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

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appFigma - https://www.figma.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(11:16) - John LePore (31:16) - Elliot Jay Stocks (42:24) - Andrew Reed (01:11:49) - Marty Ringlein (01:27:05) - Jeremy Hindle (02:03:39) - Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian

You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, May 7th, 2025. We are live from the Dojo of Design, the gridiron of grid layouts, and the Valhalla vibe coding. It is Figma Config 25. We're here in San Francisco. In a pod. We're poding 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. 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. For the woodstock of generative AI, many people have been saying this. The gladiatorial games. It feels like a Roman Coliseum moment. Like something you see in Gladiator, but for designers and vibe coders. That's right. That's right.

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

We're in a fishbow. It's great. And so if you're here at config, just come by. Yeah. Say hello. Wave. Anyway. But we're very excited to be here.

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 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 maybe we can go back and do some history on Figma? You found some interesting data points to share. I thought it would 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 focused on the business and technology side. And so I thought it would be interesting to go through some of the back. 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 backstory of the company, early years of Dylan Field. There's some crazy Dylan Field lore that will 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. where now you can effectively design a site and publish it all within Figma. Yep.

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 engineer is like, well, I got close enough. Yeah, they have to completely rebuild it.

Yeah, and so this is a game changer. Yeah. It gives more and more control to the person that's actually designing the website 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 classically trained designer. I basically learn 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. 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? Yeah. Because you imagine at a certain point there's going to still be, you know, 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? Yeah. 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 want to 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. You know, the access for 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, you know, 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 like,

well, I'm in a design software. This doesn't feel like the final product. It allows an agency. So, yeah, we should talk to the agency folks soon. Yeah, the amazing part of where design is going, or gender to AI is going, is that it takes the time from rough idea in your head to real product. You know, in this case, in the form of website, it's just compressing that, right? So the second product that they're announcing is Figma Make.

It 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 like vibe coding side. You can go and effectively prompt your way to, you know, 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, we 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, you know, let's not spend, you know, hundreds of hours planning and, you know, iterating. you know, spending all this time iterating if we can get, you know, 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 an AI. This is an obvious one. Oftentimes, historically, I've built sort of like brand, brand books, brand identity guides in Figma. And then, you know, any number. of people on the team are going to go in there and sort of distort it and turn it into different assets. Even for us, like we post like a silly meme or some 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.

Yeah. I'm actually, I use like a different app on my phone for that and then don't have version control if our, as our logos evolved, they're still using the old logo and stuff. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea with Figma Buzz is any, 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 and 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.

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 pro-sumer and B2B enterprise is just like blurring. I mean, it's the story of like Gmail, right? You get everyone on Gmail account eventually

they're going to walk into the enterprise and say, hey, I want to use Gmail at work, and then all of a sudden, Google Workspace becomes a huge business. Anyways, I expect this to be big in, you know, the enterprise specifically. Yep. If you have, you know, hundreds, thousands of people at your company, you want to keep assets consistent. Yeah. If you are a creative director or 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, uh, 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 could find in the national park. Kind of like what Ryan Peterson did with those

Chachibitim images in Chachapit he made a poster for every single flexport location and was able to, oh, flexport Sydney and it has this beautiful like 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 know, 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. Totally. 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 whoever's on that project, right? 100%. Cool. The last product, Figma Draw. This is a product that allows you to express yourself with enhanced vector. editing and illustration tools right 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 sort of like

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, you know, the necessary time to make truly great products. And so, 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, 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. Welcome to the pod. We're podding in the pot.

Welcome to config, man. Yes. This is wild, right? 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. Yeah, the street shut down.

The block was taken over. Yeah, it's 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. at this scale. And so it's really shocking in that way. And then, of course, I was talking to Jordy about this. 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's 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 going to 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. 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, you know, 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 of the screen into another. System is being hacked. There's a hacker. and all the code is spewing out. They're in my computer.

But you get to do these other fun things where 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. And science fiction is still just showing us the same glowing blue, bleepy blutes, and there's this whole other world of things that you can get into. And so what I'm going to 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 want to 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, Yeah, we were talking about like solar punk over cyberpunk. 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 going to be pretty disruptive. Sure. On a technological perspective or landscape. But we also have been seeing nothing but the future portrayed as like mega dystopia.

Totally. Totally. It's the darkest shit imagine. all the time. I refuse to watch the new black mirror. Yeah. I'm just not going to put it in my brain. And it's, you know, and I mean it's, I still love that stuff. Yeah, of course. I enjoy it and I appreciate cyberpunk aesthetics and whatnot.

Yeah, it's cool. I mean, we got some cyberpunk going on here. But we should, we shouldn't be making our real products, 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, yeah, yeah. It's like, well, in order. to get there. We have to live through the apocalypse.

Exactly, exactly. 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 after effects? And were you getting into Cinema 4D and Houdini? I went to Seagraph a couple of years ago and there was a ton of cool FUI projects.

And then I want to know how is 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, 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 Newark and Blender and, you know, 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, you know, 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. Yep, totally. 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? Um, so I know, not, not, not, I'm not legitimately interested. I'm not trying to do a gotcha, but I'm, I'm genuinely curious around, you know, is it, is it, is it an hour here or there sporadically or? It is, it is at times like it's a very intentional choice to be like, sprint. You pull that tool out of the tool chest. Yeah, totally. Blow a little bit of the dust off of it. You know, put it on and go in. Yeah. But I also find particularly being creative. in that space. For me, it reminds me of like the first time that I ever started using 3D tools or learning how to design on a computer

because like 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, you know, 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 like in my space, like as a lot.

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 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 like all the details on top as opposed to having start fresh with just like a blank canvas.

And to me, yeah, 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 just, once you can see something and interact with it, whether it's a digital product or,

you know, even, again, like some type of 3D render in VR. Yeah. And coming from a back, background in animation, the process would be, you know, 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 going to 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, you know, and it's really interesting that sort of feedback loop that you get, and now that feedback loop is getting to be almost a media, and having things be more, you know, the notion of, you know, 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 thought that was amazing. I had no idea that was you. It went unbelievably that was incredible for us. It was a wonderful experience for us. Yeah. But it also

it inspired a lot of people that are working in this space. Yeah, yeah. 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 a spec work for you. You weren't paid by F1 for that, but that's 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 like when we saw all the first demos of it, it was like, cool. put on this insane hallucination machine and use this to view bounded rectangle, floating in space, your inbox with 2,000 unread emails. Look at that, PDF, you know. And we just saw like, there's so much more that you could do with this. And so like that experience, and if you're a racing fan, there's a fully functioning

beta of it today. That's amazing. And it changes the way that you experience this stuff. And you put it on and you do like feel like, I'm Iron Man, but you also feel like, oh, this is like, this is so obvious. Like, of course, this is the way that we interact with things like this. So 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 going to enable some amazing things that we can't even accurately predict until these, until we've been living with these things. with these things for a while. Can you talk a little bit about the reception of AI in Hollywood in 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 historic,

you know, 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, okay, 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 are, 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. Yeah, because the craft is sometimes what's enjoyable. I mean, like the sweat that goes into it.

Any of the people here love that aspect of it. And they like the vision and creation and You know, 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, you know, there's not a lot of this work where people are just like, oh, I wish, you know, someone else could do all of the stuff for me. There is still, you know, significant portions of this that people just love and enjoy it. 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, you know, are just closing up that feedback loop. And the other thing that's amazing to me is as soon as even in, you know, 22, 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, direct. direction to achieve their goals and had, you know, the vocabulary and wisdom. And now you know, it's like you should study art history if you want to be great

a prompting. Yeah, like you find these like cheat sheets of like, hey, these are all the different terms. One S-Raff and it just does it. And it's, yeah. And what not. So it's wild and it's interesting. You know, 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, you know, the needs. for a clear and articulate vision. But yeah, you know, 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 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 you kind of re-inject that creativity once 3D printing gets really good or some sort of manufacturing. And I know you've done product design in many ways.

Are there things that you're excited about bringing, you know, 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 had instructed it to build. Yeah, that's the next Figma Conflict.

