Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field

Config Conference Recap

Lenny Rachitsky: Today I am excited to bring you a very special episode, which was recorded live at Figma Config with Figma CEO and co-founder, Dylan Field, in front of a live audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the first ever live recording of this podcast and it was so much fun. If you watch this on YouTube, you can see the epic stage that they built specifically for us to recreate my podcast studio. I could not be more thankful to the Config team for making this happen.

In my conversation with Dylan, we dig into how he builds and refines his product taste and intuition, how intuition is a hypothesis generator, the future of product management. How Dylan attempts to operationalize keeping Figma simple and to continue simplifying the experience. A bunch of stories from the early days of Figma that I’ve never heard before. Also, he shares his favorite AI tool called websim, which is wild. And if you wait till the very end, you can see a very young child actor Dylan Field in a clip that I found online that was hilarious.

If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Dylan Field.

Dylan, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the podcast.

Design Dialogue in the AI Era

Dylan Field: Thank you, Lenny.

Defining Good Design

Lenny Rachitsky: Hi all.

Dylan Field: Is this your first live podcast?

Raccoon Paws and Pancake Hands

Lenny Rachitsky: This is my first ever live podcast. Also, a big thank you to the Config team who set up this crazy studio. I had no idea this was going to happen. I feel like I’m in my studio here with a thousand people watching us. It’s very impressive. I very much dig the background and also the mics that may or may not be wired.

Dylan Field: That’s right. Don’t say that. Don’t tell people.

Intuition and Product Taste

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, sorry.

Dylan Field: There’s no wires coming out of them.

Listening to User Feedback

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s no one behind the curtain either. Okay, so Dylan, I want to start by just checking in on how you’re doing. So Config is about to wrap up. We’ve been at it for two days now. I know how much lift goes into doing these sorts of things. I imagine you’ve been thinking about this for a long time now. I’m just curious how you’re doing, any surprises, any highlights, any low lights?

Dylan Field: The highlight is the community and just the incredible, incredible people here at Config. Y’all are awesome. I don’t know why I keep talking in the mic like this. It’s instinctual. But seriously, it’s just the most amazing community to be part of and I feel so lucky. And then in terms of how I’m doing at this exact moment, exhausted, but riding on caffeine and whatever this really cool probiotic drink is.

Changing Your Mind

Lenny Rachitsky: Any surprises from the past couple of days? Anything that’s like, “Oh wow, that went a lot better than I thought, maybe less well.”

Tangible Outputs Are Most Persuasive

Dylan Field: Demo, definitely things I would’ve improved. But also Emil and Mihika were phenomenal, and it was just so awesome to see them do their demos and present materials. I was just really pleased with the conversation, I think, that’s getting started at Config around AI. I was looking online on social media and I think people are already zeroing in the right conversation, which is, okay, in a world of more software being created by AI, what does that mean and the impact on craft and the impact on quality and the need to have more unique design and how design is a differentiator.

And I think some people are saying, “I agree with that.” Some people are saying, “That I disagree with that”, and that’s exactly the bounds of what the conversation I imagined would emerge from yesterday. It was funny, the make design feature, I think that I said on the keynote, I was like, “This is going to give you the most obvious thing in the most obvious form possible.” And then people online are like, “It’s just going to give you some obvious thing.” I agree.

Thoughts on Product Management

Lenny Rachitsky:

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Let’s keep talking about design. You once said that the definition of design is art applied to problem solving. Can you just add a bit more to that? What do you mean by that? Because that’s an amazing line.

Dylan Field: Well, I don’t think it’s my original line. I think someone else said it, but there’s a lot of definitions of design out there too. There’s also ‘design is dialogue’ or ‘design is problem solving’. You just go straight there. I could go with 10 more. But I like art applied to problem solving because I think that design is often… There is some component of creativity to it and unique expression that you’re trying to provide and create and put out into the world. But you are also trying to do it and match it to a user need, a problem that needs to be solved. And I think that it’s not pure art, but if you lose the art and you’re just solving the problem, it’s totally utilitarian and it lacks soul. And so the combination of those two things is to me really beautiful.

Why Simplification Matters So Much

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m going to pivot to a very hard hitting question. I hope your PR people don’t kill me for asking this. Many people asked me to ask you this question. Very important. Please explain a Figma tradition called raccoon feet and muffin hands.

