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First Round Capital

Playing it safe with marketing is the riskiest thing you can do | Sheila Joglekar Vashee (Figma CMO)

In today's conversation, Brett sits down with CMO of Figma, Sheila Joglekar Vashee.

Brett BersonhostSheila Joglekar Vasheeguest

Jun 4, 20261h 4mWatch on YouTube

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CHAPTERS

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Chapter summaries

Excellent marketing in 2026: creating coherence across product, revenue, and community
Sheila Joglekar Vashee defines excellent marketing as the function that sits across product, revenue, users, perception, and (for Figma) community. She argues the job is to create coherence: clarifying who you’re building for, why they should care, and ensuring every touchpoint works together authentically—even as everything moves at “warp speed.”
- •Marketing’s role is to connect product, revenue, users, perception, and community into one coherent story
- •Core questions: who it’s for, why they should care, and how it drives growth and revenue
- •Brand authenticity comes from resonating with users and community, not just messaging
- •The environment is faster in 2026, but Sheila says the fundamental job remains the same
Cross-functional accountability: why different goals create dysfunction
Asked how to disambiguate accountability across teams like marketing, sales, product, and engineering, Sheila warns against assigning different goals to different stages of the same outcome. Using pipeline as an example, she says siloed goals create adverse incentives and team dysfunction.
- •Pipeline has multiple contributors across teams (lead volume/quality, pickup rate, close likelihood)
- •Goal-setting by funnel stage (marketing vs. sales) can create misalignment and dysfunction
- •Sheila recommends aligning everyone to the same end goal while clarifying who influences which inputs
- •Shared outcomes reduce adverse behaviors across the process
Most important CMO decision: expanding Figma’s definition of design without losing the core
Sheila points to a major decision: building around an expanded definition of design, reflecting that many Figma users are non-designers. She describes the brand challenge of welcoming broader functions while staying committed to the design community that put Figma at the center of product development.
- •Sheila notes two-thirds of people building in Figma are non-designers (engineers, marketers, others)
- •The push aimed to bring new functions closer to Figma while staying committed to the design core
- •She frames it as expanding who participates in the design process, not abandoning design
- •She describes this as difficult from a brand perspective but important for serving real users
How the expansion showed up in marketing: campaigns, launches, and community moments
Sheila explains the practical marketing work behind the expansion: launching and promoting products that broaden participation, paired with events, campaigns, and thought leadership. She emphasizes doing this in a way that felt authentic to the existing community while building awareness with new audiences.
- •Sheila cites the launch of Figma Make as a product that made participation more accessible beyond designers
- •Marketing included campaigns, events, thought leadership, and in-person “moments”
- •The aim was both product awareness and audience expansion without breaking authenticity
- •Sheila says the team plans to do more of this kind of work
SVP vs. CMO: shifting from executing initiatives to steering the business
Sheila distinguishes senior marketing leadership from the CMO role: VPs/SVPs drive specific initiatives, while CMOs step back to evaluate whether programs are the right use of people and time for the overall business. She credits time spent investing for helping her build empathy for board-level questions and decision-making.
- •VP/SVP: get initiatives through (campaigns, launches, pushes)
- •CMO: assess overall effectiveness and whether to reallocate effort across priorities
- •Sheila says investing experience helped her adopt an objective, board-level perspective
- •The CMO role requires pushing broader relevance questions across the organization
Marketing as one engine: aligning brand, product marketing, and growth
Sheila describes a major learning: when you oversee the full function, you see how marketing components feed each other like an engine or funnel. She notes that brand and growth can be mutually reinforcing but sometimes in opposition, making harmony a core challenge and “unlock.”
- •Running only one part of marketing limits visibility into how the pieces connect
- •As CMO, Sheila says you must view marketing as an integrated engine/funnel
- •She describes her own progression from product marketing to brand to growth as a key learning arc
- •Brand and growth can feed each other, but require active management when they conflict
Brand vs. growth tension: resisting short-term hooks that erode long-term perception
Sheila explains the common conflict: tactics that maximize acquisition in a channel can undermine the brand you want to create. She uses examples of attention-grabbing, “spammy” ad patterns to illustrate how local maxima can become long-term liabilities, requiring someone to make long-horizon trade-offs.
