TBPN - LIVE FROM NYSE FOR $FIG | Dylan Field, Lynn Martin, Kris Rasmussen, Andrew Reed, Danny Rimer, Mamoon Hamid

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

(38:35) - Andrew Reed, a partner at Sequoia Capital, reflects on Figma's journey from its early days to its successful IPO. He highlights the company's meticulous attention to detail, evident in their product development and the recent New York Stock Exchange debut. Reed also discusses the evolving role of creative technologists and the impact of AI on organizational design, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and innovation in the tech industry. (53:25) - Kris Rasmussen, CTO at Figma, discusses his journey from contractor to CTO, highlighting the company's collaborative culture and the technical challenges of building a real-time, browser-based design tool. He emphasizes the importance of integrating AI to enhance designer efficiency and the necessity of fostering a culture where roles are flexible, allowing team members to tackle challenges beyond their defined positions. (01:04:40) - Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures, has been instrumental in investments in companies like Figma, Dropbox, and Etsy. He discusses Index's early investment in Figma, highlighting their contrarian approach to the company's extended development timeline and the importance of talent in driving success. Rimer also emphasizes the significance of human intervention in design and the firm's commitment to maintaining a focused, small-scale investment strategy. (01:15:23) - Mamoon Hamid, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, discusses his 2017 investment in Figma, highlighting the company's strong user engagement and the strategic selection of board members to support its growth. He also emphasizes Figma's timely integration of AI features, enhancing its design platform's capabilities. (01:25:03) - Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, a web-based vector graphics editing software company, discusses the company's recent product updates, including the introduction of offset vectors and enhancements to Dev Mode MCP, which facilitates translating designs into code. He emphasizes the importance of design as a critical differentiator in the software industry, highlighting its evolution from mere aesthetics to a fundamental component of business success. Field also reflects on organizational design in the age of AI, advocating for a blend of research and product applications to drive innovation and adaptability. (01:45:35) - Lynn Martin, the 68th president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the second woman to lead the exchange, discusses the recent surge in IPO activity, highlighting successful listings such as Figma, Circle, and Hinge Health. She emphasizes the NYSE's unique market model, which includes human oversight to stabilize stocks during their debut, and underscores the importance of technology in maintaining efficient and transparent markets. Martin also reflects on her journey from a technologist at IBM to leading the NYSE, attributing her success to embracing challenges and continuous learning. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight 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.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, July 31st, 2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange. It's the Pigma IPO. The Fortress of Finance. This is the real Fortress of Finance. We have created a simulacrum of the fortress of finance in Hollywood, California. But today we're in New York City. We're in Manhattan. We're in the financial district. We're on Wall Street at the New York Stock Exchange. And the mood is electric. It is wild. Just down here a second ago, there was a, there was a. crowd breaking out cheering. Yes. And it is really a sight to see. Yes. So Figma is going public today and earlier today, Dylan Field and the Figma team rang the bell to open the market. And then throughout the course of the day, the market is in the process of filling orders and actually taking the stock public and getting liquidity into the stock. And I will say Figma has really made this place their own. Every single floor in space in this building has been designed. Yes, yes, yes.

Which makes sense. They're taking design public. There's little like graphics on the floor. There's every single, every single digital billboard has been done up with a motion graphic treatment. Even signs pointing you around the building. The merch. They made merch for, I guess this is the process that they do, but they made merch for a bunch

of the employees in the building and they're all wearing it. It looks stunning. I want it for myself. Everyone's very happy. And it's just absolutely incredible to be here. So we will be interviewing a number of people today in and around the Figma IPO, taking you through the story of what's unfolding here on the ground. Some guy with the username Zoink.

He's got an NFT profile picture. Yeah, yeah. I think his name might be, oh, his name is Dylan Field. Dylan Field will be joining the show. Very excited for that. Chris, the CTO of Figma, will be joining as well. Great. Of course, Andrew Reed, a friend of the show and former guests will be joining from Sequo.

and then Danny from Index. Danny Reimer. Mahmoon from Kleiner Perkins. And last but not least, Lynn Martin from the New York Stock Exchange itself. Fantastic. So we should have about a 90 minute show for you. We are going to say thanks to our sponsors now. Thank you to Ramp.Ramp.com.

Time is money. Say both. Thank you to Figma, one of our sponsors. We're very proud to be partnering with them. Vanta. You can go to vanta.com. Linear. linear.

Linear.app. Graphite. of course. Wander, you can find your happy place at Wander.com. Public.com, if you're looking to trade public securities, adquick.com, out of home advertising, made easy and measurable. Bezzle, go to getbezzle.com, numeralhq.com, adio.com, thin.aI.i. And of course, restream, which wouldn't, which the stream wouldn't be possible without. So, without further ado, let's take you through what else is in the news so then we can dive more deeply into the Figma IPO. So we covered this.

A little bit distracting, everybody keeps breaking out into applause. People are really, really happy. It's, we'll get into some of the timeline and what's going on. For me, on a personal level, I mean, I'll start this off by saying nothing on today's show is financial advice. Yes. We're not qualified to get financial advice. We're qualified, but I do feel qualified to talk about the product. I was lucky, I've basically been lucky to spend my entire career using product.

Here we go. And I can't even hear myself because people are. You got to yell into the mic. They're really, they're, yep. So, yeah, we'll share some photos, but I think it's opening. Fantastic. So, yeah, you were going to talk about your journey using Figma. It's a real overnight success.

So the stock is officially open. Here we go. Everyone's excited. You can hear it. And people on X are celebrating. They maybe got access to one share. Yes, yes. They're having trouble with the listings.

But the excitement. is palpable across both the online and offline world. We're seeing it here. Yeah, and there's so many people that wanted to invest in this business forever. Totally, rounds ago. Totally. In the private markets. And it's,

even public companies wanted to invest in Figma at one point. Yes, yes, do a little bit more than the best. Yes, yes, yes. But anyways. But now it's public. I was going to say, I mean, the context here is very surreal for me.

I've been lucky. I don't really know a time before Figma. Yeah. Sketch was like kind of on the way. out. I used it, you know, here and there early in my career, but I've been in Figma every single day. As somebody that never identified as a designer, I'm more of an ideas guy, more of a product guy. Sure. And it's just been with me throughout my entire career. And someone was saying on the timeline, I think it was Norgarty was saying, you can tell what a product's made with love.

And despite Figma, you know, growing and launching so many different products over the years, you can just tell that the people that design and build Figma care so much about the people that use the products. Totally. Yeah. A true overnight success. Four years working. Four years grinding to get to launch. Fat MVP, as they call it. And then another decade or so building the product and the customer base and launching a lot of products. So what a fantastic journey. I remember like learning about Dylan Field is this like, you know, Teal Fellow Wunderkin and seeing that the product was growing And they were always getting rounds done, but they were never like the totally frothy company. It was just like compounding compounding.

They never looking, I pulled it up earlier. So index did the seed round. Yeah. And somebody, uh, Terrence Rohan, I guess was in there as well. Yeah. I'm so I'm sure he's, he's doing well today. Yep. Uh, and then Greylock did the series A.

But the seed round was three point eight million, uh, somewhat of a modest seed. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the series A was by Greylock for 14 million in total. Yeah. KP did the B, a $25 million round. Andrew Reed and Sequoia came in and did 40 and then the series D was 50.

And then the other thing is, I believe it was GC and iconic that did the round in 2022. Okay. I'm going to look it up. Sure. But anyways, the vibes here on Wall Street are good. They are. They are. But it's not just stigma. The timing is remarkable because, I mean, yesterday we got news.

that the US GDP grew at 3%, which beat estimates. And so the economy has returned to growth is on the front of the Wall Street Journal, of course. We covered this a little bit yesterday, but obviously a good environment. People were talking about, like, will the IPO window open? And it kind of opened months ago,

but people were still not declaring it fully open because it felt like, oh, this is one special company that's sneaking out. This is just one, maybe this is just one off. Or core weave, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Exactly. Stable coins.

Yep. And now it's like, okay, well, all of the companies that make sense are now going public. And it's really exciting soon. Yeah. And there were some commentary earlier on the timeline people talking about more companies need to be taking advantage of this moment. Sure. Right. There's a lot of companies that probably, you know, the window's wide open, right?

It is. It is. If it makes sense. But it doesn't make sense for every company to go public for a variety of reasons. And the bar is just so high now. It is. Part of what makes the Figma IPO special is just looking at the rule of 40 and just looking at their business. as broadly, it's coming out and day one being one of the most impressive companies in SAS.

Yeah. Yeah. And then the other news is that the Fed has kept rates steady over rare dissents. Two of the members of the Fed said, no, we should lower rates, but they were overruled. And the Fed kept rates high. And this is interesting because you'd think if they cut rates, we'd see the market ripping even more. The market's already ripping, which is kind of like, it feels like a little bit of like a safety deposit by. like a rainy day fund that if something doesn't go well in the markets, there's still that lever to pull. And so it feels reassuring that the economy's growing well.

We're also seeing big tech earnings perform very well. And then we also have high rates. So there's a number of lever, like the health of the consumer is strong, unemployment's doing well. There's just good news all across the economy, which I feel like we've been dancing around from one, one bull case, one minor story, one sliver of hope for a while. now we're really firing on all servers. Big tech, big tech, big tech having just blow out earnings yesterday. You know what they call Figmet, Big Deck? Big Tech. I've made so many decks in

Pygma, you wouldn't believe. But yeah, big tech just blowing out earnings, Microsoft, meta, et cetera, certainly doesn't hurt. Yeah, I saw the, I saw the headline number. We talked about Google having something like $100 billion in cloud backlog. So if they could fill it today, they could just make $100 billion. I mean, these might be longer dated contracts. People might not want them. We talked about this. This is kind of business.

This is not financial advice, but business advice. You build up a $100 billion customer backlog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Demand backlog. Just do that. Just do that. Yeah, especially in time. Focus on that.

Everything else will kind of solve itself. Yeah, the share price will take care of itself at that point. So Google's been doing very well. Apparently Azure and Microsoft Cloud has an even larger backlog, something around 300 billion I was seeing. I'm not sure. But the Wall Street Journal is breaking down Microsoft's cloud business, which is driving a lot of the profits.

That makes sense in the age of AI and every company. And the relationship with open AI. Exactly. And so the Walser Journal kicks off by saying demand for Microsoft's artificial intelligence services continues to pay off for the company. Its cloud computing units saw another high growth quarter while the tech giant spends heavily on building out its AI data centers. Now there has been some timeline and turmoil over whether or not the depreciation is, the

depreciation calculations are too aggressive for some of the high-preciation. for scalers. So I was talking about meta specifically. But I'm, when I was reading into it, a lot of people were saying like, no, the depreciation schedule is widely disclosed. It's actually very well understood. They're not doing anything that crazy. And yes, it feels like it feels crazy to go out and buy a ton of the most advanced

Nvidia GPUs that might be quote unquote obsolete like next year when there's a new model and new hardware out there that you want to be, that we want to be taking advantage of. But if you think about there's cloud workloads staying around and grow. and doing the thing that is that they are capable at for a very long time. Yeah, we've covered a lot on the show, the sort of like capability overhang, even if the models don't get smarter, which they are. There's still so much to build and so much value to unlock with the agentic workflows. Yes.

And who doesn't love, I mean, there's so many like just PDF to pipeline into databases and just Yeah, we're still getting really good at PDFs. Knowledge retrieval. Just basic knowledge retrieval is just a massive market for for business overall. So the cloud groups, the cloud groups, strong performance powered Microsoft during the last quarter of the fiscal year. The company on Wednesday also outlined that its first quarter would be better than analysts projected. Wall Street cheered and the result cheered the results sending shares of Microsoft up 9% in aftermarket trading.

The support carries over to if the support carries over to trading Thursday, which is today, the company could be worth around $4 trillion. That's that number that Nvidia broke. But also, of course, their Kappex is growing. significantly and they are getting very, very close to spending over $25 billion in a current in a single quarter on CAPX. But when you have that type of cloud backlog, it makes a lot of sense to build the data centers to service that backlog. Yeah, Saadzia has also been fairly pragmatic. If you think about, you know, some of, I mean,

he's conducted multiple layoffs this year. He's clearly feeling the pull of AI, but not getting over his skis, wants to, wants, you know, seems to be managing through this kind of euphoric revenue ramp. Yeah. I saw a funny post that was like something the effect of like, well, we now know that Sacha is good for his 80 billion. Yeah. Because he blew out earnings and he's been doing fantastically.