Why Simplification Matters (Continued)

Dylan Field: I should probably just leave this interview now. So this is a conversation, I’m not sure exactly where it started, but it started in early Figma. And basically we had these lunch tables at Figma where we would just all gather and have very long, interesting meandering conversations before we got back to work. And one of the questions that, was a ‘would you rather’, was would you rather have raccoons for feet or muffins for hands? And I think this is a deeply philosophical question. I have pondered it since I’ve heard it. I still don’t have one answer. If you’ve got an answer, I’m curious what it is.

Redesigning the Figma Platform

Lenny Rachitsky: I’ve got follow up questions. Can you control where the raccoon take you or are they just deciding on their own what’s happening?

Dylan Field: I think that raccoons probably wouldn’t even agree with each other where to go.

Who Owns the Simplification

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, that’s complicated.

Dylan Field: If you had raccoons for feet right now, do you think that it would interfere with this podcast?

Figma’s Early Startup Days

Lenny Rachitsky: But muffin hands would also interfere with my newsletter and I feel like I’d be out of work.

Dylan Field: I don’t know if you can type.

The Importance of Shipping Early

Lenny Rachitsky: I’d need a special keyboard. This is very difficult.

Dylan Field: You haven’t even thought about the upsides of this yet.

Quality Versus Shipping Speed

Lenny Rachitsky: What are the upsides?

Dylan Field: We can get there, it’s all-

Early User Acquisition Strategies

Lenny Rachitsky: Maybe I could eat some of the muffins.

Dylan Field: It’s the case for optimism.

Insights on Future Trends

Lenny Rachitsky: Cupcakes?

Dylan Field: If you have muffins for hands, maybe if you’re hungry…

Reflecting on Figma’s Journey

Lenny Rachitsky: Do they regenerate as you you eat them?

Dylan Field: That’s a good question. There’s no answers here, just questions. Do your nails grow?

The Future of Computing

Lenny Rachitsky: Yes.

Dylan Field: Oh, okay. Interesting. It’s deeper than you might think.

Quick Lightning Round Questions

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m going to play a short clip with Rick Rubin and then I have a question about it. So we’ll see if that plays.

Speaker 3 (10:06): But exactly what he does and how is difficult to describe. Do you play instruments?

Rick Rubin: Barely.

Speaker 3 (10:13): Do you know how to work a soundboard?

No. I have no technical ability and I know nothing about music.

Speaker 3 (10:21): Then you must know something.

Well, I know what I like and what I don’t like. And I’m decisive about what I like and what I don’t like.

Speaker 3 (10:29): So what are you being paid for?

The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.

Lenny Rachitsky: So I’m not going to say this is you. You need to grow the beard. But I think this is a little bit you because what I’ve heard from a number of your colleagues is that one of your superpowers is intuition and product taste. And someone said that you have the sixth sense for what’s going to work, when you’re designing Figma and you’re making decisions in the product. So I’m curious how you’ve built and refined your intuition and product taste when it comes to Figma and then even broadly.

Dylan Field: That’s a lot kinder than I thought you were going to be. I thought you’re going to be like, “You don’t know how to code and you don’t know how to design.”

Lenny Rachitsky: No.

Dylan Field: But no, here’s my framework for it. I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator and you’re constantly generating these hypotheses and others are generating hypotheses as well. And you then take these hypotheses and you put them forward and you debate them and you try to find data to support them or negate them. And then you winnow it down into what is our working hypothesis? And from that you move forward.

Lenny Rachitsky: I heard that you read every tweet that mentions Figma and share them with folks. There’s a Slack channel where you paste them. I imagine that is a part of this where you’re just constantly watching what people are saying about Figma, what people are complaining about.

Dylan Field: I definitely look everywhere trying to constantly ingest information about Figma, and it’s not just Twitter/X, whatever that’s called now, but anywhere on the internet, support channels, et cetera. And I’m always trying to understand. I also ask a lot of questions and I try to get to root problems and understand where people are coming from and what are they actually trying to solve. Sometimes people are saying, “Hey, I need X”, but they really want Y or Z. And trying to do that myself and engage and dive deeper there, but also to encourage our team to do that, I think leads to really good outcomes in terms of what we ship.

