Y Combinator Startup Podcast - The Future Of Design With Figma's Dylan Field

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Design isn’t just about making things work—it’s about how they work, says Dylan Field, the co-founder & CEO of Figma.As AI transforms tech, he believes a designer's judgment, taste, and agency will matter more than ever.Dylan sat down with YC's Garry Tan to discuss the evolving world of design in the age of AI, the challenging early days at Figma, and how his team forever changed the way designers and engineers collaborate.

As software gets easier to build, design becomes more important. Yeah. And there's going to be more designers hired because at the time it felt like this tiny market. I think that so far AI is very much in the tool category. You know, we talk a lot about lowering the floor, raising the ceiling, making us that more people can participate in the design process, but also raising the ceiling on what you can do. The more time has gone on, the more that I'm confident in the designer's role

and believe that that's going to be one of the critical roles in the more building software in the future. Today we have a real treat. We have Dylan Field, the co-founder and CEO of Figma, which millions of people in the world use for collaborative design. Dylan, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Yuri. So we're in the middle of this crazy AI revolution, and design itself is also changing quite a lot. How do you view AI changing the face of design right now? It's definitely an incredible time that we're living through. Ever since we started Figma, the exponential curve we've been on is that there's just more software being created than ever before. But it's kind of looked like this before. And now it seems to be going

vertical. Yeah, which is exciting. I think it's super exciting. And my point of view is that design has the opportunity to differentiate software at this age of AI where we'll see whole new workflows emerge where designers, engineers, product will work together in different ways that maybe they're doing today or at least different cancences. And it's been pretty neat to have a front row seat to that. And with our platform, figure out how we can empower everyone to use Figma to be able to be on that journey of design. You know, if I think back to just even the earliest days of Figma, some of the metrics that have held constant, one is that we've always had this really strong international base of users. So even from the start, over 80% of our weekly active users,

were outside United States. The second one is from the start, it's been like one-third designers consistently. And the other two-thirds are non-designers. All coming to the platform and making things, viewing things, giving feedback. I'm quite excited about how we can activate those users more, make it so they're able to make more contributions

to the product process with AI. Does the capability go up and are you doing more or will AI take these things over? Like, what's your view so far? Oh, I think that so far. So far, AI is very much in the tool category. Totally. And whether it's designers, developers, others, people are using AI to just do more and to explore more.

So the way that I see it is that, you know, we talk a lot about lowering the floor, raising the ceiling, making it so that more people can perspate in the design process, but also raising the ceiling on what you can do. Yeah. And I always had this image in my head of like the idea of maze you go down, all these different branching paths that you explore. as you design and ideate your way through that product journey. My point of view is you get more breadth now in terms of the things that you can try, but it still requires a lot of depth to fully explore it. We're sort of in this uncanny valley still where, you know, you can do prompt app,

but prompt app doesn't give you an app that is well designed yet. So, you know, given that, like, how do you see this playing out? It's kind of interesting to, like, look at the language people use around this stuff, you know, people talk about like, you're locked in or I'm cooking or they're cooking. Yeah. And vibe coding. Vibe coding. Exactly.

And for a while, I was just like, you know, whatever, it's new language. And then at some point, I realized that maybe the reason people are using this language in particular is that's kind of the feeling you get as you're developing something really fast. Like there's always this call and response you have with tools as you're trying to trying to get the thoughts out of your head onto a screen and you're iterating quickly. And the faster you make that feedback loop, I think the more you can get into that flow state and also the more fun you can have actually. And for Figma, one of our values as a company is play. We're always trying to make it so that whether it's as a culture or as a product,

Figma is fun to use and is a tool that just like lets you creatively express. I think that the opportunity here is how do you create even more of that feeling, even if you're on an expert of Figma, and have that rapid ideation loop going at all times. But to the point that you made, it's like you also want to give people a way to not just get started and prototype rapidly, but also get to the finish line. And I think that's where the disconnect is. And I think that that disconnect is not just for design, but also for code. Like you can go and get locked in for three hours and make something cool.

