Figma CEO Dylan Field on Collaboration and Design in the Workplace | Greymatter

In this episode of Gray Matter, Greylock partner John Lilly talks to Figma CEO Dylan Field about the future of interface design. For more podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com so.

I'm John Lilly, and I'm one of the partners at Greylock Partners, and I'm very happy to be here this morning with Dylan Field from figma. Hi, Dylan.

Hey, John.

It's good to talk to you today. This will be a fun podcast because you know my background. Not everyone knows this, but my background is in design. At Stanford, I did a lot of interface design, and obviously figma is. Why don't you do the tagline?

Yeah, we're the collaborative interface design tool. So it was pretty cool when we started talking with John, like, his HCI background leapt out immediately, and we just started just digging in the details right away.

So you've been around technology for a long time. You grew up just in the North Bay?

Yeah, I grew up in Pengrove, California, in Sonoma county, near Petaluma. If you don't know where that is, that's cool.

And you've known O'Reilly for. Since you're a kid, right?

So I started working O'Reilly Media like I think I was 14 or 15 in high school. Whatever it was, it was like as soon as we could make it work with the labor laws. So whatever that number was. What happened was that my best friend, Andy Stone, his dad, was their IT guy. Is their IT guy still? Actually Chris Stone. They were doing events and stuff like that on the Riley campus. I needed people to restock water coolers and whatnot. And Andy was like, hey, you want to restock water coolers for like, a weekend? And said, yeah, sure, if it's O'Reilly, absolutely. From there, I got to, like, hang out in their warehouse, do like, odd jobs once in a while. And from there, eventually, they invited me to be an intern.

So you did that for a little while and then you went to Brown?

Eventually, yeah.

Yeah. Why'd you go to Brown?

So also through O'Reilly, I met someone named Dana Boyd, and she told me that I should really go investigate and look at Brown.

Is that where she went?

She went to Brown? She was under Andy Van Damme, one.

Of the most famous graphics professors.

Yeah, I mean, the guy is a legend. He is literally the person who wrote the book on graphics and still teaching at pretty old age now. And anyway, Dana told me that I have to meet Andy. I have to talk with Andy. You know, she set up a call. I hadn't applied yet, and he said, okay, well, what questions do you have for me? And I had prepared. I thought he was gonna, like, interview me or something. So I was like, trying to brush up on all my CS fundamentals or whatever. And he asked, what questions you have for me? I was like, wasn't prepared for that. And so I was like, well, why should I choose Brown? And he like, went on a rant about how awesome Brown was. Then I did a college tour. I looked at a lot of colleges. I thought my dream school was like, mit, went to mit. And I think I went there the wrong time because it was cloudy and everyone looked depressed. So maybe, maybe that was my terms. But anyway, I. I crossed that one off the list. And I looked at Harvard too, and got a. Actually, at mit, though I will say this, I cold emailed Ron Rivest because I was like, again, a crypto nerd and really excited about, like, RSA and stuff. And he actually met with me. It was just kind of cool.

But this seems to be a theme of yours, which is you find on the Internet or whatever, you find people you think are interesting and you go try to spend time with them.

Yeah, I mean, people are pretty accessible if you just email them and say, hey, I'd like to meet you.

Those are the things I found notable about you at the very beginning of talking to you, which is you just didn't seem to have any fear at all. And I think that's an unusual thing for people who tend to be as introverted as engineers do. Like me.

So, yeah, so Brown. I kept going and talking and looking at different campuses and Harvard people would be like, you should go to Harvard. And MIT people are like, you should go to mit. I'm not sure if I got it would have been able to get into any of these schools. Just people would tell me that. Anyway, then I went to, like, Brown and looked at Brown and everyone along the way. I kept meeting people from Brown and they kept sitting me down for like half an hour or an hour. These people I'd never met before. And they're like, no, no, no. Like, you have to go to Brown. Yeah, let me tell you why. And they would just like ran at me for an hour or so. I had that experience at least two or three times before I even went to the campus. And I went to the campus, loved it and had a great time and I applied and got in.