Lenny Rachitsky: Is there something you’ve changed your mind about, building on that, either based on customer feedback or some employee just making a case and like, “Okay, you’re right.” Is there something that comes to mind of something you’ve changed your mind about recently? Somebody said Flides.

Dylan Field: For when we started out Flides. I have not. It’s Figma Slides. Well, it’s not recent, but one good example of me changing my mind is that you all have Pages in Figma, you’re welcome. But I think I have deep skepticism of Pages still. I’m not sure they’re… If you could freeze time and I could just go in with my team, work on Figma for a very long time, I’m not sure we’d come to the same implementation of Pages that we are at today. I just don’t think it’s the most elegant solution in the context of the entire system of product design that you could create. The world told me and our team that that did not matter and they needed Pages. And don’t worry, we’re not shipping Pages. But I am still very skeptical of them and I think that in general, probably my team would tell you that I don’t always change my mind, but I also build trust with people in deep ways.

And I think across our organization, if things are not going to be fatal, then if I hear from someone, “Hey, I really think we should do X”, then I’ll say, “Okay, just go with it. And here’s my feedback, here’s what I’m skeptical of, let’s see what happens.” And then sometimes they come back to me and they’re like, “See I was right.” But usually they’re pretty polite about it.

Lenny Rachitsky: Just to build on that, something a lot of people try to work on is being good at influencing leadership execs, CEOs. What do you find works to change your mind? What do people come to you with that helps you like, “Okay, you’re actually right?”

Dylan Field: I think the more concrete an artifact is or the more you can debate something, the better. I ask for examples a lot, I try to ask follow up questions about things and make sure I fully understand it. And I think where I get stuck sometimes is if I ask follow up questions and we don’t have answers yet, and then my response might be, “Let’s go find the answer to these questions and then let’s go back to this conversation”, if I think it’s something that’s really important. And I think for some people they might go, “Okay, this is actually really obvious. I can’t believe you’re so dense and you don’t get it yet.” And sometimes they’re right and they come back and they’re like, “Okay, here’s the data now, can we move on?” And we do, we move on and they’re right. And I just think that it’s important though to just really understand something from first principles for a lot of decisions. And maybe it’s just a perfectionist quality repeated over time, I think it leads to good outcomes as long as you make sure it’s not bottle-necking the organization.

Lenny Rachitsky: So following up on that, let’s talk about product management. So last year you had Brian Chesky here, I think maybe on this stage, maybe a bigger stage. And he said that they got rid of product management at Airbnb and everyone cheered and all the PMs were very sad. And he didn’t actually mean they got rid of product management, they changed the function and evolved it. I’m curious just to get your take.

Dylan Field: It’s funny. This year we have you here Lenny, so that’s your answer. No…

Lenny Rachitsky: I had him on the-

Dylan Field: Before and after, all. Surprise.

Lenny Rachitsky: We’re still here. We’re still here. I want to get your take on product management. You all have amazing product managers at Figma. I’ve had three of them on the podcast already. I’m curious just what value you find the best product managers bring to Figma?

Dylan Field: It was really funny last year after that interview, so Yuhki, our chief product officer, had invited me to a dinner for our PM team. And it took a while to get out of Config at the end of the day, and I eventually made the dinner but I was 40 minutes late. And I walk in and Mihika who was on stage yesterday, presenting Figma Slides, Flides, she was standing up and doing a mock Brian Chesky impersonation. And she’s standing up in front of the entire product team and she goes, “And then Brian Chesky’s like, ‘There don’t need to be any PMs.’ And Dylan’s like… Ooh.” And I’m like, “Hi, Mihika.” And I’d never seen her so red. And then I gave a quick, “Hey PM team, I believe in you. Thank you for your hard work.”

Seriously, I think that if you zoom out, it’s always tricky whenever you’re asked to formally define, what is the separation between a product manager, a designer, and an engineer? It’s always hard to actually create those clear lines. And I think in many organizations they’re blurry. But at the end of the day, a PM and designer, they need to have some technical expertise or at least understand how some systems work to probably create the best things they can possibly make. A designer, engineer, they should probably have some sense of the business objectives. They should have some sense of what users want. An engineer and a product manager, they should have taste and craft and some sense of the option space, and some desire to care about the visual implementation.