So just since April, where after Liberation Day and all of the big tech stocks kind of selling off in the first quarter of the year, Microsoft's been an absolute tear, up 20% over the baseline on the year where the S&P 500 has been around 8% up. And so outperforming the S&P 500 broadly, big tech continues undefeated. The Windows. Microsoft is sitting at $3.98 trillion. It's up 4% today, but they're just touching 14. So close.

They're trying to do it. So close. Well, good luck at them and everyone involved. The funny thing to think about is imagine you joined META maybe a couple weeks ago and the stock with this like massive nine-figure comp structure. And then you're immediately made, you've been averaging basically making, you know, an extra million dollars a day in stock-based comp. Oh, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

People were running the math on how many AI researchers, you know, you, you know, the added, you know, you could, you could, Zuck could go and do this, this round of aggressive. Like every single day. Every single day for a while. It's wild. So let's continue with Microsoft earnings. The Windows Maker is among the many tech companies. he's trying to cash in on the expected AI windfall.

The cloud offerings, its cloud offerings put it in stronger position to capitalize than other firms, because of course they are very neutral in terms of what they are building. Satch has been very model agnostic. He has great access to Open AI, which is leading API, but then he's also happy to sell you Lama or GROC or anything else.

And so he's kind of acting as a de facto model router in many ways. The model router companies are obviously doing something different and helpful in other contexts. especially in terms of bidding against Microsoft. He's excited to be a platform. But he is embracing the platform, of course, of course. Yeah, I'm interested to see if the markets,

when the Open AI Microsoft negotiation around their whole licensing deal, they're cheering again. Not exactly sure why, but I love the sound of it. And anyways, it'll be interesting to see if the market reacts positively to that at all. I know Satya cares a lot about the partnership, and I'm sure. both sides are negotiating their hearts out. So Sauta Nadella said, we are going through a generational tech shift with AI.

Absolutely true. Microsoft reported revenue of $76.4 billion for its fourth fiscal quarter. The figure topped Wall Street's expectations. It's closely watched Azure Cloud business grew 39% beating expectations. This is already a massive business in a highly competitive market. They compete directly with GCP and AWS. And so they're doing fantastically. All the cloud providers seem to be doing very well.

Operating income increased 22% to 34.3 billion higher than consensus projections to be on top line and bottom line. The company said net income was $27.2 billion or $3.65 a diluted share. That figure also topped analyst projections. They're just blowing it out across the board. This AI adoption is really helping the whole portfolio. It certainly gives us great confidence in our ability to continue to lead in the cloud, an AI wave that is here. And so in other news, the meta also beat earnings and went up, what, 10% something like that. You mentioned this.

Soaring meta ad revenue fuels push into artificial intelligence. 22% revenue growth in its second quarter. We've talked to a lot of people about this. Like they're just like when you're in one of these companies that has the ability to continue to compound seemingly endlessly. it's just one of the best online ads are big market yeah one of the best like financial phenomenon to ever exist yeah and so showing that core ad revenue business remains strong at a time when the company is investing billions of dollars into artificial intelligence for the first time this year the company is

spending its top capital is held its top capital spending projection steady a move that is sure to ease investor concerns after Mark Zuckerberg's AI spending spree, shares rose more than 11% in after hours trading. And it's interesting to read into the CAPEX numbers because we were talking about that they might be limited on power. So it might not be that Mark Zuckerberg and the meta team want to necessarily hold back CAPEX, but the market and the public market certainly is looking at that as, oh, well, you know, ad revenue grew a ton and you didn't even need to spend more on CAPX. Maybe that's coming down the pipe in coming quarters, but not this quarter. And so everything across the board looks much better for the company.

It's shares rose more than 11% in after hours trading. The results show the extent to which meta's advertising business will continue to pay for the company's outsized AI ambitions, as well as how the AI tools are contributing to its strength. Sales came in at 47.5 billion ahead of analyst expectations and net income was at 18.3 billion also ahead of market expectations. Technology giants expects to pose between 17 and 24% revenue growth year over year for the current quarter. The investments it's making in AI are already paying off in its ads business, said a researcher. Meta is the third biggest technology company to report this earning cycle and shareholders are keeping a close watch on the extent to which revenue is increasing as a result of the AI boom relative to spending levels. And Geiger Capital is reporting on X.

Meta is now up 760% from its 22 low after the failure of the Metaverse, never doubt Zyker. Obviously, there was a bunch of other factors going on there, broader correction rise in interest rates. Yeah, the metaverse bet certainly didn't translate to bottom line. I do remember the iconic image of Zoc's face in the metaverse, you know, in that moment. The Wii graphics. Okay, we're a little bit away from the metaverse. Yeah. And the Oculus or the MetaQuest would sell well at Christmas time, but it wouldn't, like the stickiness just wasn't there to drive real adoption.

And then of course, you know, the whole goal was never just to be in the hardware business and sell $300 headsets. The goal was to be a platform and then take an ad store-like cut of all software that's sold through those headsets. You can't just get the install base up. You actually have to get the DAU base up. And that hasn't happened yet, but it may be well in the future. Meta ended 2024 with $44 billion in cash in cash equivalents. They're now down to $12 billion. So he's been spending.

He's been on a spending spree. Okay. Which makes sense. We've been tracking it. I wanted to cover an article here that Sarah Gwo just posted. She says design goes public. It took Dylan Field and Evan Wallace. And I think she's here in the building somewhere.

We'll try to get her on. She says, it took Dylan Field and Evan Wallace more than four years to go from founding Figma to public launch. They built Figma playing for the end game, not the headlines. Dylan didn't chase growth at all costs or settle what they can ship in 10 weeks. He didn't try to crush competitors. Instead, he spent a decade obsessing over the product he imagined should exist and the best company he could, making design and software product delivery more powerful and collaborative.

He consistently acted with integrity and thoughtfulness. Turns out not just good, that's not just good philosophy. It's a strategy for a special business. In 2014, when John Lilly led Greylock Series A investment, Dylan and his team had seven people in a nondescript office on Alma Street in Palo Alto and barely an alpha product, but they described a future with remarkable foresight, a high-performance, collaborative multiplayer design tool built natively for the web, harnessing all its power, changing product development forever.

And this product was just so incredibly viral. Obviously, people don't design in a silo. They would make something, share it with people instantly. You could just open it in the browser. You could see everyone else's cursor. And we take that kind of software for granted now, but it's because so many different companies realized how powerful it was. Yep.

And move to, and, you know, we're inspired by Figma. I mean, it's the difference between Instagram and Hipsomatic. Like, they both had photo filtering, and people saw them as, like, tools for photo filtering. But Instagram bootstrapped a network and was worth billions. And now probably, if you spun it out worth, like, hundreds of billions. So Sarah says Figma had its fair share of challenges. Market size was an early question, right? People were just looking at the market and being like,

How many designers are they really out there? How many are willing to pay for this? Totally, totally. And they were burning, Sarah says they were burning $800,000 a month pre-launch. So no real sign of validation other than their own conviction. So bold. She says, like with any startup, getting early pilot customers required cajoling of our friends, competitors who built less product for a while seemed ahead.

Dylan persisted, driven more by conviction than fear. He assembled a team of remarkable people. Chris Rasmussen, who's going to be on later. Show, Kuomato, Claire Butler, Previer, Malwani, Kyle Parish, Amanda, Klaia, Yuki, Yamashita, and more. Each of these figmates, which is a good name. Figmates. Figmates contributed extraordinary talent. Fig leaves.

Fig leaves. But figmates makes more sense. Dylan himself evolved dramatically along the way from a clearly talented, thoughtful, dropout founder to a formidable CEO capable of scaling a legendary company. And this is a special one for me, again, to just experience the product first as a user and then somebody that followed tech closely. And being able to watch his evolution as a CEO is just amazing. I mean, the hardest thing was.

Do you learn who Dylan Field was or did you use the product first? I think he always had insane aura. I do you think I used the product. I must have used the product first. I think I probably used the product first or it was brought into my organization first. Because again, it's not like he was coming out the gate raising 50 million or whatever. These relatively normal rounds, they were great by. Completely different go-to-market motion back then too.

It was not viral launch video podcast like growth. Yes. This was entirely showing the power of that. At just a few million in revenue, the board received a letter about aligning our path to IPO. Very few people, very few other people play secret Hitler as ruthlessly against their own spouse or casually suggest starting a game of diplomacy at 11 p.m. These aren't just games to Dylan. They were exercises in long-term strategy. The same discipline that meant Figma.

I don't know if, I don't know if everybody can do it. We're getting news that the first trade might happen in a few minutes. And so I think people are getting ready for the first trade to happen. And so they're chanting Figma, Figma. Figma, Figma, FIGMA, FIGMA, I love it. Absolutely wild. Continue with the piece when you're ready. Sarah says that Figma's IPO roadshow last week, two developer advocates.

Great job, Jake and Tom spent the first 35 minutes of the presentation doing a comprehensive live demo. Wow. It's something I'm convinced had never been done before to a room full of bankers, mutual fund managers, and hedge fund investors. Afterwards, Dylan turned to me with that familiar. slightly nutty gleam in his eye. I want them to understand the product they're investing in. They're all going to be designers eventually. Wow.

I do believe that. In some ways, I become a better designer over the years, even though I'm not classically trained, just because the Figma products gotten better. Like, as Figma gets better, I get better, and that's such a powerful feedback loop. Today, millions rely on Figma, and its scope and power continues expanding.

The IPO is proof that special founders can reshape even entrenched categories and that they will find the surrounding hills to climb and focus on product is rarely wrong. It underscores that technology matters. We covered this yesterday and at config, but, you know, that focus on WebGL early. Like that was, that was the Y now. And it's, it can be rare to have a true technological Y now. Oftentimes founders try to. I think that's the first grade. First grade. Dylan just rang the bell for the first trade. The first trade is at 90.

93. All right, climbing to 93. Climing, wow. That is amazing. Dylan looks absolutely fantastic. He does. He does. That's remarkable.

We should just turn this around. We'll show the screen right there. Good idea. There we go. You can see the screen. Put it, put it down and just point it up, maybe. Oh, no. There we go.

Oh, so emotional. So emotional. It's remarkable. Going through the almost acquisition blocked. And to make it to make it back here well beyond. And the employees too, I mean, the resilience, right? We saw this last week or the week before, you know, the windsurf team thinking they're getting acquired by opening I. It's a roller coaster.

It doesn't go through. and that was a different scenario, but they really had to build, you know, find a new gear. Yeah, I mean, we all know that there was a breakup fee, but. Yeah, it didn't hurt. But the value of focus is just so underrated. And you think about that for that, like how long were they going through that process, like a year? And the amount of distraction, both from just like a legal, compliance, financial thing, but also just like, well, you think you're going to partner up with somebody.

are you going to build a competitor? Are you going to be like, okay, let's just not put that. Let's push that out on the roadmap because we're partnering with them. They'll bring that to the. Scott Belski was, I imagine, and Adobe. To it, effectively running, running the show over there. And, you know, disappointing for him as well.

But he obviously was very congratulatory. Yes. Sarah says, I'll close it out. She says, we're all going to be designers eventually. congratulations Figma and yeah design's going public today. I'm going to pull up Scott's post. Yeah yeah, read me Scott's post. What a crazy day. Citadel securities in the back looking great. Scott says thrilled for my friend Dylan and the whole Figma team today upon such a milestone. There are few products that have had such an impact on the lives of designers, our everyday experiences of products in the value of design.

He says, I had a unique opportunity to get to know the entire Figma management team in business very deeply a few years ago. Of course, Scott was at Adobe at the time, you know, one of the key players in the deal. And he says, what I learned inspired me in many ways and makes me confident that this team is just getting started. This is a team with deep empathy for their customer. They, of course, in my words, are the customer. That's part of what Figma uses Figma to make Figma. It's like this perfect, perfect partnership. The S-1 showed that.