But you didn't finish Brown. So you were there for a couple years.

Yeah, so I was there two and a half years and I didn't intend to drop out and actually think I only recently realized I'm a dropout. No, like, literally it was because. Okay, so Brown has finished.

Brown. You would have figured it out sooner.

Yeah, exactly.

Stay in school.

Yeah. Well, actually, no. I mean, I don't think everyone should drop out. We can get talk more about that later.

But you did it after a couple years. And so were you doing computer science there?

Yeah, I was doing CS math.

And why'd you leave?

What happened was I'd interned at O'Reilly. I did like a. I worked at a startup the summer after high school. And then I was. I got to hang out with Dana a little bit at msr for MSR is Microsoft Research. I was a research assistant there. It's not an intern. I was like the lowest rung in the totem pole. And then that summer I went to LinkedIn with DG Patil. Because the summer I was at the startup, after high school, I saw him, I knew him again through O'Reilly. And he was like, why don't you work here? Why don't you come work for me? And I said, I didn't know that was an option.

And DJ had coined the term data scientist and started the day in data science. He was one of the first data scientists here. He started that group at LinkedIn. He recruited you to that group?

Yeah. So he came, he told me, summer after high school, come take a tour. I did. I was like, wow, this is amazing, because I was a total stats nerd. I love stats. I went on a tour of LinkedIn, loved it. And he invited me to work there in the next. When I was a freshman, I didn't even know, like, how great it would be. It was an amazing summer for so many reasons. You know, not only were they doing advanced work that no one else was doing yet and thinking in a way that really other people were not thinking in terms of building data products. But also, DJ was such a great leader, and the people and the connections I made there ended up, you know, being people that really become my tribe. Like in Silicon Valley as a whole. I was. I then went to the next summer to Flipboard. And at Flipboard, I was doing more kind of like data engineering work that summer. And then I went back to Brown, and that time Flipboard was like a really, I thought, a super interesting company. They're doing all this really interesting work around taking this iPad app, which was really design focused, and moving it to the iPhone. And also their data game was starting to really. Data was really starting to come into play with them in terms of recommendations and sort of what they called cover stories, which was kind of like a newsfeed experience. And I also thought the CEO, Mike McHugh, I was really impressed with him as a leader as well. And so I thought it was like sort of a unique time at the company. And so I started looking into taking a semester off from Brown in order to go work at Flipboard again. And they had for some reason accepted me to go work on their product and design team. So yeah, when they let me like work for six months on their design team, that was just like a dream come true because I was so impressed with the talent they had and their ability and the willingness to mentor me. And so I went there. And in the meantime, I was applying sort of on a lark for the Thiel Fellowship. I was talking with somebody who actually is pretty anti education. I'm not sure if he'd label himself that way, but he has a sort of movement slash company called Uncollege. He got in touch with me through a mutual friend and said, you got to drop out, you got to apply for the Teal Fellowship. I said, that sounds crazy. Gradually, he convinced me to apply. I thought the application process. I started reading through the application. I was like, actually this is like just interesting as an introspective measure to go read through this, go work through this application. Because it asked a lot of questions for yourself that are a pretty interesting question.

You applied for fun.

Somewhat. Yeah. But also because, like, I thought I had talked with Evan at that point and I thought maybe we should consider doing a startup. You were the one person I would consider doing this with. I would knew that I would not do it by myself and if I got the Thiel Fellowship. But Evan was interested, like, game over. Wouldn't do it.

Interesting. Well, let's talk about Evan for a second. So Evan Wallace, CTO and your co founder of Figma. So talk about that.