And I think you can include research in there too, if you want to make it four legs of the stool rather than the trio. And you can talk about all three probably should have exposure to users and be talking in dialogue with users. So I think that if you think about that group holistically, each is important. If you think about a team, there’s all these qualities that you have to have to make a great product. And that said, I think for product managers and the product function… I think sometimes when you see people that fall down in that function is because they treat it too much like process. Which is very important too, don’t me wrong. Good process can help support good outcomes. But I think that you can’t lose sight of the problems that you’re solving. You have to go talk to users and you have to actually have a strategy. And if you’re really good, you should have a point of view. And some point of views are going to lead to good outcomes and some point of views aren’t. And there’s some tense sense of taste.

And you also have to bring everyone together and make sure that they get to the objective, that it’s celebrated, and that at the end of the project or when you complete a milestone, everyone’s stoked. Otherwise, it’s not going to be a team that gels, you’re not going to get to the next outcome. Even if you get to an outcome and it’s a milestone, but if everyone’s unhappy, you failed. And so somehow good product people are able to do all this and they’re able to create great frameworks that bring everyone along with them. And so everyone’s able to have a shared head space around what it is they’re trying to get to.

Lenny Rachitsky: Someone once said that if PMs disappeared or if a PM goes on vacation, everything’s okay for a week or two or three and then things start to crumble a little bit because they glue everything together. Do you find that sort of thing? Let me actually ask a different question along those lines, are you bearish or bullish on the future of product management? Do you think PMs will continue the way they are? Do you think PMs will dwindle any sense of the future of product management?

Dylan Field: I think probably everyone’s learning to do a bit more of everyone else’s job in this current moment. That said, I definitely think there’s still immense value in product, immense value in design, immense value in engineering. And so I think those roles will continue to exist.

Lenny Rachitsky: So maybe I just want to come back to the question of just, with the best PMs that you work with, do you find, what value do they most bring? I guess is there anything that’s like, “Here’s what would be gone if we didn’t have these PMs”?

Dylan Field: The best PMs, I think again, create those frameworks that bring everyone else along and those frameworks also have a point of view and a strategy associated with them. So you’re able to take the strategy, take the point of view, wrap it all up in a framework, and then make it so that everyone knows what the destination is and how to get there.

Lenny Rachitsky: So along these lines, something I’ve heard you’re really big on is simplification. Somebody told me that when you’re in a designer view and things just feel too complex to you, quote, “You furrow your brow and insist there must be something simpler.” Why is simplification so top of mind for you, why is it so important for you and just why is it so hard to do?

Dylan Field: Oh, gosh. Well, I think probably anyone here who’s worked on product knows how hard it is. I think the more that you add, the harder it is to create something that’s coherent. One essay that Evan, my co-founder, introduced me to early on in famous history, I think from Stevie’s [inaudible 00:23:06] grants or something like that, contains the term irreducible complexity. And it’s basically this idea that one plus one does not equal three, it sometimes equals one and a half. And the more that you add and the more that you continue to put in something, the more complex it gets and the worse it gets. And I think this is definitely true for tools.

So in the context of Figma, we can make it more powerful, but to do that in a way that’s not making it more complex at the same time is extremely hard. And we have to always be paying attention to how complex or how simple things are because if we don’t, it just becomes a monstrosity really fast. And there’s parts of our product that, I don’t want to dive into that part of the conversation, the self-critique, but definitely as I’m in conversation with a bunch of our product leaders at Figma, there’s parts where it’s like, “Okay, this thing is too complex as a system and we made all the right local decisions and yet together they’re too complex and they’re not working anymore. And let’s go revisit the system now.”

Lenny Rachitsky:

I know you just redesigned Figma. I imagine part of that came from things are just getting too complicated, not as simple as we want. Is there anything that’s been bugging you in the old Figma but like, “Oh, this is way too complicated, I really want to simplify this thing”?

Dylan Field: Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky: What’s that?

Dylan Field: We’ll move on, but many things.

