You weren't paid by F1 for that, but that's incredible. It was totally speculative project just because we were really passionate

about this $3,500 array of sensors and amazing tech. And we were super disappointed that when we saw all the first demos of it, it was like, cool, put on this insane hallucination machine and use this to view rounded rectangle. Yeah, a rectangle. Your inbox with 2000 unread emails. Look at that, PDF.

And we just thought, there's so much more that you could do with this. And so that experience, and if you're a racing fan, there's a fully functioning beta of it today. That's amazing. And it of it today that's amazing. And it changes the way that you experience this stuff. And you put it on and you do feel like Iron Man. But you also feel like, oh, this is so obvious.

Of course this is the way that we interact with things like this. I'm just stoked that there's all these different things that are happening with these paradigms where we're still in the like Apple Newton days of all of these things, whether it's spatial, whether it's AI, and it's gonna enable some amazing things that we can't even accurately predict until we've been living with these things for a while. Can you talk a little bit about the reception of AI

in Hollywood and the film industry? Like, we were talking about how it takes data render. I remember when Redshift came out, we started rendering things on the GPU instead of the CPU. That was like a 10X increase in speed. Everyone loved it. Now we're like, oh, we're almost going too fast because it renders instantly.

And obviously there's like job displacement issues. But in general, are there pockets of cautious optimism? Yeah, and the only other context that I would add there is I think an interesting thing has been happening where good renders have always been expensive. Truly great renders have always been extremely expensive in context. And I think there was this idea maybe, you know, starting a couple years ago,

what's going to happen to the sort of craft of generating these types of assets. And the thing that I've seen happen is the OK, you know, OK renders are now available almost at a push of a button. They're not actually 3D assets. But the people that I know that are truly elite at the craft are actually busier than ever now, because companies need to, in some ways, separate themselves again from the sort of average.

But I'm curious what you're seeing. Yeah, I want to be as cautiously optimistic as possible. But there's also a tremendous amount of stress across particularly the visual effects and animation community, a little less so than in digital product design. But I feel like there's a point at which that will start to catch up here as well. For me, these tools, there is something sad about this idea

of like this tool is going to do the craft for you. For the people that- Yeah, because the craft is sometimes what's enjoyable. I mean, any of the people here love that aspect of it. And they like the vision and creating, following through on that vision to create an amazing end result. But so much of that comes from the craft and applying yourself to that.

And there's not a lot of this work where people are just like, oh, I wish someone else could do all of this stuff for me. There is still significant portions of this that people just love and enjoy. So I think that's interesting now. I'm really curious about some of the models and some of the processes for figuring out

how the creatives can have a little more control and a little more real-time manipulation and basically are just closing up that feedback loop. And the other thing that's amazing to me is as soon as even in 2022, know, 2022 first gen mid journey stuff, the only people that could make really good stuff with it were professional creative directors. Totally. Whose jobs it was to give clear, you know, very articulate direction to achieve their goals and had the vocabulary and wisdom. And now you know you should study art history if you want to be great at producting. Like you find these like cheat sheets of like hey these are all the different

terms you can throw in there and whatnot. So it's wild and it's interesting. I'm excited because things will, you know, we'll get to the end point just faster and faster and everybody becomes a production studio of sorts. And it does reinforce the need for a clear and articulate vision. But yeah, I just want to make sure people can still hold on to the craft. Totally.

Are you excited about any of the kind of other product unlocks downstream? Like I was with my son, I made like this like little Lego thing I was able to take it studio giblet and then but but like just showing the image was one thing But when we printed it out, it was like, oh, this is something you could hang on the wall And I feel like like you kind of Reinject that creativity once 3d printing gets really good or or some sort of manufacturing I know you've you've done done product design in many ways.

Are there things that you're excited about bringing? Yes, this one aspect of the work is collapsed, but then there's other ways to instantiate the vision. Yeah, I think 3D printing is really, really epic, really exciting. I mean, at some point, it's also just going to be like, oh, and your humanoid robot will let itself out of the box and will craft whatever you instructed it to build.

That's the next Figma Conflict, actually. That's 2026. Oh, humanoid. Humanoid. So I bring that up partially because we've been doing some stuff with some of the leaders in the humanoid robotics space around like, how do you create like a face?

Oh, sure, yeah. For these things, which is. Some of them are so dystopian. It's very bizarre. I don't wanna name names, but some of them are bizarre. Really, really wild space. And it's just like, what can you share at a high level

around what you think the inevitable face form factor is for humanoids? What's your optimistic vision? Yeah, it's like uncanny alley. I always think about. Photoreal or like uncanny alley, photoreal, or like the Asimo, just like cute little happy face. So I have a- I think about the example of, you know, you get up,

you know, let's say you get up at 4.30 a.m., you have an early day, you walk out to your kitchen, and your humanoid is doing some dishes or something like that. And what's the face that's not gonna, you know, I think over time you get used to anything, but what's gonna be pleasant versus jarring? So I even have a tough time imagining

what's the ideal future because I've been so obsessed with well what should it be today? Is it already here? And I feel really strongly that today it should not have eyes and a mouth. It shouldn't be this thing that's developed to approach you and be like, tell me why do humans cry?

It should just, it should be very crystal clear. I'm a tool, I'm a really expensive forklift or piece of industrial equipment. And just tell me what to do. You don't have to say please and thank you. Should it even have a head? Yeah. Should it even have a head? Yeah, should it even have a head? I mean, I could go on forever about why even humanoid?

Why work to those limitations of the human body and whatnot. But it's a fascinating space. There's a ton of things that you have to unpack. And even just right now, the priorities are just like safety. Making sure that nobody gets hurt or people can predict what a humanoid robot is going to do. Did you see the video that came out of China a couple of days ago where the humanoid just goes AWOL?

Oh, that was in China. I saw that crazy kind of like something wrong with the code. Not necessarily, it didn't seem like it was attacking. Yeah, it probably wasn't trying to attack, but did you see it going crazy? Absolutely terrifying. It didn't seem like it was attacking. Yeah, it probably wasn't trying to attack, but it was pretty violent. But did you see it go crazy? Absolutely terrifying. It's like having, yeah, it looks like it's throwing a fit.

It doesn't look happy. And now all I can imagine is that's the scariest Black Mirror episode. Totally. It's the thing that was loading a dishwasher. It didn't even mean to kill you. It just was like, I can't stop swinging my arm at 90 miles per hour. It's wild. Anything else you're excited to check out while you're here? Any other partners you're talking to? Oh man, you know, there's many amazing people. There's a ton of wild talks that I want

to check out. I've been spending a lot of time bumping into some friends that are in the automotive industry. I've done a ton of work in that space as well, which is probably the digital experience that needs the most un-fucking. Yeah, totally. Most people just plug in their phone and then they get this very basic, Apple hasn't really refreshed CarPlay in years.

The positive is that manufacturers are realizing that people love analog buttons. Oh yeah. The problem is they're realizing that today, which means that products will be available in about seven years. That's how long it takes to go from sketch to show. There's some manufacturers that are putting, they figured out how to put buttons on top of the touch screens.

Have you seen this? That's kind of a funny hack because they're like, we just really want to do one big touch screen, but somebody wanted a volume button, so we're like, we just really want to do one big touch screen, but somebody wanted a volume button, so we'll just glue that on and it'll be capacitive. So it just acts like a config. Yeah, it's got a little sausage inside of it, so that it activates the touch screen.

Yeah, the touch screen basically, such a funny thing. Well, anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Good luck with the rest of your config. Good luck with your talk. You nervous? I'm stoked. I'm excited I I I love doing that stuff. Yeah, I'm nervous about walking around because there's just so many I am super agree with you all everywhere. Yeah, and that that enough time Yeah, that gets me into my we were at a conference last week and one of our friends said

He shook so many his hand so many hands his his hand got bruised Crazy, so also stay healthy. Thank you. Enjoy. It's crazy, so stay healthy. Thank you, enjoy, have a blast while you're here. I'll talk to you soon. All right, take care. Bye. Great to hang. Yeah, it's fascinating.

We have our next guest coming into the studio. I love the motion design DNA moving from film and television into the real world, we're finally able to instantiate some of the stuff, and you do see it pop up in real world devices, but it feels like Hollywood is always the best at defining some kind of new UI paradigm and then actually bringing it into the real world.

Hey, what's going on? Hey. Great to meet you. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you, I'm John. Excited to have you. Feel free meet you. Great to meet you. I'm John. Excited. Excited to have you. Feel free to throw on those headphones if you want. Yeah, it'll make it a little bit easier.

You'll be able to hear your own voice. But let's kick it off with a little introduction of yourself, who you are, what you do, why you're here, how you're enjoying the day. For those who don't know you. Sure. Yeah, I'm Elliot. And I am a designer and author.

I'm here on Speaking Tomorrow. So I can relax today. I just had to enjoy it. I've just seen one of my very old friends do a fantastic presentation on stage. His name's Dylan Field? Tim Van Dam. They just announced some amazing stuff and it's great to be here. So what's your talk about tomorrow?

It's about typography, typography in design systems. Give us the full back story. I mean, I'll go out on a limb and say you're the godfather of type. It's a little bit dramatic, but I certainly have had a massive influence on type online. So yeah, I would love to hear the full journey. Cool. That's kind of you to say. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, I've been super lucky to work in the type industry

for many years. I did a bunch of stuff with Adobe fonts. I'm now actually doing some more stuff with Adobe fonts and Google fonts as well. And I like to balance things like writing about typography and about design with actually being handled in the tools as well. And yeah, it's been great to just get to shadow everyone. What is the structure of the industry?

I imagine that there's the big players, Adobe, Google, like you mentioned, who are buying lots of fonts, but then there's also companies that need whole fonts for their own brand systems and their design systems, I'm sure. So is that kind of the shape of the industry or is there another player that's really important? How would you break it down? It's the independent firms that make some of the fonts

that you use and interact with on a daily basis, even some of the fonts that I'm sure we use at TBPN, but would love to understand the market. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, those indie foundries that you mentioned are kind of the backbone of the industry, really, because even you've got folks like Adobe, for instance, that library is made up of a bunch of different founding

partners. And so they are not owned by companies like Adobe. They are independent practitioners. A lot of the time, they are one-person bands. A lot of the time, super indie. Obviously, you've got folks like Monotype as well who do own large libraries, and they have that IP. But the type industry is really just made up

of a huge number of independent foundries who then use those distribution channels like Adobe Fonts, et cetera, to get stuff on there. Monotype have MyFonts as well, which is also another big channel. And the differentiator there, I suppose, is like Google Fonts, they are open source. And so they tend to not exist elsewhere, although Adobe Fonts does pull in those as well.

One second, we're going to pull in Gary Tan. He's just stopping by. Gary. It's great to see you. How you doing? Great to see you. I know you got to get out of here quickly. Good to see you. Busy man, it's great to see you. How's your FigmaCon fig been? Oh it's been sick. Yeah? All I wanted to say was keep

moggin guys. Thank you. Always be moggin. We'll see you Gary. I'm sure you know, do you familiar with Gary? I have not encountered Gary at all. He's the president of Y Combinator, also quite an accomplished designer, a bunch of the logos of some of the biggest companies. But anyways, good friends. So I want to know more about the business model of working with Adobe. Is it like Spotify, where you put your stuff up

and then the more it gets used, the more you get paid? Or is it more of like a one-off deal? Is it like selling a book? Yeah, usage is shared to the, yes, so the successful fonts that get more usage, they get more money, yeah. Is it at the level where people are trying to, you know, pay influencers to use their fonts

to promote them, go trending, go viral? So from my perspective, How mature is the industry? From my perspective, I mean, you can see this sort this hype cycle with individual fonts where one, oftentimes, one designer will leverage a font in a really unique way and then three months later there's an explosion of sites using that. And we've even had people that have been maybe a little bit too inspired by what we're doing at TBPN actually find the font that we use for our logo and use that for our logo. It's all mostly fair game on the internet.

You can never predict how that stuff takes off as well. Foundries obviously try and look at trends and see what's doing well and sometimes try to replicate that. But sometimes if something blows up and there's no real reason, it comes from maybe someone using it or whatever. And some foundries have done very well at that. I know some type designers who've struggled for many years and slogged away and they've released one thing

and it blows up and they can go and buy a house. Yeah, it's a hits business. It's just like music, it is like Spotify. Totally, yeah. It's amazing. Are there specific eras of font design, typography design that you think of as you tell the story of how typography has evolved

over the last, I don't know, 50, 100 years or something? I mean, it's driven by technology, a lot when you think of the move from metal type, wood type, photo type setting, early digital type. When you look at what we know as fonts these days, you got the 80s, sorry, the 90s when folks like FontShop really pioneered that, originally making them available on actual physical disks and then obviously online. And that would really radically change things.