Yeah, Evan's my co founder now. At the time, he's my TA at Brown and he was my TA in particular in software engineering and also computer vision. He's always has been and continues to be the smartest person in the room. This guy is beyond brilliant. He's also really humble and kind. Great product sense, just a joy to work with. I had gotten to spend time and work with him at like, for example, one of the LinkedIn hackathons. We also happened to get first place. That didn't hurt the perception of the hackathon, but it was already a lot of fun. We also got to know each other through the CS Doug at Brown, which is the department undergraduate group. Pretty unfortunate acronym name, Doug. And yeah, we just started to get to know each other better. And I took him out for dinner one night and said, hey, you got offers from everywhere. I know that, but would you ever consider doing a startup? And it's like, maybe November 2011, some. My first semester as a junior at Brown.

Yep.

He said, yeah, I would consider that, you know, and then we started looking at what technologies we're interested in, and there's two. One was drones, one was WebGL. And about a month later we were like, definitely not drones for so many reasons.

So WebGL by default.

WebGL by default. And then it's like, what's exciting about WebGL? Okay. It makes it so creative tools can be more accessible and more collaborative. And at first we're really focused on the accessibility aspect of it.

I didn't know that. So accessible for people who can't see or who can't read or. Is that what you know?

I mean, although I do think that there's ways that we can make that true as well. I meant more in terms of accessibility in the sense of, like, there's no need to install software.

Ah, right.

So you can just go to a link and you can start to use this tool.

Interesting.

And it can spread very quickly. You know, someone without much knowledge of creative tools or desire even can start to get that first taste of making something.

Yeah, I think that, you know, when I was growing up, well, probably when you were growing up, everybody who started to do creative stuff would go download a pirated copy of Photoshop or whatever and just start to hack on it on their own, their modified Xbox or whatever. And because Photoshop is such an expensive tool at the time, but that's how you learn. You're just trying to figure out how to make it work. And then. But now you Fast forward to 2011, 2012, you start to view, like, maybe it's not. Maybe those tools aren't so precious. Maybe they can be more accessible to more people.

Yep.

So it sounds like you and Evan got led there through a technology path.

That's right. Yeah. I mean, it's not the traditional path of, like. I think most startups, you know, ultimately follow the formula of you're solving a problem for some set of people, you know your target market, and you're better than the competition, so they pay you X price. And we didn't, like, really think about any of that. Whereas, like, what technologies excite us and then we start exploring from there, like, what areas does that enable us to explore? And so we started looking at a range of tools, everything from 3D tools to ways to productionize and make accessible to consumers, the latest computational photography research to photo editing, and ultimately the accessibility path, I think led us to a place where we felt like a lot of the things we were creating would just make it easier to create memes and it didn't feel as meaningful as we wanted to feel.

So that's interesting. So we'll fast forward now. So you convinced Devin to once he graduated to come join you and you've been working, you know, funded by the Thiel Fellowship to figure out how to start a company out here.

So basically like while I was at Flip warriors pursuing an apparel Path Teal Fellowship during that time I kind of went between I'm not sure if I want to drop out of college to okay, eventually, yes, like let's make the decision to start a company but still didn't have the Teal Fellowship at that point. And then finally, like, okay, let's take the Thiel Fellowship and let's aggressively pursue the Teal Fellowship because like, otherwise, like how are we gonna support ourselves? And it's non dilutive grant, it's 100k.

For free, of course.

So yeah, so then Evan had some stuff, he had to graduate. He wanted to graduate and help his mom move and. And so we started full time in earnest after I finished the flipboard and he finished all that stuff, it was like August now of 2012.

Yep.

And we incorporate like October 2012.

Yep.

And yeah. And then we kind of went through all the other stuff I just mentioned around conventional photography, photo editing until probably about April to June. Somewhere in there of 2013, we saw fireworks die. We saw a lot of people that no longer had at home and at.

The same time, Adobe or Macromedia Fireworks.

Yeah, exactly. And we started thinking to ourselves, like, what can we do to be. We kind of were already thinking along a more professional lens. How can we make serious tools people can that are really meaningful, but still with an accessibility bent. Yeah. From there we started to work on what we're currently doing. You know, the market was something we're really interested in. It was a problem space that's infinitely fascinating in terms of the technical implications. And then also like the challenge to design for designers. And then also like the market is I think lucrative as well in that demand for design is just increasing so much right now.