Will it be the design you want? Probably not. But also, it will take some time to untangle the spaghetti mess of your code base as it currently stands when you're going from start to prototype. And then get to something that's extensible and you can build off of. Yeah. The design part is very interesting because you can get something that works very quickly. but maybe it doesn't work well yet. There's sort of this increasingly lost art, I'm worried,

that founders are not focused on design enough. Do you find that in some of your angel investing yet? What I'm seeing is that people seem to, year over a year, and this has been true for a long time, care more about design than ever. Which is great. I might have some selection bias. Because, like, you know, obviously people are excited to talk to me

as an angel or my capacity at Figma. Overall, my sense is that people just care much more about design, also understand the value of design. Totally. It's not just about, like, can you make it work? Yeah. There's a lot of people that can make it work. And as people are able to make stuff faster, it's how it works.

That actually matters. Can you talk about how you're thinking about the evolution of the actual models right now? Because there's sort of like two regimes, right? Image diffusion models, like Mid Journey and our friends, you know, Sue Hell, playground. They're doing image diffusion models. And then, you know, on the flip side, there's code gen. And the code gen methods, the large language models themselves, like, you know, they can't generate SVG, for instance. Do you think that one or the other is going to work, or is it like

both in tandem? And then way out in left field is, you know, the multimodal models coming from Open AI and others. Is it just a matter of like, let's just wait a little bit and those will do it? Or is it some other combination. Well, I mean, it's almost goes back to the question of like, what is design when you're asking the question of like, why aren't models better at design? Because they still kind of suck. There's so many definitions of design, but like when I like is art as it applies to problem solving. Totally. It's I think maybe the reason why these models are not created design yet. It's like on the art side, you've got diffusion. On the problem solving side, you've got LMs. and it's not clear that people will figure out how to marry techniques together yet

and figure out how to go approach these problems in the right ways. And I think also just as you think about what a designer does, they're bringing in all this context, you know, way more than just, okay, here's this like two, one or problem I want to solve. They're doing, you know, a lot of research with the user like you talked about in order to like go into that iconic pie and figure it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're in the IDMA is trying to figure out, like, you know, from first principles.

What is it that this person needs or wants? What are they feeling at any given moment? Yeah, and how do you take that all in? Also, the current cultural moment you're in, the flow you're in, the part of the brain experience you're in, how that all ties together, how they all maps. And then I just, yeah, I don't yet see models that have been able to figure out how to, like, bring all those different components in. They're lacking the empathy piece of being a designer. Maybe that's too. I don't know.

For now. I don't know. Maybe not forever. Yeah. I'm curious to see how they'll evolve. But I also, the more time has gone on, the more that I'm confident in the designer's role and believe that that's going to be one of the critical roles in building software in the future.

I think people that call themselves developers today, they might call themselves designers, you know, in the near future. That doesn't mean they're not writing code. It just means that they're going to be thinking more holistically about the product experience along with their colleagues. Yeah, that sounds right. There's a sense that the large language models are going to somehow become superintelligence

through just getting smarter and smarter. But it doesn't seem like there's a lot of agency, whereas what a designer, a large percentage of what a designer does is actually using their own agency to, like, create a thing on a canvas basically. Agency and also judgment. Yeah. And I think that it's super interesting to me

because I think in the Grock 3 announcement, for example, you know, one of them was saying that a lot of the training is done on math problems and CS problems and that kind of transfers over to everything else. But then I think about the people I know

as humans that are like the best math missions I know are the best engineers. And like sometimes they're really good at having great judgment about product experiences, and sometimes they're really not. Yeah. And it seems like it's almost a different muscle, at least for humans. And so I'm curious if that transfers over or not. Yeah.

I mean, my hope is that humans basically retain the agency bit. And I think we were hanging out with some AI researchers recently, and they were sort of disappointed that the models are not, you know, but they don't demonstrate as much human-like agency, you know, even after all these innovations with, you know, climbing the scaling laws, it just hasn't popped up. The thing they said was the models are more like hyper-intelligent toasters. But I think that that's the opportunity here. It's like, you know, the human designer has to understand people and understand their needs and goals and their reward functions and then create UI, create user experiences that match like, you know, think, they're,

jobs to be done. From there, it's about how do we equip them with the right tools? Totally. Remove TDM, make it so that they're able to have that rapid feedback loop. Yeah. Do you think that people are going to do more and more, you know, chat-based interfaces, or is it more visual design or, you know, is it even going to be like terminal and prompting which way, you know, what are you seeing right now in terms of the cutting edge of design? I'm seeing pretty much everything right now. Okay. Which is exciting. So way more variety then. Yeah. It's not just, you know. It feels like we're kind of, you know, kind of exploding out the possibility space of how you actually can work. And that's been my