The S-1 showed that. It was very nicely. S-1 of all time. But yeah, the story here is the thoughtfulness, right? Down to the signage in the building today. Every single step has been considered. And they have to, right? If they want to help other people have great design.

They need to lead by example. I have a post here from John Lilly, who was, I believe John was at Graylock. Okay. Let me confirm that. Yeah. I saw Greylock on the cap table. Pretty big shareholder probably over 10%.

Graylock led the A. Okay. John Lillian through a bunch of pro rados. Yes. Did quite well. Yep. John says today's IPO is a landmark moment for Figma, not just a financial milestone,

but a powerful validation of Dylan and Evans founding vision back in 2012. to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. Figma's relentless focus on product community and craft has reshaped how the world designs. What began as a bold technical challenge, building a web-based design tool that felt native, evolved into a platform that helped millions of creators design and build together. In a 2003 interview about the iPod,

Steve Jobs famously said, design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Figma built around this idea, building tools so that designers of all kinds come together not just to make things beautiful, but to make them work better. And now we're standing at the threshold of a new era, one defined by the rise of artificial intelligence. It's an especially important moment to ask, what does the future of design look like? I think that's on everybody's mind. I think a lot of

people have good ideas for what it can look like. John says design has always existed in the space between tools and human intention. And as Mitch Kapoor wrote in his 1990 software design manifesto, what is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds, the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes. And you try to bring the two together. That's powerful.

35 years later, that's still the clearest expression I know of what great design strives to do. And it's what Figma enables a connection between imagination and reality and between the systems we build and the people we build them between our machines and ourselves. Not, my words, not Johns, but it's so funny to think about how when you are interacting with anything online, there's probably like an 80% chance that it was built with Figma at some point or another.

You can't open an app on your phone and not have a designer under the hood that probably spends hours and hours a day in Figma. I have so many great, I have so many great memories. And the stock is over $100 now. This is remarkable. And I saw something that it seemed like there was potentially some sort of circuit breaker going on where there was like a limit up where it seemed like they stopped trading for a little bit and then resumed. But the stock is jumping all over the place. I'm seeing like 107 now.

Really, really on a rocket ship today. A couple of fond memories for me. One is with Brandon Jacoby. who is at X. He's a free agent now. We'll see how long that sticks. The greatest stigma users to ever do it. And I have so, there was so many nights when we were building party around that it was like deep COVID. So we were, we were often remote. And so many nights we'd spend just in Figma for and had Zoom in the background, Figma just like just grinding it out. And I cherish those memories. The other thing,

some meet over formerly at Andresen brought up today when I posted earlier. He said that when I was pitching A16Z originally, almost the entire pitch, I didn't have a deck when I first met them. So the entire pitch was walking around all of our product designs in Figma, showing them the product, showing them where we wanted to take it. And so it's really just been such a core part. I'll close it out with John. He says, on a personal level two, this is a significant moment for me. I was lucky in my career to be mentored by some of the best thinkers and designers in the world. Terry Winnegrad and David Kelly at Stanford and later Mitch Kapoor and many others.

And from the very first time I set foot in Figma's offices, I felt like I'd come home. Dylan and Evan had built a temple of design with typography books scattered around. We love temples. Let's go. We love temples. Let's give it up for temples. But the whole company culture was infused with a belief in and a reverence for designers in their work. And that's still the core value of Figma today. I love it. We made somebody mad sometime when we joked on the show.

We joked on the show that like Figma hadn't like released some feature fast enough. They released the ability to do to do to create more responsive designs automatically. Yeah. And we were like people were protesting the street for this one. And somebody came out and very angrily messaged us saying no one was protesting. No one was protesting. This is fake news. And we were like, okay, we were joking.

But people do love Figma. It's a thing. Yeah, people get emotional about it. That was the thing. We were at config and the number of people that there was somebody from every country there. It was standing room only. It was crazy. The community is wild.

John says one of the other things that Mitch said to me about entrepreneurship is that you've got to build a house you want. In other words, build organizations that can help create the world you want. By elevating and empowering designers, Figma has done that in a profound and lasting way. Here's to the team at Figma and to continue to build the world of designing together. It's so true. I mean, in a world without Figma, every digital product that you use is less beautiful. Every website that you use is less beautiful. Do you think in the original Microsoft formulation of what a platform is, Figma fits that definition? So the original, I think it was Bill Gates' conception of it was a platform is a business or product

where the value that is created on top of the platform is greater than the value. that is captured by the platform. For sure. So the classic example is, yeah, is Microsoft Windows. They're like the Windows app ecosystem, uh, is larger than the amount of money captured by just Windows licenses. And when you think about it's a little bit different because although there is a third party ecosystem, there are also like design agencies that probably wouldn't

exist. Yeah. I mean, the part of why Figma has such a great brand is they can't possibly, they, they can't possibly capture. There's so much value creation. like happening on the platform. Yep. And it's as simple as like a company signing up, two founders paying 50 bucks a month or whatever

it is. Everyone feels like they got their money's worth. Yeah. And creating something that allows them to go, create a deck that allows them to raise millions of dollars or creating a product with millions of users. Yep. And in that flow of like somebody can be a freelance designer, sign up for Figma, create designs that they can go sell.

And yeah, I think it definitely fits the definition. It's very much a, it's an operating system for people that design and build software. We talked a little bit about it yesterday. Ben Thompson gave a breakdown on Stratory, which you should go read and subscribe to, obviously, of this Figma S1 and the IPO prospects. And he was highlighting the potential benefit of being a public company and having public company stock to do M&A with. And I'm wondering where you sit on the M&A question. There's the world where Figma has a talented team. They can build new products. They also have this network effect.

They have amazing go-to-market in sales motion. But if they were to acquire something, what do you think would be the right angle? Is it more something like a foundational technology that can improve all the products or some sort of new line extension, new skew to add on to the portfolio of products? I think that's where the debate should be going forward. I'm less excited about what they, I'm personally I'm more excited about them acquiring better, you know, I mean, the team is obviously beyond stacked. It's one of the most talented groups in certainly design, well, the most talented group in design and one of the most talented

teams in the industry broadly. I'm less excited about individual app plays, although there's some exciting Gen. AI applications that are growing quickly. Figma has compelling products in those categories, right? You look at Figma Make, Figma Sites, right? And everything they're doing around making it so that anyone within an organization can generate designs that are on brand. I guess the question is, yeah. And again, trading has been halted at $112 on a limit up. If someone goes out and builds not just a tool that is complementary, but also has a network and is starting to bootchrap a network, that feels like the Instagram, Facebook moment

and something that would potentially merit an M&A, but just building a tool or different approach to the product or different feature, always this question about, like, you know, is it a feature or isn't a company? And I think that will be something that people are debating going forward. Yeah, they acquired a buddy mine, Jordan Singer's company. Yeah, that's right. I think it was probably two plus years ago.

And he was building, you know, very early to building in generative AI. And I believe they integrated a lot of what he was working on. Yeah, I do wonder on the M&A topic, like, what is the formula for success? Because there's a little bit of a meme in Silicon Valley that, like, you should never sell your company, it can never work. Then there are like these zombie aquires that feel like something that people want to avoid. And so one of the questions that I've been kicking around my head is like, what is the shape of the company or founding team or employee base that is suitable for an acquisition that could actually integrate well and be something where everyone is happy, a decade. later like oh yeah that was a fantastic partnership that was great it probably has to be something around the the the the acceleration that would happen post acquisition and then also just the the actual

integration and yeah there was while back you remember this company it was a six month own six month old solo owned vibe cutter base 44 sold to wicks for 80 million which was not to my knowledge not in the game at all from a generative AI standpoint. So it looks like we have our first guest lined up here. Andrew Reed. In a beautiful suit. Looking great. Somebody confused me for Andrew Reed earlier.

They said, hey, we're Andrew, right? I said, I am not, but he is close by. What's going on? Andrew, welcome to the stream. You're alive. How are you doing? You are live. Welcome to the New York Stock Exchange.

Thank you for having us. You guys look like you were made to be here. Yes. We're very happy to be here. The decision to put it on the since six months ago has paid off flawlessly because we don't have to dress up for something like this. Is this my microphone? That's your microphone. Yeah, wonderful.

How are you doing? Give us your reactions. How's this day been for you? Let's see. Well, first off, congrats to your initial public appearance at the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you. Thank you. That's very exciting.

Today has been, it's been a good day. You know, you open Dylan ring the bell at 930 and it's 2.11 p.m. Eastern right now. Sure. So we've been milling around for many. hours. Okay. It's a little exhausting. It opened and yeah, it's amazing seeing the team here. Yeah. Um, and just the excitement of everyone chanting Figma and seeing all the traders in their swagged out Figma jackets. Yeah, yeah, the jackets are fantastic. The jackets are amazing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bidding, uh, yeah, yeah,

The thing that stood out to me is all the little, like they really made, they really made nice of their home. Like every, like every single place you look, there's something, Figma, and it's just so, so incredibly well done. Yeah. And this is one of my, one of the experiences I've had with Figma, you know, dating back to when we first invested seven years ago was it's a company that, overnight success. It's a company that's always had extraordinary attention to detail.

And, you know, it shows up when you do an all hands out there. office and the S-1. The board slides, the S-1, config the conference, and how they applied that attention to detail to the NISI is incredible because, you know, there's applying the attention in detail and then realizing all the things you can do in terms of the signs on the ground and the party outside. The data said an unbelievable job. They have to be doing things that haven't been done before. Yeah, I mean, I think the takeover outside was like breathtaking. And I'm obviously very biased because I see the logo. I get very excited. Did you see the road show? Did you go to any of the road show? I heard there was like a long product demo there, which is kind of uncommon.

Yeah. So I think it's, I think it's true for, you know, many CEOs, but especially for Dylan. Like Dylan cares a lot about the product. And it's important that everybody who is considering investing in the company really knows what figment, not just what figment stands for and design and creativity and all the things you see. But really how the product works. And it was not a five minute fly by, you know, look at the cool, you know, shiny features. The product demo was, you know, they were in the weeds. It was, yeah, I was, in fact, uncovered parts of the product I didn't know existed. But it was good. I think it's important, again, like part of, you know, that's who Dylan is, right?

He actually cares so deeply about every single pixel and every single feature, and then that shows through. How early did you actually meet Dylan? Sarah, Sarah Guo was posting earlier that pre-Line, that pre-Lylo, launch they were burning $800,000 a month, which just sounds like that's the most nerve-wracking scenario for any, you know, a lot of founders will go through that at some point. But when did you realize what a special founder he was? Well, Dylan and Evan, by the way, I think just, I think it's a nice moment to take a pause and just give a shout to Evan Wallace. It's like an absolute legend. And I think the stories that people hear tell about Evan are just, you know, they'll go on. Yeah. Chris, who's going to come on next, you know, is the Figma CTO.

He'll, I think, have a lot of, he'll tell you actually all the stuff Evan did in the code base, but allegedly it's insane. And, you know, well, and just going, like, taking another step back, people have, like, people love to use Figma as an example that it's okay to take a long time to ship your products. And I think most, like, almost always when I hear a founder say, well, Figma took four years, I go, well, you're not, Evan, Wallace and Delphiel. And you're not like fundamentally changing, you know, the way that like software works online. Yeah. You're just, you're building enterprise workflows. You should probably ship like next month. Yeah. The other thing about the, you know, you can take, take as long as you need, you know, Figma. There's this, there's something that Rolf talks a lot about for our business, which is the red queen dynamic. You have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same

place. And I think in a world of accelerating technology change. Like in order to win in your markets, you just have to run the company faster and do more. And obviously like AI's allowing companies to do a lot more. Isn't the Red Queen race usually an anecdote of something you want to avoid getting into? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's just the truth of technology, I think. It's the truth of venture capital. Yeah.

The truth of enterprise software, business and business software. And if you look at how, you know, when Figma went from four products to eight products, I can fig, right? Like the pace, and I think everyone who uses the product feels it. Like the pace is just picking up. Yeah. Yeah, we got a little preview of config, and I messaged Nairi. I was like, wait, you're announcing all of this at config? Like all four of these?

