LIVE FROM CONFIG: Jeremy Hindle, Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian, Andrew Reed, Elliot Jay Stocks, John LePore, Marty Ringlein

You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, May 7, 2025. We are live from the dojo of design, the gridiron of grid layouts and the Valhalla vibe coding. It is figma config 2025. We are here in San Francisco in a pod. In a pod. We are podding in the pod.

We're very excited about it.

We're excited to be here. Did you expect the scale of this event?

No, the sheer magnitude.

I mean, I met. I met Dylan Camping years ago. He's not the most boisterous of CEOs. He doesn't walk around with a swagger of someone who takes over San Francisco with something that is absolutely future. I don't know if we can go to that camera and show just the scale of everyone walking around. But he was on stage. I mean, it felt like there were. It was the super bowl of design.

It did for the Woodstock of generative AI. Many people have been saying this, the gladiatorial games.

It feels like moment like a Roman Coliseum.

That's right.

Like something you see in Gladiator, but for designers and vibe coders.

That's right, that's right.

But we're very excited.

It's amazing. There's so many different builders, designers, agencies, other SaaS companies and yeah, I wish we could honestly be out watching a lot of the keynotes that we're gonna be in here talking with some of the people doing keynotes and we have somewhat of a live audience here. We're basically in a fishbowl.

It's great.

And so if you're here config, just come by. Yeah, say hello, wave. Anyway, but we're very excited to be here and we have a stacked lineup of guests for the day.

Yeah. So we're going to run through some designers, some venture capitalists, some friends of the show, all sorts of people. Some people we just met a few minutes ago who stopped by, took some pictures and we said, hey, come on the show. So we're going to be doing some interviews over the next few hours, hanging out, talking about Figma, talking about what they're launching today. Should we kick it off with what they launched and then maybe we can go back and do some history on Figma because you found some interesting data points to share. I thought it'd be interesting to take people through since that's the business side. This is not a business conference. They're not pitching the company, they're pitching the product. But we focus on the business and technology side. And so I thought It'd be interesting to go through some of that.

Yeah. So I can talk briefly about the new products that are launching today. Absolutely massive. And then we get into. We should really run through the backstory of the company. Early years of Dylan Field. There's some crazy, crazy Dylan feel lore. The lore is a breakdown. But the things that are launching today. So the big one. I already posted about this Figma sites. It sounds like what it is. I've wanted this feature since the very first day that I ever used Figma in college. So if you've ever designed a website in Figma, you usually hit this point where you're like, great, we have a beautiful website now we want to turn it into a functional website that anybody can visit. And at that point you would have to go off platform and build your own site or host it elsewhere. Now you can effectively design a site and publish it all within Figma. And it's basically taking the time from design to live site down to effectively zero just publishing in the platform. So that's one of the ones I'm most excited about.

And there's always like a tension point there with the designers and the engineers where the designers want a pixel perfect design. They export, you know, this amazing PNG and then the front end engineer is like, well, I got close enough. Yeah, they have to completely rebuild it.

Yeah. And so this is a game changer. It gives more and more control to the person that's actually designing the website and enables them effectively to go. Allows the designer and the user in Figma to ship. Even if you're not a designer. I'm not a classically trained designer. I basically learned design through using Figma back in the day. And this just is so effectively just empowering. Right. So I don't have to make something myself and then wait, wait for somebody to debit out.

So how do you think about this product positioned in terms of like enterprise versus prosumer? I could imagine this is all part of a funnel to get individuals like yourself who are doing work in design and then they publish their site and then as they scale they stay on Figma until they're massive. Or do you think this is something that will be vended into enterprises for even huge sites? Because you imagine at a certain point there's going to still be, you know, that fine grain control that comes from building something from scratch. But even for front end landing pages, marketing pages, all these things, it was always better to have something that was a little bit more wysiwyg, right?

Yeah, no, I Think you just look at the journey of a company, right?

Yep.

If this is something that you can use, if you just have an idea for a company, something as simple, or you're creating an event, you want to get something out there. This allows you to go in Figma, design something in a few seconds, publish it and get it live. And so that can be the starting point for a company and you can, I imagine, grow on it. You know, the access for Figma sites will be rolling out after today. So, you know, I haven't been able to use it directly yet, but it's, it's very kind of like everything else with figma, I imagine it'll be super intuitive.

Yeah.

But yeah, over time, you know, companies of all sizes, from, you know, one person, freelance operations to, you know, companies with thousands and thousands of people, I'm sure will be using this product, you.

Have to imagine, it's amazing for agencies that want to just share a link with the client and say, hey, here, like we're, here's our iteration. We built you a design in figma, but you can actually just go play with it at this URL as opposed to needing to go into Figma and there's all these different tools and even if you're in the view only mode, you're still kind of as a client saying like, well, I'm in a design software. This doesn't feel like the final product. It allows an agency. So yeah, we should talk to the agency.

The big thing, I mean the, the amazing part of where design is going or generative AI is going is that it takes the, it takes the time from rough idea in your head to real product. You know, in this case in the form of website, it's just compressing that.

Right.

So the second product that they're announcing is Figma Makeup allows you to turn natural language prompts or imported designs into working prototypes or apps with a. So this is what you're alluding to on the sort of like vibe coding side. You can go in and effectively prompt your way to working products and prototypes. And again, this idea of taking, effectively compressing the time from that initial spark of an idea to something that you can actually use. Right. And we talked with Kari from Linear on the show a week ago, a couple weeks ago about this idea that with engineering costs dropping dramatically, everybody's expectation is let's not just, you know, let's not spend, you know, hundreds of hours planning and, you know, iterating, you know, spending all this time iterating. If we can get you Know basically get to something that's maybe even 60, 70% as good as what the final product will be so that we can feel it, use it and really evaluate it from there. The third product, Figma Buzz. This allows you to create visual assets at scale without compromising brand consistency. With built in AI, this is an obvious one. Oftentimes historically I've built sort of like brand, brand books, brand identity guides in Figma.

Yeah.

And then you know, any number of people on the team are going to go in there and sort of distort it and different assets even for us.

Like we post like a silly meme or some like we want to overlay the TVPN logo on a paparazzi photo for example.

It's different every time.

It's different every time. I'm actually I use like a different app on my phone for that and then don't have version control. If our, as our logos evolved they're still using the old logo and stuff. So.

Yeah. So the idea with Figma Buzz is any, any person in an organization can come in and generate assets for a variety of needs. Whether you need to generate an email for retention, marketing an ad for Meta. If you need to generate, you know, temp, you know, design for some type of event, you can do that all within Figma.

I do wonder how much that becomes just a true consumer product because you can imagine something that is designed for these brand assets can also be used to make you know, a invitation to a wedding or something like that. And a lot of those like you know, consumer products that you want to go in and not just have a blank canvas. Yeah, but you want to be able to build off a template, make something look nice, then export it. Like you could imagine that this allows them to go even further, I guess down market into the consumer might wind up making a design software choice in the future.

Totally. I mean the line between consumer and prosumer and B2B enterprise is just like blurring.

I mean it's the story of like Gmail, right. Like you get everyone on Gmail account, eventually they're going to walk into the enterprise and say hey, I want to use Gmail at work. And then all of a sudden Google.

Workspace becomes a huge business anyways. I expect this to be big in you know, the enterprise specifically if you have, you know, hundreds, thousands of people at your company that you want to keep assets contain consistent.

Yeah.

If you are a creative director, VP of design or cmo.

Yeah.

There's nothing more frustrating than watching people sort of take the brand and just kind of do their own thing with it. And so this provides guardrails and also.

Like, uniquely empowered by generative AI. Like, the example that they have is this national park kind of invitation. And then they're able to publish this template and then have a different design for every animal that you could find in the national park. Kind of like what Ryan Peterson did with those ChatGPT images. In ChatGPT, he made a poster for every single Flexport location and was able to say, oh, Flexport Sydney. And it has this beautiful, like, Sydney background. And so you can imagine that that's normally so much grunt work, even just to go find the stock image that fits with that. But all of a sudden you have a. You know, you're creating a template that can then have the eastern gray wolf and the alpaca and all the different elements that you'd want to actually have a flow of assets as opposed to just like, okay, I made one. Now it's just as much work to make the second one. It's just as much work to make the third one. Instead you're thinking of this, like, higher level abstraction. And so you're getting way more leverage out of whoever's on that project. Right.

100%. Go the last product, Figma Draw. This is a product that allows you to express yourself with enhanced vector editing and illustration tools right. In Figma design. So this is a product people have wanted forever, much like the others. And historically people would have to go outside of Figma to do this sort of like more complex illustration work. And so now you can do that in house. And so again, Figma is a company that historically wants to spend the necessary time to make truly great products. And so again, the full suite here are things that again, the users and the people that are here at Config have been asking for for years. And so it's really making a statement to come out and launch these for massive products. So we should talk about some of the early history. Should we dive in there?

Yeah, I just want to make sure that John Lepore is ready because we could maybe bring him and do that if there's a gap later in the show. But if he's ready to go, let's bring him in. Welcome to the Stream. Thank you so much for joining us. Grab some headphones. Good to see you. Good to meet you in person.

Yes.

Great to meet.

What's happening, fellas?

Not too much.

Welcome to the podcast Potting in the Pot.

Welcome to Config, man.

Yes.

This is wild, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is this your first one?

This is my first time coming here.

It's massive.

I knew it was a big deal, but my face was melted when I got here.

Like, street shut down the block.

It's a block party.

Yeah. You kind of expect it with Apple because they've been doing these, these big releases for decades now. But it's not every year that we see a company graduate to this scale. And so it's really shocking in that way. And then, of course, I was talking to Jordi about this. Like, Dylan is not the type to be like, oh, it's all about me. I gotta throw this massive thing. It just kind of clearly happened because there was demand and there's partners and there's lots of people.

It's a community too. Like, it's a epic scale community.

It's a lot. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. So can you give us a little bit of background? Introduce yourself for the stream. For those who might not know.

Sure.

So my name is John Lepore. I'm the co founder of a practice called Blackbox Infinite Cool. So I'm here at Figma to present in about an hour upstairs on the mezzanine stage. And I'm going to be talking about my weird little corner of the world, which is this bizarre journey that I took towards working in tech and product design, which actually started through working in film. And I had this background of making the fake gadgets and technologies that you would see in science fiction and superhero movies and things.

Is that specifically like fui, like futuristic UI or product design that would be done by the art department.

So for me, it started as fui, which was typically implemented into the film as a visual effect after the fact, but also started evolving into, like, really rich world building and creating deep technology concepts that might affect the plot of the story and help to move the narrative along in any of these films. And I love that space. I thought it was a really fascinating world to work in. And then I got really excited because at a certain point, pretty early on, real world tech brands started popping up and saying, hey, can you help us close the gap between these aspirational visions of technology that we see in film that sometimes are just. They're just sort of, you know, beautiful images on screen or stuff that, like, doesn't make sense. If you know anything about tech. Like real tech doesn't say, access denied from one side.

Yeah.

To another.

System is being hacked. There's a hacker and all the code is spewing out. They're in my computer.

Yep.

But you get to do these other fun things where you're like. You find yourself prototyping different concepts that are a little more applicable to the real world. And so two years ago, I started my practice because we had hit this inflection point where it felt like the real world technology was not just like catching up to science fiction, but in some ways it's fully surpassing it.

Right.

And science fiction is still just showing us the same glowing blue leapy bloops, and there's this whole other world of things that you can get into. And so what I'm going to be talking about is this concept of what it takes to design a positive future and how you do everything that you can to not get too caught up in the science fiction of it all, especially.

No, I've talked. I mean, if you want to change the future, one of the best ways would be to travel back, you know, maybe to the 50s and make a bunch of, you know. Yeah, we were talking positive science, like.

Solar punk over cyberpunk. It doesn't always have to be, you know, these dark, you know, glows. Sometimes it can be a more, I don't know, grounded in nature vibe, even for the future.

I mean, we know that the near term is going to be pretty disruptive on a technological perspective or landscape, but we also have been seeing nothing but the future portrayed as, like, mega dystopia.

Always.

Totally.

Like always. It's the darkest shit.

Imagine. I refuse to watch the new black mirror.

Yeah.

I'm just not gonna put it in my brain.

And it's good, you know, And I mean, it's. And it's. I still love that stuff. I enjoy it and I appreciate cyberpunk aesthetics.

Yeah, it's cool. I mean, we got some cyberpunk going.

On here, but we shouldn't be making. Our real products are real experiences, you know, they shouldn't be influenced or driven by that because it's like, yeah, yeah, that would look perfect after the apocalypse.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, well, in order to get there, we have to live through the apocalypse.

Exactly, exactly.

We could avoid that.

Yeah. I'm interested to know, back on the FUI thing, what was the. What was the typical software stack back then? Was it a lot of, like, after effects and, like, were you getting into, like, Cinema 4D and Houdini? I went to Seagraph a couple of years ago and there was a ton of cool, cool, like, FUI projects, but. And then I want to know, like, how has that evolved as we get into more generative projects and there's just so many more things you can do. Even, even robust tools are more accessible just because you can search for what you want to do easier.

Yeah, absolutely. So you nailed it. When I started out with this stuff, it was after Effects, it was Cinema 4D, it's Houdini and Blender. And Blender and, you know, a lot of these traditional platforms. And even, even when not working in film, our team finds ourselves using some of those tools and those approaches just to kind of like pre prototype certain concepts or ideas. But also I'm seeing now there's a lot more new tools and approaches. And of course there's all the generative stuff. There's, you know, designing things, but designing things while you're in VR or in Apple Vision Pro or whatnot, so that you have this sense of SC and you get this very different way. Like, I've been obsessed with Vision Pro since that came out, just as this.

Thing where how many hours a week have you used it since launch?

So I know. Not that I know where I'm going with this.

I'm legitimately interested. I'm not trying to do a gotcha, but I'm genuinely curious around, you know, is it an hour here or there sporadically, or it is at times, like.

It'S a very intentional choice to be.

Like, you pull that tool out of.

Between, get it out of the drawer, totally blow a little bit of the dust off, you know, put it on and go in.

Yeah.

But I also find particularly being creative.

Yeah.

In that space.

Yeah.

It, for me, it reminds me of like the first time that I ever started using 3D tools or learning how to design on a computer because, like, it's almost like I've got a. The world's fastest 3D printer in front of me that can just like, you know, I was designing swag for our company and making, you know, a design that goes on a hoodie and then viewing the hoodie at human scale and immediately being like, oh, well, now that I see it like in my space, like as if it's hanging on a hanger in front of me. I'm going to change this. I'm going to tweak this. I'm going to.

There's something about being in that virtual world that just makes the blank canvas more accessible. Like, I remember I had. This was before, before Apple Vision Pro, I think I had a quest and went into one of the modeling softwares that you could kind of just 3D draw whatever you wanted exported that as OBJ brought it into Houdini and then it was so much easier to kind of tinker with and add like all the details on top as opposed to having to start fresh with just like a blank canvas.

And it's really hard. To me, so much of the excitement that I have around specifically Genai.

Yeah.

Is taking the timeline from that high level idea down to genuinely feeling what the end product could be like. Maybe it's not 100% what, what it will be, but yeah, it's just, it's once you can see something and interact with it, whether it's a digital product or, you know, even again, like some type of 3D render in VR and.

