Design’s dominance sparks a blockbuster IPO

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DYLAN FIELD: I think that designers have for a long time had a mentality of almost like this imposter syndrome. Then we kind of got into the Apple era and Steve Jobs really championing design. When we started Figma, we didn’t know if Figma design was a big enough market because the Bureau of Labor statistics said that there were 250,000 designers or something like that in the United States. Well, now design has a seat at the table. What we had hanging from the walls of the New York Stock Exchange was signage that had the words, “Design is everyone’s business.”

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, the collaborative design platform. Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after Adobe made a $20 billion bid to buy the company that was then derailed amid regulatory issues. Dylan hasn’t looked back. He engineered a splashy IPO this summer at nearly twice that valuation.

In today’s episode, we talk about that journey, what sets Figma apart from Adobe and Canva, and what it takes to level up your skills in an AI world. Dylan represents both a rising generation of tech native CEOs and the increasing centrality of design for all industries and roles in a software dominated economy. Plus, he offers some great practical insights on how to improve your AI prompting. So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Dylan, thanks for joining us.

FIELD: Thank you so much for having me.

Copy LinkFigma’s key differentiator

SAFIAN: You first got on my radar because you were a Kleiner Perkins Design Fellow working at Flipboard. My son was also a Kleiner Fellow who ended up working as a designer at Flipboard for a couple of years also, and he always raved about Figma. Now since then, of course, this passion from the design community, you’ve moved past that to grow into broader audiences. It seems tricky to build a product for a specialized audience and a general one, or is that part of the fun, solving that challenge?

FIELD: The challenge and the fun part is that design is so broad now and it’s how you win or lose it is the differentiator that’s core to every software business. And so a lot of people, whether they’re calling themselves designers, not calling themselves designers, they are now part of the design process. And I think looking ahead, what we’re going to find is that more and more people really care about design since it’s how you win or lose in a world of more and more software.

But right now, the way we wake up every day and think about it is, how do we make it so that Figma is approachable, but also it is powerful? And that is a constant tension that we wrestle with. We’re trying to go from an idea in your head to a shipped product that’s awesome. And we’re seeing not just designers, but product managers, developers and more people in the organization, about two thirds of our users are those non-designers, and so how do we help them succeed in Figma as well? Even though that designer persona is the core of what we do.

SAFIAN: For those who aren’t using Figma, and I know Figma is used by almost all the Fortune 500 companies. What makes Figma different from Adobe Canva? How do you describe that differentiation?

FIELD: Yeah, so Figma is focused on digital product design. We’re trying to get you from idea to product. How do we eliminate the gap between imagination and reality? We’ve got not just Figma Design and Make, but also whiteboarding, brainstorming, diagramming, ideation tools. With FigJam, tools for illustration, tools for graphic creation and scale; with Figma Buzz, Figma sites, a way to go build, design, ship websites and we have dev mode to bring people from design to code.

Canva is an amazing platform. If you’re trying to make templated graphics, especially for consumer use cases, if you want to make a birthday card, Canva is probably going to have a great template or set templates for you. And Adobe, on the other hand, if you’re making a movie, they’re awesome. We’re not trying to make movies, we’re not trying to make birthday cards, we’re trying to make software.

Copy LinkFrom failed acquisition to blockbuster IPO

SAFIAN: I should congratulate you because you had a blockbuster IPO this summer. The stock settled a bit, but you still got nearly a $30 billion valuation, which is double what Adobe tried to buy you for a couple of years ago. Going public with so much fanfare and attention and success, has that been fun? How much do you look at it as a distraction in some ways for you and your team versus, “Let’s ride this wave as long as it’ll go, this is great”?

FIELD: I’ve been really proud of the team. I think nothing’s really changed in terms of our focus. I think the day itself was not just a celebration of Figma, but a celebration of design and for design to go public in that way. I just felt very honored to be able to be part of that day. But we had hanging from the walls, the New York Stock Exchange was the words, “Design is everyone’s business.” There were some champagne toasts, some people who were singing karaoke that night.

SAFIAN: What’s your go-to karaoke song?

FIELD: After two weeks of roadshow, my voice was gone, so I was just trying to make conversation, not sing that night, but there were some epic performances for sure.

SAFIAN: I mean, I thought about you a lot and the whiplash you had to go through with the Adobe merger getting blocked. I’m curious how the company’s different because of that experience. Are you different? Are your products different? There were strategic reasons you wanted to become part of Adobe initially.

