Y Combinator Startup Podcast - Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Dylan Field on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Dylan Field co-founded Figma to bring the design process online and make it multiplayer. From a meme maker built on WebGL to a design platform powering millions, Figma’s journey hit a major milestone with its IPO last week.In this conversation, Dylan shares the early challenges of building in the browser, the early risks and pivotal choices that shaped Figma’s growth, the principles that guided its product and community, and how he thinks about building tools that empower creativity at scale.

Designers need to be founders. We need to have folks that are designers step into the founder role and start companies. It feels intuitively like we're in the MS DOS era of AI right now. If you look back 10 years from now, everyone's going to go, can you believe that we just have this chat box? Awesome. Well, I want to welcome Dylan.

I'm curious what the makeup of the audience is here. How many people have used Figma before? Wow, all right. Awesome. How many people consider them to be designers. Okay, all right. Many of us.

Yes, our people. And how many are currently founders? Awesome. Cool. Okay, that's a good mix of people in the audience. So we'll hear the Figma story. Then we'll talk about advice around AI and design. And then we'll get some advice on just being a founder from Dylan too.

So I'm excited to jump in. Maybe to start, give us kind of a snapshot on where Figma is today. And then we can kind of go back to the beginning days. Yeah. Today, we are many different places. We're hybrid. 1,700 people now, which is wild. I have to pinch myself on that number.

We have eight products now. We just doubled our product lineup at our last config. So very excited to hear your feedback if you got any on things like FigmaMake, sites, straw, buzz. But it's been a very exciting time. Lots of work we're doing as we explore. all the things that we can do to help our audience. And now take us back to maybe 19-year-old Dylan, getting started with the kernel of the idea

that eventually became Figma, but it wasn't a straight line getting there. Tell us about the early days and kind of how you and Evan got started. Yeah, so in the early days of Figma, well, I guess before it was even Figma, Evan and I were at Brown together. He was my TA,

and we were asking ourselves the question of why now, like what's changing the world? and the two answers that we came up with that we also felt deep conviction in. One was drones and quadcopters. The other one was WebGL. And Evan, after about a month or so, said, hey, not into drones for all sorts of various reasons. That was kind of the one I was pushing for more at the time. Also except for WGL, of course.

And then I was like, great, WebGL it is. And so WebGL, I think everybody probably here knows, but is what you use the GPU in your computer in the browser. Web GPU is its successor. And, yeah, we started going really deep on, like, what are all the things that we can build? And two main paths were games or tools pretty fast. We said, okay, not games. Let's go tools.

And then it was a deep exploration with many twists and turns as we explored all sorts of tools that we could build. And, you know, it took... We really started in earnest August 20th. 2012, whereas we started talking about it more December of 2011. So it took a while to get to the point where we started. And then from there, I would say it was at least June or July of 2013 before we went all in on, okay, let's build Figma as it is today. And even then there was still a bit of a narrowing path to get to the product that exists now.

And when you first started, were you thinking about this as a startup and a company that you wanted to build, or were you thinking about it more as like a project that you wanted to do with your friend? No, it was definitely the hope was startup and startup that could scale. At the same time, my downside case was I get to work with Evan, who I considered then, consider now to be a hero. He's like the smartest guy I know. If you have any doubt about the statement, just to look up his GitHub. He's an amazing man and an absolute genius. And I figured, worst case scenario, I spent a few years working with Evan, I learn a lot.

And I go back to school, same place I'm at now. can't hurt. Upside case, we go build a cool company. All the problems that we were thinking about working on were very, very interesting to me. And so I didn't really see any, like, risk the scenario and also to help that I had the TEAL fellowship. I would have done it without it, but like having 100K over two years, I know now, you know, inflation, et cetera, probably sounds like less than it was net then. But yeah, I mean, to have actual cash and not have to dig into savings or going to debt, huge deal, not just because of the cash element, but also because it gives you time. If we had stopped six months in, and that was our point where we made a call,

Figma would not be here today. And so I think if you're a founder already going or you're thinking about founding, you've got to give yourself time somehow. That's really important. Yeah, you spent a couple years trying to do all the twists and turns and the thing that eventually became what Figma is today. Yeah. What kept you going in that time? A lot of you know, founders will get into this like pivot hell of jumping from idea to idea and motivation just keeps declining. And how did you keep yourselves motivated during that time and feel like you were on to something and you were on the right track? Well, I mean, first of all, just working with Evan was super fun. You know, we're kind of thinking through ideas by building them. It felt every week

like we were kind of inventing the future in some way. At some point, I kind of went, memes are going to go to the moon. And I convinced Evan, hey, let's go build a meme generator. And this is, you know, 2012 time frame. We built a great fucking meme generator. I think it was for sure would have been the best one in the market. And my thesis was right, by the way. Look at the exponential curve of meme since 2012. Yeah, we would have made some money there. At the same time, after a week of that, I think both of us were ready to quit.