Lenny Rachitsky: Sounds good. And in terms of how to keep things simple, so I had Dharmesh Shah on the podcast, he’s the co-founder of HubSpot, and the way he described it is that you’re always fighting the second loft through more dynamics of entropy, just the product getting more complicated. And he sees himself as part of the solution, of top down, you have to be on top of that. Is that the way you see it? That’s your role, to keep things simple. Do you think people further down the ladder can do that?

Dylan Field: Absolutely, everyone’s responsible for simplicity. And I think another quote that is not mine but is a really a good one is “Keep the simple things simple. Make the complex things possible.” And I think that’s a really important principle to hold as you’re designing tools. And I’d say that it’s really easy to make the simple things complex, unfortunately.

Lenny Rachitsky: I want to pivot to talking about early days Figma. So I don’t know how many people know this, but it took three and a half years to launch Figma from when you were beginning to work on it.

Dylan Field: Way too long, don’t do that.

Lenny Rachitsky: This is my question. So it took three and a half years to launch and then five years to get your first customer. Dylan, what the hell were you doing all that time?

Dylan Field: I don’t think it took five years for a first… Well okay-

Lenny Rachitsky: Paying.

Dylan Field: First paying customer, sure. Okay, fine. Slightly less but approximately five years, it gets to be round up. I think that if I had been probably better at hiring and recruiting… I see Nadia in the audience, making eye contact with her the entire time, for some reason. She’s our chief people officer. If she had been at Figma from day one, we would’ve hired probably faster and we would’ve gotten to market faster. But I think that it was a hard product to build and to get everything to come together with. I also see Sho. And I think for… Sho’s joined us as a director of engineering. He’s a VP of product now. Again, people can wear many hats. And he was someone that joined Figma and said, “Hey, y’all need to ship this thing, you’re really close.” And he really helped catalyze us to ship in that moment. And I think, in week one, he gave a presentation. It was like, “Here’s what we got to do, here’s the gap. Everyone agrees on it. Let’s go.”

Lenny Rachitsky: You already said that you wish you shipped earlier. Is there any advice there for just people building something today of-

Dylan Field: Get it out as fast as you possibly can. Everything they tell you about making sure that you get a product out really quickly is totally true. The faster you get it out, the more feedback you get. That is a positive thing. And now I index on that when we try to build. And FigJam’s a great example of that, we shipped it incredibly fast and it helped us get to market and get feedback faster. Figma Slides, great example of that too. Dev Mode, for what it’s worth, it took us longer. We just had to keep iterating and building it and building it again. Certain directions we tried didn’t work out and we really had to get to a place where we were able to really believe that we were adding value and really understood the developer’s user, and it just didn’t happen for a long time. So it’s interesting because I think people look at Dev Mode and sometimes they go, “Oh, this is quite simple”, to the point about simplicity.

Figma, is this simpler than FigJam? And the reality was it took at least three times as long.

Lenny Rachitsky: So your advice is ship quickly. There’s also this push the-

Dylan Field: I’d hold the bar, for sure.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s the question I have, is there’s also a lot of talk of just the bar has risen. You need, especially B2B software, craft is really important. Linear talks a lot about this, just the bar is very high for people to switch from something out there. Is there anything… I don’t think you’ll have, “Here’s the answer. When you’re ready to ship…”, but just any advice of just like, “Here’s good enough” versus “No, you should probably wait.”

Dylan Field: Well, another thing that Evan taught me was that for a new launch, you got quality, features, deadline, choose two. And I think that the beautiful thing about software is you can keep iterating on it. So it’s not like a physical product where you have to always have quality in there, otherwise it’s never going to have quality. You can ship it with features and deadline and then improve it iteratively over time. I’m not saying you should always do that. Sometimes you need to at least have a minimum bar of quality for the things you have and you’re going to ship less features maybe.

So you choose quality and deadline and sometimes you say, “Actually here’s the minimum feature set and we’re going to have this quality bar and you’re willing to push it out.” But I think you have to know when you’re introducing a new thing, what it’s going to take and then to make that minimally awesome product. But also I think that when you’re iteratively improving it, you shouldn’t just be focused on the features, you have to focus on the quality too.

Lenny Rachitsky: I like this term you use, ‘minimally awesome product’. Love it. So the way you got your early users for Figma is quite fascinating. I don’t know how many people know this story, but you basically wrote a script to scrape Twitter and create a graph of the most influential designers on Twitter, and then you made it your mission to convince them to use Figma and make them evangelists. Is there anything more to the story there? And then I have a question along those lines.

