LIVE FROM NYSE FOR $FIG | Dylan Field, Lynn Martin, Kris Rasmussen, Andrew Reed, Danny Rimer, Mamoon Hamid

You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, July 31, 2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange. It's the FIGMA ipo. This is the real fortress of finance. We have created a simulacrum of the fortress of finance in Hollywood, California. But today we're in New York City, we're in Manhattan, we're in the financial district, we're on Wall street at the New York Stock Exchange. And the mood is electric. It is wild.

Just down here a second ago the, there was a crowd breaking out, cheering.

Yes.

And it is really a sight to see.

Yes. So FIGMA is going public today and earlier today Dylan Field and the Figma team rang the bell to open the market. And then throughout the course of the day the, the, the market is in the process of, of filling orders and actually taking the stock public and getting liquidity into the stock.

And I will say Figma has really made this place their own. Every single floor and space in this building has been designed.

Yes, yes, yes.

Which makes sense. They're taking design public.

There's little like graphics on the floor. There's every single, every single digital billboard has been done up with a motion graphic treatment.

Even signs pointing you around the building. The merch they, they made merch for. The merch looks great process that they do. But they made merch for a bunch of the employees in the building and they're all wearing. It looks stunning. I want it for myself. Everyone's very happy and it's just absolutely incredible to be here.

So we will be interviewing a number of people today in and around the FIGMA ipo, taking you through the story of what's unfolding here on the ground.

Some guy with the username Zoink, he's got an NFT profile picture.

Yeah, yeah, he's in the.

I think his name might be. Oh, his name's Dylan Field.

Dylan Field, yeah.

Dylan Field will be joining the show. Very excited for that. Chris, the CTO of FIGMA will be joining as well.

Great.

Of course Andrew Reed, friend of the show and former guest will be joining from Sequoia. And then Danny from Index, Danny Reimer Mamun from Kleiner Perkins and last but not least, Lynn Martin from the New York Stock Exchange itself.

Fantastic. So we should have about a 90 minute show for you. We are going to say thanks to our sponsors now. Thank you to ramp, ramp.com, time is money. Save both. Thank you to Figma. We one of our sponsors. We're very proud to be partnering with them. Vanta you can go to vanta.com linear linear app graphite graphite.dev8sleep.com of course wander, you can find your happy place at wander.com public.com if you're looking to trade public securities. Ad quick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Bezel go to getbezel.com numero hq.com adio.com fin AI and of course Restream, which wouldn't. Which the stream wouldn't be possible without. So without further ado, let's take you through what else is in the news so then we can dive more deeply into the Figma ipo. So we covered this yesterday.

A little bit distracting. Everybody keeps breaking out into applause.

People are really, really happy. It's, it's. We'll get into some of the timeline and what's going on, but everyone's very.

Happy for me on a personal level. I mean, I'll start this off by saying nothing on today's show is financial advice. Yes, we're not qualified to give financial advice. We're qualified, but I do feel qualified to talk about the product. Yeah, I was lucky. I've basically been lucky to spend my entire career using.

Here we go.

And I can't even hear myself because people are.

You gotta yell into the mic. They are. Really, they're. Yep. So, yeah, assuming that means frustrating. I think it's opening. Fantastic. So, yeah, you were going to talk about your journey using Figma. It's a real overnight success. So the stock is officially open. Here we go. Everyone's excited. You can hear it.

And people on X are celebrating. They maybe got access to one share.

Yes, yes. They're having trouble with that, the listings. But the excitement is palpable across both the online and offline world. We're seeing it here and there's so.

Many people that wanted to invest in this business forever rounds ago. Totally private markets and it's even public.

Companies wanted to invest in Figma at one point.

Yes, yes. Do a little bit more than invest.

Yes, yes, yes.

But anyways. But now I was going to say, I mean the context here, you know, is very surreal for me. I've been lucky. I don't really know a time before Figma.

Yeah.

Sketch was like kind of on the way out. I used it here and there early in my career. But I've been in Figma every single day as somebody that never identified as a designer, more of an ideas guy, more of a product guy. And it's just been with me throughout my Entire career, someone was saying on the timeline, I think it was Norgaard who was saying, you can tell when a product's made with love. And despite Figma growing and launching so many different products, products over the years, you can just tell that the people that design and build Figma care so much about the people that use the products.

Totally. Yeah. A true overnight success. Four years working, four years grinding, grinding to get to launch Fat MVP as they call it. And then another decade or so building the public, building the product and the customer base and launching a lot of products. So what a fantastic journey. I remember like learning about Dylan Field as this like, like, you know, teal fellow wunderkin and seeing that the product was growing and that they were always getting rounds done, but they were never like the totally frothy company. It was just like compounding, compounding, compounding.

I pulled it up earlier. So Index did the seed round and somebody, Terrence Rohan, I guess was there as well.

Yeah.

So I'm sure he's doing well. And then Greylock did the Series A, but the seed round was 3.8 million. Somewhat of a modest seed, Today's dollars.

Yeah, yeah.

The Series A was by Greylock for 14 million in total. KP did the B, a 25 million dollar round. Andrew Reed and Sequoia came in and did 40 and then the series D was 50. And then the other thing is, I believe it was GC and iconic.

Yeah.

That did the round in 2022. Okay, I'm going to look it up.

Sure.

But anyways, the vibes here on Wall street are good. It's absolutely electric if you look.

Yeah. It's not just stigma. The timing is remarkable because I mean, yesterday we got news that the US GDP grew at 3% which beat estimates. And so the economy has returned to growth is on the front of the Wall Street Journal. Of course we covered this a little bit yesterday, but obviously a good environment. People were talking about like, will the IPO window open? And it kind of opened months ago, but people were still not declaring it fully open because it felt like, oh, this is one special company that's sneaking out. This is just one. Maybe this is core weave.

That makes sense.

Yeah, Core weave, exactly.

Stablecoins.

Yep. And now it's like, okay, well all of the companies that make Sense are now going public and it's really exciting.

Yeah. And there was some commentary earlier on the timeline. People talking about more companies need to be taking advantage of, of this moment. Right. There's a lot of companies that probably, you know, the Window's wide open, right?

It is if it makes sense. But it doesn't make sense for every company to go public for a variety of reasons.

The bar is just so high now. It is part of what makes the Figma IPO special. Just looking at the rule of 40 and just looking at their business broadly, it's, you know, coming out and, you know, day one being one of the most impressive companies in SaaS.

Yeah, yeah. And then the other news is that the Fed has kept rates steady. Over rare dissents, two of the members of the Fed said no, we should lower rates, but they were overruled and the Fed kept rates high. And this is interesting because you'd think if they cut rates, we'd see the market ripping anymore. Even more. The market's already ripping, which is kind of like, it feels like a little bit of like a safety deposit box, like a rainy day fund, that if something doesn't go well in the markets, there's still that lever to pull. And so it feels reassuring that the economy's growing. Well, we're also seeing big tech earnings perform very well. And then we also have high rates. So I mean the timing number of like the health of the consumer is strong, unemployment is doing well. There's just good news all across the economy, which I feel like we've been dancing around from one. One bull case, one minor story, one sliver of hope for a while now we're really firing on big tech.

Big tech, big deck, big tech having just blow out earnings yesterday.

They call figment big.

Dax, I've made so many decks in figma you wouldn't believe. But yeah, big tech just blowing out earnings. Microsoft, yes, Meta, et cetera. Certainly doesn't hurt.

Yeah, I saw the, I saw the headline number. We talked about Google having something like $100 billion in cloud backlog. So if they could fill it today, they could just make $100 billion of. I mean, these might be longer dated contracts.

People might not want this, but kind of business. This is not financial advice, but business advice. Build up $100 billion customer backlog.

Yeah, yeah.

Demand backlog.

Just do that.

Yeah, Especially focus on that.

Everything else will kind of.

Yeah, everything else. Yeah. The share price will take care of itself at that point. So Google's been doing very well. Apparently Azure and Microsoft Cloud has even an even larger backlog. Something around 300 billion I was seeing, I'm not sure. But the Wall Street Journal is breaking down Microsoft's cloud business, which is driving a lot of the profits. That makes sense in the age of AI and every relationship with OpenAI. Exactly. And so the Wall Street Journal kicks off by saying demand for Microsoft's artificial intelligence services continues to pay off for the company. Its cloud computing units saw another high growth quarter while the tech giant spends heavily on building out its AI data centers. Now there has been some timeline and turmoil over, over whether or not the depreciation is. The depreciation calculations are too aggressive for some of the hyperscalers. Somebody was talking about Meta specifically, but when I was reading into it, a lot of people were saying like, no, the depreciation schedule is widely disclosed. It's actually very well understood they're not doing anything that crazy. And yes, it feels like it feels crazy to go out and buy a ton of the Most advanced Nvidia GPUs that might be, quote unquote obsolete. Like next year when there's a new model and new hardware out there that you want to be, that we want to be taking advantage of. But if you think about those cloud workloads staying around and growing and doing the thing that is that they are capable at for a very long time.

Yeah, we've covered a lot on the show. The sort of like capability overhang. Even if the models don't get smarter, which they are, there's still so much to build and so much value to unlock. Agentic workflow.

Yes. I mean there's so many like just PDF to pipeline into databases and just.

Yeah, we're still getting really good, we're getting really good at PDF knowledge retrieval.

Just, just basic knowledge retrieval is just a massive market for, for business overall. So the clouds groups. The cloud group's strong performance powered Microsoft during the last quarter of the fiscal year. The company on Wednesday also outlined that its first quarter would be better than analysts projected. Wall street cheered and the result cheered the results, sending shares of Microsoft up 9% in aftermarket trading. The support carries over. If the support carries over to trading Thursday, which is today, the company could be worth around $4 trillion. That's that number that Nvidia broke. But also of course their capex is growing significantly and they are getting very, very close to spending over $25 billion in a current investment. A single quarter on capex. But when you have that type of cloud backlog, makes a lot of sense to build the data centers to service that backlog.

Yeah, been fairly pragmatic if you think about, you know, some. I mean, he's conducted multiple layoffs this year. He's clearly feeling the pull of AI but not getting over his skis wants to. Wants, you know, seems to be managing through this kind of euphoric revenue ramp.

Yeah, I saw a funny post that was like something the effect of like well, we now know that Satya is good for his 80 billion.

Yeah.

Because he blew out earnings and he's been doing fantastically so just since April where after Liberation Day and all of the big tech stocks kind of selling off in the first quarter of the year, Microsoft's been an absolute tear up 20% over the baseline on the year where The S&P 500 has been around 8% up and so outperforming the S&P 500. Broadly, big tech continues undefeated.

The Windows Microsoft is sitting at 3.98 trillion. It's up 4% today but they're just touching 4T.

They're trying.

So close. So close.

Well, good luck to them and everyone involved.

The funny thing to think about is imagine you joined Meta. Yeah you know, maybe a couple weeks ago and the stock with, with this like you know, massive nine figure comp structure and then you're immediately made. You've been averaging basically making you know an extra million dollars a day in stock based comp. If you.

Oh I didn't even think about that.

People were running the math on how many AI researchers, you know, you, you know, the, the added, you know, you could, you could Zuck could go and do this, this round of aggressive every single day, every single day for a while.

It's wild. So let's continue with Microsoft earnings. The Windows maker is among the many tech companies trying to cash in on the expected AI windfall. The cloud offerings, its cloud offerings put it in stronger position to capitalize than other firms because of course they are very neutral in terms of what they are building. Such has been very model agnostic. He has great access to OpenAI which is leading API but then he's also so happy to sell you llama or Groq or anything else. And so he's kind of acting as a de facto model router in many ways. Model router companies are obviously doing something different and helpful in other contexts, especially in terms of bidding against Microsoft.

He's excited to be a platform but.

He is embracing the platform. Of course. Of course.