I was asking myself, like, why did I drop out of brown for this? That was probably a pretty low point at the start. But other than that, there's the constant existential nature of asking yourself, like, what are we doing? What's the big goal here? when you're in that phase of really trying to discover what to work on. But I think if you've got a co-founder, you've got a collaborator, you're not just alone. You know, hopefully your highs and their highs, your lows, their highs, cancel out somehow.

And you can kind of feed off each other to keep each other going. That really helps. That's cool. Once you kind of came up with the idea for Figma, how did you get your first users? Yeah. Really, the first users of Figma, a lot of it was cold emailing and people in network. So folks that I'd either interned with, for example, I intern at Flipboard, LinkedIn, O'Reilly Media. And from that, there are people I could reach out to.

They could tell me others to talk with. But also, I just looked online. Like, who are the designers that I think could be really helpful to us? And I respect their work. You know, if they answer my email and they let me buy them a coffee, like, it'll just be like a personal moment for me because they're my hero. And a lot of them replied. Like, it's kind of wild that people reply to cold emails, but they do. And so, yeah, I went there.

And then it turns out designers give great feedback. So it wasn't just like meeting them and them saying, yeah, your product sucks. They'd be like, here's exactly why it's not great. And here's what you can do better. Here's what it would take for me to use this. And the more that I engaged and we worked through that, the better the product got, I'd fall up with them. And eventually they started converting some of them.

It took a while before a lot of them converted. Later on, we kind of went on tour. I met at this point we had venture investment. The venture firms that invested in us, they invested in other companies too. I had them make introductions to the companies. You know, for an entire summer, I basically met with, I don't know, five, six, seven companies a week at least. Sitting down with them, sometimes several a day saying, hey, here's a demo. Will you use it?

If not, why not? And very low conversion rate. I think in that entire summer, maybe two of them went in for it and actually started using Figma. One was Notion, the other was the company that became Coda, then called Krypton. And kind of interesting, there are both these cloud-based document tools with very similar philosophies to us. But, you know, you then launch it and people start using it more. There's a lot of folks out there that resonate with the message. So it was a slow arc over time, but the constant was feedback, getting feedback to the same.

team, making sure we understood what problems we need to solve. That's interesting because, you know, everyone tells you to launch early. And the reason to launch early is to get that feedback. And from the outside, it looks like you took a long time to launch. But behind the scenes, you were actually talking to tons of users and potential customers and getting feedback constantly. Like, how did you think about when was the right time to actually launch the product? First of all, I like definitely echo the point of launch as soon as you can.

If you take anything away from this, it's don't do it. what I did, you know, get your product out faster and charge money faster for the product to see if you actually can make money. Unless you have some genius galaxy brain consumer thing you're doing, in which case, figure it out yourself. I don't know what to tell you. I think that the feedback is essential and you should launch as quickly as you can. For me, the feedback was very clear. It's not ready. And that made it said we didn't feel comfortable launching yet. But looking back, we did have the capital. I should have scaled the team fast. so we could move faster and get it out quicker.

That was something that I now looking back have learned. And when a team at Figma comes to me with an epic roadmap that they think is perfection, the first question I always ask is how do we slim, slim that down, how do we make it more bite-sized and test this earlier with our users? So it's absolutely the case that I try to push people internally towards a one-month or three-month cadence at most.

You know, if someone comes to me with a nine month, a 12 month, two-year cadence, it's like, what the fuck are you doing, man? Yeah, that's such an important point, especially for small teams, which is a lot of times people are like, well, I have all this stuff I have to build, so I need to go hire a bunch of people to be able to do it. But it seems like usually the right answer is like, how can you scope it down and do fewer things really well? Like, it sounds like, is that part of your culture as you're building things?

