The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - First Time Founders: Figma’s Founder on Post-IPO Life & the Road Ahead

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Ed Elson speaks with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. They discuss the future of design in the age of AI, how his management style has changed over time, and what it was like to go public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform. that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-4-free at O-D-O-O-O-O-com. Welcome to first-time founders. I'm Ed Elson. At the start of 2025, the IPO market felt like it had frozen in place. Then, slowly, the tide began to turn. By the third quarter, deal flow picked up dramatically. 23 companies raised nine figures or more, and five made headlines with blockbuster listings. One of those headlines came from a company whose tools have quietly become essential to modern digital design. At this point, the company has

has millions of users. It's used by 95% of Fortune 500 companies. Its platform is now central to nearly every digital team's workflow. That company went public in July, and it is now finding its feet after one of the biggest IPOs of the year. This is my conversation with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan Field, thank you for joining me on first-time founders. Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here and to finally get to meet you. Absolutely. So we're going to get into how you started Figma. Everyone's been talking about it. Biggest IPO of the year, really. We've been talking a lot about it on our other podcast, property markets. But I want to start with a quote from your founder letter. In the internet boom of

the late 90s, the ethos was build it and they will come. Today, that could not be further from the truth. It used to be that design was an afterthought. Now design is more than form and function. design is how you win or lose. You are a design company. What is different about the world today compared to 30 years ago that makes design so important? I love that you read the founder's letter, first of all, so thank you for reading it. Absolutely. I put a lot of thought into it, and so I've always been eager to kind of get that reflected back

and love that we're just diving right into it. Let's go. It's certainly been the case for Figma that from the beginning, we had this intuition, that design was becoming more important. Now, I couldn't put in the words that I could put in today. And design, I think, started to become this infectant around software. Yeah. It started to make us expectations for everything increased,

and we started to see that in design hiring. And design ratios, you know, we're going from like, okay, we got one designer for, you know, dozens of engineers, and their job is to put lipstick on a pig and make it pretty at the end of the process to a different set of mind, sort of shift of, mindset into this more Apple philosophy of design is how it works. Yes. And the more people that took on that philosophy, the more people that tried to meet the

market where they wanted to be met, those companies, I think, did so much better. And people were starting to realize that. Yeah. And so they started to hire more designers. We saw this ratio change tremendously over that time. Suddenly it was going to, you know, in extreme cases like Airbnb, you might have one designer for every two or three engineers. instead of one designer for every 30 engineers or no designers.

And so then as this wave of design hiring happened, we also saw just the wave of software increase too. And all of this started to come together into a thesis of design is how you win or lose. And that's a thesis we held before AI. With AI, it is like absolutely unequivocally clear that that is true. Yes. Because now that exponential is no longer just like this kind of, Oh, it looked flat and now it's trending upwards.

Is it linear or is next dimensional? We're trying to tell it's going vertical. You know, now you can create software faster than ever. I'm not saying it's going to be the best software yet. But what we do see is more software being created. And as software gets more competitive, you have to differentiate. How do you differentiate? Well, you need to have a point of view, first of all.

That's on the product side and the brand. But you also have to have great design, great user experience. It has to be delightful, it has to be clear, it has to be useful. And I think that also you need to really be leaning on the brand and marketing and shining there too. It's not enough just to have great product design. You have to have great brand design, and you have to communicate that point of view across all of it, and your brand, which stretches across every experience the customer has with your company. So you create the company in 2012, product design becomes more of a thing.

and from my understanding, you didn't fully release your product until several years after. What were those years, those first years like, and what was the product that you brought to the world? My co-founder and I were very excited about exploring WebGL, the ability to use the GPU in your computer in the browser. And we really started with technology rather than a problem. And I think that most companies that do well have some why now. And the why now doesn't have to be technological, it can be so. It can be regulatory. You know, there's any number of things that it can be.

Something we even have multiple line hours. I think Figma, looking back, we did have multiple line outs. But we thought, okay, we're technologists. You know, we're both studying computer science. Let's start with tech. And we looked at all the tech that exists in the world and WebGL stood out. We explored for a while, tried to figure out, okay, what are we going to do with WebGL? We've got our hammer.