FIELD: It’s interesting. The company that’s acquiring in this period between sign and close, they can’t direct activities, and that’s something I think people don’t really know. And so we had our roadmap going into the deal, and that was our roadmap during the deal.

It didn’t change, and our foot I think, was on the gas throughout. And the more that we started to have to ask ourselves with just regulatory being what it was, whether or not that was a correct assessment, not a correct assessment, we’ll leave it to history to tell. But I think that throughout as we saw that regulatory risk was real, that gave us even more impetus to say, “Foot on the gas even more.”

I was like, “Okay, if we’re part of Adobe, great, we’re going in strong, and if we’re not, we should definitely be keeping our foot on the gas.” It was hard. As you’re talking with regulators all over the world, that’s almost a full-time job in itself. And to do that while also keeping the company going at full speed and then some, the team was incredible through that period.

SAFIAN: My assumption in some ways was that part of the appeal for Adobe of having Figma was like, you guys are future tools that they didn’t have in the future way of operating. Where they want to go is where you are, and to a certain extent, maybe where they are is some of the places you want to go.

FIELD: We still don’t really see Adobe as competitive. I think it’s the easy framing, maybe. A lot of the Adobe suite, I’m not rushing to go build any of that. We have so much to go cover this journey from my data product, and I think that the focus for us right now is on a lot of the AI stuff that’s opportunities to make it so that we can lower the floor, bring more people into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make us that designers can do more.

It’s easy to say those words. It’s a lot to execute on to actually make that really good and up to the standards of designers. Because ultimately all of us humans, we expect more from AI than we expect from a human. If you say, “Here’s a small prompt to change my spacing in a file,” Figma better get it right, otherwise people dismiss it out of hand.

I’m not saying that we have to do the work of a world-class designer, because we won’t. There’s a need for designers to lead the charge, and AI will only get you so far. But the drudgery, how do we remove that from the design process? How do we get more access to more people, bring more people into the world of creating prototypes and software? Those are our big things to bite off.

Copy LinkRedefining the role of designers

SAFIAN: I’ve noticed that the word design and the definition of what a designer is are often misunderstood by people in the business community, often by investors in the Wall Street community.  People think, oh, designer, they’re deciding what color the curtains are going to be or something like that. And I’ve had these conversations before with Mark Parker when he was the CEO of Nike who was a designer, Brian Chesky at Airbnb. Designer CEOs are still a small club. What do people not understand about design? What makes a designer CEO different?

FIELD: There’s a million definitions of design, but I always like to think of it as a kind of core problem solving, and I think that people go on this design journey and maybe the first step is like, does that even matter? I made something cool. Why do I need a designer?

And then I think at some point people go, “well, I should at least make it pretty. I’ll hire a designer. How do I make it pop? How do I make it cool, sexy?” And then I think from there people go, “Wait a second, maybe that’s not enough because I’m putting this in front of people, my product, my software, my app, and they don’t know how to use it. They’re getting stuck.”

And I think then from there they kind of think about, okay, well what’s the overall system? How do I think through how this entire thing should work? What’s the brand? What’s my point of view as a business? What are the business constraints? What’s the culture right now? How does that affect everything?

It’s like you can go out in these outer rings and just keep going. And I think that designers have for a long time had a mentality of almost like this imposter syndrome. If you think about the way that design has evolved as a career, there were almost no designers in the 1990s, early 2000s, very few in number. They were oftentimes misunderstood, and yet they did incredible work despite it.

Then we got into the Apple era of “design is how it works,” and Steve Jobs really championing design. You started to see this rapid growth in the number of designers being hired. When we started Figma, we didn’t know if Figma design was a big enough market because the Bureau of Labor said that there were 250,000 designers or something like that in the United States. And the reality was that just there’s this total exponential trend of how many designers were being hired and how design to engineer ratios were changing.

Through that growth, there were new challenges that were introduced. How do I keep everything consistent when all these different design voices have all sorts of creative ideas they want to explore? And also, how do I be efficient on a team with many designers around the table? How do I bring my voice as a designer to the highest levels? How do I have a seat at the table? And that was the meme then.

Well, now design has a seat at the table in the era of today. I think people recognize the importance of design. They might not always understand it, but everyone’s trying to understand it. So now I think it’s like how do we lead? How does design bring people along and how did more designers step into roles where they can guide their organizations? Because the design process of thinking through different ways things can work, diverging, and then being able to converge on a solution and deliver it to customers and iterate, that is the business process that you go through for everything, and that’s what everyone needs to be thinking through as they adapt in this new age of software that we’re in.