Yeah. I'm interested to see if the markets when, when the OpenAI Microsoft negotiation around their whole licensing deal. They're cheering again. Not exactly sure why but I love the sound of it and anyways it'll be interesting to see if the market reacts positively to that at all. I know Satya cares a lot about the partnership and I'm sure both sides are negotiating their hearts out.

So Satya Nadella said, we are going through a generational tech shift with AI. Absolutely true. Microsoft reported revenue of 76.24 billion for its fourth fiscal quarter. The figure topped Wall Street's expectations. It's closely watched. Azure cloud business grew 39% beating expectations. This is already a massive business in a highly competitive market. They compete directly with GCP and AWS and so they're doing fantastically. All the cloud providers seem to be doing very well. Operating income increased 22% to 34.3 billion, higher than consensus projections. So they beat on top line and bottom line. The company said net income was 27.2 billion or $3.65 a diluted share. That figure also topped analyst projections. They're just blowing it out across the board. This AI adoption is really helping the whole portfolio. It certainly gives us great confidence in our ability to continue to lead in the cloud and AI wave that is here. And so in other news, the micro Meta also beat earnings and went up what, 10%? Something like that. You mentioned this soaring Meta ad revenue fuels push into artificial intelligence. 22% revenue growth in its second quarter. We've talked to a lot of people about this. Like they're just like when you're in one of these companies that has the ability to continue to compound seemingly endlessly. It's just one of the best online.

Ads are big market.

Yeah. One of the best like financial phenomenon to ever exist.

Yeah.

And so showing that core ad revenue business remains strong at a time when the company is investing billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. For the first time this year, the company is spending its top capital, is held its top capital spending projection steady. A move that is sure to ease investor concerns after Mark Zuckerberg's AI spending spree. Shares rose more than 11% in after hours trading. And it's interesting to read into the CapEx numbers because we were, we were talking about that they might be limited on power. So it might not be that Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta team want to necessarily hold back capex, but the market and the public market certainly is looking at that as oh well, you know, ad revenue grew a ton and you didn't even need to spend more on CapEx. Maybe that's coming down the down the pipe in coming quarters, but not this quarter. And so everything across the board looks, looks much better for the company. Shares rose more than 11% in after hours trading. The results show the extent to which Meta's advertising business will continue to pay for the company's outsized AI ambitions, as well as how the AI tools are contributing to its strength. Sales came in at 47.5 billion, ahead of analyst expectations, and net income was at 18.3 billion, also ahead of market expectations. Technology giants said it expects to post between 17 and 24% revenue growth year over year for the current quarter. The investments it's making in AI are already paying off in its ads business, said a researcher. That is the third biggest technology company to report this earnings cycle. And shareholders are keeping a close watch on the extent to which revenue is increasing as a result of the AI boom relative to spending levels.

And Geiger Capital is reporting on X. Meta is now up 760% from its 2022 low.

Wow.

After the failure of the Metaverse, never doubt Zuck. Obviously there was a bunch of other factors going on there, broader correction, rise in.

But yeah, the Metaverse bet certainly didn't translate to bottom line.

I do remember the iconic image of Zox Fair space in the Metaverse.

Yeah.

The Wii moment, the Wii Graphics.

Okay, we're a little bit away from the Metaverse.

Yeah.

And the Oculus or the Meta Quest would sell well at Christmas time, but it wouldn't like the stickiness just wasn't there to drive real adoption. And then of course, you know, the whole goal was never just to be in the hardware business and sell $300 headsets. The goal was to be a platform and then take an ad store like cut of all software that sold through those headsets. You need. You can't just get the install base up. You actually have to get the DAU base up. That hasn't happened yet, but maybe it will in the Future.

Meta ended 2024 with 44 billion in cash. In cash equivalents, they're now down to 12 billion. So he's been spent. He's been on a spending spree, which makes sense. We've been tracking it. I wanted to cover an article here that Sarah Guo just posted. She says design goes public. It took Dylan Field and Evan Wallace and I think she's here in the building somewhere. Yeah, we'll try to get her on. She says it took Dylan Field and Evan Wallace more than four years to go from founding Figma to public launch. They built Figma playing for the end game, not the headlines. Dylan didn't chase growth at all costs or settle what they could ship in 10 weeks. He didn't try to crush competitors. Instead he spent a decade obsessing over the product he imagined should exist and the best company he could making design and software product delivery more powerful and collaborative. He consistently acted with integrity and thoughtfulness. Turns out, not just good turn. Turns out that's not just good philosophy. It's a strategy for a special business. In 2014, when John Lilly led Greylock Series A investment, Dylan and his team had seven people in a nondescript office on Alma street in Palo Alto and barely an alpha product. But they described a future with remarkable foresight. A high performance, collaborative multiplayer design tool built natively for the web, harnessing all its power, changing product development forever. And this product was just so incredibly viral. Obviously, people don't design in a silo. They would make something, share it with people instantly. You could just open it in the browser, you could see everyone else's cursor. And we take that kind of software for granted now. But it's because so, so many different companies realized how powerful it was and moved to and were inspired by Figma.

I mean, it's the difference between Instagram and Hipstamatic. They both had photo filtering and people saw them as tools for photo filtering. But Instagram bootstrapped a network and was worth billions. And now probably we have, you spun it out worth like hundreds of billions.

So Sarah says Figma had its fair share of challenges. Market size was an early question.

Recognition.

People were just looking at the market and being like, how many designers are there really out there? How many are willing to pay for this?

Totally, totally.

And they were burning, Sarah says they were burning $800,000 a month pre launch. So no, no sign, no, no real sign of validation other than their own conviction.

So bold.

She says, like with any startup, getting early pilot customers required cajoling of our friends. Competitors who built less product for a while seemed ahead of Dylan, persisted, driven more by conviction than fear. He assembled a team of remarkable people. Chris Rasmussen, who's going to be on later, Sho Kuwamato, Claire Butler, Previr Melwani, Kyle Parish, Amanda Klea, Yuki Yamashita and more. Each of these Figmates, which is a good name, Figmates contributed extraordinary talent.

Fig Leafs.

Fig Leafs.

But Figmates makes more sense.

Dylan himself evolved dramatically along the way, from a clearly talented, thoughtful dropout founder to a formidable CEO capable of scaling a legendary company. And this is a special one for me. Again, to just experience the product first as a user and then somebody that followed tech closely and being able to watch his evolution as a CEO is just amazing. I mean, the hardest, the hardest thing.

You learned Who Dylan Field was or did you use the product first?

I think he always had insane aura. I do think I used the product. I must have used the product.

I think I probably used the product first or it was brought into my, my organization first because again, it's not.

Like he was coming out the gate raising 50 million or whatever. These were relatively normal rounds. They were great.

Completely different. Go to Market Motion back then too.

Yeah, it was.

I mean this viral launch video podcast growth. Yes, the showing the power of that. At just a few million in revenue, the board received a letter about aligning our path to ipo. Very few people, very few other people play secret Hitler as ruthlessly against their own spouse or casually suggest starting a game of diplomacy at 11pm These aren't just games. To Dylan, they were exercises in long term strategy. The same discipline that meant figma. I don't know if, I don't know.

If we're getting news that the first trade might happen in a few minutes. And so I think people are getting ready for the first trade to happen. And so they're chanting figma, Figma. I love it. This is wild. Absolutely wild with the piece.

When you're ready, Sarah says. At figma's IPO roadshow last week, two developer advocates. Great job. Jake and Tom spent the first 35 minutes of the presentation doing a comprehensive live demo. It's something I'm convinced had never been done before to a room full of bankers, mutual fund managers and hedge fund investors. Afterwards, Dylan turned to me with that familiar, slightly nutty gleam in his eye. I want them to understand the product they're investing in. They're all going to be designers eventually.

Wow.

I do believe that in some ways I've become a better designer over the years, even though I'm not classically trained. Just because the Figma product's gotten better. As Figma gets better, I get better. And that's such a powerful feedback loop. Today, millions rely on Figma and its scope and power continues expanding. The IPO is proof that special founders can reshape even entrenched categories and that they will find the surrounding hills to climb. And focus on product is rarely wrong. It underscores that technology matters. We covered this yesterday and at config, but you know that focus on WebGL early like that was. That was the why now. And it's. It can be rare to have a true technological why now. Oftentimes founders try to.

I think that's the first trade.

First trade.

Dylan just rang the bell for the.

First trade is at 93. All right, climbing to 93.

Climbing. Wow, that is amazing.

Dylan looks absolutely fantastic. Is that a purple suit? That's remarkable.

We should just turn this around, show the screen right there.

Good idea.

There we go. You can see the screen.

Put it, put it down and just point it up maybe.

There we go.

There we go. Oh, so emotional. So emotional. It's remarkable going through the almost acquisition block to make it back here. Well beyond. And the employees too. I mean, the resilience, right?

Totally.

We saw this last week or the week before, you know, the Windsurf team thinking they're getting acquired by Open AI. It doesn't go through. And that was a different scenario, but they really had to build, you know, find a new gear.

Yeah, I mean, we all know that there was a breakup fee, but yeah, it didn't hurt. But the Valley, like the value of focus is just so underrated. And you think about that for that, like, how long were they going through that process? Like a year. And the amount of distraction, both from just like a legal compliance financial thing, but also just like, well, you think you're going to partner up with somebody, Are you going to build a competitor? Are you going to be like, okay, let's just not put that, let's push that out on the roadmap because we, we, we're partnering with them. They'll bring that to the.

Scott Belsky was.

Yes to it.

Running, effectively running, running the show and, you know, disappointing for him as well, but he obviously was very congratulatory. Sarah says, I'll close it out. She says we're all going to be designers eventually. Congratulations, figma. And yeah, designs going public today. I'm going to pull up Scott's post.

Yeah, yeah, read me Scott's post. What a crazy day. Citadel securities in the back looking great.

Scott says thrilled for my friend Dylan and the whole Figma team today upon such a milestone, there are a few products that have had such an impact on the lives of designers, our everyday experiences of products and the value of design. He says, I had a unique opportunity to get to know the entire Figment management team and business very deeply a few years ago. Of course, Scott was at Adobe at the time, you know, one of the key players in the deal. And he says, what I learned inspired me in many ways and makes me confident that this team is just getting started. This is a team with deep empathy for their customer. They, of course, in my words, are the customer. That's part of what Figma uses figma to make Figma perfect Perfect partnership and showed that the S1 showed that it.

Was very nicely one of all time.

But yeah, the story here is the thoughtfulness right down to the signage in the building today. Every single single step has been considered and they have to. Right. If they want to help other people have great design.

Yeah.

They need to lead by example. I have a post here from John Lilly who was. I believe John was at Greylock. Okay, let me confirm that.

Yeah, I saw Greylock on the cap table.

Pretty big shareholder, probably over Greylock. Greylock led the a.

Okay. John Miller threw a bunch of pro ratas.

Yes.

Did quite well.

Yep. John says today's IPO is a landmark moment for figma. Not just a financial milestone, but a powerful validation of Dylan and Evans founding vision back in 2012 to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. Figma's relentless focus on product, community and craft has reshaped how the world designs what began as a bold technical challenge. Building a web based design tool that felt native, evolved into a platform that helped millions of creators design and build together. In a 2003 interview about the ipod, Steve Jobs famously said, design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Figma built around this idea, building tools so that designers of all kinds come together not just to make things beautiful, but to make them work better. And now we're standing at the threshold of a new era, one defined by the rise of artificial intelligence. It's an especially important moment to ask, what does the future of design look like? I think that's on everybody's mind. I think a lot of people have good ideas for what it can look like. John says design has always existed in the space between tools and human intention. And as Mitch Kapoor wrote in his 1990 software design manifesto, what is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds. The world of technology and the world of people and human purposes, and you try to bring the two together. That's powerful. 35 years later, that's still the clearest expression I know of what great design strives to do. And it's what FIGMA enables. A connection between imagination and reality and between the systems we build and the people we build them for, between our machines and ourselves. My words, not John's. But it's so funny to think about how when you are interacting with anything online, there's like probably like an 80% chance that it was built with Figma.