So let's step back one second. So I think I first met you in 2013, probably towards the beginning of 3013. So that must have been three or four months after you started in earnest here. And I remember that feeling too, because I think I heard from DJ and four or five other people the same weekend that you gotta go meet this guy Dylan. He's doing amazing stuff. And so I remember you and I met actually near my house in Palo Alto, and I was Starbucks on the weekend. The demo was interesting because you said, let me just show you some things. And so you open up a browser and you started showing me some stuff you built in WebGL. And I think, I remember my background was at Mozilla before this, and I think everybody expects me to be the guy who loves everything made in the browser. And so I think you kind of expected me to just, like, love it too.

I didn't know what to expect. Everyone said you were really smart.

Well, yeah, some days. But I remember, I see, I saw it and I'm like, that is amazing. I can't Believe you made WebGL in the browser do that. Because, you know, We've worked on WebGL at Mozilla as an enabling technology. And then I said, but you're doing kind of photo editing and photo effects at the time. And I remember saying, incredible. Amazing. I've never seen anything like that, but who cares? And I hopefully I said, like, two steps more softer than that. Yeah. But now that we're old friends, we can talk, we can sort of let it all hang out. But it was an amazing thing. I mean, what did you guys like about WebGL? What was important? What were the really special things about it for you?

I think it's different from the technology standpoint versus the business standpoint. But I'll start with technology standpoint, which is that it just opens up a class of web experiences that people can normally never have.

And what do you mean?

I mean that. So I guess, like, stepping back, I have a fundamental belief maybe this bridges both technology and business, but I really believe that software in the cloud is just the future.

Sure.

And I don't think that's like, super debatable at this point. Right. We've now seen just so many successes in that realm. I grew up with Google Docs or G Suite or whatever it is now, and that's just fundamentally formed the way that I see software.

I call that Google's version of quip. But yeah, so I think that. So I think you're right. I think software in the cloud obviously is right and we'll see that again. And Again, but the thing that's special about. But that's never been true for design tools, because design has always needed local CPU and GPU. And that's what WebGL. That's the breakthrough for now.

You can finally use the GPU on your computer in the browser. And I don't think the browser is the important part, but I think the browser is a forcing function to make it so that you can have a truly collaborative experience. I think that's what's more important.

When I saw you, I thought the demo and the technology was amazing. You and Evan both are obviously inspirational on a lot of fronts. And I care about design. Every two or three years, for the past 30 years, there's been a new Adobe Killer. No, no. This time Adobe is dead. And it hasn't really been true because I think every successive wave it's been the same tools as Adobe, but a little different, but same architecturally. What I liked about where you guys were started, at least, is that it enabled something that was completely new architecturally because if you're on the server, that enables a lot of things. It makes things more like GitHub than like applications, per se. But, you know, so it's. But it took us a year and a half to figure that out together, right?

Yeah, it did.

So you went off and you raised money from Index.

Yep.

And you.

We kind of at that point were talking with Danny about like, we're. I think the evolution was sort of photo editing to Photoshop to interface design. Yep, over a. A few months. It was a very brief amount of time.

That's interesting, too. When Index invested, you guys thought you were doing a photo editing company.

We thought we were doing more of a Photoshop company. At that point, we already knew it wasn't photo editing, but we thought it was more Photoshop. And then from there we narrowed in really quickly, maybe in next month or so, to interface design. But yeah, at first it was a little bit more broad. And we realized, I think there's an interesting thing with tools where people assume that in order to have a more powerful tool, you have to have a more complex tool. And that's actually not completely true. If you basically focus on just a few use cases and you do them really well, and those use cases complement each other, then you can still have a very powerful tool for those use cases. And it doesn't have to be very complex.

I actually think power and complexity are completely orthogonal. They don't have any real relationship to each other, except that they're the easiest way to make powerful tools is to make them more complicated.

Exactly.

