Figma CEO Dylan Field: How AI Will Transform Design

**Dylan Field** (0:00)
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 gonna go, can you believe that we just had this chat box?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:20)
Awesome, well, wanna welcome Dylan. I'm curious what the makeup of the audience is here. How many people have used Figma before? Wow, all right. How many people consider themselves to be designers?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:36)
Okay, all right.

**Dylan Field** (0:38)
Many of us.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:39)
Yes, our people. And how many are currently founders?

**Dylan Field** (0:44)
Awesome.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:44)
Oh, okay, that's a good mix of people in the audience. So we'll hear the Figma story, then we'll talk about advice around AI and design, and then we'll get some advice on just being a founder from Dylan, too. So I'm excited to jump in. Maybe to start, give us kind of a snapshot on where Figma is today, and then we can kind of go back to the beginning days.

**Dylan Field** (1:06)
Yeah. Today, we are many different places. We're hybrid. 1700 people now, which is wild. I have to pinch myself on that number. We have eight products now. We just doubled our product line up at our last config. So I'm very excited to hear your feedback, if you got any, on things like Figma Makes, Sites, Draw, Buzz. But it's been a very exciting time. Lots of work we're doing as we explore all the things that we can do to help our audience.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:35)
And now take us back to maybe 19-year-old Dylan, getting started with 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.

**Dylan Field** (1:47)
Yeah. So in the early days of Figma, well, I guess before it was even Figma, Evan and I were at Brown together. 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 and quadcopters, the other one was WebGL. And Evan, after about a month or so, said, hey, like not into drones 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 I was like, great, WebGL it is. And so WebGL, I think everybody probably here knows, but is what you use the GPU in your computer and the browser. Web GPU is its successor. And yeah, we 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, you know, it took, we really started in earnest August 2012, whereas we started talking about it more December of 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.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:21)
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?

**Dylan Field** (3:29)
No, it was definitely the hope was startup and startup that could scale. At the same time, my downside case was I get to work with Evan, who I considered then, considered now to be a hero. He's like the smartest guy I know. If you have any doubt about the statement, just look up his GitHub. He's an amazing man and an absolute genius. And I figured worst case scenario, I spent a few years working with Evan, I learned a lot and I go back to school, same place I'm at now, can't hurt. 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 risk to the scenario, and also to help that I had the Teal Fellowship. I would have done it without it, but having 100K over two years, I know now inflation, et cetera, 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. 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 gotta give yourself time somehow. That's really important.