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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 had this chat box?
[Music]
Awesome. Well, um, want to welcome
Dylan. Um, I'm curious what the makeup
of the audience is here. How many people
um have used Figma before?
Wow. All right.
Awesome.
How many people consider themselves to
be designers?
Okay. All right.
Many of us.
Yes. Our people. And uh how many are
currently founders?
Awesome.
Cool. Okay. That's a a good mix of
people in the audience. So, we'll hear
the Figma story. Then we'll talk about
um advice around AI and design. Um and
then we'll get some advice on uh just
being a founder from Dylan too. So I'm
excited to jump in. Um maybe to start uh
give us kind of a snapshot on where
Figma is today and then you know we can
kind of go back to the uh the beginning
days.
Yeah. Uh today we are uh many different
places. We're hybrid uh 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 um very excited to
hear feedback if you got any on things
like Figma make sites draw uh buzz. Um
but it's been a very exciting time. Uh
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 uh maybe
19year-old Dylan uh getting started with
the 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, uh, 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 uh,
and quadcopters. Other one was WebGL.
And uh Evan after about a month or so
said hey like not into drones uh for all
sorts of various reasons. That was kind
of the one I was pushing for more at the
time also except WebGL of course. And
then uh I was like great WebGL it is.
And so WebGL I think everybody probably
here knows but is a way to use the GPU
in your computer and the browser. Uh web
GPU is its successor. And yeah, we uh
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 uh you know it took
uh we really started in earnest August
2012 uh whereas we started talking about
it more December of uh 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 uh 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. Uh if you
have any doubt about this statement,
just look up his GitHub. Uh he 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. Then I go back to school, same
place I'm at now, can't hurt. Uh 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 to the scenario. And also it helped
that I had the Teal Fellowship. Uh, I
would have done it without it, but like
having 100K over two years, I know now,
you know, inflation, etc. probably
sounds like less than it was then, but
yeah, I mean to have actual cash and not
have to dig into savings or go into
debt, huge deal. Not just because of the
cash element, but also because it gives
you time. Uh, 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 got to give yourself
time somehow. That's really important.
Yeah. You spent a couple years trying
to, you know, do all the twists and
turns and the thing that eventually
became what Figma um is today.
Yeah.
Um what kept you going in that time? A
lot of times, 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're 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. And we built a great
[ __ ] meme generator. I think it was
for sure would have been the best one in
the market. Uh, and my thesis was right,
by the way. Look at the exponential
curve of memes since 2012. Yeah. uh 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'd I drop out of
Brown for this? That was probably like 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 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 uh the idea for Figma, how did you
get your first users?
Yeah. Um really the first users of Figma
uh a lot of it was cold emailing and uh
people in network so folks that I had
either interned with for example I
entered at Flipboard, LinkedIn uh
O'Reilly Media and from that there were
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, uh, yeah, I 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 uh the more that I
engaged and we worked through that, the
better the product got. I'd follow up
with them and eventually they started
converting. Some of them 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 invest 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.
um sitting down with them, sometimes
several a day, saying, "Hey, here's a
demo. Will you use it? If not, why not?"
And uh
very low conversion rate. I think like
in that entire summer, maybe two of them
went in for it and actually started
using Figma. Uh one was Notion, the
other was the company that became Kota,
then called Krypton. and uh kind of
interesting they're both you know 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 it was a slow arc over time but
the the constant was feedback getting
feedback to the 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 what I did. Uh you know get
your product out faster and charge money
faster for the product to see if you
actually can make money. Uh, unless you
have some genius galaxy brain consumer
thing you're doing, in which case figure
it out yourself. I I don't know what to
tell you. I think that the feedback is
essential and uh you should launch as
quickly as you can. For me, the feedback
was very clear. It's not ready and that
made it so we didn't feel comfortable
launching yet. But looking back, we did
have the capital. I should have scaled
the team faster 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 a epic road map 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 it's absolutely the case that I
try to push people internally towards,
you know, a one month or three month
cadence uh at most. You know, if someone
comes to me with a 9 month, a 12 month,
two-year cadence, it's like, what the
[ __ ] 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 not equation, but the cycle that
you're always in is 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. Uh figuring
out how to get someone else to help you
with 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? 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 believed this was
going to be a huge company?