But I don't think they're fundamentally related.

Yeah. Photoshop does a million things, right? And you can make GIFs in it, you can do 3D work in it. Like, you can edit photos, you can paint, you can make interfaces, if you so choose. But we thought that making an interface design tool in particular was one use case of Photoshop that was a huge. There's a big market attached to it, and it was a very underserved community at the time.

Yep. And there's a big clue, right?

Yeah.

And the clue was an application that came out of Europe called Sketch.

Yeah, absolutely. So that was the time we had, I think, to our mistake, largely dismissed Sketch, you know, because it didn't look like much of the time, but people were looking at fireworks and saying, we need a new home, we need something else to try. And they were trying Sketch for the first time. That was their first wave of adopters, really, and they'd been around for a long time, but I think that was the first big wave and a big pivotal moment for them. And so, yeah, I think if we had been more sensitive to the competitive market, that would have been another clue, although it wasn't really on our radar at the time.

Interesting. Yeah. I look at it, and for me, that was a big driver. I thought you guys were amazing architecturally, culturally. You're just right. But I do think that there's a real connection to Adobe because we all started using IT stuff when we were 6, 7, 8 years old, 15 or 20, when I was, for me, and I thought people were just committed to it. But the move to Sketch, like the adoption of Sketch by designers, that's the first really clear break point that I can remember in design. Okay, let's fast forward all the way to now. About six weeks ago, you launched Figma 1.0 to the world. So tell me about Figma and what it is and what you're trying to do with it from here.

Yeah. So traditionally, the old model of tools is to be offline and single player. And figma is like, we were just talking about a fundamental change in architecture. It's a way to be online, it's a way to be collaborative with the rest of your team and for designers to no longer be in isolation. And when we looked and we started talking with designers, we recognized a lot of pain points for them. Some of them individual pain points, things that they could have better tools with their workflow, other ones that are more collaborative pain points. So as designers, we're talking with, working with other engineers in the organization, with marketing people, with product managers, with other designers, executives. There are all these different pain points that came up. And so with Figma you just share a link, for example. And when you share a link, then the engineer can go figure out the specs to build it. The marking person can then get the copy they need or just copy in order to change that. The PM can constantly check or pull whenever they need to to find out what the latest status of the design is. And the file is all in one place. So it's a different model of how to work. But also we try to make it feel familiar so that even though we're innovating on the tool side, we try to map to the keyboard shortcuts you're used to and we try to make it so it's really easy to use and opt.

So we've had a lot of different reactions to Figma so far. Some have been highly embracing, like collaborative workflow and real time multiplayer as you call it. Some have been negative, saying, look, design should be a solo effort, like where I get to design the work that I want and then share it out when I'm finished. So what's your reaction to that? What's your sense of things?

So first of all, I think that the industry in general is going more towards a place where everyone will be working more in the open. That said, I don't think we're there yet. And if you want to work in Figma in isolation, you can. If you want to work in a collaborative setting in public, you can. We have basically taken the vantage point that we should enable designers to work in various ways, however they're comfortable. I think that going forward, I mean, like, we also have to win the single player experience. If you're not going to be collaborative, we have to make sure that you have a tool that in figma that is still useful. And we've done a lot of work to make that the truth. And so we've made a very precise experience, one where with vector networks and constraints, there's just things you can do in Figma that you can't do elsewhere. And it's much easier to accomplish your workflow. And so we actually, when we look at the numbers, number of teams using us are really promising. But then also the number of individuals using us are also exciting.

Yeah, interesting. There's a lot of things in the data that's interesting. We can start to see companies adopt one or two designers at a time and then you can already Start to see people around them adopt. And it goes to a majority or 100% of these startups quite quickly, which is that's something design tools have never done before. I think it's because of the lightweight nature. I think it speaks to the fact that we're going to broaden the market with Figma.

I hope so.