SAFIAN: There’s this expression, “Stay in your lane,” and for a lot of corporate roles, like you’re a marketer, you stay in your lane. And as you’re talking about the history, there was a certain point where people push designers to stay in a certain lane, but I’ve always found that design is most effective because it crosses over between different disciplines, and it finds that connection in that problem solving.

FIELD: And in the early days of Figma, that was such a boost for us because of the collaboration and the way that people could come together in one space. More recently, the roles of design engineer, product management, researcher, they’re blending so much more than ever before, and we’ve actually done some research around this. 56% of non-designers said they engage a lot or a great deal in at least one design centric task, and then almost two thirds identified with more than two or more roles.

So, I think people are breaking out of those lanes. People are identified more and more as just product builders and not necessarily their singular role or title they’ve been assigned. That doesn’t mean that more people call themselves designers, but it does mean that more people can be involved in the design process. So, how do we welcome them in? And how do we give them the tools they need?

SAFIAN: For you as a CEO, how do you approach leading and running the company differently because you’re a designer?

FIELD: I think I definitely do take a more expansive view of, what are the different paths here when there’s a decision that really matters? I like to try to play it out, see how it connects to other things. I sometimes have to curb this impulse a little bit because sometimes you’ve just got to move and I’m always learning about when that right time is, because at some point you’ve got to converge. Sometimes you’ve got to converge fast. Sometimes for really strategic decisions, you’ve got to converge slow.

SAFIAN: Dylan’s focus on when to act with speed versus patience isn’t confined just to Figma or to the design world. It’s a leadership challenge I’ve been hearing from lots of CEOs as they navigate so much volatility. So for Dylan, how does his decision making adjust when working with the fast evolving arena of AI, and where does he see the design of AI interfaces and prompting adjusting in the time ahead? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Figma’s Dylan Field talked about the company’s blockbuster IPO and the rising role of design in a software-centric economy. Now he explains how AI is poised to raise the ceiling on what’s possible with design tools and where he predicts AI interfaces will move, plus his advice on leveling up your own AI prompting skills. Let’s dive back in.

Copy LinkHow AI will impact design

AI is impacting every industry. It’s impacting design. You said you don’t think it’s going to replace jobs, the designer itself. I’m curious how you do think it’s going to impact?

FIELD: I think what ends up happening is you’re able just to explore more as a designer, more of the options space faster. And I think this will be very helpful in a world where you’re needing to design for so many different screens, and there’s so many different places that your system that you’re creating needs to surface. We are working on and we’ll soon ship features around, how do you prompt to edit, prompt to riff and the editing prompts, especially once people learn those, I think it will save a lot of time.

SAFIAN: Vibe coding is this rising craze, and the allure I guess is that it’s more natural. Although, I have to say that when I use most of these tools, it’s not intuitive. You do really have to learn how to use the prompt and the tool the right way. It sounds like that’s what you’re saying also.

You do have to know how to use these tools. It’s not going to necessarily be intuitive as maybe we might think from the outside.

FIELD: You have to try different things. You have to experiment, and you have to see what works. I think it’s important to know how to discretize tasks. If you’re able to break up tasks the right way, that really helps because if you tell, whether it’s Figma Make or whatever agent, “Go make me Google, like Microsoft,” it just makes no sense. “Go make me Figma.” It’s not going to go make you Figma.

Now if you said, “I want to make a line drawing tool, and here’s how I think it’ll work and here’s what I want to see,” and you give it a pretty clear specification, Figma Make, that has a better chance of converging the way you want to.

But still, even if you’re very good with your prompting, you might get to good enough, but good enough is not enough. Good enough is now mediocre. And in this world where there’s an exponential amount of software that exists and it’s going up all the time, I think that competition has never been more fierce.

Design, if you accept, that’s the differentiator, then you have to differentiate through design and craft. And so you have to push these tools, but also your team way further than you ever have before.

SAFIAN: I find when I use the tools, I’m often amazed at how quickly it’s able to create something, whether it’s code or whether it’s a video or whatever. But then at the same time, when I look at that closely, I’m like, but it’s still kind of messy. I have to spend more time to fine tune it, and maybe I have to end up fine-tuning a lot of it myself, not using those tools.