Or whatnot. That's 2026. Figma, humanoid. So I bring that up partially because we've been doing some stuff with some of the leaders in the humanoid robotic space around like, how do you create like a face? Oh, sure. Yeah.

Some of them are so dystopian. It's very bizarre. I don't want to name names, but some of them are bizarre. It's really, really wild space. And it's just like, you share at a high level around what you think the inevitable face form factor is for humanoid. What's your optimistic vision? Yeah, it's like uncanny valley,

photoreal, or like the azimaux, just like cute little happy face. So I think about the example of, you know, you get up, you know, let's say you get up at 430 a.m. You have an early day. You walk out to your kitchen and your, you know, humanoid is, you know, doing some dishes or something like that. Sure.

And what's the face that's not going to, you know, I think over time you get used to anything. to anything, but what's going to be pleasant versus Jerry? 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? Because they're already here. And I feel really strongly that today it should not have eyes and the mouth. It shouldn't be this thing that's developed to approach you

and be like, tell me, why do humans cry? It should be very crystal clear. I'm a tool. I'm a really expensive, like, forklift or piece of industrial equipment and just, you know, 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? I mean, there's, you know, I could go on forever about like, like, why even humanoid, you know, why work to those limitations of the human body and whatnot. But it's a, 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, you know, nobody gets hurt or people could predict what a humanoid robot is going to do that. Did you see the video that came out of China a couple days ago where the humanoid just goes a wall? Oh, that was in China. I saw the, I saw that crazy kind of like something wrong with the... Not necessarily. It didn't seem like, yeah, probably wasn't trying to attack, but it was pretty violent. It's absolutely terrifying. It's like having, yeah, it looks like

it's throwing a fit. It doesn't look happy. And now I can, all I can imagine is like that's the, that's the, scariest black mirror episode is the thing that was like loading your 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. Yeah. 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 spent a lot of time bumping into some friends that are in the automotive industry. I've done a ton of work in the... that space as well, which is like probably the digital experience that needs the most unbucking. Yeah, totally.

Most people just plug it in their phone and then they get this very basic, like Apple hasn't really refreshed car play 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 the product will be available in about 70 years. That's how long it takes to. go for 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? Yeah, that's kind of a funny, like, hack, because they're like, we just really want to do one big touchscreen, but somebody wanted a volume button, so we'll just glue that on and it'll be capacitive. So it just actually, and it's, yeah, it's got like a little like sausage inside of it so that it activates the touchscreen. Yeah, the touchscreen basically. Such a funny thing. Well, anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah. Good luck with the rest of your config. Good luck with your talk. You nervous? I'm stoked. I'm excited. I'm excited. I love doing that stuff.

Yeah. I'm nervous about walking around because there's just so many goddamn super cool people everywhere. Yep. And that not enough time. Yeah, that gets me into my job. We were at a conference last week, and one of our friends said he shook so many hands, so many hands, his hand got bruised. Crazy. So stay healthy.

Thank you. Enjoy. Have a blast while you're here. We'll talk to soon. All right. 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.

Hey, what's going on? Great to meet. Nice to meet you. I'm John. Excited. Welcome to the show. Have you. Feel free to throw on those headphones if you want. 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 like to enjoy it. I've just seen one of my very old friends do a fantastic presentation on stage. Is his name Dylan Field?

Well, Tim Van Dam. And yeah, they just announced some amazing stuff. and it's great to be here. So what's your talk about tomorrow? It's about typography. It's about being in design systems. Very cool. Give us the full backstory.

I mean, I'll go out on a limb and say you're the godfather of type. It's a little bit dramatic. I certainly have had a massive influence on type online. So, yeah, I would love kind of 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 kind of 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 kind of 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 interact with on a daily basis, even some of the fonts that I'm sure we use it at TBPN. but we'd love to understand the market structure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, those indie foundries that you mentioned are kind of, you know, 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 foundry partners. And so they are not owned by companies like Adobe. They are independent practitioners. A lot of the time they are like one-person bands a lot of the time. You know, super indie. Obviously, you've got the 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 boundaries who are then use those distribution channels like Adobe fonts, et cetera, to get stuff on there. Monotype have my fonts as well, which is also another big channel. And the differentiated, 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 FigmaConfig been? Oh, it's been sick. Yeah? All I wanted to say was keep mauging, guys. Thank you.

Keep mauging. All right. Always be magging. We'll see you, Gary. I'm sure, you know, do you familiar with Gary? I have not, counsel. He's the president of Y Combinator, also quite an accomplished designer, a bunch of the logos.

Yeah. of some of the biggest companies. Anyways, good friends. So I want to know more about the business model of working with Adobe. Is it like Spotify where like 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 selling a book?

Yeah, usage is shared to the successful fonts that get more usage. Okay. 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 trend? No, I mean, so from my phone. So from my perspective, how mature is the industry?

From my perspective, I mean, you can see this sort of hype cycle with individual fonts where, you know, one, you know, oftentimes, you know, one designer will leverage a font in a really unique way. And then three months later, there's sort of an explosion of sites using that. And, you know, we've even had, we've had people that have been maybe a little bit too inspired by what we're doing at TBPN actually, you know, find the font that we use for our logo and sort of use that for our logo.

You know, it's all, you know, mostly fair game on the internet. Yeah, I mean, you can never predict how that stuff takes off as well. There is 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 out there. I know some type designers who've struggled for many years and some.

logged 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. That'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 like, I don't know, 50, 100 years or something?

I mean, it's driven by technology a lot when you think of like the move from metal type, wood type, phototype setting, early digital type. When you look at what we know as fonts these days, you know, you got the 80s, sorry, the 90s when folks like Font Shop really pioneered that originally making them available on, you know, actual physical discs, and then obviously online, and that would really radically change things. And you had web fonts come along in around sort of, what, sort of 20, 2009, 2010, which before that you couldn't use anything on your websites other than, you know, Georgia, Ariel,

Ghana, Tiny Roman, you know, and people forget that that was, you know, 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 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. Yeah, it is kind of odd. The chat GPT, when they generate images, they can now do text pretty effectively, but they're not using an actual font library. Like a source. Yeah, 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 fonts generators, which have mixed results. But, yeah, there are some tools which will generate images, and as part of that, text is part of that. There is some recent huge leaves been made in that,

like the designer Jessica Hish has been posting a bunch of stuff, some experiments she's been doing with Chat GBT, GPT, where she's a very accomplished lettering artist, but she's looking at what ChapGPT can actually put out, and it's actually, you know, the progress is incredible. It's now its ability to actually do some half-decent lettering is, you know, it's super interesting. where you look at a few months ago and you'd be lucky if you even have like the right word spelled correctly.

No, that was always, 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's certainly, yeah, it's getting, getting uncanny. We're pushing past the uncanny valley now. How do you think the, what do you, how do you expect kind of the business models of the industry to evolve? I imagine I can see it going, you know, the way of fashion to some degree where, you know, maybe in the future you can get kind of a

factory font that was just generated, but there's something about, you know, typography that's almost soulful, you know, and you discover, you know, something you can just see, you can feel, you know, 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 and kind of the business models to evolve as, you know, assuming, I think we can safely assume that generative AI will be, you know, twice as good at type in a year, right? Yeah, maybe more.

Yeah, I mean, totally AI generated fonts are coming, for sure. Like, it's going to be a thing. And it is interesting for the business, because at least in the U.S., you can't copyright a design. You can trademark a name. So, you know, things like Helvetica are always going to be trademarked and known by monotype, but you can't copyright the outlines. So, you know, 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'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 support. 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 shot, I want to hear. I don't know. I don't know. You can go way back. Let's see. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I have some very good connection.

Maybe meta-commentary. What does the community typically say is overrated? I mean, the community tends to, people like free stuff, right? Sure. So a lot of people use stuff from places like Google fonts. Sure. Provide fonts for free. And it's great.

There are 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 a Derby fonts or just buying a 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. Yeah, this is great. Thanks for shopping by. Thank you for having. Good luck with your talk tomorrow.

