Figma | Collaborate from Anywhere

Hi everyone, I'm Sarah Goa, general partner at Greylock. You're listening to Grey Matter, the Greylock podcast. This is episode five of our Work From Anywhere series exploring how the world has been turned upside down over the past seven months since the pandemic began. At Greylock, we're excited to invest in entrepreneurs that are tackling the rapid change 2020 has brought. In this series, we'll talk to an amazing set of founders and CEOs of companies that are working through these issues in real time, and especially those who have led the distributed work movement or those people building technology tools for the digital first economy. Our next guest is Dylan Field, the co founder and CEO of Figma, which has taken the design world by storm over the past few years and is changing how we visually collaborate. But more importantly, it's also changed how I make memes and presentations. Dylan, welcome to Gray Matter.

Thanks for having me.

Sarah, can you introduce yourself and the founding story of figma?

Yeah, certainly. So my name is Dylan field. I'm the CEO and co founder of Figma. I co founded Figma in August 2012 with Evan, who was my TA at Brown. And Evan is just an amazing guy. He and I were in the same department, undergraduate group and really interested in startups and emerging tech. And we started getting really interested in WebGL in particular. Evan had done some experiments around it and we realized that there was a ton of possibility there in terms of remaking our creative tools and doing it in the browser. And as we started to pull that thread, realized, okay, this will lead to more accessibility around creative tools, more collaboration. And eventually after I dropped out and Evan and I started the company together and we iterated for a long time, we got to interface design as a way to sort of make these tools more collaborative and accessible to everybody. And we realized that for interface designers, you know, as software becomes a huge part of the world economy and everything is going digital, design is just more important than ever. Also, because design is becoming more important, everyone wants to have a say in the design process, everyone wants to be part of that process. And so figuring out ways to let people collaborate online becomes ever more important. And so we'd accidentally kind of stumble upon this growing movement that even though we were kind of starting to get a sense that in 2013, 2014, we're just now seeing even the ramifications of now, and the change is monumental. I remember back when we pitched you at Greelock, Sarah, I mean, I think you were, how do you do a market analysis of how many designers are there in the world. I think we both had no idea. We just knew it was growing really fast. And I think we both underestimated still, like, how fast would it grow and also how much people would want to do design work as well.

Yeah, I remember that silly analysis. And it just goes to show, part of being any good inventor is A, being lucky and then B, being like, well, my hunch is this is pretty important, so I think the numbers will match it. But so many people see the impact that Figma has today, like leading this movement, but we don't often get to see that maybe in 2013, like, there's a little bit of messy iteration to arrive at the thing that is the kernel of great in the future. So tell us a little bit about the ideas you were thinking through. I mean, when we funded the company, I remember seeing like the WebGL water textures demo and being like, this is amazing. That's not the company.

Totally. When I first met John, I think actually we'd already been through maybe eight or nine months of iteration. And even then John said to me, dylan, you don't know what you're doing yet. So really love you guys, but let's keep talking and maybe next round, the timeline there was. We started talking maybe December 2011 and just had a lot of assignment around WebGL. And then we continued talking about it more. Started full time on the project August 2012, and in between then, I had been an intern on the design team at Flipboard. And. And so I witnessed a lot of the problems that we're now solving at Figma firsthand had in my brain, but kind of was like, oh, but you know, it's really hard to solve. It's not clear there's a big enough market. So I kind of had dismissed it at first and it was further down the list. And so first we looked at, you know, a lot of things that were more consumer, more on the accessibility aspect, like computational photography, photo editing. But each one, you know, is kind of hard to answer the questions of, like, how do you take these individual computational photography use cases and make them into like one super app for photo editing? It was kind of weird. We were, you know, this is now early 2013, we're looking at that. And we were like, wait a second. So it seems like the number of cameras being sold might be like, concave down. And then it looks like the number of megapixels per iPhone, like, that's definitely concave up and accelerating. It might be that, like, everyone just uses like, their mobile phone instead of a digital camera in the future. And if that's the case, then why do you have a WebGL editor on desktop for like your mobile photos? That doesn't make sense. And so we were then we kind of thought, okay, maybe Photoshop in the browser. And then kind of from there we went, well, there's lots of different use cases of Photoshop that doesn't make sense. Then kind of narrowed it on interface design from there. But it was a bit of a journey and quite iterative. And along the way I was talking with John Lily a lot. And I think at first we were thinking more how do we make this more accessible and how more of a community based approach where people create and they upload this kind of global creative community and then we'll do this business thing. Second, and I think eventually some combination of John Lilly and Jeff Wiener convinced me maybe switch the order of those two and start with the thing that makes you money. And that was a good thing to have decided eventually. But I think it took us a while to get to that.

