No Priors Ep. 55 | With Figma CEO Dylan Field

(techno music) 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 Elade, Dylan Field. Dylan is the founder and CEO of Figma, the beloved and dominant design collaboration tool. Figma's 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, Dev Mode, and their first AI products. Welcome, Dylan.

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.

Dylan, you've now been working on Figma for more than 10, 11 years. What was the original vision?

Well, it's actually even longer. It's, like, coming up on 12 years, uh, which is totally wild. Um, but yeah, original vision was, uh, to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. And back in August 2012, 2013 timeframe, uh, when I tried pitching people that, uh, they were pretty confused and thought it was very vague. We had a lot of, uh, uh, 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, uh, 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 put forth of how you can actually, 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.

I wanna come back to AI a- and, like, new opportunities for creative expression in a bit. Uh, 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, uh, acquired by Adobe, but the merger was recently called off due to regulatory scrutiny.

Mm-hmm.

You're coming out the other end of that with independence and a billion dollars. Like, tell us about it. How'd you manage that process emotionally in terms of decision-making?

The original decision to, uh, say let's go do this with Adobe, um, it wa- it was obviously one that we thought very deeply about, and, uh, at the time seemed like a one-way door (laughs) . You know, there's the classic meme of there's one-way doors and two-way doors in a, in business, and really think deeply about the one-way doors. 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, uh, do what we wanna do just so much faster if we're at Adobe. And, uh, 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. Uh, unfortunately, regulators were not fans. And, uh, 16 months later, we kind of, at some point said, "Okay, we gotta call it." And, uh, that was late December. Um, talked to my team about that. It was actually the first day of break that I called, uh, 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 gotta think about next." Um, we had, you know, communicated along the way, "Hey, this is looking harder. The path is narrowing. The path is narrow." Uh, but still, I think something a lot of people were, were excited about, of course. And that said, I'm just so thankful to start the year with clarity.