Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design

Today, I'm excited to bring you a very special episode, which was recorded live at Figma Config with Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field in front of a live audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the first ever live recording of this podcast, and it was so much fun. If you watch this on YouTube, you can see the epic stage that they built specifically for us to recreate my podcast studio. I could not be more thankful to the Config team for making this happen. In my conversation with Dylan, we dig into how he builds and refines his product taste and intuition, how intuition is a hypothesis generator, the future of product management, how Dylan attempts to operationalize keeping Figma simple and to continue simplifying the experience, a bunch of stories from the early days of Figma that I've never heard before, also he shares his favorite AI tool called WebSim which is wild, and if you wait till the very end you can see to be a very young child actor, Dylan Field, in a clip that I found online that was hilarious. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Dylan Field.

Dylan, thank you so much for joining me, and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Annie. Hi, all. Is this your first live podcast?

This is my first ever live podcast. Also, a big thank you to the Config team who set up this crazy studio. I had no idea this was going to happen. I feel like I'm in my studio here with 1,000 people watching us.

It's very impressive. I very much dig the background and.

Also the mics that may or may not be wired.

That's right.

Don't say that. Don't tell people.

Sorry.

There's no wires coming out of them.

There's no one behind the curtain either. Okay. So, Dylan, I want to start by just checking in on how you're doing. So Config, It's about to wrap up. We've been at it for two days now. I know how much lift goes into doing these sorts of things. I imagine you've been thinking about this for a long time now. I'm just curious how you're doing. Any surprises? Any highlights? Any low lights?

The highlight is the community and just the incredible, incredible people here at Config. Yeah. Y'all are awesome. I don't know why I keep talking in the mic like this. It's instinctual. But seriously, it's just the most amazing community to be part of, and I feel so lucky. And then in terms of how I'm doing this exact moment, exhausted but riding on caffeine and whatever this really cool probiotic drink is.

Any surprises from the past couple days? Anything that's like, oh wow, that went a lot better than I thought, maybe less well?

Yeah, I mean, you know, demo, definitely things I would have improved. But also, Emil and Mojika were phenomenal. And it was just so awesome to see them do their demos and present materials. And then, yeah, I was just really pleased with the conversation I think that's getting started at Config around AI. And I think that, you know, I was looking online on social media, and I think people are already kind of like zeroing in the right conversation, which is, okay, in a world of more software being created by AI, What does that mean and the impact on craft and the impact on quality and the need to have more unique design and how design is a differentiator? I think some people are saying I agree with that, some people are saying that I disagree with that, and that's exactly the bounds of what the conversation I kind of imagined would emerge. from yesterday. You know, it was funny, the make design feature. You know, we, anything I said on the keynote, I was like, this is gonna give you the most obvious thing in the most obvious form possible. And then people online are like, it's just gonna give you some obvious thing. I agree.

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Let's keep talking about design. You once said that the definition of design is art applied to problem solving. Can you just add a bit more to that? What do you mean by that? Because that's an amazing line.

Well, I don't think it's my original line. I think someone else said it. But there's a lot of definitions of design out there too. I mean, there's also design is dialogue or design is problem solving. You could just go straight there. I could go with like 10 more, but But yeah, I like art applied to problem solving because I think that design is often, there is some component of creativity to it and unique expression that you're trying to provide and create and put out into the world, but you are also trying to do it and match it to a user need, a problem that needs to be solved. And I think that it's not pure art. But if you lose the art and you're just solving the problem, it's totally utilitarian and it lacks soul. And so the combination of those two things is, to me, really beautiful.

I'm going to pivot to a very hard-hitting question. I hope your PR people don't kill me for asking this. Many people ask me to ask you this question.

Okay.

Very important. Please explain a Figma tradition called Raccoon Feet and Muffin Hammer.

Okay. I should probably just leave this interview now. Okay, so this is a conversation. I'm not sure exactly where it started, but it started in early Figma. And basically we had these lunch tables at Figma where we would just kind of all gather and have very long, interesting meandering conversations before we got back to work. And one of the questions that was a would you rather was, would you rather have raccoons for feet or muffins for hands? And I think this is a deeply philosophical question. I've pondered it since I've heard it. I still don't have one answer. If you've got an answer, I'm curious what it is.

I've got follow-up questions. To the raccoon, can you control where the raccoon take you, or are they just deciding on their own what's happening?

