Designing the Future: Dylan Field on AI, Collaboration, and Independence

**Sarah** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, and welcome to another episode of No Priors. Today, we're in for a treat, talking with a longtime friend and business partner to both me and Elad, Dylan Field.
Dylan is the founder and CEO of Figma, the beloved and dominant design collaboration tool.
Figma has been working on making it possible to design and build digital products on a single multiplayer canvas, and we're excited to talk about the world after Adobe, FigJam, DevMode, and their first AI products. Welcome, Dylan.

**Dylan Field** (0:33)
Thank you.
Glad to finally be on No Priors. We've been trying to make this happen and I'm stoked. Let's do it.

**Sarah** (0:39)
Dylan, you've now been working on Figma for more than 10, 11 years. What was the original vision?

**Dylan Field** (0:45)
Well, it's actually even longer. It's like coming up on 12 years, which is totally wild. But yeah, original vision was to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality.
And back in August 2012, 2013 timeframe, when I tried pitching people that, they were pretty confused and thought it was very vague. We had a lot of challenges recruiting people. And so we thought, okay, how about a North Star, like make design accessible to all.
And we've tried to make this tool that's very powerful, but also is one where you can easily learn it. And that said, I think that the idea of what design is, is growing beyond just pixels and software. And at the same time, now you see all these amazing demos and ideas, but forth of how you can actually eliminate the gap between imagination and reality, like we would originally set out to do. And so I feel like those two kind of visions are converging. It's an interesting moment.

**Sarah** (1:54)
I want to come back to AI and new opportunities for creative expression in a bit. We have to talk about what's been in the news, and I think what has been preoccupying at least part of Figma for a while. You guys were on track to be acquired by Adobe, but the merger was recently called off due to regulatory scrutiny.
You're coming out the other end of that with independence and a billion dollars. Tell us about it. How did you manage that process emotionally in terms of decision making?

**Dylan Field** (2:24)
The original decision to say, let's go do this with Adobe, it was obviously one that we thought very deeply about and at the time seemed like a one-way door. You know, there's the classic meme of there's one-way doors and two-way doors in business and really think deeply about the one-way doors. It turns out sometimes one-way doors can be two-way doors too, but we thought really deeply about it and we thought this is a way to just accelerate our vision and be able to do what we want to do just so much faster if we're at Adobe. And I thought that the team there, I'd learn a lot from as well. I mean, it's an incredible group of people over there.
Unfortunately, regulators were not fans. And 16 months later, we kind of at some point said, okay, we got to call it.
And that was late December, talked to my team about that. It was actually the first day of break that I called the team back and I was like, hey, it's not going through. Here's this means for us immediately. And here's sort of the timeline from here and what we got to think about next.
We had communicated along the way, hey, this is looking harder. The path is narrowing. The path is narrow, but still I think some people were excited about, of course. And that said, I'm just so thankful to start the year with clarity.

**Elad** (3:51)
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because if you look historically in the 90s, Microsoft tried to buy Intuit for, I think it was a billion or one and a half billion dollars.
And that got blocked from a regulatory perspective. And now Intuit's $178 billion company is up today. I just looked it up.
And when you hear stories of that time period, it sounded like it was a similar journey where you get kind of wrapped up in all the regulatory stuff and it's uncertain and it's stressful and all the rest. And I feel like in recent conversations, you've been really re-energized. Like when I talk to you, I feel the energy and the excitement in terms of building Figma, in building future products and roadmaps. And it really feels like you're in it in a really strong way. I'm just a little bit curious, like what are some of the things you're excited about from a roadmap perspective and sort of looking ahead with the company?