Maybe it's been drinking the Kool Aid, but it feels like Figma has done a pretty good job so far of bringing the community along with the business.

Thank you. We try very hard to do that.

So 2013, 2014, messy iteration. Some help from John and Jeff and Greylock and the community. Fast forward seven years of hard work. Where's Figma today?

Yeah, so we're around 215 employees or so. We're used all over the world in some of the biggest companies, but also by individuals. And we finally did get to the community part. It's still early. We're in beta right now, but recently launched this worldwide design community which we're really excited about. We always thought that'd be like a fast follow. Turns out it took five years, whatever. But yeah, it's been a really exciting journey and the team has been incredible. And I'm so lucky to be working with such an amazing team and also to have great investors like Greylock and you.

Thanks, Dylan. It must have been 2014 where you were already like turning over with us the idea of a designer forum, which means that you were at least thinking about it like two years before that.

Yeah, pre Covid, we were basically all in San Francisco. We had a few people that were in Amsterdam, a few folks that were remote across the United States. We have a designer advocate team and most of those people were remote. And then we had a few people that kind of gone remote in different ways. But yeah, mostly all in sf and very much a work from office culture. We didn't really do work from home. That was just not really the way we operated at that point.

So talk about the first and second week of March. Like, when did it occur to you, as a leader, we might need to make a dramatic change here?

Yeah, it was pretty rapid. There's like one day where there's like a celebrity who got diagnosed with COVID and then there was some other news. And 10 of felt like it was all happening that night. And then I think the next day we thought, okay, let's just be cautionary here and shut down the office before we feel like we need to, because better safe than sorry here. And, you know, let's just do it. And so we were a bit ahead of the curve by like, maybe a few days to a week. We were just kind of coming from that position of being conservative about our employee base and making sure everyone was safe. Didn't expect that, you know, come July, August, that we'd still be sheltering in place. But it's been a really interesting experience. I think I've learned a lot in terms of how do you make sure that your culture persists and how do you make sure that, especially as you're scaling as fast as we are, I mean, we've added so many hires this year. How do you make sure that things are, you know, you're going to more of a written culture. How do you make sure that you're not relying on purely synchronous meetings? You can't just be on zooms all the time. It'll fatigue everybody. And, you know, I think we're learning a lot about, like, how do you codify the culture and make it sure that it's really clear people without the presence of an office. And I think these are all important things to learn and have also led us to think about, okay, how we're going to in the future, really think about our workforce, even post Covid as well.

So let's pick that point about culture apart a little bit. What are you doing instead of meetings? And then in particular, as you've onboarded a bunch of new people over the last five months to get them to imprint to figma.