I think that raccoons probably wouldn't even agree with each other where to go.

Okay, that's complicated.

I mean, if you had raccoons for feet right now, do you think that it would interfere with this podcast?

But muffin hands would also interfere with my newsletter, and I think I'd be out of work. I don't know if you can type. I need a special keyboard. Okay, this is very difficult.

You haven't even thought about the upsides of this yet.

Yeah, what are the upsides?

We could get there. It's odd, but maybe you could eat something. It's a case for optimism. Muffin cakes.

Yeah, if you have muffins for hands, you know, maybe. If you're hungry, do they regenerate organs as you eat them?

That's a good question.

Okay. There's no answers here, just questions.

Do your nails grow?

Yeah.

Oh, okay, interesting.

It's deeper than you might think.

Okay. Okay, I'm gonna play a short clip with Rick Rubin, and then I have a question about it, okay? So we'll see if that plays.

But exactly what he does and how is difficult to describe. Do you play instruments? Do you know how to work a soundboard?

No. I have no technical ability, and I know nothing about music.

You must know something.

Well, I know what I like and what I don't like, and I'm decisive about what I like and what I don't like.

So what are you being paid for?

The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel. has proven helpful for artists.

Okay, so I'm not gonna say this is you.

You need to grow the beard.

But I think this is a little bit you because what I've heard from a number of your colleagues is that one of your superpowers is intuition and product taste. And someone said that you have the sixth sense for what's gonna work when you're designing Figma and you're making decisions in the product. So I'm curious how you've built and refined your intuition and product taste when it comes to Figma and then even broadly.

That's a lot kinder than I thought you were going to be. I thought you were going to be like, you don't know how to code and you don't know how to design. No. But no, I mean, I think here's my framework for it. I think intuition is like a hypothesis generator. And you're constantly generating these hypotheses and others are generating hypotheses as well. and you then take these hypotheses and you put them forward and you debate them and you try to find data to support them or negate them and then you whittle it down into like, what is our working hypothesis? And from that you move forward.

I heard that you read every tweet that mentions Figma and share them with folks and there's a Slack channel where you paste them. I imagine that is a part of this where you're just constantly watching what people are saying about Figma, what people are complaining about.

I mean, I definitely look everywhere. I'm trying to constantly ingest information about Figma, and it's not just like Twitter slash X, whatever that's called now, but anywhere on the internet, support channels, et cetera. And yeah, I'm always trying to understand, I also ask a lot of questions. And I try to get to root problems and understand where people are coming from and what are they actually trying to solve. Sometimes people are saying, hey, I need X, but they really want Y or Z. And trying to do that myself and kind of engage and dive deeper there, but also to encourage our team to do that, I think leads to really good outcomes in terms of what we ship.

Is there something you've changed your mind about, kind of building on that, either based on customer feedback or some employee just making a case and like, okay, you're right. Is there something that comes to mind, if something you've changed your mind about recently? Somebody said flies.

Someone started out flies. I'm not, it's Figma slides. I, well, it's not recent, but like one good example of me changing my mind is that y'all have pages in Figma. You're welcome. But I think I have deep skepticism about pages still. I'm not sure they're like, if you could freeze time and I could just go in with my team, work on Figma for a very long time, I'm not sure we'd come to the same implementation of pages that we are at today. I just don't think it's the most elegant solution. in the context of the entire system of product design that you could create. The world told me and our team that that did not matter and they needed pages. And don't worry, we're not unshipping pages. But yeah, I'm still very skeptical of them. And I think that in general, probably my team would tell you that I don't, always change my mind, but I.

Also.

I like build trust with people in deep ways. And I think across our organization, if things are not going to be fatal, then if I hear from someone, hey, I really think we should do X, then I'll say, okay, just go with it. And here are my, here's my feedback, here's what I'm skeptical of, let's see what happens. And then, you know, sometimes they come back to me and they're like, see, I was right, but usually they're pretty polite about it.

Just to build on that, something a lot of people try to work on is being good at influencing leadership, execs, COs. What do you find helps you, how works to change your mind? What do people come to you with that helps you like, okay, you're actually right?