Thanks so much. I hope you get to tune in. We'll see you on the internet. All right. See you then. Thanks guys. It's great. 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 he is. How you doing, Andrew? Welcome. What's going on? Welcome. Yeah, yeah, you're live. You can throw on the headphones,

talking to the microphone. How are you doing? Good to me. You're in person. There we go. Thank you for having me. What's going on? You might be able to adjust it, but you should be. Okay, great. Yeah, how has it been? Is this your first config, or have you been coming for a long time? This is my... Yeah, I was going to say, very bad investor, if he's just like,

oh, I guess now that Figma's a big deal, you know, I guess I'll show up. I remember back when we got standing ovation for the font picker, you know, the first of two standing ovations for the font picker. Wow. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. No, I mean, today, today feels monumental, just given the scale. of the event, but also the launches, the people that were, you know, doing a standing ovation

for the font picker, I'm sure they're here today seeing, you know, the four massive launches. Yeah. 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, like, the story of Instagram where, like, Kevin would, like, 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 was like kind of the same sort of vibe and actually very similar venues. Yeah. It was the open source developer ecosystem. And I remember sitting through some of those universes back in the mid-2010s

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

And, you know, it was just, like, buzzing. And I remember whenever I come to config, like, I really feel like I'm cosplaying, you know? Yeah. Like, I like making websites. But, like, you know, some say I apply, like, design, like creativity to my Excel sheets. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'd say, I'm an artist in Excel. Yeah. It's funny, I'm so used to, I go to these events with my daughters, like, for school and stuff. And they're, you know, there's always like a long line of people for face painting. And there's plenty of face painting supplies, but there's only like two or three people who can actually do their face painting. I always walk around here like, man, like everybody here could be the most amazing face painter. You know, it's like, you know, I could just bring my kids in the face paint and have a little. Yeah, yeah. No, the talent, the talent density is wild.

Yeah. 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 going to become increasingly popular because the Airbnb, 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's 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 and just telling us, okay,

you've improved it. So there's a little bit of like a balancing act there. But what like what do you think of the overall trend of these an annual kind of agenda setting events versus something that's like you can kind of blend the two? Yeah, I think 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. Yeah, yeah. And like I remember back when you could, you know, you get a tech crunch article written about your product launch and it would. You know, you drive all this sign-ups and it's 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 a, you know, like the Red Queen dynamic, like just to stay in place, you have to be doing, you know, usability improvements, AI upgrades, et cetera, to your product every single week. Just to, like, like, kind of maintain. Exactly. Yeah. Then I think as it relates to, like, genuine product launches, you know, I think, and, you know, even for the stuff that's launched today, there's an alpha, as a beta, right? 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, you know? Like knowing the Figma team, like this date has kind of been in the back of everyone's heads for a very long time. Well, and it's such a, 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, on the round? 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 are built on top. Exactly. Is there a story around 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 plug-in developers for a long time. And I think a lot of the power of Figma comes from, you know, comes from. what Figma enables, but also comes from the ecosystem around it. That applies to things like templates, right? Yeah, yeah. And to these plugins. Yeah. 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, you know, trying to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. Yeah. 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 seduce 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, 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, like, 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 You went to the exact same brand thing, the Warby Parker guys went to or whatever. No, it's funny, I remember this is going to definitely date me. You know, we used to print out all these decks. You would, like, you know, get the deck and you just hit print. And I remember. They started being black. No, then for the first, so we, uh...

Black backgrounds. For the first, I'm going to send this clip to Joe at Loom, Joe and Veney from Lowe. For the first board meeting for Lume, they did like a hundred and thirty-page deck in, like, dark mode, square. It was like the level of dark gray versus modestly less dark gray in these stack bar charts was impossible And I came into the board meeting with this printout and it looked just like basically like a bunch of black pages 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 Don Valentine thing is storytelling, right? Yeah. 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 know, you can do it in the Times New Roman. and, you know, the spreads at tour 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 going to 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 got to, like, you know, actually read between the lines. No, the worst is when you get the ones that are, And as a, you know, I used to work from Goldman Sachs.

Yeah. You know, as a former banker, I love my investment maker friends. Yep. 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. Yeah. And then you get the, you know, 98 years of combined industry experience, like highly seasoned management teams.

They're not doing this. Whoa, whoa, whoa. John and I have, you know, 20 years of a combined experience in technology media. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I've never met a management team that's not highly seasoned. Yeah. I mean, Dylan was brand new.

I'm curious, you think there's, you know, the lore around Figma is that, you know, Dylan and it's Evan, right? Yep. Dylan and Evan, you know, spend years, you know, basically in obscurity building this, like, you know, product. You know, today, if a founder was building a SaaS tool and they were three years in and, you know, didn't have, like, a product that they were letting people actually. use, I think most investors would write it off. I almost feel like it almost ended up being an anti-lson, you know, that sort of four-year period of obscurity, because they were using, they were pioneering the use of WebGL

for, you know, browser collaboration. And have you ever found yourself kind of like pushing back on founders that are like, well, Dylan and Evan spent, you know, four years getting their products? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. a little bit like, you know, for decks, you can either do the, we really didn't try at all, or we made it look beautiful. Yeah. I think with companies similarly, 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. Yeah. And when we launch it, it's going to work. I think the in-between area where you're just, like, slowly maneuvering off of your initial course, like that's, I think, the really, the unhappy path. Yeah. I think we've done so many retrospectives on, like, analyses on what are the commonalities between the big outlier, big outlier companies.

And 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 faster company grows. But how fast you go from one to ten is highly correlated. So basically it's like, you know, 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 a variety of times to get into the key. I mean, I think the most recent example, probably Open AI, literally a nonprofit for a decade, and then all of a sudden a billion in like a couple months. Do you think that there's...

Well, actually one more thing we'll list. lore story. I'm never, you know, I just, um, so, uh, this is a Doug Deany story. So I think, you know, like, yeah, it's time to give Doug, it shine. Um, so when we were doing our Figma investment, it was, this was, uh, January 2019. And now it's an associate. So I was like, you do my best to, to position ourselves. And I thought, you know, we, we're totally going to do this investment, you know, like, Dylan, Dylan loves us. And I was, but just the case I'm going to bring Doug into, like, you know. Bringing 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, you know, trying to show them how much we love them. Is that the term sheet in that photo? Yeah. One that got like, you know, someone did the CIA analysis to figure out all the taller terms. Yeah, you see. That was a hand.

That was my bad to our comms team. And we're about, you know, 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 in the Coy named after our LPs. And, you know, when we were going to do this meeting in the MIT conference room. And then, you know, I was just like, yeah, it's a much nicer conference room than the Brown conference room. The Doug was like, no, we're doing this in the Brown conference room.

And, like, maybe 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, like, 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. He puts this, you know,

beats 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. Yep. And I was like, this guy freaking rocks. Wow. Yeah, that's like... I was about to be just, like,

hanging in the MIT conference room with no plan. So anyway, that's Doug. Yeah, the alumni playbook. Crazy. Yeah. To actually go that extra stuff. Do you have fun at Brown? Well, we played a part.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Switching gears. a little bit. Are you surprised at how Gen A.I seemingly came for image creation before product design in some ways? Like, yes, you can use Gen A.I. to generate screens of various products, but you would think that that would be a lot of the product designers I know are still, you know, doing this sort of handcrafted work to design, you know, flows and features and things like that. 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, I'd say, I've been generally surprised at the order of things that have come out of this generative AI ecosystem in general, right? Like, I remember, 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. sense of, well, that was a very seemingly for take, you know, in hindsight. Same thing with radiologists. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They almost all have their job still. Yeah. And who is it?

