Figma's Dylan Field on the Future of Design | Ep. 31

We're gonna get to a world, we're already kind of there, where good enough is not enough. Good enough is gonna be mediocre.

Mm.

And you're gonna need to differentiate through design, through craft, through point of view, through brand, through storytelling, and marketing. And I think, uh, the people that internalize that now, they're gonna be winners.

Yep.

That's my point of view, is that this is what's gonna matter, the stuff at the top of the stack. And if you don't internalize it now, like, you got an issue. [upbeat music]

Dylan, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for doing this.

Jack, thank you.

Okay, I wanna start by teeing up a contrast between Figma in the early days, which was, like, a multi-year-long build before you kind of got things going, and then the state of the world today, where, like, AI startups are racing out of the gates, and there's tons of competition, and-

Yeah

... everything's frenetic.

13 years in, uh-

13 years for you.

And, uh, it's, it's a little different now, isn't it?

Yeah. So you started in 2012?

Mm-hmm. August 2012 was our official start.

And then you got really kind of off to the races when? Like, four or five years later?

Closed beta was launched December 2015. Uh, GA, October 2016. Didn't start charging until summer 2017.

Geez.

Same day as our CFO, now CFO, started. Fun fact.

CFO started the day you started charging?

Yeah, he was, like, a biz ops guy then-

Yeah

... but now he's CFO.

Okay, so you had this five-year period.

Mm-hmm.

And I guess when you look back on it, you could, you could either sort of, I imagine, feel like that was a little too long. We should have launched-

Definitely too long

... We should have launched earlier.

If you're watching, don't do that.

But on the other hand, you built some hard stuff. Like, you put, like, you know, an- a design product in the browser when people had never done it.

Mm-hmm.

You'd made, like, collaboration, which, you know, I've read is very- was a very difficult task, and that had advantages, too. So how do you sort of make sense looking back now in sort of the fullness of time on that five-year period?

Yeah, I think definitely there were ways we could have speed run it. Uh, hiring faster, noticing that we had product market pull, and that folks were, like, literally begging us to go do things. You know, when we got very long docs from people saying, "I was so inspired by our last night together," when we went through this very long user test where the... Everything was not performant, and it was-

Mm

... you know, uh, the tool was in terrible shape. Then they followed up the next morning with, like, you know, a 13, 14-page doc, and it was like, "Here's all the stuff that I want you to build." I probably should have known that maybe people, like, cared and wanted this thing. Um, but, you know, I was also nervous. I kind of took the roadmap feedback, and I was like, "Oh, man, it's gonna take forever to do all this stuff." In reality, I should have hired faster. Uh, I think we had the resources to do it. I was just a little trepidatious. But beyond that, I think, um, yeah, there was a lot of stuff to build, and there were certain things we could have not done that we, like, later pulled out.