FIELD: Yeah, I think the riffing, the refinement, the creative iteration is everything. And some of that can be done with AI, but a lot of it needs to be done by hand still. And even as we get to a place where AI can help you with more of the workflow, it still requires the human push.

And I think in the coding case, zero to one, one to 100 are totally different. So zero to one, we’re going to a prototype. The models are exceptional at that. Maybe not getting high quality from a design standpoint, you’re going to have to push there, but just making it work, it’s very impressive.

But then going from one to 100, if you’re in an established code base, the productivity gains there are not what they are in that zero to one stage. And so I think that things are not changing maybe as fast as some would claim, but also no one knows the curve we’re on. Are we at the flat end of an S-curve? Are we on an exponential? Are we on an S curve about to become an exponential with some architecture shift?

I mean, stay tuned week over week, there’s updates. I mean, you’ve just got to always know there’s a new model to drop, and you have to make sure that your strategy aligns with AI gain better. And for Figma, that’s what we’re always checking is if the models get better, we should get better. And I think that’s true for most companies. That’s the test.

Copy LinkThe future of AI interfaces and user experiences

SAFIAN: I’m curious about your take on where the interface might be moving the interface for AI. I mean, we’ve been consumed with chatbots. Brian Chesky talked to me about his conviction that voice would not be the answer. OpenAI is doing something with Jony Ive, although it’s not really clear what that is, Meta seems to be betting on glasses. Do you have a prediction, a theory, about where the interfaces are moving?

FIELD: The only thing that’s clear to me is that there’ll be an explosion of options and space to cover in terms of how people are consuming software and digital content. I think everything has its place, and it’ll all be used. The question is what will be used the most?

And I think when it comes to the interface for prompting, to me it feels like we’re still in just this MS-DOS era of AI, where basically we’re going to look back and go, “Wow, can you believe we ever prompted like that? Can you look at the stuff we were running down to get the models to do that thing?”

The way I think about it is, the models are this incredible almost spaceship that can navigate through this hyperdimensional latent space, but the only way that you can steer it right now is textual prompting. What is the interface, what is the compass that can be created per use case as we start to really understand the use cases of these different models that will let people more intuitively and with more ability to steer, actually control where they want to go in that latent space. And I just think it’s a giant opportunity that we’re going to see a lot of exploration in.

Copy LinkDylan Field’s journey as a 19-year-old co-founder

SAFIAN: I want to ask you one question about yourself personally. You co-founded Figma when you were 19, which is a formative age for most of us. For a lot of people, their twenties is a time where they do a lot of very loose exploration, and you’ve been very task-focused and had to be. Clearly, you’ve enjoyed it, but I wonder whether you ever think about the things that you didn’t get to do that was the choice you made.

FIELD: I had plenty of existential crises and random paths I was able to explore during two and a half years at Brown. There’s always more from a college setting that I wish I was able to have learned, and yeah, maybe I had a little less time to read the books I would’ve loved to read, do the math I would’ve loved to explore, be able to go on all the hikes I would’ve liked to go on, but it’s been very meaningful. And I have no regrets. I mean, that was the reason that I started working with Evan in the first place; I was comparing and contrasting going, “I’m going to learn more from working with Evan, my co-founder, than any other situation I can put myself in.”

So whether Figma works, doesn’t work, this doesn’t feel like a risk to me. Worst case scenario is I learn a ton from Evan, because he’s a genius, and then I go back to Brown and how blessed am I, lucky am I to be able to say that? So, I’ve just felt a lot of gratitude all along the way too.

SAFIAN: Well, Dylan, this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it.

FIELD: Thank you again for having me and really fun to chat and catch up.

SAFIAN: I love talking to young leaders like Dylan, hearing them explain how they think and see the world, their fresh approaches, even as they work to refine the stories they tell about their business and themselves. I’ll confess, there was a time where I was a design skeptic. It just seemed squishy to me, but I’ve learned that design is a discipline for problem solving that meshes well with our modern pace of change.

While design is sometimes defined as appearance or style, it’s really a holistic way to connect across tasks and silos and to test assumptions. It’s also distinctly human, which is what makes Dylan’s commitment to software and AI as a tool for democratizing design so fascinating. While we might not all call ourselves designers, the best entrepreneurial leaders are always finding new ways to look with fresh eyes, grappling with the fine details of what’s under the hood, while also focusing on the big picture. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.