Coming from a background in animation, the process would be, you know, you set your keyframes, you set everything up and then you hit the render button and then you wait and then, and then you're like, I'm going to play the render now. And then you watch it and you're either excited or you're like, there's 15 things I got to change right now, but it's going to be even better, you know, and it's a real, it's really interesting, that sort of feedback loop that you get. And now that feedback loop is getting almost immediate.

Yeah.

And having things be more, you know, the notion of spatial computing, it makes things a bit more intuitive or just natural at a certain point. Our practice got on everybody's radar early last year because we put together this prototype for what it would be like to watch a Formula one race.

Oh yeah, you did that?

Yes.

Oh, that went super viral. I saw. That was amazing. I had no idea that was.

You went unbelievably.

That was incredible.

Yeah, it was a wonderful experience for us, but it also, it inspired a lot of people that are working in this space. There was a few different groups of developers who jumped in and started making their own prototypes based on.

So that was basically a spec work for you. We weren't paid by F1 for that, but totally speculative. That's incredible project.

Just because we were really passionate about this $3,500 array of sensors and amazing tech. And we were super disappointed that when we saw the first demos of it, it was like, cool. Put on this insane hallucination machine and use this to view.

Rectangle space.

Your inbox with 2,000 unread emails.

Look at that PDF, you know, and we just saw like, there's so much more that you could do with this. And so like that experience. And if you're a racing fan, there's a fully. So much, fully Functioning beta of it today. That's amazing. And it changes the way that you experience this stuff and you put it on and you do, like, feel like Iron Man.

Yeah.

But you also feel like, oh, this is like, this is so obvious. Like, of course, this is the way that we interact with things like this. So I'm just stoked that there's all these different things that are happening with these paradigms where we're still in the, like, Apple Newton days of all of these things, whether it's spatial, whether it's AI, and it's going to enable some amazing things that we can't even accurately predict until we've been living with these things for a while.

Can you talk a little bit about the reception of AI in Hollywood in the film industry? We were talking about how it takes day to render. I remember when Redshift came out, we started rendering things on the GPU instead of the CPU. That was like a 10x increase in speed. Everyone loved it. Now we were like, oh, we're almost going too fast because it renders instantly. And obviously there's like job displacement issues. But in general, are there pockets of cautious optimism?

Yeah. And the only other context that I would add there is, I think an interesting thing has been happening where historic, you know, good renders have always been expensive. Truly great renders have always been extremely expensive in context. And I think there was this idea maybe starting a couple years ago, what's going to happen to the sort of craft of generating these types of assets. And the thing that I've seen happen is the, okay, renders are now available almost at a push of a button. They're not actually 3D assets, but the people that I know that are truly elite at the craft are actually busier than ever now because companies need to, in some ways different, separate themselves again from the sort of average. But I'm curious what you're seeing.

Yeah, I want to be as cautiously optimistic as possible, but there's also a tremendous amount of stress across, particularly the visual effects and animation community. A little less so than in digital product design. But I feel like there's a point at which that will start to catch up here as well. For me, these tools. There is something sad about this idea of, like, this tool is going to do the craft for you, for the people craft.

Is that sometimes what's enjoyable?

I mean, sweat. Any of people here love the craft, that aspect of it, and they. They like the vision and creating, you know, following through on that vision to create an amazing end result. But so Much of that comes from the craft and applying yourself to that. And there's not, you know, there's not a lot of this work where people are just like, oh, I wish you know, someone else could do all of this stuff. For me, there is still, you know, significant portions of this that people just love and enjoy. So I think that's interesting. Now I'm really curious about some of the models and some of the processes for figuring out how to the creatives can have a little more control and a little more real time manipulation and basically are just closing up that feedback loop. And the other thing that's amazing to me is as soon as even in 2022, first gen mid journey stuff, the only people that could make really good stuff with it were professional creative directors.

Totally.

Whose jobs it was to give clear.

Yep.

In you know, very articulate direction.

Yep.

To achieve their goals and had, you know, the vocabulary, wisdom. And now you know, like you should.

Study art history if you want to.

Be great at like you find these like cheat sheets of like hey, these.

Are all the different 1s graph and.

It just doesn't go in there and whatnot. So it's, it's wild and it's interesting. You know, I'm, I'm excited because things will, you know, we'll get to the end point just faster and faster and everybody becomes a production studio of, of sorts and it, and it does reinforce, you know, the need for a clear and articulate vision. But yeah, you know, I just want to make sure people can still hold on to the craft.

Are you excited about any of the kind of other product unlocks downstream? Like I was, I was with my son, I made like this like little LEGO thing. I was able to take it studio giblet but like just showing the image was one thing, but when we printed it out it was like, oh, this is something you could hang on the wall. And I feel like, like you kind of reinject that creativity once 3D printing gets really good or some sort of manufacturing. And I know you've done like product design in many ways. Are there things that you're excited about bringing? You know, yes, this one aspect of the work is collapsed, but then there's other ways to instantiate the vision.

Yeah, I think 3D printing is really, really epic, really exciting. I mean at some point it's also just going to be like, oh, and you're humanoid robot will let itself out of the box and will craft whatever you instructed it to build.

Yeah, that's the next Figma Conquer or What? Yeah, that's 2026 figma humanoid, humanoid.

So I bring that up partially because we've been doing some stuff with some of the leaders in the humanoid robotics space around. Like, how do you create like a face?

Oh, sure, yeah.

For these things, which is.

Some of them are so dystopian.

It's very.

I don't want to name names, but.

Some are bizarre, really, really wild space. And it's.

What can you share at a high level around what you think the inevitable face form factor is for humanoids? What's your optimistic vision?

Yeah, it's like uncanny.

I always think about photoreal or like.

The Asimo, just like cute little happy face.

So I think about the example of, you know, you get up, you know, let's say you get up at 4.30am, you have an early day, you walk out to your kitchen and your humanoid is doing some dishes or something like that. And what's the face that's not gonna. I think over time it can be jarring. Anything but what's gonna be pleasant versus jarring.

I even have a tough time imagining what's the ideal future because I've been so obsessed with, well, what should it be today? Because they're already here. And I feel really strongly that today it should not have eyes and a mouth. It shouldn't be this thing that's developed to like approach you and be like, tell me, why do humans cry? You know, it should just, it should be very crystal clear. I'm a tool. I'm a really expensive like forklift or piece of industrial equipment and just, you know, tell me what to do. You don't have to say please and thank you.

Should it even have a head?

You know? Yeah, should it even have a head? I mean there's, you know, and I could go on forever about like, like why, why even humanoid? You know, why. Why work to those limitations of the human body and whatnot. But it's a, it's a fascinating space. There's a ton of things that you have to unpack. And even just right now, the priorities are just like safety.

Yeah.

Making sure that, you know, nobody gets hurt or people can predict what a humanoid robot is going to do.

You see the video that came out of China a couple of days ago where the humanoid just goes awol?

Well, that was in China. I saw that.

I saw that.

Crazy, kind of like something wrong.

Not necessarily. It didn't seem like.

Yeah, it probably wasn't trying to attack.

But it was pretty violent.

Crazy, absolutely terrifying. It's like it's like having. Yeah. It looks like it's throwing a fit.

And it doesn't look happy.

And now I can. All I can imagine is, like, that's the scariest Black Mirror episode.

Totally.

The thing that was like loading a dishwasher. It didn't even mean to kill you. It just was like, I can't stop swinging my arm at 90 miles per hour.

It's wild. Anything else you're excited to check out while you're here? Any other partners you're talking to?

Oh, man. You know, there's many amazing people. There's a ton of wild talks that I want to check out. I've been spending a lot of time bumping into some friends that are in the automotive industry. Done a ton of work in that space as well, which is, like, probably the digital experience that needs the most.

Yeah.

Unbucking.

Yeah, totally. Most people just plug in their phone and then they get this very basic, like, Apple hasn't really refreshed CarPlay.

The positive is that manufacturers are realizing that people love analog buttons.

Oh, yeah.

Like, analog.

The problem is they're realizing that today, which means that product will be available about seven years. That's how long it takes to go.

There's some manufacturers that are putting. They figured out how to put buttons on top of the touch screens. Have you seen this? Yeah. That's kind of a funny, like, hack because they're like, we just really want to do one big touchscreen, but somebody wanted a volume button, so we'll just glue that on and it'll be capacitive.

So it just edits. Yeah, it's got, like, a little, like, sausage inside of it so that it activates.

Yeah. The touchscreen, basically. Such a funny thing. Well, anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Good luck with the rest of your config.

Good luck with your talk. You nervous?

I'm stoked. I'm excited. I love doing that stuff.

Yeah.

I'm nervous about walking around because there's just so many. Super.

I agree with you everywhere. Yeah.

And that not enough time.

Yeah.

That gets me into my.

We were at a conference last week, and one of our friends said he shook so many. His hand. So many hands. His. His hand got bruised. Crazy. So stay healthy.

Thank you. Enjoy. Have a blast while you're here. All right, bye.

Great to hang.

Yeah. It's fascinating. We have our next guest coming into the studio. I love the motion design DNA. Moving from film and television into the real world. We're finally able to instantiate some of the stuff and you do see it pop up in real world devices, but it feels like Hollywood is always the best at defining some kind of new UI paradigm and then actually bringing it.

Hey, what's going on? Great to meet.

Nice to meet you.

Great to meet you. I'm John.

Excited, excited, excited to have you.

Feel free to throw on those headphones if you want. You'll be able to make your own voice. But let's kick it off with a little introduction of yourself. Who you are, what you do, why you're here, how you're enjoying the day. For those who don't know you.

Sure, yeah. I'm Elliot and I am a designer and author. I'm here speaking tomorrow so I can relax. Today I decided to enjoy it. I've just seen one of my very old friends do a fantastic presentation on stage.

His name's Dylan Field.

Tim Van Damme. And yeah, they just announced some amazing stuff and it's great to be here.

So what's your talk about tomorrow?

It's about typography. Typography in design systems.

Very cool.

Give us the full backstory. I mean, I'll go out on a limb and say you're the godfather of type. It's a little bit dramatic, but certainly have had a massive impact. I'll take it on type on Type online. So, yeah, I would love, would love, kind of hear the full journey.

Cool. That's kind of you to say. Thank you, man, I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, I've been super lucky to kind of work in the type industry for many years. I did a bunch of stuff with Adobe fonts. I'm now actually doing some more stuff with Adobe fonts and Google fonts as well. And I like to kind of balance things like writing about typography and about design with actually being handled in the tools as well. And yeah, it's been great to just get to shout out everyone, what is.

The structure of the industry? I imagine that there's the big players, Adobe, Google, like you mentioned, who are buying lots of fonts, but then there's also companies that need whole fonts for their own brand systems and their design systems, I'm sure. So is that kind of the shape of the industry or is there another player that's really important. How would you break it down?

It's the independent firms that make some of the fonts that you interact with on a daily basis. Even some of the fonts that I'm sure we use it at tvpn but. But would love to understand the market structure.

Absolutely. I mean, Those indie foundries that you mentioned are kind of, you know, the backbone of the industry really because even you've got folks like Adobe for instance. They, that library is made up of a bunch of different foundry partners and so they are not owned by companies like Adobe. They are independent practitioners a lot of the time they are like one person bands a lot of the time, you know, super, super indie. Obviously you've got folks like Monotype as well who do own large libraries and they have, they have their ip but the, the type industry is really just made up of a huge number of independent foundries who are then use those distribution channels like Adobe fonts, etc. To get stuff on there. Monotype have my fonts as well, which is also another big channel. And the differentiator there I suppose is like Google fonts. They are open source and so they tend to not exist elsewhere. Although Adobe Fonts does pull in those as well.

One second, we're going to pull in. Gary Tan, he's just stopping by.

Gary, great to see you.

How you doing?

Great to see you.

I know you got to get out of here quickly. Good to see you.

Busy man. It's great to see you.

How's your figma config been?

Oh, it's been sick.

Yeah.

All I wanted to say was keep mogging guys.

Thank you.

Always keep mogging.

We'll see you Gary.

I'm sure you know. Are you familiar with Gary?

I have not.

He's the president of Y Combinator. Also quite an accomplished designer. A bunch of the logos of biggest companies.

But anyways, so I want to know more about the business model of working with Adobe. Is it like Spotify where like you put your stuff up and then the more it gets used the more you get paid? Or is it more like a one off deal? Is that selling a book?

The, the yeah. Usage is, is shed to. Yes. So the successful fonts that get more usage.

Okay.

They, they get more money. Yeah.

Is it at the level where people are trying to, you know, pay influencers to use their fonts to promote them, go trend?

No, I mean it. So from my perspective, how mature is the industry? From my perspective, I mean you can see this sort of hype cycle with individual fonts where you know, one, you know, oftentimes, you know, one designer will leverage a font in a really unique way and then three months later everyone.

Has to use it.

Sort of an explosion of sites using that. And you know, we've had people that have been maybe a little bit too inspired by what we're doing at tvpn actually, you know, find the font that we use for our logo and sort of use that for our logo. You know, it's, it's all fair game on the Internet.

Yeah, it's. I mean, you can never predict how that stuff takes off as well. There is foundries, obviously, try and look at trends and see what's doing well and sometimes try to replicate that. But sometimes if something blows up and there's no real reason, it comes from maybe someone using it or whatever. And some foundries have done very well at that. I know some type designers who've struggled for many years and slogged away and they've released one thing and it blows up and they can buy a house, you know.

Yeah, it's a hits business. Just like music, it is like Spotify.

Totally.

Yeah.

It's amazing. Are there specific eras of font design, typography design, that you think of as you tell the story of how typography has evolved over the last, like, I don't know, 50, 100 years or something?

I mean, it's driven by technology a lot. When you think of like the move from metal type, wood type, photo type setting, early digital type. When you look at like sort of what we know of as fonts these days, you know, you got the 80s, so the 90s when folks like Font Shop really pioneered that, originally making them available on, you know, actual physical discs and then obviously online. And that really radically changed things. And you had web fonts come along in around sort of what sort of 20 2009, 2010, which before that you couldn't use anything on your websites other than, you know, Georgia, Ariel Roman, you know, and people forget that that was, you know, a pretty huge thing for web design. And I was, I was a web designer exclusively at that time. And it was a kind of a wild time to, to be working on the web and with all this sort of new stuff that we had to play with.

So how, how is the industry reacting and responding to generative AI? I mean, I, I haven't played around with any tools around type myself, but I imagine we're not far away from somebody kind of saying, hey, I like these three fonts generate me something net new.

Yeah, it is kind of odd that ChatGPT, when they generate images, they can now do text pretty effectively, but they're not using an actual font, you know, library. Yeah, source. It's kind of just creating its own on the fly.

Yeah, I mean, like everything with AI, it's, it's just changing day to Day. Yeah, there are definitely some experiments going on. There are some like entirely AI generated font fonts, font generators which have mixed results. But yeah, there are some tools, you know, which will generate images. And as part of that, as text is part of that, there is some recent huge leaps been made in that. Like the designer Jessica Hish has been posting a bunch of stuff that some experiments she's been doing with ChatGPT where she, you know, she's a very accomplished lettering artist, but looking, she's looking at what ChatGPT can actually put out and it's actually, you know, the progress is incredible. It's now its ability to actually do some half decent lettering is, you know, it's super interesting when you look at a few months ago and you'd be lucky if you even have like the right words spelled correctly.

You know, that was always, that was the most quick way to identify if something was AI generated was just how badly all the text was botched.