It was like four major announcements, and that's what picking up the pace looks like and finding that new gear. Yeah. How are you thinking about org design changing in the age of AI? This is something I've been talking to a lot of folks about. There's taking designers and giving them the ability to ship, they're kind of this flip from going from a zero X engineer, a designer to a one X engineer. And that gain can sometimes be better than taking a 10x engineer and making them a little bit better because you just unlock this new capability.

How are you thinking about companies just broadly thinking about AI as a product vertical that is its own silo versus something that infuses the whole company? What are you hearing? What do you see? I've been thinking about that question a lot. Yeah. And the way I kind of craft the archetype would be the creative technologist. And I think in the same way that all of us are capable of scribbling something on a piece of paper when we're bored in a meeting, I think similarly, all of us are going to be capable of creating something on the internet. It's actually interactive. Exactly. And I think that has been happening for a while. I think it's picking up Steam in an incredible pace.

And I think this role of creative technologist, I think, you know, in big companies, you'll still probably have siloed engineering, product design, you know, marketing teams. I think in our small companies, like the founding, the founding engineers, founding teams, people are wearing a lot of hats, right, and using tools like Figma to do everything from ideation to prompt something, to iterate, get in hands of users, and to actually, you know, publish code. I think that, the small companies, I bet we believe the way. Even my buddy and Jocene said that when I was first pitching them, we weren't like actually raising it. I didn't have a deck. And so I just was in Figma screen sharing, showing them the product and showing them all the different ways that we were going to take it and things like that.

And again, that that's just like evidence of Figma not being for designers. No. I never thought. I thought it was a tool for building things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One dynamic Ben Thompson's been talking about is that as a public company, sometimes it can be easier to do M&A.

Have you ever run into that in your career just broadly of a company that, where that is an important factor in kind of their long-term stress? I've always, generally the meme has been like stay private as long as possible, but, you know, there's a reason companies go public. There are obviously tons of benefits, but what are the, what is the M&A dynamic in public and private markets right now? Yeah, I think the, you know, there's what you learn when you start out of Goldman Sachs. Yeah. It's, you know, it's, you have access to the capital markets. You can you have a public currency for MNA, you know, blah, blah, blah. Blah, you tell your story. For me, the, the, the, the reason why I'm so happy with the IPO timing. today is coming off of config a few months ago and just like feeling the energy you guys were there and felt the energy amongst the community like the incredible community surrounding Figma and then being able to tell that story and all the stuff we're doing with our new product

initiatives with AI and tell it to the broader world yeah you know in the S1 we reported I think 13 million monthly active users two thirds of which are not designers and you know did you did you note did you did you did you did you did you fully see that the the the TAM for this was not like how many designers are there and just like added up multiply it did you imagine you believe that it could be used across the TAM expanded is similar to what I saying with the you know I think the creative technologist archetype who's going to do a lot of things and eventually in 10 years the way that companies run their product engineering teams will probably look very different I think similarly like there were

There were even predating our investment. There were definitely examples of teams that went all in on the Figma way, collaborative way of building products. And you had full product engineering design teams at small companies or even at mid-sized companies. I remember Airbnb and Square were in our portfolio and we talked to them before we invested. And they were early at pioneering this. We're getting off of the dropback lengths being sent around. We're going all in on working in Figma.

And it turns out it was a much better way of shipping, products if you wanted to ship really good products quickly and therefore the entire world seemingly changed its mind in a few years. I think similarly some small companies are going to ponder new ways of doing things. They're going to move really fast. It's going to be obvious that there's like a new archetype emerging. I think many of those people are going to live in Figma. I think the most creative community on the internet today already exists in Figma.

I always, it felt even I remember using it as a like a social social. app in the sense that like I would get I would it'd be late at night I would open my laptop and I'd be like oh Brandon's up I'd go over to wherever he was designing I'd be like hey what's up dude I just type of comment yeah and it was like this like it was like a lot of people built these in these like virtual offices but like yeah yeah it's interesting yeah I'd just be like hey what's up or I just like start you know I'd just mess with them and like changing button colors yeah the one thing I'm really excited about with the new products is you know they're both

raising the ceiling of what it is possible to do for the most creative people in Figma you know like with the draw for instance right like the ability to do like really interesting artistic creative work inside of Figma files and also massively raising the floor for those of us who are you know more excel inclined and our you know creative abilities sell-coded yeah exactly exactly and I think it's so rare to find like technology shifts that allow companies to capture both of those things usually there's a trade-off yeah And it was really exciting.

I mean, Excel kind of served the same purpose, but just decades ago, right? Totally. Yeah. And similarly to the idea of, you know, Figma slides came out of this intuition, or not even intuition, just the reality that many people were torquing Figma files in the slide decks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a file called deck formatting. Yeah.

I've shared with probably hundreds of people at this point of like, this is how I build decks. Yeah. This is how I build fundraising decks. here's like 50 examples for each page and I would just send it out to everyone they could just copy it and start working off of it okay I mean that bow that sounds yeah it's great we don't have to make many decks it really does do we should we should we should we should yeah it'd be great uh last question I think we'll let you go um I want to talk about the culture and and hiring changes and just how going public changes any of that how do you describe the culture of like

someone who's a good fit to become a fig mate. Ooh, that's a really good question. You know, when I was reflecting... As the series C lead. When I was reflecting on what I was going to tweet today, you know, because there's always a fine balance, right? Like, how do I tweet something to say congrats without doing the, you know, can you believe this amazing event?

So I kind of went into a very paranoid headspace of how do I get, you know, not end up in the wrong quadrant? We just go too far. You're welcome, everyone. You said, congrats to the incredible. Figment team, the most creative, determined, imaginative, and positive group of people. I'm just so happy for all of your success. There we go.

And I almost responded, our success. So those four adjectives, I think they are creative. I think I tried to pull off an analogy when I was talking to you guys at Config about how everybody, everybody who was at Config would be a good tattoo artist for my, my face painting artist for my daughter. And my brother said that was, that analogy did not land. They're very creative. I think they were extremely determined. I think like this is a company that, you know, when the early days of burning however much money,

they were burning a month and not having product market fit and grinding your way to market fit. And all the twists and turns over the last seven, eight years since they really started their ascent. But you still have like the hardcore WebGL crew. Yeah. And that's like, oh, it's not like quite like foundation model level AI research, but it's like serious engineering. It's a company that does hard things. They are not afraid of doing really hard things. Yes.

I think they're imaginative. I think that's like, you know, the make-believe billboard you see in San Francisco. It's a company that really does think out there. And I think Dylan, obviously, Dylan is on the bleeding edge of technology. And they're positive. Like, they are just good human beings. And, you know, looking at, obviously, the reaction to the IPO is just, look around. These are awesome people who are so cool.

The valedictorian of my high school works at Figma. Her name's Katie Zito. Amazing. A PM here. She's literally like the smartest person I knew in high school. And how she builds products of Figma. And anyway, I'm just so happy for their success and your success. Yes.

We're happy for your success. I didn't put it out. But yesterday we did the, we did it meme with Ramp. Every person involved. Yeah, that was great. But now Ramps congratulating Figma with the big billboard today. That was an answer. You know they had that idea Monday.

We found the phone with them. They're like, yeah, we think we might get a banner. And like, because our offices right across the street from Figma's New York office, we should just hang it out. And it's like this like 40 by 40. It's unbelievable. It looks like it's a Figma canvas. I will say the ramp thinking Figma with TBPN and the New York Stock Exchange, it's a big day.

Yeah, it's a big day for you guys. It's a big day. It's a big day. It's a big day. Yeah, it's a lovely having you. Yeah, thanks for being here. Enjoy talking to everyone else. And obviously, I hope we'll see you later.

That's be great. Congratulations on your success, too. Congratulations. I'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in our next guest to the studio. We are going to tweak some cameras. Kramer. Jim Kramer, what did he say?

Celebrate the moment. Celebrate the moment, says Jim Kramer. And we certainly are. And we are at 101 54 and it's getting quieter. The folks of the Citadel Securities crew. Disappointed that nobody's manually executing trades. I also didn't see a single crowd surfing event happen. Maybe we can make it happen still.

Good to meet you. Could you meet you? Where should we start? But please introduce yourself for the stream. Let people know who you are. Yeah, I'm Chris Rasmussmoo. I'm the CTO at Figma. Great. Take us a little bit through your journey with the company.

When did you join? What have you've been working on, all that? Yeah, yeah. It's amazing to have like a barely a two-sentence, you know, intro that just tells everything you need to really know. It took a lot to get there. Yeah, it's a lot easier now that it was in the beginning to explain. But no, yeah, I joined Figma through a roundabout means.

I actually started off as a contractor with the company. So, wow. For the first eight months, I was just writing code, helping to get the product launch publicly and then working from there. Yeah. I think the thing that stood out to me back then was just like how incredible incredible the team was. It was this insanely high-aptitude team. It was probably the first time in my career. I felt old. And yet I felt like everyone around me was just like some of the most gifted

people I had a chance to work with. And the thing that like really sold me on the company was just how much people were trying to lift each other up rather than compete with one another. I think, you know, when you have these really fast growing startups, everyone's ambitious, everyone's hungry. And that's great. But I think it's really important to remember that, you know, you're not trying to drive towards an end state. You're trying to build something that's lasting. Does that culture just come from like four years in the trenches, not being like, like, you know, being a quiet company and kind of building in like this monastery almost is like the vibe that I get from like the early days. And then you kind of carry that through. The other thing that

stands out is the first six months are insane. And then you're like ups and downs. Sarah, Gros said that the company was leading up to the launch. The company was burning like $800,000 a month and didn't have a product really out in the wild. But I have to imagine you, you were using, were you guys, how early were you able to dog food the product and like build that conviction that, Hey, we've actually built something really magical here. Yeah, so I started working with Figma about a month before the public launch. There was a lot of work that had already been done. I think there was a time when people thought that, you know,

everything just had to take six months. If it took any longer, you know, it wasn't interesting. But, you know, hard things take time. And I think it's a testament to the culture of the company and to Dylan to really persevere and push through that time and bring something to the market that hadn't existed before. So were you brought in for specific WebGL experience or was WebGL at the focus of what you did? Or were there other challenges?

Because the whole story gets kind of collapsed to like, oh, they just picked WebGL and like, that was the key innovation. But I'm sure there was a ton of other stuff going on. Yeah, yeah. WebGill was the technology that enabled us to do graphics, like custom graphics in the browser and bypass some of the traditional browser graphics stack.

I think I was brought in because at this really weird intersection of things that aligned with the company. So I used to work at a company called Asana and I built a lot of the real time kind of real time collaboration infrastructure, which relates to the multiplayer stuff that we've been working on at Figma. And then funny enough, I had been taken a sabbatical. So the reason I got introduced to Figma is because I was working on a side project.

It was just a passion project. And in my case, it was writing a game engine to simulate surfing because I'm a surfer. And I think I'm the only person stubborn enough to work on that long enough. You solving Navier strokes? Like, wait, is not like the hardest problem? There was one browser surfing game that I used to play as a kid because I'm a surfer too. But it's funny you bring up Asana too because like as when I look back at like the real like start of my career, it was like I was quickly invited to Asana. and I felt like such an adult.

I was like, oh, look at me. I've got this, you know, very cutting edge, you know, project management tool. And then very quickly after that was invited to Figma. And then ever since then, I've used to product every single day. That's amazing. We're following the same path as sounds like. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, what else were the technical challenges going on to release?

Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, first off, it's just not easy. I think a lot of people, like, when they first looked at Figma back then, they were thinking, oh, a design tool, a single player tool. But under the hood, Figma is this real-time multiplayer engine. And it had to be multiplayer from day one. Yes, because I think like the opportunity back then and the opportunity still today is not just to make a designer more efficient and more effective.

It's also to bring the team closer together to enable the best ideas to surface to the front and to help them align and ship and execute those ideas. And I was saying to Andrew right before you jumped on, for me, Figma was a social product in the COVID times because I would jump on. I'd open my laptop. My son would go to bed. He was just like six months old or something like that. I'd open up Figma and I'd see a couple other people on the team like in the main like, you know,

file that we had. And I would just pop over their cursor and be like, you know, in the comments being like, hey, what's up? I didn't realize you were up still. Yeah, yeah. And it felt like a virtual office for the team at a time when there was like, no, there was not much social activity at all. Totally. Yeah.