Yeah, it's constraints can actually really help. But I also think the startup equation, or you're not equation, but the cycle that you're always in, It's something along the lines of if you're the leader of a startup, you need to be identifying what you're doing the most of, figuring out how to get someone else to help you do that. Or maybe in the future it's AI, who knows? But then from there, okay, how do you like go find that person? And if you don't have enough resources, how do you get the resources? Right? That's a cycle that you're always in.

It just turns out that actually having constraints, it breeds creativity. It breeds interesting ways to solve problems. And so, yeah, I think they're useful. What was the inflection point, I don't know? Was it shortly after you launched? Was it years later? Was it a few weeks ago when you actually believe this was going to be a huge company? Oh, man.

I think the point at which I started to believe that actually this might be real was way later than our users did. People were telling me this is amazing. I'm really excited. Here's my 12-page doc on all the things that I want you to do for Figma. I should have known then, even though our product was really big. bad that there was something there. But in reality, it took until Microsoft told us, hey, is this spreading like wildfire and we're asking ourselves, should we shut it down or, you know, should we keep going? And the reason we're asking ourselves that is because you're not charging us.

Maybe you should actually charge for the product. That was the moment that I was like, oh, I think something might be working. We should probably charge people. And that was like five years in. So yeah, don't do that. And also listen for when people are. pulling the product out of you. Like I think everyone talks about product market fit, but product market pull is really important. And you'll see signs of it when people are highly engaged, when they are obsessive about what you're doing, when they see the future of the vision that you're planting, that is a sign that you should really double down and then whatever way you can. And so many people interpret it instead

as, oh man, if only we had all these things that they're asking for, then we might have product market fit. Guess we got to grind for a long time and who knows if it'll work. The right mindset is, oh my God, they actually care enough to give us this feedback. This is huge. And I think that people misinterpret that too much. It seems that even your feedback seeking early on in the early days, I think a lot of people are nervous to do that because they don't want to hear that it's not good enough and you know they don't want to hear the thing that they poured so much time and energy into is not good yet and I would not use it and I would not pay you for it and so you want to just hide from that how did you shift your perspective to actually want to seek that

I think maybe it's just like childhood for me when I was growing up I was a child actor not like a child actor that got into like anything really cool that you know about like commercials and some TV and stuff but as part of that you audition constantly and basically you constantly get rejected. For me, that was not a big deal. Like, I was used to rejection and I had fun with the process of it. So, yeah, I think for me, it's just maybe a different mental equation than others. But yeah, if you're not there yet, like, seek rejection. It's got interesting data in it. Don't you want to know the data? Switch gears talk about design for a little bit. It's been a really great month for design, it feels like. It's been pretty wild. Yeah. I mean, we've had some popular redesigns from

Airbnb and Netflix. We've had Apple's new liquid glass UI, which seems to be somewhat controversial. I'm sure there are opinions out here. At least there's opinions on X or Twitter or whatever. You guys had some incredible launches at config recently. And at YC, we have kind of a call for more design founders. And then maybe the most surprising and impressive thing was OpenAI acquiring Johnny Ivan, his company, for more than $6 billion, which is pretty crazy. So, So I'm curious, like, why now? Like, what is happening in this moment where it seems like design is really a part of the conversation in a lot of the tech world? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think that in some ways it's new.

In some ways, it's not new. Design has, I think, been growing in importance exponentially over the past decade. At Figma, we see it up close every day. More designers being hired. Design going from, you know, lipstick on a pig, make it pretty at the end of the first. process to let's deeply think about how it works every step along the way. That's been a mindset shift that's been ongoing. But now I think in this age of AI, if you really believe that development gets easier and it's more simple to create software, it's faster to create software, than like,

what is your differentiator? It's design, it's craft, it's tension to detail, its point of view. What we're seeing is recognition of that. I mean, Airbnb, they literally said our differentiator is designed. I think Brian said that. I believe that, you know, there's lots of takes on Open AI and this more than $6 billion transaction. Some people are like, this is the stupidest thing in the world. Other people are handling it as like absolute genius. I guess my mental model is there are some people out there who when they do something

you don't understand, it's easy to go into an attack mode and just dismiss it. But over enough time, sometimes you see patterns. And you're like, okay, I've consistently not understood what this person's saying over the course of like years. And, you know, years later, I go back to it. And I'm like, oh, what I said in response to what they did was just wrong. And then you kind of do this mental flip of, okay, assume that there's something to learn from whatever they're doing. Assume you're missing something.