What's our nail? This is not usually when people start a company and have the youth surround. Usually they start with the problem. They start with the problem. People say it's the opposite. That's the way we started, it's the honest truth. And we explored for quite some time. And we looked at all sorts of things that you might apply the verb photoshopped to

in terms of taking that kind of verb and distilling into use cases that we thought were going to be interesting for consumers. Things like face swapping. That was one of the first things we built. Face swapping. Yeah. So, you know, it was like 2012, and we could, with plus on blending, make it so that you could, we could swap our faces. and it looked credible. Or background removal,

changing color gradients dynamically in a scene. What we found with a lot of this was basically that the tech wasn't ready yet. And we were able to get like 85% the way there. In cases like face-wopping, maybe 90-95% the way there, but it just wasn't 100%. And I think it wasn't until deep warning that actually we got to the point where,

yeah, you can get 100% the way there. Yeah. So then we explored, okay, we got to ship something, built a photo editor, but it was in the browser because again, WebGL. That was the hammer.

And I actually quite prior to that work. We never shipped it because we decided it wasn't the thing, but did all sorts of things that later informed us at Figma. And then we basically said, okay, wait a second. Like, photo editing is going to happen

on your mobile phone. It is not going to happen in a web browser and definitely not if we don't support Raw. which is an advanced image format for digital photographers. Why are we building the web browser when the curve around mobile phone adoption and megapixels per phone is just up into the right in what is probably exponential way as well? So then we said, okay, we got to back out of this and do something else.

And that's when we started to pay attention on what is now Figma. So even that starting period, it took a while. If I had said, let me give ourselves six months and then we'll make a call, we would never have Figma today. Yeah. Past that, then we were on track. And we started to raise money, build a team. But it took a while.

Professional tools are hard to build. They have very complex workflows. A lot of mechanics that you have to get just right. And so, you know, we had an aggressive timeline that we communicated to people, investors, employees. We certainly did not hit it. We were pretty much in the right order of things, but basically offset by a year or two in each case. Yeah. You know, my favorite part of it was actually we kept putting it in front of designers once we got to the point where we had theoretically met some subset of their needs we thought could get us to market.

And there's an entire summer where I went out and just showed people the tool. And they all were intrigued, but they all basically said, I just don't trust it. Like, oh no, what if it's like the browser element? We bet everything on this. Turns out it, uh, yeah, the comments all went away when we did a redesign and the visual design itself. The tool was not sufficient, and that's why he didn't trust it. You know, go figure that designers won a well-designed tool visually. So we fixed that, and then we were off to the races truly. And did a close beta launch in December 2015, and then a GA release in October 2016,

and then finally started to price in mid-2017, which was almost five years after we started the company. So it took quite a while to get off the ground. Basically, anyone that I know who's starting a website or creating some app or use it or creating some sort of digital product, everyone is using Figma, or at least in my circles. How did designers, how do people build stuff before? Like, what were people using before Figma? Yeah, I mean, it was a single player. And there's a culture that I think came out of agency culture where there's a lot of like, I'm going to,

show you three things like the first two are not going to be like just what you want for the third one everyone's going to go oh it's so good and then i'll go back in my corner and i will do my work and we won't interact that much because i'm not sure i want to and so that's completely different from the multiplayer experience of figma and i think that cultural shift was real like the first comments we got on the launch were you know uh it was controversial people basically uh said in the launch comments, stuff like a camel is a horse designed by committee. They said,

if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. But also there was a small set of people that loved it and saw that vision of what it could mean to make multiplayer design in the browser. And with a tool that was high quality, a tool that could actually really meet their needs and be focused on their use case. What does single player versus multiplayer mean? Single player mean local to your file system.

One person can use it as a time. You export something, an image, send that image over. You've got version control issues. You know, the web forced us to be multiplayer. We didn't initially try to do multiplayer. We had an instinct that multiplayer was important. But it was a complex thing to build. And so we thought, okay, let's not start there until we hear some validation.

And no one validated it. Like, I think out of 100 people, maybe two people told, both them were sitting next to each other. and they were doing this pair design sort of workflow so they uniquely got it. Otherwise, people pulled us, this is not what I want. Like, why would I want to interact with all these people? More stakeholders, I think that's bad. And so we didn't initially start there,

but we got there because we were forced to. If I have, you know, Figma, and I've got a tab, and you've got the same tab open, and then I make an edit, and your tab reloads, and you make an edit, and my tab reloads, it's a terrible user experience. So as soon as we started to get to the point where it was closer to production

and we were doing that on the team, we knew we had to go build it. And the benefits were tremendous, not only the ability for more people to be in the canvas at the same time, just like a Google Doc, but also a single source of truth. Your versioning problem goes away.