I think it's really important to make work fun and to, you know, again, it comes back to lifting each other up. We're all trying to kind of surface ideas and put things out there. And it's a lot more fun when you get to do it with your team. One of my favorite memories from the pandemic was actually this time when Slack went down. So Slack went down as like the middle of the pandemic. It doesn't go down that much, but you remember when it goes down. We use it too.

We're big fans of Slack. But when it went down, we found out that a bunch of people were actually recreating the Slack UI inside of Figma and then using our multiplayer functionality to chat on the canvas. It's just a super cool. That's wild. Do you think that adding multiplayer features, after launch would have been, if you play out like the counterfactual, would that have been much more technically challenging, you think?

I think it's like, there's something of this special about, from day one, this is baked in. Yeah, I think there's two sides to this problem. So the first is just getting the base technology in place. That's one problem. The other thing is actually rethinking all of the product features so that they are actually eventually consistent and you're not stepping on each other's toes

and dealing with conflicts. And so a big part of building, you know, collaborative multiplayer software is actually reasoning about how you design features so they compose elegantly when multiple people are doing things at the same time. Yeah. And that's very hard to bolt on later. Yeah. The thing that makes it so powerful in my own words is if you have no matter how talented an individual like designer, engineer, product person, founder is, no matter how much of a visionary they are, no matter how capable they are, whatever idea they initially have for something will be better once it has like the input

of a group of people. And so the prehistoric era when design tools were built for like designers and like no one else would even have the file necessarily, it's just so wild to think back because I think like every, every great feature I've ever made, every great ad I've ever made, every great website was always like this combination of a bunch of smart people coming together and all contributing. And then Figma makes it so that it's as simple of like even if you're not in the same room, right? I think about how much progress would have been lost if you didn't have something like Figma during COVID,

where if you were used to as a team working and all working on the same feature and being able to be there in person, it just made it so seamless to recreate that and actually build great things. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I think the other aspect of design that sometimes people mistake it for is they think it's just about building like a static mock or a single image. And I think the reality is like the best design products, people sweat the details all the way. to production. So you're not just thinking about, you know, how is it going to look in a few key states. You're thinking about how is that going to work? What's the system behind the design? You know, and how are you going to make it perform and efficient and how are you going to learn

from that and keep iterating? And so it's a really broad space and super excited to be playing in it. What was the lead up to config like? You guys came out the gates with what four major new product areas it felt like. And I remember Nairi gave me a little preview of what you guys were announcing. And I was like, really? Like four? I imagine it was pretty stressful for you, but you guys pulled it off. Yeah, no, the team pulled it off to their credit. It was incredible.

Yeah, we went from like four to eight products all in one config, which is really cool. And it was even cooler because I was on parental leave for the first month before config. So I was just so stoked to come back from my short little parental leave and see that this team had just cranked everything out and done such an incredible job.

Yeah, talk to me about AI. Obviously there are AI enabled products, but then I imagine that AI is starting to infuse both in the internal workflows and all also the sub features within products that exist already. And I'm wondering how you think about organizational design, how you think about letting the existing team run with just adding on features and tools that leverage AI

to setting up new teams. And do you need a crack team that goes around and AIifies everything? Or is this just another tool in the tool chest that everyone can be pulling from regardless of where they sit in the org? Yeah, no, it's a good question. We've been kind of sweating that question ourselves.

But I think it really comes back to what we've been doing all along for us. So at Figma, like when we started, the goal was to make designers more efficient and give them superpowers, if you will, so they can do more and bring the best ideas to life. And then also to enable them to collaborate more seamlessly and effortlessly with their team. And make that whole process more accessible to their team as well. And I think AI is just this incredible tailwind and accelerant to all of that right now. It's not hard to imagine the ways in which designers are using AI in the context of Figma, for example, Figma make to not just like you know build a prototype but actually breathe life into

that prototype with prototyping and chip it all the way to production. At the same time, you know, all these technologies are making the entire product suite that we have much more accessible to the people around them. And so, you know, people can come into Figma and they can prompt themselves to get started, but then they still have the full power of the Figma ecosystem. So, you know, when the prompting is no longer the most efficient way, they can just grab the mouse and, you know, grab that color wheel and find that perfect red color rather than trying to just try the final touch. Yeah, the final touch. So yeah, it's super exciting.

Yeah, last question. I think we have someone else coming on in a second. Talk about the engineering culture. Thing was so interesting because I think everyone, I don't want to generalize too much, but it feels like everyone has some design chops or at least taste or cares about design. But at the same time you have those deep WebGL roots. It feels like there's some pretty serious, hardcore technologists in the organization. What's the blend? What is that like when those two orgs come together?

I imagine that you've spent a decade. integrating those two disciplines, but culturally, what does it take to really succeed to the company? Yeah, I think it takes like intellectual curiosity, right? That's what we seek out in our hires. Like, we're finding to find people who are just as passionate as we are about making things better, which really serves our customers too, because that's exactly what we're trying to help them do. You know, I think that we have like these incredible designers who also know how to code, and we have these incredible systems architects who have really, really good product sense as well. And I think it's this like kind of role blending that we've embraced as a culture. And we're starting to see,

you know, with AI breaking down some of the learning barriers between these functions, other companies embrace as well. Yep. Last question. Andrew Reed says that Evan Wallace had some crazy contributions to the code base early on. Any standout highlights in your mind? Yeah, Evan is just an incredibly gifted engineer. And the thing I remember is actually even before I joined Figma, when I was working on my own

little game engine, I was reading these articles online about how to do constructive solid geometry and you know, all these mathematical things. And I was reading these tutorials. And then when I started working with Evan at Figma, he was like, I went to his personal website and I realized the articles I was reading were written by him. Like he's just, he's a super gifted person. It's really, really an honor to have worked with him. That's fantastic.

Congratulations. Congratulations, everyone. An incredible journey to date and just getting started. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks so much for hopping on the stream. Great meeting you both. Congratulations. See you soon.

And we are ready for our next guest on this Figma stream. TBPN is live from the New York Stock Exchange. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Danny, pleasure to meet you. To meet you. I've always heard great things. It's such a pleasure to meet you in person. Would you mind just doing a quick introduction for the folks who might not be familiar? Yeah, so I'm Danny Reimer.

I'm with Index Ventures. And we're a firm that's based in London, San Francisco, and New York. We are invested in early in growth stage. And we invested in Figma. We led the Seed Round in Figma. So met Dillon when he was 18. for the first time, which is pretty amazing. I'm now going down, you know, Melancholy Hill, as I'm Nostalgia Hill as I'm hearing this.

I have to ask right away, how did you react early on to their kind of launch timeline, right? Like the thing that keeps coming up today, and we talk with Andrew Reed about this earlier, personally as an angel, if somebody tells me they're building a software company for other businesses, and they say that we're going to launch in two years. I almost immediately think like, okay, this person probably needs to update their thinking. And I think people generally use a Figma example of like this fat MVP and it can be a trap because you can work on something for a long time

and have it not really be that valuable. But I wonder what your immediate reaction was given that this was, you know, well before the launch. Yeah, I mean, believe it or not, it's sort of in line with our contrarian approach. Like we're contrarian on a bunch of stuff. who've been really, you know, bearish on crypto. We didn't do any crypto investments. So for us, it was a feature, not a bug, that it was going to take that long.

You've been contrarian about being loud, too, on Figma. A lot of people I think they saw, like, you know, indexes ownership at the IPO and didn't, you know, you guys haven't been posting threads every single day. It's about the team. It's about the team. I mean, you're bearish on crypto. How'd you react to Dylan's NFT profile picture? I think it's a god.

It makes sense. Yeah, right on. He's got the pass for this. It doesn't mean that he can't be. Yeah, yeah. But you know, really at the time, you know, all of the technology, all the software was sort of like in that meta spirit, that Facebook spirit of like throw it against a wall, you know, ship quickly. Doesn't matter if it's broken. Yeah, build fast and break things.

Build fast and break things. And this was so contrary. It's like the two guys were contrary. and they were committed to actually developing things for two years before we were going to have any sense as to whether it was going to be good or not. And it really had to compete against Sketch was the primary competitor. And Sketch was a damn good product. Exactly. Which is like the hard.

You know, even, you know, most investors, if they're looking at a new investment in a category with a very well-loved product that has massive saturation. I mean, I don't, I think it would be hard to find a product designer in San Francisco pre-year. Figma that wasn't using Sketch. You're absolutely right. Do you remember what the other comps were from that era of companies that had figured out how to do something utilitarian but then bolted on a multiplayer aspect? We were kind of kicking around the obvious example of like Instagram. There were a few other photo filtering apps, but Instagram started with the social network

out of the box, kind of bootstrapped it in the background and wound up being very successful product, obviously. But were there other companies that were coming to mind at that time? So we're big game investors. Okay. Right. So first of all, multiplayer was a term that we were very familiar with. Sure, sure. And then we were Dropbox investors.

That makes sense. So like the notion of sort of the product, the consumerization of the enterprise, starting small, growing through, you know, guerrilla tactics and just mainstream adoption within the organization we felt really comfortable with. Sure, sure. Is that broadly product-led growth or is product-led growth in your mind a broader term? No, it is PLG. Just PLG. Absolutely. And it was clear back to the, I totally agree with you, the line share of folks were using Dropbox and Sketch. Yeah.

And so for us, we knew what the problem was. Like the first time I met Dylan was at Flipboard when he was 18. Yeah. And they had amazing designers at Flipboard. And I just remember the confusion. Yeah, beautiful product. And also, I don't know if it was WebGL, but the 3D animation of the page flipping. Yeah. Yeah.

Fantastic. And you can see that that comes. through with like, okay, just the, just the technical challenge of like, how would I implement that? I remember playing with it on the iPad and being like, okay, this is a different thing. That's exactly right. I mean, they launched it before the iPad was launched. Yeah, yeah, that's right. But the, the versioning headaches that they were getting through, like, you know, they had all

these amazing designers. One ended up leading design at Uber or another one and is one of the senior designers at Apple for like eight years. And the design problems that they would get into of like sending the wrong version, and sending the wrong asset, you know, through Dropbox, it was clear that you needed a better solution. Yeah. What are you seeing broadly in terms of artificial intelligence

as a sustaining or disruptive innovation to companies that have established a market and then there's a whole bunch of companies that are coming in and saying like, we're gonna be the AI version of that. It feels like in some ways you could say, oh, well that's just like the multiplayer version, but in some ways it's more of a sustaining innovation.

What's your broad take? I would say the latter. Sustaining innovation. I mean, I'm super bullish about it. I mean, sure. It's hard not to be, right? Yeah, but you probably have to qualify that. Like, bullish on AI doesn't necessarily mean you're, like,

upset about what's happening at, you know, the foundation model labs or in terms of CAPEX or InVIDIA, like there's a million different places. But you're broadly bullish? You know, our job is to see a trend and then to analyze a trend and then to go pretty deep. Okay, yeah. And we are very bullish on AI. Very bullish. Well, it seems like every other time I see a billion dollar M&A headline, it's another,

index always ends up with the most. Thank you. The thing that strikes me about Figma that I think is still powerful to this day is the simultaneously, like the complexity of the product and the simplicity of the product. If you get invited to Figma and you've never used the product before, you just get

dropped in to the canvas. You're there. You can see the other people. And despite all that you can do with the product, it's still, I just found it like somehow intuitive even for somebody. And I think that's, yeah, very, very difficult. Yeah, and you know, the co-founder, you know, Dylan was brilliant enough to hire as co-founder the best computer scientist he had ever met, who was, you know, his TA at Brown, right?

Like, convinced him to stop doing a PhD and to code. Wow. That guy had such an understanding of that. Yeah. Or it still does. Evan. Evan. Still has such a clear understanding of how to create the lowest common denominator and make it inclusive with everyone, while also, So because it's design and design is going to become central to everything, have enough sophistication so that you can differentiate from anyone else. Yeah.