And I think that I look at up something like Open AI and some part of I understand, design is differentiator. Some parts I don't understand. Like that's a really big transaction. But Sam is one of those people that, you know, he's right about a lot of stuff. So I would encourage you if you just dismissed it outright to ask yourself what you might be missing. And you guys launched some really cool AI-focused products at your conference config about a month ago,

which has been really cool to see the reception there, really positive from a lot of your users and design community. I'm curious if you can share more about those and your motivation for building some of those. If you look historically at the products we've launched for Figma, the pattern is we notice behavior happening in Figma Design. We take it out of Figma Design and make it its own product, and therefore Figma Design is able to be what Figma, design wants to be a product design tool. And, you know, whether it's FIG jam or whiteboarding brainstorming tool, the first new product we launched, that we can make a dedicated space for and make it be everything it needs to be. Or it's slides where we saw, okay, 5% of files created in Figma Design are slides. So great. Pull that out, make a slide tool, because there's all

the stuff you need for slides that if you put it in Figma Design, now you've got a complicated UI and 1 plus 1 is not equal to 3. It's more equal to like 1.5. A lot of the things you saw launch at configure in that category. So draw, for example, which is a way to do more vector tasks, we made a separate mode for so that users can go deeper. Because again, if you believe the craft is differentiator, more people want to be more expressive. How do we enable our customers and designers everywhere

to do that on the thing about platform? Buzz, same thing. You have all these people that want to create mass exports and figure out ways to create production graphics. So if you got a brand team and they've created templates, how do you make it so that you're able to then empower a marketing team to go use those templates and do mass creation of assets? That's like a core workflow we see all the time, but we didn't want to make Figma Design more complicated or dumb it down. And so instead you make a new surface. Sites, we see people designing websites all the time in Figma Design, but then they have to go somewhere else to actually build the site and get it out there.

So how do we get so that they can actually ship it? And then make, we're so excited about make. This is a tool that lets you go from prompt to app. And it's already changed a lot of how we do work at Figma in terms of quickly prototyping and being able to get to the point where you throw ideas away faster. And with Figma Make, there's so much more that we want to explore and are really excited to explore there. So yeah, stay tuned on that one. Cool.

Yeah, I mean, you just touched on it there, but it feels like a lot of the line between design and development is getting blurred. and they used to be very distinct phases in a product development process or parts of an iterative cycle and now it feels like they're almost being combined into one. How do you think about that with the tools that you're making? And I'm also curious maybe how that process has changed

like how your own development process has changed within Figma. I'll start with Figma. I think that for us, it's all about speed of iteration, speed of testing ideas, and tools like make really help with that. It helps to have ways to rapidly prioritize. and to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work and make that as low cost as possible.

And then there's tools I can't talk about and things we're developing that have been pretty instrumental to how our development process is changing. So yeah, can't wait to talk about you with them, but not today sadly. Yeah, when you go back to just the way that design and development are blurring more, I think there's a lot of stuff going on there. I think product is also boring with design and development and potential. even parts of research, all this is becoming less distinct, and it's all kind of coming together more. I think this is happening before AI, but it's happening even more with AI. There's something about AI that empowers generalist behavior. I will say that I think that the models today are better at the earlier phases of development than they are at late stage code bases. So if you have an

established code base, I think you're going to get less out of AI development tools as they currently exist than if you're at the very start. So I think that everything's better suited for prototyping and sort of like zero to one than it is from one to 100 at this current moment. But, you know, in a week, this could change. Yeah, it changes so fast. Yes. I mean, related to that, how do you expect user interfaces to change over the next couple years and feels like chat has kind of become a lot of the dominant interface paradigm, but I don't know, it feels like there's got to be something better that comes along, right? Yeah, I think that it feels intuitively like we're in the MS DOS era of AI right now.

And that, you know, if you look back 10 years from now, everyone's going to go, can you believe that we just have this chat box? And yet, I think the problem of how do you show users, all the things that are possible to do with these models, is a very hard challenge. And there's something about the experiments that have worked there that's very interesting. So, for example, look at Mid Journey. You know, they started off in Discord where you can rapidly see all the other things that people are doing.

And that was in many ways a way to show people what's possible. Or even Meta's new AI app, there's been a lot of press cycle and whatnot about the public aspect of people sharing accidentally things that are quite private. But the flip side of that is you actually learn what you can do. And so I think that's been under explored in the media. So I think that there's this problem that people have not solved of like how do you expose capabilities of these models? And there's so much that needs to be developed and work through there. Yeah, I think there's a lot to come. On top of that, everything will be more contextual.