Was it Hinton? Or I forget, it was someone, a big machine learning foundational researcher was saying, like, stop training them. Yeah, it's the, the, you know, how stuff. And I think it 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, 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. Like, that has been the story for this whole wave. I think that will continue to be the story. And I think predictions from people, you know, who are the spreadsheet types are going to consistently be proven wrong. Yeah. Do you think that there's a Dylan field out there right now, kind of grinding in silence for four years, and then we'll come out with something disruptive, or does that pattern not even work in the age of the internet? Well, Sequoia is probably already going to check in. Well, what Dylan, it's interesting. It's like, haven't you guys known Dylan for a long time?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, Figma was grinding for a long time. Yeah. But it's not like they were grinding in true silence, right? Like Dylan and Evan were in seven, Evan, you know, absolute genius. Dylan, very engaged in ecosystem. It's a Teal Fellow. Yep. We were wondering about those early rounds because it seems like going back to 2014,

2015, like doing a $20 million series, even a $4 million seed round. Like that's not easy, even if you're a hot company. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, they were, and they were, you know, they were engaging, actually like, interestingly, so many of the people who I've run into already today were people who were like the early users of Figma when it was still a developing product. Sure.

And those people, you know, they didn't hear about it and want to try it and, you know, sign up. Like those are, that's customer development, right? Like Dylan was like one of these true grassroots growth people in addition to the, you know, like, the kind of product visionary, exactly. And like building this community, you know, it's like everything that is magical in the, with that John Carlson, you know,

the John Carlson tweet around like it's a 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 Stoleo Cuervo, who's the first product designer at Facebook.

Yeah. He now just some investing. He an amazing, amazing guy. And I remember he told me about Dylan, you know, 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 to be like four people, and one was Dylan, and then one was Guillermo from Roussel. So, like, no more opt-in.

You know what I mean? If you got somebody's sent him 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, 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, you know, basically every, you know, a bunch of different continents all the way 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. You can kind of like... Well, that's... I completely agree with this. And to me, like, I was thinking about this was morning. I wish everyone could have seen

the keynote, like it was so awesome. Yeah, it was watching a rock star. Like the room, the the room was, it's so big. There's like so many people in that room. It's massive. It's massive.

It's massive. It's like I didn't... And it was standing room at the back. Yeah, it's unbelievable. But then you're like, it's like 9,000 people, right? Yeah. Like, you know, imagine seeing a slide with, you know, 9,000 monthly active users, right? They're nothing, you know?

But 9,000 people's a lot of people, right? And to me it's the, like, your users aren't just numbers, your users are people. Yeah. Right? And the nucleus of this community are people who travel from Southeast Asia to be here, travel from Europe to be here. Yeah. Travel from Africa.

going 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? Like it's enormous. And finding the ability to get that level of a nucleus, I think, is like, it's a product thing, right? You know it just buy them thinner.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I know you can't talk about public companies. companies too much, but I'd love to know if you have any interpretation of what's going on with the MagS7 right now as far as like an opportunity for startups. Like today,

what was the news with Google? They traded down basically Apple might launch something. Apple's VP of services basically came out and said that for the first time searches and Safari like shrank month over month. It just seems like there's general

chaos in big tech, whether it's Google potentially splitting up. 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, like, very well-run companies that are often in founder mode or have amazing management teams and fortress balance sheets? I forget whose law it is that you as a company shipped your org chart. Oh, yeah, I know that one. I'll look it up after. Yeah, yeah.

Reads law now. Yeah, reads law now. Yeah, it reads law too. I think the idea that AI will be a sustaining innovation, I think it's probably, it's probably far enough along now to call that mostly 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 in collaborating to move this 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 something that we are definitely seeing. And so small enough people can do so much more, and you aren't encumbered by shipping your org chart, because you are the org chart, right?

And you can just put out amazing experiences. And I think some of these big companies, what you see is, you know, 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. And it's funny because it shouldn't be using past tense.

We should be like, yeah, it's still great. Yeah. There's probably somebody- All of a sudden you guys are in trouble. It's like that's probably some app in the app store that's just notebook LM client that's like doing 10 million of error are. Yeah.

Yeah. We were talking about this idea that like, you know, there's the rapper, the ChachyPT 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 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 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? And it's like, I don't know what this administration is going to do, let alone the next one. Right? Like in the gestation period for these companies, it's sufficiently long that, like, what's going on today, I don't think really will be able to change your investment criteria today. 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 going to 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 going to do. Yeah. I was thinking about it more just from this idea that if, like, foundation model companies are not necessarily going to 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 X-AI merger, so social people. 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 Sony about this. Okay, we'll talk to you about that. And that present, she had a presentation based on this exact topic. Okay, great. And I could, you know, try to copy what you said and do a poor job.

Yeah, yeah. What were the other takeaways from... I assume you went to AISN? Oh, yeah. What were the good takeaways? Other than we found out that Jensen Wong's jacket is Farragamo. Oh, we did find that out. I know, I know.

It's leaked. It's leaked. It's leaked. It sold out everywhere. Yeah. It's sold out of Alfred. That was a great trade. Oh yeah, yeah, he did the jersey swap.

Jersey swap. Well, you're a best. Legendary, legendary. It's like, man, that's so cool. Hang it in the halls. Yeah. I would just leave at that point. You had a frame-back.

Yeah, frame it. I would like ossify it somehow, put it on a, you know. That's great. Yeah, I think Alfred's jacket was- Yeah, what's the state of the Sequoia merch team? Have you guys explored anything as unique as a jacket? Well, I was thinking for this one, you know, this is all of a sudden we can, we can somehow turn it

a statue and then just that's like an operating but we can sell that for it. Yeah, yeah. You don't see a lot of Sequoia merch floating out there. You guys are pretty hold it close to the chest. Very subtle. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But anyway, other takeaways from AISN, who's interesting? What was vibe-wise? It was, you know, it's so much, so much smaller than this room. Yeah, yeah. But I think vibe-wise, it was really amazing. We held it for a few years now

predating, I think, GPT3. Yep. And it's been, you know, a lot of the same sort of people, right? Like the 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 focused on like energy scale, data center build out or like new algorithms? Because a lot of people are scale-pilled, scales all you need, that are less in, Rich Sutton. And then on the flip side, there's some folks that are saying like, 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 just 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. Yeah. Yeah. Something that I've been trying to dig into more is, like, when are we going to see other models scale up to the size of, like, the big transformer from the GBT models? Yeah. Like, we feels like we're getting there with diffusion, certainly not there with robotics, even though some of the robotics companies are now saying, like, hey, we have the end-to-end

models. We have, you know, big data sets. And, but they're not yet talking about, we're building the massive data center. We're doing the 100K H-100s 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 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. Yeah, I read the book on walking. I read every book.

But there is something there where it's like, yeah, if you're training a 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, yeah, just walk. Yeah, yeah, it works. It just works.

So there's a way to do it, you know. Yeah, anything else before we move on? No, this is fantastic. This is fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping here. It's great. It's great. Yeah, great.

We'll see you. always a fun time with Andrew Reed from Seqlaas. Legendary investor. One of the greatest to ever do it. And we have our next guest... And still cooking. Still cooking.

Decided for the next 40 years. Yeah, I'm bummed we couldn't make the AIScent 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... What's going on?

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

Marty Ringline, CEO, co-founder of Agree.com. Great. And what is it agree.com? It's a better docket sign. The best part is it's totally free. So 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just brought it all together. Okay. 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. So it operates a lot like strike.

Sure, sure. I can't tell you how many times I feel like it's mostly with home services where I'm paying like for pest control. And I'm like signing, I'm, you know, I'm like signing something. And then I'm like, okay, like I'm ready, you know, again, I'm ready to pay. and then it's like, oh, well, like, Zell me or whatever. I'm just like, really like this should be all in one. What I'm curious what markets have you guys really focused on initially? We're at Figma, designers, agencies, freelancer, 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 SOC2 compliance quicker. So like delaying the invoice just doesn't make any sense, right? 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 kind of weird in 2025. Yeah. I got to ask, how did you get the domain? Yeah, so it was always agree. We knew that 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 missed said, he said, agree.com. It's like, oh, that could be a problem. He's got a nice ring to it. He's like, hey, did you ever go to a greed. I'm saying, no, 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. Sure.

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. Yeah, yeah. We will be like, yeah, I was at the beginning of that's great. That's great. Probably an early.com guy, I imagine, just sat on a bunch of domains. He picked it up a few years ago for like 75K at an auction.