And you had web fonts come along in around, what of, what, sort of 2009, 2010, which before that, you couldn't use anything on your websites other than, you know, Georgia, Ariel, Madonna, Times New Roman, you know. And people forget that that was, you know, a pretty huge thing for web design. And I was a web designer exclusively at that time, and it was kind of a wild time to be working on the web

and with all this sort of new stuff that we had to play with. So, I'm excited. How is the industry reacting and responding to generative AI? I mean, I haven't played around with any tools around type myself, but I imagine we're not far away from somebody kind of saying, hey, I like these three fonts

generate me something that new. And then it's kind of odd that ChatGPT, when they generate images, they can now do text pretty effectively, but they're not using an actual font library. Like a source. Yeah, a source. It's kind of just creating its own on the fly.

Yeah, I mean, like everything with AI, it's just changing day to day. Yeah. There are definitely some experiments going on. There are some entirely AI-generated font generators, which have mixed results. But yeah, there are some tools which will generate images, and as part of that, as text is part of that.

There is some recent huge leap's been made in that. The designer, Jessica Hish, has been posting a bunch of stuff, some experiments she's been doing with ChatGPT, where she's a very accomplished lettering artist, but she's looking at what ChatGPT can actually put out, and it's actually, you know, the progress is incredible. It's now, it's ability to actually do some half-decent lettering is, you know, it is super interesting.

When you look at a few months ago, and you'd be lucky if you even have the right word spelled correctly. Or the simply answer. That was the most quick way to identify if something was AI generated, was just how badly all the text was botched. Exactly.

But it certainly, yeah. It's getting uncanny. We're pushing past the uncanny valley now. It's getting harder to understand.'re pushing past the uncanny valley now. It's getting harder to just start. How do you expect the business models of the industry to evolve? I imagine I can see it going the way of fashion to some degree, where maybe in the future you can get a factory

font that was just generated. But there's something about typography that's almost soulful when you discover something you can just see, you can feel the attention that was put into it. Where do you expect the kind of, how do you expect kind of the industry to evolve and kind of the business models to evolve

as assuming, I think we can safely assume that generative AI will be twice as good at type in a year, right, maybe more. Yeah, I mean totally AI generated fonts are coming for sure, like it's gonna be a thing. And it is interesting for the business because at least in the US, you can't copyright a design. You can trademark a name, so things like Helvetica

are always gonna be trademarked and owned by Monotype, but you can't copyright the outlines. So it's interesting. Models can learn from all of the type that's out there. Also type by its very nature is very systems based. There are, there's plenty of like maths in there and metrics and things which are in a sense, easy to replicate.

I mean, my hope personally is as a creative person and a great supporter of all type designers out there, hope that there will always be a market for people who want to make type and have something very bespoke and something that we've got a lot of feeling and love put into it. But for sure, AI fonts are coming. And I think it's going to massively disrupt

the industry in the same way that all those previous technological advances also changed the font industry Give us some spice Most overrated font most underrated font take some shots. Yeah Let's see well, I mean yeah, I mean there I Maybe meta commentary. What does the community typically say is overrated? I mean, the community tends to be people like free stuff, right?

A lot of people use stuff from places like Google Fonts that provide fonts for free. And it's great. There was some superb quality stuff. And they've done a lot of work recently to really improve the technical quality of their library But it's important to remember that when you're using something for free Obviously lots of other people also using it for free So to get that differentiation

Still the kind of easy hack is to effectively to pay for a font whether that's through a subscription service Like Adobe fonts or just buying the font outright from the foundry. So that's always a good way to get something that's super unique. Yeah Amazing. Well, thank you so much. I think we have our next guest. Thanks for stopping by. Good luck with your talk tomorrow. Thanks so much. Hope you get to tune in. We'll see you on the internet. Thanks guys. Cheers.

And we have Andrew Reed coming into the studio next. Second time appearance. I'm sure he is doing deals out there. Writing term sheets on napkins Finding the next figma there. Yes, how you doing? Yeah, yeah, you're live you can throw on the headphones talking to the microphone. How are you doing? Good to me your personal? Yeah, yeah, that's for having me. What's too loud? I you might be able to adjust it, but no, it's perfect. Okay, great Yeah, how's it been?

Is this your first config, or have you been coming for a long time? This is my fifth. Yeah, I was gonna say, very bad investor, if he's just like, oh, I guess now that Pygma's a big deal, I guess I'll show up. I remember back when we got standing ovation for the font picker.

The first of two standing ovations for the font picker. Wow. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. No, I mean today feels monumental just given the scale of the event, but also the launches, the people that were doing a standing ovation for the font picker. I'm sure they're here today seeing the four massive launches.

Yeah, it's massive. Yeah, I mean, what was the precursor to config? Were there like little user group meetups? You hear about that with the story of Instagram where Kevin would go running with the early group, which there were only 100 people on the service, but he still was doing that customer development. Do you remember kind of the arc of how we got here?

Well, for me, so yes. Well I remember predating our investment in Figma, we were involved with GitHub, which is a universe, which is like kind of the same sort of vibe and actually very similar venues as the open source developer ecosystem. And I remember sitting through some of those universes back in the mid 2010s and thinking

I'm never going to be involved with a company that can do something like this. Just having the true vibrant community, people actually want to show up. I was like that was a cool thing to be involved with. And then I go to the first config and it was in a room that's the size of the Maker Studio thing now. And it was just buzzing. And I remember whenever I come to Config, I really feel like I'm cosplaying.

I like making websites. Some say I apply design-like creativity to my Excel sheets. Yeah, that's what I was about to say. An artist. Let's say I'm an artist in Excel. It's funny, I'm so used to these. ECF. I go to these events with my daughters for school and stuff,

and there's always a long line of people for face painting. And there's plenty of face painting supplies, but there's only two or three people who can actually do face painting. I always walk around here like, man, everybody here could be the most amazing face painter. It's like, I could just bring my my kids in there and a face paint Yeah, no the talent the talent density is wild. Yeah on on the topic of like these annual releases

Brian Chesky recently said like part of founder mode is like even if you're a company that can do Non-waterfall, more agile development, more iterative releases, it helps to get on an annual cadence, not talking about Figma specifically, but is that something that you think is correct advice for big companies, small companies? Is it gonna become increasingly popular? Because the Airbnb, Brian, like the Chesky memo,

kind of shook Silicon Valley. I know Ryan Peterson at Flexport was like, we're doing that too. At the same time, people have been looking at Apple and saying, hey, AI is moving too fast, Apple. You can't wait to launch your next thing for a full year. You should be dropping software updates every single month too fast, Apple, you can't wait to launch your next thing for a full year. Works well with iPhones. You should be dropping software updates every single month and just telling us, okay, you've

improved it. So, there's a little bit of like a balancing act there, but what do you think of the overall trend of these annual kind of agenda setting events versus something that's like you can kind of blend the two? Yeah, I think as software and technology has gotten easier to create it has just gotten so much harder and as there's more companies that have gotten started and it's more venture capital and like I remember back when you could you know you get a TechCrunch article

written about your product launch and it would yeah you drive all this signups and it was like this amazing thing and it's just so much harder to stand out now like there are so many companies launching amazing stuff constantly. And just as the Red Queen dynamic, just to stay in place, you have to be doing usability improvements, AI upgrades, et cetera, to your product every single week just to maintain.

I'll fall behind. Exactly. Then I think as it relates to genuine product launches, even for the stuff that's launched today, there's an alpha, there's a beta. So you kind of have to do the user testing in sync with this. But yeah, it's pretty freaking cool to show everybody the things that you spent a year working on

and rally your team around a deadline. Knowing the Figma team, this date has kind of been in the back of everyone's heads for a very long time. Yeah. Well, and it's such a, you know, we can kind of be understated, but Dylan and the Figma team are making a huge statement coming in with, you know, sites, make, buzz, like these are, you know, they can come out with a V1 now, but the, you know, my expectation is they become, you know, very, very significant pretty quickly.

Yeah. I mean, obviously you're here to support Dylan, but has Figma grown into a type of ecosystem where there are other potential power loss startups building in and around? Because you see that with a lot of companies, I mean, Zuck was just talking about it with like Facebook ultimately becoming a platform at a certain point. It's been a lot of companies that built on top. Shopify's obvious. Exactly. Is there a story around like the broader design ecosystem

that's taking hold or is the venture capital community still just kind of like laser focused on Figma by itself? I think Figma has supported and enabled a broad network of plugin developers for a long time. And I think a lot of the power of Figma comes from what Figma enables, but also comes from the ecosystem around it that applies to things like templates, right? And to these plugins. So I think Figma, from a architecture standpoint, Figma was a platform before it became the platform, right?

And I do think it is the center of a community and a center of a community of products. And I love the mission of trying to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. You know, these are not just face painters, right? They're like the most creative people in the world who also love technology. And I think for people with minds like that, allowing them to do so much more, that's like one of the coolest things a company can do.

How do you think about design trends in the decks that you get pitched? I mean, if Figma launched a deck designer, obviously just design is becoming more accessible, it's becoming more affordable, and also I feel like there's a little bit of just a meme in Silicon Valley that, hey, if you're going out for a Series A, it's not unreasonable to spend 10K $50K on design for your deck. At the same time, that can totally be like Band-Aid on a bullet wound if you're not actually

building a great business. So I imagine as an investor, there's a little bit of like, don't fall for the pretty design, but we've seen trends where, I mean, for a while there were like a ton of direct-to-consumer companies that were just getting funded. And it was like, oh, you went to the exact same brand thing that the Warby Parker got to whatever. No, I funny I remember this is gonna definitely date me. Yeah You know we used to print out all these decks Yeah, you would like you know get the deck and you just hit print and I remember

Sort of being black. No, and then for the first so we Black backgrounds for the first I'm gonna send this clip to Joe at Loom, Joe and Vinay from Loom. For the first board meeting for Loom, they did like a 130 page deck in like dark mode squared, right? It was like the level of dark gray versus modestly less dark gray in these stack bar charts was impossible. I came into the board meeting with this printout

and it looked just like basically like a bunch of black pages look, we've already lost like four hundred dollars on this investment because We have like burned through our entire printer ink and I can't figure out what the hell's going on in our business you know, so anyway, we switched that one to light mode, but I do think like Presentation, you know, it's like anything in business, you know, at its course, the non-valentine thing is storytelling, right? And visual storytelling is imperative to fundraising, it's imperative to sales, and I think having the right set of assets to tell your story, it really matters. I actually do think like spending the money to create a presentation that really captures your idea,

your ethos of what you're trying to build, it's like totally worth it. And you know, there's also the flip side, that you can do it in the Times New Roman, you know, the Sprezatura presentation, you know, or like, so you can go that path, like look how little we tried, or you can do the really good.

Every once in a while you see a deck from someone who's like coming out of an enterprise and has like deep, deep institutional knowledge, and they're probably gonna build something really cool, but they just don't understand design or even how to speak Silicon Valley's language at all. And you're like, okay, I gotta like, you know, actually read through the, read between the lines.

No, the worst is when you get the ones that are, and as a, you know, I used to work for Goldman Sachs, as a former banker, I love my investment banker friends. When you get the, all of a sudden, it's a series B company, and they hire the head of finance and operations from Goldman, and then you get the 98 years of combined industry experience, like highly seasoned management teams,

they were not doing this. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, John and I have 20 years of combined experience experience, like highly seasoned management teams. We're not doing this. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. John and I have 20 years of combined experience in technology media. Exactly. Yeah, I've never met a management team that's not highly seasoned. Yeah. I mean, Dylan was brand new. I'm curious, do you think there's... The lore around Figma is that Dylan and it's Evan,

right? Dylan and Evan spend years basically in obscurity building this product. Today, if a founder was building a SaaS tool and they were three years in and didn't have a product that they were letting people actively use, I think most investors would write it off.

I almost feel like it almost ended up being an anti-lesson, that four-year period of obscurity, because they were pioneering the use of WebGL for browser collaboration. Have you ever found yourself pushing back on founders that are like well Dylan and Evan spent You know four years getting their product. I know I know exactly what you mean So I think it's a little bit like you know for decks you can either do the we really didn't try at all or we get it Look beautiful. Yeah, I think with companies similarly you can do though We're gonna iterate constantly in the market and find our way to product market fit Or you can do that we're going to iterate constantly in the market and find our way to product market fit, or you can do that we have a concrete vision

and we're going to build what we want to build and when we launch it, it's going to work. I think the in-between area where you're just slowly maneuvering off of your initial course, I think the really unhappy path. I think we've done so many retrospectives on analysis on what are the commonalities between the big outlier companies. The reality is, if you look at most of Silicon Valley history, the length of time it took you to get from nothing to a million dollars of revenue is basically uncorrelated with how fast your company grows,

but how fast you go from one to 10 is highly correlated. So basically it's like, you're trying to coil a spring, you know, and most of the companies that really make it go very fast out the gate, but take a variety of times to get into the gate. Yeah, I mean, the most recent example, probably OpenAI, literally a nonprofit for a decade, and then all of a sudden a billion in a couple months. Do you think that there's...

Well, actually one more Figma lore story. So this is a Doug Biani story. Of course, it's time to give Doug his shine. So when we were doing our Figma investment, it was, this was January 2019, and I was an associate. So I was like, do my best to position ourselves. And I thought, we're totally gonna do this investment. Dylan loves us.