Exactly.

But it certainly, yeah, it's getting, getting uncanny.

We're pushing past the uncanny valley now. It's getting.

How do you think the, what do you, how do you expect kind of the business models of the industry to evolve? I imagine I can see it going, you know, the way of fashion to some degree where, you know, maybe in the future you can get kind of a factory, a factory font that was just generated. But there's something about, you know, typography that's almost soulful, you know, and you discover, you know, something you can just see, you can feel, you know, the attention that was put into it. Where do you expect the kind of, how do you expect kind of the industry to evolve and kind of the business models to evolve as, you know, assuming. I think we can safely assume that generative AI will be, you know, twice as good at type and in a year.

Right.

Maybe more.

Yeah, I mean, totally AI generated fonts are coming for sure. Like it's, it's gonna be a thing. And it is interesting for the business because at least in, in the US you can't, you can't copyright a design. You can, you can trademark a name. So, you know, things like Helvetica are always going to be trademarked and own by monotype, but you can't copyright the outlines. So, you know, it's interesting. Models can learn from all of the type that's out there. Also, type by its very nature is very systems based. There's plenty of like, maths in there and metrics and things which are in a sense easy to replicate. I mean, my hope personally is as a creative person and a great supporter of all type designers out there, hope that there will always be a market for, for people who want to make type and have something very bespoke and something that we've got a lot of feeling and love put into it. But for sure, AI fonts are coming and I think it's. It's going to massively disrupt the industry in the same way that all those previous technological advances also change the font industry.

Give us some spice. Most overrated font. Most underrated font. Take some shots. I want to hear.

I don't know, you go way back.

See.

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean.

Maybe meta commentary. What does the community typically say is overrated?

I mean, the community tends to. People like free stuff. Right. So a lot of people use. Use stuff from places like Google Fonts to provide fonts for free. And that's great. There was some superb quality stuff and they've done a lot of work recently to really improve the technical quality of their library. But it's important to remember that when you're using something for free, obviously lots of other people also using it for free. So to get that differentiation, still, the kind of easy hack is to effectively to pay for a font, whether that's through a subscription service like Adobe Fonts or just buying the font outright from the Foundry. So that's always a good way to get something that's super unique.

Yeah. Amazing.

Well, thank you so much. I think we have our next guest.

Thanks for stopping by.

Thank you for having us.

Good luck with your talk.

Thanks so much. Hope you get to.

We'll see you on the Internet.

All right, see you then. Thanks, guys.

Cheers.

It's great. And we have Andrew Reed coming into the studio next, second time appearance. I'm sure he is doing deals out there, writing term sheets on napkins, finding the next figma.

There he is.

How you doing, Andrew? What's going on? Yeah, yeah, you're live. You can throw on the headphones. Talking to the microphone. How are you doing? Good to meet you in person.

There we go.

Thank you guys for having me.

It's too loud. You might be able to adjust it, but.

No, it's perfect.

Okay, great. Yeah. How's it been? Is this your first config or have you been coming for a long time?

This is my.

Yeah, I was going to say very, very bad investor. If he's like, oh, I guess now that's a big deal, you know, I guess I'll show up.

I remember back when we got Standing ovation for the font picker. You know, the first of two standing ovations for the font picker.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing.

No, I mean today feels monumental just given the scale of the event, but also the launches, the people that were doing a standing ovation for the font picker, I'm sure they're here today seeing the four massive launches. It's massive.

Yeah. I mean, what was the precursor to config? Were there little user group meetups? You hear about that with the story of Instagram where Kevin would go running with the early group, which there were only 100 people on the service, but they still was doing that customer development. Do you remember kind of the arc of how we got here?

Well, for me, so. Yes. Well, I remember predating our investment in Figma, we were involved with GitHub, which opened up Universe, which is like kind of the same sort of a vibe in actually very similar venues. It was the open source developer ecosystem. And I remember sitting through some of those universes back in the mid 2010s and thinking, I'm never going to be involved with a company that can do something like this. Just having the true vibrant community, people actually want to show up. I was like, that was a cool thing to be involved with. And then I go to the first config and it was in a room that's the size of the maker studio thing now and it was just buzzing. And I remember whenever I come to configure, like I really feel like I'm cosplaying, you know, like I like making websites but like, you know, some say I apply like a design like creativity to my Excel sheets.

Yeah.

Like an artist, let's say I'm an artist in Excel. It's funny, I'm so used to, I got, I go to these events with, with my daughters, like for school and stuff and they're, you know, there's always like a long line of people from. For face painting and there's plenty of face painting supplies, but there's only like two or three people who can actually do the face painting.

Yeah, I see where you're going.

I always walk around here like, man, like everybody here could be the most amazing face painter. You know, it's like, you know, I could just bring my kids in the face paint and have it all solved.

Yeah, no, the talent density is wild.

Yeah. On the topic of like these annual releases, Brian Chesky recently said, like part of founder mode is like even if you're a company that can do non waterfall More agile development, more iterative releases. It helps to get on an annual cadence. Not talking about figma specifically, but is that something that you think is correct advice for big companies, small companies, is it going to become increasingly popular? Because the, the Airbnb, Brian, like the Cesky memo kind of shook Silicon Valley. I know Ryan Peterson at Flexport was like, we're doing that too. At the same time people have been looking at Apple and saying, hey, AI is moving too fast. Apple, you can't wait to launch your next thing for a full year. You should be dropping software updates every single month and just telling us, okay, you improved it. So there's a little bit of like a balancing act there. But what, like what do you think of the overall trend of these annual kind of agenda setting events versus something that's like you could kind of blend the two?

Yeah, I think as software and technology has gotten easier to create, it has just gotten so much harder. And as there's more companies have gotten started and there's more venture capital and like I remember back when you could, you know, you get a TechCrunch article written about your product launch and they would, you know, you drive all this signups and it was this amazing thing and it's just so much harder to stand out now. There are so many companies launching amazing stuff constantly. And just as the red queen dynamic, just to stay in place, you have to be doing usability improvements, AI upgrades, et cetera to your product every single week just to kind of maintain, not fall behind. Exactly. Then I think as it relates to genuine product launches, I think even for the stuff that's launched today, there's an alpha, there's a beta. Right. So there's, you kind of have to do the user testing in sync with this. But yeah, it's pretty freaking cool to show everybody the things that you spent a year working on and rally your team around a deadline. You know, like knowing the Figma team like this date has kind of been in the back of everyone's heads for a very long time.

Well, and it's such a, it's such a, you know, we can kind of be understated but, but Dylan and the Figma team are making a huge statement coming in with, you know, sites make buzz like these are, you know, they can come out with a V1 now, but the, the, you know, my expectation is they become, you know, very, very significant pretty quickly.

Yeah, I mean obviously you're here to support Dylan, but has figma grown into a type of ecosystem where there are other Potential power loss, startups building in and around. Because you see that with a lot of companies. I mean, Zuck was just talking about it with like Facebook ultimately becoming a platform at a certain point. There's been a lot of companies that have built on top. Exactly. Is there a story around like the broader design ecosystem that's taking hold or is the venture capital community still just kind of like laser focused on Figma by itself?

I think Figma has supported and enabled a broad network of plugin developers for a long time. And I think a lot of the power of Figma comes from what Figma enables, but also comes from the ecosystem around it that applies to things like templates right into these plugins. So I think Figma from a architecture standpoint, Figma was a platform before it became the platform. Right. And I do think it is the center of a community and a center of a community of products. And I love the mission of trying to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. These are not just face painters. Right. They're like the most creative people in the world who also love technology. And I think for people with minds like that, allowing them to do so much more, that's one of the coolest things a company can do.

So how do you think about design trends in the decks that you get pitched? I mean, if Figma launched a deck designer, obviously just design is becoming more accessible, it's becoming more affordable. And also I feel like there's a little bit of just a meme in Silicon Valley that hey, like if you're going out for a Series A, it's not unreasonable to spend 10k 50k on design for your deck. At the same time, that can totally be like band aid on a bullet wound if you're not actually building a great business. So I imagine as a, as an investor there's a little bit of like, don't fall for the pretty design. But we've seen trends where, I mean, for a while there were like a ton of direct to consumer companies that were just getting funded. It was like, oh, you, you went to the exact same brand thing that the Warby Parker guys went to or whatever.

No, it's funny, I remember this is going to definitely date me.

Yeah.

You know we used to print out all these decks.

Yeah, right.

You would like, you know, get the deck and you just hit print. And I remember then it started being black. No. Then for the first black backgrounds for the first, I'm gonna send this clip to Joe at Loom, Joan Vinay from Loom for the first Board meeting for Loom. They did like 130 page deck in like dark mode squared. Right. It was like the level of dark gray versus modestly less dark gray. And these stacked bar charts was impossible. And I came into the board meeting with this printout and it looked just like basically like a bunch of black pages. Look, we've already lost like $400 on this investment because we have like burned through our entire print drink. And I can't figure out what the hell's going on in our business, you know, so anyway, we switched that one to light mode. But I do think, like, presentation, you know, it's like anything in business, you know, at its core is like the Don Valentine thing is storytelling. Right. And visual storytelling is imperative to fundraising, it's imperative to sales. And I think having the right set of assets to tell your story, it really matters. I actually do think, like spending the money to create a presentation that really captures your idea, your ethos of what you're trying to build is like totally worth it. And, you know, there's also the flip side that, you know, you can do it in the Times New Roman, the, the Sprezzatura presentation, you know, or like, so you, you can go that path, like, look how little we tried. Or you can do the.

Yeah.

Really good.

Every once in a while you see a deck from someone who's like coming out of an enterprise and has like deep, deep institutional knowledge. And they're probably going to build something really cool, but they just don't understand design or even how to speak Silicon Valley's language at all. And you're like, okay, I gotta like, you know, actually read through the. Read between the lines.

Now the worst is when you get the ones that are. And as a, you know, I used to work at Goldman Sachs.

Yeah.

You know, as a former banker, I love my investment banker friends. When you get the. All of a sudden it's a series B company and they hire the head of finance and operations from Goldman. And then you get the, you know, 98 years of combined industry experience, like highly seasoned management teams. They will not do it.

John and I have, you know, 20 years of combined experience in technology media.

Exactly.

Yeah. I've never met a management team that's not highly seasoned.

Yeah, I mean, Dylan was brand new.

I'm curious, do you think there's the lore around Figma, Is that Dylan and it's Evan, right? Yep. Dylan and Evan spend years basically in obscurity building this product. Today, if a founder was building a SaaS tool and they were three years in and didn't have a product that they were letting people actively use, I think most investors would write it off. I almost feel like it almost ended up being an anti lesson, that sort of four year period of obscurity because they were pioneering the use of WebGL for browser collaboration. And have you ever found yourself kind of pushing back on founders that are like, well, Dylan and Evan spent four years getting their products.

I know exactly what you mean. So I think it's a little bit like for Dex, you can either do the we really didn't try at all or we made it look beautiful. I think with companies similarly, you can do the we're going to iterate constantly in the market and find our way to product market fit or you can do that we have a concrete vision and we're going to build what we want to build and when we launch it, it's going to work. I think the in between area where you're just like slowly maneuvering off of your initial course, like that's, I think, the really unhappy path. I think we've done so many retrospectives on analyses on what are the commonalities between the big outlier, big outlier companies. And the reality is, if you look at most of Silicon Valley history, the length of time it took you to get from nothing to a million dollars of revenue is basically uncorrelated with how fast your company grows. But how fast you go from 1 to 10 is highly correlated. So basically it's like you're trying to coil a spring. And most of the companies that really make it go very fast out the gate, but take a variety of times to get into.

I mean, I think the most recent example, probably OpenAI, literally a nonprofit for a decade, and then all of a sudden a billion in. In like a couple months. Do you think that there's like.

Well, actually one more Figma lore story. I'm never gonna. I just. So this is a Doug Leone story. So I figured, you know, of course it's time to give Doug his shine. So when we were doing our Figma investment, it was. This was January 2019 and I was an associate, so I was like doing my best to position ourselves. And I thought, you know, we're totally gonna do this investment. You know, like Dylan, Dylan loves us and. But just in case, I'm gonna bring Doug in to like, you know, bring.

In the big dog.

And so Dylan and Evan are coming down to our office in Menlo Park. We had already given them a term sheet and we're just, you Know, trying to show them how much we love them.

Is that the term sheet in that photo?

Yeah, the one that got like, you know, someone did the CIA analysis to figure out all the reverse. That was a hand. That was my bad to our comms team. And we're about to do the meeting and Dylan and Evan both into Brown and Brown's one of our LPs, and we have all of our conference rooms at Sequoia named after our LPs. When we were going to do this meeting in the MIT conference room, and then I was just like, yeah, it's a much nicer conference room than the Brown conference room. The dog was like, no, we're doing this in the Brown conference room. And like 10 minutes before the meeting, he moves the meeting to Brown. And then he goes into our system and shows, he prints out a page with like, all of the amount that Brown had invested in our various funds over the years and how much we had returned back to Brown.

Wow.

And sits down, you know, we talk about Sequoia and all the stuff that we're doing, and he puts this piece of paper out and, you know, Brown is where Dylan and Evan met. It's where a lot of the early work at Figma kind of began.

Yeah.

And I was like, this guy freaking rocks. I was about to be just like hanging in the MIT conference room with no plan. So anyway, the alumni playbook.

Crazy to actually go that extra step.

You have fun at Brown. Well, we played a part.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Switching gears a little bit. Are you surprised at how Gen AI seemingly came for image creation before, for product design? In some ways, yes. You can use Genai to generate screens of various products, but you would think that that would be. A lot of the product designers I know are still doing this sort of handcrafted work to design flows and features and things like that. And meanwhile, if you want to generate an image of the three of us sitting in a podcast studio, you can do that instantly.

Yeah, I've been. I've been generally surprised at the order of things that have come out of this generative AI ecosystem in general. Right. Like I remember, I remember back when people were, you know, self driving Truck Wave and it was all this concern about blue collar jobs, you know, and everyone should learn how to code. And you fast forward five years and it's like, well, that was a very seemingly poor take. You know, definitely in hindsight, same thing with radiologists. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

They almost all have their job still.

Yeah.

And who is it? Was it Hinton or I forget it was someone big machine learning, foundational researcher was saying, like, stop training them.

Yeah, it's the, the, yeah, the, you know, how stuff. And I think it ultimately, it's kind of what I was saying about creativity earlier. I genuinely think it's not because of a difficulty of the problem or some underlying architectural thing. I think it's just like, you know, like, look at the image editing models came out of amazing diffusion work. Right. And that just happened at a point in time because of the creativity of a group of people.

Yeah.

And it's amazing. Right. And I think that same sort of thing, you know, bottoms up creativity, creating massive technology innovation. Like if that has been the story for this whole wave, I think that will continue to be the story. I think predictions from people, you know, who are the spreadsheet types are going to consistently be proven wrong.

Yeah, yeah. Do you think that there's a Dylan field out there right now kind of grinding in silence for four years and then we'll come out with something disruptive or does that, does that pattern not even work in the age of the Internet?

Sequoia is probably already a check in.

Well, the thing with Dylan is interesting is like, haven't you guys known Dylan.

For a long time?

Yeah. You know, like Figma was grinding for a long time.

Yeah.