Yeah.

At some point or another you can't open an app on your phone and not have A designer under the hood that probably spends, you know, hours and hours a day.

Yeah.

In Figma I have so many great. I have so many great memories.

And the stock is over $100 now. This is remarkable. And I saw something that it seemed like there was potentially some sort of circuit breaker going on where there was like a limit up where it seemed like they stopped trading for a little bit and then resumed. But the stock is jumping all over the place. I'm seeing like 107 now. Really. Really on a rocket ship today.

Couple fond memories for me. One is with Brandon Jacoby. He's a free agent now. We'll see how long that's six Figma.

Users to ever do it.

And I have so there was so many nights when we were building party round that it was like deep Covid so we were often remote and so many nights we would spend just in Figma and had zoom in the background Figma just like just grinding it out. And I cherish those memories. The other thing Sumit over formerly at Andreessen brought up today when I posted earlier, he said that when I was pitching a 16Z originally, almost the entire pitch, I didn't have a deck when I first met them. So the entire was walking around all of our product designs, Figma showing them the product, showing them where we wanted to take it. And so that's amazing. It's really just been such a. Such a core, core part. I'll close it out with John. He says on a personal level too, this is a significant moment for me. I was lucky in my career to be mentored by some of the best thinkers and designers in the world. Terry Winograd and David Kelly at Stanford and later Mitch Kapoor and many others. And from the very first time I set foot in Figma's offices, I felt like I'd come home. Dylan and Evan had built a temple of design with typography books scattered around.

Let's go.

We love temples. Let's give it up for temples. But the whole company culture was infused with a belief in and a reverence for designers and their work. And that's still the core value of Figma today.

Love it.

We made somebody mad sometime when we joked on the show. We joked on the show that like Figma hadn't released some feature fast enough. They released the ability.

To create more responsive designs automatically. And we were like people were protesting the street for this one.

Obviously somebody. Somebody came out and very angrily messaged us they were protesting.

No one was protesting. This is fake news. We were like okay, we were joking. But people do love figma.

It's a thing like people get emotional about it. That was the thing we were, we were at config and the number of people that there was somebody from every.

Country there, it was standing room only was crazy. The community is wild. Yeah.

John says one of the other things that Mitch said to me about entrepreneurship is that you've got to build a house you want to live in. In other words, build, build organizations that can help create the world you want. By elevating and empowering designers. Figma's done that in a profound and lasting way. Here's to the team at Figma and to continue to build a world of designing together. It's so true. I mean in a world without figma, every digital product that you use is less beautiful. Every website that you use is less beautiful.

Do you think in the original Microsoft formulation of what a platform is, figma fits that definition? So the original, I think it was Bill Gates conception of it was a platform is a, is a business or product that where the value that is created on top of the platform is greater than the value that is captured by the platform. So the classic example is. Yeah. Is Microsoft Windows. They're like the Windows app ecosystem.

Is.

Larger than the amount of money captured by just Windows licenses. And when you think about figma, it's a little bit different because although there is a third party ecosystem, there are also like design agencies that probably wouldn't exist.

Yeah.

I mean the part of why Figma has such a great brand is they can't possibly, they can't possibly capture there's so much value creation like happening on the platform.

Yep.

And it's as simple as like a company signing up two founders paying 50.

Bucks a month or everyone feels like they got their money's worth.

Yeah. And creating something that allows them to go. Creating a deck that allows them to raise millions of dollars or creating a product with millions of users and that flow of like somebody can be a freelance designer, sign up for Figma, create designs that they can go sell and yeah, I think it definitely fits the definition. It's very much an operating system for people that design and build software.

We talked a little bit about it yesterday. Ben Thompson gave a breakdown on Stratecheri, which you should go review, read and subscribe to obviously of this figma S1 and the IPO prospects. And he was highlighting the potential, the potential benefit of being a public company and having public company stock to do M and A with. And I'm wondering Where you sit on the M and A question, there's the world where Figma has a talented team, they can build new products. They also have this network effect. They have amazing go to market sales motion. But if they were to acquire something, what, what do you think would be the right angle? Is it more something like a foundational technology that can improve all the products or some sort of new line extension, new SKU to add on to the portfolio of products? I think that's where the debate.

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean I'm less excited about what they. I'm personally more excited about them acquiring better. You know, I mean the team is obviously beyond stacks. One of the most talented groups in certainly design. Well, the most talented group in design and one of the most talented teams in the industry broadly. I'm less excited about individual app plays, although there's some exciting gen AI applications that are growing quickly. Figma has compelling products in those categories. Right. You look at figma make Figma sites. Right. And everything they're doing around making it so that anyone within an organization can generate designs that are on brand.

I guess the question is yeah, like.

And again trading has been halted at $112 on a limit up.

If someone goes out and builds not just a tool that is complementary but also has a network and is starting to bootstrap a network that feels like the Instagram Facebook moment and something that would potentially merit an M and A. But, but just building a tool or different approach to the product or different feature. Always this question about like, you know, is it a feature or is it a company? Yeah, I think that'll be something that.

People are debating and they, they acquired a buddy of mine, Jordan Singer's company.

That's right.

I think it was probably two plus years ago and he was building, you know, very early to building in generative AI and I believe they integrated a lot of what he was working, working on.

Yeah. I do wonder on the, on the M and A topic like what is the formula for success? Because there's a little bit of a meme in Silicon Valley that like you should never sell your company. It can never work. Then there are like these zombie aqua hires that feel like something that people want to avoid. And so one of the questions that I've been kicking around my head is like what is the shape of the company or founding team or employee base that is suitable for an acquisition that could actually integrate well and be something where everyone is happy a decade later? Like oh yeah, that was a fantastic partnership that Was great. It probably has to be something around the, the, the, the acceleration that would happen post acquisition and then also just the actual integration and yeah there was.

A while back you remember this company, it was a 6 month own, 6 month old solo owned vibe coder base 44 sold to Wix for 80 million which was now, not to my knowledge, not in the game at all from a generative standpoint. So looks like we have our first.

Let's bring them in.

We have Andrew, Andrew Reed in a beautiful suit looking. Somebody, somebody confused me.

You guys do look.

They said hey, you're Andrew right? I said I am not. But he is close by. What's going on?

Andrew? Welcome to the stream. You're alive. How you doing?

You are live.

Here's my New York Stock Exchange.

Thank you for having us.

You guys look like you were made to be here.

Yes, we're very happy to be here.

The decision to put on the seats six months ago has paid off flawlessly because we don't have to dress up for something like this.

Is this my microphone?

That's your microphone, yeah.

Wonderful.

How are you doing? Give us your reactions. How's this day been for you?

Let's see. Well first off congrats to your initial public appearance at the New York Stock Exchange.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's really exciting. Today has been, it's been a good day. You open? Dylan rang the bell at 9:30 and it's 2:11pm Eastern right now.

Sure.

So we've been milling around for many hours.

Okay. And a little exhausting.

It opened and yeah it's amazing seeing the team here and just the excitement of everyone chanting Figma and seeing all the traders in their swagged out Figma jackets.

Yeah, the jackets are gonna go and start market you know, bidding jackets after this because those are totally iconic. The thing that stood out to me is all the little like they really made, they really made Nicee their home. Like every, like every single place you look there's something Figma and it's just so incredibly well done.

Yeah. And this one of my, one of the experiences I've had with Figma dating back to when we first invested seven years ago was it's a company that.

Overnight success.

Overnight success. It's a company that's always had extraordinary attention to detail and it shows up when you do an all hands at their office. The board slides, the S1 config, the conference and how they applied that attention to detail to the NYSE is incredible because there's applying the attention to Detail and then realizing all the things you can do in terms of the signs on the ground and the party outside. They just did an unbelievable job.

You have to be doing things that haven't been done before.

Yeah, I mean, I think the takeover outside was breathtaking and I'm obviously very biased because when I see the pickle logo I get very excited.

But yeah, it's like, did you see the roadshow? Did you go to any of the roadshow? I heard there was like a long product demo there, which is kind of uncommon.

Yeah. So I think it's, I think this is true for, you know, many CEOs, but especially for Dylan. Like Dylan cares a lot about the product and it's important that everybody who is considering investing in the company really knows what figment, not just what figment stands for and design and creativity and all the things you see, but really how the product works. And it was not a five minute flyby look at the cool shiny features the product demo was. They were in the weeds. I in fact uncovered parts of the product I didn't know existed, but it was good. I think it's important. Again, part of that's who Dylan is. He actually cares so deeply about every single pixel and every single feature. And then that shows through.

How early did you actually meet Dylan? Sarah Guo was posting earlier that pre launch they were burning $800,000 a month, which just sounds like that's the most nerve wracking scenario for any, you know, a lot of founders will go through that at some point. But when did you realize what a special founder he was?

Well, Dylan and Evan, by the way. I think just, I think it's a nice moment to take a pause and discuss, give a shout out to Evan Wallace, like an absolute legend. I think the stories that people here tell about Evan are just, you know, they'll go on.

Yeah.

Chris, who's going to come on next, you know, is Figma cto. He'll I think have a lot of, he'll tell you actually all the stuff Evan did in the code base, but allegedly it's insane and you know, well.

Well and just going like taking another step back. People have like, people love to use Figma as an example that it's okay to take a long time to ship your product. And I think most like almost always when I hear founders say, well Figma took four years, I go, well, you're not Evan Wallace and you're not like fundamentally changing, you know, the way that like software works online. Yeah, you're just, you're building enterprise workflow workflows you should probably ship like next month. Yeah.

The other thing about the, you know, you can take. Take as long as you need. You know, Figma, there's this. There's a something that Roloff talks a lot about for our business, which is the red queen dynamic. You have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. And I think in a world of accelerating technology change, like in order to win in your markets, you just have to run the company faster and do more. And obviously like AI is allowing companies.

To do a lot more race usually an anecdote of something you want to avoid getting into.

That's just the truth of technology, I.

Think the truth of venture capital and the truth of enterprise software business to business software.

And if you look at how when Figma went from four products to eight products at config the pace and I think everyone who uses the product feels it like the pace is just picking up.

We got a little preview of config and I messaged Nairi. I was like, wait, all you're announcing all of this? Like all four of these? It was like four major announcements and that's what picking up the pace looks like and finding that new gear.

Yeah. How are you thinking about org design changing in the age of AI? This is something I've been talking to a lot of folks about. There's taking designers and giving them the ability to ship code. They're kind of this flip from going from a 0x engineer, a designer, to a 1x engineer. And that gain can sometimes be better than taking a 10x engineer and making them a little bit better. Just unlock this new capability. How are you thinking about companies just broadly thinking about AI as a. As a product vertical that is its own silo versus something that infuses the whole company. What are you hearing? What do you see?

I've been thinking about that question a lot. The way I kind of craft the archetype would be the creative technologist. And I think in the same way that all of us are capable of scribbling something on a piece of paper when we're bored in a meeting, I think similarly all of us are going to be capable of creating something on the Internet.

It's actually interactive.

Exactly. And I think that has been happening for a while. I think it's picking up steam in an incredible pace. And I think this role of creative technologist, I think in big companies you'll still probably have siloed engineering, product design, marketing teams. I think in our Small companies, the fact that founding engineers, founding teams, people are wearing a lot of hats, right. And using tools like figma to do everything from ideation, to prompt something to iterate, get in the hands of users and to actually publish code. I think that the small companies, I.

Bet even my buddy Andreessen said that when I was first pitching them, we weren't actually raising yet, I didn't have a deck and so I just was in figma screen sharing, showing them the product and showing them all the different ways that we were gonna take it and things like that. And it's just, and again that's just like evidence of figma not being for designers. I never thought, I thought it was a tool for building things.