prediction of what's going to happen for a long time. And I think it's actually go much further out from here for a while in terms of people trying different patterns with their tools and different things. I think it's a really good thing. I think like prompting alone is sort of like we're in the telnet days of AI. You're able to just have, I think, so much more ability to work with tools through different interfaces. It doesn't mean that prompting is not important. Uh, But I think there's a lot more to try out there. And I'm excited to see people doing that. And also explore different design patterns and things like, you know, AR, VR, VR, XR, you know, there's different windows where I think we're going to see entirely different dynamic interfaces start to pop up.

Fundamentally, you know, I love just how humans interact with machines. We don't have BCIs yet, but one day that'll be like the final frontier. Totally. You know, until we get there, like there's a lot of other stuff to explore. I guess the really wild thing is once you have code gen, in theory, that might be something we see, like sort of custom designed vertical software. You mean basically custom design for each user? Yeah. This is when I'm a little skeptical of.

Doesn't mean it's not going to happen or people will try it. But I think that I remember like seeing Snapchat for the first time. And then, you know, years later, like started to use Snapchat more. That's an example of software that someone's going to teach you. It's like a consumer product and yet it's actually quite complex. Yeah. You're not going to just like figure it all out if you land in Snapchat. You're going to learn it because you watched your friend use Snapchat.

I think there's a lot of software that's like that. And the more you shift the interface around, the less someone's able to just natively learn and transfer over that learning to someone else. Yeah. So I think there's like a trade off there that's actually quite important. Snapchat and Minecraft are two of the more crazy examples of like, you know how in design low bar high ceiling is like a maxim. You just want anyone to be able to clear that low bar and then you want people to stick with you all the way through the high ceiling. There were like remarkable examples of like, actually the low bar is optional. Let's take a step back and I mean, I love your

story of starting Figma. How did you come up with the idea? It was a process. I guess going all the way back, we started talking about what would become Figma, Evan and I, in late 2011. I was at Brown of the time, Evan's my TA. We were kind of like asking the question of why now first, what are the technologies that are shifting? And we'll create all sorts of opportunities in like late 2011. That was for us drones and webGL. And I was actually pushing a little bit harder on drones. And Evan very quickly vetoed that. He's like, look, I think drones will be very important, but they're going to be regulated and or defense. And I don't really want to do either those. And also, I like software more. Once you have the hardware component, the run debug loop,

it's really slow. Totally. He's like, I don't want to deal with that. Okay, no drones. Yeah. So that was kind of his call. And then it was okay, WebGL, which Evan had a lot of expertise in in particular, he done a lot of prototyping and making sort of toy applications webge all the time. And we started to think about, okay, what do you do with that? So then I was like, okay, is it gaming or is it tools and software? And we kind of looked at that and said, okay, well, gaming's super hard. You have to have, it's like a hit-based business. You got to make something awesome.

It's got to really resonate. Like, let's not do gaming. Let's do tools and software. And then I went and left for a gap semester, what I thought was a gap semester. what I thought was the gap semester to work a flipboard. Evan was finishing up in sort of spring 2012. We started to

just kind of like tinker and explore and think about those together. looked at stuff like 2D to 3D scene creation. I got the TIL Fellowship. Then we started working full-time August 2012. My internship ended. Evan moved the West Coast and

explored a lot of different stuff. I think you made like meme creation. We did. Meme generation was one of them. probably the low point of Figma. I was like very on it in terms of my thesis was correct. Mims the moon. Yeah. I was like literally looking at the graphs from memes and meme generation and just looking

in the search terms and stuff. And I'm like, oh, man, there's no good meme generator out there. Totally. We can make the best meme generator. And we spent a week and we made it. And it was like this like, you know, moment of, but is this like really what we want to do? Yeah.

And I think Evan was ready to quit and I was ready to go back to school. And I was like, okay, this is a clear sign that this is not it. Yeah. But Evan, being the technical genius that he is, he made the text rendering in our meme generator, like, stay of the art in the canvas. And then, you know, later on when we eventually got to Figma, it would get us to kind of take that out and reuse it for our V1. Yeah. And so it's kind of like this hilarious moment of like our first text rendering and Figma came from the meme generator. Yeah, do you remember, I guess, I mean, a lot of people were still using, like, I guess, even Photoshop or Illustrator for, you know, this type of, you know, high fidelity design.