Instead of, you know, V2-3-5, final three, three, you know, you now have just a document, a space to go to. And it was also interesting the behavioral change over time as people kind of got used to this world because they started to treat Figma like a space. And that was fascinating, like Slack went down one day during COVID. And we started to see folks basically putting text boxes in a Figma canvas in order to go back and forth in chat. And we're like, this is not what we built Figma for.

But there's something here. And so that led us to Fig Jam, which is our way to basically brainstorm, ID8, whiteboard diagram, and it's a simpler product. It's really for that use case. But with it, we tried to incorporate concepts that were really speaking to that idea of how do you create a space for people? It's similar to Google Docs. I think that's a good comparison. It's like we used to sort of write up a dock, you save it, you send it off.

I mean, before that we would print it out. And someone would put notes and edit it with a pen. and then you go through it again. And then there's just this great idea where it's like, let's just put it on a single page and let's all just jump in the dark and we can comment on things and tag things. And that's basically what Figma is doing

from a product and web design perspective. And it's been like this unbelievable success. Now, when I think about who you're up against, the first name that comes to mind is Adobe. I mean, Adobe is and has been the job. in digital design for many, many years. And it's almost like, or at least from a consumer perspective, it seems as if they have had historically almost a monopoly.

You are the first company that has really eaten into that and at least presented yourself as a real competitor to Adobe. How did you do that? Or it sounds like maybe you'll disagree with that characterization. But how did you? you get to this point where I'm saying the word Figma in the same sentence as Adobe. We saw ourselves as going up against Adobe in the earliest days of Figma, for sure. And over time, what we found was that actually designers, they're our core audience.

The core thing we do is make software for product designers. They work with teams. And multiplayer shows that even more in terms of those workflows. And if they're teammates, the people around the designers, are not successful. the designers are not successful. So that led us to go and both go sort of upstream in the workflow and downstream, to things like fig jam for ideation brainstorming

to Figma slides, for alignment, but also downstream in the product design and development workflow into, okay, how do we go and make it to a developer, for example, can take the assets in Figma design and translate them to code in the most effective, efficient way that they can and save time. And as we've kind of mapped out that process, we found ourselves building for anyone that wanted to go from idea to a polished application that they can deploy and get into production.

But it was interesting because I think we thought of, okay, it was small market for product designers, web designers, fear of labor statistics, said it was 250,000 people at the time when we started Figma. We thought, okay, this is not going to be our long-term market. It's growing. We don't know how much, but, you know, we'll have to go into other use cases around creative tools. And instead we found ourselves really focused at our core on the product design, development, workflow, and building software, and how to help people build the most well-designed software. But overall, it's not like we see Adobe.

There's a period where they tried, but then they sudden set the product, and they decided they're going to focus on their core, which is the creative professional. and also, I think, compete in the down market. Yeah. And so it's just two very different businesses at this point. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Indeed. Finding the right tech talent for your company isn't just hard. It's mission critical.

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No min balance required. Chime card on time payment history may have a positive impact on your credit score. Results may vary. See chime.com for details and applicable terms. We're back with first time founders. It's kind of fascinating to hear these those first five years in how many. messy it really did sound. It's always messy. Every startup is.

And now you are a public company, biggest IPO of the year. We were looking at the IPO pricing, and we said on our podcast, we're like, this is a buy. It was originally priced at 25. Then it was repriced at 30. We said it was a buy at 30. Then it was, I mean, 33. 33 is that it was a buy. And that's what it went out at the IPO price. And then it opens in the market. and it's 85, and then it goes up to 100. And, you know, we thought that you guys would see a big pop.

I didn't see it being that crazy. And then it's really interesting, you know, a lot of our listeners, I've heard people saying, like, hey, it's come down a lot since 100. And I keep wanting to tell me, like, I was saying buy it 33. That's what I was talking about. But the point being, now that you're a public company, there is a lot of pressure on you to return value to shareholders. And even I was receiving that pressure as someone who just talked about the stock. So I could imagine that that would be kind of a different paradigm where everyone's watching you, everyone's asking questions, people like me asking you, what do you think of the stock, how do you feel about the pricing?