Yeah, exactly.

One dynamic Ben Thompson has been talking about is that as a public company, sometimes it can be easier to do M and A. Have you ever run into that in your career, just broadly of a company where that is an integral, important factor in kind of their long term strategy? I've always, generally the meme has been like, stay private as long as possible. But you know, there's a reason companies go public. There are obviously tons of benefits. But what, what are the, what is the M and A dynamic in public and private markets right now?

Yeah, I think the, you know, there's what you learn when you start out at Goldman Sachs and it's, you know, it's, you have access to the capital markets, you need a public currency for M and A, you know, blah, blah. Your story. For me, the reason why I'm so happy with the IPO timing today is coming off of config a few months ago and just feeling the energy, you guys were there, you felt the energy amongst the community, the incredible community surrounding figma and then being able to tell that story and all the stuff we're doing with our new product initiatives with AI and tell it to the broader world. You know, in the S1 we reported I think 13 million monthly active users, 2/3 of which are not designers. And you know, they got.

Did you, did you know, did you, did you. Was that your guess early on? Did you fully see that the TAM for this was not like how many designers are there? And just like add it up and multiply it. Did you, I imagine you believe that it could be used across the TAM expander?

It's similar to what I was saying with the, you know, I think the creative technologist archetype who's going to do a lot of things and eventually in 10 years, the way that companies run their product Engineering teams will probably look very different. I think similarly, like there were, there were even, you know, predating our investment. There were definitely examples of teams that went all in on the Figma way, collaborative way of building products. And you had, you know, full product engineering design teams at small companies or even at mid sized companies. I remember Airbnb and Square were in our portfolio and we talked to them before we invested and they were early at pioneering this. We're getting off of the Dropbox links being sent around. We're going all in on working in figma. And it turns out it was a much better way of shipping products if you wanted to ship really good products quickly. And therefore the entire world seemingly changed its mind in a few years. I think similarly, some small companies are going to pioneer new ways of doing things. They're going to move really fast. It's going to be obvious that there's like a new archetype emerging. I think many of those people are going to live in figma. I think the most creative community on the Internet today already exists in figma.

I always, it felt even I remember using it as a, like a social app in the sense that like I would get, I would, it would be late at night, I would open my laptop and I'd be like, oh, Brandon's up. I'd just go over to wherever he was designing. I'd be like, hey, what's up, dude? I just type a comment and it was like this like, it was like almost like a lot of people built these in these like virtual offices. But like Sigma was our virtual office.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

I would just be like, hey, what's up? Or I'd just like start, you know, I'd just mess with them and like change the button colors.

Yeah. The only thing I'm really excited about with the new products is, you know, they're both raising the ceiling of what it is possible to do for the most creative people in figma. You know, like with Figma Draw, for instance. Right. Like the ability to do like really interesting artistic, creative work inside of Figma files. And also massively raising the floor for those of us who are, you know, more Excel inclined in our, you know, creative abilities. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think it's so rare to find like technology shifts that allow companies to capture both of those things. Usually there's a trade off.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's really exciting.

I mean, Excel kind of served the same purpose, but decades ago. Right?

Totally. Yeah. Like, and it's. And similarly to the idea of, you know, Figma slides came out of this intuition or. Not intuition, just the reality that many people were torquing Figma files into slide decks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had a. I had a file called deck formatting.

Yeah.

I've shared with probably hundreds of people at this point of, like, this is how I build decks, this is how I build fundraising decks. Here's like, you know, 50 examples for each page and I would just send it out to everyone. They could just copy it and start working off of it.

Can you add me to that bow? That sounds good.

Yeah, it's great. We don't have to make many decks.

At the end, though.

We should start making more decks just for each other.

Yeah, we should. Yeah. Be great. Last question. I think we'll let you go. I want to talk about the culture and hiring changes and just how going public changes any of that. How do you describe the culture of, like, someone who's a good fit to become a figmate?

Ooh, that's a really good question. You know, when I was reflecting as.

The series C leaves, when I was.

Reflecting on what I was going to tweet today, you know, because there's always a fine balance, right. Like, how do I tweet something to say congrats without doing the, you know, can you believe this amazing event? You know, So I kind of went into a very paranoid head space of how do I get know not end up in the wrong quadrant?

We just go too far.

Just.

You're welcome, everyone.

Congrats to the incredible Figma team. The most creative, determined, imaginative and positive group of people. I'm just so happy for all of your success.

There we go.

And I was. I almost responded. Our success.

Yeah. So those are those four adjectives. I think they are. They are creative. I think I tried to pull off an analogy when I was talking to you guys at Config about how everybody. Everybody who was at Config would be a good tattoo artist for my face painting artist for my daughter. And my brother said that analogy did not land. They're very creative. I think they're extremely determined. I think, like, this is a company that, you know, when the early days of burning however much money they were burning a month and not having product market fit and grinding your way to market fit and all the twists and turns over the last seven, eight years since they really started their ascent, but.

You still have like the hardcore WebGL crew.

Yeah.

And that's like all. It's like quite, quite like foundation model, AI research, but it's like serious engineering.

It's a company that does hard things. They are not afraid of doing really hard things. I think they're imaginative. I think that's like, you know the make believe billboard you see in San Francisco. It's a company that really does think out there. And I think Dylan, obviously, Dylan is on the bleeding edge of technology. And they're positive. Like they are just good human beings. And you know, looking at obviously the reaction to the. To the IPO is just look around. These are awesome people who are so cool. The valedictorian of my high school works at figma. Her name is Katie Zito. She's a PM here. She's literally like the smartest person I knew in high school. And now she builds products with Figma in anyway. I'm just so happy. I really am happy for their success and your success.

Yes.

We'Re happy for. I didn't put it out. But yesterday we did the. We did it meme with Ramp.

Every person involved.

But now Ramp's congratulating Figma with the big billboard today or the big banner.

You know, they had that idea Monday. We're on the phone with them. They're like, yeah, we think we might get a banner and like hang.

Because we're.

Our office is right across the street from Figma's New York office. We should just hang it out. And it's like this like 40.

It's unbelievable.

It looks like I didn't even know.

You can get that made in.

I will say the ramp thinking Figma with tvpn. The New York Stock Exchange stays. A big day.

Yeah, it's a big day.

Yeah, it's awesome.

Well, it's lovely.

Yeah.

Thanks for being here.

Enjoy talking to everyone else. Obviously. I hope to see you later.

Yeah.

Congratulations on your success too.

Congratulations. I'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in our next guest to the studio. We are going to tweak some cameras.

Kramer.

What did he say?

Celebrate the moment.

Celebrate the moment.

Certainly are.

And we are at 10154 and it's getting quieter. The folks have the Citadel security disappointed.

That nobody's manually executing trades.

I also didn't see a single crowd surfing event happen. Maybe we can make it happen.

Still.

Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Where should we start? But please introduce yourself for the stream. Let people know who you are.

Yeah, I'm Chris Rasmussen. I'm the CTO at figma. Great.

Take us a little bit through your journey with the company. When did you join? What have you Been on, working, working on all that.

It's amazing to have like a barely a two sentence intro that just tells everything you need to really know. Took a lot to get there.

Yeah, it's a lot easier now than it was in the beginning to explain it, but no, yeah, I joined Figma through a roundabout means. I actually started off as a contractor with the company, so for the first eight months I was just writing code, hoping to get the product launched publicly and then working from there. I think the thing that stood out to me back then was just like how incredible the team was. It was this insanely high aptitude team. It was probably the first time in my career I felt old and yet I felt like everyone around me was just like some of the most gifted people I had a chance to work with. And the thing that like really sold me on the company was just how much people were trying to lift each other up rather than compete with one another. I think, you know, when you have these really fast growing startups, everyone's ambitious, everyone's hungry and that's great. But I think it's really important to remember that, you know, you're not trying to drive towards an end state, you're trying to build something that's lasting.

Does that culture just come from like four years in the trenches not being like, you know, know being a quiet company and kind of building in like this monastery almost is like the vibe that I get from like the early days and then you kind of carry that as opposed to the first six months are insane and then you're like ups and downs.

Sarah Guo said that the company was, leading up to the launch, the company was burning like $800,000 a month and didn't have a product really out in the wild. But I have to imagine you, you were using, were you guys, how early were you able to dog food the product and like build that conversation conviction that hey, we've actually built something really magical here.

Yeah. So I started working with Figma about a month before the public launch. So there was a lot of work that had already been done. I think there was a time when people thought that, you know, everything just had to take six months and if it took any longer, you know, it wasn't interesting. But you know, hard things take time and I think it's a testament to the culture of the company and to Dylan to really persevere and push through that time and bring something to the market that hadn't existed before.

So were you brought in for specific WebGL experience or was WebGL at the focus of, of what you did or were there other challenges? Because the whole story gets kind of collapsed to like, oh, they just picked WebGL and that was the key innovation. But I'm sure there was a ton of other stuff going on.

Yeah, yeah. WebGL was the technology that enabled us to do graphics, like custom graphics in the browser and bypass some of the traditional browser graphics stack. I think I was brought in because I had this really weird intersection of things that aligned with the company. So I used to work at a company called Asana and I built a lot of their real time, kind of real time collaboration infrastructure which relates to the multiplayer stuff that we've been working on at Figma. And then funny enough, I had been taking a sabbatical. So the reason I got introduced to Figma is because I was working on a side project. It was just a passion project and in my case it was writing a game engine to simulate surfing. Because I'm a surfer and I think I'm the only person stubborn enough to.

Work on that long enough solving navier strokes. Isn't that like the hardest?

There was one browser surfing game that I used to play as a kid. I'm a surfer too. But it's fun you bring up Asana too because like, as when I look back at like the real like start of my career, it was like I was quickly invited to Asana and I felt like such an adult. I was like, oh, look at me, I've got this, you know, very cutting edge, you know, project management tool. And then very quickly after that was invited to Figma. And then ever since then I've used the product every, every single day.

That's amazing. We're following the same path, it sounds like.

So yeah, what else were the technical challenges going on to release?

Yeah, I mean, so I mean first off, it's just not easy. I think a lot of people, like when they first looked at Figma back then they were thinking, oh, a design tool, a single player tool. But under the hood, FIGMA is this real time multiplayer engine and it had.

To be multiplayer from day one.

Yes, because I think like the opportunity back then and the opportunity still today is not just to make a designer more efficient and more effective, it's also to bring the team closer together, to enable the best ideas to surface to the front and to help them align and ship and execute those design ideas.

And I was, I was, I was saying to Andrew right before you jumped on the. For me, Figma was a social product in the COVID times Because I would jump on, I'd open my laptop, my. My son would. Would go to bed. He was just like six months old or something like that. I'd open up figma and I'd see a couple other people on the team, like in. In the main, like, you know, file that we had, and I would just pop over their cursor and be like, you know, in the. In the comments being like, hey, what's up? I didn't realize you were up still.

Yeah, yeah.

And it felt like a virtual office for the team at a time when there was like. No, there was not much social activity at all.

Totally. Yeah. I think it's really important to make work fun and to, you know, again, it comes back to lifting each other up. We're all trying to kind of surface ideas and put things out there and it's a lot more fun when you get to do it with your team. One of my favorite memories from the Pandemic was actually this time when Slack went down. So Slack went down as like the middle of the pandemic.

It doesn't go down that much, but you remember when it goes down.

You do remember when it goes down. We use it too, we. For big fans of Slack, but when it went down, we found out that a bunch of people were actually recreating the Slack UI inside of figma and then using our multiplayer functionality to chat on the canvas. It's just a super cool mode. That's wild.

Do you think that adding multiplayer features after launch would have been. If you play out like the Counterfactual, would that have been much more technically challenging, you think? I think it's like there's something this special about from day one, this has been baked in.