Yeah, fireworks as well. Fireworks, yeah. I'd use fireworks as a design and turn flipboard. Yeah. And it was a awesome tool in many ways, but also very buggy. And at some point, it was killed. So I was looking at, we were looking at the photography space as well, photo editing, built a really cool photo editor. but it was just not something that made sense

because we're doing the browser and at some point we just kind of like picked our heads up and went wait a second like the best camera is the one that you have in your pocket. Yeah, it's on the phone. Like why would we be making this browser-based editor for the photos you're taking on your phone? It'll just be an app.

And it looked at the app market for phone editing and it was like, no, this is totally crowded and this can be a commodity. Yeah. So then we said, okay, can we do something else there? Storage or search? or interesting machine learning stuff,

computational photography. And it felt like either would go to the platforms or it would be sort of too early. While the computational photography stuff we're looking at was like in our respect quite a bit too early. Yeah. You know, more than a dozen years too early. That's right.

And then we, you know, soft fireworks get killed and went, wait a second, maybe there's an opportunity there and started to form the thesis of as software gets easier to build, design becomes more important. Yeah. And there's going to be,

more designers hired because at the time it felt like this tiny market. Yeah. And what it was in retrospect was a market that was rapidly growing. Yeah. And so design ratios changed a ton and even just the five years after we started focusing on building a design tool. And then thankfully we had made that call and it still took quite a while. You know, another year and a half two years before we got to the point where we had people

using it outside of Figma. I guess this is a very profound example of you shouldn't use like, VC thinking to decide what to work on. Because a lot of people might have looked at how many designers are there in the country and then multiplied that out by like whatever they thought they could spend. Totally. And it's like, oh, that, you know, that number is too small. I shouldn't work on that. Whereas you looked at your users and looked at where things were going like from a much larger perspective. And, you know, you made a bet. You didn't necessarily know you were going to be right, but it turned out to be super right. Well, yes and no, right? Like, it's easier to say in retrospect.

Yeah. But, and looking back, I can be very crystal clear about, oh, here's what we're doing. Here's a thesis. Yeah, yeah. I think in reality, you know, if you looked at the seed pitch for Figma in June 2013, it was all over the place. Like, we were saying we're going to do like a million things. None of it made sense. It was all very murky. So, yeah, I'm pretty impressed at Dany Index. because like, yes, let's go. You guys will figure it out. I don't know if I'd be that prescient today if I was looking at a seat stage company like that. I think that a lot of our framing up to investors at the time was sort of more what you're saying. Oh, yes, it's a small thing right now. We think it'll grow, but also there's like all these other things we expand into.

And a lot of the things we decided were, you know, creative tools at the time. And then with the irony of it is that like that's not all the process we're in. We're in the process we're in the process of creating software. It's like how do you go from idea or brainstorming, diagramming, and fig jam to, you know, filmless slides where you align, to going to design where you're trying things in prototyping to production, we have product dev mode for that. And, you know, then once you're in production, how do you learn? How do you loop back to idea and make this loop continuous? Then do that other places too. You know, we're like, oh, we'll go think about the existing markets that are out there, not what's the new process needs to be created.

And eventually we got there because that's what our users pulled us into. You know, Fig Jam, brainstorming. It was a behavior people were doing in Figma. We saw it, especially as a pandemic hit. It's like, okay, let's pull it out into its new product and slides. Like, people are creating all these slides in Figma design. Okay, great, let's make a new product.

I mean, the team really drove that, to be honest. They just saw it and we're like, we're going to go do this. So the users pull the product right out of you. It's a pretty powerful moment. Exactly. And demo is the same thing too. It goes back to like the diversity of users that are in Figma and how do we like make better experiences for them.

Can you go back to the first prototype to like the first V1 that was generally available? Like, you know, when you're entering a space where, you know, fireworks existed, there's probably, you know, your spec or product feature list was like, you know, a hundred items long. What was that process like for you? you know, were you really methodical about it? Or was it, you know, we're going to do two-week sprints and see what we can get done? Like, what was the- A bit of both, yeah.