Yeah, well, first of all, I will say we're not perfect here yet. This is very early stages. The thing that I'm working with my team on is trying to get to the point where how do you make sure that there's more clear decision owners, people that are driving things, and, you know, what's the sort of Frameworks we use to make sure that people are informed and also that it's clear when people are expected to just move things forward. Making sure that if there is a conversation that we try to do some pre work beforehand hopefully versus just like getting to a call and sort of like brainstorming or talking. This is all just like basic hygiene stuff. But I think that it's so easy to accidentally ignore it because you're just trying to move fast and you can't ignore it when you're in an environment where everyone's in the same time zone. Everything's synchronous. But I think as you scale ends up being more important. On the new hire side, one thing I've been doing that I really have enjoyed is these new hire breakfasts where I'll just get on a zoom call for an hour with five or six people and one of the member of the exec team and we'll do a breakfast conversation with people that are just joining that's really special and I always wish they're longer. I always want to do a follow up. So it's kind of like okay, well how do you persist past that too? But that's been one nice way to kind of make those connections. But I think that the bigger thing we're seeing still and we don't have a solution for yet is you know, I think people report that have just joined the report. Actually the onboarding goes okay. We've really reoriented a lot of our onboarding processes around being remote and you know, not being able to just kind of tap someone on the shoulder. While the team connection is high, the connection to the overall company is not as high and people don't have the serendipity of like oh yeah, Sarah's on my team but like I've met her because we sat at lunch together one day. So I'm trying to think through ways to encourage that. One idea I've had recently is like can we just like find ways to, to recommend people who you should meet? So seeing if we can implement that in some way. But it's yeah, it's tough and we're still figuring that out.

Is the way that you communicate with your direct reports and your leadership team different.

So we're making an effort on the leadership team to do more decision making Async. So for example, just having threads in Slack where we someone has a doc and then we were able to kind of like have a deadline for when you need to reply to something by and we have a conversation on the doc, rather than having as a staff meeting topic, for example, we're going a bit more written and overall, but I still think we have a lot more headway to do there.

So what about the customer and user facing side of figma? I'm sure you had a lot of synchronous meetings even in person with people as they're learning figma as they're expanding usage in their organizations. Like how are you replacing that, changing that, interacting with the community?

There's a bunch of different ways to talk to this. I think first of all, the customer interaction part, I don't think that's changed too meaningfully. Although we're always trying to figure out different ways to kind of scale our availability to customers and so that's probably the bigger input there. The bigger thing is that we have a lot of events that we support and there are user groups around figma, so trying to find ways for them to meet virtually has been very interesting. And then I think in terms of use cases for figma, that's been the most fascinating to me is that I've just seen this explosion in ways that figma is used. We're seeing that people are spending so much more time in figma now. If you look at the number of days that people use figma out of 7, 5 days out of 7, 6 days out of 7, 7 days out of 7. Usage has exploded since COVID and it's like very clear that's, that's like the, that's the reason why you just look at the. It's like here's when Shelter in place started and here's when 5, 6, 7 day out of 7 usage rose. Because of that I think people are just exploring all these ways to use figma that are not interface design, which is really cool and motivating for us to try to figure out ways to build more products for them to capture those use cases.

What's your theory on why that's happening? Why are people in FIGMA more.

I mean, I think the scary part is that I think people have less boundaries between work and home. One theory I have, which there's no way to validate this with data necessarily, but I think it's a little bit harder to be afraid and anxious when you're being creative. And so I think it can also be an escape.

Okay, I understand the negative of work taking over all of your time, but that's a little bit inspirational.

I definitely like that.

Is there anything that you guys are doing in the product differently or with your roadmap in reaction to that kind of usage you're seeing.

Yeah, a lot with the roadmap that I can't talk about yet. Unfortunately Influencer are thinking in all sorts of ways and I'm pretty excited to over the next, probably next year or so, start to show people in the.

Community that this is the result of lots of different things you guys have continually shipped over the last year. But I'm super excited to see people do things that I never expected in figma, like play games and create worlds.

Yeah, there's a student thread and one that I saw was from Waterloo and she was using FIGMA for circuit design and then someone else followed up and they're like oh yeah, I'm using it for my models project where they're creating this robotic system and someone else was using it for something that was more like an interior architecture project or something like that. And so it's like just cool to see the expansion of use cases into things that we did not intend FIGMA to be used for too. Maybe not even as creative as like building a new world or a city or a game, but it's very practical.

Yeah. Well, I think related to your previous point of it's a little harder to be scared when you're creative maybe. I definitely also think if you are feeling trapped in a world that is in limbo for a while, being creative is also a way to like make that world feel bigger.