Yeah. I think there's two sides to this problem. So the first is just getting the base technology in place. That's one problem. The other thing is actually rethinking all of the product features so that they are actually eventually consistent and you're not stepping on each other's toes and dealing with conflicts. And so a big part of building collaborative multiplayer software is actually reasoning about how you design features so they compose elegantly when multiple people are doing things at the same time. And that's really hard to bolt on later.

The thing that makes it so powerful, in my own words, is if you have, no matter how talented an individual like designer, engineer, product person, founder is, no matter how much of a visionary they are, no matter how capable they are, whatever idea they initially have for something will be better once it has the input of a group of people. And so the prehistoric era when design tools were built for designers and no one else would even have the file necessarily. It's just so wild to think back because I think like every, every great feature I've ever made, every great ad I've ever made, every great website was always like this combination of a bunch of smart people coming together and all contributing. And then Figma makes it so that it's as simple of like even if you're not in the same room. Right. Like, I think about how much progress would have been lost if you didn't have something like Figma during COVID where if you were used to as a team working and like all working on the same feature and being able to be there in person, it just made it so seamless to recreate that and actually build great things.

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I think the other aspect of design that sometimes people mistake it for is they think it's just about building like a static mock or a single image. And I think the reality is like the best design products, people sweat the details all the way to production. So you're not just thinking about how is it going to look in a few key states, you're thinking about how is that going to look, work, what's the system behind the design and how are you going to make it performant and efficient and how are you going to learn from that and keep iterating? So it's a really broad space and super excited to be playing in it.

What was the lead up to config? Like you guys came out the gates with what four major new product areas it felt like. And I remember Nayri gave me a little preview of what you guys were announcing and I was like, really? Like 4 imagine it was pretty stressful for you, but you guys pulled it off.

Yeah, no, the team pulled it off to their credit. It was incredible. Yeah, we went from like four to eight products all in one config, which is really cool. And it was even cooler because I was on parental leave for the first month before config. So I was just so stoked to come back from my little parental leave and see that this team had just cranked everything out and done such an incredible job.

Yeah. Talk to me about AI. Obviously there are AI enabled products, but then I imagine that AI is starting to infuse both in the, the internal workflows and also the sub features within products that exist already. And I'm wondering how you think about organizational design, how you Think about letting the existing team run with just adding on features and tools that leverage AI to setting up new teams. And do you need a crack team that goes around and aiifies everything, or is this just another tool in the tool chest that everyone can be pulling from regardless of where they sit in the org?

Yeah, no, it's a good question. We've been kind of sweating that question ourselves, but I think it really comes back to what we've been doing all along for us. So at figma, when we started, the goal was to make designers more efficient and give them superpowers, if you will, so they can do more and bring the best ideas to life, and then also to enable them to collaborate more seamlessly and effortlessly with their team and make that whole process more accessible to their team as well. Yeah, and I think AI is just this incredible tailwind and accelerant to all of that right now. It's not hard to imagine the ways in which designers are using AI in the context of figma. For example, with figma, Bake to not just build a prototype, but actually breathe life into that prototype with prototyping and ship it all the way to production at the same time, all of these technologies are making the entire product suite that we have much more accessible to the people around them. And so people can come into figma and they can prompt themselves to get started, but then they still have the full power of the figma ecosystem. So when the prompting is no longer the most efficient way, they can just grab the mouse and grab that color wheel and find that perfect red color rather than trying to describe it.

Final touch?

Yeah, the final touch. So it's super exciting.

Yeah. Last question. I think we have someone else coming on in a second. Talk about the engineering culture. Figma is so interesting because I think every. I don't want to generalize too much, but it feels like everyone has some design chops or at least taste or cares about design, but at the same time, you have those deep webgl roots. It feels like there's some pretty serious hardcore technologists in the organization. What's the blend? What is that like when those two orgs come together? I imagine that you've spent a decade integrating those two disciplines, but culturally, what does it take to really succeed at the company?

Yeah, I think it takes like, intellectual curiosity.

Right.

That's what we seek out in our hires. Like we're trying to find people who are just as passionate as we are about making things better, which really serves our customers too, because that's exactly what we're trying to help them. Do you know, I think that we have like these incredible designers who also know how to code and we have these incredible systems architects who have really, really good product sense as well. And I think it's this like kind of role blending that we've embraced as a culture and we're starting to see, you know, with AI breaking down some of the learning barriers between these functions other companies embrace as well.

Yep.

Last question. Andrew Reed says that Evan Wallace had some crazy contributions to the code base early on. Any, any, any standout highlights in your work?

Yeah, Evan is just an incredibly gifted engineer. And the thing I remember is actually even before I joined Figma, when I was working on my own little game engine, I was reading these articles online about how to do constructive solid geometry and, you know, all these mathematical things and I was reading these tutorials and then when I started working with Evan at figma, he, he's like, I, I went to his personal website and I realized the articles I was reading were written by him. Like, he's just, he's a super guy, gifted person. It's really, really an honor to have worked with him.

That's fantastic.

Congratulations.

Congratulations to everyone.

Incredible journey to date and just getting started.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Thanks so much for hopping on stream.

Congratulations.

See you soon. And we are ready for our next guest on this FIGMA stream. TBPN is live from the New York Stock Exchange. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Danny? Pleasure to meet you.

To meet you.

I've always heard great things. It's such a pleasure to meet you in person. Would you mind just doing a quick introduction for the folks who might not be familiar?

Yeah. So I'm Danny Reimer. I'm with Index Ventures and we're a firm that's based in London, San Francisco and New York. We invest in early and growth stage and we invested in Figma. We led the seed round in Figma, so met Dylan when he was 18 for the first time, which is pretty amazing. I'm now going down, you know, melancholy hill as a nostalgia hill. As I'm hearing this, I have to.

Ask right away, how did you react early on to their kind of launch timeline? Right. Like the thing that keeps coming up today and we talked with Andrew Reed about this earlier. Personally, as an angel, if somebody tells me they're building a software company for other businesses and they say that we're going to launch in two years, I almost immediately think like, okay, this person probably needs to update their thinking. And I think people generally Use a FIGMA example of this fat MVP and it can be a trap because you can work on something for a long time and have it not really be that valuable. But I wonder what your immediate reaction was given that this was well before the launch.

Yeah, I mean, believe it or not, it's sort of in line with our contrarian approach. We're contrarian on a bunch of stuff. Been really, you know, bearish on crypto. We didn't do any crypto investments. So for us it was a feature, not a bug that it was going to take that long.

Contrarian about being loud too on figma, a lot of people, I think they saw like, you know, Index's ownership at the IPO and didn't, you know, you guys haven't been posting threads every single day. It's about the part of the culture.

It'S about the team.

I mean, you're bearish on crypto. How'd you react to Dylan's NFT profile picture?

I think it's a God. It doesn't mean that he can't be. Yeah, but you know, really at the time, you know, all of the technology, all the software was sort of like in that meta spirit, that Facebook spirit of like throw it against the wall, you know, ship quickly, doesn't matter if it's broken, break in, break things, build fronts, break things. And this was so contrary. It's like the two guys were contrarian and they were committed to actually developing things for two years before we were going to have any sense as to whether it was going to be good or not. And it really had to compete against Sketch was the primary competitor. And Sketch was a damn good product.

Love the product.

Exactly.

Which is like the hard, you know, even, even, you know, most investors, if they're looking at a new investment in a category with a, a very well loved product that has massive saturation. I mean I don't, I think it would be hard to find a product designer in San Francisco pre Figma that wasn't using Sketch.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Do you remember what the other comps were from that era of companies that had figured out how to do something utilitarian but then bolted on a multiplayer aspect. We were kind of kicking around the obvious example of like Instagram. There were a few other photo filtering apps, but Instagram started with the social network out of the box, kind of bootstrapped it in the background and wound up being very successful product obviously. But were there other companies that were coming to mind at that time?

So we're Big game investors. Right. So first of all, multiplayer was a term that we were very familiar and then we were Dropbox investors.

That makes sense.

So like the notion of sort of the product, the consumerization of the enterprise, starting small, growing through, you know, guerrilla tactics and, and just mainstream adoption within the organization, we felt really comfortable with.

Sure, sure. Is that broadly product led growth or is product led growth, in your mind a broader term?

No, it is plg.

Just plg.

Absolutely. And it was clear back to the. I totally agree with you. The lion's share of folks were using Dropbox and Sketch. And so for us we knew what the problem was. Like the, the first time I met Dylan was at Flipboard when he was 18 and they had amazing designers at Flipboard. And I just remember the Fusion. Yeah, beautiful.

And also, I don't know if it was WebGL, but the 3D animation of the page flipping.

Yeah, absolutely fantastic.

And you can see that that comes through with like, okay, just the technical challenge of like, how would I implement that? I remember playing with it on the iPad and being like, okay, this is a different thing.

I mean, they launched it before the iPad was launched.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

But the versioning headaches that they were getting through, like, you know, they had all these amazing designers. One ended up leading design at Uber, another one and is one of the senior designers at Apple for like eight years. And the design problems that they would get into of like sending the wrong version, sending the wrong asset. Totally, you know, through Dropbox it was clear that you needed a better solution.

Yeah. What are you seeing broadly in terms of. Artificial intelligence is a sustaining or disruptive innovation to companies that have established a market and then there's a whole bunch of companies that are coming in and saying like, we're going to be the AI version of that. It feels like in some ways you could say, oh, well, that's just like the multiplayer version. But in some ways it's more of a sustaining innovation. What's your broad take?

I would say the latter. Sustaining innovation. I mean, I'm super bullish about it. I mean, sure, it's hard not to be. Right.

Like, you probably have to qualify. You're bullish on AI, doesn't necessarily mean you're like, like upset about what's happening at, you know, the Foundation Model Labs, or in terms of Capex or Nvidia, like there's a million different places but, but you're pretty broadly bullish.

You know, our, our, our job is to see a trend and then to analyze a Trend and then to go pretty deep.

Okay. Yeah.

And we are very bullish on AI.

Very bullish.

It seems like every other time I see a. A billion dollar M and a headline it's another index always ends up with the most.

Sean, thank you.

The thing that strikes me about fake that I think is still powerful to this day is the simultaneously like the complexity of the product and the simplicity of the product. If you land, if you get invited to Figma and you've never used the product before, you just get dropped in to the canvas, you're there, you can see the other people and despite all that you can do with the product, it's still, I just found it somehow intuitive even for somebody and I think that's very, very difficult.

Yeah.

And you know, the co founder, you know Dylan was brilliant enough to hire his co founder, the best computer scientist he had ever met who was, you know, his TA at Brown, right. Like convinced him to stop doing a PhD and to code.

Wow.

That guy had such an understanding of that or still does. Evan still has such a clear understanding of how to create the lowest common denominator and make it include with everyone while also because it's design and design is going to become central to everything, have enough sophistication so that you can differentiate from anyone else.

Yep.

No. It's really amazing to me the magic of Figma and the thing that I, from the very first Figma that I was invited to and that was obviously why the growth was so insane early is it's like natural product led growth versus versus forced product led growth was this. As a user, if the thing that you provide a customer or user is the ability to take the thing that's in their mind and make it real so they can see it. That's like the most magic thing ever. And the other thing I would comp kind of this moment too is we cover Alphabet and Google a lot and we talk about how Google's initial mission to organize the world's information and make it useful. I forget exactly how they position it and how that's so aligned to gen AI in the sense that a lot of what LLMs do today is just make organizing information for you and making it useful. Right. That's like the core of the value and it feels like Figma of this core of like taking a spark of an idea and making it into a thing is so aligned with generative AI because it's like oh, you want to make a website, like describe it, you want to make an app, describe it, you want to change the details. You want to, want to change this color. You want to build an entire app underneath the website. It's just all there. And reducing that time from spark of an idea to real product.

That's right. I think it is a really important component at making sure that the human intervention is critical for differentiation. You need that in order. The idea has to, to first manifest. But you can do that with AI tools. But then it has to have a human differentiation like a human intervention that makes it way better to use.