We had like a long list of things that we felt needed to be there. And some of them were like, maybe this is optional, maybe not. There was clearly table stakes. And when I look back to the first people that use Figma for real design work, they were minimalist because they liked how few features we had. So it's kind of interesting that there is like this group of designers that are and was out there that like a minimal tool. Yeah.

And the second group maybe was people that, you know, like our first customers were Notion in Kota. Cota was called Krypton at the time. And I remember going to Shashir's office, Shashashir's the CEO of Kota. I think that they resonate with the fact that it was like cloud first, high performance in the browser because they wanted that for their own teams too.

And I finally got after like months of trying to get a team to adopt Figma for real. got Shashir and his designers to get excited about Figma, we got them like onboarded. So I think it was a few meetings once we were at that point of having table stakes features met. Mind you, this is not a point where like Figma is today. So there's no multiplayer now at this point. You know, and like a lot was broken. So for example, I remember going to a meeting when they finally said, we'll use it.

Let's give it a try. And we walked out. We're so stoked. and then we're driving home from there in Palo, we're going back to SF, like 20 minutes into the drive, 30 minutes back, got this email that basically said, hey, thanks so much for coming by. The fonts broke.

We can't read the fonts to local computer. That was a shitty thing that I'd built. And thanks so much, but we'll have to give it a try a few months. And so we just kind of like turn the car around, went back. We're like, no, no, we're back. We're still here. We'll set up for you. But we didn't tell them.

install. Yeah, we didn't tell them at the time, Evan and I that, you know, that was our, they were our first customer. Yeah. And I remember just year came in to Figma for All Hands later, like years later, and I introduced him as the first customer and he was like, I am. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that story. I mean, basically, this is also a great example of like, don't take no for an answer and, you know, basically going into your first customer's office is a very powerful moment. Yeah, and then showing that they'll learn from them and if they have lots of feedback, great, like we'll prioritize it. I guess like some of the really banger features initially, I remember you guys had like really amazing sync, like multi-browser sync with like operational

transforms and I hadn't seen anyone else do that type of very fast updates across multiple browsers before. Was that like a moment that, you know, wowed the users or? Definitely. So it's interesting because we launched our closed beta, December 2015. Our GA was done until October of 2016. Oh, wow. So it was a little bit. A good gap. And when we launched the closed beta, there was no multiplayer. It was just kind of like in the browser and here's this new design tool. High quality, but minimum feature set. In the sort of months following, Evan started working on our real-time collaboration multiplayer engine. And it took a while to build out.

And I remember when we finally launched the GA, October 2016, I mean, the comments we got were like, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. You know, that person commented about it and said, a camel is a horse designed by committee. So it's like very much this reaction from the design community of, I'm like the designer that's going to be in the corner. I'm going to do this amazing work and I'll do the grand reveal, which is kind of the agency mindset versus the product team approach of we're all on to. together, we're going to work through this and figure it out. That's fascinating. And then one of our early users that tried out Figma, I remember he tweeted at the time, like, kind of making fun of us, but in a nice way, and said, oh, we're going to do a design party

and like invited everybody to Figma file where, you know, just like at the time there was not many limits on how many people could be in the file, there's public link sharing, there's no, you can, there's no pain for Figma. Oh, crazy. until like made of 2017 and our servers like started breaking and I mean like for the 48 hours after launch you know the team and Evan

were just like firefighting trying to like make sure this one file that was the design party didn't crash. That's hilarious but it was like started as people making fun of Figma and turned out to be like this great advertisement of look at what you can do in Figma and people started to jam it and actually make stuff together

that they didn't even know each other it's like this is powerful there's something here So it showed what we were trying to show, even though people were maybe not buying into the message at the time. Yeah, that's fascinating. Your story is very interesting, especially for a lot of startup founders today, because I feel like, you know, it's very common. I'm sure you run across founders that you've probably funded that, you know, three, six months in, you know, it's not working. You know, I'm only a quarter of the way through the list.

Like, I want to pivot. I don't, you know. And then this is such a powerful example of some. Sometimes you have to work through the list. Like it might take 18 months. It might take 24 months from like where you're at to a workable or usable thing. But in a way, that's the both, right? I mean, we had from August, 2012 to May, June 2013, that was a period where we're pivoting constantly trying lots of things.