Yeah. My two cents too is that designers, if you play back 20 years, developers would have said that coding is a solo practice, you have to need time and space. And then you, you'd show it out when you're finished. And the open source really blew that up. Open source being online all the time, eventually GitHub and all the real time collaboration stuff and then Google Docs and Quip and messaging and on and on and on. So my sense is that this is an inevitable arrow. Everyone's getting more collaborative and on a smaller, smaller granularity.

And I think the parallels you're drawing between development 20 years ago and Figma today and design today, I think are extremely relevant. I'm not saying that it's a perfect parallel between GitHub and Figma. It's not. And you don't want to apply the tools and the solutions from one market to another directly. But I think the parallels of people becoming less closed off, more open is definitely true and that's definitely a trend that we're seeing.

Yeah, I was talking to somebody about GitHub and we kind of missed GitHub yesterday. And even at Mozilla we kind of missed significance. So in 2005, 2006, we were fighting over whether you use to go from CVS to Mercurial or Subversion or whatever, or Git source code control system. And I think we looked at GitHub and The rise of GitHub is basically just hosted Git. And in retrospect, it wasn't that at all. It was about how do you bring social and collaboration to coding. And it changed the world really fast. And so I think that Fuma has the same opportunity to do that.

Definitely. Yeah. It's one thing I'm really excited about.

I want to talk about some specific features inside the product now. So we talked about asynchronous collaboration, which is like I can edit and then I can send you and get comments or whatever via Slack or through commenting system. But what about this new thing, multiplayer, that we just launched, which is simultaneous editing.

Yep.

How are you seeing people use that?

So far it's all over the place. There's so many different ways that people are using it. And that's one of the coolest things is, you know, putting a fundamental shift in technology out there and then seeing what happens.

Yeah, to my knowledge, there's never been a simultaneous design tool, not that I know of.

So let's just talk through some of the use cases. On the fundamental level, it just basically solves the problem.

Wait, so how does it work? So what happens now? So you're. I've got a designer in Figma, looks a lot like Sketch or Photoshop, whatever, doing design, designing icons or what have you. So tell me about how multiplayer works.

Yeah, so in Figma, there's personal spaces and team spaces, and in your personal space, no one can see your files. They're secure. In your team space, anyone on your team can go into your file. And so let's say that I am working in a file doing brand work, and you're another designer that's also collaborating with me on brand work. You can then come into my file and then you can work with me side by side if you choose. Or we could share a whiteboard, for example. I could also invite you into a file via a link if I want to do it that way. And we're seeing all sorts of different ways that people are using multiplayer. One of the most obvious ways is just that it solves this problem of right now, if I have one file, maybe it's Sketch or Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever in my Dropbox folder, and you open it up while I'm in it and you save, you get a. Now you have a merge problem on your hands. You have two different files. And in Figma, now you can just open the file and we can both be in the file at the same time. So it sounds like a very simple thing, and it should be a very simple thing. It's just the way that things should work. Other things we're seeing are people collaborating on brand, people using it for whiteboard sessions. We're also seeing people use it for design reviews a lot. That's one of the things that we built, one feature where you could basically present to people. And having this presentation mode in a design review, I can say, okay, let me present to everybody. You can click on my face and see my viewport, and then I can actually tour you around the file. And your viewport is now locked to mine. And as we do that, you get to see the full view of what's in my file. And so I've actually even seen one of our customers did a screen recording of themselves doing a design review where they're all remote and anyone in the same room and they're from all over the world doing this design review together in Figma with voice chat in the background and yeah, it was pretty incredible.

Well, yeah, it seems to me that what's going to do is it's just going to close, it's going to shorten feedback loops across the board on everything.

And obviously, like, it's so important to have velocity and every loop in the organization. That takes a lot of time. Whether it's just, like I said, design engineering, you know, what are the specs like, oh, designer has to go redline, it takes the day, engineer goes build it and then it's wrong or something. And then if you can just go to the Figma document and measure in real time and have a real time conversation, that's way shorter. If it's a loop between like marketing, where, you know, marketing person is like, here's the copy, designer copies the copy, puts in their Photoshop document, exports a png, sends it to the marketing person, marketing person changes it an hour later, like, that's all real time. Now product management can leave a comment in real time and have a conversation in real time. So yeah, it just shortens those loops and makes us get to a better product faster.