And this is the same. This is the same way that making things in an organization work. You might have the smartest person on a team have an amazing idea and get it here. And then the intern might throw in, hey, by the way, what if we did it like this and everybody's like, oh, that's a good idea. And even with super intelligence or whatever we're hurling towards, it's like, you know, you might be able to create a V1, but it's this combination of ideas and experiences that makes it truly special.

Last question. Give me the update on index. It's a huge fund growing. What's the contrarian strategy?

We're hearing rumors.

Are we going to see you out there soon? Public funds, I guess.

Our contrarian element has been not to grow enormously. So, you know, we've had a billion dollar venture fund and $2 billion growth fund for a decade now and we haven't expanded our size. So, like, the idea is that from our perspective, investing is a craft and if we get bigger, we might lose the focus and we're not going to be able to have the same relationship with the founders that we, that we adore having. So we just have to generate the returns. So that's what we're focused on, like keeping it small and hopefully, I mean, you know, I have some amazing partners who. How big is that now? We're seven investing partners.

Seven partners.

Yeah. And what's cool is that, you know, like Shardul is behind Wiz for us.

Sure.

And we have Dream Games and we have Service Titan.

And do you see it as a mentorship business? Oh, yeah, yeah.

That's, that's, that's, that's what excites us.

Yeah.

Is that the next generation, you already are better, are better than the current generation.

It's great.

Well, thank you so much for coming. It was fantastic. We'd love to have you back on the show soon.

Hang out.

Pleasure.

And we will bring in our next guest. Jordy, do you have any updates from the timeline? What Else is going on. We have Mamoon. Hello, welcome to the Streams. Thank you so much. Oh, I like that pin.

That pin is investing. We're gonna have you on the show.

Yes.

I'm so, so fired up to be here.

It's perfect timing. Give us a little introduction on yourself. And what do you do?

All right, well, I'm a partner at Kleiner Perkins early stage venture capitalist. Kleiner Perkins. The firm has been around for 50 plus years. Amazing companies like Google and Amazon and Netscape and Figma of course. And yeah, we invest in early stage companies, but we also have a growth fund.

Yes.

Then invests in some pretty cool later stage opportunities as well.

When. What is the story of meeting Dylan and Figma? When did that come together?

Yeah, I think I met you guys.

Did the B.

We did the B. Yeah. And that was in 2017. Yeah, I met Dylan probably in 2017. Early in 17. I was on a board with John Lilly who led the Series A. Oh.

Yeah, we read his blog post today.

And John and I were involved with the company that didn't really work out. Okay. And he told me at the time that hey, this thing may not work out, so I owe you one. I'm going to introduce you to this guy Dylan and you're going to love him. And by the way, your background in Box and Yammer and Slack really could help. And so spend time together, get to know each other, which we did over a bunch of months and we really hit it off. And later that year, Dylan decided to raise a Series B. And this is around the time when the product had just come out of beta and you could, you'd hear people talking about Figma and you know, the company had been around for five years. So this is a long wind up.

Yep, totally.

And it was coming out of beta, just started to monetize a few customers. And you walk around actually south park where we were based, and you see people in coffee shops, the designer types using Figma. Interesting. Just like three, four, five years prior, you'd see Slack on people's screens. And so, okay, there's something going on. And then when I saw my friend Josh Williams, who's a designer, incredible designer, like, oh, Josh is using it. That means that the designer community has really latched on to Figma and so took a few tidbits, data points, and then I remember asking Dylan, like, show me this one chart. All you need to see is one chart. It's called the L28. Yeah, it's the, the usage for the whole user base over a 28 day period of time. It's a histogram, it's kind of nerdy. But Dylan, just go look at this data and tell me what it looks like. So he sent it over and it had this little smile which effectively shows that at day 14, 15, 16 out of 28 days, many of the users were using it for like every day of the work week. Which meant that effectively if you're a designer, you were using Figma to get your work done. And there's just no question about it.

By the way, I'm a non designer and I kind of came online in the work world startup game in 2017 and I was very quickly a DAU. Like I use it all the time. As somebody that didn't consider myself a designer, I was just invited to Figma and I was like, wait, this is a pretty good way to just do a lot of different types of work, whether you're making a deck or marketing assets or, or website or anything.

Totally. And you saw that. I think the first board deck I think I ever got was actually en Figma. So En Figma Slides wasn't a product that we just launched actually. So yeah, you saw this incredible depth of engagement with the product that I'd seen with products like Slack and obviously Slack we all use and we love some hate, but mostly love.

Yeah.

Right. And, and you saw that early people.

Feel about it, they still use it.

So yeah, yeah, L28, that's effectively like a churn analysis.

But short term usage over the first.

28 usage over a 28 day period. It's actually just say take any user, like the whole user base, like let's say 1000 users.

Okay, so random slice. They could have been installed months ago. Yeah, but you want to see how.

They use every person who, who signed up, let's say.

Got it.

A thousand users.

Yep.

And did they use it for that once a month, twice a month, three times a month or 28 times a.

Month, 28 days out of the month. Okay, got it.

Yeah.

So then you saw this tick up like the smile curve. And only consumer companies typically look at that. So to see that sort of behavior out of an enterprise software product was incredible.

Yeah. One of the analyses I saw was rule of 40. People were talking about how Figma's in a great position right now. Great margins, but also great growth rate. Add that together, that's the Rule of 40. When did the Rule of 40 come into your world? What did it factor into the series B? Or was it something you started tracking Later. What can you tell me?

I think just the CAFE analysis.

Yeah, real later. Actually, funny enough, I think about 10 years ago, I came up with this thing called the quick ratio, which was more interesting to me because for early stage companies it showed a quick ratio is effectively in a given month, how much. How many users did you add?

Yep.

And how many users did you churn? Okay, so let's say you added 400 users.

Yep.

And you churned 100.

Yep.

Your quick ratio is four.

Yeah.

And that was actually like a good number. Sure. But if you're adding 250. Not good.

Yep.

Right. That's a leaky bucket.

Leaky bucket.

So for an early stage person, the quick ratio was just way better than looking at growth rate and then looking.

At the margins, which could be all over the place based on what they did that month or that quarter. Makes sense.

One question I have, I'm curious how you see it. So it was index, greylock, kp, sequoia, a16z were the leads. If this company, if Figma had been started in 2020, do you think there would have been one or two funds just like going back and forth, was it? You know, I feel like today you'll see these like fast forward, fast follow.

Concentration seems to be a real focus for a lot of fun.

And was that something you think that like Dylan was just pushing for, wanted a diverse board, or was it more just the state of venture at that time?

I think Dylan is just very nuanced and detail oriented and very methodical and every round he had in his mind who was the invitation investor, the right investor for me at this point in time, which is how I think he even sought out this, our relationship where John, Lillian, Dylan was telling me downstairs, you know, you know, we sought you out for that Series B was like a, you know, a beeline.

Yeah.

And I think Dylan had that same sentiment towards the series C with Andrew Reed, who was just on.

Right.

Yeah.

And then even the round thereafter. So he was always in his mind, had his. This is the person, the firm that I really want to work with based on their skill set, their capabilities. And he went after it and he got it every single time.

How do you think the board evolved? It seems like there's a lot of different investors, different firms joining. How do you think the board will evolve going forward? And it already has evolved. Can you talk to some of the additions and what the rationale was behind those?

Yeah, so we, in just. In the last month we've added three incredible people Bill McDermott OG OG. You have to have Bill on the show. If you haven't.

Oh no, we'd love to.

Oh my God.

Bill is the man. I mean Obviously he runs ServiceNow. Before that he ran SAP. So he's just the CEO of all the goat in terms of running an enterprise software business. And we added Mike Krieger founder of.

Instagram company on guys and and and a very interesting focus. Yeah yeah.

Anthropic now chief product officer at Anthropic. He was downstairs.

Yeah.

And then we added Louis Von on Luis Vanon I think is from dual lingo.

Amazing.

And he's a founder, a CEO went early in on AI and you know running a public company y also a KP company so just like three. Three folks who bring different skill sets but are just like a top notch and I think that's sort of how Dylan has really built the company from setting the tone, the culture amongst the team, his executive team, the board and it's you know you couldn't be more proud of what's been built there.

It's fantastic.

When did last question then we'll I'm sure you have a busy evening. 1 When did the kind of Gen AI opportunities opportunity click with you and Figma was it instantly was there a specific moment that you realized what an opportunity Figma would have in terms of if you're already helping people turn ideas into real things and products Gen AI has an obvious immediate application there.

Yeah. I think there's more the features that allow you to do things with AI inside of the canvas of Figma and then there's the what can you do from prompting to code, code to design and I think there's both elements of AI to integrate into the Figma product which we've done but I think Dylan just being such a so early on technology but also timing it really right as well was early but you know, more recently as you know we've launched four products and one product is very heavy on AI. The Figma make.

Yeah.

Which goes from prompt to code.

Yep.

So really just timing matters and I think you know Dylan and the team are all over it and you just.

Had Chris on and you have millions and millions of daus weekly active users that are ready saying please give us more.

We're ready.

So great.

Well thank you so much.

Thank you guys.

I'm a fan of the show.

Thank you so much.

Sometime soon.

Fantastic. And I think we're going to hop on with Dylan right now. Welcome to the stream.

Here we go. Looking incredibly strong thanks so much.

Fantastic looking suit.

Great.

What do you have there? You have a gal. We're gonna ask you to hold this.

You know, I mean he's got.

How many times did you ring the bell today? Because you open the opening bell. Walk me through your day. What did you actually do today? Have you gotten any sleep?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Is that how bad I look?

No, no, no. I just know the schedule is brutal.

It's a more than 10 schedule, but it was a great day.

Amazing.

And the team was incredible. And yeah, the. In terms of the gavel, I mean I just feel like you're holding this thing, you know, you can do anything.

You can do anything.

So powerful. It's a powerful gavel. I feel like it's time to make a bunch of product decisions.

Yeah.

Not sure on what yet.

Okay.

You know, just.

Yeah, the gavel. Well, you also shipped a bunch of.

Products updates today too.

Right.

What were the highlights?

I mean a lot of highlights but the things that I was super excited about. One was off offset vector.

Sure.

Because we've been getting requests from that from the start of Figma and then also for dev mode mcp, we made a bunch of improvements. And it's interesting with Dev mode mcp, I mean this is one where the team was like, yeah, I think it's time to release it. And we kind of did the walkthrough.

This is for McP servers for AI agents essentially.

Yeah, basically it lets you translate designs to code and pull that in via MCP and kind of an extension of our dev mode functionality. And I was nervous because I just felt like we have so much to build out still and. We do.

Yeah.

But it's been great to see the reception. The reception has been really positive. And then today we made some more improvements to it. But this is just the start. There's a lot more coming on Dev mode.

Yeah, we were talking about mcp. We were talking about this earlier, kind of making the argument. I think we both agreed that Figma fits the traditional definition of like a platform that was designed, I think defined by Microsoft. This idea that the value that's created on top of the product is greater than the product.

Product.

The value that the product captures. But how do you think that's going to change or what is the shape of it right now? I know that there are. We have friends who run agencies that probably wouldn't exist if Figma did not exist. I'm sure they would find a way. But they're like, they have Built a whole company and business around it. And they're obviously incredibly synergistic with you.

Every single. Every single thing that I've done in my career.

Yeah.

Arguably Jordy's career is like, I don't.

Think I've ever closed like, even Figma, I always love using it in the browser because it's just as good. I don't think I've ever closed.

You have the tab open.

Figma has just been like, you know, 99.9% like, yeah, it's your operating system.

Yeah, it's your operating system.

Yeah, I love hearing that, obviously. But also, I mean, it's folks like you who are in the product so much every day that give us the best feedback and we learn from it. And the thing about designers is they are so thoughtful with their feedback.

Yeah.