Oh man. I think uh 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." Uh, I should
have known then, even though our product
was really bad, that there was something
there. But in reality, it took until
Microsoft told us, "Hey, this is
spreading like wildfire, and we're
asking ourselves, should we shut it down
or uh, 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. Um, and also listen for
when people are uh 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, uh that is a sign that you
should really double down and in
whatever way you can. And so many people
interpreted 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. Uh, and I think
that people misinterpret that too much.
It seems 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 um,
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
I think maybe it's just like childhood
for me. When I was growing up, I was a
child actor. Uh not like a 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. Uh and
basically you constantly get rejected.
Uh 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
been pretty wild.
Yeah. I mean, we've had some popular
redesigns from Airbnb and Netflix. Yep.
We've had um Apple's new liquid glass
UI, which seems to be somewhat
controversial. I'm sure there are
opinions out here. at least there was
opinions on X or Twitter or whatever.
You guys had some incredible launches um
at um at config recently and you know at
YC we have kind of a call for more
design founders and then maybe the most
um surprising and impressive thing was
uh OpenAI acquiring Johnny Ivan his
company for more than $6 billion which
is pretty crazy. So I I'm curious like
why now? Like what is happening in this
moment where it seems like design is is
really a part of uh the conversation in
a lot of the tech world.
Yeah. I mean I 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. Uh more designers being
hired. design going from, you know,
lipstick on a pig, make it pretty at the
end of the 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. Then like what is
your differentiator? It's design, it's
craft, it's attention to detail, it's
point of view. What we're seeing is
recognition of that. I mean, Airbnb,
they literally said our differentiator
is design. Yeah,
I think Brian said that. I believe that,
you know, there's lots of takes on Open
AI and uh this more than $6 billion
transaction. Uh some people are like
this is the stupidest thing in the
world. Other people are hailing 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
uh 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
uh 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
something like OpenAI and some part of I
understand. Design is differentiator.
Some parts I don't understand. Like
that's a really big transaction. Uh but
Sam is one of those people that, you
know, he's he's right about a lot of
stuff. So I I would encourage you if you
just dismissed it outright to ask
yourself what you might be missing. And
you guys launched some uh really cool AI
focused products at uh your conference
config about a month ago which has been
really cool to see the reception there.
Um really positive from a lot of your
users and the design community. Um I'm
curious if you can share more about
those and 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 uh in Figma Design or
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 oneplus 1 is not
equal to three is more equal to like
1.5. A lot of the things you saw launch
at configure in that category. So uh
draw for example which is a way to do
more uh vector tasks we made a separate
mode for uh 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 Figma platform buzz same
thing you have all these people that
want to create uh mass exports and
figure out ways to create production
graphics. So, if you got a brand team
and they've created templates, uh, 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
uh make Figma design more complicated or
dumb it down. And so, instead, you make
a new surface. Uh, sites, we see people
designing websites all the time in Figma
Design, but they have to go somewhere
else to actually build the site and get
it out there. So, how do we get that so
that they can actually ship it? And then
make, uh, 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 you know they're almost being
combined into one. How do you think
about that with the tools that you're
making and and I'm also curious um maybe
how that process has changed like how
your own development process has changed
within Figma?
I'll start with Figma. Uh, 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
prototype and to figure out what's going
to work and what's not going to work and
make that as low cost cost as possible.
And then there's tools I can't talk
about and things we're developing that
uh have been pretty instrumental to how
our development process is changing. Um,
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, um I think it there's a lot of
stuff going on there. I think product is
also blurring with design and
development and potentially even parts
of research. All this is becoming less
distinct and uh 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 like late stage code bases.
Um, so if you have an established
codebase, I think you're going to get
less out of uh 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 uh at this
current moment. But you know, in a week
this could change. Yeah, it changes so
fast.
Yes.
Um I mean related to that, how do you
expect user interfaces to change uh over
the next couple years? And feels like
chat has kind of become a lot of the
dominant uh 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.
Yeah.
Uh 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 had 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 um there's something about
the experiments that have worked there
that's very interesting so for example
look at midjourney 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 is a way
to show people what's possible or even
Meta's new AI app. Uh 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 underexplored uh
in the media. So I I I think that
there's this problem that people have
not solved of like how do you expose
capabilities of of these models and
there's so much that needs to be
developed and worked through there.