It's a great way to say it.

Nobody thought we'd be here five or six months later, but here we are. How do you think about sustaining like figmas growth as you go forward and with any luck bringing us into a new normal and what that looks like for figma.

Yep. The way that we thought about this for the team was rather than trying to think about sort of the going into the office again and trying to figure out reopening that is this very complex and and hard problem on its own. And so I like to think more about sort of like what's the end state. Let's assume there's been a vaccine and it's been six months. Like if you get Covid, it's easy to treat that now. Hopefully that's not overly optimistic. Hopefully that's our reality soon. But I think it's easier for me at least to think through that reality and then work our way backwards to how do we reopen and how do we get to that versus trying to think through linearly. And so I started having this conversation with my exec team and leadership figma Maybe a month or two in. And it was really hard because I think even relying on a language and concepts is hard. Like the entire world, to me, it seems, is going more remote here. And I think there's like all these trends that show that, you know, we've got software, hopefully Figma's part of that that makes it more possible for people to be remote. We have increasing economic changes, we have the student debt crisis, we have further economic instability. And this means that people are going to be looking for ways to save money on cost of living. I think that we have, you know, more companies that as they go through this remote experiment of COVID are seeing actually this can work for us. And some of the companies will permanently be remote. And as more people go through those company experiences of places that have gone remote, different people in the workforce will expect the ability to remote. And so I think it's really hard to not support remote in 2021, 2022. And that was one conclusion I came to pretty fast. But then it's like, okay, well how do you actually navigate to that change? And also, do you shut down an office? Do you go for a hybrid model? If you go for a hybrid model, like, what's your plan for work from home? And so in order to kind of like answer these questions, one thing we did was we made a survey just to see what people's preferences were, because it really helped us to get grounded in the data. And the results I thought were were pretty fascinating. So just to give you some stats for it, we had, first of all, it was like 90% employee participation. And that was kind of impressive, I thought on its own, because we set it out a link. We closed the survey after four or five days and we never remind people of it. Like 90% of our employees folded out anyway, which our survey completion rates are usually pretty good, but they're not that good unless we bug people a lot. So that was neat to see that people just had such opinions on it in the first place. One thing that we learned was that a substantial percentage of our employee population, like over 70% came to the office via public transit. And so that's one thing that immediately I was a little shocked by and went, wow, reopening is going to be very tough. You know, we had over 80% of our employees agree or strongly agree with the statement, you know, despite global events, I generally feel productive while work from home. So I was another surprise was that actually this is tough. And definitely some of the free text around that was, well, look like I'M not as productive, but I still am productive. And then we asked people, okay, if, if we gave you multiple work from home days a week or made it, you know, more flexible in general, would you consider moving to another city within commute distance? And 47% of people that live in SF on our team said, yes, I would consider moving to another city within a commute distance if Figma offered multiple work from home days per week. And again, this is all about like cost of living and people wanting to get these life milestones of like starting a family, buying a home, being closer to their family. And then we asked, okay, are you open to Figma being remote friendly? And we had almost 90% of people say, yes, I'm open to making my team remote friendly. We asked people, okay, would you consider moving to a non hub location? In other words, being remote before the end of 2022? And we had, I think over 2/3 of people say, I would consider that all this were very high rates. And so that I think made us go, okay, wow, we really need to think through our approach here. And I don't want to paint a vision of like, everyone wants remote at Figma because we don't. You know, I think there's a lot of people that really value the in person collaboration too. And so it's, it's a hairy, hard problem. And I think that, you know, where we landed was more of a hybrid model where you have to designate as remote or not remote. And if you designate as not remote, you have to be tied to a hub location. And I think this is really important because you need to have predictability about like, where will I find this person? And if you designate as non remote, then you do have flexible work from home. We encourage everybody to come to the office two days a week and those two days will be the same days per week. So I think that as we validated sort of the hybrid model and asked a lot of people about it that have gone through that, one thing that we heard was that it can become a ghost town very quickly. And so that's one thing that, you know, it's like, we'll make it flexible. We'll encourage days that are the same days, but if that doesn't work, then maybe that becomes more mandatory or maybe we change that opinion over time. And then, you know, on remote it's like, okay, if you're assuming that you go through a process, everything will have to go through a process. For HR reasons, we'll allow people to go remote anywhere in the United States. I think we're not doing Hawaii at first, due to some random benefits reasons. And then there will be required, even as we open up additional locations, you will be required to have sufficient overlap with your team in terms of working hours. And so I think that another one's really important is that, you know, it's okay to hire remote. Obviously, that can work. You need the predictability, you need the inclusion, which will be an entire. Another thing that we're going to have to work through. But then also there has to be enough overlap with the team. When we announced this, the company we talked about, like, here's how remote will affect us, here's the megatrends, here's our decision that based on the data we've collected here is the way it impacts our roadmap, here's how it impacts the community. But overall, we said, look, while we're going to try a hybrid model, this is going to be really hard. And we know this because we talk to people and they told us it's going to be really hard. And so, you know, I think there's a lot of people out there and voices like, for example, Sid from GitLab, that say hybrid is not a good idea. You know, I think we'll need to see if that's true or not for ourselves. I'm a believer that it can work, but I don't want to minimize how difficult it might be. And we'll have to work through that together with the company.