No, it's really amazing to me, the magic of Figma and the thing that I, from the very first Figma that I was invited to, and that was obviously why the growth was so insane early, is it's like natural product-led growth versus forced product-led growth. Yeah. was this ability, you know, as a user, if you can, if the thing that you provide a customer user is the ability to take the thing that's in their mind and make it real so they can see it, that's like the most magic thing ever. And the other thing I would comp kind of this moment to

is, you know, we cover alphabet and Google a lot. And we talk about how Google's initial mission to like organize the world's information and, you know, make it useful. I forget exactly how they position it. And how that's so aligned. into Gen AI in the sense that a lot of what LMs do today is just make organizing information for you and making it useful, right? That's like the core of the value. And it feels like Figma of this core of like taking a spark of an idea and making it and do a thing is so aligned with generative AI because it's like, oh, you want to make a website?

Like describe it. You want to make an app? Describe it. You want to change the details? You want to change this color. You want to build like an entire, you know, app underneath the website. It's just all there and reducing that time. from spark of an idea to like real product.

That's right. And I think it is a really important component and making sure that the human intervention is critical for differentiation, right? Like you need that in order, like the idea has to first manifest, but you can do that with AI tools. But then it has to have a human differentiation, like a human intervention that makes it way better to use

than anything else. This is the same way that making things in a different an organization work. You might have the smartest person on a team, have an amazing idea and get it here. And then the intern might throw in, hey, by the way, what if we did it like this? And everybody's like, oh, that's a good idea. And even with like super intelligence or whatever we're hurling towards, it's like, you know, you can, you might be able to create a V1, but it's, it's this combination of ideas and experiences that makes it truly special. Last question. Give me the update on index. It's a huge fund growing. What's the contrarian

strategy? Yeah. How, how, how, how, how, how, everybody, see you. out there soon? Yes, of course. Where are you going to see public funds? I guess our contrarian element has been not to grow enormously. Yeah. So, you know, we've had a billion dollar venture fund and two billion dollar growth fund for a decade now.

And we haven't expanded our size. So like the idea is that from our perspective, investing is a craft. And if we get bigger, we might lose the focus. And we're not going to be able to have the same relationship with the founders that we, that we adore. having. So we just have to generate the return. So that's what we're focused on, like, keeping it small and, and hopefully, I mean, you know, I have, I have some amazing partners who, how big is the team now? Um, we're, we are, we're seven investing partners.

Seven partners. And, uh, yeah. And what's cool is that, you know, like Chardul is behind whiz for us. Sure. And we have dream games. Yeah. And we have service Titan. And so it's, as a mentorship business. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what excites us. Yeah. Is that the next generation are better, are better than the current generation.

That's great. Well, thank you so much for coming. Congratulations. Fantastic. Take care. We'd love to have you back on the show scene. Yeah, pleasure. Thanks a lot.

I'll take the microphone. And we will bring in our next guest. Jordi, do you have any updates from the timeline? What else is going on? We have, Mamoon. Hello, hello. Hello, welcome to stream. Thank you so much.

Ooh, I like that pin. Finally. is fantastic. We've been excited to have you on the show. I'm so fired up to be here. It's so perfect timing. Give us a little introduction on yourself and what do you do. All right. Well, I'm a partner of Kleiner Perkins, early stage venture capitalist. Cliner Perkins, the firm has been around for 50 plus years in amazing companies like Google and Amazon and Netscape and Figma, of course. And yeah, we invest in early stage companies, but we also have a growth fund. Yes. Then invest in some pretty cool later stage opportunities as well.

What is the story of meeting Dylan and Figma? When did that come together? Yeah, I think I met him. You guys did the B. We did the B, yeah. And that was in 2017. I met Dylan probably in 2017, early in 17. I was on a board with John Lilly who led the series A.

Oh yeah, we read his blog post today. And John and I were involved with the company that didn't really work out. Okay. And he told me at the time, hey, this thing may not work out. So I owe you one. I'm going to introduce you to this guy. Dylan. Yeah.

And you're going to love him. And by the way, like your background in Box and Yammer and Slack really could help. Yeah. And so spend time together, get to know each other, which we did over a bunch of months. And we really hit it off. And later that year, Dylan decided to raise a series B. And this is around the time when the product had just come out of beta. and you could, you'd hear people talking about Figma.

And you know, the company had been around for five years. So this is a long windup. Yep, totally. And it was coming out of beta, just started to monetize a few customers. And you'd walk around actually South Park where we were based. And you see people in coffee shops, the designer types using Figma. Just like three, four, five years prior, you'd see Slack on people's screens. And so, okay, there's something going on.

And then when I saw my friend, Josh Williams, who's a designer, incredible designer, it's like, oh, Josh is using it. That means that the designer community has really lashed on the Figma. And so took a few tidbits, data points, and then I remember asking Dylan, like, show me this one chart. All you need to see is one chart. It's called the L28. It's the usage for the whole user base over a 28-day period of time.

It's a histogram. It's kind of nerdy, but Dylan, just go look at this data and tell me what it looks like. So he sent it over, and it had this. little smile and which effectively shows that at day 14, 15, 16 out of 28 days, many of the users were using it for like every day of the work week, which meant that effectively, if you're a designer, you were using Figma to get your work done. Yeah. And there's just no question about it. By the way, I'm a non-designer and I kind of came online in the work in the work world startup game in 2017 and I was very quickly at DAU. Like I use it all the time.

as somebody that didn't consider myself a designer, I was just invited to Figma and was like, wait, this is a pretty good way to just do a lot of different types of work, whether you're making a deck or marketing assets or a website or anything, so. Totally, and that's, you saw that, you know, I think the first board deck I think I ever got

was actually in Figma, so, and Figma Slides wasn't a product that we just launched, actually, yeah, so yeah, you saw this like incredible depth of engagement with the product that I'd seen with products like Slack and obviously like Slack we all use and we love some hate but mostly love yeah right and and you saw that early people feel about it they still use it so yeah yeah L28 that's effectively like a churn analysis but short term it's because you should see usage over a 28 day period it's actually just say take any user like the whole user base

okay like let's say a thousand users okay so a random slice they could have been installed months ago Yeah. But you want to see how they use it. Every person who signed up, let's say, got it. A thousand users. Yep. And did they use it for that once a month, twice a month, three times a month? Okay, okay, okay.

Or 28 times a month. Okay, oh, okay, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then you saw the tick up, like the smile curve. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And only consumer companies typically look at that. Yeah, yeah. So to see that sort of behavior out of an enterprise software product,

yep, was incredible. Yeah. One of the analysis I saw was Rule of 40. People were talking about how Figma's in a great position right now. great margins but also great growth rate add that together that's the rule of 40 when did the rule of 40 come into your world what did it factor into the series B or was it something you started tracking later what can you tell you just the cafe analysis yeah I think real later actually funny enough I think about 10 years ago I came up with this thing called a quick ratio okay

which was more interesting to me because for early stage companies it showed a quick ratio is effectively in a given month how much how many users did you add yep and how many users did you turn okay so let's say you added 400 users yep and you churned 100 yep your quick ratio is four yeah and that was actually like a good sure but if you're adding 200 and losing 150 not good yep yep right that's a leaky bucket yeah so for an early stage person the the quick ratio was just way better than sure looking at growth rate and then looking at the margins which could be all over the place based on what they did that month or that quarter Makes sense.

One question I have, I'm curious how you see it. So it was Index, Greylock, KP, Sequoia, A16Z were the leads. If this company, if Figma had been started in 2020, do you think there would have been one or two funds just like going back and forth? Was it, you know, I feel like today you'll see these like fast, fast follow rounds, insider around, concentration seems to be a real focus for a lot of funds? And was that something you think that like Dylan was just pushing for it, wanted a diverse. or was it more just the state of venture at that time? I think Dylan is just very nuanced and detail-oriented and very methodical. And every round he had in his mind, who was the right investor for me at this point in time,

which is how I think he even sought out this our relationship where John, Lilley and Dylan was telling you downstairs, you know, we sought you out for that series B. He was like a, you know, a beeline. Yeah. And I think Dylan had that same sentiment towards the Series C with Andrew Reed, who was just on, right? Yeah. And then even the round thereafter. So he was always in his mind had is this is the person, the firm that I really want to work with based on their skill set, their capabilities.

And he went after it and he got it. Yeah. Every single time. Yeah. How do you think the board evolved? It seems like there's a lot of different investors, different firms joining. How do you think the board will evolve going forward? And it already has evolved.

Can you talk to some of the additions and what the rationale was behind those? Yeah. So just in the last month, we've added three incredible people. Bill McDermard. O.G. Right. O.G. You have to have Bill on the show.

Yeah. Oh, no. We'd love to. Oh, my God. Bill is the man. Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, he runs service now. Yep.

Before that, he ran SAP. Yep. So he's just the CEO of all, like, the ghost. in terms of like running an enterprise software business. And we added Mike Krieger, founder of Instagram. Come on, guys. And a very interesting. People wouldn't think about it, but a big design focus.

Yeah. Anthropic. Anthropic. And now two product officer at Anthropic. He was downstairs. Yeah. And then we added Louis Van on, Lewis Van on, I think, is from Duolingo. Amazing.

And he's a founder, a CEO, went early in on AI. Yep. And, you know, running a public company. also a KP company. So just like three folks who bring different skill sets, but are just like A plus top notch. And I think that's sort of how Dylan has really built the company from setting the tone, the culture amongst the team,

his executive team, the board. And it's, you know, he couldn't be more proud of what's been built there. It's fantastic. When did last question, then we'll, I'm sure you have a busy evening. One, when did the kind of Gen AI opportunity click with you in Figma? Was it instantly?

Was there a specific moment that you realize what an opportunity Figma would have in terms of if you're already helping people turn ideas into real things and products? Gen AI has an obvious immediate application there. Yeah, I think there's more the features that allow you to do things with AI inside of the canvas of Figma. Yeah. And then there's the, what can you do from prompting to code to design? And I think there's both elements of AI.

to integrate into the Figma product, which we've done. But I think Dylan just being such a, so early on technology, but also timing it really right as well. Yeah. Was early, but more recently, as you know, we've launched four products. And one product is very heavy on AI, the Figma Make product, which goes from prompt to code. Yep.

So really just timing matters. And I think, you know, Dylan and the team are all over it. And you just had Chris on. And you have millions and millions. of DAU, weekly active users that are ready saying, please give us more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you guys. I'm a fan of the show. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. On sometime soon. Fantastic and I think we're going to hop on with Dylan right now.

Welcome to the stream. There we go. Looking incredibly sharp. Thanks so much. Fantastic looking suit. Great. What do you have there? You have a gaffel? We're going to ask you to hold this. I mean, you just got a hold on to that. Because you rang the opening bell. You rang the opening bell. Walk me through your day. What did you actually do today? Have you gotten any sleep? Your day also started.

Okay. I don't know. I don't know. Is that how bad I look? No, no, no. I just know the schedule. It's brutal. You know it's been intense schedule, but it was a great day.

Amazing. And the team was incredible. Yeah. And yeah, in terms of the gavel, I mean, I just feel like you're holding this thing. You can do anything. You can do anything. It's a powerful gavel. I feel like it's time to make a bunch of product decisions.

Yeah. Not sure on what. yet. Okay. You know, just. Yeah. The gavel will symbolize. Well, you also shipped a bunch of products updates today too. We did. Yeah. What were the highlights? I mean, a lot of highlights, but the things that I was super excited about, one was offset vector. Sure. Because we've been getting requests from that from the start of Figma. Yeah. And then also for Deb mode MCP, we made a bunch of improvements. And, you know, it's interesting with Deb mode MCP. I mean, this is one where the team was like, yeah, I think it's time to release it. And, you know, we kind of did the walkthrough it. This is for

MCP servers for AI agents, essentially. Yeah, basically it lets you translate, you know, designs a code and pull that in via MCP. Yep. And kind of an extension of our Deb mode functionality, and I was nervous because I just felt like we have so much to build out still, and we do. Yeah, yeah.

But it's been great to see the reception. Yeah. The reception has been really positive, and then today we made some more improvements to it, but this is just the start. There's a lot more coming on Deb mode. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier, kind of making the argument,

I think we both agreed that, Figma fits the traditional definition of like a platform that was designed I think defined by Microsoft This idea that the value that's created on top of the product is greater than the product the value of the product captures But how do you think that's going to change or what is the shape of it right now? I know that there are We have friends who run agencies that probably wouldn't exist if Figma did not exist I'm sure they would find a way, but they're like they have built a whole company and business around it And they're obviously incredibly synergistic with you every single every single thing that I've done in my career.