But it's not like they were grinding in true silence. Right. Like Dylan and Evan were in seven. Evan, you know, absolute genius. Dylan very engaged in the ecosystem. He's a teal fellow.

We were wondering about those early rounds because it seems like going back to 2014, 2015, like doing a $20 million series, even a $4 million seed round, like, that's not easy even if you're a hot company.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I don't know.

But they were. And they were, you know, they were engaging, actually. Like, interestingly, so many of the people who I've run into already today were people who were like the early users of Figma when it was still a developing product.

Sure.

And those people, you know, they didn't hear about it and want to try it and you know, sign up. Like those are. That's customer development. Right. Like Dylan was like one of these true grassroots growth people in addition to the, you know, like the kind of product. Product mind visionary. Exactly. And like building this community, you know, it's like everything that is magical. And what's that? John Carlson. You know, John Carlson tweet around like it's a museum of passion projects. Right. Like, you know, like this community doesn't just happen Right. Like, it starts with a spark. And I think that spark really is Dylan. Like, I remember there's a guy named Soleil Cuervo who's the first product designer at Facebook. He now does some investing. He's an amazing, amazing guy. And I remember he told me about Dylan, you know, back when Figma wasn't even around yet. And he was just like, this guy's gonna be amazing. And it's funny, he's interested me, like, four people, and one was Dylan, and then one was Guillermo from Vercel.

Oh, wow.

So, like, it's an odd. Like, no more opt in. You know what I mean? If you got somebody, send them my way yesterday. Yeah.

On the note of you said Dylan kind of creating this spark of community, I think that when people. When startup founders talk about community, it's almost like a meme, because usually the first context that they're using it in is like, oh, we should have a dinner. And it's like, to me, like, a community is not like, getting a room at a nice restaurant and just like, getting people to show up and eat free food. Like, this is a community of people that have traveled from, you know, basically every, you know, bunch of different continents all the way here, taking time out just to be immersed with this group. And it just feels like community is ultimately created at the product level to some degree. Like, you can kind of like.

Well, that's. I completely agree with this. And to me, like, I was thinking about this this morning. I. I wish everyone could have seen the keynote. Like, it was so awesome.

Yeah. Watching a rock star.

Like, the room, the. The. The. The. The room was. It's so big. There's, like, so many people in that room.

It's massive.

Like, I didn't.

And it was standing room.

Yeah. It's unbelievable. But then you, like, it's like 9,000 people, right?

Yeah.

It's like, you know, imagine seeing a sly with 9,000 monthly active users, right? Nothing, you know, but 9,000 people is a lot of people, right? And to me, it's the. Like, your users aren't just numbers. Your users are people, right? And the nucleus of this community are people who travel from Southeast Asia to be here, travel from Europe to be here, travel from Africa to be here. And that Core 9000 MAO has such a loud voice and the ability to really propel a company forward. And if you put those 9,000 Mao into a room, it looks like that, right? Like, it's. It's enormous. And finding the ability to get that level of Nucleus, I think Is like it's, it's a product thing, right? Yeah, you know, just buy them dinner.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know you can't talk about public companies too much, but I'd love to know if you have any interpretation of what's going on with the Mag 7 right now on as far as like an opportunity for startups like today. What was the news with Google? They traded down based on Apple.

Apple's VP of Services basically came out and said that for the first time searches in Safari like shrank month over month and that's.

It just seems like there's just general chaos in big tech. Whether it's Google potentially splitting up or you know, the pressure on Facebook for Instagram, it just feels like that could be fertile ground for startups. At the same time, a lot of people have been saying artificial intelligence, it just reads as a sustaining innovation, not necessarily a disruptive innovation. But, but what are you like, what is the level of optimism around the next generation of founders right now given what's going on with these like very well run companies that are often in founder mode or have amazing management teams and fortress balance sheets.

I think I forget whose law it is that you as a company ship your org chart.

Oh yeah, I know that one well.

We look it up afterwards.

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Reed's law now.

Yeah, Reed's law too. I think the idea that AI will be a sustaining innovation, I think it's probably, it's probably like far enough along now to call that like mostly wrong so far. And I think it comes from that grassroots creativity combined, you know, small number of people, especially with AI can do so much. I think that's one of the things that I was thinking about listening to the figma keynote is like, you know, if the origin of figma were was specific, you know, verticals inside of companies, designers, developers, marketers, content people, legal coming together and collaborating to move this very complicated process from idea through to deployment. Now any one of those people can basically do all of those jobs and I think that's something that we are definitely seeing. So small enough people can do so much more. And you aren't encumbered by shipping your org chart because you are the org chart, right? And you can just put out amazing experiences. And I think some of these big companies, what you see is, you know, they'll have amazing models or products or ideas, but they just don't even let you find them. You know, it's like the, the Notebook LM thing, right? Like oh my gosh, that was sick. Right? And like now what?

The fact that we're using the past tense for a breakthrough Google product is so cool.

It was six months ago.

I know.

And it's funny because it's probably past tense.

We should be like, yeah, it's still great.

Yeah, there's probably somebody and all of.

A sudden you guys are in trouble.

There's probably some app in the app Store that's just notebook that's doing 10 million of ARR.

Yeah, we were talking about this idea that there's the ChatGPT wrapper meme and then the recent news of OpenAI acquiring windsurf. I was debating this with Jordi. Is it kind of game on for wrapper M and A? Maybe that doesn't affect how you're underwriting investments at Sequoia, but do you think that there are other venture firms that see a multibillion dollar outcome as something that changes how they underwrite? Like if the M and A markets at that level are open, does that change the risk on nature of early stage venture? Maybe in like the mid market? Or do you think it should just be business as usual? I.

So I got a lot of questions that were similar to this after we mutually called off the Figma deal with Adobe. And some of that how does this change your underwriting of an investment? It's like I don't know what this administration is going to do, let alone the next one. Right. And the gestation period for these companies is sufficiently long that what's going on today, I don't think really we'll be able to change your investment criteria today. Now, what you do with your companies might change, right? Whether it's you're looking to buy smaller companies, you have things that you're going to end up selling to bigger companies as it relates to the actual investment criteria, at least for Sequoia, we are looking for the big outlier companies, one of ones, the future aircraft carriers. But obviously you pay attention to the news and obviously you pay attention to what the administration's going to do.

Yeah, I was thinking about it more just from this idea that if foundation model companies aren't necessarily going to steamroll the application layer, even regardless of the administration. Just this idea that foundation model companies, it feels like they need dance partners in a lot of different areas. We saw this with the X and XAI merger. So social. Who are we talking about? Like should Anthropic buy Snap? And I'm just wondering if there's more.

You guys are having Sonia on, I think on Friday. Yeah, yeah, on Friday you Should talk to Sonia about that.

Okay, we'll talk to you about that.

In that present, she gave a presentation based on this exact topic. And I could, you know, try to copy what you said and do a poor job or.

What were the other takeaways from? I. I assume you went to AI Send.

Oh, yeah.

What were the takeaways? Other than we found out that Jensen Wong's jacket is Ferragamo.

Oh, we did find. I know, I know.

It's leaked. It's leaked from us.

It's sold out everywhere.

It's sold out everywhere. Yeah.

Shout out Alfred. That was a great trade.

Oh, yeah, yeah. He did the Jersey swap.

Jersey swap.

Well, Europe.

Legendary. Legendary Jersey swap.

Legendary.

Man. That's.

Hang it. Hang it in the halls.

Yeah, I would just leave it that. Yeah. Frame. I would like ossify it somehow. Put it on a. You know.

That's great.

Yeah, I think, I think Alfred's jacket was.

Yeah, yeah. What's the state of the Sequoia Merch team? Have you guys explored anything as unique as a jacket?

Well, I was thinking for this one, you know, we. This is all of a sudden we can, we can somehow turn it into a statue and then.

Yeah, just.

That's like an operating. But we can sell that for.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you don't see a lot.

Of Sequoia merch floating out there. You guys are pretty, pretty. Hold it close.

Very subtle. Yeah.

Okay. But anyway, other takeaways from AI sent. Who was interesting?

I think it was vibe wise, it was so much smaller than this room.

Yeah.

But I think vibe wise, it was really amazing. We held it for a few years now, predating, I think, GPT3. And it's been a lot of the same sort of people. Right. Like the people who started working on this early really passionately are still the ones who are kind of at the bleeding edge.

Yeah, yeah.

Is there more focus on like energy scale data center build out or like new algorithms? Because a lot of people are scale pilled. Scales. All you need that are less enriched, Sutton. And then on the flip side, there's some folks that are saying like, hey, maybe we're actually topping out. That seems like a really foundational question.

Yeah, we had a little bit of both. We had a little bit of both. And I think, I think the practical reality is the answer is just yes. Like both.

Just both. Yeah, of course. Why not Better algorithms at higher scale.

Yeah.

And it's going to be both.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that I've been trying to dig into more Is like, when are we going to see other models scale up to the size of like the big transformer from the GPT models? Like we, it feels like we're getting there with diffusion, certainly not there with robotics. Even though some of the robotics companies are now saying like, hey, we have the end to end models. We have, you know, big, big data sets and. But they're not yet talking about, hey, we're building the massive data center, we're doing the 100K H1 hundreds or anything. That seems like a really critical discussion point, especially for where the next applications go. Because it does seem somewhat specific. It doesn't feel like I was talking to one, the founder of Etched and he was saying, no, I actually think you will just be able to train a robot to walk by having it read every book on walking. I was like, I don't know about that.

Yeah, I read the book on walking.

I read every book. And, but, but there is something there where it's like, yeah, if you're training a humanoid robot, like, why not just feed it all the data possible, including all the images and all the videos and everything. Just the more it knows, the better. And that just builds like those stronger world model.

Yeah, I'm trying this with, you know, with my kids.

Right.

It's like, yeah, yeah, just, just walk, you know. Yeah, yeah, it works. It just works. So there's a way to do it, you know.

Yeah. Anything else before we move on?

No, this. Fantastic.

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Yeah, great. And I will tune in later today.

Yeah, absolutely. We'll see you. Bye.

Peace.

Thanks for coming.

Bye. Always a fun time with Andrew Reed from the best legendary investor. One of the greatest to ever do it. And we have our next guest.

Still cooking.

Still cooking.

Excited for the next 40 years.

Yeah, I'm bummed we couldn't make the AI send thing. It would have been very good but we had a lot of travel going on.

A lot of birthday.

A lot of birthday. Anyway, it was a lot of event, but fantastic.

What's going on? Thanks for coming.

Welcome to the stream. Would you mind kicking us off an introduction for those who might not know you? What's your name, what's your company and.

Your camera by the way, is over there. But you can just, you can just chat with us here.

Yeah, yeah.

MartyRingline CEO co founder of Agree.com Great.

And what is Agree.com?

It'S a better docusign.

Okay.

Best part is it's totally free. Free E signature for everyone. But what makes it really special is we've combined invoicing and payment.

Okay.

At the end of most signatures, somebody has to pay someone. Yeah, we just brought it all together.

Okay. When I hear, when I hear free, I think, am I the product? What's going on? Are you selling my documents to foreign countries or something?

So we operate like a fintech, right? We monetize payments on the payment side. Yep. So it operates a lot like stripe.

Sure.

I can't tell you how many times I've. I feel like it's mostly with home services where I'm paying like for pest control and I'm like signing, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm like signing something and then I'm like, okay, like I'm ready, you know, again, I'm ready to pay. And then it's like, oh well, like Zell, you know, Zell me or whatever. I'm just like really like this should be all in one. I'm curious, what, what markets have you guys really focused on initially?

Just, we're at Figma, designers agencies, freelancers, solopreneurs are obvious ones, but the B2B SaaS, sales, especially in tech startups, they're just moving so fast. The growth trajectory is there. And I think you pointed out something that's really interesting where if I say you have net 45 to pay, I think most of us think I'll pay on the 46 day. I'll stretch it out as long as I can. But usually we want what's on the other side of that transaction so bad we want to pay quicker. We want my pest control done, I want my roof fixed, I want my contractors started, I want my stock to come compliance quicker. So like delaying the invoice just doesn't make any sense. Right. I want to go from execution of agreement, I want to pay quickly. Don't stop that. That's such a manual process right now. Everyone takes executed agreement, they send it over to finance. Somebody in finance manually creates an invoice, manually sends it over. It's just, it's kind of weird in 2025.

Yeah. I gotta ask, how did you get the domain?

Yeah. So it was always agree. We knew that that was the word. But one day we're pitching and my co founder says to me at the end of the pitch, the investor Ms. Said, he said Agree.com, it's like, oh, that could be a problem.

It's got a nice ring to it.

He's like, hey, did you ever go to agree.com no. What if it's a porn site? So we go. It's clear that it hasn't had love in a number of years.

Sure.

But I see, I know there's a privacy policy and a privacy policy is going to be a legal entity. I track it down, I find the owner of that legal entity and then it was four months of pestering and wooing. And because he's a high net worth individual, he didn't, he didn't need to let it go for the money that we paid.

Did he make you give you some equity?

No, no, we did all cash, but we did, I did have to eventually sell him on the vision of the dream.

Sure.

Be a part of the story.

Yeah. Like it'll be used for good.

And I will never not do one of these interviews where that question won't come up. He will be like, yeah, I was at the beginning of.

That's great.

Probably early.com guy, I imagine just sat on a bunch of fantastic.

He picked it up if you years ago for like 75k at an auction.

Oh, wow. Cool. Yeah. Wow. What's the go to market been like? I imagine that there's some sort of like almost like viral loop where somebody sends something and then they get a chance to sign up and then you kind of grow from there. Is there like a positive viral coefficient with this?

Oh yeah, yeah. And it's one where I pitched it just like that in the pre seed. Didn't realize how fast it would kick in and then like how substantial that would be to us. So we launched the products September 4th. In a month there was a thousand users.

Wow.

Hey, not bad. 30 days later, 10,000 users. Okay, that's impressive. And then seven weeks after that it doubled to 20,000. But when I looked at those users, a third of them, they came to us. Their origin story is someone sent them to Docs to sign on the platform. They signed, they're like, let me give this thing a shot. So that's kicked in. That's been awesome. So we'll always talk about our customer, but then our customers. Customer is vitally important to us. And then now. Yeah, the go to markets just. We see the same thing on the invoicing side. So it's just more the. The customer base itself is the biggest distribution engine.

How big is the company? I imagine it's like several thousand. Are you in tens of thousands of yet in terms of just employees?

Oh no.

To run one of these businesses, typically it's five figures of employees. Typically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone likes to remind that DocuSign 7000.

That'S how many it is.

I chatgpt it. It would take four Titanics to fit all the employees of DocuSign. But we're, we're a team of eight and I think this is what you're.

Eight people, not 8,000.

Doing the impossible.

Doing the impossible.

DocuSign execs look at you guys and they're like, we don't know how they do it.

You know how they do it.

That's right. That's right.

Payments too. We, I mean, we need to double.

Yeah.

Everyone always wonders what are they all doing over there?

Yeah.

Do you actually, do you actually have a. I'm curious if you have a read. I was always surprised that after, you know, Twitter was able to lay off, you know, such a huge amount of the workforce. I was surprised that didn't inspire other similarly drastic cuts. Have you been, are you surprised in general at some of these more scaled enterprise companies that. That they haven't tried taking a leaner approach yet?