Dylan Field: You can’t do this anymore, first of all, because the Twitter API doesn’t exist anymore. Rest in peace, Twitter API. But look, I was an intern at LinkedIn and when I was there I saw some really cool work people had done with Gephi, which was a network visualization tool. And based on that I thought it’d be interesting to try to, like you said, look at who the design network was, who the central nodes were, which you can just run [inaudible 00:31:31] on and see. And you could do that for other communities too, which I have done in the past just because I’m curious about social network dynamics and social network analysis.

And you could just do those things back in 2012, 2013 when Figma started. So I constructed this list of, “Here are the most central designers in the graph”, but also then I looked at their work. And the ones that I was really inspired by as a total fanboy, and someone who wanted to learn as much as I could about design, was inspired by these folks, the ones I was inspired by I reached out to and said, “Hey, can I buy you a coffee?” And most of them are really kind. The design community is amazing. And they said yes and then from there was able to learn from them, show them Figma, get their feedback. And I think it started honestly more as me fanboy and me getting feedback.

One example is Tim Van Damme. I saw him on Dribble. Max [inaudible 00:32:35], I’m like, “Oh, my God, this guy is just genius. These icons are incredible.” I think the first time I met Tim was at Dropbox and think I had this total fanboy moment. I’m like, “I’ve been tracing your icons.” He’s like, “Hi.”

And I had been working on vector networks with a team, and my test cases were a lot of his icons. Because they were just beautiful and I liked looking at them and studying them. And to now have Tim on the team and have him doing the icons for UI 3 is such an honor, and privileged to work with someone of that craft. So reaching out to your hero sometimes works.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s interesting because when people hear that story, when I’ve heard that story many times, it was always like, “Here’s a growth hack. Find the most influential people in your field, go try to convince them to use your product.” And the way you’re describing it is you were using it more as feedback. “I just want to show you the product, get your feedback, make this better”, and then it ended up working. They’re like, “Oh, I love Figma, I’m going to use it.”

Dylan Field: Well, I think it especially works for designers that way, because designers are really good at giving feedback. It turns out that not everyone is good at giving feedback, but designers are awesome at that. So we’re really lucky. And literally early on in Figma’s existence, folks… I think Payam [inaudible 00:34:00] is here somewhere. I’m not sure if he’s in this room, but I was hoping to see him before the end of Config. Payam wrote a very long doc for us about all the things that he wanted to see in Figma after we did a user research study with him. With a bottle of wine because our text editing didn’t work very well then. So I ran him through the user study, I knew we’d need a bottle of wine to finish and it took hours. The type of sentence in Figma was so slow.

Lenny Rachitsky: That reminds me of a story I’ve heard where… One of your first customers was Coda, sponsor I think of Config. It used to be called Krypton. And there’s a story where you installed Figma, you helped them get set up, you drove home and then they called you like, “Hey, Figma is not working anymore.” And you drove back yourself to help fix them and it ended up their wifi was down or there was a wifi issue. Is that the story?

Dylan Field: I don’t remember what the solution was, but-

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s what I heard.

Dylan Field: … we were halfway home and somehow I saw… I’m sure I was not looking at my email while driving, definitely is not something anyone here should do. But somehow found out that they had an issue and we turned the car around. Shishir is amazing by the way, and has been a mentor for a long time to me and many people on our team. And he, I think, at the time did not know he was the first customer.

And later on he came over to Figma’s office and I introduced him without really thinking about that. And I was like, “This is Shishir, he’s team was really the first user of Figma as a team.” And he goes, “Wait a second, I am?”

Lenny Rachitsky: I want to talk about something totally different. Something I’ve noticed you are good at is you spot trends ahead of other people. So obviously WebGL you were on early and that’s what allowed Figma to exist, to link it in the browser. I saw you tweeting about CryptoPunks way before they were worth millions of dollars. You’re just like, “Look, CryptoPunks. Look, I got a few, they’re really cool. They’re super cool, little pipe.” I’m curious if there’s anything these days you’re really excited about that might become bigger in the future?

Dylan Field: Well, we talked about websim. We were just talking about them backstage and I think before this conversation too.