AI as you blended in to different applications. That's a really interesting layer to think about. And on top that, we're going to have so many new surfaces as well. The surfaces that will exist are not going to be just like your phone and your phone. laptop and your tablet and the thing you know it's going to be glasses we're going to see much more in terms of different types displays that exist throughout your life so the surfaces are going to multiply AI will have context all of it will be a layer you have to interspers and that is a really interesting challenge for design of how do you reconcile that keep it consistent and

actually be able to navigate that whole broad spectrum that people will expect you to show up on. YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you. Apply at Ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early, and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video.

How many of you consider yourselves to be researchers or have done research work? Wow. So a lot of people in this audience here. And I know you've done this internally, you know, at Figma and building your own models. what is the role of design in research and the research work that you've done? And, you know, what are some of the design decisions that go into actually, like, making them better and making them work really well?

I mean, I think that a lot of researchers are sort of training in academic environment and come at problems as abstractions. And I try to think very generally. And I think if in some research, like if you're doing pure math, like keep going, that is definitely the way to approach it. If you're doing more research that's applied, for example, in AI, I really do think that thinking like a designer can be helpful and working with designers can be helpful too. We found, for example, that embedding designers into our research teams, because obviously we're doing a lot of work on how do we make better AI tools for designers, is been clear. critical because researchers need that intuition of how designers think. And without actually having that close collaboration, it really doesn't work. Now, you might say in response, well, yeah, that's nice, but you're building for designers. My maybe response back would be, well,

it's the case that designers have this mindset of you're building for an audience. Maybe it's a general audience, maybe a specific audience. That audience has a problem or a set of problems or trying to solve. And that sort of thinking, I think, is very useful to bring into the research context. And also qualitative research needs to pair with more deep AI research as well. The more that you can actually surface through qualitative methods, what people are actually trying to do and how they perceive and think, the more you can advance. So yeah, I guess my push for anyone who's coming for more of a research background would be go get in the field, go talk people because you'll learn from it and it'll actually make you go faster. And some of the

ways that designers have learned and some of the tools that designers have are likely useful for you. Yeah, it's like that Steve Jobs quote that, you know, design isn't just how it looks. It's how it works. Yep. It feels like, you know, when you're building models and doing research, you're trying to make a thing, like, that is the how it works. You know, you're trying to define that. And that is the core function of a designer that may not be obvious to how people view them from the outside. I'm curious what you think the role of designer looks like over the next decade. It seems like it's shifting a lot and, you know, design and development seems to be, you know, drawing closer together and there's all this research where design can be involved. How do you think that role changes? I'm really excited about how this will evolve. I think that designers will have far more leverage in the future and the value of design will only continue to go up. I mean, your RFP, request for proposal for designer founders, I think embodied this. You said, designers need to be founders. We need to have folks that are designers step into the founder role and start companies.

I know that it's been looking back, you know, you got Brian Chesky, you got Kari, it linear. We have so many designer founders that you can point to now and say, wow, these folks are really successful and are killing it. But I think that the number of designer founders will multiply. I think the number of designers that are leading large areas and sort of GMs will grow as well. And in general, designers will be looked to as experts inside of companies that, in sort of the same way that you might have a writer today who is the expert and like the best writer in the company or the best editor, but everyone has a word processor and can write. You'll have a designer who might be the best at problem solving and thinking through how do I have. actually craft a solution and explore this idea maze and figure out which direction to go, create a system around it. But I think most everyone in the company will be contributing to that

process of design. And so there will be a lot of curation involved and a lot of leadership will be needed from designers. So they're going to have to step up. I'm curious, what are some of the most interesting ways you guys are using AI internally at Figma? Yeah, I mean, can't talk about it all, like I said, since some of it is like products that will be releasing. But maybe one thing I'll say is on the designer embedded in the research side point, it's been fascinating to see just how important it is for designers to contribute on e-vows. So if you think about it, as you're developing a model or you're developing research ideas, you have to have good evals. And usually the researchers are the ones building those. And I think that's kind of just the wrong model. For us, at least,

designers, my point of view is that they should be contributing to e-vows. product people, they should be contributed to e-vals. It's not something that you need your engineers and your researchers to do because they probably have less understanding of the end user, less contact with end-user than your designers do, your product people do. So as you design these models, I think e-vals become more important too. And I guess if you were in your 20s today, what are some of the skills or tools that you would focus on becoming great at in this you know, to be successful in this new AI world. The setup of the question is that it's like you should kind of do different things than