I think one of the secrets behind Some of the B2B SaaS in Silicon Valley is that there are an enormous amount of humans that power what we think is technology. And there's some companies where you can tell between December 21 and January 1, the servers have gone down or something's not working. Oh, no, the humans are gone. They're out of the office.

This is a service as a software.

That's right. That's right. And so I think for some of these organizations, you need a huge customer service staff, a huge support staff to make it all work because they're pushing buttons and pulling levers behind the scenes. And so they, the tech deck is just so enormous that they can't scale back even though they know they need to. And I think this is what we're seeing with AI. We know smaller teams can do more, they can do it faster. Now how do they start automating their workflows with agentic AI or whatever tools they might be putting into place.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

So you're here specifically pitching designers and studios who is the current customer avatar that you're going after at config?

So at 8, we got to do everything and anything to build the brand.

Sure. So I'm, I saw some flyers that were just hanging out.

Stack of the flyers.

I saw a stack of flyers. I was like, oh, he's doing.

I've got official partner coffee cart out front that I push and I make cold brew cart.

That's great.

Me, my co founder will.

Yeah, yeah.

But this conference is going on Right, Yeah. Thousands of people here.

Totally.

May 6th through 8th at Moscone West. Turns out Stripe Sessions is right across the street. The same dates within the same block radius. And my ICP is here. Why would I not be here? So what I do, yeah, I'm here handing out cards, knocking on doors, giving out free coffee, whatever it takes. But just build that brand, get them to know what it is. Because for us, it's an amplification. The big announcement just went out about our seed round. And so now we're doing interviews like this and just want people to be like, oh, agrees everywhere. It's not everywhere, it's just everywhere that I know you're looking and you're listening and you're reading.

Yeah, break down the round for us. How does it come together? Who's in?

Yeah. So it was exciting because we raised yesterday. That was yesterday. Yeah, yeah. So this is perfect timing. We had closed 3 million pre seed in March of last year. We launched in September. And then once those viral loops started hitting and there was, there was some interesting traction and so we had a number of investors start reaching out to us towards the end of the year, year, expressing interest. We were going to go to market with a round either right before the summer, right after the summer. But then a few folks asked to preempt and just say, hey, let's just, let's just do it now. Yeah. So we thought, let's formally go to market on January 6 and then it closed in two weeks, which was a wild. Yeah, so it was beyond our own expectations. And then we just made the big announcement yesterday.

It's great to get it out.

That's great.

I'm curious, I'm curious. Was some of the early pushback from investors? There's always pushback, even if people are generally bullish. Just like, why hasn't anyone done this before? Or doesn't this, this feels pretty counter.

Position against, against DocuSign. Right. Because like it would be a massive upending to their business model.

It cannibalizes their pricing model.

No, no, no. I know it's. I know it's highly. I know it's highly disruptive.

But.

But you know, if you look back somewhere around two years ago, it felt like a lot of traditional SaaS and we were like out of new, traditional fintech and SaaS ideas. But the thing that became obvious is if you just brought a new approach or a disruptive pricing model idea.

Deadly serious.

Exactly.

So the biggest pushback was. This is too obvious. Why doesn't this exist? And that Was a great question because I'm like glad you asked. What I'll always say in the pitch at that point is this is the last time we'll ever actually talk about DocuSign because this is about payments, this is about AR automation.

Sure, sure.

And it becomes very clear that the second question they shouldn't ask me is like what if DoConnect did this? DoConnect can't become a payments company. The real question I'd have is what happens if Stripe across the street decides they want to do E signature? That would be disruptive.

Yeah, that's really interesting to me.

What if they decided that owning the contract as a source of truth to revenue was really impactful to financial and cfo? That would be really.

Well, hopefully they're not listening.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the problem is you still have to be really.

They have their conference right now. We're live.

Yeah, yeah, they're busy. So this can't be listening.

Watching backstage.

We know John and Patrick are on stage. They can't be watching this right now. That's great. What was your background before this?

Yeah. So longtime entrepreneur. Had a. Had a startup back in 2007 that it got acquired by Twitter in 2012.

Oh cool.

Had a few exits, a few other startups in between. But most pertinent to this one is me and two of the folks that worked with me even at that first company we started up a fintech that got acquired by Brex and Brex brought us into build out expense management.

Sure.

Specifically invoicing bill pay. And this is like right before we all meet our friend ChatGPT but before the GPT3 beta goes out and the best technology we have at the time to scan and parse invoices is called ocr. Optimal character recognition. Brexit's position was spare no expense, use the best technology. It's Google. It's 87% accurate and reliable. Like that's just not great for financial services. It means we still need human in the loop. There are human beings pulling levers, pushing buttons. But that June when we get access to the GPU, the whole world's freaking out. Gen AI generated. Turns out you put generative AI on top of OCR, it closed that 13% error gap almost instantly. Yeah. So we knew that. Oh, legal documents.

Huge.

Because the generative nature of generative AI, it's context aware. So it can read the document and start to infer and imply things and fill in those gaps. That was a huge unlock for us.

Yeah. Were you at Twitter? Post acquisition for A little bit, yeah.

I was at. No, no. It was only at Twitter pre ipo.

Okay.

And I was only there. I did my. My year.

Your year. What was it like working there?

It was awesome. But I always talk about it as is equal parts frustrating and fascinating.

Yeah.

Because the site's still going down. They're still fail. Well.

Oh, wow.

But it was fun for us. It's 140 characters. It's still no photos, no videos. They just acquired tweety2. So they didn't even have their own apps yet. They just got tweetdeck and Tweety two. So they're starting to get their own app. But this was the mantra of let's be mobile first.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. So we're watching them for the first time figure out what happened because that famous photo of when the plane lands in the Hudson, people forget that's a tweet pic, Sully. Yeah, but that's not Twitter. That's Tweetpic on Twitter.

It's a separate service. Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. Very, very decentralized back then. Now you can't even link out to anything.

Oh, yeah.

It's completely different.

Yeah.

Now it's like a product for everything.

Do not put agree.com in a post.

No, it hurts us.

It hurts us.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Are you finding any luck with like the world of venture capital and startups? Sending safe notes around on Agree.

So this one made it easy on the pitch. I didn't have to explain the pain. All VCs are like, yeah, this is a miserable experience.

Sure, sure.

I hate moving money with my bank.

Yep.

I don't like working with Docusign. Docusign is not a bad company, but people get a visceral reaction. It's like Microsoft Teams or Jira. And nobody likes DocuSign.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, when we told them that the way you invest in startups, it'll be your workflows will be better. Like, oh, that's an immediate.

Aha. Is that a different product on the fintech side? Because it's a more of like an investment wire than just a payment.

It's different in that to monetize the way just the benchmark against stripe invoicing and billing, they take.0.6% blended 0.4, 0.7.

Oh, yeah. You don't want to take.0.6% on like a VC investment.

The psychological moment for people is $50,000.

Okay.

If it's a $30,000 SaaS charge and you take 0.6 nobody really even notices. Yeah, 50,000. But on our 7.2 million, I'm not paying 6 anything. But there is a place in fintech where people take a 0.6 because what do I do with the 7.2? I don't spend it right away. I put it into a bank and then it goes a Roe bank if I can plug that. But no, it goes. They've just been so great to us. But it goes into treasury account. I make greater than 4% interest on it.

Got it.

You know what? The Rose MERCURY Brexit's take 0.6%. So the Agree Act 2, it's coming out this October. The agree count by default will be a Treasury. So we want founders doing their safes on the platform. We want all the money flowing through it and then it would just make sense just to leave it and agree, don't move it to another bank. Because I didn't have a Treasury. I had to go to RO and I had the checking, but then I had to create a Treasury account on top of that.

Interesting.

That makes a ton of sense. Well, our next guest is here. Miking up anything else you want to share with the stream.

Just love having you guys in. Hey, today we always say is the last day you'll ever pay for Docusign.

There we go. What a punch.

I feel like you're going to get a cease and descent at some point because I feel like I can't wait.

To tweet that cc.

There's something weird about startups that like.

Very hesitant about even if they are building a direct competitor or something, they're usually pretty hesitant about saying it out loud for a variety of reasons. Just inviting companies.

Bold.

He's brave.

Bold.

Brass take all 7,000.

It's while you guys are in town.

Though, if you happen to hit the blue bottle on second street, there's a billboard that's going up right as we speak.

There we go.

All it says is today's the last day you'll ever pay for document.

That's putting the heat on it.

I'm poking the bear. We're going to see what happens. Thanks for having me.

Good luck out there.

Congrats on the new round.

Thank you. Thank you.

Great to meet you. That is bold. Well, hopefully he's buying billboards on adquick.com we are of course sponsored by Ad Quick.

Of course.

We should tell you about all.

It's interesting. I feel like it's the. The treasury functionalities. Feel like it makes sense potentially for if you're like an SMB.

Yeah.

But if you're a startup that raises through like a Docusign like, product, are you going to leave money in that.

Corporate treasury you probably want to pay your employees, do all sorts of stuff.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Anyways, very bullish on the product overall.

Good to meet you.

What's happening?

Hi. You can throw on headphones if you want to hear yourself. Whatever you want.

Are we twins? Yeah, we're brothers.

We're not related, actually.

Not actually related?

Yeah.

You guys look so much alike.

That's fun.

It'll be easier. You can adjust.

But we are live. Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do for the stream?

Jeremy Hindo, production designer. I designed Severance, Top Gun, Maverick, Zero Dark Thirty. A couple things.

I mean, just a couple things. Why don't you go say a few more? First few are so impressive.

It's.

And a few thousand commercials.

Yeah.

And Detroit, A few other movies. And I have a new Kathryn Bigelow movie coming out.

Oh, cool.

In the fall on Netflix.

Awesome.

We're just finishing that up now.

Where. Where are you based? Normally?

Los Angeles.

Nice. So are we talking.

I never worked there.

I moved.

I moved from Toronto 19 years ago to work in LA. And then you've only done one film in California.

Yeah.

Why? Even when you moved, it was already.

It's just so. There's so much shooting abroad. I mean, it's good for like certain projects, like Zurich 30.

You need to.

You're always going to need to travel. It's just now that there's a, you know, other than.

But severance feels like something you could film in la.

No. So we shoot out in New York. Because Ben Stiller lives in New York.

Okay. Which is awesome.

So we're not going too far.

Yeah.

And it's nice. It's great to be in New York. And yeah, a lot of the cast live there and the crew are amazing.

Do you agree with the criticism that Los Angeles and Hollywood have. Should have done more to prevent.

It's been bleeding for years.

Yeah. The interesting thing that the tariffs on foreign films. News came out Sunday and I forget the guy's name who was kind of spearheading that John Voight saying, like these other countries, you know, it was like the local, state and county leadership in LA have to take some responsibility for creating an environment where, you know, it's just like economically unfeasible.

Do you think that was just hubris by the elected officials in Los Angeles and Hollywood to say, oh, we don't need to compete With Atlanta, because we're Hollywood.

Honestly, I don't know why they. I mean, I think, honestly, the tech. A lot of tech moved into California, into LS and Angeles.

Oh, sure.

And I kind of think that might have distracted.

Oh, interesting.

I'm not sure they were paying attention. Revenues are coming, you know, and they saw that. And. I don't know, but, like, the studio system, but. And all the prop houses, they've been closing for the last five years. All the best ones are gone. They went bankrupt. A lot of them through Covid, and then a lot of them hung on till the last year, but they're all closing because no one's shooting in California. It's.

It's.

The stage is. I think It's. I've heard, 40% empty.

I mean, we.

We've been looking for a new. So we've been looking for, like, effectively a sound stage, new studio space. And. And we found a space that we liked.

Everything's empty.

But it was shocking negotiating. We would tour a space, be completely empty, then we'd start the negotiation process. And they would have these. Even the spaces, maybe the way that the management or however they're capitalized, but they would start throwing out numbers. And I'm just like, you realize I've been in this space, and I know that there's no one there. I'm like, I know you're kind of, who's your backup offer?

Because.

Yeah. And then, of course, like, everyone who's ever been involved in the building, management, ownership, they're all of a sudden flying in to see you for just touring one little stage, and you're like, okay, this is a big deal for you.

No, there's something wrong for sure.

Yeah.

I think it's just, you know, most countries, it's. So, like, I did a movie in Australia, so incentivized.

Totally.

It's not. Because what a lot of these countries are giving is above the line. All the money is the above the line. It's actors, directors.

Yeah.

That's the big money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the places like California don't do that. New Jersey's starting to do that now.

Is that just tax incentives or. Actually, but it's.

Well, it's a tax incentive for crews and shooting and post production, but not always. A lot of places don't cover the cost. You know, if an actor's $25 million, they don't cover that part.

Okay.

But now New Jersey is covering that part for Netflix. Like, certain people have their own deals.

Yeah.

That's where the real Money is. Yeah.

The state of New Jersey is giving.

A tax write off for. For that.

Like a certain part of. Above the line. Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

And a bigger. Because a lot of them are capped at like half a million.

Sure.

It doesn't save you much when someone's getting 30 million on a movie.

Yeah.

You know, and see, you have two or three of those people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a big chunk of money that it's. It's a lot. And I mean, if career wise, for most people. I know everyone's making the same money they made 10, 15 years ago.

Yeah.

It hasn't changed much. So it's just.

Even if. Even if you've progressed a lot in your career in terms of doing.

You know, I still think what I make, I still probably make the same as Rick Carter would have made 20 years ago. The same number. And the currency is not even close.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's a good number. I'm not complaining. But it's not what people. It's. It's the same number.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's wild.

It's interesting. And they still go. That's. You know, it's. But it hasn't caught up in a lot of ways. And I'm not asking. I have a nice life.

Yeah.

It's more. I just like to be home sometimes.

Yeah.

Well, take me through the production design workflow on a project that we might be familiar with. Start with. Like, is there location scouting involved? Photographs? Are you sketching things? Are you in a particular software? Like, what is your process?

I mean, basically, severance is. You know, it's. It was like. When Ben sent it to me, it was two scripts. There was only two scripts for the first 10 episodes.

Sure.

And tonally, it was. It was really nothing there. It was very funny and it was a great concept like this. People will want to be severed. It kind of scares me, but I could go, well, I know half my friends want this.

Yeah.

Get it. And. But it didn't have a look to it.

Sure.

So I wasn't. It read like the Office. It was budgeted exactly like the Office shoot in the location. Great cast. Adam was already attached to it. You know, it could have been Parks and Rec. It was the same sort of tone, like that feel. And I was like. But I don't really. It's not my thing. I want to do cinema. I want to do something really visual.

And. Yeah.

He said, well, what do you want to do? And I'm like, give me couple days and I'll put a lookbook Together. I didn't know him. I just put a lookbook of what I thought it would look like. I'm like, if you want to do this, I'll. I love this. I had an idea that I really fell in love with, and he loved it, you know, and it was sort of conceptually like the outside was always going to be. I was like, it should always be winter. It should always be really sad outside. We have to kind of accentuate it. It was.

Yeah.

And then when we go underground, it has to be, you know, very particularly designed. And also all the technology should be all the tropes that I, as a kid, grew up with, that if you came out in the outside world now and told somebody you worked at this CRTC screen with a trackball, it wouldn't make any sense. It had to be things that made no sense to anyone outside the world, especially young people. They'd never even seen my son. He didn't even know what it was. He's 20. He's like. But he still doesn't know what a trackball is, really. So it's trying to, like, that's. The initial part is really conceptually, what does the world look like? And then I really always start everything with a researcher. Her and I, we just bang stuff out for a while, and then I start with research with a concept artist.