How has that changed your overall experience as a CEO? Well, I told the company, before we went public, during the IPO, literally on a listing day, before we saw any signals from the market and after, and then also after IPO, then I just showed up about it, is, look, the number's going to go up, the number's going to go down. We do not control the number. the only thing we've got control over is the inputs and so we have to keep our eye on the prize and we got to do everything we can to drive those inputs

and we have to take the long-term view you know the irony is of course that as a public company you have to report earnings every quarter and I think that one reaction that is to take a quarterly view of course we we care about our results

and also you have to take the long-term view and the long-term view always has to come first. And so I spend my energy thinking not about, okay, what is the stock price doing on any given day? Some days I literally forget to look because I'm so focused on what we're trying to do for the long-term. And you only get one shower thought a day.

There's a great Paul Graham essay on that. Your shower thought needs to be on what are the long-term things we can do to make our customers lives better, value will follow. There's the great Bill Walsh quote, which is the score takes care of itself, which is a very similar dynamic. It's like if we focus on our inputs,

on driving value, on our fundamentals, the score is going to take care of itself, the stock price is going to take care of itself. But I could also imagine now, as a public company CEO, that at the same time, you kind of take care of the stock price as well as the vibe setter, as the leader of the narrative. And, you know, we talk a lot on our podcast about the narrative versus the numbers.

There's the numbers that can drive the stock, and then there's the narrative, that what our investors think is happening. Do you feel any pressure? It sounds like you don't want to think too much about this is the story we're telling people. You want to think about are our numbers good, or our input? it's high quality. But do you feel a pressure now to, you know, show up on that earnings call and, like, capture the imaginations of people to set a narrative that investors are really excited about? Is that something that you feel is incumbent on you now as a public company CEO?

I think what's most important, and this is the same perspective I had when we were a private company, is to make sure that people understand what the company is doing. yeah and to make sure that people are educated and so that's most of my focus it's why i do demos on earnings calls really so far maybe at some point i don't do them i don't know i felt like i can't commit to that forever but yeah but i like doing that i like to show people what are we actually improving and i think without that it's so easy to get lost in sort of whether it be narrative or numbers or whatever for people and my advice to anyone who's like looking at the stock is is understand our company.

It's very simple. Like, go read our S-1, go watch the earnings calls, go look at our filings, go look at what we're doing. Like, that's how you understand. Now, on narrative, of course, there's an importance to narrative.

This is different than narrative for markets. This is a narrative for the business. If you don't have a narrative about what is going to occur in the world, you don't have a vision. You don't have a point of view on where you're headed. And so, to me, it's very important to story tell there.

It is show people and unpack the context that's in my head about where we're headed for our employees, for our customers. And that's something that, you know, I feel a lot of pressure on because otherwise we don't have a North Star. Yeah. And then I think the fun model question that maybe is related to markets and is deeper related to strategy, the question that everyone seems to be asking these days for any company, private or public, is this an AI winner or an AI loser? And this is a very important question to answer, obviously. If you care about the long term, you've got to be on the right side of AI. Yes.

So what's that mean? To me, it means that you have to be in a place where as the model capabilities improve and come online, you are getting better as a company. It's that simple. And so my advice to everybody is make sure that that is true for your company. How does AI play into Figma's business and Figma's product, I guess? Let's hear the answer to do that question for Figma. One of the products we have right now that it's, you know, a PRII product in many ways, is Figma Make, which is our basically prompt to working app product. We see it used for prototyping use cases by designers to make it said they can go explore prototypes that are more interactive.

We see it used for people that are shipping websites or web apps publicly. And even internal tools use cases. And a film make is fascinating because there's so much that we can do on the application level to make it better all the time. And also, yeah, you get a new model in there that's got better functionality, more power, and it makes the product better. Like literally we see that with all the model releases. Overall for our entire ecosystem, I think that, you know, we've publicly said about how we're introducing prompting in Figma Design. that's still a work in progress. You know, we're in early alpha stage there, lots to do.

But Figma Design and Figma Make, you know, those should be two sides of the same coin. You should really go back and forth rapidly. Right now you can copy from Figma Make to Figma Design. You can copy from Figma Design to Figma Make. That's very powerful. You can use design systems that you've built up in Figma's platform and convert them into a form that you can then use in Figma Make.