And I was, but just in case I'm going to bring Doug in. Bring in the big dog. And so Dylan and Evan are coming down to our office in Menlo Park. We had already given them a term sheet. And we're just trying to show them how much we love them. Is that the term sheet in that photo? Yeah, the one that got like, someone did the CIA analysis

to figure out all the taller terms. Yeah, you see how they did the CIA analysis to figure out all the taller terms. That was my bad to our comms team. And we're about to do the meeting and Dylan and Evan both into Brown and Brown's one of our LPs. And we have all of our conference rooms at Sequoia named after our LPs. And you know, And we were going to do this meeting in the MIT conference room. And then I was just like, yeah, it's a much nicer conference room than the Brown conference room.

Doug was like, no, we're doing this in the Brown conference room. And 10 minutes before the meeting, he moves the meeting to Brown. And then he goes into our system and shows, he prints out a page with all of the amount that Brown had invested in our various funds over the years and how much we had returned back to Brown. Wow. And sits down, you know, we talk about Sequoia and all the stuff

that we're doing, and he puts this piece of paper out and you know, Brown is where Dylan and Evan met, it's where a lot of the early work at Figma kind of began. And I was like, this guy freaking rocks. I was about to be just like hanging in the MIT conference room with no plans. So anyway, that's done. Yeah, the alumni playbook. Yeah, that attention to detail is crazy, to actually go that extra step.

Did you have fun at Brown? Well, we played a part. Yeah, exactly. Switching gears a little bit, are you surprised at how Gen. AI seemingly came for image creation before product design in some ways. Like, yes, you can use GenAI to generate

screens of various products. But you would think that that would be a lot of the product designers I know are still doing this sort of handcrafted work to design flows and features and things like that. And meanwhile, if you want to generate an image of the three of us sitting in a podcast studio, you can do that instantly. Yeah, I've been generally surprised at the order of things that have come out of this generative AI ecosystem in general.

I remember back when people were, you know, self-driving truck wave, and it was all this concern about blue collar jobs, you know, and everyone should learn how to code, and you fast forward five years, and it's like, well, that was a very seemingly poor take, you know, in hindsight. Same thing with radiologists.

Yeah, exactly. They almost all have their jobs still. Yeah. And who is it, Was it Hinton? Or I forget. It was someone, big machine learning foundational researcher was saying, stop training them. Yeah, it's the, yeah, the, how stuff.

And I think ultimately, it's kind of what I was saying about creativity earlier. I genuinely think it's not because of a difficulty of the problem or some underlying architectural thing. I think it's just like, you know, like look at the image editing models that came out of amazing diffusion work, right? And that just happened at a point in time because of the creativity of a group of people. Yeah.

And it's amazing, right? And I think that same sort of thing, you know, bottoms up creativity, creating massive technology innovation. That has been the story for this whole wave. I think it will continue to be the story. And I think predictions from people who are the spreadsheet types are going to consistently be proven wrong.

Do you think that there's a Dylan Field out there right now grinding in silence for four years, and then will come out with something disruptive? Or does that pattern not even work in the age of the internet? Well Sequoia is probably already gonna check in. Well I think with Dylan it's interesting, it's like... Haven't you guys known Dylan for a long time? Yeah. You know like Figma was grinding for a long time.

Yeah. But it's not like they were grinding in true silence. Like Dylan and Evan were insane. Evan, absolute genius. Dylan, very engaged in the ecosystem. He's a Teal fellow. We were wondering about those early rounds, because it seems like going back to 2014, 2015,

doing a $20 million series, even a $4 million seed round, that's not easy, even if you're a hot company. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah, and they were engaging, actually, interestingly, so many of the people who I've run into already today were people who were the early users of Figma when it was still a developing product.

Sure. And those people, they didn't hear about it and want to try it and sign up. That's customer development. Like Dylan was one of these true grassroots growth people in addition to the product visionary. Exactly. And building this community, it's like everything that is magical. the woods with that John Carlson You know the John Carlson tweet around like it's a lot museum of passion projects right like you know like this community doesn't just happen Right like it starts with a spark, and I think that spark really is Dylan like I remember

There's a guy named Soleil Cuervo. Who's the first product designer at Facebook? Yeah? He now just investing. He now does some investing. He's an amazing, amazing guy. And I remember he told me about Dylan back when Figma wasn't even around yet. And he was just like, this guy's going to be amazing. And it's funny, he's interested in like four people. And one was Dylan and then one was Guillermo from Roussel. So like, he's an odd, like, no more opt-in.

You know what I mean? If you got somebody, send them my way. Yesterday. Yeah. On the note of you said Dylan kind of creating this spark of community, I think that when people, when startup founders talk about community, it's almost like a meme.

Because usually the first context that they're using it in is like, oh, we should have a dinner. And it's like to me, like a community is not like getting a room at a nice restaurant and just like getting people to show up and eat free food. Like this is a community of people that have traveled from basically every bunch of different continents all the way here here taking time out just to be immersed with this group and it just feels like community is ultimately created at the product level to some degree like you can kind of like well that's it I

completely agree with this and to me like I was thinking about this this morning I wish everyone could have seen the keynote like it was so awesome Yeah, watching a rock star like the room the the the the room was it's so big There's like so many people in that room Yeah, it's unbelievable But then you like it's like 9,000 people right? Yeah, it's like, you know, imagine seeing a Slide with no 9,000 monthly active users, right? Nothing. Yeah, you know, imagine seeing a slide with 9,000 monthly active users, right? Nothing, you know?

But 9,000 people is a lot of people, right? And to me, it's the like, your users aren't just numbers, your users are people, right? And the nucleus of this community are people who travel from Southeast Asia to be here, travel from Europe to be here, travel from Africa to be here. And that core 9,000 Mao has such a loud voice and the ability to really propel a company forward. And if you put those 9,000 Mao into a room, it looks like that, right?

It's enormous. And finding the ability to get that level of a nucleus, I think, is a product thing. You don't just buy them dinner. I know you can't talk about public companies too much, but I'd love to know if you have any interpretation of what's going on with the Mag7 right now as far as an opportunity for startups.

Like today, what was the news with Google? They traded down. right now on as far as like an opportunity for startups like today What was the news with Google they traded down basically Apple my Apple's VP of services? Basically came out and said that for the first time searches and Safari Like shrank yeah per month and that just seems like there's general chaos in big tech whether it's Google potentially splitting up or you know or the pressure on Facebook for Instagram, it just feels like that could be fertile ground for startups. At the same time, a lot of people have been saying,

artificial intelligence, it just reads as a sustaining innovation, not necessarily a disruptive innovation. But what are you, like what is the level of optimism around the next generation of founders right now, given what's going on with these very well-run companies that are often in founder mode, or have amazing management jobs and fortress balance sheets? I think I forget whose law it is that you as a company ship your org chart. Oh yeah, I know that one.

I'll look it up afterwards. Reed's law now. Yeah, Reed's law too. I think the idea that AI will be a sustaining innovation, I think it's probably far enough along now to call that like mostly wrong so far. And I think it comes from that grassroots creativity combined, you know, small number of people, especially with AI, can do so much. I think that's one of the things that

I was thinking about listening to the Figma keynote, is like, you know, if the origin of Figma were, was specific, you know, verticals inside of companies, designers, developers, marketers, content people, legal, you know, coming together and collaborating to move this, like, very complicated process from idea through to deployment. Now, any one of those people can basically do all of those jobs. And I think that's like, that's something that we are definitely seeing. And so smaller people can do so much more

and you aren't encumbered by shipping your org chart because you are the org chart, right? Like it's, and you can just put out amazing experiences. And I think some of these big companies, what you see is they'll have amazing models or products or ideas, but they just don't even let you find them. You know, it's like the Notebook LM thing, right? Like, oh my gosh, that was sick, right?

And like, now what? The fact that we're using past tense for a breakthrough Google product is so crazy. Six months ago, I know. It's funny because it's probably... We shouldn't be using past tense. We should be like, yeah, it's still great. And it's growing. And they're building it.

All of a sudden, you guys are in trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's probably some app in the app store that's just great. Yeah, there's probably somebody like that. All of a sudden, you guys are in trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's probably some app in the app store that's just Notebook, LM, Cloud, that's doing 10 million of ARR. Yeah. We were talking about this idea that there's the rapper, the ChatGPT rapper meme,

and then the recent news of OpenAI acquiring Windsurf. I was debating this with Jordy, like is it kind of game on for a rapper M&A? Maybe that doesn't affect how you're underwriting investments at Sequoia, but do you think that there are other venture firms that see a multi-billion dollar outcome as something that changes how they underwrite? Like if the M&A markets at that level are open, does that change

the risk-on nature of early-stage venture maybe in like the mid-market or or do you think it should just be business as usual? I got a lot of questions that were similar to this after we mutually called off the Figma deal with Adobe. And some of that, you know, how does this change your underwriting of an investment? Yeah, it's like I don't know what this administration is gonna do let alone the next one Yeah, like in the gestation period for these companies is sufficiently long. They're like what's going on today? I don't think really will be able to change Your investment criteria today. Yeah now what you do with your companies might change, right?

Whether it's you know, you're looking to buy smaller companies, you have things that you're gonna end up selling to bigger companies. That's relates to the actual like investment criteria. At least for Sequoia, you know, we are looking for the big outlier companies, one of ones, you know, the future aircraft carriers. But obviously, you know, you pay attention to the news and obviously you pay attention to what the administration is gonna do. Yeah, I was thinking about it more just from this idea that if foundation model companies aren't necessarily gonna steamroll the application layer,

even regardless of the administration, just this idea that foundation model companies, it feels like they need dance partners in a lot of different areas. We saw this with the X and XAI mergers, so the social, who are we talking about? Like, should Anthropic by Snap? And I'm just wondering if there's more.

Are you guys having Sonia on, I think, on Friday? Yeah, yeah, on Friday. You should talk to Sonia about this. OK, we'll talk to her about that. And she had a presentation, basically, on this exact topic. OK, great. And I could try to copy what she said and do a poor job.

Or should I? Yeah, yeah. What were the other takeaways from, I assume you went to AI Ascent? yeah. Yeah. What were the other takeaways from I assume you went to? Yeah, I sent. Oh, yeah, what were the takeaways other than we found out that Jensen Wong's jacket is Ferragamo Oh, we did find that out. Yeah, I know it's leaked From us. It's sold out everywhere. Yeah Alfred that was a great trade. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he did the jersey swap jersey swap. That's what you're legendary legendary jersey swap

That's hanging in the halls. Yeah, I would just leave it. Yeah, the frame. I would like ossify it somehow. You know, it's like, it's great. Yeah, I think I think outfits jacket. Yeah, we have what's the state of the Sequoia merch team? Are you guys explored anything as unique as a jacket? Well, I was thinking for this one, you know, we this is all of a sudden we can we can somehow turn into a statue and then yeah, that's like operating but we can sell that for. Well, I was thinking for this one, you know, we this is all of a sudden we can we can somehow turn it into a statue And then yeah, just that's like an operating but we can sell that for yeah. Yeah

You know see a lot of Sequoia merch floating out there. You guys are pretty hold it close very subtle. Yeah Okay, versus but anyway other takeaways from a I sent who's interesting Vibe wise it was you know, it's so much so much smaller than this room. Yeah, but I think vibe wise it was Really amazing. We helped me held it for a few years now Yeah, predating I think GPT-3 yep And it's been you know a lot of the same sort of people right like people who started working on this early really? Passionately are still the ones who are kind of at the bleeding edge Yeah, yeah

Is there more focus on like energy scale data data center build out, or new algorithms? Because a lot of people are scale-pilled, scale's all you need, that they're less in, rich Sutton, and then on the flip side, there's some folks that are saying, hey, maybe we're actually topping out. That seems like a really foundational question. Yeah, we had a little bit of both.

We had a little bit of both. And I think the practical reality is the answer is yes, like both. Just both, yeah. Of course, why not better algorithms at higher scale? Yeah, and it's going to be both. Yeah. Yeah.

Something that I've been trying to dig into more is when are we going to see other models scale up to the size of the big transformer from the GDT models? It feels like we're getting there with diffusion, certainly not there with robotics, even though some of the robotics companies are now saying, hey, we have the end-to-end models, we have big data sets,

but they're not yet talking about, hey, we're building the massive data set. We're doing the 100K, H100s or anything. That seems like a really critical discussion point, especially for where the next applications go, because it does seem somewhat specific. It doesn't feel like... I was talking to one, the founder of Etched, and he was saying like, no, I actually think like you will just be able to train a robot to walk by having it read every book on walking. I was like, I don't know about that.

I read the book on walking. I read every book. But there is something there where it's like Yeah If you're training humanoid robot like why not just feed it all the data possible including all the images and all the videos and everything Just the more it knows the better and that just builds like those stronger world model Yeah, I'm trying this with you know with my kids right it's like yeah. Yeah, just walk It just works. Yeah, there's a way to do it. You know yeah anything else before we move on no this fantastic fantastic thank you so much great Sonia on yeah great um and I will tune in later today yeah always a fun time with Andrew Reid from the best legendary investor one of

the greatest ever do it and we have our next guest. And still cooking. Still cooking. Excited for the next 40 years. Yeah, I'm bummed we couldn't make the AI Ascent thing. It would have been very good. But we had a lot of travel going on. A lot of birthday. A lot of birthday. Anyway, there's a lot of event, but fantastic.