Oh, wow. Okay, cool. Yeah, wow. What's the go-to-market been like? I imagine that there's some sort of like, 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. like how substantial that would be to us. So we launched the product, September 4th. In a month, there was 1,000 users. Wow. Hey, not bad. 30 days later, 10,000 users.

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. So 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

are vitally important to us. And then now, yeah, the go-to-market is 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 of yet

in terms of just employees? Oh, yeah, no. To run one of these businesses, typically it's five figures of employees, typically? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone likes to remind that Docu-Sign 7,000. That's how many it is? I chat GPTed it.

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. Not 8,000. Wow, doing the impossible. Doing the impossible. Better technology. Look at you guys, and they're like, we don't know how they do it.

That's right, that's right. Payments, too, we need to double it. Yeah, everyone always wonders, what are they all doing over there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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, you know, 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 staffs 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 that's 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 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 8, we got to do everything and anything to build the brand. Sure. So I'm big on. I saw some flyers that were just hanging out here. I've got a stack of flyers. I was like, oh, he's doing it. I've got an official partner. I've got a copy cart out front that I push and I make cold brew coffee.

That's great. People meet my co-founder will. Yeah, yeah. But this conference is going on, right? Thousands of people here. Totally. May 6th through 8 at Musconi West. It turns out Stripe Session.

is right across this tree. The same dates within the same block radius. In my ICP's here, why would I not be here? So what I did, 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 being 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.

That was yesterday. That was yesterday. Yeah, yeah. So this is perfect timing. We had closed three million precede 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 and just say, hey, let's just do it now. Yeah, 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. There we go. 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. 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, or doesn't this already... This feels pretty counterposition against DocuSign, right? Because, like, it would be a massive upending to their business model. It catalyzes their pricing model. No, no, no. I know it's highly disruptive. But, you know, if you look back somewhere around two years ago,

it felt like a lot of traditional SaaS. And we were, like, 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, you know, pricing model. Took a simple idea deadly serious. Exactly, exactly. So the biggest pushback was this is too obvious. Yeah.

Why doesn't this exist? Yeah. So, and that was a great question, because I'm like, glad you asked. Yeah, yeah. What I'll always say in the pitch at that point is this the last time we'll ever actually talk about DocuSign, because this is about payments. This is about big tax. 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 a signature. Sure, sure, sure. That would be disruptive. 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? Like, that would be really interesting. Well, hopefully they're not listening. Yeah, yeah. The problem is you still have to be really good at the industry. They have their conference right now. We're live. Yeah, they're busy, so they can't be listening. 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 long-time entrepreneur had a startup back in 2007 that got acquired by Twitter in 2012. Oh, cool. Had a few exits, a few other startups in between. But most pertinent to this one is me and two of the folks that worked with me even at that first company, we started up of fintech that got acquired by Brex. And Brex brought us into build-out expense management. Sure. Specifically, invoicing bill pay. And this is like right before we all meet our friend Chat GPT.

but before the GPT3 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. Gen.A.I. It 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, right, it's context-aware. So it can read the document and start to infer and imply things and fill in those gaps. That was huge unlock for us. Yeah. Were you at Twitter post-acquisition for a little bit? Yeah, I was at, no, 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. Yeah, because the site's still going down. They're 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 Tweety 2, so they didn't even have their own apps yet. They just got tweet deck and Tweety 2, so they're starting to get their own app. But this was the mantra of let's be mobile first. Yeah, yeah.

So we're watching them for the first time figure out what happens. That's crazy. Because that famous photo of when the plane lands in the Hudson, people forget, that's a tweet pit pit. Sully, right? Yeah, but that's not Twitter. That's tweet pick on Twitter. It's a separate because Twitter doesn't have photos.

Wow. Yeah, very, very decentralized back then. Now you can't even link out to anything. Oh, yeah. It's completely different. Yeah, now it's like, product for everything. You're not put agree.com in a post.

No. It hurts us. It hurts us. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Are you finding any luck with, like, the world of venture capital and startups sending safe notes around on a grid? So this one made it easy on the pitch.

Yeah. I didn't have to explain. the pain. All VCs are like, yeah, this is a miserable experience. Sure, sure, sure. I hate moving money with my bank. I don't like working with DocuSign. DocuSign's 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. Yeah. It's like, oh, that's an immediate 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, 4.7. Oh, yeah, you don't want to take 0.6% of that. Yeah. So the psychological moment for people is $50,000. Okay. If it's a $30,000 sash charge and you take 0.6, nobody really even noticed. Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah. 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 0.6. Yeah. 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 row bank, if I can plug them. But now it goes, they've just been so great to us. But it goes into a treasury account. I make, you know, greater than 4% interest on it.

Got it. You know what the rows, Mercury, Brex's take, 0.6%. Okay. So the agree, Act 2,

what's coming out this October, the agree count by default will be a treasury. Yeah. So we want founders doing their safes on the platform. We want all the money flowing through it. And then it would just make sense

just to leave it and agree. Don't, don't move it to a, another bank because 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 that. Interesting. That makes sense. Well, our next guest is here, micing 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 dockyside.

There we go. There's a point. I feel like you're going to get a season to some point. I can't wait to tweet that season. There's something, you know, they're something weird about startups that, like, 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 love it. It's all 7,000. It's going to find employees. Why are you 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 documents.

Very nice. Just one block from our HQ. That's, putting the heat on them. I'm poking the bear. We're going to see what happens. Poked the bear. Thanks for having to get on a lot. 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 our products. It's interesting.

I feel like it's the treasury functionality. I feel like it makes sense potentially for if you're like an S&B. Yeah. But if you're a startup that raises through like a DocuSign like product, are you going to 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, I'm very bullish on the product overall. Good to meet you. What's happening? You too, hi. Hi. You can throw on headphones if you want to hear yourself. Are we twins?

Yeah. We're brothers. We're not related, actually. We're not actually related. Yeah. You guys look so much alike. It'll be easier. You can adjust.

But 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 30, a couple things. Amazing. Just a couple things. Why don't you go say a few more?

Just because the first few were so impressive. And a few thousand commercials. And Detroit. A few other movies. I have a new Catherine Biggillo movie coming out. Oh, cool. In the fall on Netflix. Awesome.

We're just finishing that up now. Where are you based normally? Los Angeles. Nice. So are we. Talk me through. I never worked there. I moved from Toronto 19 years ago to work in L.A.

And then you'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, like, certain projects like ZERDIC 30, you need to. You're always going to need to travel. It's just now that there's a, you know, other than...

But Severance feels like something you could film in L.A. So, no, so we shoot out in New York because Ben Stiller lives in New York. Okay, sure. Which is awesome. Yeah, yeah. So we're not going too far. 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 should have done more to prevent? Oh, my God. Yeah. It's been bleeding for years. Yeah.

Yeah. the tariffs on foreign films news came out Sunday, and I forget the guy's name who was kind of spearheading that. John Boyd. You were saying, like, these other countries, you know, it was like the local state and county leadership in L.A. 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 in 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. Oh, interesting. I'm not sure they were paying attention.

You know, and they saw that, and I don't know, but if, like, 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.

It's, the stages, I think it's I've heard 40% empty. I mean, we're... No, we've been looking for, like, effectively a sound stage, new studio space, and we found a space that we like that. Everything's empty. 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'm just like, you realize I've been in the 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, this is a big deal for you. No, there's something wrong for you. 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, directors. That's the big money. 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.

You know, if an actor's $25 million, they don't cover that part. Okay. But now New Jersey is covering that part for Netflix. Like, certain people have their own deals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's where the real money is. The state of New Jersey. He's giving a tax write-off for that?

Like a certain part of above the line, yeah. Wow. Yeah, and a bigger, because a lot of them are capped at like half a million. Sure. It doesn't save you much when someone's getting 30 million on a movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And see, you have two or three of those people. Yeah. That's the big chunk of money that it's a lot.

And, I mean, career-wise, for most people, I know, everyone's making the same money they made 10, 15 years ago. Yeah. 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a good number. I'm not complaining, but it's not what people. It's the same number. Yeah, yeah. It's wild. It's interesting. And they still go, that's, you know, it's, but it hasn't caught up in a lot of ways.