- •Acquisition hooks can feel at odds with how a company wants to present itself
- •Sheila points to spammy-looking ads and manipulative formatting as examples of short-term attention tactics
- •She argues someone must evaluate what’s right long term across channels and touchpoints
- •She describes marketing as both science (ROI, spend, modeling) and art (message and breakthrough)
What the CMO should (and shouldn’t) decide: hiring better experts and balancing resources
Sheila says her job starts with hiring people who are better than she is across key disciplines. Instead of making many small program decisions, she aims to focus on load balancing—allocating people, time, and resources to move the business forward, and ensuring marketing efforts form a balanced approach.
- •Sheila emphasizes hiring specialists who exceed her expertise across growth, brand, comms, and more
- •The CMO’s focus is load balancing: people, time, and resources across priorities
- •She prefers not to be pulled into granular decisions when experts can make them
- •She frames her role as portfolio management and resource allocation across the function
Running marketing like a portfolio: “run the business” work plus moonshot bets
Sheila describes dividing energy between sustaining efforts (ongoing growth drivers and launches) and disproportionately time-intensive “big bets” that could create step-change outcomes. She says moonshots can be growth-oriented or creatively “off the charts,” and they must be managed as a portfolio so failures don’t jeopardize core performance.
- •Baseline work includes ongoing campaigns and launches that maintain business momentum
- •Moonshots aim for step-change outcomes, not incremental gains
- •Sheila says moonshots demand disproportionate attention because they’re risky and complex
- •Portfolio thinking matters so the business can still hit numbers even if some bets fail
A moonshot example: “Make Believe” and community spotlight moments
Sheila shares an example of a major creative bet: investing behind the “Make Believe” tagline that connected imagination with building production-level products. She describes multi-channel execution and a Times Square community takeover, highlighting the kind of memorable work that can resonate strongly—while acknowledging it could have missed.
- •Sheila describes “Make Believe” as connecting creativity/imagination with real product-building
- •Execution spanned events, out-of-home, and videos
- •A major community push included featuring community creations in Times Square
- •She frames these as memorable bets that take time and aren’t guaranteed to land
Staying relevant as you grow: “ubiquity is the opposite of cool”
Sheila argues that what makes a brand feel “uncool” isn’t age but ubiquity—being everywhere. Drawing from retail experience, she explains the challenge of maintaining challenger energy as a company grows, and she points to the importance of aligning clearly with a core audience to remain relevant.
- •Sheila says ubiquity—not longevity—drives the loss of “cool”
- •She references a retail lesson: when something is everywhere, it stops being cool
- •She highlights the power of being the challenger/underdog and the difficulty of keeping that as you scale
- •She says staying relevant requires clear alignment with a core audience and what you stand for
Momentum and perception cycles: the “Silicon Valley clock” and staying user-focused
Discussing why some companies gain outsized momentum, Sheila describes a recurring cycle of hype, backlash, and renewed interest that can be divorced from fundamentals. She says the antidote is staying anchored in users and community, with leadership and systems that keep feedback loops central despite external noise.
- •Sheila describes perception cycles where companies are hot, then face contrarian backlash, then swing back
- •She attributes shifts to dynamics, prioritization trends, and occasional irrationality in tech
- •Sheila says Figma stays grounded by focusing on community and user value amid market noise
- •She cites leadership behavior (including direct social engagement) and structured feedback loops as reinforcing mechanisms
Scaling organizational taste: transparency in decision-making and shared judgment
Sheila argues taste can be scaled across an organization by making decision-making and underlying assumptions visible. She describes sharing the “why” behind marketing and product choices so more people can internalize judgment, while still needing some centralized bar-setting to ensure quality.
- •Sheila believes organizational taste can be developed and scaled, though it’s hard
- •She emphasizes openness about thought process, judgment, and assumptions behind decisions
- •She says shared reasoning helps others apply the same decision logic independently
- •A quality bar still requires looking across outputs to ensure they meet expectations
Post-LLM marketing: faster idea generation, higher stakes on judgment and craft
Sheila says LLM-era tools create the ability to scale quickly at low quality, shifting the premium from generating options to choosing the right outcome. She argues the core qualities of great marketers remain curiosity and adaptability, while human creativity, curation, and craft become differentiators as more output looks the same.