Lenny Rachitsky: Talk about websim.

Dylan Field: And that’s an example of something where it’s so interesting because there’s a generative UI component and yet it’s not what we’re going for, for Figma, it’s totally different. So we actually invested in websim with Figma Ventures.

Lenny Rachitsky: Maybe explain what websim is for folks.

Dylan Field: Websim is a hallucinated internet basically. If you go to websim.ai, you can use different models like Claude or GPT-4o, and you can do that either through their defaults or you can use open router to get a bigger context window. And the more that you use it, the more you construct this context window of this almost universe that you’re building up in websim. And as you do it, it’s almost like you’re world building. And I just have gone deep and geeked out on this when I’ve had time, and they’ve evolved the platform a lot.

So we were back there and they were showing me some new functionality that’s really cool too. But I think it’s so interesting to see it as this almost lean forward entertainment tool using the internet.

Lenny Rachitsky: So I thought you would answer this and so we’re going to have a picture come up here, that I tried websim and played around with it. And hopefully a photo comes up somewhere. So all I typed here was gmail.com/dylanfield. So this is in an invented Gmail. Just came up with this using AI of what your inbox should look like and it looks pretty accurate. There’s Adobe stuff-

Dylan Field: DOJ, not FTC.

Lenny Rachitsky: … financial. This is not actual information. Nobody buy stock based on this. So it’s pretty-

Dylan Field: No comment on 75% year over year.

Lenny Rachitsky: So the way it work-

Dylan Field: I hadn’t ever tried Gmail before. Did you try you? What was your inbox?

Lenny Rachitsky: I didn’t do me. I don’t think it would have anything. It’d be like, if it does-

Dylan Field: Who are you?

Lenny Rachitsky: So the way it works is just you type a URL or a prompt in the URL field and it’ll just invent what that website looks like. It’s hilarious.

Dylan Field: It’s awesome.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s awesome. So I think they’re going to get a lot of traffic right now.

Dylan Field: One time someone posted in our random channel on Slack, they said, “I had a dream last night.” It’s always a good start for the random channel. “I had a dream last night that I was working on FigJam, but it wasn’t FigJam, it was Frog Jam.

And websim was like figma.com/frogjam and it came up with a whole marketing website complete with toad puns for Frog Jam. The sticky notes were lily pads and you were supposed to… It had this whole metaphor of hopping from lily pad to lily pad to generate new ideas.

Lenny Rachitsky: This is genius. Interestingly, before Figma, your only other job was an intern at three different companies and now you’re leading this juggernaut of a business, a thousand plus people. I imagine there’s a lot you’ve had to learn over this time. So I’m not going to ask you what you’ve learned because I think it’s probably a lot. I’m curious just what has most helped you scale and learn? Is it exec coaches, is it co friends? Is it hiring execs? What’s most helped you scale with the business and become the leader you are today?

Dylan Field: I think all the above. And also just having a mindset of, you have to constantly adapt and grow and change and adapt. But I would say that mentors can come from anywhere. It can come from the community, all of you. Mentorship can come from the people you hire. It can come from folks that you actively seek out as investors or explicit mentorship and mentors. It can come from people that call themselves coaches. And what’s interesting too is it can come from people you mentor as well. There have been plenty of people where they ask me a question at some point and I give them an answer and they think it’s insightful for whatever reason. And then years later where we’re talking again and I ask them a question and they’re like, “Well, years ago you told me…” And they repeat back what I told them like, “That’s a really good point.”

Or they’ve grown and they’ve changed and they’ve learned and they tell me something completely different. They give me a new framework. And so I think that when you’re… A lot of times when I talk with new founders, they teach me things that are totally things that I’ve just never thought about. Or interns at Figma have been mentors to me, in many ways. So you really have to have a ready mindset and just always be ready to absorb new information, I think.

Lenny Rachitsky: When you were just tinkering around with Figma 12 years ago, I think at this point, did you ever imagine you’d be running a thousand person company and audience just spell bound by what you’re building? There’s people lining up to take photos with your logo in the lobby. That doesn’t happen. That’s very rare. Just to give you a chance to reflect on just how it feels to have built that over time, how does that feel? I’m sitting here right now.