But, you know, there's all this room to be more seamless across it And to make it so this all feels very integrated. And we are working hard on that and figuring out the best way to unify and to make it so that the entire platform is AI-Native in a way that fits that criteria. And the last thing I'd say is just, it might actually be true that, ironically, you know, design is non-verifiable. There's no way to know other than, you know, rigorous debate, AB testing is. design A or design B, better for my audience. Yeah. And even with A-B testing, you could hit local maximums and not the global maximum.

And you might be missing sort of the forest for the trees. Yeah. And so there's so many different inputs to design, whether it be product design, visual design, brand design, that are just kind of beyond the context that you have in a tool or in a model. You know, there's just sort of like, what is the call? culture right now. What's the system we're trying to create? What's the brand we're going for? What's the ethos we stand for? What's the point of view we have? What are the business constraints? Like, I can keep going. And also, what are the flows? What's the before and after of these states? And how do we

want to manage our complexity? And how do we want to make it so that we're able to have progressive disclosure? What's our philosophy and viewpoint on all of us? And like, this is a lot of context to go gather and it should lead to many outputs if you give it to an LM and I don't even think it's possible right now to give a lot to an LM. But the better that the models get

generative capabilities that are highly opinionated, I think it's actually better for the conversation around design because if I show you a very opinionated design, you'll have a reaction. You're going to love it, you're going to hate it,

But you're not going to be neutral. If I show you a not very opinion of design, you know, something that's kind of like the average of averages, you will be more neutral. I'm like, yeah, it's all right. Yeah. As the craft increases, as the aesthetic increases for these models, as they get better at that,

it's almost like you're planting all these different flags in a potential option space. And it's your job as a designer as a team to go figure out where in that option space we want to go even deeper, push harder, and explore further. Yeah. And so I think it actually amplifies the role of designers. It is interesting. You talk about having an opinion.

I found that that is the worst trait of AI right now, is that it's so good at aggregating, it's so good at collecting, it's got the best memory of all time, but it's so bad at having an opinion, saying something interesting, novel, new. Even when I push it, I'm like, you must have an opinion

on this subject that I'm bringing to you. And it says, well, there are both sides, which ultimately leads to, I imagine, in the design space, bad design, because, as you say, you say non-verifiable. Another word for that would be subjective. It's about taste. And AI has kind of bad taste. So what is AI going to do to design? Is it going to, I mean, the classic question, replace designers, or would you say that this space is a little bit more protected in that sense? If you're at a company that values design, the opportunities will be even bigger than they are today. If you're not at a company that values design, you already have some problems.

So that's the problem that maybe you should already look at. But every company that wants to win should value design right now. And again, there are ways to actually prompt models to... to make them more opinionated. It's just that the range with models that are currently released, you can't get that far. I think that'll change. We'll get to a place where with clever prompting,

you'll be able to go further on aesthetic. That does not mean it's the thing you're gonna ship. The more that you can explore, currently limited by human toil, is, and I'm not saying that's not enjoyable work for a lot of people too. But that's all stuff that limits how much of that option space you can explore.

It will be on the human to pick, which is the right one. I actually think it's not just picking. I don't think it's a curation rule. I think it's pushing. Pushing. And I think you have to explore the option space. You need tools that help you. And then when you find something that you like,

it's your job than to push and to go way deeper there. And that's what's going to lead you to a truly differentiated design level of craft. and expression. That's our philosophy across all the products at Figma. I have a quote from an interview that you did in 2021. You said, I'm so curious now. You said, I was not a very good manager when I started Figma. Oh, I wasn't, yeah. I was an intern before that, so I had a lot to learn.

What were you bad at from a management perspective? How have you improved? And now that you've improved, what does it take to be a good manager of people. Management and leadership are different. And you can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa. For me, I think I'd always, you know, been a leader in terms of leading different initiatives I've been a part of or trying to help whoever was the leader really do their best. And from that, I kind of came into starting Figma and just thinking I was good to go. But turns out there's this whole new skill set around management that I definitely did not know.

And the good news is if you're a first-time manager, it's all very learnable. It'll feel like muscle memory eventually. But it's knowing where your team is at, building great relationships. The tactics are things like one-on-ones, creating context, making sure that people know what their goals are, holding them accountable with those goals, making sure that you're able to keep good cadences for your team. And you're about it all of this. Oh, for sure.