you did in the past. And that's probably true. But I guess I'd start by saying that I think that the stuff that, you know, folks have done historically in order to get really good at thinking and work through problems with critical thoughts and learn broadly so they can make mental connections, those are still important. So I think learning about as many different areas as you're curious about deeply and trying to experience the world, making sure you're still relating to people. Like those are pretty core things that you should still do. One thing that I'm worried about is, you know, I think a lot of people in their 20s these days, apparently, according to the stats, are dating less.

Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not true. you all can tell me later. But if you think about the future, it'd be so easy to just go talk to your AI model all day. Maybe that gives you a sense of social connection. Like, I would highly advise you don't do that. I would highly advise that y'all date

if you're in that cohort. And I even go so far as to say, just less the comment about the products that are in this category of the past, but more about what the future could hold. I think AI boyfriends and girlfriends friends, if developed and allowed to exist, is a societal self-owned. I think it's like actively poisonous to society if this becomes a primary mode of relationship. There's a lot of things

that we need to talk about there and have a pretty broad society level discussion about. Well, I don't want to leave it on that before we open up to questions. But maybe, you know, before we can open up some questions here as people kind of line up, I'm curious, what was the most fun period in the history of building Figma for you. Uh, you know, maybe it's like the answer everyone's expecting, but it's true. It's right now. Uh, we have like so many things we can do the most brilliant people around to do them with. I love my team. I love the problem set that we have. Uh, some companies, they go, uh, forward and they kind of tap out and they don't have any more ideas. Like the number

of ideas that we have right now has grown so much. There's so much we can do and there's so much people are asking of us. And it's more about, okay, how to make sure we do the right things? And that's a fascinating and really fun place to be. Cool. Let's open up to some questions. I'm a founder, product engineer, social engineer, everything, solo entrepreneur at the same times. And recently, I have started using cursorial AI to handle both coding and design, even like down to pixel level details. So what do you think about cursor AI? Is this cursor AI can become one of your competitors? And at the same times, I just recently,

recently discover a tool called pen pod or giving like developers more control through open source, sell hosted options. What do you think Figma should move toward being more open and developer friendly to catch up with the trend of many software engineers become product engineer in the future and more and more solo entrepreneur using virtual AI to create product in the future? Yeah, I think it's a great question. And actually just was able to run to Michael backstage. I was good to see him.

I think that when it comes to AI generation, if you take a step forward from OK, I generated something, the next question is, OK, how to make it good? And there's different ways to do that. You can be writing code and going into your browser and kind of having that loop. That's a very structural way to think. Other people prefer to think in a more freeform way.

With make, we're trying to enable that in a way that's visual first rather than code first, you can still get to the code. But I really don't think of cursor as a competitor. I think of them as someone that we just launched our MCP server to explicitly make it so that you can get your designs in a cursor and Winsurf and all these other NBS code, you know, all these great tools faster. So I think there's just going to be new workflows that are established.

And like I said, if the differentiator's design, then your first generation, your one shot is probably not the thing that's going to win. So I encourage you to think a little bit further than that. In terms of open source, we actually just announced today the acquisition of payload CMS, which is an open source project. And I'm really excited about what we can do there and how we can support open source more. Thank you.

Hi, Dylan. My name is Charlie Fearborn. I'm a game designer here at a startup in San Francisco, and I graduated last year from USC and computer science and game design. Best major ever. So it's cool to hear about the game's roots of Figma. Yeah, we cut it off early. Evan is also like really, was really deep in game design and it's a hard, hard industry. It's a hard industry. Yeah. It's awesome that you're doing it. I have kind of a more personal

question for you. What is the meaning of life? Mean of life, I think, you know, seek out how to explore consciousness, more than as much as you can, share love with others, and make sure that you feel fulfilled and the other people around you are fulfilled and happy at the end of the day. And I think that that can be something you do on a micro level in your local community, a macro level at scale. It doesn't matter. As long as you're living true to your internal values, I think that you're leading a fulfilling life.

Hey, Dylan. Thank you so much. I was wondering, as a designer, are there any specific design principles that you love and use, but you think a lot of, like, builders or companies get wrong or like sometimes even completely ignore? I think the biggest one that I repeat all the time at Figma, which is not my own. It's, you know, has existed for decades, is keep the simple things simple and make the complex things possible.