- •Sheila warns that tools enable speed and volume, including “low quality” output
- •She says the role shifts toward judgment, intent, and choosing what to move forward with
- •She expects a widening gap between people who leverage new tools and those who don’t
- •She argues human creativity and craft remain essential differentiators when everyone has access to similar tools
Telling the AI story and making people care: realism, humanity, and intuitive judgment
Sheila and Brett discuss how tech marketing has struggled to tell an optimistic AI story; Sheila argues fear is tied to job displacement, but platform shifts also create new opportunities. She emphasizes the need for an optimistic yet realistic narrative, warns against vague “AI” messaging, and reframes breakthrough as simply making people care—supported by intuition built from many user and market data points.
- •Sheila says AI fear is driven by structural displacement, but platform shifts also create new opportunities
- •She argues for optimism paired with realism, so messaging feels authentic
- •Sheila critiques generic “AI” billboards that don’t explain value beyond productivity
- •She defines breakthrough not as “being different,” but as making people care by serving a clear audience; she ties judgment to consuming many data points
Public-company marketing and enterprise credibility: telling the story once, consistently
Sheila says the biggest surprise about being a public-company CMO is how little changes, aside from tighter processes for forecasting and budgeting—and more external noise to ignore. She describes going public as a moment when “the whole world is paying attention,” offering one chance to make a statement (which Figma centered on community) and adding credibility for enterprise customers.
- •Sheila says public-company life is similar, but demands tighter process around plans and budgets
- •She highlights increased market noise and the need to stay focused on users
- •She describes IPO as a unique attention moment and “one opportunity to make a statement,” which Figma made about community
- •She says being public can increase enterprise customers’ sense of security
A favorite campaign, and why humanity is missing from many announcement videos
Sheila shares her favorite campaign from earlier in her career: Chrome’s “The Web Is What You Make of It,” including the “Dear Sophie” spot, which she says still makes her emotional because it brought a human lens to technology. Building on that, she agrees with Brett that many modern founder-led announcement videos feel like the opposite—humans on screen, but lacking humanity—and suggests the industry is still figuring out how to tell the “humanity” story, especially around AI.
- •Sheila cites Chrome’s “The Web Is What You Make of It” as a deeply human, memorable campaign
- •She says it tapped into how tools elevate relationships and experience
- •She agrees that many announcement videos feel polished but not human
- •She links improved “humanity” storytelling to helping people feel more optimistic about AI
How Sheila runs marketing: rhythms, pods for velocity, and keeping everyone close to users
Sheila outlines how she structures her weeks with executive meetings, leadership meetings focused on weekly priorities, and recurring touchpoints across product, customer feedback, and business tracking. She also describes how marketing adapts to high product velocity by using nimble pods for smaller launches while keeping discipline-based teams, and she emphasizes rituals that share metrics and insights broadly so the team stays grounded in user reality.
- •Weekly cadence includes exec team meetings and a leadership meeting oriented around priorities and execution
- •She balances product momentum, customer feedback themes, and business/ROI tracking through meetings and async share-outs
- •With many launches, she describes evolving execution via smaller pods and clearer guardrails while retaining discipline-based org design
- •She values regular, team-wide metric and insight sharing to create shared context and immersion in user sentiment
Transparency over politics, career-defining mentorship, and the CEO-CMO trust relationship
Sheila says politics often emerge when decision-making is unclear, arguing that transparency reduces jockeying and assumptions; she describes Figma as low-politics due to executive openness and low tolerance from Dylan. She also shares pivotal career influences—mentors and a question that reframed how she values her time—then explains why the CEO-CMO relationship requires deep trust and alignment on narrative, given marketing’s high volume of outward-facing surfaces, closing with what she hopes her team feels working with her.
- •Sheila says politics are fueled by obscurity in decisions; transparency reduces the breeding ground for it
- •She describes valuing facts, shared forums, and truth to keep culture healthy and interpretation-driven politics low
- •She shares mentors and a pivotal question—whether she would “change the world” in a job—that reshaped her career priorities
- •She explains CEO-CMO trust is crucial because marketing outputs span many surfaces and require aligned taste and narrative; she wants her team to feel empowered to do the best work of their lives while taking risks and having fun

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