How much of moving from a look that's similar to the Office, which is very docu style, to something that's cinema, where you wound up is driven by actual budgetary choices versus just picking the right tools out of the same tools.

We didn't have any on servants. We just abandoned that thought. Like, the cinematographer, Jess and Ben and I, we were like, what do we want to make?

Yeah.

And we just made it.

Okay.

The budget exploded. It really did.

Really? What drives that? Because people think about, like, oh, we're filming with cook lenses or Arri Alexa, and it gets expensive. But on the production side, you know, not to degrade it, but it does feel like it's desk. How expensive can it be?

Well, it's. It's. It's. It's five stages of set.

Sure. It's a lot.

It's a lot. It's a volume.

Sure.

Like, it's a lot of shows like, say, Parks and Rec. It's one set.

Yeah.

The entire show.

Yep.

The entire. Every.

Speaking of a lot of sets, that makes sense. The rehearsal. That's a lot of sets.

A lot. It's a. Yeah.

I mean, there's. Every new scene is like, the amount of Sets.

And then the amount of actors that come in and the amount of time it takes to shoot all the sets and pre light and camera test it all just.

And the lighting probably gets more expensive as you're going for more cinematic look.

Yeah.

Right.

As opposed to just because we have sets that. You know the birthing cabin in season two.

Yeah.

We built it. It's only in one season scene.

Wow.

But it's a particular scene.

It's.

That's. It's destroyed. Will never. It doesn't exist anymore. Well, so you start to. You have to offset. Like how. But a lot of shows are. You know, like Law and Order is designed to. The sets are standing sets.

It's a courthouse.

It has. And then the only sets are. The only other ones are locations.

Yeah.

Ours are whatever we want. And also all the locations, like, they have to be places that we've never seen before. Like, we go to. We shoot in Utica. We shot in Newfoundland, where we're all over the place. Because I can't have somebody know that train station. I can't know it. And then we all take a.

Take a location that's unique and maybe hasn't been popularized before and build on top of it.

Absolutely. And then we do a lot of visual effects after we augment and alter it. Because it's really about creating a world that everyone doesn't know. They don't know where it is. I always say we're in Poland. For all I know. Nobody knows. And I don't want people to know we're in upstate New York. There's nothing identifiable, really, that people could pick. And it's not. It's. The intention is really just for people to go down that rabbit hole. It's not to really trick them. It's just. It makes it believable. They can't go, well, I hike there all the time.

Yeah.

It's just.

Can you talk about pre Vis. Is generative. AI Playing a role is everything. Do you interface with storyboard artists? What does that look like as you're trying to go from just this idea on the page, which you said was very blank, to something that you need to get to the point where you're like, this is exactly what we're building.

Basically what I do is I concept everything. And we do iterations, like, sometimes probably 50 times, to the way we like the set looks the way we all think it should shoot. Like Jess the dp, and now she's one of the directors on Severance and Ben. It's really the three of Us that just run with it when we're in shoot mode.

Yeah.

And it's really. They. They both storyboard like crazy together. Like, we. We're really tight and very opinionated. We. We ride each other like crazy. We argue all the time.

Yeah.

But in a really passionate, collaborative way. We have, like, there's zero egos. None of us have an ego about it. It's just passionately. What is the best thing? Like, if it's not perfect, we don't shoot it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ever.

Yeah. Do you ever feel like the materials that you're working with to build a particular piece of furniture, for example, actually matter beyond just how they read on camera? Is there something about a heavy desk that actually brings out a better performance?

Oh, yeah.

Even though you could just make everything out of balsa wood or something.

Well, it's like the desk, the main desk, like, you know, it was just. It just. The script said four desks, large room.

Yep.

And I was like, wait, this. It has to be. This is like. I kind of treat it like a spaceship. It's like the control room of Star Trek or any. You know, it's like you need one thing to set the tone. If everyone buys off on that set, they'll believe anything after.

Yeah.

So I'm like, the desk has to be. Let's. Let's build this desk that's very interactive. They're like 5 year olds. We treat them like once they're birthed into the Audi on the. On the boardroom table, which Dan calls the womb of the office. That's the birthplace. You go to this work and you're really five years old. You don't know anything. You just start to work at this computer. I'm like, let's make it really playful. Like, let's treat it like kind of like a playground.

Yeah.

And. But I want them to be able to jump on it. Like, I want Zach to be able to jump on it. I want. It has to be structurally insanely strong. And we just think of everything. So that. That way there's. They're not impeded by anything. Whatever they want to do. Safety first. Go do it. It's just amazing.

Did you. I'm assuming you made the. You you created the activation. Where was it in New York? It was in the middle of.

That's so marketing for Apple is amazing. That's all Mark. That's okay.

Interesting.

They are amazing. And that.

The one in GR Based on.

Yeah. It's all based on what we do. And then they. They're. But they're really interesting how they take it to the next level. That one worked out really well. Well worked not in a good way, but the fires. So the premiere was canceled because of the fires in la.

Yeah.

So that was happening at the same time. And all the actors were going to be. We were all going to be at the premiere. They all just jumped on a plane and went to the event. So it would have just been like, you know, people cast to be there, but they all showed up.

That's amazing.

Unknown to everyone. I wasn't there. I didn't know they were going is. And the cast feel like.

I feel like just the imagery. There's so many different images from Severance that have become iconic and in some ways just got outsized attention on the Internet just because they were.

Have you been. Have you been to the Apple website?

Is it still.

You click on it. It's the first computer they sell. I don't know if they still have it.

Yeah.

IKEA started making a desk, like in Austria. They issued it first.

Yeah.

It's on the COVID of ikea.

Yeah. But is it the work that you're most proud of in your career, or is there something else that maybe didn't get the same level of attention that you.

I mean, I love the process is the best part.

Yeah.

I mean, Top Gun was hilariously fun. Zero Duck thirty was amazing challenge. Like, they're all it's about for me. It's the experience of. It's a year or two of my life.

Yeah.

People I'm with, like, I'm so particular who I work with. It's like, yeah, you better be. They better be interesting because why are you going to spend your time with them? That's really, for me, what it is, what it goes out into the world, what people make it is. I mean, this is exciting to watch, but not unlike Top Gun was.

Well, I. You must appreciate, you know, product design is really hard. Right. There's no doubt about that. But somebody can have an idea for a product and within maybe call it 10 minutes to an hour, they can have something that looks somewhat like the end state. You must not have a lot of sympathy for that, given when you're like, oh, we need to design this entire scene and we're going to need to import wood from this region and that. It's just a very different.

But it's also. AI is a funny one because we don't use any AI.

Nothing.

But. Well, no, because I. I mean, my biggest problem is I don't need ideas. I just need money to make stuff. I have. So my ideas just fall out of me, like.

Yeah.

And the older I get.

So you want, like, you want humanoid robots that can, you know, I really.

Just want, you know, support.

Yeah.

You know, really, we just want artists that we can. We're making art.

Yeah.

Which is amazing. And it's. It's not actually a robot wouldn't work for me. I need the person who has an opinion. Like, I have this amazing sculptor who does all the sculptures. He's full time. I've never had a full time sculptor. I could go panko make. Let's make this. Let's make a bus. Let's make this piece of art.

Yeah.

He makes it in a day and it's. And it's all in his head.

It's creative. It has that human and it has like.

Yeah.

And it has his heart and it has. I love that. And it's not necessarily what I wanted. It's. I want what they want to.

Sure, sure, sure. Put that in.

There's so much doom and gloom in the world. The movie industry. No, not the world. I actually.

Not here. The world is config. It's great.

No, but specifically in entertainment filmmaking, it.

Is pretty gloomy these days.

It is gloomy. But clearly there's amazing work being made. There's all these new tools that people are going to have access to or already have access to that make variety, different parts of the process easier. Where are the bright spots to you? What gets you excited?

I miss the John Hughes movies. I miss scripts. I'm so tired of seeing guns. I really am. If I see any of the poster with a gun on it.

Yeah.

I just. I find it really sad.

Yeah.

And I really, I miss John Hughes. Like I. My kids know them all and most people know them, but there's nothing to really take. Like adolescence is an interesting thing for young kids to watch because it's about real life. But it would be nice to also give them something that's to look forward to. That's like how to fall in love for the first time. Like.

Yeah.

The things that I find young generations are not getting, they're literally getting. I love John Wick. It's fun. But they can't all be John Wick.

Yeah, we do have a lot of John Wick.

We were talking earlier the need for positive science fiction. Right. You can still have a. You can still have a dramatic storyline, but not dystopian.

Not cyberpunk necessarily. Maybe solar punk like ours.

I think ours is funny because it's really still a love story.

Yeah.

He loves her outside and he fell in love inside. It's just about love. That's really all we all want. And it's the hardest thing to figure out how to have and how to let you be vulnerable. It's not something that's being allowed these days.

Can you talk about production design in the context of a film where there's going to be a lot of shots on location? Like, I mean, I imagine that the nature of an aircraft carrier plays into the design. Production design, even when you're on a soundstage and there's less things that you have full control over. But how did you think about that in the context of Top Gun or. Or Zero Dark Thirty Similar, where, you know, there's a certain grounding in the real world that you need to pull into the rest with the lighting design, but also the production design.

I mean, honestly, I think we can do anything, really. We built Osama bin Laden compound. It's the size of whole area. It's massive.

That's amazing.

I'm like, why wouldn't we build it?

Yeah.

It was 300 people laying bricks for six weeks. Just. Non. Just. It was a factory line. It was amazing. All these Egyptian.

That's remarkable.

Bricklayers. It was incredible. Like, I. We built the jet on Top Gun. Like, if. Yeah, I just don't think you can't do it.

Yeah.

I have zero understanding of. No. Or why not? Like, I always go, why not? And they go, why? And I'm like, I said, why not?

We're doing it showbiz.

What about cgi? Like, set extensions as a tool.

Amazing.

Are you reaching for that more? And then how does that change your process?

We use a lot in severance. We use it a lot. I use it on everything. It's.

It is.

And I do a lot of cleanup now.

Sure.

Because you're shooting so much faster. You're prepping so much faster. It's a great tool that doesn't allow you to waste your time stressing over it that I can't do this in three weeks, but I can do this, and then I'll do the rest after. It's more economical and it's way less stressful. But the hardest part is the production, the studio, producers. It's hard because that bag of money hasn't been put aside until people are just starting to like. I'm like, put it away.

Yeah.

Let's commit to this amount of money and leave that money.

But how much of. How much of your process is a Dance with the, you know, whoever's funding project where you're just trying to understand. You're like dancing with a bowl, right? You know, or you're like, you know, trying to figure out if I push the budget, you know, 15%, maybe they'll be fine, but if I take it, you know, 22%, you know, you kind.

Of can read a room like anybody, like, you know, and I love just. I'm. I'm just like, let's just talk to them. Let's. Can I just. How about I just pitch. Let them see it. And then if they say no, they say no. You get a nose a lot and you have to adapt, but you have to keep pushing. It's. It's just a battle. Like, filmmaking really is a war, and it's a war till the end and every. It's just how it works because. And I understand, I respect their job. Like, we can't all go rogue. You have to be responsible. But you have to. They do hire me to trust my instincts. And if you don't do that, you don't make good art. You can't.

How confident are you. Film is, you know, television, it's a hits business. How confident are you, you know, mid. During your process around what the, you know, commercial, you know, commercial or just reception of a project will be?

I have no, I honestly have. For a long time. I did commercials because I couldn't pick a movie because I was terrified, is this gonna be good? And then I had a friend of mine who's done a million.

Because you have to just kind of.

He said, just let go. You have to let go. Just pick the people you love to work with and forget about it. Because, you know, he did, you know, silence with Marty. And, you know, that movie didn't do well. It's a great movie, though, but you don't know why. And you can't bleed over it for the rest of your life. You've got to do another one and another one. And you just can't predict what people are going to like. And honestly, you just. You have to not care. I couldn't care less. Yeah, you'd love to care. Like, wouldn't we all love to care to make everyone happy? But I don't know why people like anything. And I think once you just give up on that and just look, they want what you want. If you are a visualist, they mostly want what you want.

Yeah, I have a conspiracy theory I want to run by you. Someone was posting. This is just a random person on the Internet. But they said that Apple is preparing people for a world where we're using virtual avatars in the Apple Vision Pro by using a more high key lighting style in shows like Severance and Ted Lasso. Do you think there's anything to that?

No, I don't think I've ever. None of us have ever even heard of it.

Yeah. I mean our goal that it would.

Bleed over, but our goal is really we are we. When I like Justin, Ben and I really wanted to make a movie.

Yeah.

A ten hour movie.

Yeah.

And another ten hour.

Yeah, that's great.

Because everyone has a huge like I have 140 inch screen at home.

Yeah.

People have a projector now. Anything you can buy one for 500 bucks projected on your wall. It's still amazing.

Yeah.

I think most people have the, you know, a lot of people have the potential to see it bigger than watching it on their phone, which a lot of people. Producers say. Yeah, but everyone's watching on their phone. I'm like, I don't agree. And I think some of these shows could be shown in theaters. I think it could go back the other way. We just screened Severance Episode 10 at the Dolby Theater a couple weeks ago for 3,000 people. And it was like the Rocky horror picture show.

3,000 people in one.

How would you.

Wow, that is incredible.

How would you fix the theater industrial complex? Because the sort of 100% tariffs on foreign films plan involved government basically subsidies to help theaters like fix their bathrooms. Or at least that was what was put out there. And I was like, I'm going to go out on a limb. And I. And I don't think the reason our theaters are suffering is because they haven't had a new toilet in, you know, 20 years.

I honestly, I don't. I don't. I think everybody just wants like companies want this guarantee they're going to make money. They got to take risk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, so you fail. I'm sorry. I fail all the time. It's what we do. Humans are failures. Works. And sometimes it doesn't. It's like so you have like their odds are still going to be good. Like look at what people will watch. And if there are like I couldn't believe how many people came dressed up as characters like they could screen on a weekend all 10 episodes. And I guarantee you the, like the dome, if the arc lake was still open, would be packed. It would be sold out. You could sell it out for weeks.

Yeah.

Like I do believe that because I see what these kids Want to see. And I have a 25 year old daughter. She had every Friday night she had severance dinner night at their friends.

Amazing.

Everybody was doing it. It's like that's what Rocky Horror Picture show was like when I was a kid. That's. There was. We had those experiences. People want them and they want to walk out and talk about them. They don't want to watch at home and then look to the left and to the right and then go back on Instagram.

There can only be so much laundry tv. Right.

Like it's fun to communally watch something and then talk about it and hang out on the street. Like.

Like on that note, do you have a take on.

You guys have to get it back. That's the thing is you have to demand it.

Sure, John. Or movie nights.

Yeah. I actually amazing movie nights with all my friends and I just text everyone in Los angeles. I get 20 tickets. I text everyone in my phone who's in town, say hey, do you want to come? And then if people don't show, I just refund the tickets. That's great.

Amazing.

And just put together a huge movie night. It's just an activity to go out. Better than going to the bar with your guy friends. I'm not really that into sports. I've always been more into movies.

But I think that's the thing is I don't think that they're. Look, baby boomers have obviously lived too long. They're still controlling how we live. Then there's, you know, my age and there's not a lot of. Like there needs to be a lot more control for you at your age. That's really controlling a lot of this and demanding that this is what you guys want. They still think they know.