Well, that's certainly been my experience. Like, you know, my experience with Quip and now with Figma is that once you start using it and it's sort of fundamentally collaborate. So I'll start working on a document in Quip, I'll start working on a, on a design in Figma and you invite co workers in to work with you. It's really hard to go into a system that's not fundamentally social after that.

Yep.

I think it's just becomes a very isolating way to work. You just can't work as quickly or as well.

And that's also one of the things that we're trying to do internally for Figma is we're just trying to. Right now we push internally. Like, how do we make it feel more alive? Because right now it feels sort of like an isolated experience, even though it's a very alive experience. When you just use a file browser, for example, it's like, how do we show people, like, what's going on? More activity around what's going on.

Yeah, that's interesting. At some level you want to make it livelier, but you don't want to be as alive as Facebook or things like that. Absolutely not all the time.

No. It's so important for the editor, like one of our core product tenants is that we are in the editor. We're about showing you your work. Right. And we shouldn't get in the way. Right. So that's something that we work really hard to accomplish and make sure we're not distracting.

Yeah, got it. Let's talk about another feature that you guys built that nobody else has yet, which is Vector Networks.

Yeah.

Vector is a fun. And it's just. We're going to nerd out for a little bit on it. So just talk about what they are.

Yeah. So traditionally you have paths In I think 1986 or 87, Illustrator was invented and released in the early versions of Illustrator, you know, the inventor was basically like his wife was hand coding postscript.

Yeah.

And he made a.

So I got my parachute pants, which you'll have to look up. You'll have to Google.

I haven't seen them on you yet. I think you should wear them sometime.

It was a while ago. Yeah.

Anyway, so, yeah, the first version of Illustrator is made for. So his wife would not have to hand code postscript. It's a very romantic love story, but postscript sort of implied the path model that we have today. And paths are a sequence of lines and curves. When you connect it back to its origin, it closes. And when a path closes, you cannot modify it further, add more points, connect points to other points.

It becomes a unitary shape.

Yes, exactly. And so in retrospect, a more natural model is a graph. And so that's what we went on to accomplish with Vector Networks and took a lot of time to figure out and to kind of finesse it to a point where all of the expectations people already have from two decades plus of using Illustrator are met through figma with Vector Networks. But through a lot of user research, we were able to both push it forward in terms of introducing a new model that is fundamentally better but also meet people's expectations.

Yep. So fundamentally, vector networks are collections of points that are connected that you can modify after the fact. And they kind of.

Exactly, exactly. And if you click and drag like an area, then it's able to move all at once, kind of like a mesh.

So let's talk about FIGMA going forward. A year ago we launched beta and six weeks ago we launched 1.0. What are some AHAs or some learnings in that from that period?

I think one of the biggest ones that honestly was a surprise to us because we're always super self critical was how much excitement there was around the product.

Yeah.

And how much people were looking for new solutions. And were already in this mental model of, yes, our tools should be collaborative. Like, we thought we'd get more resistance there and people would be apprehensive and. And some people are, but I think more people than we expected are actually really excited about that. And just the amount of teams that are adopting and teams that not also. One thing that's been really interesting is our thesis, like the thesis that I pitched you when we raised our Series A was that, you know, entire companies will adopt Figma, not just designers. And that's something that we were hoping for and that's actually proven true. And not for all teams. Some teams are just designers, some teams are just one designer, and there's also some teams that are. The entire company has adopted. And you talk to the marketing person, the engineering leader, the CEO, and people that are removed from the design team and they're like, oh yeah, Figma's great for us too. And you talk to the design team and you're like, oh, it's great because we can manage all these different people outside the design team in a much more effective way. And so seeing that go from no one's using it, or very few people are using it, but no one in a team setting and we're just building away and we hope this will be the reality that we can shape to like, literally. One of the slides that I pitched you being like echoed back to us by a customer is a pretty magical moment to us.