What's going on? Thanks for coming. Welcome to the stream. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction for those who might not know you? What's your name? What's your company? And your camera, by the way, is over there.

But you can just chat with us here. Marty Ringline, CEO, co-founder of Agree.com. Great. And what is Agree.com? It's a better docu-sign. The best part is it's totally free. Free e-signature for everyone. But what makes it really special is we've combined invoicing and payment.

At the end of most signatures, somebody has to pay someone, we just brought it all together. It's the most annoying. When I hear free, I think, am I the product, what's going on? Are you selling my documents to foreign countries or something?

So we operate like a FinTech, right? We monetize on the payments. On the payment side. Yep, so it operates a lot like Stripe. Sure, sure. I can't tell you how many times, I feel like it's mostly with home services where I'm paying for pest control

and I'm signing something and then I'm like, okay, again, I'm ready to pay and then it's like, oh, well, like, zell me or whatever. I'm just like, really, this, like, you know, Zell me or whatever. I'm just like, really, like, this should be this should be gold to one. I'm curious, what markets have you guys really focused on initially? Just give us.

Well, at Figma, designers, agencies, freelancers, solopreneurs are obvious ones. But the B2B SaaS sales, especially in tech startups, they're just moving so fast, the growth trajectory is there. I think you pointed out something that's really interesting where if I say you have net 45 to pay, I think most of us think, oh, I'll pay on the 46th day, I'll stretch it out as long as I can.

But usually, we want what's on the other side of that transaction so bad, we want to pay quicker. I want my pest control done, I want my roof fixed. I want my contractor started. I want my SOC 2 compliance quicker. So like delaying the invoice just doesn't make any sense. I want to go from execution of agreement. I want to pay quickly. Don't stop that.

That's such a manual process right now. Everyone takes executed agreement. They send it over to finance. Somebody in finance manually creates an invoice, manually sends it over. It's just, it's kind of weird in 2025. Yeah. I gotta ask, how did you get the domain? Yeah. So it was always agree. We knew that that was, that was the word. But one day we're pitching and my co-founder says to me at the end of the pitch, the investor miss said, he said, agree.com

and say, Oh, that could be a problem. He's like, Hey, did you ever go to agree?com and say, oh, that could be a problem. Got a nice ring to it. He's like, hey, did you ever go to agree.com? I say, no, I don't know. What if it's a porn site? So we go. It's clear that it hasn't had love in a number of years. But I see, I know there's a privacy policy. And a privacy policy is going to be a legal entity. I track it down.

I find the owner of that legal entity. And then it was four months of pestering and wooing. Because he's a high-net-worth individual. He didn't need to let it go for the money that we paid. Did he make you, give you some equity? No, no, we did all cash. But we did, I did have to eventually sell him on the vision and the dream.

Be a part of the story. Yeah, like it'll be used for good. And I will never not do one of these interviews where that question won't come up. And he will be like, yeah, I was at the beginning of this thing. That's great. Probably early dot com guy, I imagine, just sat on a bunch of domains.

Big domainer. Fantastic. He picked it up a few years ago for like $75K at an auction. Oh, wow. Cool. Yeah, wow. What's the go-to-market been like? I imagine that there's some sort of almost like viral loop

where somebody sends something and then they get a chance to sign up. And then you kind of grow from there. Is there like a positive viral coefficient with this? Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it's one where I pitched it just like that in the pre-seed. Didn't realize how fast it would kick in and then like how substantial that would be to us.

So we launched the product September 4th. In a month, there was a thousand users. Wow. Hey, not bad. 30 days later, 10,000 users. It's like, okay, that's impressive. And then seven weeks after that, it doubled to 20,000. But when I looked at those users, a third of them, they came to us. Their origin story is someone sent them to

sign on the platform. They signed, they're like, let me give this thing a shot. So that's kicked in. That's been awesome. So we'll always talk about our customer, but then our customer's customer vitally important to us. And then now, yeah, the go-to-market's just, we see the same thing on the invoicing side, so it's just more, the customer base itself is the biggest distribution engine. How big is the company? I imagine it's like several thousand, are you in tens of thousands to be at,

in terms of just employees? Oh, yeah, no, we're baby. To run one of these businesses, typically it's five figures of employees, typically? Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone likes to remind that DocuSignign 7,000 people. That's how many it is? I chat GPTed it would take four Titanic's

to fit all the employees of DocuSign. But we're a team of eight and I think this is what you're. Eight people. Well that's what you're saying it's 8,000. Doing the impossible. Doing the impossible. DocuSign execs look at you guys and they're like, we don't know how they do it.

We don't know how they do it Payments to we need to double You actually do you actually have a I'm curious if you have a read I was always surprised that After you know Twitter was able to lay off to lay off such a huge amount of the workforce, I was surprised that didn't inspire other similarly drastic cuts. Have you been, are you surprised in general at some of these more scaled enterprise companies that they haven't tried taking a leaner approach yet? I think one of the secrets behind some of the B2B sess in Silicon Valley is that there are an enormous amount of humans that power what we think is technology.

And there's some companies where you can tell between like December 21st and January 1st, the servers have gone down or something is not working. Oh no, the humans are gone, right? They're out of the office. This is a service as a software. That's right, that's right. And so I think for some of these organizations, you need a huge customer service staff,

a huge support staff to make it all work, because they're pushing buttons and pulling levers behind the scenes. And so the tech deck is just so enormous that they can't scale back even though they know they need to. And I think this is what we're seeing with AI. We know smaller teams can do more.

They can do it faster. Now how do they start automating their workflows with agentic AI or whatever tools they might be putting into place? Yeah, that's awesome. So you're here specifically pitching designers and studios. Who is the current customer avatar that you're going after at Config?

So at eight, we gotta do everything and anything to build the brand. Sure. I saw some flyers that were just hanging out here. I've got a stack of them out there. I saw a stack of flyers, I was like, oh, he's doing it. I've got a copy card out front that I push and I make cold brew coffee.

That's great. People mean my co-founder well. Yeah, yeah. But this conference is going on, right? Thousands of people here. May 6th through 8th at Moscone West. Turns out Stripe Sessions is right across the street. The same dates within the same block radius.

In my ICPs here, why would I not be here? So what I do, yeah, I'm here handing out cards, knocking on doors, giving out free coffee, whatever it takes, but just build that brand, get them to know what it is. Because for us, it's an amplification. The big announcement just went out about our seed round. And so now we're doing interviews like this and just want people to be like, oh, agrees everywhere.

It's not everywhere. It's just everywhere that I know you're looking and you're listening and you're reading. Yeah, break down the round for us. How did it come together? Who's in? Yeah, so it was exciting because we raised it. That was yesterday. That was yesterday. Yeah, yeah. So this is perfect timing. We had closed three million pre-seed in March of last year. We launched in September. And then once those viral loops started hitting and there was some interesting traction. And

so we had a number of investors start reaching out to us towards the end of the year, expressing interest. We were going to go to market with around either right before the summer or right after the summer but then a few folks asked to preempt. Let's just do it now. Yeah so we thought let's formally go to market on January 6th and then it closed in two weeks which was a while ago. Yeah so it was beyond our own expectations and then we just made the big announcement yesterday. It's great to get it out. That's great. I'm curious, was some of the early pushback from investors,

there's always pushback, even if people are generally bullish. Just like, why hasn't anyone done this before? Doesn't this already? This feels pretty counterpositioned against DocuSign, right? Because it would be a massive upending to their business model. It caramelizes their pricing model.

No, no, no. I know it's highly disruptive. But if you look back somewhere around two years ago, it felt like a lot of traditional SaaS. And we were out of new traditional fintech and SaaS ideas but the thing that became obvious is if you just brought a new approach or a disruptive pricing model. Took a simple idea deadly serious.

Exactly. So the biggest pushback was this is too obvious. Why doesn't this exist? It was a great question because I'm like, I'm glad. Yeah. What I'll always say in the pitch at that point is this is the last time we'll ever actually talk about DocuSign, because this is about payments. This is about paychecks, this is about AR automation. Sure, sure.

And it becomes very clear that the second question they shouldn't ask me is like, what if DocuSign did this? DocuSign can't become a payments company. The real question I'd have is what happens if Stripe across the street decides they want to do e-signature? Sure, sure, sure. That would be disruptive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really interesting to me. What if they decided that owning the contract as a source of truth to revenue was really impactful to financial and CFOs? That would be really interesting. Well, hopefully they're not listening. Yeah, yeah.

Well, the problem is you still have to be really good at talking to the industry. They have their conference right now. We're live. Yeah, yeah, they're busy. So they can't be listening. That's right, that's right. They're watching backstage. We know John and Patrick are on stage.

They can't be watching this right now That's great. What was your background before this? Yeah, so Longtime entrepreneur had a start-up back in 2007 that it got acquired by Twitter in 2012 Oh cool had a few exits a few other startups in between but more most pertinent to this one is me and two of the Folks that worked with me even at that first company We started up a fintech that got acquired by Brex. And Brex brought us into build out expense management. Sure.

Specifically, invoicing bill pay. And this is right before we all meet our friend, ChatGPT. But before the GPT-3 beta goes out, and the best technology we have at the time to scan and parse invoices is called OCR, Optical Character Recognition. Brex's position was, spare no expense, use the best technology. It's Google, it's 87% accurate and reliable. It's just not great for financial services.

It means we still need human in the loop. There are human beings pulling levers, pushing buttons. But that June, when we get access to the GP, the whole world's freaking out, Gen. AI, Gen. AI. Turns out you put generative AI on top of OCR, it closed that 13% error gap almost instantly. So we knew that, oh, legal documents.

Huge, because the generative nature of generative AI, it's context aware. So it can read the document and start to infer and imply things and fill in those gaps. That was a huge unlock for us. Were you at Twitter post acquisition for a little bit? Yeah, I was at Twitter. No, it was only at Twitter pre-IPO.

And I was only there, I did my year. Your year. What was it like working there? It was awesome. But I always talk about it as equal parts frustrating and fascinating. Because the site's still going down. There's still fail well.

Oh, wow. But it was fun for us. It's 140 characters. It's still no photos, no videos. They just acquired Tweety2. So they didn't even have their own apps yet. They just got TweetDeck and Tweety2, so they didn't even have their own apps yet. They just got TweetDeck and Tweety2, so they're starting to get their own app.

But this was the mantra of let's be mobile first. So we're watching them for the first time, figure out what happens. Because that famous photo of when the plane lands in the Hudson, people forget, that's a TweetPick. Sully, right? Yeah, but that's not Twitter. That's TweetPick on Twitter.

It's separate, because Twitter doesn't have photos. Yeah, very, very decentralized back then. Now TweetPick on Twitter. It's separate because Twitter doesn't have photos. Yeah. Wow. Very, very decentralized back then. Now you can't even link out to anything. Oh, yeah. It's completely different.

Now it's like a product for everything. You can't put agree.com in a post. No. It'll nuke it. It hurts us. It hurts us. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure.

I'm sure. Are you finding any luck with the world of venture capital and startups sending safe notes around on a green. This one made it easy on the pitch. I didn't have to explain the pain. All VCs are like, yeah, this is a miserable experience. Sure, sure. I hate moving money with my bank. I don't like working with DocuSign. DocuSign is not a bad company, but people get a visceral reaction. It's like Microsoft Teams or Jira, and nobody likes DocuSign. And so, yeah, when we told them that the way you invest in startups, it'll be your workflows will be better. It's like, oh, that's an immediate aha moment.

Is that a different product on the fintech side because it's more of like an investment wire than just a payment? It's different in that to monetize the way, just the benchmark against Stripe, Invoicing and Billing. They take 0.6% blended, 0.4 or 0.7. Oh yeah, you don't want to take 0.6% of that guy. Yeah, so the psychological moment for people is $50,000. If it's a $30,000 SaaS charge and you take 0.6,

nobody really even notices. Sure, sure, sure. 50,000, but on our 7.2 million, I'm not paying point anything of that. But there is a place in FinTech where people take a.6. Because what do I do with the 7.2? I don't spend it right away. I put it into a bank, and then it goes,

a Roe Bank, if I can plug that in. But no, it goes, they've just been so great to us, but it goes into a treasury account. I make greater than 4% interest on it. You know what the Roe, Brexit take yeah point six percent So the agree act to what's coming out this October the agree count by default will be a treasury Yeah, so we want founders doing their saves on the platform We want all the money flowing through it and then it would just make sense just to leave it in agree

Don't don't move it to another bank. I didn't have a treasury I had to go to row and I had the checking but then I had to create a treasury account on top of interesting that makes sense Well, our next guest is here miking up anything else you want to share with the stream just love having you guys in hey Today we always say it's the last day you'll ever pay for DocuSign What a pill you're gonna get a season to say some point because I feel like I can't wait to tweet that see there's at some point because I feel like- I can't wait to tweet that season. There's something weird about startups that they're very hesitant about.