Yeah, I had no memory. And so I just kind of like, and I think also, you know, you take on VC money, you're trying to get this into market. It's not in market for like ever. By the way, I want to be clear, too, for anyone listening,

don't do what we did. Like, if you have any way not to, go build fast. Yes. The best is to get me out rapidly. Like, that's the question I'm always asking in my product reviews. How do we go faster here? What can we stage?

What can we, what assumptions do we have that we can be cut? So, please don't take away that you should take five years to launch a company. You'll be dead. Like, we are the outlier in from a different time. Yes. But, yeah, I think I was bad at all of it. What was tremendously helpful was hiring our first manager. It came as director of engineering, his name is show.

and he was someone that came from this amazing history of companies who worked at General Magic, Macromedia, Adobe, Medium, as well as starting his own thing a few times, deep history and knowledge of our space. All's just a great human and just like an incredibly smart human, but also deeply empathetic. And yeah, I mean, he came in and instantly went, okay, there's a bunch of stuff to change and improve. And, you know, we talked every day for quite a long time. And I learned a ton from him. And I learned a ton from the next people we hire that were leaders and managers as well.

In general, I think your mindset has to be higher people you can learn from. One of the biggest traps, the biggest mistakes is sometimes people will try to hire folks that they will just, like, look up to them and revere them. I think a lot of times they look for people that might be not as skilled because they feel like there's some control. control aspect there or something. And I think it's like the worst thing you can do. You need to find people that will push you further, the company for further, that are aligned with you in terms of where you want to go. But also, they will add new skills and new possibilities to the company, the organization. So that's what I'm always looking for is ways to level up our team and people to learn from. I think I can learn from anyone. That's how I do you interview. too. When I'm on the other side of the table, and I'm asking questions. You're looking for, can this person teach me something? Yeah. I mean, my mental test for interview is like, okay, I come out of this learning something. Yeah. Among others. But that's one of the things that I care about.

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But most of all, they deserve AI cybersecurity that can stop novel threats before they become breaches across email, clouds, networks, and more. DarkTrace is the cybersecurity defenders deserve and the one they need to defend beyond. Visit darktrace.com forward slash defenders. for more information. We're back with first-time founders. What are your core strengths, would you say?

I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of companies that have tried to do what you did, and you won, for lack of a better word, what are you really good at? What did you do differently that you think other companies didn't do? Well, first of all, there's a lot of the story be written.

So, you know, the bigger the ambition, the more there is to go tackle and that's definitely my mindset. I never feel like we've won. But I would say that, you know, the first great decision I made was working with Evan. He was my T.A. Brown smartest guy I knew, and I felt like, okay, if this thing works out, great.

But if it doesn't, I'll learn more by working with Evan than doing anything else in the world. And so it's the easiest call. Yeah. For me, I guess, you know, I have a hard. time talking myself this way, but curiosity is definitely a strength. I'm always trying to make sure that it stays a strength, and I love learning about new things, new spaces, patterns, sometimes even are teaching people something, and they ask you a question, and you give them an answer,

and you realize, wait a second, that answer is gave, like, that applies to the situation I'm in right now. So, ironically, you can learn by mentoring, too. Yes. I think in addition of that, I think that early on in my sort of tech career, being at O'Reilly Media, which for those don't know is they do many things, but they hosted conferences, they publish technical books. They're the ones that the animals would cut on the covers. Their entire business was basically seen around corners and understanding tech trends. And being able to really project in the future and understand what's going to happen or what's sort of the tech tree going forward and how it unlock what's too early, what's on time,

what will be later on, and just the different stages of technology development, and being able to kind of be able to track that in my head and have like global state there. I think it's the strength. You do have a history of recognizing what the trend is going to be at a very large level, starting as early as 2012 when you realize there's this big problem which is that design is not it's not good enough

on the internet on your mobile phone et cetera for someone who wants to be better at that at understanding and predicting what the future is going to be what the large trends are going to be how can we be better at that

what is some of is that just talent or is there a way to kind of coach yourself absolutely a loop you can be in that'll help you. It's very simple. You form hypotheses about the world, or I'm down a specific way that is testable, and make sure you kind of set a timeline to it. And then, yeah, see how things play out. See what happened in the system that did not match your mental model. Yes. See what happened that did. And when you don't have a match, don't just get discouraged. Like, that's a learning

opportunity. Use any delta to inform how to enrich your mental model of the world. Yeah. Or models, you know, the best cases that you actually have many frameworks and you're able to try on different ones, different times, according to situation, rather than just having one rigid framework that you see the world through. Who do you look up to? And this could be personal precedent. Who are your heroes? Who are your role models?

