Figma CEO: From Idea to IPO, Design at Scale and AI’s Impact on Creativity

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi, everybody. Welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Soap and Wealth Fund. And today, we have the founder and CEO of Figma visiting us, Dylan Field. Now, quite incredibly, Dylan founded Figma when he was 19 years old, and now 14 years later, Figma had one of the biggest IPOs of 2025 So warm welcome.

**Dylan Field** (0:24)
Thank you for having me.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:34)
So Dylan, we have to start. What does Figma do?

**Dylan Field** (0:38)
Yes, so Figma is a platform that helps you go from an idea in your head to a production application in the software space. But also once you ship something, once you ship some software, you want to then market it. And we also help with that too. We help you get your brand out there and make it so you can create more collateral around it. And ultimately, it's not just some one year process where you have an idea and you get to finish product and you're done. Perhaps in the industrial design world, we were talking about that before we started, that's more of what it is. But in software, it's always a loop and you're always iterating and you're learning and you're trying to figure out, how do I evolve this thing that I've created with my team? And we try to make it very collaborative so designers can bring their entire team in to do that.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:25)
So listen, I run a cup factory, okay? So now I'm going to design a new cup. Here we go, we are like four people. We want to design a cup. How do we use your software?

**Dylan Field** (1:37)
We have people that will maybe draw cups or maybe they will market their cups on Figma, but we're not a piece of software for 3D or CAD design. And so that's typically not what people use those for. I'm always amazed when people will draw 3D assets, it's like a beautiful cup with an amazing shadow and incredible lighting in Figma. Not what it's made for, but people do it. That said, CAD is an entirely different area, and we really stick to digital design.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:10)
Why is design such an important differentiator?

**Dylan Field** (2:13)
So I think going back a bit and speaking about digital product design, the history of design I think is interesting in the digital realm. Because for a long time, there were very, very few designers. Almost none of them had a traditional art school background, or very few did. And many of them randomly found their way into design. Sometimes from engineering, sometimes they were in a band and made a poster. It could come from any different place. But there was a period of time in, for example, 2000, the dot-com era, where the mantra was, build it and they will come. And at that point, if you had a designer, which was rare, the sort of role of design was conceived to be what sometimes in America, we call lipstick on a pig. The, you know, you've got a pig, but we're going to put some lipstick on it to make it pretty. And it was really about making it aesthetically pleasing, but not thinking about the function, the form, how it works. And that has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. First, we got to the 2010 era, where you not only have Apple evangelizing design and saying how it works matters. This is why you should buy this iPhone with Steve Jobs championing design. But also you have the advent of consumer applications like Facebook or Gmail. And suddenly, the expectations rise. At the same time, things like AWS, cloud computing are starting to pick up. And we've moved from a world of managed servers to cloud, from box software to app stores. And it's easier than ever to build software as well, because developer tools are improving. And as all this is happening, what's happening to the distribution? Well, no longer are we in the world of building the will come.
We're starting to transition out of that into a world where, well, if you build it and you have really great design and really great marketing, then you might have a chance, because there's more software, and it's not the case anymore that you're building something, it's the only thing like that that exists in the world. Competition is increasing, and the value is moving up the stack.

**Nicolai Tangen** (4:35)
Your initial goal was to, I think you say, eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. What does that mean?

**Dylan Field** (4:40)
Yeah, so when we started, I painted a pretty broad vision for where we could go, partially because I didn't know exactly where we were going to go. We had a hammer that was WebGL, and I think that there's always this why now for great companies. Something's changed in the world, and the why now is something you can look back on, and you can point at one or two or three of them, and say, this is why this company came to exist at this particular time. For us, we thought, okay, let's look at technology that's changing. We're computer scientists. My co-founder, Evan, he is beyond brilliant. He's my TA Brown, and he had done quite a lot of exploration into WebGL. Evan is not just a 10x better engineer than I am, he's like a 100x better engineer than I am.