Even if they are building a direct competitor or something, they're usually pretty hesitant about saying it out loud for a variety of reasons. Just inviting competition. He's bold, he's brave. Bold, brash. We'll take all 7,000. It's still one.

When you guys, while you guys are in town though, if you happen to hit the blue bottle on Second Street, there's a billboard that's going up right as we speak. There we go. All it says is today's the last day you'll ever pay for Poking the bear we're gonna see what Thank you, thank you good to meet you That is bold. Well, hopefully he's buying billboards on adquick.com. We are of course sponsored by adquick. Of course. We should tell you about all that. It's interesting.

I feel like it's the the treasury functionalities feel like it makes sense potentially for if you're like an SMB. Yeah. But if you're a startup that raises through like a Docu-sign like product are you gonna leave money in that corporate treasury yeah you probably want to pay your employees do all sorts of stuff yeah I don't know anyways very bullish on the product overall good to meet you what's happening hi you can throw on headphones if you want to hear yeah are we twins yeah we're brothers you know we're not related actually not We're not actually related. Really? Yeah.

You guys look so much alike. That's funny. It'll be easier. You can adjust. We are live. Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do for the stream? Jeremy Hindo, production designer. Design Severance, Top Gun Maverick, Zero Dark Thirty, a couple things.

Amazing. Just a couple things. Why don't you go say a few more? The first few are so impressive.. And a few thousand commercials. And Detroit. A few other movies. I have a new Catherine Bigalow movie coming out. In the fall on Netflix. We're just finishing that up now.

Where are you based normally? Los Angeles. I never worked there. I moved from Toronto 19 years ago to work in LA. I've only done one film in California. Yeah. Wow.

Even when you moved, it was already. It's just so there's so much shooting abroad. I mean, it's good for certain projects like Zerg 30. You need to travel. It's just now that there's other than. But Severance feels like something you could film in LA. So no. So we shoot out in New York because Ben Stiller lives

in New York, which is awesome. So we're not going too far. Yeah. And it's nice. It's great to be in New York because Ben Stiller lives in New York. Okay, which is awesome. Yeah, we're not going too far. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's nice. It's great to be in New York. Yeah, a lot of the cast live there and the crew are amazing. Do you agree with the criticism that Los Angeles and Hollywood have should have done more to prevent?

Oh my god, yeah. It's been bleeding for years. Yeah, the the interesting thing that the the tariffs on foreign films news came out Sunday and I forget the guy's name who was kind of spearheading that. John Boyd? He was saying like these other countries, you know, it was like the local state and county leadership in LA have to take some responsibility

for creating an environment where, you know, it's just like economically unfeasible. Do you think that was just hubris by the elected officials in Los Angeles and Hollywood to say, oh, we don't need to compete with Atlanta because we're Hollywood? Honestly, I don't know why they, I mean, I think honestly the tech, a lot of tech moved into California, into Los Angeles. Oh, sure. And I kind of think that might have distracted them.

Oh, interesting. I'm not sure they were paying attention. Tax revenues are coming in. You know, and they saw that and I don't know. But the studio system and all the prop houses, they've been closing for the last five years. All the best ones are gone. They went bankrupt. A lot of them through COVID.

And then a lot of them hung on until the last year. But they're all closing because no one's shooting in California. The stages, I think I've heard 40% empty. We've been looking for a new, so we been looking for like effectively a sound stage new studio space And we found a space and we like but but but it was shocking negotiating We would tour a space be completely empty then we'd start the negotiation process and they would have these Even the spaces, you know, maybe the way that the management or however They're capitalized but they would start throwing out numbers and I was like,

you realize I've been in this space and I know that there's no one there. I'm like, you're kind of, who's your backup offer? Yeah, and then of course, like everyone who's ever been involved in the building management ownership, they're all of a sudden flying in to see you for just touring one little stage and you're like, okay I this is a big deal for you. No, there's something wrong for sure. Yeah, I think it's just You know most countries it's so like I did a movie in Australia. It's so incentivized totally It's not because what a lot of these countries are giving is above the line all the money is the above the line It's actors. Okay actors. Yeah, that's the big money. Yeah, yeah, and the places like California don't do that

New Jersey's starting to do that now. Is that just tax incentives or actual? Well, it's a tax incentive for crews and shooting and post-production, but not always. A lot of places don't cover the cost. If an actor's $25 million, they don't cover that part. But now New Jersey's covering that part for Netflix. Certain people have their own deals.

That's where the real money is. State of New Jersey. Is giving a tax write-off for that? Like a certain deals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where the real money is. The state of New Jersey. Is giving a tax write-off for that? Like a certain part of above the line, yeah. Wow. And a bigger, because a lot of them are capped at like half a million. It doesn't save you much when someone's getting

30 million on a movie. Yeah, yeah. And see, you have two or three of those people. That's the big chunk of money that, it's a lot. And I mean, crew-wise, for most people I know, everyone's making the same money they made 10, 15 years ago. It hasn't changed much.

So it's just how... Even if you've progressed a lot in your career in terms of doing... You know, I still think what I make, I still probably make the same as Rick Carter would have made 20 years ago, the same number. And the currency is not even close. But it's a good number. I'm not complaining. But it's not what people... It's the same number. I'm not complaining. But it's not what people.

It's the same number. Yeah. It's wild. It's interesting. And they still go, that's, you know, but it hasn't caught up in a lot of ways. And I'm not asking. I have a nice life.

It's more I just like to be home sometimes. Well, take me through the production design workflow on a project that we might be familiar with. Start with, like, is there location scouting involved, photographs, are you sketching things, are you in a particular software, what is your process? I mean basically Severance is,

when Ben sent it to me it was two scripts, there was only two scripts for the first 10 episodes. And tonally it was really nothing there, it was very funny, and it was a great concept, like people will want to be severed. It kind of scares me. But I could go, well, I know half of my friends want this. Yeah.

If they could get it. But it didn't have a look to it. So it read like the office. It was budgeted exactly like the office. Shoot in a location. Great cast. Adam was already attached to it. It could have been Parks and Rec.

It was the same sort of tone, like that feel. And I was like, I's not really my thing. I want to do cinema. I want to do something really visual. And he said, well, what do you want to do? And I'm like, give me a couple days and I'll put a lookbook together. I didn't know him. I just put a lookbook of what I thought it would look like.

And like, if you want to do this, I'll, I love this. I had an idea that I really fell in love with, and he loved it. You know, and it was sort of conceptually like the outside was always going to be, it should always be winter, it should always be really sad outside. We have to kind of accentuate it. And then when we go underground it has to be, you know, very particularly designed and also all the technology should be, all the tropes that I, as a kid, grew up with, that if you came out in the outside world now and told somebody you worked at this CRTC screen

with a track ball, it wouldn't make any sense. It had to be things that made no sense to anyone outside the world, especially young people. They'd never even seen, my son didn't even know what it was. He's 20, he still doesn't know what a track ball is really. So I was trying to like, the initial part is really, conceptually, what does the world look like? And then I really always started everything with a researcher and her and I, we just bang stuff out for a while.

And then I start with research, with a concept artist. How much of moving from a look that's similar to the office, which is very docu-style to something that's cinema, where you wound up, is driven by actual budgetary choices versus just picking the right tools out of the same tools. We didn't have any on service, we just abandoned that thought. Like the cinematographer Jess and Ben and I, we were like, what do we want to make? And we just made it. The budget exploded, it really did. Really? And what drives that? Because people think about like,

we're filming with Cook lenses or Arri Alexa and it gets expensive. But on the production side, you know, not to degrade it, but it does feel like it's desk. How expensive can it be? Well, it's five stages of set. Sure. It's a lot of volume. Sure.

Like a lot of shows, like say Parks and Rec, it's one set for the entire show. Yep. The entire, every season. Speaking of a lot of sets. That makes sense. The rehearsal, that's a lot of sets. A lot. It's a lot, yeah. I. The entire, every season. Speaking of a lot of sets, the rehearsal. That's a lot of sets.

A lot. I mean, every new scene is like an entirely... Like the amount of sets and then the amount of actors that come in and the amount of time it takes to shoot all those sets and pre-light and camera test and all just exponentially. And the lighting probably gets more expensive as you're going for a more cinematic look, right?

As opposed to just... Because we have sets that, you know, the birthing cabin in season two, we built it. It's only in one scene. Wow. Yeah, but it's a particular scene. It's that's it's destroyed. Well, never it doesn't exist anymore. Wow. So you start to you have to offset like how a lot of shows are you know like Law and Order is designed to the sets are standing sets. It's a courthouse. It has and then the only sets are the only other ones are locations. Yeah, ours are whatever we want.

And also all the locations, like, they have to be places that we've never seen before. Like we shoot in Utica, we shot in Newfoundland. We're all over the place because I can't have somebody know that train station. We can't know it. And then we alter so much of it later. So you're fine to take a location that's unique

and maybe hasn't been popularized before and build on top of it. Absolutely. And then we do a lot of visual effects after. We augment and alter it. Because it's really about creating a world that everyone doesn't know. They don't know where it is.

Like, we're always a lot. I would say we're in Poland for all I know. Nobody knows. And I don't want people to know we're in upstate New York. There's nothing identifiable really that people could pick. And it's not, the intention is really just for people to go down that rabbit hole. It's not to really trick them.

It's just, it makes it believable that they can't go, well, I hike there all the time. It's just. Can you talk about pre-vis, or is generative AI playing a role? Is everything, do you interface with storyboard artists? What does that look like as you're trying to go from just this idea on the page which you said was very blank

to something that you need to get to the point where you're like this is exactly what we're building. Basically what I do is I concept everything and you do iterations like sometimes probably 50 times to the way we like the set looks the way we all think it should shoot. Like Jess the DP and now she's one of the directors on Severance and Ben it's really the three of us that just run with it when we're in shoot mode yeah and it's really they they both storyboard like crazy together like we we're really tight and very opinionated we we ride each other like crazy we

argue all the time yeah but in a really passionate collaborative way we have like there's zero egos. None of us have an ego about it. It's just passionately, what is the best thing? Like, if it's not perfect, we don't shoot it. Yeah. Ever. Yeah.

Do you ever feel like the materials that you're working with to build a particular piece of furniture, for example, actually matter beyond just how they read on camera? Is there something about a heavy desk that actually brings out a better performance? Oh, yeah. Even though you could just make everything out of balsa wood or something? Well, it's like the desk, the main desk, like, you know, it was just a script set for a desk, large room. Yep.

And I was like, it has to be, this is like, I kind of treat it like a spaceship. It's like the control room of Star Trek or anything, you know, it's like you need one thing to set the tone. If everyone buys off on that set, they'll believe anything after. So I'm like, the desk has to be, let's build this desk that's very interactive. They're like five-year-olds. We treat them like once they're birthed into the Audi

on the boardroom table, which Dan calls the womb of the office, that's the birthplace, you go to this work and you're really five years old. You don't know anything. You just start to work at this computer. I'm like, let's make it really playful. Let's treat it kind of like a playground. But I want them to be able to jump on it.

I want Zach to be able to jump on it. It has to be structurally insanely strong. And we just think of everything so that that way, they're not impeded by anything. Whatever they want to do, safety first, go do it. It's just amazing. Did you, I'm assuming you made the, you created the activation, where was it in New York? It was in the middle of...

That's so marketing for Apple is amazing. That's all marketing. That's all the interesting. They are amazing. And that, the one in Grand Central was... Based on... Yeah, it's all based on what we do. But they're really interesting how they take it to the next level.

That one worked out really well. Well, not in a good way, but the fires... So the premiere was cancelled because of the fires in LA. So that was happening at the same time. And all the actors were going to be... We were all going to be at the premiere. They all just jumped on a plane and went to the event. So it would have just been like, you know, people cast to be there, but they all showed up.

That's amazing. Unknown to everyone. I didn't know they were going. I feel like just the imagery, there's so many different images from Severance that have become iconic and in some ways just got outsized attention on the internet just because they were so much so. Have you been to the Apple website? Is it still? Yeah, you click on it, it's the first computer they sell.

I don't know if they still have it. Yeah. Or IKEA started making the desk. Like in Austria, they issued it first. It's on the cover of IKEA. Yeah, but is that the work that you're most proud of in your career, or is there something else that maybe didn't get the same level of attention that you? I mean, I love the process is the best part.

I mean, Top Gun was hilariously fun. Seroduck 30 was an amazing challenge. They're all, for me, it's the experience of, it's a year or two of my life. The people I'm with, I'm so particular who I work with. It's like, they better be interesting, because why are you going to spend your time with them? That's really, for me, what it is.

When it goes out into the world, what people make it is, I mean, this is exciting to watch. But not unlike Topka, which was exciting to watch. You must appreciate, product design is really hard. There's no doubt about that. But somebody can have an idea for a product and within maybe call it 10 minutes to an hour, they can have something that looks

somewhat like the end state with, you must not have a lot of sympathy for that, given that when you're like, oh, we need to design this entire scene and we're going to need to import wood from this region and that is just a very different... Well, that's also AI is a funny one because we don't use any AI. Nothing.