And they really helped steer us and really orient us towards the right things to build. And then, you know, of course you got to also take some bets where everyone's saying one thing and you're gonna do another thing, but. Or things that, you know, people aren't thinking about yet. So we try to do a mix.

Yeah.

But it's the feedback from designers I think is consistently just like probably some of the best feedback in the world.

I saw it, so we're very lucky. It was crazy. Standing room only and standing ovations and it was like Woodstock. It was crazy. I want to talk about organizational design in the age of AI. How is the org structure changing, if any at all? I imagine that you have your own team of designers and then developers and front end and back end down to hardcore WebGL folks. Right. And there's some sort of, you know, different tiers and different groups and product groups. But how does AI fit in? How does it change it? Obviously with Figma make it's kind of its own product team, but then I imagine that there are folks using AI all over the organization. So how do you think about AI playing a role either as a vertical product focus or horizontal slice or support teams like, how are you tussling with that?

I think it's got to be kind of many things at once. So one dynamic that's always interesting is you have to motivate research by having, you know, great product applications. But also, you know, if you don't have the research done, sometimes people go, I can't build the product application part yet. And I think you just have to break that chicken and egg.

Sure.

You have to, you know, motivate by showing here's what's possible and Then you have to also try to break through and find new ways to do research so that you're able to inspire people on the product side. And it's just a version virtuous loop if you can get it right. But the thing I'd say more broadly on organizations beyond even just figma is the core thesis of figma is over the last decade we've had this point of view that as the inputs to software change, as more people are creating software, there's just an exponentially more amount of software in the world then design craft point of view, that's the differentiator. And I think that there's a really interesting dynamic that we're observing. You know, is like two decades ago design was lipstick on a pig, you know, make it pretty. And maybe a decade ago the conversation shifted to okay, design's how it works. You gotta really think about design through the whole process. And designers were like, yeah, we've always been saying this, but finally everyone else kind of got it. And then now I think it's literally it's how you win or lose.

Yeah.

And I think there's. If you look at some of the companies that are doing the best they, you know, some, many of which have been on your show, I'm familiar.

It is my number one complaint. Between many of the modern products, I wind up making a, making a decision not on the foundational technology, but instead on the user experience ui, which feels crazy in the age of benchmarks and like something that's so quantifiable and yet I find myself making decisions based on the unquantifiable.

John Lilly had a, had a post earlier congratulating you and the team. He said in a 2003 interview about the ipod. Steve Jobs famously said design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works. He said that you just built like around this like core idea from.

Absolutely. But I think it's evolving. I think it's now how you win.

Yeah.

And the companies that are understanding that I think are just, we're seeing them outperform and the ones that are sort of like catching up, they're investing a lot in design and not just in the design team and how to get everyone in the organization to be part of the design process. And I think this is really interesting for the designer's role because designers are the ones who are then going to have to lead the charge. That's going to be a lot of power and we're going to start seeing so many more designer CEOs so many more design oriented folks who are leading and shaping directions of the future of software and of companies more broadly because every company is becoming a software company now and I just think that it's going to be quite a shift. I suspect we're already seeing this a little bit but maybe not at the level of magnitude of know zuck throwing these offers at researchers but like I think there's a parallel at a different scale on design. I think that the design talent wars are heating up and people are realizing that they have to get ahead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Really. I mean the like clearest example here is despite how far gen has come and how many new capabilities there are incredible. Designers are more in demand than ever. Like you just get hit up all the time and I think there's like few people in my Rolodex that I'm like these people are truly incredible but like good luck recruiting them because like they have 50 other offers and infinite optionality.

Yeah, talk to me about research. You mentioned doing research in the context of the of figma and I'm interested.

To know and this dates back to Evan's. Evan's work.

I was thinking about the WebGL example. I was thinking about you know what watching GPT3 come out, GPT4 and kind of understanding capabilities, research. Like walk me through the understanding of like how do you think about design translating to tokens and then AI? Like how do you even test all these new functionalities? Like you can operate on pixels, diffusion models or tokens and HTML. There's so many different angles. Like what does research actually look like in the FIGMA context?

Yeah. Without sharing too much I think one of the high level framing might be diffusion models are excellent in just like if you look at sort of some of the things that we've seen with diffusion, the results over time it's really felt like more of an exponential. Obviously with lms, whether it be language or toy problems in code and math, that feels like an exponential. Yeah, I think that not neither is quite the approach for design just yet. I mean obviously with LLMs we use models to generate, make outputs and make and FIGMA make. We're super excited about it. I think it's the ideal case because you go from zero to one but we are still in a world where there are constraints and to actually get to the point where you're differentiating the output where you're adding that craft, that point of view, you know, the foundational models don't get you there and even if they were to be able to increase quality of visual output. I think it actually only makes design more powerful because if you had, you know, five different designers in this room who are experts of their craft and they're all looking at, you know, some wonderfully generated design that was actually very good, which is not maybe where we're at.

Yeah, yeah.

They probably have five different points of view. And if that's how you're going to stand out, is your design craft, your brand, your marketing, I think it requires intentionality and systems thinking, not just in the design and software context, but even beyond cultural business constraints. And so we have in the front of the New York Stock Exchange today, the sign. Design is everyone's business. It's so true.

It also does seem. Seem particularly reinforcement learning resistant because there's no like taste benchmark.

Non deterministic.

It's non deterministic. Yeah.

How did you think about adding to your board heading into the IPO and beyond? Every single investor that led various rounds from Andrew to Danny to Mamoon talked about your thoughtfulness around choosing the right partners at each stage. And I know you added Mike Krieger and. And Bill and I'd love to Louise too. Yeah.

And yeah, we're super fortunate to have just the most incredible board. We also have two other independents. Lynn, she's the former CMO of Salesforce and on some other incredible boards too. Kelly. Kelly was the former CFO at Cisco.

Oh, wow.

And they are. Are just powerhouses. They're amazing. And yeah, I'm just. My mindset, whether it be on the VC side, independent side, although I think as of right now, everyone's now an independent technically, as of hours ago. Yeah, a few hours ago with our gavel. But yeah, I think that you're looking for folks that you can learn from, folks that you love spending time with. Because the perfect board relationship is one where you're going to be calling them up with questions and you're going to really enjoy spending the time and working through with them.

Yeah.

And I don't think they have to be folks. You don't have to find board members who are universally great at everything. That's a high ask. But when you can find people that spike in certain areas and then you know what to call them for, that is awesome. And so I think we have a very great group on the board also on our exec team where we just, on all these different levels of the company have folks that really spike in different areas and then coming together, they really have. They can really help everyone in the group get to the right decision.

Yeah.

Do you think your team pushed nicely to the limit? You can't walk anywhere in the building without seeing like either the most iconic merch on the back of somebody down on the trading floor or, you know, this like meticulously designed sign pointing you to like a storage closet or something like that.

You know, I, I, I had some early previews, but it's nothing like walking around for real. I mean this was incredible to.

It's probably the best this place has ever looked.

I, I haven't been here before. First time, you know, first time, so I can't comment on that, but I thought today looked exceptional and they were great. Great to work with. Yeah.

Talk about the evolution of the company culture over just the entire journey. I mean, I have to imagine that like just the vibe change from being, you know, pre, pre release for four years and then, and then growing on this kind of steady trajectory where it was obviously tier one after tier one coming in, but never felt like super overhyped and never saw you on like the deified podcast circuit, if you know what I'm talking about.

We're doing that right now.

This is.

Well, you and Evan both kept a lower profile than other companies with your financial and performance and growth.

Yeah. So where do you see the company culture going from here on out? Is anything changing or do you think there's an evolution or shift?

Yeah, I mean, I think you look at the folks that come to figma, we sort of shine this bat signal in the sky through our product and the folks that are wanting to come work at figma, a lot of them are people that use figma.

Yeah, of course.

It's a very creative team. We're very oriented towards craft. We, I think as a group are very first principles oriented. We're in the weeds, but we can talk about strategy. People need to be able to go across all those different levels. And I think very growth mindset, very humble, very kind. And I, I just think we're builders.

Yeah.

And I would imagine that in the future that will all be the same. I don't see why that would change. The things that I think about a lot right now are just clarity. I think that in order to this is true for I think a lot of organizations, just the more clarity you can create for your team, both top down but, but also noticing and creating processes for stuff to bubble up from everyone in the organization and then have it meet in the middle and quickly have a great cycle time where you're able to figure out, okay, what is the right decision here and progress. That's what will make it so that you're able to adapt rapidly in an era where everyone has to adapt rapidly. Right now, things are changing that fast.

How did the product demo go the other day?

The investment bankers, are they. Are they converts? Converts now?

You know, I did have one investor come up to me in the roadshow and say that they wanted to be a designer now.

Wow.

So I don't know if they actually quit their job. And, you know, it's never too late. That's what I told them.

Yeah.

I was like, you can be. It's okay.

Yeah, yeah.

We didn't have time to go deep on it, but like, I was excited to hear that.

I had never taken a design class. I'd never considered myself a designer. I knew I was creative and I did have this moment, like in 2021, and I was like, wait, am I a designer? I like, use Figma a lot. I make a lot of designs. And it was this like, realization that it was like the reason, you know, a lot of like what all the people involved here talking about today is like, everybody's. Everybody can be a designer. Everybody can create things, make things. And it was true from the very first moment that I use the product.

Yeah.

And just balancing that, you talked about having team members that have that range to be able to talk about strategy and then get in the weeds and Figma the product. What makes it so incredible is the range where you get invited to a file, you just land in it, you're there, you can see your buddies there in the same file all together with your cursors. But then as you understand the product more, there's no. I don't think. I certainly haven't hit the limit of what the product's capable and I don't know that maybe anyone has.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's this tension always of you got to make things both approachable and you also have to cater to the most power user functionality. And for folks that are real power users of the product, how do you make sure that you do both? And I think that's always a balance we're trying to strike. One thing that helps though, is pulling out new areas and use cases into their own products. That lets them breathe. But it also makes that Figma design can be focused on product design. So for example, figjam was the first one we did it for. And we're like, had noticed for a long time. Okay. People are doing brainstorming, whiteboarding.

I would make the Jankiest whiteboard diagrams and like I would pre design graphics and then I would like make them look nice and then you had to like copy and paste them all on the same like weird way. And then you guys made fig jam. I was like, okay, cool, that's. I was like making this myself in the product for years.

We saw that with many people. And then by taking it and bringing it to his own space. The other thing that we thought about was during pandemic times especially people were treating Figma design like a space to hang out in.

This is what I told Chris.

You were watching the stream.

No, I told six different people. I told this to, I told this to Chris. Figma during the pandemic era was like a virtual office where I would open, I'd open my computer after my son would go to bed, it'd be late at night, I'd pop it open. Figma would be open. I'd see Brandon in there, I'd see his little cursor. I'd go over, put a comment, hey, what's up?

How you doing?

I would mess with him, I'd change the button colors on him, I'd move stuff around. But it was just like it felt like a virtual office. I ultimately didn't adopt any other virtual office tool because I was like, well, I kind of. I think at one point we even designed like an office in Figma that everybody would jump in.

You could move your character around a little bit. Exactly. That's so funny.

I mean that was part of the insight for how we differentiated figjam. You know, I told the team, you know, maybe a month before launch, hey, like our differentiator for figjam is going to be fun.

Yeah, yeah.

And I remember having a board call and I told, you know, the team this and everyone looks at me like, oh man, you've been sheltering in place way too much, buddy.

Yeah, because that was, I mean there was a bunch of companies that were dedicated to whiteboarding and I don't even, I haven't heard about them in a while. But it wasn't like a category you just waltz into, you know.