Dylan Field: I feel very, very lucky, but also very humbled by just the community that is around Figma. I mentioned in the keynote, but just the people that are in the Figma community are the people that are shaping the world’s technology. And the chance to serve them and to make software for them and hopefully improve their life in some little way is such a privilege. It’s a responsibility and one I don’t take lightly, but also I try not to carry that as a weight, but rather as pump me up and get me excited to go build for them.

Lenny Rachitsky: When we were talking about this idea earlier… The first thing you said is it’s a responsibility, which I didn’t expect. Is there anything more there just like, “Wow, I really have to help make…”?

Dylan Field: Well, again, going back to the simplification point, it’s very important that we continue to make Figma more and more simple. We make Figma as powerful as we can for the people that are in our community. That we figure out what people’s needs truly are and that we advance the state of the craft, make it so that we do that in a responsible way. And that we champion design and champion quality. So we’re trying to do all those things. We sometimes mess up, but people have been very patient with us and we’re very thankful for that. And thankful for the support of just everyone here and in our community that are giving us a chance to make this impact.

Lenny Rachitsky: Is there anything else you want to… Oh, there’s some applause. Love that.

Dylan Field: Thank you.

Lenny Rachitsky: Applause break. Is there anything else you want to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to a very quick lightning round?

Dylan Field: Well, no, one thing I’ll share is I think we’re so early on this journey of computing in general. And in our lifetimes, we’re going to have the chance to just build such incredible technology and incredible products. And I’m really excited to see what everyone in this room builds, but also everyone on the internet that [inaudible 00:43:48] maybe also builds and send me cool stuff. If you build something cool, message me somewhere and share it with me.

Lenny Rachitsky: What’s the best way to message you?

Dylan Field: Email’s good. You can probably figure out my email if you-

Lenny Rachitsky: Just use websim.

Dylan Field: … [inaudible 00:44:03] for five seconds or use websim. Twitter/X is good. Those are two places at least you can find me.

Lenny Rachitsky: Dylan, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. We only have a couple of minutes left. It’s a very short one. Do you have a favorite product that you’ve recently discovered that you really love other than websim?

Dylan Field: Well, I’ll say that, and it’s not like a favorite product, but I will say that if you get… Hesitate if I should say this or not.

Lenny Rachitsky: We’ll cut it out in post, don’t worry about it.

Dylan Field: I’ll say this, it’s so fascinating to look at all the different LMs out there right now and what each one is uniquely good at. And it’s really fun if you can hack them the right way and get them in the right mood, what they’ll do. That’s what I’ll say.

Lenny Rachitsky: Whoa, what does that mean?

Dylan Field: It’s my diplomatic answer.

Lenny Rachitsky: Interesting. Do you have a favorite life motto that you come back to, repeat to yourself, share with friends or family, that you find really useful?

Dylan Field: I don’t know if I’ve got a life motto, but one piece of advice I’ve always appreciated is when people give you advice, they’re not giving you advice, they’re giving themselves advice in your shoes. I think that’s an interesting one. So if I gave you advice here, I’m giving myself advice in your shoes.

Lenny Rachitsky: Final question. Not many people know this, but you were a child actor when you were five years old. Do you think you made the right career move? Do you feel like you sometimes regret acting?

Dylan Field: Yes, definitely. That’s my mom. My mom’s in the audience and she says yes. No. We’ve been talking about product. If you’re an actor, you’re a product in some way. And that’s not to disparage actors, actors are awesome. Acting is awesome. I loved it. But my differentiators when I was five, five and a half I think, was that I could read and I could sit still and I was decently cute. And I hit puberty and those things were no longer differentiators. And then it was like, let’s do some computer science.

Lenny Rachitsky: So to close, we’re going to play a… Oh, applause. We’re going to play a clip, something I found on YouTube to close and enjoy. 30 seconds clip.

Speaker 5 (47:09): Where will you find a world of ideas for your child? Only at eToys. From Barbie to Brio to SwimWays. eToys, where great ideas come to you.

Dylan Field: That was a good find. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (47:27): Dylan, thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you. Can I make one comment about that commercial?

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, one comment.

Dylan Field: One comment before we end. That commercial made that company go bankrupt. Thank you all for joining. Thank you for having me, Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky: Good luck. Thanks Dylan. Bye everyone.

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