But no, because I mean my biggest problem is I don't need ideas. I just need money to make stuff. I have some ideas just fall out of me. And the older I get, the more I have. You want humanoid robots that can assemble... I really just want support. Really we just want artists that we can. We're making art, which is amazing.

And it's not, actually, a robot wouldn't work for me. I need the person who has an opinion. I have this amazing sculptor who does all the sculptures. He's full time. I've never had a full time sculptor. I could go, Panko, let's make this. Let's make a bust. Let's make this piece of art.

He makes it in a day. And it's all in his head. And it's creative. It has that human touch. And it has his heart. And I love that. And it's not necessarily what I wanted. I want what they want too.

Sure, sure, sure. Put that in the description. There's so much doom and gloom in the movie industry. No, not the world. Not here. The world is- Played for and config, it's great. No, but specifically in entertainment, filmmaking. It is pretty gloomy these days.

It is gloomy, but clearly there's amazing work being made. There's all these new tools that people are going to have access to, or already have access to, that make variety, different parts of the process easier. Where are the bright spots to you? What gets you excited? I miss the John Hughes movies. I miss scripts.

I'm so tired of seeing guns. I really am. If I see any of the poster with a gun on it, I just, I find it really sad. And I really, I miss John Hughes. My kids know them all and most people know them, but there's nothing to really take, like adolescence is an interesting thing for young kids to watch, because it's about real life,

but it would be nice to also give them something to look forward to, that's like how to fall in love for the first time. The things that I find young generations are not getting, they're literally getting, I love John Wick, it's fun, but they can't all be John Wick. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We do have a lot of John Wick. We were talking earlier, the need for positive science fiction. You can still have a dramatic storyline. Futuristic, but not dystopian, not cyberpunk necessarily, maybe solarpunk. I think ours is funny because it's really still a love story. He loves her outside and he fell in love inside. It's just about love. That's really all we all want.

And it's the hardest thing to figure out how to have. And how to be vulnerable. It's not something that's being allowed these days. Can you talk about production design in the context of a film where there's going to be a lot of shots on location? I mean, I imagine that the nature of an aircraft carrier plays into the design, production design, even when you're on a sound stage. And there's less things that you have full control over.

But how do you think about that in the context of Top Gun or Zero Dark 30 is similar where there's a certain grounding in the real world that you need to pull into the rest with the lighting design, but also the production design. I mean, honestly, I think we can do anything. Really? We built the Sama Ben Laden compound. It's the size of this whole area.

It's massive. That's amazing. I'm like, why wouldn't we build it? It was 300 people laying bricks for six weeks. It was a factory line. It was amazing. All these Egyptian brick layers. It was incredible.

We built the jet on Top Gun. I just don't think you can't do it. I have zero understanding of no or why not. I always go, why not? And they go, why? And I'm like, I said, why not? What about CGI, like set extensions as a tool? Amazing. Are you reaching for that more? And then how does that change your process?

We use it a lot in Severance. We use it a lot. I use it on everything. It is, and I do a lot of cleanup now. As you're shooting so much faster, you're prepping so much faster, it's a great tool that doesn't allow you to waste your time stressing over it that I can't do this in three weeks, but I can do this and then I'll do the rest after. It's more economical and it's way less stressful.

But the hardest part is the production, the studio producers, it's hard because that bag of money hasn't been put aside until people are just starting to, I'm like, put it away. Let's commit to this amount of money and leave that money. How much of your process is a dance with the, whoever's funding the project, where you're just trying to understand

you're like dancing with a bowl, right? Or you're like trying to figure out if I push the budget, 15%, maybe they'll be fine, but if I take it, 22%. You kind of can read a room like anybody. And I love, I'm just like, let's just talk to them. Can I just, how about I just pitch, let them see it. And then if they say no, they say no. You get a no's a lot and you have to adapt,

but you have to keep pushing. It's just a battle. Like filmmaking really is a war. And it's a war till the end and every, it's just how it works because, and I understand, I respect their job. Like we can't all go rogue. You have to be responsible, but you have to,

they do hire me to trust my instincts and if you don't do that You don't make good art. Yeah can't how confident are you? Film is you know television. It's a hits business How confident are you you know mid during your process around? What what the you know? your process around what the commercial or just reception of a project will be? I honestly have, for a long time I did commercials because I couldn't pick a movie because I was terrified, is this going to be good? And then I had a friend of mine who's done a million movies.

Because you have to just kind of. He said just let go, you have to let go. Just pick the people you love to work with and forget about it. Because he did Silence with Marty and that movie didn't do well. It's a great movie though, but you don't know why. And you can't bleed over it for the rest of your life. You've got to do another one and another one. You just can't predict what people are going to like.

And honestly, you have to not care. I couldn't care less. You'd love to care. Like, wouldn't we all love to care to make everyone happy? But I don't know why people like anything, and I think once you just give up on that and just look, they want what you want. If you are a visualist, they mostly want what you want.

Yeah. I have a conspiracy theory I wanna run by you. Someone was posting, this is just a random person on the internet, but they said that Apple is preparing people for a world where we're using virtual avatars in the Apple Vision Pro by using a more high-key lighting style in shows like Severance and Ted Lasso.

Do you think there's anything to that? No. I don't think I've ever, none of us have ever even heard of it. It does seem odd that it would bleed over. Our goal is really, when I, like Justin Bell and I really wanted to make a movie, a 10 hour movie and another 10 hour movie. Because everyone has a huge, like I have a 140 inch screen at home.

I like to have a projector now. You can buy one for 500 bucks, project it on your wall. It's still amazing. I think most people have the, you know, a lot of people have the potential to see it bigger than watching it on their phone, which a lot of people, producers say, yeah, but everyone's watching it on their phone.

I'm like, I don't agree. And I think some of these shows could be shown in theaters. I think it could go back the other way. We just screened Severance, episode 10 at the Dolby Theater a couple of weeks ago, for 3,000 people, and it was like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. 3,000 people in one.

How would you, how would you. Wow, that's incredible. How would you fix the theater industrial complex because the sort of 100% tariffs on foreign films, plan involved government basically subsidies to help theaters like fix their bathrooms, or at least that was what was put out there. And I was like, I'm gonna go out on a a limb and I don't think the reason our theaters are

Suffering is because they haven't had a new toilet and you know 20 years I honestly I don't I don't I think everybody just wants like companies want this guarantee. They're gonna make money They gotta take a risk. Yeah, you know, so you fail. I'm sorry. I fail all the time Yeah, what we do humans are works, and sometimes it doesn't. It's like, so you have, like, their odds are still gonna be good. Like, well, look at what people will watch. And if there are, like, I couldn't believe how many people came dressed up as characters.

Like, they could screen on a weekend all 10 episodes, and I guarantee you, the dome, if the Arc Lake was still open, would be packed. It would be sold out. You could sell it out for weeks. Like I do believe that, because I see what these kids want to see. And I have a 25 year old daughter, she had, every Friday night,

she had Severance Dinner Night with her friends. Everybody was doing it. It's like, that's what Rocky Horror Picture Show was like when I was a kid. That's, there was, we had those experiences. People want them and they want to walk out and talk about them. They don't want to watch at home and then look to the left and to the right and then go back on Instagram

There can only be so much laundry TV, right? Like it's fun to community watch something and then talk about it and hang out on the street like and yeah On that note, do you have a take on you guys have to get it back? That's the thing is you have to you have to demand it sure John John or is demanding nights Yeah, I actually move movie nights with all my friends and I just text everyone in Los Angeles, I get 20 tickets, I text everyone in my phone who's in town, say, hey, do you wanna come?

And then if people don't show, I just refund the tickets. It's great. Amazing. And just put together a huge movie night. It's just an activity to go out, better than going to the bar with your guy friends. I'm not really that into sports, I've always been more into movies. But I think that's the thing is,

I don't think that they're, like, Baby Boomers have obviously lived too long. They're still controlling how we live. Then there's, you know, my age. And there's not a lot of, like, there needs to be a lot more control for you at your age. It's really controlling a lot of this and demanding that this is what you guys want.

They still think they know. The 65, 70 year old guys, they still think they have the answers. Like nobody wants to go out. No, you don't want to go out. You're 70. You want to sit at home. You loved COVID.

It's like 25 years don't want to sit at home. You go to Paris, the movie houses are packed. Every little theater is jammed all the time. You will go if they're available. I've actually been surprised. I mean, we're a technology and business focus show show but I've been surprised to not see more attempts at You know, I'm surprised there isn't like a sweet green of theaters, right? Ah something that's like, yeah well designed and yeah as healthy snacks and food and it's like hard to the food

Isn't it awful? Yeah. Yeah, I mean I that that's a big part of it It's like I haven't even movie theater our place with that a little bit in LA and... But a lot of them, they end up focusing too much on avant-garde film and all that. You just wanna, you know, if they were just playing... Yeah, I do feel like, yeah, mixing in the hits and creating these like big re-release moments can be good for kind of getting people back in the flow.

Like look at Top Gun, people saw it five, six times. Oh yeah, totally. It was amazing, it was exactly how I grew up for kind of getting people back in the film. Look at Top Gun, people saw it 5-16. Oh yeah, totally. It was amazing. It was exactly how I grew up. You had to see it in the theater. And I loved it. And it's like, I... There's also...

Why can't there be more of those? Well, so here's another funny, the concept of scarcity could be interesting to implement. It's like, you figure out a way to say, we're going to pull this film off the internet everywhere for a year, off all the streaming platforms. I mean, that was the way it was. It used to be, you see it in the nine months, you have to wait. Now it's on demand the next week. But now you can do it. Take a movie, pull it off everywhere for a year. Bring it back. I hope someone starts an app

and I'll give you a free. Do one that doesn't track you or focus to you. You have to be, it's like going to Blockbuster, walk around and find it. Yeah, interesting. You have to be, it's like going to Blockbuster, walk around and find it. Yeah, interesting. You just get sent this huge stuff. It's awful. Yeah. There's so many good, like go to join the Criterion Collection, which not a lot of people do. There's a billion amazing films on there. And start watching them. They're available.

You just have to get off some of the, you know. Yeah, we got to get him the Criterion Collection. He hasn't seen any movies. I've seen everything. It's so cheap to have 10 bucks a month. I know, yeah. I love it. It's like the same price of a coffee with a tip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We gotta get him through that.

So we're actually going into a production design session, building a new studio. What are the common pitfalls where we could get stuck in Quagmire? We've been looking at big news desks. We're thinking about putting some TVs behind us for graphics and displays. It'll be a pretty basic set,

but we do want it to be more opinionated than just one newsroom, please. We want something that speaks to a more modern brand, but we have a little bit of this, like we wear suits even though we're tech people, and there's a little bit of that, but where would we get stuck? Who are the people we need to be talking to

to really nail this project? Yeah, because I don't think it's whoever did CNN's set. Those sets are so old. Yeah, I mean, honestly, this is a fun set. Do this. Do this at large. Yeah, that's cool. I think the cool thing is to make it really what it's real.

Those sets are just designed for this. All they care about is their logo. It's so boring. Make something, I remember Letterman. Letterman was hilarious. When you throw that card through the window that didn't exist and you heard the sound effect, like just make it fun.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. Like an interactive, cheap. It doesn't have to be expensive. No one cares. It's just make it fun. Fun is key. Back at our home studio, we have a range of exotic sound effects

that really bring the show to life. Yeah, we're building the soundboard, but we also have props. We have a tin foil hat for when we're talking about conspiracies. We have a crystal ball that we pull out. We have bottles of champagne and books. And we've kind of built this whole library.

Come back and hang with us in the new studio. Studio City. Oh, fantastic. Perfect. Just go to CBS Radford. It's the best. CBS Radford was that it's where they shot. It's Laurel. It's Laurel and Ventura. OK, yeah, maybe we should check that out.

Well, this other city is Parks and Recs where they shot. Yeah. OK, Gilligan's Island. I mean, everybody. Yeah, CBS is a place we were looking at. Television City. Oh, I don't know that. It's another CBS lot. Bill Maher films there. Oh, I don't know that. It's another CBS lot.

Bill Maher films there. Oh yeah, yeah. But we were touring it and it was pretty empty. But it was very cool. I mean, it was the real deal. Docks Bill Maher? I think that's probably. No one wants to go there anymore.

I mean, there's like seven layers of security to get in that building. I think it's fun. It's a live studio audience. People go in all the time. Right, right, right. Anyway, are there any new trends that you're tracking in production design

or kind of advice for up and coming folks who want to get into the industry? Is it, like, what is the path? Because I imagine you don't just call up a studio and ask for your first job. You need to build a resume of some kind, but it's kind of hard in the TikTok age to do anything related to that.

You know what's funny? I tell all my kids, like all their friends, you just have to do what we did. You have to knock on doors. Knock on doors. Like my son's graduating from LMU right now. He's interviewing for these jobs that have five positions, 8,000 applicants.