Yeah, arguably Jordy's career is like I don't think I've ever closed like even Figma I always love using it in the browser which is just as good I don't think I've ever closed you have the tab open

Figma has just been like you know 99.9% like yeah it's your operating system yeah it's your operating system yeah I love hearing that obviously but also I mean it's it's folks like you who are in the product so much every day

that give us the best feedback and we learn from it and the thing about designers is they are so thoughtful with their feedback. Yeah. And they really helped steer us and really orient us towards the right things to build. And then, you know, of course, you got to also take some bets where everyone's saying one thing and you're going to do another thing, but, or things that, you know, people aren't thinking about yet. Yeah. So we try to do a mix. Yeah. But it's the feedback for designers, I think, is consistently just like probably some of the

best feedback in the world. I saw it. So we're very lucky. It was crazy. It was crazy. Standing room only and standing ovations. It was like Woodstock. It was crazy. I want to talk about organizational design in the age of AI. How is the org structure changing, if any, at all? I imagine that you have your own team of designers and then developers and front end and back end down to hardcore WebGL folks, right? And there's some sort of different tiers

and different groups and product groups. But how does AI fit in? How does it change it? Obviously with Figma Make, it's kind of its own product team. But then I imagine that there are folks using AI all over the organization. So how do you think about AI playing a role either as a vertical product focus or horizontal slice or support teams? How are you tussling with that?

I think it's going to be kind of many things at once. So one dynamic that's always interesting is you have to motivate research by having great product applications. But also, you know, if you don't have the research done, sometimes people go, I can't build the product application part yet. And I think you just have to break that chicken and egg. Sure. You have to, you know, motivate by showing here's what's possible. And then you have to also try to break through and find new ways to do research so that you're able to inspire people on the product side.

And it's just a virtuous loop if you can get it right. But the, I think I'd say more broadly on organizations beyond even just Figma is, you know, the core thesis of Figma is like over the last decade we've had this point of view that. that as the inputs to software change, as more people are creating software, as there's just an exponentially more amount of software in the world, then design, craft, point of view, that's the differentiator.

And I think that there's a really interesting dynamic that we're observing, you know, it was like two decades ago, design was lipstick on a pig. You know, make it pretty. And maybe a decade ago, the conversation shifted to, okay, design's how it works. I really think about design through the whole process. And designers were like, yeah, we've always been saying this,

but finally everyone else kind of got it. And then now I think it's literally, it's how you win or lose. And I think there's, if you look at some of the companies that are doing the best, they, you know, some, many of which have been on your show. I'm intimately familiar. It is my number one complaint between many of the modern products.

I wind up making a decision not on the foundational technology, but instead on the user experience, the UI, which feels crazy in the age of benchmarks and like something that's so quantifiable. And yet I find myself making decisions based on the unquantifiable. John Lilly had a had a post earlier congratulating you and the team. He said in a 2003 interview about the iPod, Steve Jobs famously said design is not just what it looks like and feels like design is how it works. And he said that you just built like around this like core idea from the very beginning. But I think it's evolving.

I think it's now how you win. And the companies that are understanding that, I think, are just seeing them outperform. And the ones that are sort of like catching up, they're investing a lot in design and not just in the design team and how to get everyone in the organization to be part of the design process.

And I think this is really interesting for the designer's role because designers are the ones who are then going to have to leave the charge. That's going to be a lot of power. And we're going to start seeing so many more designer CEOs. Yeah, that makes sense. So many more design-oriented folks who are, you know,

leading and shaping directions of the future, of software and of companies more broadly because every company is becoming a software company now. Yeah. And I just think that it's going to be quite a shift. I suspect we're already seeing this a little bit, but, you know, maybe not at the level of magnitude of, you know, Zuck throwing these offers at researchers. Maybe it'll have it.

But I think there's a parallel at a different scale on design. I think that the design talent wars are heating up. Yep. And people are realizing that they have to get ahead. Yeah. Yeah, really, I mean, the clearest example here is despite how far Gen AI has come and how many new capabilities there are, incredible designers are more in demand than ever. It's like, you just get hit up all the time.

And I think if there's like a few people in my Rolodex and I'm like, these people are truly incredible, but like good luck recruiting them because like they, I have 50 other offers and infinite optionality. Yeah. Talk to me about research. You mentioned doing research in the context of Figma. And I'm interested to know. And this dates back to Evans.

Evans work before the company as well. I was thinking about the WebGL example. I was thinking about watching GPT3 come out, GPT4, and kind of understanding capabilities research. Like walk me through the understanding of like how do you think about design translating to tokens and then AI? How do you even test all these new functionalities? You can operate on pixels, diffusion models, or tokens, and HTML.

There's so many different angles. Like, what does research actually look like in the Figma context? Yeah, without sharing too much. Sure. I think one of the high-level framing might be, you know, diffusion models are excellent. And just like, if you look at sort of some of the things that we've seen with diffusion, the results over time, I mean, it's really felt like more of an exponential.

Obviously with LMs, whether it be language or toy problems and code and math, that feels like an exponential. Yeah. I think that neither is quite the approach for design just yet. I mean, obviously with LMs, we use models to generate outputs and make. Yeah. And Figma Make, we're super excited about it. And I think it's the ideal case because you go from zero to one. Yep.

we are still in a world where there are constraints. And to actually get to the point where you're differentiating the output, where you're adding that craft, that point of view, the financial models don't get you there. And even if they were to be able to increase quality of visual output, I think it actually only makes design more powerful. Because if you had five different designers in this room who were experts of their craft,

and they're all looking at, you know, some wonderfully generated design that was actually very good, which is not maybe where we're at now. Yeah. They probably have five different points of view. And if that's how you're going to stand out is your design craft, your brand, your marketing.

Yeah. I think it requires intentionality and systems thinking, not just in the design and software context, but even beyond cultural business constraints. And so, you know, we have in the front of the New York Stock Exchange today, design is everyone's business. It's so true.

Design went public. It also does seem particularly like reinforcement learning resistant because there's no like taste benchmark. Not deterministic. It's not deterministic. How did you think about adding to your board heading into the IPO and beyond every single investor that led various rounds from Andrew to Danny to Mamoon talked about your thoughtfulness around choosing the right partners at each stage and I'm and I know you added

Mike Krieger and and Bill and I'd love to. Louise too. Yeah. And yeah, we're super fortunate to have just the most incredible board. We also have two other own independents. Lynn,

she's the former CMO of Salesforce and on some other incredible boards too. Kelly. Kelly was the former CFO at Cisco. Oh, wow. And they are just powerhouses. They're amazing. And yeah, I'm just, my mindset, whether it be on the VC side,

independent side, Although I think as of right now, everyone's now independent. Technically. As a few hours ago. Yeah, a few hours ago with the gavel. But, yeah, I think that you're looking for folks that you can learn from. Folks that you love playing time with. Because the perfect board relationship is one where you're going to be calling them up with questions

and you're going to really enjoy spending the time and working through with them. Yeah. And I don't think they have to be folks, you don't have to find board members who are universe. great at everything. That's a high ask. But when you can find people at spike in certain areas, and then you know what to call them for, that is awesome. And so I think we have a very great group on the board, also in our exec team, where we just on all these different levels of the company have folks that really spike in different areas. And then coming together, they really have, they can really help everyone in the group get to the right decision.

Do you think your team pushed nicely to the limit? You can't walk anywhere in the building without seeing like either the most iconic merch on the back of somebody down on the trading floor or, you know, this like meticulously designed sign pointing you to like a storage closet or something like that. You know, I had some early previews, but it's nothing like locking around for real. I mean, this was incredible to see. It was probably the best place has ever looked. I haven't been here before. First time. You know, first time, so I can't comment on that, but I thought today looked exceptional.

They were great, great to work with. It was great. Yeah. Talk about the evolution of the company culture over just the entire journey. I mean, I have to imagine that, like, just the vibe change from being, you know, pre-release for four years and then growing on this kind of steady trajectory where it was obviously tier one after tier one coming in, but never felt. like super overhyped and never saw you on like the deified podcast circuit if you know what I'm talking about um you and we're doing that right now dea yeah yeah this is well you and evan both both kept you know a fair lower profile than other companies with your financial and yeah everything

performance and yeah yeah so where do you see the company culture going uh from here on out is anything changing or do you think there's an evolution or shift yeah i mean i think you look at the folks that come to Figma. Yeah. We sort of shine this bat signal in the sky of, uh, through our product. And the folks that are, want to come work at Figma, a lot of them are people that use Figma. Yeah, of course. It's a very creative team.

Uh, we're very oriented towards craft. We, I think as a group, our very first principles oriented. We're in the weeds, but we can talk about strategy. People need to be able to go across all those different levels. And I think very growth mindset, very humble, very kind. and I just think we're builders. And I would imagine that in the future that will all be the same. I don't see why that would change.

The things that, you know, I think about a lot right now are just clarity. I think that in order to, this is true for, I think, a lot of organizations, just the more clarity you can create for your team, both top down, but also noticing and creating processes for stuff to bubble up from everyone in the organization and then have it me in the middle and quickly have a great cycle time where you're able to figure out, okay, what is the right decision here and progress? That's what will make it so that you're able to adapt rapidly in an era where everyone has to adapt rapidly right now. Things are changing that fast.

How did the product demo go the other day? with Wall Street. The investment bangers. Are they converts, converts now? You know, I did have one investor come up to me to the road show and say that they wanted to be a designer now.

So I don't know if they actually put their job and, you know, started on a house. It's never too late. That's what I told them. I was like, you can be. It's okay. Yeah. We didn't have time to go deep on it,

but I was excited to hear that. I had never taken a design class. I'd never considered myself a designer. knew I was creative. And I did have this moment like in 2021. And I was like, wait, am I a designer? I like use Figma a lot. I make a lot of designs. And it was like the reason, you know, a lot of like what all the people involved here are talking about today is like everybody's everybody can be a designer. Everybody can create things, make things. And it was true from the very first moment that I used the product. Yeah. And just balancing that. You talked about having team,

members that have that range to be able to talk about strategy and then get in the weeds. And Figma, the product, what makes it so incredible is the range where you get invited to a file, you just land in it. You're there. You can see your buddies there in the same file all together with your cursors. But then as you understand the product more, there's no, I don't think, I certainly haven't hit the limit of what the product's capable. And I don't know that maybe anyone has.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's, there's this tension always of you got to make things both approachable. and you know you also have to cater to the most power user functionality and for folks that are real power users of the product how do you make sure that you do both and I think that that's always a balance we're trying to strike one thing that helps though is pulling out new areas and use cases into their own products that lets them breathe but it also makes that figma design can be focused on product design so for example fig jam was the first one we did it for and we're like yeah had noticed for a long time. People were doing brainstorming, whiteboarding. I would make the jankiest whiteboard diagrams and like I would pre-design graphics. And then I would like make them look nice. And then you had to like copy and paste them all in this like weird way.

And then you guys made fig jam. I was like, okay, cool. I was like making this myself in the product for years. We saw that with many people. And then by taking it and bringing into its own space, the other thing that we thought about was during pandemic times especially, people were treating Figma design like a space to hang out in. This is what I told Chris.

And when you were watching the stream? No. Yeah, yeah. I told us. I told this to Chris. I told this to Chris. Figma during the pandemic era was like a virtual office where I would open. I'd open my computer after my son would go to bed.

It'd be late at night. I'd pop it open. Figma would be open. I'd see Brandon in there. I'd see his little cursor. I'd go over and put a comment. Hey, what's up? How you doing? I would mess with them.