So in the new year, we'll start charging for Figma and every indication is that that will go very well. You've sort of preemptively said Figma's always going to be free for students.

That's right.

Let's talk about why that matters and why are you doing it.

I think if you look at the macro environment, the demand for designers and great designers has never been more. We need more designers in the world and we need more people that can use design software and visually communicate. But those are not skills that people are getting in college right now. You know, maybe they're getting a traditional design background, but that doesn't mean they're worrying about interface design. I also think that it's really important for our tools to be accessible to the world. And so us saying that Figma is free for students is a way to make it so that we hope the next generation of students will grow up on Figma and use Figma and then bring it to their place of work. You know, it's somewhat selfish in that regard, but it's also hopefully Empowering, because we want the next generation of students to actually learn more about interface design. Actually going broader. I think design education is largely broken right now. I think that the fundamentals are good and in a lot of fields you've got conflict between fundamentals, theory and practical skills you can use for your job. But I think that this difference is this Delta is very great in our art schools and our design schools. Some schools are more progressive than others. So I'm not saying it's across the board, but a lot of schools woefully under prepare their students for jobs in industry.

Yeah, I was lucky in that when I was at Stanford in the early 90s. There's an emerging sense that design is going to matter in people science, but it's a big fight. Like designers didn't really think computers were good and the computer scientists didn't really think design was a discipline that deserved to be in the department.

But yeah, and I think there still is a question in some schools of like this Internet thing, is it a passing fad? And it's like, I think we know enough now that we know it's not Internet.

It seems like it'll be around for a while.

It seems to be around for a while. And interface design is still such a young profession, but there are disciplines and there are things that are being. There are. It's discipline in itself already. And it's fundamentally different than like print design, for example. You have to think about state, you have to think about the way that things work across different screen sizes. So the fundamental questions you ask yourself when you're starting a graphic design assignment do not apply in an interface design world. Sometimes some do, but some, a lot don't. So I think that we need more training for students and I hope that figma, in addition to being free for students, will also give them more resources too, so they can learn.

Yep. That's my sense too, is that it will reduce the friction to get started.

Yeah.

And then it'll reduce the friction to share. So like, the more that people share designs with each other, they look at how they've been constructed, they try to tear them apart. You share with instructors, instructors share back comments that I think that's all going to lead to a lot more learning in an open way. A little bit like View Source on the web did.

Absolutely. Yeah. I really hope that ultimately designers that are established not only share sort of like how their files were constructed, but also the process. How do they get from initial conception of an idea to the thing that shipped? It's a big ask for designers and it's a change in culture, but one that I think will fuel the next generation of designers, learning a new craft and becoming the experts that our design world needs.

Cool. So the last question is we have a lot of entrepreneurs listen to the blog and entrepreneurs or sometimes designers themselves, sometimes hard designers. How would you encourage them to try out Figma and how would you like you can import from Sketch now or some other places. So how do you get started?

Figma.com is obviously where you go F I G M A dot com and yeah, we have a lot of resources that are rolling out as well. So you can look at our tutorials page also, I think just generally trying to jump in and choose a project and then do that project, that's the best way to get started with any tool.

And you go import from Sketch or just for or she need Blue Ocean projects that you haven't started yet.

Just depends on where you're coming from. If you're already using Sketch. Yeah. Feel free to import from Sketch. If you've never done it before and you're an entrepreneur and you've got an app idea, go in and just start playing around. I think that you're going to learn more about the way that you want to build the app. You're going to be able to find more. And if you ultimately do hire a designer, if you're not a designer, then it's going to be even better for them because you'll be able to actually have a conversation about the mockups that you've already created and they can go off that and you can have a more detailed conversation.

All right, well, thanks so much, Dylan. I could talk about design for hours and hours and hours. I appreciate you spending some time.

Anytime, man. Thank you.