And I'm not asking, I have a nice life. Yeah. It's more I just like to be home sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. 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? Like, what is your process? I mean, basically severance is, you know, it was, when Ben sent it to me, it was two scripts. There was only two scripts for the first 10 episodes. Sure. And tonally, it was really nothing there.

It was very funny. And it was a great concept. Like this people will want to be severed. It kind of scares me. Yeah, yeah. I could go, well, you know, half of my friends want this. Yeah. If they could get it.

And, but it didn't have a look to it. Sure. So I wasn't, 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 red it was the same sort of tone like that feel

and I was like I don't really it's not my thing I want to do cinema I want to do something really visual 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 look book of what I thought it would look like and like if you want to do this 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 the eyeball, 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 never even see it. My son didn't even know what it was. He's 20. He still doesn't know what a trackball is, really. So I was trying to like, that's, the initial part is really conceptually, what does the world look like?

And then I really always start everything with a researcher. Her and I, we just bang stuff out for a while, and then I start 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 servants. 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, oh, we're filming with Cook lenses or ARIA and it gets expensive. But on the production side, you know, not to degrade it, but it does feel like it's a desk. How expensive can it be? Well, it's five stages of set. Sure.

It's a lot of that. It's a lot of... It's a lot of shows, like, say, Parks and Rec, it's one set. Yeah. The entire show. The entire... Speaking of a lot of sets. That makes sense.

The rehearsal. That's a lot of sets. A lot. I mean, every new scene is like... Like the amount of sets and then the amount of actress that come in and the amount of time it takes to shoot all those sets of pre-light and camera tests. And the lighting probably gets more expensive as you're going for a more cinematic look. Yeah.

Right? As opposed to just... Because we have sets that, you know, the birthing cabinet in season two. Yeah. We built it. It's only in one scene. Wow. Yeah.

But it's a particular scene. 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 go to, we should in. Utica, we shot in Newfoundland, we're all over the place because I can't have somebody know that train station. Yeah.

Can't know it. And then we alter so much of a later. You're fine to take a location that's unique and maybe hasn't been, you know, 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, I would say, we're in Poland for all I know. Like nobody knows. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. 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, what 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 get to the way we like the set looks the way we all think it should shoot. Sure. 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 both storyboard like crazy together. Like we're really tight and very opinionated. 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 eagles. 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 dust 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, it just, the script said four desks, large room. Yep.

And I was like, it has to be, this is like, I kind of treat it like a spaceship. Yeah. It's like the control room of Star Trek, right? 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. Yeah. So I'm like, the desk has to be, let's, let's build this desk that's very interactive. They're like five-year-olds.

We treat them like once they're, 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 like kind of like a playground.

But I want them be able to jump on it. Like, 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 there's, 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 end. They are amazing. And that, the one in Grand Central was... Based on...

Yeah, it's all based on what we do. And then they, but they're really interesting how they take it to the next level. That one worked out really well, well, worked not in a good way, but the fires, so the premier was canceled because of the fires in L.A. Yeah. So that was happening at the same time. and all the actress 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, I wasn't there.

I didn't know they were going. And the cast event. 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 something.

Have you been to the Apple website? Is it still? Yeah, if you click on it, it's the first computer they sell. I don't know if they still have it. Their IKEA started making the desk. Like in Austria, they issued it first. Yeah. It's on the cover of IKEA.

Yeah, but is that, is it 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've I mean, I love, the process is the best part. Yeah. I mean, Top Gun was hilariously fun. Cerrodoch 30 was amazing challenge. They're all, it's about, for me, it's the experience of, it's a year or two of my life. The people I'm with, like, I'm so particular who I work with.

It's like, you better be, they better be interesting because why are you going to spend your time with them? That's really for me what it is. What it goes out into the world, what people make it is, I mean, this is exciting to watch. But not unlike Topka, was excited to watch. You must appreciate, you know, product design is really hard, right? There's no doubt about that, but somebody can have an idea for a project. 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 you're like, oh, we need to design this entire scene and we're gonna need to import, you know, wood from, you know, this, this region and that's just a very different. Well, it's also AI's 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 need to need money to make stuff. I have some, my ideas just fall out of me. And the older I get, the more I have. You want humanoid robots that can, you know, assemble. I really just want, you know, support. Yeah, you know, really we just want artists that we can, we're making art. Yeah, which is amazing. And it's not, actually, a robot wouldn't work for me.

I need the person who has an opinion. Like I have this amazing sculptor who does all the sculptures. He's full time. I've never had a full-time sculptor. Wow. I could go, Panko, make, let's make this, let's make a bust. Let's make this piece of art. Yeah.

He makes it in a day. Wow. And it's all in his head. It's created. It has that human touch. And it has, yeah, and it has his heart. And it has, I love that. And it's not necessarily what I wanted.

It's, I want what they want, too. Sure, sure, sure. Put that inspiration. Where there's so much doom and gloom in the movie industry. No, not the world. Not here. The world is. It's great.

No, but specifically in entertainment, you know, filmmaking. It is pretty gloomy these things. It is gloomy. Yeah. 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 was any of the poster with a gun on it, I just, I find it really sad.

Yeah. And I really, I miss John Hughes. Like, 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, yeah. We do have a lot of John Wick. We were talking earlier the need for positive science fiction, right? You can still have a dramatic storyline. Futuristic, but not dystopian, not cyberpunk necessarily, maybe solar punk. 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 imagine that the nature of an aircraft carrier plays into the production design,

production design even when you're on a sound stage. And there's less things that you have full control over. But how did you think about that in the context of Top Gun or Zero Dark 30, similar where, you know, 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 Somabed-Benlon compound. It's the size of this whole area. It's massive. That's amazing. I'm like, why wouldn't we build it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was 300 people laying bricks. for six weeks, just, it was a factory line.

It was amazing. All these Egyptian bricklayers. It was incredible. Like, I, we built the Jedon Top Gun. Like, if, I just don't think you can't do it. Yeah, yeah. I have zero understanding of no or why not. Like, I always go, why not?

And they go, why? And I'm like, I said, why not? They're doing it. Showbiz. What about, 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. on everything. It is, and I do a lot of cleanup now. Because 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 and the studio producers, it's hard because that bag of money hasn't been put aside until people are

just starting to, like, I'm like, put it away. Let's commit to this amount of money and that money. How much of your process is a dance with the, you know, whoever's funding project where you're just trying to understand you're like dancing with a bowl, right? You know, where you're like, you know, trying to figure out if I, if I push the budget, you know, 15%, maybe they'll be fine, but if I take it, you know, 22%. You know, you kind of can read a room like anybody, like, you know, and I love just, I'm just like, let's just talk to them. Let's, can I just, how about I just pitch, let them see it?

And then if they say no, they say no. You get a nose 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 it's just how it works. And 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. You can't. How confident are you

film is television, it's a hits business. How confident are you, you know, during your process around what the, you know, commercial,

you know, 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. You have to just kind of... He said, just let go. You have to let go. Just pick a movie. the people you love to work with and forget about it. Because, you know, he did, you know, silence with Marty.

And, you know, 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. And you just can't predict what people are going to like. And honestly, you just have to not care. I couldn't care of us.

Yeah. You'd love to care. Like, wouldn't we all love to care of 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 want to 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 Lassow. 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. Yeah.

I mean, our goal is, that it would bleed over, but our goal is really, we are, we, when I, like, Justin Bell and I really wanted to make a movie. Yeah. A 10-hour movie. Yeah. And another 10-hour movie. Yeah, that's great.

Because everyone has a huge, like, I have a 140-inch screen at home. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I can buy one for 500 bucks, projected on your wall. It's still amazing. Yeah. 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 screen Severance, episode 10, at the Dolby Theater a couple weeks ago, for 3,000 people, and it was like the Rocky Horror Picture show. How would you...

At the Dolby Theater? Wow. That's incredible. How would you fix the theater industrial complex because the sort of 100% tariffs on foreign films plan involved government's 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 going to go out on a limb, and I don't think the reason our theaters are suffering is because they haven't had a new toilet in, you know, 20 years. I honestly, I don't, I think everybody just wants, like, companies want this guarantee they're going to make money. They've got to take risk. Yeah, yeah. You know, so you fail. I'm sorry.