Yeah, it's very interesting because there hasn't been such a period of experimentation of, like, how you manage teams, in my opinion, a lot of time, forced experimentation. But you have very smart people like Sid. Or we just had Adam from Quora on and he was like, well, I'm not going into the office because I don't believe we can have people not go into the office if I'm not going. So we will see. But I'm excited to see, like, a lot of different types of companies in terms of how they work together thrive. Because we haven't had that. What sort of concerns do people have, either in your executive team or from the broader Figma team when you describe.

The approach, Despite Figma being a product that enables collaboration, I think part of the draw to figma is the team cares a lot about collaboration. And so there's one ongoing question that we've had to wrestle with. And I think this part kind of ties back to the roadmap thing too. So I'll be a bit vague about it, but how do you make it so that people can collaborate and really be effective when you have a hybrid model and when you have people that are maybe in the office, maybe at home, maybe at another place entirely in a different time zone. And how do you make those collaboration flows work? And yeah, I think there's a lot of problems to solve there that our software at Figma, but also just more globally, does not solve yet.

Yeah, I have a picture in my mind of like Figma design reviews happening in a circle on a beach somewhere with everybody's giant screens and trying to figure out how that's going to happen in the new world. And thinking about that transition, how do you think about the timing of this? Obviously you can't predict what happens in terms of global health and policy, but assuming we're in this world where we, we can go back into offices safely, how do you think about sequencing and also beginning to hire more remotely?

Yeah. So one thing we're doing as we announce this more publicly is we're making it so that all of our, pretty much all of our existing roles are open for remote employees. And by remote, I mean again, it's going to be United States right now. And then we separately have some stuff going on in the uk, but that's been more specific to go to market. And then over time we'll open up different locations in different countries. It is a payroll and like legal accounting challenge to open up new locations. It's not trivial. So that's something that will happen over time, not immediately. As we open up those roles, we'll be able to see more traction there.

So, Dylan, everything that's going on with figma occupying 99% of your brain space, when you're looking at all of the change that's happening in the world right now and all the new problem statements that we have, like, what else are you thinking about? What excites you?

Oh man, so much. I don't know if excitement's the right word. Along with everybody else right now I'm a little anxious, which maybe is a different side of excitement. But I'm looking at the global economy right now and I think we're in strange times for sure. And I think I'm excited by some of the stuff that's happening in decentralized finance right now, even though it's a bit buzzy and I think there'll probably be some huge swings and corrections as that world kind of figures out what works long term and what doesn't. I'm definitely excited by the range of remote tools that are coming up and all the approaches that are happening there. I think like you said, we're going to this time of experimentation both in the management side, but also on the tooling side and there will be a lot of really interesting approaches that I think will come out of this.