Wow, yeah. What does he want to do? He's in marketing and marketing for you know, marketing for somebody like event planning, or film promotion, or he was interviewing agencies. Connect us. We're hiring. Yeah, we're hiring. No, it's really, it's amazing, but that's what they're up.

And the other thing is, they're all having to do these stupid Zoom interviews. You can't, you can't not. I tell Sam, don't take one. You need to know if you like them too. And you'll know their chemistry. If you I find zoom interview is a waste. It's like, I don't know, I can't get a vibe from them. But the second I sit with you guys, I'm like, I get their vibe. Yeah. And you want to hang out. And you know who you don't want to hang out with. Totally. Yeah. And that's what's being lost. That's the art of, I think that whole thing is just chaotic bullshit.

Is there? And really lazy since COVID, a lot of you. No, I go super quick. It's very lazy. It's typically one call, 10 minutes. Come hang out. Let's meet up in person. Yeah, and meet up at coffee shop.

Yeah, of course. You can just tell, there's a million things. There's style, there's, do they look at you? Do they shake? I don't know, I feel like the etiquette of a human you need to meet. Yeah. Are there any particularly underrated films

from a production design perspective that you go back and you think... Yeah, Playtime. Playtime. It's the one I reference all the time, Jacques Tati's Playtime. It's a... France Coppola still talks about it. It's what, you know, Metropolis is going to be another one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they're bombs.

Like, Playtime is a masterpiece. What... It's my biggest reference for Severance was... Oh, man, yeah, yeah, because they're bombs. Like Playtime is a masterpiece. What it's my biggest reference for Severance was was there's artists. Like there's cardboard cutouts as people in the back. Wait till you see the airplane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just wait till you see it. OK. Awesome. And it's it's it was all his own money. Yeah. You went bankrupt.

Well, and nobody watched it. And it's like now there's books. It's it's one of the greatest films ever made. And sometimes that takes 50 years. Yeah. Sadly, it's one of the greatest films ever made and sometimes that takes 50 years Yeah, sadly, he's not you know, he doesn't see it. It's fine. So when is when does metropolis actually release? It's oh, it's out And it bombed right? Yeah, but it was long Will it be it's pretty cool. It will it be appreciated in the fullness of time or just you know I think sometimes it takes 20 years for people to want to watch.

Maybe it's too close to us. It's about us. We don't really like watching about ourselves, right? We don't like what we're doing to the world. So I think in 20 years, the people will... Your kids will be like, people like... You guys didn't watch this?

People like... But in a weird way, people like White Lotus because it's like watching their own family vacations. Yeah, isn't that amazing? But that's different. Yeah, White Lotus feels like being at a luxury resort and just eavesdropping on everyone and their lives are full of perfect. You're doing great.

More than eavesdropping. I know, you're sitting there the whole time going, God, I'm so lucky. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm here, I'm eating the same food, but look at these freaks. Yeah, look at these freaks, that's great. Yeah, anything else you're exactly. I'm here. I'm eating the same food, but look at these freaks. Yeah, that's great Yeah, anything else you're you're tracking or watching these days. Have you seen the studio? I did. Yeah, okay

I don't I don't do you think it rung true because for me as an outsider It felt like it was this great introduction It felt honestly like the world of Silicon Valley and venture capital with with like episode 2 He he he is giving notes that he shouldn't. And then episode three is he has to give a note but can't bring himself to it. And it showed that, you know, it's not just, there's not just a blanket rule.

Studio exec never gives notes. No, sometimes they do have to. And that kind of back and forth was really cool. I mean, I think it has to be true because they're all assessed experiences. He's regurgitating. Yeah, of course. And I have friends who have, you know, pitched me. I don't do, I don's experiences. He's regurgitating. Yeah, of course. And I have friends who have pitched me. I don't do I don't have that sort of relationship with studios.

Yeah, yeah. So but a lot of my director friends who pitched and pitched and they and they laugh. They know they're like, oh, my God, that's that guy. Yeah, that's it's based on real people. Yeah, I think it's hilarious. I don't know if other people get it. I don't know because it feels very filmy. Yeah, I mean, sometimes he's doing Woody Allen. That cracks me up like the one episode four. I felt like Manhattan murder mystery

Yeah, you know he's I get what he's doing. He's just trying to be fine. Yeah, which is cool. Yeah. Yeah What's like the most expensive? Item you've ever had to procure during a production build has there ever been any moment where it's been like, this is really high stakes, we gotta get this shot? The jet for Top Gun. The jet for Top Gun. It took me a lot of time. How did that work? You built it, right?

Yeah, and everyone kept saying, no, no, it's gonna be. But you built it out of parts or? Now you get why the F-35 is a trillion dollar. God, so much. You know, it was only, I think it was about three million all in to build, but it's only, it's not, it obviously doesn't fly, but to build a prop, that's a lot of money for a prop.

Yeah, and does it go on some sort of like robotic arm or motion control device? Yeah, but we also built it to be real at China Lake, and Tom, I wanted Tom to be able to touch it, see it, interact with it, he gets in it, we tow it out, all the way till it takes off is all real. And I'm like, I'm just a believer everything should be real, and you know,

there's some feedback, it was like, well we can do, you're just gonna change it to post later, I'm like, we're not be real and you know, I there's some feedback was like well we can do we can You just gonna change in a post later. I'm like, I joke we're not gonna change it. We love it Yeah, if we make it, yes, that's it That's it And it's you have to find certain directors that could commit to that to a lot of directors want to change So producers like we're not gonna pay for this is gonna change. Yeah, anyways, we didn't change And there's a unique dynamic with Tom Cruise specifically, correct?

Because he I've heard like he even has his own insurance so he can do stunts, but can you unpack what it's like to work with him? So when we did the cockpit, we built, you basically, when you do something like that, especially with Tom, you have to build plywood versions. We built it to make sure, because Tom's an amazing pilot. So we built this wooden cockpit with the wooden windows and the template, and he's like, it's not comfortable guys, we gotta make it comfortable.

Like yeah, we know it's a plywood. But he's really adamant, he's gonna be in there a lot, it's gonna be really comfortable. And Ron, who was the aircraft designer I was working with, he's done about five movies with Tom. He got it all. But Tom is very specific where he likes buttons. Like he moves things to where they want,

that where he is, if he was a pilot, that's where he is a pilot. Yeah, he is a pilot it I would put it there so it so it's all so when he's in that mode he's perfect because it's so custom to him and it and the inside cockpit we we did it with skunkworks we had a whole deal with skunkworks really I was out there Joe and I were there all the time we co-designed the cockpit with them there are components there's buttons in there that are two three million dollars that are two, three million dollars

that are from prototypes. That only 10 people know what they are. And they're nods to those people, they're not for us. But they would bring them into us in these little boxes and we'd put them in and then, you know, and that part's amazing. It's such a little touch, but you know it just goes a little bit further.

It's like that finishing, that last 1%, it takes 90% of the time. And for me, it's, you know, in Severance, a lot of the actors and it's like that finishing, that last 1%, it takes 90% of the time. And for me, it's, you know, in Severance, a lot of the actors say it to me. It's like, they look around the room, and they're like, there's so much we won't see, and I'm like, but you're seeing it. And they're using it, and it's not just

for the audience to see it all. If they walk into this bunker set, and it all feels real, and there's things to do, they just get lost like you naturally would. So it's just the way you have to design. A lot of people say, we won't see that. It's like, I don't even know what that, I just don't ignore it. Creating a world.

It's hard as a lot of designers, they will cut it out. They'll be like, oh yeah, they won't see it. It's like, you don't know that. And every director, like Catherine Bigelow, everything's at 360. You don't give her a half set. It's like, because if you do, she will shoot that other half. And it'll be in the movie.

You're wrong. You gotta do the whole thing. Yeah. But you just have to be. She wants to be immersed. Our job is to create a world that actors feel real in. Totally. And then when you watch it, you believe it.

Yeah. Should there be an Academy Award for production design? There is. There is? Yeah. But it doesn't happen during the main event? It does? Yeah. Should there be an Academy Award for production design? There is. There is? Yeah. But it doesn't happen during the main event? It does? Yeah.

OK. My friend Patrice won for Dune last year. I don't know who won this. OK. I can't remember. Yeah, that's a big award. I thought there was one category that I feel like people get snubbed.

This will be an Emmy for Severance. There you go. I hate to cut this interview short. This is really fun. No, I love it. It's amazing. It's really fun. Oh, I love it. It's very enjoyable Yeah, I'll happily do the game. Yeah, this would be great. You'll be in my home. I'll drive my best put on the busy guys Oh, there we go. You can drive it. I'll drive it onto the set do a burnout on the side. Go west side It's too damn. No, no, we're we're going Hollywood. Nice. We're bringing me to Hollywood. Yeah

All right, they're gonna media back to Hollywood. Yeah. yeah. Anyway, thank you so much. Cheers. Great hanging. That was great. I got to watch Playtime. 1967 comedy drama. Never seen it. Later.

Bye. Yeah, what a delightful conversation. Not someone that we normally have on the stream, but we need to do more Hollywood. We should do a whole Hollywood day. Welcome. Hey. Hi. How you doing?

Welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Great to be here. Really, really chill day, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, super relaxing. Super relaxing, just plenty of time to just come hang out on a podcast. Here, and let's adjust that microphone so it's towards your face. You can just adjust the mic, I think will be enough. There we go, that's good.

Would you mind introducing yourself for the stream? Tell us who you are, what you do. Sure, hi. I'm Nairi Hurdajian. I'm the Chief Communications Officer at Figma, which basically means I'm lucky to work with this amazing design community on events and how we engage them all around the world,

including config. How have the comms been different this year than in years past? You know, I think that the launches really set the tone for how we bring the community together at config every year. And you know, we were just so excited about the launch slate this year for new product, taking us from four to eight. We had Andrew read on from Sequoia earlier and he said that a few years ago, they were

giving Dylan a standing ovation for a font picker. And to see this year, it's make, site, buzz. Oh my God, I remember in 2022, it was a dark mode. Was similar. Oh my God. Everyone's so excited, but now it's like, oh my god. And it's just been really amazing to see the response so far already.

And we're excited to see the community play with the product, get feedback, and keep iterating. Do you think about who you're communicating with as specific customer avatars or cohorts, or is it all just kind of one big, happy, Figma family? And yeah, if you put on the headphones, you'll just be able to hear yourself a little bit better. A little more authentic podcast mode.

But yeah, in terms of the types of communities that are here, obviously there's consumers who might use Figma just to design a wedding invitation or a birthday card, and then there's all the way up to an enterprise that has probably hundreds of seats, if not more. Do you think about communicating to different groups in different ways or is it kind of just a big celebration

of the broader Figma community? Yeah, I mean, Figma can be really good for figuring out your wedding seating, so I don't wanna discount that in this case, but in general, we're really serving people who are making software. So going from idea to product and all the tools that they need to be able to do that. And obviously, the product design community is a huge part of that. But over the past several years, the way people are building has changed.

The entire process has become more blended interdisciplinary. Today, you heard from an engineer, a product manager, designers, and they're all just working together to build, to go from idea to product, and AI is changing that, and so we really think of serving that entire development. It's crazy, the entire org chart can now make things. Totally. Which is insane.

Like the idea that someone illegal could create a marketing asset or some type of material for hire, you know It's pretty unheard of yeah, even even just like a one-off internal tool. Yeah be built. Can you talk about? Kind of the pressure You know around figma a lot of companies say they have a community But they really just have you have an audience or a customer base. But something that feels very obvious here, and even online, is that Figma's community

is a real community, right? You have people coming in from Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, all descending here, and you don't get that without people. And some people are coming on behalf of a company. Other people are like a one person studio that's just like, I'm spending my own money to get here because I need to be there. Can you talk about how you've approached, you know, comms specifically at Figma, knowing that when you send an email, people are going to open it. And they're going to care a lot about what they're hearing. And I just feel like that's very different

than even some big important companies where they're just sort of this monolithic organization, and, you know, people are going to buy their stuff, you know, whether, regardless of how they feel about, you know, the company. Totally. Well, you know, a lot of that goes back to the very earliest days, and, you know,

I think because Bigigma was in the browser and suddenly made Design Collaborative, it completely changed how designers worked, completely. Like radical change in their day to day. And so that, we always try to bring it back to the product solution that we're offering. But we think of config as being an event for the community by the community. It always has been that way since the first one back in 2020, right before the pandemic.

That predates my time at Figma. But the talks are by the members of our community, the activations, even some of the other events that are being sponsored and put on by people who are just here gathering. And so for us, the way we think about it is just to maintain authentic relationships with people. We ask for a lot of feedback, sure, on the event, but also on product. And so we're just trying to have a really open

and engaged dialogue with folks. You know, we're happy that they tell us when they like things. We're also glad when they tell us what they don't like. Last year, we had a lot of overcrowding at config. On the one hand, that was an interesting problem to have. It's just shoulder to shoulder. More of a Coachella complaint.