I fail all the time. Yeah. It's what we do. Humans are, failures, works, and sometimes it doesn't. It's like, so you have, like, their odds are still going to be good. Yeah. Like, 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 back. It would be sold out. You could sell it out for a week. Yeah. 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 at her with their friends. Amazing. Everybody was doing it. It's like, that's what Rocky Horror Picture Show was like when I was, like, 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 communally watch something and then talk about it and hang out on the street. On that note, do you have a take on... You guys have to get it back. That's the thing is you have to demand it. Sure. John organizes movie nights.

Yeah, I actually organized movie nights with all my friends. And I just tech to... gets 20 tickets. Everyone in Los Angeles, I get 20 tickets. I text everyone in my phone who's in town. So, hey, do you want to 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 in the movies. But I think that's the thing is I don't think that they're, look, 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. that'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 people don't want to sit at home. You go to Paris. The movie houses are packed.

Every little theater's jammed all the time. Yeah, yeah. You will go if they're available. I've actually been surprised. I mean, we're a technology and business-focused 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? It's something that's like well designed and has healthy snacks and food.

I'm so tired of the food, isn't it awful? Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a big part of it. It's like I haven't eaten movie theater. Yeah, Arclight was that a little bit in L.A. and aloe drop-dolls. A lot of them, they end up focusing too much on avant-garde film and all that. You just want to, you know, if they were just playing. Yeah, I do feel like, yeah, mixing in the hits and creating these 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.

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. 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.

If you guys want to, I hope someone starts an app and I'll give you the idea away for 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 just get sent the same stuff.

It's awful. Yeah. There's so many good, like join the criterion collection, which not enough 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 other, 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 him. 10 bucks a month. I know. Yeah. I love the same price of a coffee with a tip.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got to get them 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 have, 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, you know, 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 that 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. I mean, honestly, this is a fun set. Do this. Do this at large.

Yeah, that's cool. I mean, I think the cool thing is to make it really what it's real. Those sets are, they're just designed for, all they care about is their logo. It's so boring. Like, make something, like, I remember Letterman. Ledermer 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, doesn't have to be expensive. No one cares. Just make it fun. Fun is key. Back at our home studio, we have a range of exotic sound effects. Yeah, we're building the soundboard, but we also have props. We have a tinfoil hat for when we're talking about conspiracies.

We have a crystal ball that we pull out. We have bottles of champagne and books. We've kind of built this whole library. Come back and hang with us in the new studio. I love it. I live in Studio City. Oh, fantastic. Just go to CBS Radford.

It's the best. CBS Radford? What's that? It's Laurel and Ventura. Okay, maybe we should check that out. It's where they shot Parks at Rick. It's where they shot Gilligan's Island. I mean, everybody.

The other CBS is a place we were looking at. We were looking at Television City. 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 public. 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 all good. It's a lot of. audience, people go in all the time.

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. I know it's funny.

I tell all my kids, like all their friends. France. You just have to do what we did. You have to knock on doors. Knock on doors. Like my son's graduating from LMEU right now. Yeah, yeah. He's interviewing for these jobs that have five positions, 8,000 applicants. Wow, yeah. That's the, what's he want to do? He's in marketing and, you know, marketing for something like event planning or film promotion or he was working, he was interviewing. Connect us. Connect us. Connect us. Yeah, 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 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.

Exactly. And you know who you don't want to hang out with. Totally. Yeah, 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 a coffee shop.

You can just tell. Like, there's a million things. There's style. 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 Tetis 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. It's my biggest reference for Severance was, was, there's artists. Like, there's cardboard cut us as people in the back. Wait till you see the airplane. Yeah, yeah. Just wait to you see it. Okay, awesome.

And it's, it was all his own money. Yeah, yeah. He went bankrupt. And nobody watched it. And it's like now there's books. 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. Doesn't see it. Wait, so when does Metropolis actually release? It's out. It's out. And it bombed, right? Yeah. But it was long.

I can't watch it for 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,

you guys didn't watch this? People like, but in a weird way, people. People like White Lotus because it's like watching their own family vacation. Yeah, it's like. Isn't amazing? But that's different. Yeah, White Lotus feels like being at a luxury resort and just eavesdropping on everyone and their lives are far.

But you're doing great. More than eavesdropping. I know. You're sitting there a whole time going, God, I'm so lucky. 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 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 two, he, he, he is giving notes that he shouldn't.

Yeah. And then episode three is he has to give a note, but can't bring himself to. And it showed that, you know, it's not just a, 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 important. I mean, I think it has to be true. Because they're all cess experiences.

He's regurgitated. Yeah, of course. And I have friends who have, you know, pitched me. I don't do, I don't have that sort of relationship with studios. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but a lot of my director friends who've pitched and pitched and they laugh. They know, they're like, oh, my God, that's that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's based on real people. Yeah, yeah, 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. Yeah.

Like the one episode four, I felt like Matt, I had a murder mystery. Yeah, yeah, totally. You know, he's, I get what he's doing. He's just trying to be fun. Yeah, yeah. Which is cool. 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? Yeah, we got to get a shot. The jet for top gun. It took me a lot of time. How did that work? You built it, right? Yeah. And everyone can say, no, no.

But you build it out of. I'm like, now you get why the F-35 is a $300. You know, it was only, I think it was about three months. 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, yeah, but we also built it to be real, real at China Lake. And Tom, see, I wanted Tom to be able to touch it, yeah, see it, interact with it. Yeah. It gets in it, we tow it out. Yeah. All the way till it takes off is all real. Wow. And I'm like, I'm just a believer, everything

should be real. And, you know, I, there's some feedback. I was like, well, we can do, we can do, we can, we just going to change it. We love it. We love it. If we make it, that's it. That's it. You have to find certain directors that can commit to that too. A lot of directors want to change it. So producers are like, we're not going to pay for this. He's going to change it anyways. We didn't change anything.

And there's a unique dynamic with Tom Cruise specifically, correct? Because I've heard like he even has his own insurance so he can do stunts, but can you unpack what's like to work with him? So when we did the cockpit, like we built, you basically, you know, when you do something like that, especially with Tom or you have to build plywood versions. So you build it to make sure, because Tom's an amazing pilot. So we built it in this wooden cockpit and with the wooden windows and the template and he's like, it's not comfortable guys, we've got to make it comfortable like, yeah, we know it's a plywood.

But he's really out of it. He's going to be in there a lot. It's going to 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 a pilot, that's where he is a pilot. Yeah, he is. Oh, no, I would put it there. So it's all, so when he's, so when he's, He's in that mode. He's perfect because it's so custom to him. And the inside cockpit, we did it with Skunk Works. We had a whole deal with Skunk Works.

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 $2, 3 million that are from prototypes. Wow. 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 it's just, that part's amazing. It's such a little touch, but you know it just goes a little bit further. 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 like, there's so much we won't see.

And I'm like, but you're seeing it. Yeah, yeah. And they're using it. And it's not just for the audience to see it all. Yeah. If they walk into this bonker set and it's all feels real and there's things to do, they just get lost like you naturally would. Yeah. 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. Yeah. It's like, because if you do, she will shoot that other half. And it'll be in the movie. And it'll be wrong. You got to 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. Yeah, yeah.

My friend Patrice won for Dune last year. I don't know who won this. Okay. I can't remember. Yeah, that's a big award. I thought there was, there's one category that I feel like people get stuck. This will be an Emmy for Chevron. There you go.

I hate to cut this interview short. This is really fun. Oh, I love it. It's amazing. Yeah, it's fun. I'll happily do it together. Yeah, this would be great. You'll be in my home.

I'll drive my best put down in busy, you guys. Oh, fantastic. You can drive it on, drive it onto the set. Do a burnout on the set. Don't go west side. It's too damn. No. No.

We're going to Hollywood. Nice. We're bringing media to Hollywood. Yeah. All right. We're getting 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.