Are you guys experimenting with or trying anything new yourselves beyond Figma?

I mean, as an individual, yes, I am trying a lot of things to see what could work longer term. But on the company side, because we're so focused on security, there's not a lot that we can implement in terms of most existing new startups don't pass octo right away and don't have the controls that we need for our communication. So we're a bit limited there, but we're trying to figure out ways to help them and give them the feedback they need to get there. So yeah, I wish I had a better answer there, but I'm quite excited about things like Tandem for example. And you know, Loom is another one that are companies that I talk with a lot and I think that are really good ways to potentially have presence when you're synchronous for Tandem and Async for Loom.

Just rewinding back to this point you made about culture and the in office culture of Figma being so important to you guys. Previously a big part of culture does come from the founders. So you and Evan and then you as CEO, is there anything you're doing to try to be more present or visible for your team now we're really.

Trying to just over communicate right now. And it happened since the start of COVID I think given the level of uncertainty, we were just doing everything we could to really clearly tell people, okay, here's where the business is at, here's where our heads are at, here's what's changing, here's what's not changing. And we were sending emails I think once or twice a week at that point, even just trying to recap and keep the momentum going around inquiry communication. Now that things are a bit more sort of settled in, we're not doing it like every week in that same way in terms of writing communication, although we still have all hands every other week and we have show and tell, which in our forum we used to communicate on off weeks to all hands. And then I think we're starting to do more email communication as well. But yeah, I think that this is a time that we actually need a lot stronger leadership because people are really lacking that at the national level. And so it ends up being that I think People look for that at the company level instead.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think also just being so restricted from our normal social fabric, if you're lucky enough to continue to be working, that is kind of your community right now.

And I think this is another challenge. How does remote impact our community? And are you familiar with the idea of like a third place? Basically, it's like this idea that, you know, you have the first place is home, the second place is work, and the third place is sort of like a place where you can hang out with people that share your interests. These are like fairly wholesome places. They're places that are pretty positive and they have regular people that come to them a lot. And so I think that that's one of our challenges that we're thinking about is like, how do we create that place for people that are really interested in design? And I want to figure that out as one of the challenges that is really in my mind right now.

I would not consider myself a designer, but I would say I'm interested in design in a really committed way. So I look forward to someday meeting people in the third place of Figma.

Cool.

So two last questions just for our mostly entrepreneurial listener audience. First is, like, as you said, global economic and political instability, uncertainty. Figma is extraordinarily lucky in that it is built for this and has usage that is supported by the work pattern that everybody's going through. But you still have to be thinking differently about planning at this time. So as a CEO, like, how do you look forward right now?

You always have to be looking at first principles in the first place and what your inputs are. If you don't have someone on the team that's like forecasting, then you need to build that muscle yourself or hire somebody. And so if you're building the muscle yourself, definitely go find people that are experts in this because it is a craft to be able to create a great forecast. And then I think really figuring out sort of what your model is and what your inputs are to that model is super important because that way you can measure and figure out what's going to change over time. One method that I found really useful to kind of like help our team align on some of our inputs was to kind of try to create this almost. We call it a KPI tree for our business. And this is an idea that our VP products Yuki, brought from Uber. And basically it was a. It's sort of like a graph that shows okay, at the very end you have revenue, but it's like, here are all the metrics that are the input metrics. And here's all the ways that everything ladders up to that. And we all create our own versions of this. And then looking at the different versions people made, we were able to recombine them into one master tree. And from that we were able to say, okay, here is this tree that we can refer back to. I think it didn't meaningfully impact our model yet, but it did impact the metrics that we track and that we're trying to optimize for for the company and our model. For example, for Figmas, we look at, okay, what's the number of new page views we get? And that kind of like cascades down to how much ARR we're going to be generating and what leads the sales team might have, et cetera. And so I think you have to really have a deep understanding of what that looks like. And then you have to be able to forecast forward, okay, if various events happen, what's sort of like a base case that we can expect, what's like the bear case, what's the bull case, maybe for the COVID unstable world, like, what's the bare minus case or something. And then really think through, okay, what are the gates? If we get to date X and Y is happening, how does it affect our hiring plan? Do we have to do something more drastic, et cetera? And so I think just being really realistic with yourself and going through that model and having a plan that you're going to follow is important right now.