There's always a wide range of things that you want to be able to enable. But if you try to do all of them and that's the expense of your product not being approachable and not being obvious or intuitive how to use, you're kind of messing up. So I think you have to figure out how to do both, but you start with making a simple thing simple. Thank you. I'm Michael. I study HCI and Computer Science at Columbia.

Say there's a founder you really respect, and you finally landed an enterprise contract and have a decent amount of traction on the project that you've been building with a bunch of friends. What would be the most polite way to show them the product and ask them to be an angel investor? I would send them a womb

over email. So that way, you know, it's got an acing component since time is sometimes hard to find. They can watch it. And if you want to really pique their interest, mutual connections help. But like I said earlier, cold emails work too. Expect a cold email. Thank you. Okay. I'm looking forward to it. And honored too. Hey, Dylan. I love your shoes, first of all. Thank you. Of course. But you said you know to behaviors when deciding what's productized, and I can very clearly see that. I was using slides for classes. I mean, using Figma for slides for classes before you guys dropped slides, made it easier. Using lock layers for social media graphics for my friend. And then Buzz made that so much easier. So I guess my question is, how do you watch how people repurpose the tools? And what kind of structure do you use for these emerging use cases? It's always a mix of signals, right? You have to do everything from like watching support requests to qualitative interviews. sitting with people and watching how they work, looking at the data and actually doing data science, analysis on it, you know, looking at what people are saying on social media and more. But it's kind of you digest all those signals and you build some intuition around it and hypotheses you can test.

So yeah, it's kind of art plus science, but you have to combine a lot of methods, I think. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Thank you very much for the talk. So right now you're helping designers in a huge breadth of industries. when you just started with the cold emailing, etc. How did you go about with defining a RICP? Was it very broad as today, or did you start focus on one industry?

No, we really started focused on product design. And for digital products, and I think even more narrowly, where people cared about design, if I'm going to be totally honest, rather than, like, you know, the broad world. It seemed like it would be an easier sell. But yeah, I think it required a lot of sort of, of slimming down of our ambition to be able to state that clearly. You know, I started off saying we're going to do everything and thankfully the team pushed back. And so it got us to hear with the

ambition of later on doing everything. But I'm glad we started more narrowly. Hi. So my background besides being like a CS major and whatnot is also in traditional art. Cool. Where perhaps AI is not necessarily as popular as the moment. So I guess my question is just how is Figma navigating like ethical challenges of AI and design and like incorporating AI into the products that you are, you have available? Yeah. There's so many different ethical challenges you could consider, you know, everything from, okay, you're doing some inference. Is it heating up the planet to the questions of, okay, are these models regurgitating something they've seen elsewhere?

and beyond. And so I think you have to be very clear about like what you're trying to solve for. But yeah, it's maybe a sort of escape answer. Right now, a lot of the work we're doing is actually with third party models. And so that's something we have less control over. As we do more things in house, I think these questions are very relevant and things that we'll have to wrestle with like the art world has. Hi, Dylan. I'm an HCI researcher and a design founder. And And as we've been kind of like thinking about interfaces and how we talk to AI, it seems that we tend to anthropomorphize things. It tends to be that these are probabilistic and we can't design them explicitly how we did with like previous hardware. Do you think of AI human interaction as necessarily a tool or how do you kind of like build a mental model around this?

I think that there's sort of where things are at now, where they're going, and you have to kind of consider both. I think that there's an interesting split maybe between people that come from a materialist worldview. And by that I don't mean like they're going and buying stuff all the time. I mean the worldview of materialism is one of consciousness arises from matter. And then on the opposite side of the spectrum is like religious mindsets where people go, of course that's wrong. Like there's God. God is great.

Everyone has a soul. AI doesn't have a soul. Obviously it's like a computer. And so those are like fundamentally at odds. And my prediction is that we'll probably see an increase in people projecting consciousness. onto AI, whether or not that's the right thing that, you know, you agree with or don't agree with. I think that the number of people that will do that will increase.

And I think it leads to some very hard to wrestle with territories. And so, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that. And then in terms of what that means for HCI or whatever you want to call it, I think that that's a very under-explored question, and I'm excited to see what you do with it. I think we're at time, sadly, but I just want to thank everybody for coming and wish you all the best of luck with whatever path to pursue.