I'd change the button colors on them. I'd move stuff around. you know but it was this like it felt like a virtual office I ultimately didn't adopt any other virtual office tools because I was like well I kind of I think at one point we even designed like an office in Figma that ever you jump in you could move your character around yeah exactly it's that's so funny I mean that was part of the insight for how we differentiated FIG jam you know I told the team you know maybe a month before I launched hey like our differentiate for FIG jam is gonna be fun yeah

yeah and I remember having a board call and I told you know the team this and everyone looks to be like oh man, you've been sheltered in place way too much, buddy. Yeah. Because that was, I mean, there was a bunch of companies that were dedicated to whiteboarding, and I don't even, I haven't heard about them in a while, but it wasn't like a category you just waltz into, you know. Well, and to teams credit, I mean, I said this,

and at first there was skepticism, and then people were like, okay, let's do it. We did a one-day design sprint camp with like, I don't know, 30 ideas or something like that. I think four or five of them shipped, including many of the features that are like the Hallmark features, of fig jam and stuff that's really gone very broad in like cursor chat for example where we see that pattern replicated and other surfaces now and now it'll come out of one day so just like when you got this amazing creative team making it so that you're able to unblock them and just let them

go and if you just point them in a direction it can be incredible what you find yeah we have to let you go I want to thank you for having me very much I want to talk about everything from quantum computing to Dyson Spheres, but that will be for the next one. Next time. We would love for you to hit the gong with this mallet if you would do us the honor. I don't know. We might want to use the regular mallet.

I want to keep the precious gongs safe. Should we have to? I guess we'll use this for the really serious stuff. Yeah. There's a mallet right there. There we go. Iconic moment. All right.

Have good night everybody. And thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. It's so great to be here. You're a legend. Congratulations. You guys rock. Incredible leader.

Have a great rest of you have. Yeah. We are taping. We're still taping. We're still live right now. We're still live. We'll talk to you more off the screen. Thank you.

You're the man. Congratulations. It's fantastic. And we will bring in our next guest. Who we got? Who do we have? I think we have Lynn from Nicey. Do we have our next guest available?

Perfect. Thank you. We will bring them here. Here she comes. Is the market still? open? I don't know. Another 40 minutes or so. Okay. I'm usually on West Coast time.

Hi, welcome. Nice to meet you. Welcome. You are live on the air. It is so great to be here. What a day. What a day. We picked the right one. I haven't been to the New York. My mom knew that I was coming to the New York Stock Exchange and sent me a picture of me here when I was 10 years old. And I got a and I got a booklet, a pamphlet. And then I came in college once for kind of an entrepreneur networking event.

haven't been back since but I picked the right day it's been fantastic it's been a great day here can you introduce yourself and then there's so much we want to talk about i'm lynn martin i'm president of the new york stock exchange there you go great honor and i'm thrilled to be on this podcast i listen to you guys thank you thank you incredible this is a big moment for us i mean we just started a couple months ago it's been this has definitely been on like the vision board of like one day and now we're here so thank you so much for hosting us totally surreal first question i have to ask because it's uh it feels like Figma pushed the limits in terms of making this space feel like the Figma brand.

Did they give you any trouble around the details of design? Oh, gosh. I love a good takeover. And, you know, this space is really to celebrate capital markets and to celebrate our issuers. And today, with the full brand takeover by Figma, it's been amazing. That's fantastic. Walk us through what else has gone this year. We've been talking about this dynamic that people were kind of like,

Is the IPO window open? And then all of a sudden we'd looked around and it was like, oh, it's wide open. There's been a ton of exciting news. But what have been the standout moments this year in your world? Yeah, I mean, the market very much is now open. I don't think anyone is debating that after today. I agree. You know, we've had a lot of great companies come to market.

On the tech side, we've had just in the last couple of weeks, we had Accelerant. We had Ambic Micro go yesterday. Obviously, Figma today. We had Circle. Circle. A couple months ago. That was another great one. Nielsen IQ last week.

McGraw Hill. Hinge Health. Mountain. So there's been quite a fair amount of deals. They've done well. They've done well. They've helped. Broadly tech IPOs have done very well this year.

Yeah. And when I'm with institutional investors, the thing that I keep hearing from them, these are, you know, the big long only funds is we want more issues to come to market. We want to add to our portfolio. When's the market going to open? When's the market going to open? So there's a lot of excitement, euphoria, that actually get these companies out and a lot of demand,

which I think is great. What are the key goals, the key value props, the key action items that you bring to bear in your day-to-day, in your role? You know, one of my big focus is, probably my primary focus, is to scoot more. All right, all right. We're cozy in this.

in the studio, is really to ensure that our capital markets remain the envy of the world. For me, it's about price certainty and efficiency of risk management. How do you increase those? Have to have good technology. Now I'm a technologist by trade, which most people don't. I was going to ask what the path is to becoming the president of the New York Stock Exchange. Of course, in this day and age, you start as a coder. That's how I started.

No way. That's amazing. I did. Where do you write code first? I was at IBM. There we go. It's part of their global service. is consulting practice and my clients were financial institutions.

That makes sense. Incredible. What programming language did you write back then? You know, you're asking me to date myself. We don't need to do that. I'm going to, you know, I'll say C. Okay. C was the main one that I used C++ a little bit.

Yeah. But, you know, I'm not going to go further back with the other stuff I did. Can you walk us through like a day in the life of a CEO going public? I didn't want to pull it out of Dillon, but it's like, By the way, Dylan's, and then the stock starts trading. Just how calm and collected Dylan was and just so focused on product, team, culture, totally. Vision.

But isn't that Dylan? Yeah, that's Dylan. Through and through. He doesn't have to play a character on a day like today. It's just another day. Totally. But yes, what will walk me through a day in the life of a CEO taking a company public at the New York Stock Exchange?

Well, you probably have gone through about a 10-day period where you've been on the road and you're probably a little tired. Does that mean literally on the road? When people say road show, does that just mean like one big conference room where everyone comes to you? Or are you literally flying around two different long only funds? It's a mix. Some of the big long onlies, you will go see them in person. Okay.

You know, Boston-based. Yes. Like a State Street or something. Yeah. Yeah. Or more the Wellington. Fidelity. Okay.

You probably go see T.ro in person. You know, you're going to see some of the big names, the ones that are generally the top holders of equity. You're going to probably also go see Vanguard and BlackRock and all those folks. And some of those are in Manhattan, so it might be a stop here, but you're going around, and you really are on the road. You are moving around. You are on the road. Okay.

So 10 days of that, then the big day comes. This is calendar days. Yeah. I'm going. Okay. Not business days. Okay. So it's more like five or six.

Okay. Yeah. We can a half. And then, by the way, you've already done testing the water. So you've already met these people. Sure, sure, sure. And then the night before you price. Yep.

Your deal gets priced. Yep. And then the morning of, you, And how does that happen? Is that just everyone like putting in different bids, testing the water? Is there an automated system or is this, is this piece happening more over conference calls and discussions? Like, walk me through that piece. It's probably a better question for the banking syndicate that's doing it. Yeah, yeah, it depends on who's doing it. I think it's probably a bit of everything at the moment, a bit of technology. Okay. Also some phone calls. Sure, sure, sure. They set the

price where they think the supply that is coming to the market should price. Yep. And then you You go to sleep. Yep. Wake up right and early. And of course you ring the bell. You ring the bell. At the New York Stock Exchange. And then you have a couple of hour period where you're doing media interviews.

Yes, of course. Talking about your company while your stabilization agents trying to figure out where the stocks will actually trade. Yeah, we'll open. Where should it open. Okay. There's obviously a lot of supply on some of these or not a lot of demand. A lot of demand on this one in particular.

Yeah, there's a lot of demand. Maybe, you know, we were hearing like rounds of cheers around noon and then one. And then it seemed like this particular stock opened at two kind of around there. And that was all just based on matching the buyers and selling. What have you done as president of the exchange to attract the circles and the hinge healths and the figmas, right? These are the blockbuster IPOs of the year. There's obviously other players. Got it last year.

Yeah. Yeah, and there's obviously other, there's other plenty, you know, other companies I won't name that would like to have those opportunities. But what is, what is, you know, what makes Nicety so appealing at this moment? Well, I think there's probably a couple of different reasons. But one, our market model, the fact that there are guys and girls down on the floor who are putting capital to work, taking the other side to stabilize a stock once it is open. the market. So our market model is very much differentiator. We're the only exchange in the world that has that market model. Two are the services that we offer. We partner with the best in class

firms to provide the best in class services. And three is the general community that we have of issuers at NYSA. That's great. Yeah. Talk to me about the Bitcoin ETF. That was kind of an interesting one. Was anything different about that? How did that kind of play out? Yeah. So we were the exchange to bring the first Bitcoin. ATF to market and partnership with Grayscale. We actually started working on that in 2016. What? Yeah.

I thought you were going to say in 2023 because I remember seeing some ads on CNBC and stuff for like, oh, Bray Scale is happening and then there was the approval and that took some time. Whenever you first got the pitch, did it immediately make sense? Did you think they were crazy at the time? I'm a big believer in the fact that ETFs are one of the great innovations in financial markets. It's a vehicle that, allows for liquidity and transparency of assets that have less liquidity. Sure. And transparency. Yeah. So bringing Bitcoin and ETH and some of the other ones are being talked about into the

ETF structure, it really focuses on price transparency, liquidity, and trade certainty. Yeah. The whole investor protection. Sure, sure, sure, sure. So it made a ton of sense to us that someone was thinking, yeah, well, if you wrap this in an ETF structure, you'll actually be able to get institutional investment and people to get exposure to the asset class. So eight years of work, I imagine a lot of that's with the SEC and regulatory. But was there also a piece of talking to the the buy side and the investing group to see if there was demand? Is that a piece of it? Or was it mostly just chopping one on the legal side. It was chopping a lot of regulatory wood. That makes sense. Yeah. There's a lot of that. Grace Gale did a great job, as did the other. Another overnight success,

just like Figma. It's easy. Overnight success, what, seven or eight years in the making? Yeah, most of the United States are. I think Figma was over a decade, but that's how these things happened. What's been your kind of framework around market volatility this year? How have you talked with clients and issuers around just kind of navigating that broadly. Yeah. As a technology, the big thing that I've been focused on is capacity in the systems to ensure that certainty and efficiency of trading was continuing to persist on those really volatile days.

I always like to say you're investing for the long term though. Like don't watch the market on any one given day because the markets go up and the markets go down. And we've had such a long period of time where the markets just went up. And I think people had forgotten that at times markets do go down. And it's okay. Yeah. But if you are patient and thoughtful and disciplined about your investing and you invest for the long term,

you'll see the rewards of that investment. Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy? What are you keeping track of for the rest of the year, the next quarter? What's on your mind? I'm excited to bring some more IPOs to market. Yeah. We've got some big names that we're working with, that we're really excited to come to market.

Yeah, and continuing to just watch the market, market moves, ensure that our systems are. How big is the organization right now? Well, we're part of a bigger organization. The bigger organization is about 13,000. 13,000. We've got about within our area, we've got about 1,000. 1,000 folks. That still feels.

That feels pretty lean, given the size of some of the companies that we cover that are maybe a couple years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, AI is a big area. We're also watching as well. We've been using AI for more than a decade here. So we're very focused on the application of it for specific use cases, but ensuring that there's... You're talking about internally, not on the issuer's side.

Yeah, yeah, internally. But our area focus is ensuring data privacy is held. That's the utmost importance to us. Yeah, yeah. It seems like we're still in the early innings of actually getting a lot of those products into enterprise-ready states. Absolutely. And when you're entrusted with the safety and security and liquidity of the most dominant American capital market, you can't always be on the most risk on frontier in terms of technological adoption.

Yes. But we've been using AI, for example, to help surveil the markets. You know, you can point AI at a secure, anomaly detection. Sure, sure, sure. And get amazing efficiencies. That makes sense, yeah. Right? And that then feeds back to the human.

Sure. Okay, I just got a bunch of information based on this data set, this huge data set that I just pointed my AI at. Yep. It makes the human much more efficient. That makes sense. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Thank you for hosting us.

Given your engineering background. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for having us. Hope to be here many more times this year. Come back. Ideally, ideally the windows open enough that we're just here every day. Yeah, just fully relocated.

Is there an apartment up there? I'll hang out. Thank you so much for having. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to meet you guys. Thank you.

Cheers. Well, thank you for watching our stream today. Do we have anyone else, Ben? Are we ready to wrap? I think we're good, right? That's a wrap. from the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you so much for watching. First of many, hopefully. We will see you tomorrow. One more congratulations to the

thousands of figmates that made this a thing. Yeah. It's truly incredible and I can't wait to see where the company goes from here. Me too. Thank you for watching. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Bye.