Well, and to team's credit, I mean I said this and first there's skepticism and then people are like, okay, let's do it. We did a one day design. Sprint came up with like, I don't know, 30 ideas or something like that. I think four or five of them shipped, including many of the features that are like the hallmark features of figjam and stuff. That, that's really gone Very broad. And like cursor chat, for example, where we see that pattern replicated in other surfaces now. And that all came out of one day. So it's like when you got this amazing creative team making it so that you're able to unblock them and just let them go. And if you just point them in a direction, it can be incredible what you find.

We have to let you go. I want to thank you for having me. I want to talk about everything from quantum computing to Dyson spheres, but that will be for the next one. Next time, we would love for you to hit the gong with this mallet. If you would do us the honor.

I don't know. We might want to use the. We might want to use the regular mallet. I want to. I want to keep the. The precious gong safe.

Should we.

I guess we'll use this for the really serious stuff.

Yeah.

Okay.

Oh, there we go.

There we go. Iconic moment.

Have a good night, everybody, and thank you for being here. Thank you for having me.

So great to be here. You're a legend, guys. Congratulations.

You guys rock.

Incredible leader.

Have a great rest of your day. We are taping. We are live right now.

We're still taping.

But we'll talk to you more after the stream.

You're the man.

Congratulations.

And we will bring in our next guest.

Who we got?

Who do we have?

We have Lynn from Nicee.

Do we have our next guest available? Perfect. Thank you. We will bring them.

Here she comes.

Is the market still open? I don't know. 3.

Another 40 minutes or so.

Okay. I'm usually on west coast time. Hi.

Welcome.

Nice to meet you. You are live on the air.

So, so great to be.

What a day. I haven't been to the New York. My mom knew that I was coming to the New York Stock Exchange and sent me a picture of me here when I was 10 years old. And I got a. And I got a booklet, a pamphlet. And then I came in college once for kind of an entrepreneur networking event. Haven't been back since, but I picked the right day. It's been fantastic.

It's been a great day here.

Can you introduce yourself?

And then there's so much we want to talk about.

I'm Lynn Martin. I'm president of the New York Stock Exchange.

There you go.

Great honor, and I'm thrilled to be on this podcast. I listen to you guys.

Thank you. Thank you. This is a big moment for us. I mean, we just started a couple of months ago. It's been. This has definitely been on like the vision board of like one day. And now we're here. So thank you so much for hosting us.

Totally surreal. First question I have to ask because it's. It feels like Figma pushed the limits in terms of making this space, space, like feel like the Figma brand. Did they give you any trouble around the details of design?

I love a good takeover. You know, this space is really to celebrate capital markets and to celebrate our issuers. And today with the full brand takeover by Figma.

Love it.

It's been amazing.

That's fantastic. Walk us through what else has gone this year. We've been talking about this dynamic that people were kind of like, is the IPO window open? And then all of a sudden we looked around and it was like, oh, it's wide open. There's been a ton of exciting news. But what have been the standout moments this year in your world?

Yeah, I mean the market very much is now open. I don't think anyone is debating that after today.

I agree.

You know, we've had a lot of great companies come to market. On the tech side, we've had just in the last couple of weeks, we had Accelerant. We had Ambic Micro Go yesterday, obviously Figma. Today we have Circle.

Circle, fantastic.

Months ago. That was another Great one. Nielsen IQ last week, McGraw Hill, Hinge, Health Mountain. So there's been quite a few deals. They've done well. They've done well.

They've helped broadly. IPOs have done very well this year.

Yeah. And when I'm with institutional investors, the thing that I keep hearing from them, these are, you know, the big long only funds is we want more issues to come to market. We want to add to our portfolio. When's the market going to open? When's the market going to open? So there's a lot of excitement, euphoria to actually get these companies out and a lot of demand, which I think is great.

Yeah. What are the key goals, the key value props? The key like action items that you bring to bear in your day to day, in your, in your role.

You know, one of my big focuses, probably my primary focus is to scoot more. All right, all right, we're getting, we're closing this in the studio is really to ensure that our capital markets remain the envy of the world. For me, it's about price certainty and efficiency of risk management.

How do you increase those?

Have to have good technology. I'm a technologist by trade, which is.

Yeah. I was going to ask what the path is to becoming the president of The New York Stock Exchange.

Of course. In this day and age, you start as a coder.

No way.

That's amazing.

Where do you write code first?

I was at IBM.

There we go.

It's part of their global services consulting practice and my clients were financial institutions.

That makes sense.

Incredible.

What, what programming language did you write back then?

You know, you're asking me to date myself.

We don't need to do that.

I'm gonna, you know, I'll say C. Okay. C was the main one that I used. C plus plus a little bit.

Yeah.

But you know, I'm not gonna go further back with the other stuff.

Yeah. Can you walk us through like a day in the life of a CEO going public? I didn't want to get pull it out of Dylan, but it's like by the way.

And then the calm and collected Dylan wasn't just so focused on product, team, culture, totally vision.

But isn't that Dylan?

Yeah, that's Dylan through and through.

He doesn't have to like put on. He doesn't have to play a character on a day like today. It's just another day.

Totally. But yes, walk me through the day in a day in the life of a CEO taking a company public at the New York Stock Exchange.

Well, you probably have gone through about a 10 day period where you've been on the road and you're probably a little tired.

Does that mean literally on the. When people say roadshow, does that just mean like one big conference room wherever where everyone comes to you or are you literally flying around to different long only funds?

Some of the big long onlys, you will go see them in person.

Okay.

You know, Boston base, like a State street or something. The Welling Fidelity. Probably go see tur. You know, you're going to see some of the big names, the ones that are generally the top holders of equities. You're going to probably also go see Vanguard and BlackRock, all those folks and.

Some of those are in Manhattan, so it might be a stop here. But you're going around and you really are on the road. You're.

You are on the road. You are on the road.

So 10 days of that.

Yeah.

Then the big day comes.

This is calendar days. Yeah, I'm going. Not business days. So it's more like week and a half. Six and a half. And then by the way, you've already done testing the water. So you've already met these people in the past. And then the night before you price.

Yep.

Your deal gets priced. And then the morning of you and.

How does that, how does that happen? Is that just everyone, like putting in different bids, testing the water? Is there an automated system or is this piece happening more over conference calls and discussions like, walk me through that piece.

It's probably a better question for the banking syndicate that's doing it.

Yeah, it depends on who's doing it.

I think it's probably a bit of everything at the moment. A bit of technology, also some phone calls.

Sure, sure, sure.

They set the price where they think the supply that is coming to the market.

Yep.

And then you go to sleep.

Yep. Wake up bright and early.

Wake up. And of course you ring the bell.

You ring the bell at the New.

York Stock Exchange and then you have a couple hour period where you're doing media interviews.

Yes, of course.

Talking about your company while you're stabilization agents trying to figure out where the.

Stocks will actually trade. Yeah.

Where should it open?

Okay.

There's obviously, you know, a lot of supply on some of these, or not a loss, but a lot of demand.

A lot of demand on this one in particular because we've been hearing maybe, you know, we were hearing like rounds of cheers around noon. And then one, and then it seemed like this particular stock opened at 2, kind of around there. And that was all just based on matching the buyers and sellers.

What have you done as president of the exchange to attract these circles and the hinge healths and the, and the figmas.

Right.

These are the blockbuster IPOs of the year. There's obviously other players last year. Yeah, there's obviously other. There's other, plenty, you know, other companies I won't name that would like to have those opportunities. But what, what is, what is, you know, what makes Nice so appealing at this moment?

Well, I think there's probably a couple of different reasons. Number one, our market model, the fact that there are guys and girls down on the floor who are putting capital to work, taking the other side to stabilize a stock once it is open in the market. So our market model is very much differentiator. We're the only exchange in the world that has that market model. Two are the services that we offer. We partner with the best in class firms to provide the best in class services. And three is the general community that we have of issuers at nyse.

That's great. Yeah. Talk to me about the Bitcoin etf. That was an interesting one. Was anything different about that? How did that kind of play out?

Yeah, so we were the exchange to bring the first Bitcoin ETF to market in partnership with grayscale. We actually started working on that in 2016.

What? Yeah, I thought you were gonna say 2023, because I remember seeing some ads on CNBC and stuff for like, like, oh, beretscale is happening. And then there was the approval. And that took some time.

Whenever you first got the pitch, was it. Did it immediately make sense? Did you think they were crazy at the time?

I'm a big believer in the fact that ETFs are one of the great innovations in financial markets. It's a vehicle that allows for liquidity and transparency of assets that have less liquidity.

Sure.

And transparency. So bringing Bitcoin and ETH and some of the other ones that are being talked about into the ETF structure, it really focuses on price transparency, liquidity and trade certainty and the whole investor protection.

Sure, sure, sure, sure.

So it made a ton of sense to us that someone was thinking, yeah, well, if you wrap this in an ETF structure, you'll actually be able to get institutional investment and people to get exposure to the asset class.

So eight years of work, I imagine a lot of that's with the SEC and regulatory, but was there also a piece of talking to the buy side and the investing group to see if there was demand? Is that a piece of it, or was it mostly just chopping wood?

It was. It was chopping a lot of regulatory.

That makes sense.

Yeah, there's a lot of that. Grayscale did a great job, as did the other.

Another overnight success, just like Figma.

Overnight success, what, seven or eight years in the making?

I think it was over a decade, but that's how these things happen.

Exactly.

What's been your kind of framework around market volatility this year? How have you talked with clients and issuers around, around just kind of navigating that broadly?

As a technologist, the big thing that I've been focused on is capacity in the systems to ensure that certainty and efficiency of trading was continuing to persist on those really volatile days. I always like to say you're investing for the long term, though. Like, don't watch the market on any one given day because the markets go up and the markets go down. And we've had such a long period, period of time where the markets just went up that I think people had forgotten that at times markets do go down and it's okay. But if you are patient and thoughtful and disciplined about your investing and you invest for the long term, you'll see the rewards of that investment.

Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy?

What are you keeping track of for the rest of the year, the next quarter. What's on your mind to bring some.

More IPOs to market? We've got some big names that we're working with that we're really excited to come to market. Yeah. And continuing to just watch the market moves. Ensure that our systems are.

How big is the organization right now?

Well, we're part of a bigger organization. The bigger Organization is about 13. We've got about. Within our area, we've got about a thousand thousand folks.

AI that still feels. That feels pretty lean given given the size of some of the. Some of the companies that we cover that are maybe a couple years old.

Yeah. Impressive.

Yeah. I mean AI is a big area we're also watching as well. We've been using AI for more than a decade here, so we're very focused on the application of IT for specific use cases. But ensuring that.

You're talking about internally, not on the issuer side.

Yeah, yeah, internally. But our area of focus is ensuring data privacy is held. That's the most important to us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It seems like we're still in the early innings of actually getting a lot of those products into like enterprise ready states. Absolutely. And when, when you're entrusted with the safety and security and liquidity of the. The most dominant American capital market, you can't always be on the most risk on frontier in terms of technological adoption.

Yes. But we've been using AI for example, to help surveil the market. You can, you can point a secure anomaly protection data set and get amazing efficiencies.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Right. And that then feeds back to the human. It's like, okay, I just got a bunch of information based on this data set, this huge data set that I just pointed my AI at.

Yep.

It makes the human much more efficient.

That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for stopping.

By for this era. Thank you for hosting us given your engineering background. Yeah. Thank you for having us. Hope to be here many more times this year.

Come back.

Ideally the windows. The windows open enough that we're just here every day. Yeah.

Just fully relocated. Is there an apartment up there? I'll, I'll hang out.

Thank you so much for.

Thank you. Thanks for having to finally meet you. Nice to meet you guys.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Well, thank you for watching our stream today. Do we have anyone else? Ben, are we ready to wrap? I think we're good. Right? That's a wrap folks from the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you so much for watching.

Watching many.

Hopefully we will see you tomorrow. One more congratulations to the thousands of Figmas.

Yes.

That made this a thing. Yeah, it's truly incredible. And I can't wait to see where the company goes from here.

Me too. Thank you for watching.

We'll talk to you tomorrow.

Bye.