Who are the kinds of people that you're like, yeah, that's the kind of person I want to be? In technology, I think, whether you're Larry or Sergey or Zuck or Satya, Elon, in some ways, the people that I've found a way to kind of bend the world and find a way to create technology that serves many, many people, and do it at scale. You know, you can analyze it from all sorts of lenses. But yeah, you look at Elon, for example, and plenty of people will say negative things, but then you look at SpaceX. And SpaceX is an incredibly, incredibly important company. And what they've done there is, remarkable. So do you want to bend the world in that way? Do you feel like you want to shape the world in some way? I mean, I think of sort of Steve Jobs, who talked a lot about that, the idea that you can make things just happen. You can shape, if you have an idea for how the world could be, you can actually just shape it to become that. Do you think about that a lot? I think that's from like a me perspective and more of an enabling perspective. So I think that

there are unequivocally things that will be good for the world. And you have to be willing to say that there are things that it will be good for the world in order to have this point of view. People that maybe come from different moral philosophies will disagree with me on that, but I'll put that out there. That's my starting point, is that you can say, okay, like if we cure cancer, for example, that's good for the world. It's a hardware one to abate. But if anyone has that debate, I'd like to hear it. You know, or if we can make a so that more people are able to find meaning, find joy. That seems good.

So I kind of start from, you know, the sort of unequivocally obvious places. And then from there, I go into, okay, what's the role I can play to help? And whether it be Figma, where I'm able to be in this amazing position to create a platform that helps people achieve their dreams, had food on the table, make it set our society, has better design and better ways to interact with technology or be trying to help by investing or by mentoring next generation founders who like me are coming from a background where they didn't yet have exposure to business but now they're finding themselves in a situation where they can't just do the technology they can't just do the product and the design they actually have to

you'll figure out how to go and, you know, build forward. And if they can't get the capitalist loop working, they're not going to be able to get the scale that will actually transform the world into a better place. Then those are ways that I find that I can have impact is through that empowerment. You've been massively successful. You're a first-time founder.

What is your advice to founders? What is your advice to young people who are building their own companies today who see the success you've had and want to replicate it. First, don't try to replicate stuff. Okay. Try to understand what it is that you have unique insight on.

So have some self-awareness. Be humble. There's a lot that you're going to get punched in the face over. If you don't have the humility, you won't get through it. And be willing to adapt. But also, yeah, I think get started. If you're not already on the track and you just got this great idea in your head, what's stopping you?

If it's financial, how do you get to the, buffer that you need to go thoroughly explore something. And again, if we'd stop to six months, that would have been it. Yeah. There would have been no Figma. It took at least nine to 12 months before we really felt like we had the real shot there. So that space, which was afforded me through the TIL Fellowship. I'm very, very grateful for that. Yeah. That's an example of, for me, how I had that buffer, I also had savings that I could dip into from internships. That's the problem you have to solve first, is to give yourself that buffer. And And then I also would just say, there are ironically a lot of ways to go make businesses that make money.

People don't think that, but it's actually true. I'm not saying they're all going to be like giant scale, but at least in the small scale, there's a ton. Yeah. And so be greedy in your selection of a problem to work on in the first place. Do not start something that you can't see yourself working on in 10, 20 years. I have plenty of friends who've done that or are doing that. and it just inevitably it leads to burnout

it leads to them being kind of negative on the world cynical and you will lose something of yourself if you find yourself in a place where you just don't yet have the problem that like gets you excited every day to go work on you got to find

that thing that just gets you up in the morning every day and you're so psyched to work on and you will if you project out in the future that's not going to change you're still so excited and treat it like a multi-decade journey from the start Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan, this was awesome.

Thanks for your time. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research associates are Dan Shalon and Chris Nodonoghue, and our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from Proctody Media. We'll see you next month with another founder story. Support for this show comes from Odu.

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