Yeah. But then, okay, we had a thesis. We went for it. It felt like there was an opportunity and started to build it out more. Yeah. And then it was, okay, it's going to take a while. I respect, like, we're lucky to have raised money and have resources. I should have hired faster once we started to get signal from the market around product market fit.

So, I mean, I remember going to a user study with a friend at Coursera at the time. Shut up at 6 o'clock after he finished work. Office were pretty empty. I brought a bottle of wine with me because the text editing experience in flow and Figma was so slow. and just writing things out took a long time. So I knew we'd have to drink some wine to get to the user study. We finished the entire bottle in that user study. And the next day or two days later,

or something, he followed up with me and sent me like 12 pages of a doc. It's like, here's all this stuff I want you to build and why. I should have taken something like that and gone, okay, this is clear product market poll. Like the market's pulling the product out of us. I should have then gone, okay, let's go higher faster. Let's figure I had to inflect growth of our internal team. I think instead I was still very cautious.

And so that's something I wish that I, you know, if I could have gone back in time, I wish we could have, you know, got a little faster there. Yeah. I mean, basically when you catch lightning in a bottle, that's what it feels like then. That's a great reminder. That was early before we even shipped it. So we didn't know. Yeah.

But I think now I look back in them, like there were signs. Yeah. That there was fit here, even if the product wasn't ready. The second part of your story is super interesting in that, you know, you did it, you built it, you put it out there, you made it collaborative, and then the initial reaction was we hate it. Or acceptance at least. Yeah. Or, yeah, I mean, basically they didn't understand what it was yet. And I don't know, I feel like that's a common human trait, period.

Like, you see the future and you're like, no, it's not for me. Did you have to do anything actively to undo that, or was it just a matter of time? Like, you know, everything that is different will be hated on and you just have to ignore it. And you like relentlessly seek the people who love it and they're, you know, your best net promoters. I think a bit of both. I mean, we knew from before we even watched the close beta, we were dog footing Figma internally. And we knew from just using it ourselves every day to design Figma for a meta. Yeah.

What we need to do just to make a better design tools for us. part of that we discovered through the dog fooding phase or the closed beta phase was it really sucks if I'm in a browser tab you come into the same link you edit something I have a forced reload I add something you have a forced reload that's just a terrible experience yeah or if you lock files you know having to request and unlock it's just not good yeah and that was the default back then for every other product and for us we're like okay at minimum we have to fix that so that you don't have this horrible user experience. And at best, we hope to unlock all these new workflows,

but what they'll be exactly, it's unclear. Yeah. We have ideas of what it could be, but we'll have to see. And so I think we had deep conviction in, at least to meet table stakes and make it a good UX, we've got to do this. And then everyone sort of shows us the way of like how they could use Figma to do all these amazing things.

Yeah, it's funny how often I end up using, like a product that is not ready for prime time or not quite right. And then it's just full of bugs. And then you sort of wonder, like, do the developers actually use this product? And if you dig a little bit deeper, it's like, oh, no, they actually don't dog food and they don't use it themselves. And then how could you actually make a good product without doing that? It's not possible, probably. I think that's probably the case. Yeah. I mean, everything we want to Figma always goes through a period of us really testing out internally until something like reaches, you know, environment that we use to try things, like that's for me when the clock starts, not before then.

Can I ask you about like, I guess, design culture inside Figma and how you developed it? You know, is it as simple as at some level, like, if this is crap, I'm going to say it and we're not shipping this? What went into that culture, like, you know, early on that built this thing that can like consistently create excellence? First of all, I mean, we've had the blessing of working with like amazing designers. I don't think it's ever been like, oh, this is crap. Like, it's almost never a reaction I have. I don't look at the work because like we got a great team.

Yeah. That doesn't mean that like everyone's considering the full system or, you know, I think that some of the things that come up a lot are like, how complex are we willing to make it to give users functionality they want in that interplay between, okay, Figma's got to be approachable, which we still have more work to on approachability. We're always trying to make it more approachable. but also powerful.

And you know, you're not just serving, you know, the power design user. You're also serving the user who is in Infigma, like, once in their life or never. And how do you get them to be able to create something and have that experience right away? So we have to balance both. That's one tension that comes up in design culture. How do you make the simple thing simple, but the complex things possible? I think, yeah, plenty of other tensions that come up too. And usually it's just like for lack of context or having to reason through a very hard problem.