Yeah.

The 65, 70 year old guys, they still think they have the answers. Like nobody wants to go. No, you don't want to go. You're 70. You want to sit at home. You loved Covid.

It's like 25 years.

Don't want to sit at home. They want you go to Paris. The movie houses are packed.

Yeah.

Every little theater's jammed all the time.

Yeah. Yeah.

You will go if they're.

I've actually been surprised. I mean we're a technology and business focus show. But I've been surprised to not see more attempts at, you know, I'm surprised there isn't like a sweet green of theaters. Right.

Ah.

Something that's like.

Yeah.

Well designed and has healthy snacks and food.

And it's like tired of the food. Isn't it awful?

Yeah, yeah. I mean that's a big part of it. It's like I haven't eaten. Movie theater.

Was that a little bit in la and.

But a lot of them, a lot of them, they end up focusing too much on avant garde film and all that. You just want to, you know, if they were just playing.

Yeah, I do feel like, yeah. Mixing in the hits and creating these like big re release moments can be good for kind of getting back people back in.

Like, look at Top Gun. People saw it five, six times.

Oh yeah, totally.

It was amazing. It was exactly how I grew up.

You had to stay in the theater.

And I loved it. And it's like I.

There's also there, there.

Why can't there be more?

Well, so here, here's another funny the. The concept of scarcity could be interesting to implement. It's like you figure out a way to say we're going to pull this film off the Internet everywhere for a year off. All the streaming content was the way it was and then we're going to know. But then we'll see it in the.

Nine months you have to wait now it's on demand. The next.

Now you could do it. Take, take a movie, pull it off every. Everywhere for a year.

If you guys want to. I would. I hope someone starts an app and I'll. I'll give the idea for free. Do one that doesn't track you or focus to you. You have to be. It's like going to Blockbuster. Walk around and find it.

Yeah. Interesting. You just get stuff.

It's awful.

Yeah.

There's so many good like go to join the Criterion Collection, which not a lot of people do. There's a billion amazing films on there and start watching them. They're available. You just have to get off some of the other, you know.

Yeah, we got to get him the Criterion Collection. He hasn't seen any movies. I've seen everything.

It's so cheap. 10 bucks a month.

I know. Yeah.

I love the same price of a coffee with a tip.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We gotta get him through there. So we're actually going into a production design session building a new studio. What are the common pitfalls where we could get stuck in Quagmire? We've been looking at big news desks. We're thinking about putting some TVs behind us for, you know, graphics and displays. It'll be a pretty basic set, but we do want it to have to be more opinionated than just one newsroom, please. We want something that, that Speaks to a more modern brand. But we have a little bit of this. Like, you know, we wear suits even though we're tech people, and there's a little bit of that. But where. Where would we get stuck? Where are the people. Who are the people that we need to be talking to to really nail this project?

Yeah, because I don't think it's whoever did CNN's set.

Those sets are so old.

Yeah.

I mean, honestly, this is a fun set. Do this. Do this at large.

Yeah, that's cool.

I mean, I think the cool thing is to make it really. What? It's real. Those sets are. They're just designed for. All they care about is their logo. So boring. Like, make something like. I remember Letterman. Letterman was hilarious when he Throw that card through the window that didn't exist and you heard the sound effect. Like, just make it. Just make it fun.

Yeah, yeah.

Like an interactive. Cheap. It doesn't have to be expensive. No one cares. Yeah, Just make it fun.

Fun is. Fun is key. Back at our home studio, we have a range of exotic sound effects.

Yeah. We're building the soundboard, but we also have props. We have a tinfoil hat for when we're talking about conspiracies. We have a crystal ball that we pull out. We have bottles of champagne and book. Books. And you already kind of built this whole library.

Come back and. Come back and hang with us.

I totally will. I live in Studio City.

Oh, fantastic.

Just go to CBS Radford. It's the best.

CBS Radford was that.

It's where they shot. It's Laurel in Ventura.

Okay. Yeah. Maybe we should check that out.

Well, this other cbs, where they shot.

Parks at Rex, where they shot Gilligan's Island. I mean, everybody.

The average CBS is a place where.

We were looking at Television City.

Oh, I don't know that.

It's another CBS lot. Bill Maher films there.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But we were touring it, and it was pretty empty. But it was very cool. I mean, it was. It was the real deal.

Docs Bill Maher, I think that's public.

No one wants to go there anymore.

I mean, there's like seven layers of security to get in that building. I think it's. And it's a. It's a live studio audience. People go in all the time.

Right, right.

Anyway, are there any. Are there any new trends that you're tracking in. In production design or. Or kind of advice for up and coming folks who want to get into the industry? Is it like, what is the path? Because I Imagine you don't just call up a studio and ask for your first job. You need to build a resume of some kind. But it's kind of hard in the TikTok age to do anything related to that.

I know. It's funny. I tell all my kids, like, all their friends, you just have to. You have to do what we did. You have to knock on doors.

Knock on doors.

Like, my son's graduating from LMU right now. He's interviewing for these jobs that have five positions, 8,000 applicants.

Wow. Yeah.

That's.

What's he want to do?

He's in marketing and was, you know, marketing for something like event planning or film promotion or. He was working. He was interviewing.

Connect us.

Agencies.

Connect us. Yeah, we're hiring.

Yeah, we're hiring.

No, it's really. It's amazing. But that's what they're up. And the other thing is, they're all having to do these stupid Zoom interviews. You can't.

Oh, yeah, That's.

You can't not. I tell Sam, don't take one. You need to know if you like them too. And you'll know their chemistry if you. I find Zoom interview is waste. It's like, I don't know, I can't get a vibe from them. But the second I sit with you guys, I'm like, I get their vibe. And you want to hang out.

Exactly.

And you know who you don't want to hang out with.

Totally.

And that's what's being lost. That's the art of. I think that whole thing is just chaotic bullshit.

Is there?

And really lazy. Since COVID A lot of you.

No, I go super quick. It's typically one call, 10 minutes.

Come hang out.

Let's meet up in person.

Yeah. And meet up at coffee shop. And you can just tell, like, there's a million things. There's style, there's totally. Look at you. Do they shake? I don't know. I feel like the etiquette of a human. You need to meet.

Yeah. Are there any particularly underrated films from a production design perspective that you go back and you. Yeah.

Playtime.

Playtime.

It's the one I reference all the time. Jacques Tati's Playtime. It's a. France Coppola still talks about it.

It's. It's what?

You know, Metropolis is going to be another one.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because they're bombs. Like, Playtime is a masterpiece piece.

What?

It's my biggest reference for severance was.

Was.

There's artists. Like, there's cardboard cutouts. There's people in the back. Wait till you see the airplane. Yeah, just wait till you see it.

Okay. Awesome.

And it's. It's. He. It was all his own money.

Yeah.

He went bankrupt and nobody watched it. And it's like, now there's books. It's a. It's one of the greatest films ever made. And sometimes that takes 50 years.

Yeah.

Sadly, he's not. You know, he doesn't see it.

Doesn't see it.

Wait, so when is. When does Metropolis actually release?

It's out.

It's out and it bombed, right?

Yeah, yeah, but it was long. I think people watch it.

Will it be appreciated in the fullness of time or just, you know, I.

Think Sometimes it takes 20 years for people to want to watch. Maybe it's too close to us. It's about us. And we don't really like watching about ourselves. Right. We don't like what we're doing to the world. So I think in 20 years, people will. Your kids will be like.

People like, watch this. People like. But in a weird way, people like White Lotus because. Because it's like watching their own family vacations isn't amazing, but that's different.

Yeah. White Lotus feels like being at a luxury resort and just eavesdropping on everyone and their lives are fun.

More than eavesdropping.

But you're doing great.

More than eavesdropping.

I know you're sitting there the whole time going, God, I'm so lucky I'm eating the same food. But look at these freaks.

Yeah, look at these freaks. That's great. Yeah. Anything else you're tracking or watching these days? Have you seen the studio?

I did, yeah.

Okay. Do you think it rung true? Because for me, as an outsider, it felt like it was this great introduction. It felt, honestly, like the world of Silicon Valley and venture capital with, like, episode two, he is giving notes that he shouldn't. And then episode three is he has to give a note but can't bring himself to. And it showed that, you know, it's not just. There's not just a blanket rule. Studio exec never gives notes. No, sometimes they do have to. And that kind of back and forth was really.

I mean, I think it has to be true because they're all assessed experiences. He's regurgitated, of course. And I have friends who have, you know, pitched me. Like, I don't do. I don't have that sort of relationship with studios.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So. But a lot of my director friends who've pitched and pitched and they. And they laugh.

They know.

They're like, oh, my God, that's that guy.

Yeah.

That's. It's based on real people.

Yeah.

I think it's hilarious. I don't know if other people get it. I don't know. Because it feels very filmy.

Yeah.

I mean, sometimes he's doing Woody Allen. That cracks me up. Like the one episode four. I felt like Manhattan Murder Mystery.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, he's. I get what he's doing. He's just trying to be fun.

Yeah. Yeah.

Just cool.

Yeah. What's like the most expensive item you've ever had to procure during a production build? Has there ever been any moment where it's been like, this is really high stakes? Yeah. We got to get shot.

The jet for Top Gun.

The jet for Top Gun.

It took me a lot of time.

How did that work?

You built it, right?

Yeah.

And everyone kept saying, no, no.

But you build it out of.

Now you get. Now you get why the F35 is a true.

It was only. I think it was about 3 million. All wow. To build. But it's only. It's not. It obviously doesn't fly. But to build a prop, that's a lot of money.

Yeah. And does it go on some sort of like, robotic arm or. Yeah.

But we also built it to reel at China Lake. And Tom, see, I wanted to be able to touch it.

Yeah.

See it, interact with it.

Yeah.

He gets in it. We tow it out all the way till it takes off. Is all real.

Wow.

And I'm like, I'm just a believer. Everything should be real. And, you know, I. There's some feedback was like, but we can do. We can just going to change in a post later. I'm like, joe, we're not going to change it. We love it.

Yeah.

If we make it, that's it.

That's it.

And it's. You have to find certain directors that can commit to that, too. A lot of directors want to change. So producers are like, we're not going to pay for. This is going to change anyways. We didn't change anything.

And there's a unique dynamic with Tom Cruise, specifically correct. Because he. I've heard, like, he even has his own insurance so he can do some stunts. But can you unpack? Like, what. I mean, work with him.

So when we did the cockpit like we built you basically, you know, when you do something like that, especially with Tom, or you have to build plywood versions, like, you build it to make sure. Because Tom's an amazing pilot. So we built it this wooden cockpit and with the wooden windows and a template. And he's like, it's not comfortable, guys. We got to make it comfortable. Like, yeah, we know it's a plywoods. But he's really, he's, he's really adamant. He's going to be in there a lot. It's going to be really comfortable. And Ron, who was the aircraft designer I was working with, he's done about five movies with Tom. He got, he got it all. But Tom is very specific where he likes buttons. Like, he moves things to where they want that. Where he is. If he was a pilot, that's where he is. A pilot.

Yeah, he is.

Oh, no, I want it. I would put it there so it, so it's all. So when he's in that mode, he's perfect because it's so custom to him. And it. And the inside cockpit. We did it with Skunk Works. We had a whole deal with Skunk Works.

Really?

I was out there. Joe and I were there all the time. We co designed the cockpit with them. There are components, there's buttons in there that are two, three million dollars that are from prototypes.

Wow.

That only 10 people know what they are. And they're nods to those people. They're not. They're not for us. But they would bring them to us in these little boxes and we'd put them in and then, you know, and it's just. That part's amazing.

It's such a little touch, but, you know, it just goes a little bit further. Yeah. That finishing that last 1%, it takes 90% of the time.

What is. And for me, it's, it's, you know, in severance. A lot of the actors say it to me, it's like they look around the room like there's so much we won't see. And I'm like, but you're seeing it.

Yeah.

And they're using it and they're. And it's. It's not just for the audience to see it all.

Yeah.

They feel if they walk into this bunker set and it's all feels real and there's things to do, they just get lost like you naturally would.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah.

It's just the way you have to design. A lot of people say we won't see that. It's like, I don't even know what that I just, just don't ignore it.

Creating a world.

And it's hard. As a lot of designers, they will cut it out. They'll be like, oh, yeah, they Won't see it. It's like you don't know that. And every director, like Catherine Bigelow, everything's a 360. You don't give her a half set.

Yeah.

It's like. Because if she. If you do, she will shoot that other half and it'll be in the movie.

Like, you have to be wrong.

You gotta do the whole thing. Yeah. But you just have to be.

She wants to be immersed.

Our job is to create a world that actors feel real in.

Totally.

And then when you watch it, you believe it.

Yeah. Should there be an Academy Award for production design?

There is.

There is.

Yeah.

But it doesn't happen during the main event. It does. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. My friend Patrice won for Dune last year. I don't know who won this.

Okay.

I can't remember. Yeah. That's a big award.

I thought there was. There's one category that I have to.

Imagine you're gonna be.

This will be an Emmy.

There you go.

I hate to cut this interview short.

This is really fun. No, I love it.

It's super enjoyable. Yeah, it's fine.

I'll happily do it again.

Yeah, this will be great.

You'll be in my home. I'll drive my Vespa down to visit you guys.

There we go. You can drive it on. Drive it onto the set. Do a burnout on the set.

Go west side. It's too damp.

No, no, we're. We're going to Hollywood.

Nice.

We're bringing media.

Come to Hollywood.

Yeah.

All right.

Bringing media back to Hollywood.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, thanks so much.

Cheers. Great hanging.

It was great. I gotta watch Playtime. 1967. Comedy drama. Never seen it.

Bye, guys. Later.

Bye. Yeah. What a delightful conversation. Not someone that we normally have on the stream, but we need to do more Hollywood. We should do a whole Hollywood day. Welcome. Hey, how you doing?

Welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

Great to be here.

Really, really chill day, I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah. Super relaxing.

Just plenty of time to just come hang out on a podcast here.

And let's adjust that microphone so it's towards your face. You can just adjust the mic, I think will be enough.

There we go. That's good. Would you mind introducing yourself for the stream? Tell us who you are, what you do.

Sure. Hi, I'm Nayri Hordadjian. I'm the Chief communications officer at Figma, which basically means I'm lucky to work with this amazing design community on events and how we engage them all around the world, including config.

How Are how have the comms been different this year than in years past?

You know I think that the launches really set the tone for how we bring the community together at config every year. And you know, we were just so excited about the launch slate this year. Four new products taking us from four to eight.

We had Andrew Reed on from oh good. From Sequoia earlier and he said that a few years ago they were giving Dylan a standing ovation for them for a font picker. And to see this year it's entirely make site, you know, Buzz.

Oh my God, I remember in 2022 it was a dark mode. Was dark mode similar like oh my.

God, everyone's so excited. But now it's like.

And it's just been really amazing to see the response so far already. And we're excited to see them, the community play with the product, get feedback and keep iterating.

Do you think about who you're communicating with as specific customer avatars or cohorts? Or is it all just kind of one big happy Figma family? And yeah, if you put on the headphones you'll just be able to hear yourself a little bit better. Better, more authentic podcast mode. But yeah, in terms of the types of communities that are here, obviously there's consumers who might use Figma just to design a wedding invitation or birthday card and then there's all the way up to an enterprise that has probably hundreds of seats, if not more. Do you think about communicating to different groups in different ways or is it of kind, kind of just a big celebration of the broader Figma community?

