20VC: Figma Founder, Dylan Field on How Leadership Needs To Evolve with Scale, The Transition from Application to Platform & The Future of Remote Work, Education and Digital Spaces

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
Welcome back, this is The Twenty Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, following on from our episode last week with Hopin, I wanted to stay on the theme of interviewing the founders of the fastest growing companies in the world. And one growing faster than ever before is Figma. And I'm so thrilled to welcome back to the hot seat, Dylan Field, founder and CEO at Figma, the company that helps teams create, test and ship better designs from start to finish, and is one of 2020's fastest growing companies. To date, Dylan has raised over $132 million in financing with Figma. From some of the very best in the business, including Sequoia, Andreessen, Index, Greylock, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins, just to name a few. And Figma's latest round valued them at a reported $2 billion. Prior to founding Figma, though, Dylan also enjoyed internships at Flipboard, LinkedIn and O'Reilly Media. And this scheduled state was such a team effort, so I want to say a huge thank you to Peter Levine, Mamoon Hamid, Andrew Reed, Dan Rose, Gokul Rajaram, and many more fantastic people for some really, really great suggestions. I really do appreciate that. But before we move into the show's day, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million. Check out hellosign.com forward slash 20VC to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And speaking of beautiful products there, and honestly, cutting the crap, there are a few products I truly could not live without and use 10 plus times a day. Affinity, it's a home screen app for me. And not just me, it's the number one venture capital CRM, allowing you to manage deal flow so much more efficiently, track pipeline using smart lists or Kanban style board view, which is actually my favorite. And their alliances feature means it connects to your network so you can always see who knows the person that you want that intro to. It's not just me that loves it though. Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint, DCM, Techstars, we all use and love it. So head over to affinity.co to check it out today. And finally, if Affinity recognize the importance of people, so does Zoom. And Zoom realizes communication is just everything and you really need to build that relationship and there's nothing like meeting face to face. And there's nothing like Zoom to make that happen. Zoom lets you connect and do business across town or around the world. Zoom ties together all of your communication needs into one easy platform for video conferencing, for phone calls, group chat, webinars and your conference rooms and connect easily from anywhere, your mobile phone, your laptop or your conference room. Zoom is how business gets done. Get your free account at zoom.com today. Meet happy with Zoom. I'm now very, very excited to hand over though to Dylan Field, Founder and CEO at Figma.
You have now arrived at your destination.
Dylan, my friend, it is so good to have you back on the show for a very special round two, so thank you so much for joining me today.

**Dylan Field** (3:01)
Harry, thank you for having me back. Good to see you.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:03)
It's so good to see you again, but I do want to start on, for those that maybe missed our first episode, how did you make your way into the world of startups, and how did you come to found the game changer that is Figma?

**Dylan Field** (3:11)
So I started off as an intern, and my first internship was at O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly, if you don't know it, is a, start off as a textbook publisher, but they also do events, they do online learning and all sorts of other things, and they're headquartered in Sebastopol, California, which is about a half an hour away from where I grew up, which is near Petaluma, California, Pen Grove, if you know where that is. And O'Reilly was amazing to me. I mean, I would start off as sort of a marketing, online content intern, they let me do design, development, all sorts of things, and I also got to spend time at FooCamp, which stands for Friends of O'Reilly, but it's kind of a pun, and the pun refers to the foo and bar variables people use in programming, which are kind of like placeholders, and through that, got to meet a lot of the tech community and got really inspired about entrepreneurship and startups. And then from there, I got to work at a startup a summer after high school. I went to then to work at Microsoft Research as a research assistant to Dana Boyd, which was a really cool experience. She's one of the most smartest, most thoughtful people I've ever met. Got to work as an intern at LinkedIn on the data science team there. And that was actually one of my first real exposures design. I've been in Anderson Design for a long time, but a designer named Micah Alpern actually took me in, and I remember we had these kind of like late night conversations where we talked about various design challenges at LinkedIn, and he was somebody who was just a nice guy. Like, you didn't get anything out of it, the team didn't get anything out of it, you're just trying to be nice. He ordered pizza in and talked about design stuff. And then I got to work as an intern at Flipboard after that, as a software engineering intern. And then from there, went back to Brown for a semester, went back to Flipboard for a six month internship as a design and product intern at Flipboard, and then went and started Figma.