Yeah, I think it there's a lot to come.
On top of that, everything will be more
contextual uh AI as you blend it 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 laptop and your tablet
and the thing you know it's going to be
glasses uh we're going to see much more
um in terms of uh 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 intersperse and that
is a a really interesting challenge for
design of how do you reconcile all that
keep it consistent and actually be able
to navigate that whole broad spectrum
that people expect you to show up on.
YC's Next Batch is now taking
applications. Got a startup in you?
Apply at y combinator.com/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 um consider yourselves
to be researchers or have done research
work?
Yeah, it's a it's a lot of people in
this audience here. And I know you've
done this internally, you know, at Figma
and and building your own models. Um,
what is the role of design um in in
research and the research work that
you've done? Um, and you know, what are
some of the design decisions that go
into actually like making them better
and and making them work really well? I
mean I think that a lot of researchers
uh are sort of trained in an academic
environment and come at problems as
abstractions and they try to think very
generally and I 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 uh for example
in AI I I really do think that thinking
like a designer can be helpful and
working with designers can be helpful 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 uh is been 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 uh
it's it's the case that designers have
this mindset of you're building for an
audience. Maybe it's a general audience.
Maybe it's a specific audience. That
audience has a problem or a set of
problems they're 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 uh 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 uh you can advance. So yeah, I
guess my push for anyone who's coming
from more of a research background would
be go get in the field, go talk to
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 it's like that Steve
Jobs quote that, you know, design isn't
just how it looks, it's how it works.
Yep.
Um 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 uh will
have far more leverage in the future and
the value of design will only continue
to go up. I mean your RFP uh request for
proposal for designer founders I think
embodied this. You said uh 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 uh looking back you know
you got Brian Chesy, you got Ki at
linear. We have so many designer
founders that you can point to now and
say wow uh these folks are really
successful and are 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, uh 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 uh 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 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 have to
step up.
I'm curious what are some of the most
interesting ways you guys are using uh
AI internally at Figma? Yeah, I mean
can't talk about it all like I said uh
since some of it is like products that
we'll be releasing. But maybe one thing
I'll say is on the designer embedded in
the research side point uh it's been
fascinating to see just how important it
is for designers to uh contribute on
evals. So if you think about it uh as
you're you know doing a 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 eval product
people they should be contributing to
evals 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,
uh, as you design these models, I think
eval has become more important, too.
And I guess if you were in your 20s
today, um, 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 thought uh 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, uh, and trying to experience the
world, uh, 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 I think, uh, a lot of people
in their 20s these days, uh, apparently,
according to the stats, are dating less.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not true.
Y'all can tell me later. Uh, 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. Uh, I would
highly advise that y'all date uh if
you're in that cohort. Um, and I even go
so far as to say this is less a comment
about the products that are in this
category of the past, but more about
what the future could hold. Um I I think
AI boyfriends and girlfriends if
developed and allowed to exist uh is a
societal self-own. I I think it's like
actively poisonous to society if um this
becomes the primary a 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 um you know before uh we can open
up some questions here as people kind of
line up. I'm curious um what was the
most fun period in the history of
building Figma for you?
Uh you know maybe is 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 do we make sure we do the right
things and that's a fascinating and
really fun place to be.
Cool. Let's open up some questions. I'm
a founder, product engineer, solo
engineer, everything solo entrepreneur
at the same times and recently I have
started using cursi to handle both
coding and design even like down to
pixel level details. So what do you
think about cursi? Is this cursi can
become your one of your competitors and
at the same times uh I just recently
discover a tools called penpod or giving
like developers more control through
open source uh self-hosted options. What
do you think Figma should uh move
towards being more open and developer
friendly to catch up with the trend of
many so engineer become product engineer
in the future and more and more solo
entrepreneur using cursi to create
product in the future.