I mean Figma can be really good for figuring out your wedding seating. So I don't want to discount that use case. But in general we're really serving people who are making software. So going from idea to product and all the tools that they need to be able to do that. And you know, obviously the product design community is a huge part of that. But over the past several years the way people are building has changed. The entire process has become more blended, interdisciplinary. Today you heard from an engineer, a product manager, designers, and they're all just working together to build, to go from idea to product and AI is changing that and so we really think of serving that entire development.

It's crazy. The entire org chart can now make things totally, which is insane. Like the idea that someone in legal could create a marketing asset or you know, some type of material for hire, you know, it's pretty unheard of.

Yeah, even, even just like a one off internal tool to be built.

Can you talk about kind of the pressure, you know, around Figma? A lot of companies say they have a community, but they really just have, you know, an audience or a customer base. But you know, something that feels very obvious here and even online is that Figma's community is a real community. Right. You have people coming in from Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, like all, all descending here. And you don't get that without, you know, people. And these aren't, you know, some people are coming on behalf of a company, other people are like a one person studio that's just like I'm spending my own money to get here because I need to be there. Can you talk about how, how you've approached comms specifically at Figma knowing that when you send an email, people are going to open it and they're going to care a lot about what they're hearing. And I just feel like that's very different than even some big important companies where they're just sort of this monolithic organization and people are going to buy their stuff regardless of how they feel about the company.

Totally. Well, a lot of that goes back to, to the very earliest days. And you know, I think because Figma was in the browser and suddenly made design collaborative, it completely changed how designers worked completely like radical change in their day to day. And so that we always try to bring it back to the product solution that we're offering. But you know, we think of config as being an event for the community, by the community. It always has been that way since the first one back in 2020, right before the pandemic that predates my time at Figma. But the talks are by the members of our community, the activations, even some of the other events that are being sponsored and put on by people who are just here gathering. And so for us, the way we think about it is just to maintain authentic relationships with people. We ask for a lot of feedback, sure, on the event, but also on product. And so we're just trying to have a really open and engaged dialogue with folks. You know, we're happy that they tell us when they like things. We're also glad when they tell us what they don't. Like last year we had a lot of overcrowding at config. On the one hand that was like, you know, an interesting problem to have.

Shoulder to shoulder, more of a Coachella.

It was, it was not easy for folks to get in and around and so we heard that and I think it feels like much more roomy and spacious this year. And so just trying to make the experience always feel as authentic and connected as.

Although the keynote was still standing room only, I noticed.

But you know, we maxed out the number of chairs we could put in there I think.

Can you talk about the trade offs between batching these four product releases into one big event versus splitting it up? You could imagine like quarterly releases. There's obviously trade offs there. In the age of the Internet there's a lot of demand on companies to just hey, as soon as it's done, give it to me, I want it now. Even if it's rough around the edges, let's iterate. We get that at the same time you're becoming more of like the Apple like annual release. And there's something beneficial from a comms perspective about concentrating all the energy and attention to really break through with one big day of the year. Because you can't really dominate the Internet every day even if you're the best in the business. But yeah, how do you think about it? Was it ever a trade off or do you just love the annual release?

Cyc honestly we really look at the roadmap and let the roadmap kind of dictate what will end up at config and what ends up outside of config. We're not necessarily on a big annual release a year. Obviously config is a catalyst for a bunch of stuff. We've never launched four products in one launch ever again going from four to eight. So for us it's not set. We really, we believe in the philosophy that you just said of like get product into users hands fast even if it's not, you know, like even if it's early and learn and keep iterating faster from there. Because you know, our philosophy is that design is always and product development are always iterative, always living and so you're constantly going to be tuning it and the faster you can get it to users the better. Dylan always tells the story of the early days of Figma where you know, they didn't ship for a few years. He talks about that as being something he would do differently if he could go back again and advice other founders.

Yeah, we were talking about this with Andrew too. It's just so much part of the lore of just basically building in relative obscurity and then just coming out and how most I do think that made sense in the context of building novel functionality in the browser and the super complex product. But now that there's a platform taking that kind of iterative approach makes a lot of Sense.

Yeah, you learn faster the more people get their hands on it.

Can you walk me through some of the other comms best practices from amplifying an event like this? Obviously we're here having fun kind of in the new media streaming, very different world. But I imagine that there's a series of press releases that go out and how do you work on getting coverage across? What is the. What is the market map of like getting attention at Figma's level?

Well, because this is an event for and by our community. A lot of what we do is really about that direct and owned communication and the owned channels across social especially. And then of course like the other events that are, you know, the constellation around config. Like we had a day zero block party outside on Howard street yesterday called Config Commons that was. It's so much fun. Like great music, great vibes, people really warmed up.

But I'm sure people join not knowing what it was, tried to join, not knowing what it was for being like, look, totally. That looks fun party.

Exactly. But you know, one of the things that we like to do is just have fun with how our brand shows up. Yes. Figma is a B2B SaaS company, but we have a consumer patina to our brand and we get to lean into that which is so much fun. Yeah. And unique, I think within enterprise software. And so, you know, we changed our social handles to be called Config Crave, which I don't know if you all follow Pop Crave.

Oh yeah.

But you know, the demoise, the Pop Craves and all these Stan accounts that sort of get to feature celebrities. There was us on stage even.

Even this morning. There was a bunch of really funny posts.

Yeah, I saw that.

Celebrities here are our community. Right. So we wanted to feature them and we just are always looking for ways to do that authentically and have a little fun. You saw the. I think we talked about the auto.

Yeah, yeah.

CGI video.

Yeah. There's this like very funny Godzilla. It's amazing.

We like to have fun and bring that vibe while also like sharing clear, factual information. What's launching? When can you get your hands on it? So it's really a balance to do it all.

It's the hardest thing. Clarity while trying to get max attention.

Makes sense.

Yeah. I mean it's your first config. Tell me what you all think.

Oh, it's huge. It feels like being at Coachella.

Yeah, it really does.

It feels like being at a music festival.

Yeah, it's massive.

It's so fun. To have you here.

And it's so great that the diversity of different types of creatives that we've had on the show just today is so fascinating. The last one was like production sort of.

Isn't he awesome?

Yeah, yeah, it's great.

He's so fun. He's going to do a great talk later today.

Yeah, I'm very excited for that. We didn't even get to like, how does he use Figma at all or what his. But he's just speaking about design broadly.

Yeah, we just think, you know, someone in our community tweeted at us. You know who I want to hear from at config? The production designer from severance and we.

Were like, let's make it happen.

We've got you.

No, but you can just tell like the dedication to the craft process that everybody, even if you have nothing to do with production set design. It's like I want to apply a lot from our conversation, not just to our set, but how we do the show. And a lot of it just resonated. Personally, I'm just excited to go make my first Figma site.

What are you going to make?

I don't know. I have so many different ideas, both at tvpn, of just what it enables, just that speed of iteration. I think that the most frustrating thing for me was always hitting a wall on no code, like low code software, like web development tools, where I don't have an engineering background. And it would just be so frustrating to make something in Figma and then get to the point where I'm like, okay, now I have to wait.

Who do I give it to?

Yeah, I've got to find the right developer. And they're like, okay, I can get to it in like a week. And then you're like, can you do it in two days? And then it's like you really want it like that day.

There's so many of these ideas that are effectively like memes. Like they're one off web pages that don't do not merit any sort of real budget or weeks of engineering time. Like we wanted to do venture capital radio, VC radio. And so when you go to a specific VC firm's webpage, it plays a song that identifies with that fund. And so that's a really good. You go to Andreessen Horowitz. American Dynamism is going to play like Free Bird or something.

Yeah, yeah. Because there's this idea.

It's like, that's not something that you would want to actually spend some developers time on.

But yeah, but like ephemeral apps, websites. This idea of apps as meme as like memes. Right. Of like the Internet used to be.

Like this back when it was just an HTML page. You would just kind of hack something together and then stumble upon would drive some traffic. And then we kind of went into the social era and everything has to be either an image, text or video. But you know, my hope is that something will break through and people will be able to build more interactive stuff.

Yeah, we talked about this. I want to enable, you know, we have a bunch of brand assets at TVPN and people will remix them and use them in different ways. And sometimes I look at an image, I'm like, oh, this is like hilarious. Know I want to reshare it but like the logo not quite right. So maybe figuring out a way to make buzz I was going to say for that too.

And then see what people make for you. Yeah, Meme, meme.

You guys got to be getting memed all the time.

Rise of the meme.

Love it. How are you feeling for you guys are headed to London? London we are.

Last year right after config sf we took config to Singapore.

Okay.

This year it's London. We're excited. We have.

Is it a lot of the same like set effectively or is it a separate set out there?

We are bringing the inflatables.

Yeah. Okay.

Those are easy to.

Yeah.

Collapse pack and ship the sink. The synth can't come. It's too expensive to ship unfortunately. But it's a, you know, in general in another like raw space where we can bring our own scenic and make it feel like Figma. It's a smaller venue. It's about, you know, for a couple thousand people.

Is config like a full time job now for Figma? Like does the planning for 2026 start next week?

Basically it already has.

It already has.

Already has. We have to walk and chew garlic.

Our configs are measured in centuries.

But it's fun. You know, I think there are great moments in companies lives that like rally everybody together and they differ for every company and for us this is one of them on an annual basis, everyone on the product team, on the sales team, on the marketing team and we have a lot of fun with it. And for you know, it's just really important for us to show up and be present with our users and our community and make sure that they know how much we appreciate their feedback and how much we're working to ship for them.

Totally.

Yeah.

We need your help at some point. Finding. Apparently Dylan was in a Windows XP commercial when he was a kid. Oh, do you have. Do you have that?

I think I. Well, there's that.

Yeah.

There's Dylan on the Today show after he became a teal fellow with his mom.

No way.

Another good one.

We gotta get these.

The third best is in the early days of Figma when it was really small, they were trying to recruit this intern to come work at figma. She was really into K pop, so Dylan and the early team filmed a K pop music video for her. That's like really hardcore recruiting for an intern. It must not have been very good. She declined the internship. But those are some good videos from the early days. I can share with you.

She will, I'm sure, always regret that decision.

We wish her well. We wish her well. But that came. That video is so good. We showed it at our 10 year.

That's like the equivalent for like an intern is like when the like the NBA general commissioner, like team, team coach goes to like the parents and sits them down and says like, hey, we want them to join the. Join the team or something. Or like college recruiting.

Even more than that.

Yeah. Even more brutal.

But yeah, Dylan did a lot of child acting.

There's so. There's so much good lore around that, like Eric Lyman has that video of him speaking fluent Chinese on some game show. I don't know if you've seen this. Oh, it's a fantastic. At ramp.

Is he a fluent speaker?

Yeah, yeah. So he was over in China for, I don't know, a semester, maybe a couple years or something. Went on a game show, is telling all these jokes and like getting uproarious applause from everyone. It's remarkable. And then of course, Scott Wu at Cognition has that video of him doing like the most complex math imaginable as.

Like a child in his head.

Yeah.

What about. What do you all have in your.

Yeah.

In your closet?

That's tough.

That's something meme those.

Yeah, totally.

For 2025.

Yes.

I'm trying to think if I. When. When was my. There's probably a video interview from like my first company years ago, but I don't think it was too embarrassing.

I don't have anything embarrassing. The one I. My mom was a. Was a graphic designer and.

Cool.

So my earliest memories doing design in a business context were working with her. These were like the Photoshop years. And I have like pictures. So I had a skateboard company when I was 12 and I have pictures of me like holding up, you know, the finished product. But the, like, I. It was so funny because at the time, I actually really remember how, like, Single Player the product was. It was like, you know, files and like, versions and whatever.

So anyways, I remember some of my friends in high school made like a student film and I was tall. I'm still tall, but they made me play the dad, which is hilarious. And I was a terrible actor.

Oh, you had to wear a suit.

Yeah, yeah, I did actually wear a suit. It was very, very embarrassing.

Anyway, I do feel a little underdressed compared to you two.

I mean, we're overdressed. Look at the community. This is. This is not exactly the Goldman Sachs technology media.

And we were in la, we had a meeting Monday and we. We showed up to Milk and not for the event, but meeting somebody there and we didn't have our suits on.

I had a suit on.

Oh, you had a suit.

I didn't have a jacket, but yeah.

Yeah, well, jacket doesn't count.

And then we were at Hillen Valley and we felt.

We felt right at home.

Right at home. Everyone. I mean, that was all of us Silicon Valley people putting on suits for the first time in years.

Yeah, yeah.

And all the D.C. people, we fit right in. But here, here we kind of stick out. But fortunately everyone's been very nice and I think they're having fun.

I don't miss the bad suits from Washington. Not my.

No, the joke is that, you know, you're at Hillen Valley when everyone has their business cards in their suits from the last time they were there because they only go to a DC once a year from Hillen Valley. Anyway, we're. We're getting a hard stop, so we're.

Going to stop in four minutes.

Yeah. But thank you so much for hopping on.

Thanks for being here.

To be clear, I think we're getting booted from, like, for some reason, otherwise we'd keep podcasting.

Yeah, I mean, we got another four hours now.

We got at least another four hours. Honestly, we're not used to. To being on couches and it's like.

A little bit different.

Comfy. You can go longer.

I think we can. I think. I think we can easily put up another 12 hours.

Easily, easily. But anyway, thanks for making this happen.

Why don't you meet us in London next week?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The international travel, we have yet to take the show on the road internationally. We've done Miami, we've done dc, San Francisco now. Okay, so check in the boxes. We'll get it. We'll get out, we'll get out there.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for that.

Do you know where the next next Config is or is that not really?

Come back with breaking news on the show.

I'd love to.

Maybe, I don't know, Saint Tropez or.

John just wants it to align with 2026 summer plans.

Exactly.

Sorry, sorry, John.

Lake Como, Amangiri for a more intimate setting.

I think we may not be the right company conference for those locations.

But I mean, Singapore is very nice.

London is fantastic. You know, you should maybe Cannes Lyon needs to have tvpn.

Yeah, it'd be great.

That's what you need.

Yeah, yeah, it would be great. That'd be fantastic.

I feel that for you.

Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in.

We'll see you after the. After the show.

Thank you so much. Anyway, this has been a fantastic stream. Thank you for watching. We really had a lot of fun being here at figma config 2025 had a lot of interesting conversations. Really took us on a world tour having a, having a Sequoia partner and the designer of, of those of severance. Not every day that you see a technology and business show do both. But we are men of many talents.

So how many guests do we have tomorrow, by the way?

I think we have like six. We can give everyone kind of a run through.

I think it's going to be closer to seven.

Seven.

Do we want to, do we want to leak it? I think, I don't think we should.

Leak it yet, but we have.

I don't, I don't want to go.

But, but, but we are, we are hoping to get some great people from the government as well as our first, our first post game of a major public company.

Post earnings.

Post earnings, which are very excited about. And so we're going to be digging into that. Kind of cutting our teeth in the post earnings game which we want to get more into and so stick with us. It's absolutely stacked. We have to get back to LA actually right now because we have to prep because we're, we're going wall to wall tomorrow.

It's by far the most stacked show.

I'm excited. It's going to be a big growth moment for the show. So anyway, thank you so much for watching.

We will talk to you tomorrow.

Goodbye.