One of the best parts about building something where you've got hard design and engineering challenges, you get to work with the best people. Yeah. So I'm very thankful for the folks that work on the Figma team. The top level answer might just be have an amazing hiring process. Yeah, but also seek out like the best people in the world relentlessly to work with because you're going to learn so much from them and they'll inspire a whole new ways of thinking about the problem space. Like a lot of the innovations of Figma do come from our team. It's not like I'm sitting going, hey, like, think about this thing and, you know, come up with it. Like, we've got internal things, culture, rituals.

For example, we have a hack week concept. We call it Maker Week because more than just the developers and engineers are doing stuff. Yeah. Is really the whole company. And it's the only rule is make Figma better in some way. Figma slides is a great example. I came out of Maker Week. Yeah, that's amazing.

But many of our best features, our best aspects of our platform, They've also got of similar situations. Yeah. Earlier we were sort of talking about like that zero to one and then, you know, one to scaling. You know, do you have any advice for people who basically they made it to zero to one? And then, you know, how do you nail the one to a billion? Like did your day to day change? Like you guys, you and your co-founder were probably in the weeds building a lot of the key features yourself with your own hands.

And then at some point you were saying like, actually, I wish I started scaling early. I wish I started hiring people and built, you know, sort of care and feeding of the organization feels like the salient feature of like that second phase. You know, how did you navigate that? What would you tell to people who, you know, yeah, like it's happening. Like the users are pulling it out, you know, pulling the product out of us and things like that. My main reflection I was going to abstract it all the way to be useful to everyone's watching this.

Absolutely. Is sort of the loop you're always in is, Be self-aware. What are you doing the most of right now? Then go replace yourself with that task if you've got the resources. If you don't have the resources, like figure out how to get them either by being profitable, by raising funding, or by being really clever. And if you can kind of keep doing that loop, that's a sort of loop that'll lead to team building or lead to figuring out the way to delegate work properly.

Like an OO loop, I guess. You can just stay on. you can do that, like it'll lead you to do the right things. And I think the danger is you just get so reactive that like you never get to that sort of loop and you're never able to self-improve the organization, which is, you know, easy to get to that state because there's always more to do. And as a founder, especially when it's just a few people, you're going to be doing, you know, a ton yourself as well. And not just taking this like, you know, galaxy brain, bird's eye perspective. Like, it's never like actually what headspace you're in.

Yeah. But you have to figure out how to zoom out a little bit too. Yeah. So Figma, you know, in this moment, like, what are you most excited about and where does it go from here? Yeah. I mean, I'm super excited about that loop we talked about and how do we make it so that you're able to develop software with your team. And I think that's, you know, two different aspects, right? There's the how do I get started and prototyping quickly with new concepts. But also there's, I've got existing system I have to be in. How do I create that loop and iterate quickly as well? and how do you make that accessible to more people? Yeah. So there's so much improvement we can do for both of those. And I'm super psyched about what we can do to enable people there.

Obviously, Figma came up in a moment when LLMs and Kodgen were not happening yet. Do you think that's changed then? You know, for the founder who's starting out right now, what would you say to them? I think that even without, you know, the speed at which you can work now with new models and whatnot, I would definitely tell people move as fast as you can. And you can move faster, a lot faster right now. I mean, I think the speed at which folks are operating is incredible. I don't know if that's what you're witnessing every day.

Yeah, definitely. It feels like a moment where we're able to build in a really quick way. And I definitely, you know, when my team comes to me and says, hey, we've got like a nine-month roadmap on this feature, I'm like, what the fuck? Yeah, let's squish that down. What can we do to de-scope or figure out how to get us out faster to start? talking people and showing to people. It's funny because a lot of people come to me and say, I think I should do this two-year build on something. As someone who did one, what do you think? And I'm like, don't, if you don't have to, don't do that. Yeah. Like, do it faster.

Very few people have to do that at this point. Very few. Some. Like, there's hard tech companies, you know, it's been really cool to see YC investing there and backing stuff that's, you know, like boom or something like that or these companies that are going to take a long time to get the thing out there. Yeah. It's a giant like mega project. But yeah, I think that that most things don't have to be that. And if there's a way to move quicker, you should do it. Yeah.

Dylan, thank you so much for spending time with us. You know, your story is a true inspiration to designers, engineers, and founders out there. So thanks for sharing it. Thank you, Gary.