Yeah, I think it's a great question. Um
and actually just was uh able to run
into Michael backstage that was good to
see him. Uh I think that when it comes
to AI generation, you know, if you take
a step forward from okay, I generated
something, the next question is okay,
how to make it good? And you know,
there's different ways to do that. Uh
you can be writing code and going into
your browser and kind of having that
loop. That's a very structural way to
think. Um other people prefer to think
in a more free form way. uh with make
we're trying to enable that uh in a way
that's visual first rather than code
first. You can still get to the code. Um
but I really don't think of cursor as a
competitor. Uh I think of them as
someone that we we just launched our MCP
server to explicitly make it so that you
can get your designs into cursor and
windsurf and all these other NVS 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 is design
then your first generation your oneshot
is probably not the thing that's going
to win. So I'd encourage you to think a
little bit further than that. In terms
of open source we actually just
announced today uh the acquisition of
payload uh CMS which is an open source
uh project and uh I'm really excited
about what we can do there and how we
can support open source more.
Thank you. Hi Dylan. Um my name is
Charlie Fearborn. Uh, I'm a game
designer here at a startup in San
Francisco. Um, and I graduated last year
from USC in computer science and game
design. Best major ever. So, it's cool
to hear about the games roots of Figma.
Yeah, we cut it off early. But Evan is
also like really was really deep in game
design and it's a hard hard industry,
but
it's a hard industry. Yeah.
It's awesome that you're doing it.
Um, I have kind of a more personal
question for you. Um, uh, what is the
meaning of life? um mean of life I think
uh you know seek
out how to explore consciousness, learn
as much as you can uh uh share love with
others and make sure that um you feel
fulfilled and the other people around
you uh are fulfilled and happy um at the
end of the day. And I think that uh that
can be something you do on a micro level
in your local community, a macro level
at scale, doesn't matter. Uh as long as
you're living true to your internal
values, I think that uh you're leading a
fulfilling life.
Hey Dylan, thank you so much. Um I was
wondering as a designer, are there any
specific design principles that you love
and use which 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, uh, 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.
Uh, 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 uh, and not being
obvious or intuitive how to use, you're
you're kind of messing up. So, I think
you have to figure out how to do both,
but you start with making the simple
things simple.
Thank you.
I'm Michael. I study HCI and computer
science at Colombia. Um, 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 a Loom
over email. Um, so that way, you know,
it's got an async component since time
is sometimes hard to find. Uh, they can
watch it. Um, and if you want to really
peique their interest, mutual
connections help. Uh, 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. Um, I love your shoes, first
of all, but um,
thank you.
Of course. Um, but you said you noticed
behaviors when deciding what to
productize. And I can very clearly see
that. I was using slides for classes. I
using Figma for slides for classes
before you guys dropped slides made it
easier. Using lock layers for social
media graphics for my Fred 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 you know 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. Uh thanks very much for the talk. Um
so right now you're helping designers in
a huge breath of industries. When you
just started with the cold emailing etc.
How did you go about with defining rise?
Was it very broad as today or did you
start focused on one industry?
No, we really started focused on product
design and uh for digital products
uh where and I think even more narrowly
where people cared about design uh if
I'm going to be totally honest rather
than like you know the broad world. uh
it seemed like it'd be an easier cell.
But yeah, I think it required um a lot
of sort 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 here
with the ambition of later on doing
everything, but I'm glad we started more
narrowly.
Hi. Um, so my background besides being
like a CS major and whatnot is also in
traditional art.
Cool.
Um, where perhaps AI is not necessarily
as popular as the moment. Um, 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, uh,
okay, you're doing some inference, is it
heating up the planet, uh, to the
questions of, um, okay, are these models
regurgitating something they've seen
elsewhere, uh, 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 a maybe a
sort of escape answer. right now a lot
of the work we're doing uh is actually
with thirdparty models and so that's
something that we have less control over
um 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 Dylan uh I'm an
HCI researcher and a design founder 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 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 uh sort of where
things are at now, where they're going
and you have to kind of consider both. I
think that uh 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 I mean the
worldview of materialism is one of uh
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 doesn't have a soul obviously
it's like a computer um and so those are
like fundamentally at odds and uh my
prediction is that we'll probably see an
increase in people projecting
consciousness onto AI whether or not
that's the right uh thing that you know
you agree with or don't agree with. I
think that the number of people that'll
do that will increase. Um and I think it
leads to some uh 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 uh
whatever you want to call it, I I think
that that's a very underexplored
question and I'm excited to see what you
do with it. I think we're at time sadly.
Um, but I just want to thank everybody
for coming and uh wish you all the best
of luck with whatever path you pursue.
Thank you, Dylan.
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