It was not easy for folks to get in and around. And so we heard that. And I think it feels much more roomy and spacious this year. And so just trying to make the experience always feel as authentic and connected as we can. Although the keynote was still standing room only, I noticed. Yeah. We maxed out the number of chairs we could put in there, I think. Yeah, of course.

Can you talk about the trade-offs between batching these four product releases into one big event versus splitting it up? You could imagine quarterly releases, there's obviously trade-offs there. In the age of the internet, there's a lot of demand on companies to just, hey, as soon as it's done, give it to me, I want it now, even if it's rough around the edges, let's iterate, we get that. At the same time, you're becoming more of the Apple-like

annual release, and there's something beneficial from a commerce perspective about concentrating all the energy and attention to really break through with one big day of the year, because you can't really dominate the internet every day, even if you're the best in the business. That's true. But yeah, how do you think about it?

Was it ever a trade-off, or do you just love the annual release cycle? Honestly, we really look at the roadmap and let the roadmap kind of dictate what will end up at Config and what ends up outside of Config. We're not necessarily on a big annual release a year. Obviously config is a catalyst for a bunch of stuff. We've never launched four products in one launch ever.

And again going from four to eight. So for us, it's not set. We really, we believe in the philosophy that you just said of like, get product into users' hands fast, even if it's not, you know, like, even if it's early and learn and keep iterating faster from there because, you know, our philosophy is that design is always, and product development are always iterative, always living, and so you're constantly going to be tuning it, and the faster you can get it to users,

the better. Dylan always tells the story of the early days of Figma where, you know, they didn't ship for a few years. He talks about that as being something he would do differently if he could go back again and advice his other founders. Yeah, we were talking about this with Andrew too. It's just so much part of the lore of, you know, just basically, you know, building in relative obscurity and then just coming out and how most, I do think that that made sense

in the context of building novel functionality in the browser and the super complex product, but now that there's a platform taking that kind of iterative approach, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you learn faster, more people get their hands on it. Can you walk me through some of the other like, comms, best practices from amplifying an event like this? Obviously, we're here having fun kind of in the new media streaming, very

different world, but I imagine there's like a series of press releases that go out and how do you work on getting coverage across, like, what is the market map of getting attention at Higg maintenance level? Well, because this is an event formed by our community, a lot of what we do is really about that direct

and owned communication and the own channels across social especially. And then of course, the other events that are the constellation around config. We had a day zero block party outside on Howard Street yesterday called config commons that was so much fun, like great music, great vibes, people really warmed up.

But- I'm sure people joined not knowing what it was, tried to join, not knowing what it was for, which being like looks like a fun party. Exactly, but you know, one of the things that we like to do is just have fun with how our brand shows up. Yes, Figma is a B2B SaaS company, but we have a consumer patina to our brand and we get to lean into that, which is so much fun and unique, I think, within enterprise software. And so, you know, we changed our

social handles to be called config crave, which I don't know if you all follow popcrave on Twitter. But the demois, the popcraves, the whole of these Stan accounts that sort of get to feature celebrities. And for us, our celebrities. Even this morning, there was a bunch of really funny posts. Yeah. I saw that.

Jason, you really loved that. Celebrities here are our community. So we wanted to feature them. And we just are always looking for ways to do that authentically and have a little fun. You saw the, I think we talked about the auto, the FigPal CGI video. Yeah, there's this like, you know, Godzilla auto. It's amazing. We like to have fun and bring that vibe while also like sharing clear factual information. What's launching? When can you get your hands on it? So it's really a balance to do it all.

It's the hardest thing, clarity, while trying to get Mac's attention. Makes sense. Yeah. I mean, it's your first config. It is. Tell me what you all think. No, it's insane.

It feels like being at Coachella. Yeah, it really does. It feels like being at a music festival. Yeah, it's massive. It's so fun to have you here. And it's so great that the diversity of different types of creatives that we've had on the show just today is so fascinating.

The last one was production sort of set design. Isn't he awesome? Yeah. Yeah, it was great. He's so fun. Incredibly eloquent. He's going to do a great talk later today. Yeah, I'm very excited for that.

We didn't even get to how does he use Figma at all. Oh, he doesn't, but he's just speaking about design broadly. Yeah, we just think, you know, someone in our community tweeted at us, you know who I want to hear from at Comfig? That's the production designer from Severance. And we were like, we've got you.

No, but you can just tell like the dedication to the craft process that everybody, even if you have nothing to do with production set design, it's like I want to apply a lot from our conversation, not just to our set, but how we do the show. And a lot of it just resonated. Personally, I'm just excited to go make my first Figma site. What are you going to make?

I don't know. I have so many different ideas at both at TBPN of just like what it enables, just that like speed of iteration. I think that the most frustrating thing for me was always hitting a wall on no code, like low code software, like web development tools where I don't have an engineering background and it would just be so frustrating to make something in Figma and then get to the point

where I'm like, okay, now I have to wait. Who do I give it to? Yeah, I've got to find the right developer and they're like, okay, I can get to it in a week and then you're like, can you do it in two days? And then it's like, you really want it that day. There's so many of these ideas that are effectively like memes, like they're one-off web pages that

do not merit any sort of real budget or weeks of engineering time like we wanted to do venture capital radio, VC radio and so when you go to a specific VC firm's webpage it plays a song that identifies with that fund and so you go to Andreessen Horowitz, American Dynamism's gonna play like Free Bird or something. Yeah, yeah. But there's this idea of- It's like that's not something that you would wanna actually spend some developer's time on.

But yeah, but like ephemeral apps, websites, this idea of apps as meme, as like memes, right? The internet used to be like this. Back when it was just an HTML page, you would just kind of hack something together and then stumble upon, would drive some traffic, and then we kind of went into the social era and everything has to be either an image, text, or video.

But my hope is that something will break through and people will be able to build more interactive stuff. Yeah, we talked about this. I want to enable, we have a bunch of brand assets at TBPN, and people will remix them and use them in different ways. And sometimes I look at an image, I'm like, oh, this is like hilarious.

I want to reshare it, but like the logo is not quite right. So maybe figuring out a way to make Buzz I was going to say, you can use Buzz for that, too, and then see what people make for you. Yeah. That would be fun. Meme you guys. Yes. Got would be fun. Meme you guys. Yes.

You ones. Got to be getting memed. Yeah. For sure. All the time. Rise of the meme. Love it. How are you feeling for you guys are headed to?

London. London. We are. Last year, right after config.sf, we took config to Singapore. OK. This year, it's London. OK.

Excited. We have. Is it a lot of the same set effectively or is it a separate set out there? We are bringing the inflatables. Yeah, okay. Those are easy to collapse, pack and ship. The synth can't come, it's too expensive to ship,

unfortunately, but it's a, you know, in general, in another raw space where we can bring our own scenic and make it feel like Figma. Yeah. It's a smaller venue. It's about, you know, for a couple thousand people. Is config like a full-time job now for Figma? Like does the planning for 2026 start next week? It already has. It already has. Wow.

It already has. We have to walk and chew gum. Our configs are measured in centuries. Yeah. But it's fun, you know, I think there are great moments in company lives that rally everybody together and they differ for every company. And for us, this is one of them on an annual basis, everyone on the product team, on the sales team, on the marketing team, and we have a lot of fun with it. And for, you know, it's just really important for us to show up

and be present with our users and our community and make sure that they know how much we appreciate their feedback and how much we're working to ship for them. Totally. Yeah. Anything else? We need your help at some point finding apparently Dylan was in a Windows XP commercial when he was a kid? Oh do you have that? I think I well there's that yeah there's

Dylan on the Today Show after he became a Teal Fellow with his mom. No way. Another good one. The third best is in the early days of Figma when it was really small they were trying to recruit this intern to come work at Figma. She was really into K-pop so Dylan and the early team filmed a K-pop music video for her. That's like really hardcore recruiting for an intern. It must not have been very good. She declined the internship. Those are some good videos from the early days I can share with you. I'm sure always regret that Maybe. We wish her well. We wish her well.

But that video is so good. We showed it at our tenure. That's like the equivalent for an intern is when the NBA general commissioner or team coach goes to the parents and sits them down and says, hey, we want them to join the team or something or college recruiting. Even more than that.

Yeah, even more. Brutal. Yeah, Dylan did a lot of child acting. There's so much good lore around that. Like Eric Gleiman has that video of him speaking fluent Chinese on some game show. I don't know if you've seen this. Oh, it's fantastic at ramp.

Is he a fluent speaker? Yeah, yeah. So he was over in China for, I don't know, a semester, maybe a couple of years or something. Went on a game show show is telling all these jokes and like getting a uproarious applause when it's remarkable. And then of course, Scott Wu at cognition has that video of him doing like the most complex math imaginable is like

a child. What are what about the what do you all have in your Yeah, we know we need to take those up. That's tough. That's something. Meme those for 2025. Yes. I'm trying to think. There's probably a video interview from my first company

years ago, but I don't think it was too embarrassing. I don't have anything embarrassing. One, my mom was a graphic designer. So my earliest memories doing design in a business context were working with her. These were the Photoshop years. And I have pictures. So I had a skateboard company when I was 12.

And I have pictures of me holding up the finished product. It was so funny, because at the time, I actually really remember how, like, single player the product was. It was like, you know, files and like versions and whatever. So anyways. I remember some of my friends in high school made like a student film and I was tall.

I'm still tall, but they made me play the dad, which is hilarious. And I was a terrible actor. Oh, you had to wear a suit. Yeah, yeah, I did actually wear a suit. It was very, very embarrassing. Anyway. I do feel a little underdressed compared to you two.

I mean, I forgot. We're overdressed. Look at the community. This is not exactly the Goldman Sachs technology media and telecom conference. We were in LA. We had a meeting Monday. And we showed up to Milk and not for the event, but meeting somebody there. And we didn't have our suits on. we had a meeting Monday, and we showed up to Milkin, not for the event,

but meeting somebody there, and we didn't have our suits on. I had a suit on. Oh, you had a suit. I didn't have a jacket, but I would have a jacket. Yeah, yeah, well, a jacket doesn't count. And then we were at Hillin Valley in DC. And we felt on that.

We felt right at home. Right at home, everyone. That was all the Silicon Valley people putting on suits for the first time in years. Yeah, and all the DC people already in suits. But here we kind of stick out. But fortunately, everyone's been very nice, and I think they're having fun. I don't all the DC people already insist. But here we kind of stick out. But fortunately everyone's been very nice and I think they're having fun.

I don't miss the bad suits from Washington. No, the joke is that you know you're at Hill and Valley when everyone has their business cards in their suits from the last time they were there because they only go to a DC once a year for Hill and Valley. Anyway, we're getting a hard stop, so we're gonna wrap up. Hard stop in four minutes.

Yeah, but thank you so much for hopping on. Thanks for being here. To be clear, I think we're getting a hard stop. So we're gonna stop in four minutes. Yeah, but thank you so much for hopping on To be clear, I think we're getting bearded from like for some reason otherwise weird keep hot. Yeah I mean we got another four hours. We got another four hours. Honestly, we're not used to being on couches It's a little bit different comfy I think we can I think I think we can easily put up another 12 hours. Easily. Easily. But anyway, thanks for making this happen. Why don't you meet us in London next week?

Yeah. The international travel, we have yet to take the show on the road internationally. We've done Miami, we've done DC, San Francisco now. So check in the boxes. We'll get out. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for having us. Do you know where the next next config is? Or is that not released? I'll have to come back.

It's not released. Come back with breaking news. Yeah, I'd love to. Maybe, I don't know, where, Sancho Pei? Sure. John just wants it to align with 2026 summer plans. Exactly. Sorry, John.

Lake Como, maybe. I'm on Geary for more intimate settings. I think we may not be the right company conference for those locations. I mean Singapore is very nice. London is great. Singapore is fantastic. You should, maybe Kim Lyon needs to have TBPN. That'd be great.

That's what you need. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kim Lyon would be great. That'd be fantastic. I feel that for you. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. We will talk to you soon. We'll see you after the show.

Thank you so much. Anyway, this has been a fantastic stream. Thank you for watching. We really had a lot of fun being here at Figma Config 2025. Had a lot of interesting conversations. Really took us on a world tour. Having a Sequoia partner and the designer of Severance. Not every day that you see a technology

and business show do both. But we are men of many pounds. How many guests do we have tomorrow, by the way? I think we have like six. We can give everyone a kind of a run through. I think it's gonna be closer to seven. Seven. Do we wanna leak it?

I genuinely, I don't wanna go. leak it yet. I don't want to go over. But we are hoping to get some great people from the government, as well as our first post-game of a major public company, Post Earnings. Post Earnings, which we're very excited about. And so we're going to be digging into that, kind of cutting our teeth in the post-earnings game, which we want to get more into.

And so stick with us. No, tomorrow. It's absolutely stacked. Tomorrow's absolutely stacked. We have to get back to LA, actually, right now, because we have to prep, because we're going wall to wall tomorrow. It's by far the most stacked show.

I'm excited. It's gonna be a big growth moment for the show. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. We will talk to you soon. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.