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. 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. 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 we'll be, yeah. 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 Nairie, who are Dodgian. 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. Yep. We had, we had Andrew Reed on from, oh, good. From Sequoia earlier, and he said that a few years ago, they were giving Dylan a standing ovation for, and the team for a font picker.

And to see this year, it's, you know, make, sites, you know, buzz. Oh my God, I remember in 2022, it was a dark mode. Was, like, similar? Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm so excited, but now it's like whole... And it's just been really amazing to see the response so far already, and we're excited to see them 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. 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 today? I mean, Figma can be really good for figuring out your wedding seating, so I don't want to discount that use space, but in general, we're really serving people who are making software. Yeah, yeah.

So going from idea to product and all the tools that they need to be able to do that. And, you know, 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, go from idea to product, and AI is changing that. And so we really think of serving that entire development. No, it's crazy.

The entire org chart can now make things. Totally. Which is insane. Like the idea that someone in legal could create a marketing asset or, you know, some type of material for hire. You know, it's pretty unheard of. Yeah, even just like a one-off internal tool to 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 know an audience or a customer base but you know 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 like all all descending here and you don't get that without you know people and these aren't you know 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, comm specifically at Pigma, 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 day. and you know I think because Figma 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 you know 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 like, you know, an interesting problem to have. Shoulder to shoulder. It's like more of a Coachella. Yeah, it was not easy for folks to get in and around.

And so we heard that, and I think it feels like 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 can put in there, I think. Can you talk about the tradeoffs between batching these four product

releases into one big event versus splitting it up? You could imagine like quarterly releases. There's obviously tradeoffs there in the age of the internet. There's a lot of demand on companies to just hey, as soon as this 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 like the Apple-like annual release and there's something beneficial from a commas 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. 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 lived. 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. Interesting. If he could go back again and the advice he gives 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's, 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. The more people get their hands on it. Can you walk me through some of the other, like, comm's best practices from amplifying an event like this? Like obviously, we're here having fun in the new media streaming, very different world, but I imagine that 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, like, getting attention at the figment's level?

Well, because this is an event for and 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, like, the other events that are, you know, the constellation around config. Like, 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.

I'm sure people joined not knowing what it was, tried to join not knowing what it was for, just being like, totally. That 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 Pop Crave on here, but, you know, the Des Mois, the Pop Craves, and there will be Stan accounts that sort of get to feature celebrities.

There was, for us, our celebrities. Even this morning, there was a bunch of really funny posts. Yeah. Celebrities here are our community, right? 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big Pal, CGI video. Yeah, there's just like, you know, Godzilla, Ottawa. 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 max attention. Makes sense. Yeah. I mean, it's your first config. Tell me what you all think. It feels like being at Coachella. Yeah, it really does.

It feels like being at a music festival. Yeah, that'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 like production sort of set. Isn't he awesome? Yeah, it's great.

He's so fun. He's going to do a great talk later today. Yeah, I'm very excited for that. We didn't even get to like how does he use Figma at all or like what his, 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 my config? The production designer from Severance.

And we were like, we've got you. You can just tell, like, the dedication to the craft and the 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 both at TBPN of just what it enables, just that speed of iteration. I think 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 like 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 like a week. And then you're like, can you do it in two days? And then it's like, you really want it like that day.

There's so many of these ideas that are effectively like memes. Like they're one-off web pages that don't, 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 web page, it plays a song that identifies with that fund. You go to Andrews and Horowitz, American Dynamism is going to play like Free Bird or something. Yeah, yeah.

But there's this idea. It's like that's not something that you would want to actually spend some developers time on. Yeah, but like ephemeral apps, websites, this idea of apps as memes, right, of like how many times? 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. You know, I want to reshare it, but like the logo is not quite right. Yeah, we need to manage all that.

So maybe figuring out a way to make buzz. I was going to say you can use buzz for that. that too and then see what people make for you. Yeah. Meme, you guys. Yeah, that would be great. Got to be getting memed. Yeah, all the time.

Rise of the meme. I love it. How are you feeling for, you guys are headed to London. London. We are. Last year, right after ConfigSF, we took Config to Singapore. Okay. This year it's London.

We're excited. Is it a lot of the same, like, 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. That makes sense.

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

It already has. We have to walk and chew out always. Our configs are measured in centuries. But it's fun. You know, I think there are great moments in company's lives that, like, 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, 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. 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. There's Dylan on the Today Show after he became a Teal Fellow with his mom. No way. Another good one. Okay. The third best is in the early, 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. No way. Those are some good videos from the early days I can share with you. She will, I'm sure, always regret that decision. That's hilarious. We wish her well. But that video was so good. We showed it at our 10 years. That's like the equivalent for like an intern is like when the like the NBA general commissioner like team team coach goes to like the parents and sits them down and says like hey we want them to join the join the team or something or like college recruiting even more than that yeah even more brutal uh yeah don't did a lot of child acting there's so there's so much good

lore around that like eric lyman 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, is telling all these jokes and, like, getting an uproarious applause from everyone. It's remarkable. And then, of course, Scott

Wu at Cognition has that video of him doing, like, the most complex math imaginable as, like a child. What are, what about, what do you all have in your in your closet? That's tough. That's something then meme those. Yeah, totally.

For 2025. Yes. I'm trying to think, if I, when was my, there's probably a video interview from like my first company years ago, but I don't think it was too embarrassing. Okay. I don't have anything embarrassing. The, um, one, I, my mom was a, was a graphic designer. Yeah. Oh, cool.

So my earliest memories doing design in a business context were working with her. These were like the Photoshop years and I have like pictures. So I had a skateboard company when I was 12 and I have pictures of me like holding up, you know, the finished product. But 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, he had to wear a suit. Yeah, yeah, I did actually wear a suit. very embarrassing. Anyway.

I do feel a little underdress compared to you too. 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 L.A. We had a meeting Monday and we showed up to Melk in not for the event, but meeting somebody there and we didn't have our suits on.

I had a suit. Oh, you had a jacket. I didn't have a jacket. And then we were at Hill and Valley in D.C. That was very right at home. Right at home. Everyone. That was all of us Silicon Valley.

people putting on suits for the first time in years. Yeah. And all the D.C. people are already in. 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. No. The joke is that you know you're at Hillen Valley when everyone has their business cards in their suits from the last time they were there because they only go to D.C. once a year for Hellen Valley. Anyway, we're getting a hard stop. So we're going to wrap up. Hard stop in four minutes. Yeah. But thank you so much for hopping on.

Guys, thanks for fantastic. To be clear, I think we're, I think we're getting booted from, like, for some reason. Otherwise, we'd keep podcasting. Yeah, I mean, we got another four hours in us. We got at least another four hours. Honestly, we're not used to being on couches. It is a little bit different. Comfy?

Well, it's comfy. I think we can, 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, yeah, yeah, yeah. The international travel, we have yet to take the show on the road internationally. We've done Miami, we've done D.C., San Francisco now.

So check in the boxes. We'll get out. We'll get out there. 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. I'm back with breaking news on the show. I'd love to. Maybe, I don't know, where, we're, San Chopi or. Sure. John just wants it to align with 2026 summer plans. Exactly. Sorry.

Sorry, John. Lake Como. I'm on Gehry. Yeah. For a more intimate setting. I think we may not be the. right, you know, company conference for those locations, but, um, I mean, Singapore is very nice. London was great. Um, you know, you should, maybe Cam Lyon needs to have TBPN. Yeah,

that'd be great. That's what you need. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be great. That'd be fantastic. I feel that for you. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. We will, we'll see you after the, after the show. Thank you so much. Uh, 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 the severance, not every day that you see a technology and business show do both. But we are men of many talents.

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 going to be closer to seven. Seven. Do we want to leak it? I don't think we should leak it yet, but we have. I don't want to go.

But we are hoping to get some great people for. from the government as well as our first post game of a major public company. Post earnings. Post earnings. Yeah. We're very excited about. And so we're gonna be digging into that,

kind of cutting our teeth in the post earnings game, which we wanna get more into. And so stick with us. It's absolutely stacked. It'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 going to 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.