So it sounds like you've forecasted different scenarios and you're trying to be more proactive about like, well, what are the set of things that could could happen versus having some rapid cadence of reacting to everything all the time. Because there's a little too much to react to right now.

Yeah, exactly.

We have this conversation at the board level all the time. And I have the privilege of being in some companies that, like Figma, they have pretty regular visibility, right? Like we know what our trial starts look like every week, for example. But I think that can actually be a trap. And so the conversation that we've been having with some of the founders I work with right now is very similar in that you don't want to be whiplashing the team always replanning. If you are trying to react to the major events of 2020, like, good luck, my friend. And I wouldn't say I would have predicted this, but the sort of magnitude of change we were facing, the uncertainty, is something that I hadn't seen before. And so we kind of like threw out the book and said, you know, let's have some sort of rolling forecast with different scenarios and let's, let's make them pretty extreme. Right. And some of those situations can be break glass, but we should know so we're not thinking about it for the first time, should these things happen. Last question for you here. What other advice would you give early and mid stage entrepreneurs navigating this time?

I think this is easier to say when things are going well, but just to be as open and empathetic with your team as they can right now. You know, so many people are going through so many challenges and to know where they're at in terms of the context of the workplace and what's going on is so helpful. And then I think showing them empathy and understanding their situation is really helpful as well.

Well, I've admired you for such a long time as a rapidly growing empathetic leader, so we can all try to be like that. So fun part. Quick takes. Okay. Stuck at home. What is one piece of content? Book, tweet, podcast, whatever movie that you think people should go read, listen to?

I've been doing a lot of science fiction recently, so if you haven't read like Neal Stephenson, for example, I would go read like most of Neal Stephenson's stuff.

Awesome. Okay, great. Classic. What about a shout out? Somebody at Figma having stepped up during this period of time?

Ooh, there's so many people. Wow. I mean, I think like I have to give a shout out to Marie, our head of people who I've been on many, many late night calls with and who has been a key partner to me in thinking through all the things we talked about today.

Yeah. Thank you, Marie. Gargantuan challenge that you're facing right now and all the, all the smart heads of people out there. Okay, and then last one discovery. Any weird things you've learned about yourself, your family, the team in this period of time?

We moved at the start of COVID and one thing that is a recent discovery is that my fiance, I knew that she was an amazing woodworker already because I've seen stuff she's done and we've done projects together, but she took on a project to build some shelves that fit just like very custom in our space. And after she finished the project, I was able to more unpack and get the books on the shelf and like, my gosh, just like having books around makes me so happy. And I had no idea what I was missing by not having books. Just like in my sort of visual line of sight now that they're unpacked. And just like, how do we not have these unpacked for so long? So that's a discovery is just like a very small thing. But, like, having a bookshelf makes me very happy.

It's very soothing. It used to cause me angst where I'm like, I'm not going to be able to acquire this knowledge before I die. There's too many books or too many books to experience. It doesn't even have to be knowledge acquisition. It could be Neal Stephenson. But now I'm like, you know what? I just like having them here. And someday I'll try to get to x percent of them. It'll be great.

Yep.

Awesome. Okay, well, on that note, thanks a lot, Dylan, and good luck with the FIGMA shift to hybrid.

Thank you.

Okay, everyone, that concludes this episode of Great Matter. Next up, I'm incredibly excited to talk with Shishir Marotra, co founder and CEO of Coda and former leader at YouTube and Microsoft. Find our episodes wherever you get your podcasts or get Episodes and blogs on our website greylock.com and on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Sarah Guoa, and thanks for listening.