I think the more concrete an artifact is, or the more you can debate something, the better. I ask for examples a lot. I try to ask follow-up questions about things and make sure I fully understand it. And I think where I get stuck sometimes is if I ask follow-up questions and we don't have answers yet, and then my response might be, let's go find the answers to these questions. and then let's go back to this conversation if I think it's something that's really important. And I think for some people they might go, okay, this is actually really obvious. Like, I can't believe you're so dense and you don't get it yet. And sometimes they're right and they come back and they're like, okay, here's the data. Now can we move on? And we do. We move on and they're right. And yeah, I just think that it's important though to just really understand something from first principles for a lot of decisions. And maybe it's just a perfectionist quality.

But.

Repeated over time, I think it leads to good outcomes as long as you make sure it's not bottlenecking the organization.

Okay. So kind of following up on that, let's talk about product management. So last year you had Brian Chesky here, I think maybe on the stage, maybe a bigger stage. And he kind of said that they got rid of product management at Airbnb and everyone cheered and all the PMs were very sad. And he didn't actually mean they got rid of product management. They changed the function and evolved it. I'm curious just to get your take. Yeah, it's funny.

Let's hear we have you here, Lenny, so you know, answer your answer, no.

Yeah, I had them on the phone after all.

Surprise.

We're still here. We're still here. I want to get your take on product management. You all have amazing product managers at Figma. I've had three of them on the podcast already. I'm curious just what value you find the best product managers bring to Figma.

It was really funny last year after that interview. So Yuki, our Chief Product Officer, had invited me to a dinner for our PM team. And it took a while to get out of Config. at the end of the day, and I eventually made it to dinner, but I was like 40 minutes late. And I walk in, and Mahika, who was on stage yesterday presenting slides, figma slides, slide slides. She was standing up and doing a mock Brian Chesky imprisonment. And she's like standing up in front of the entire product team and she goes, and then Brian Chesky is like, there don't need to be any PMs. And Dylan's like, ooh. And I'm like, hi, Mika. And, you know, I'd never seen her so red. And then I gave like a, you know, like quick, hey PM team, I believe in you. Thank you for your hard work. But seriously, I think that if you kind of zoom out, it's always tricky whenever you're asked to formally define what is the separation between a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. It's always hard to actually create those clear lines. And I think in many organizations, they're blurry. But at the end of the day, a PM and designer, they need to have some technical expertise. or at least understand how the systems work to probably create the best things they can possibly make. Designer engineer, they should probably have some sense of the business objectives. They should have some sense of what users want. An engineer and a product manager, they should have taste and craft and some sense of the option space and some ability to care about or desire to care about the visual implementation. So I think you can include research in there too if you want to make it four legs of the stool rather than the trio. And you can talk about all three probably should have exposure to users and be talking in dialogue with users. So I think that if you think about sort of that group holistically, each is important. If you think about a team, there's all these qualities that you have to have to make a great product. And that said, I think for product managers and the product function, what I think it sometimes when you see people that fall down in that function is because they treat it too much like.

Process.

Which is very important too. Don't be wrong. Good process can help support good outcomes.

But.

I think that you can't lose sight of the problems that you're solving. You have to go talk to users and you have to actually have a strategy. And if you're really good, you should have a point of view. And some point of views are going to lead to good outcomes and some point of views aren't. And there's some sense of taste. And you also have to bring everyone together and make sure that they get to the objective that it's celebrated, and that at the end of the project, or when you complete a milestone, everyone's stoked. Otherwise, it's not going to be a team that gels. You're not going to get to the next outcome. Even if you get to an outcome and it's a milestone, but if everyone's unhappy, you kind of failed. And so somehow good product people are able to do all this, and they're able to create great frameworks that bring everyone along. with them. And so everyone's able to have a shared headspace around what it is they're trying to get to.

Someone once said that if a PM, if PM's disappeared or if a PM goes on vacation, everything's okay for like a week or two or three, and then things start to crumble a little bit because they're, they kind of glue everything together. Do you, I don't know, do you find that sort of thing? Let me actually ask a different question along those lines. Are you bearish or bullish on the future of product management. Do you think PMs will continue the way they are? Do you think PMs will dwindle any sense of the future of product management?

I think probably everyone's learning to do a bit more of everyone else's job in this current moment. That said, I definitely think there's still immense value in product, immense value in design, immense value in engineering. And so I think those roles will continue to exist.

So maybe just, I just want to come back to the question of just what the best PMs that you work with, do you find what value do they most bring? I guess, is there anything that's like, here's what would be gone if we didn't have these PMs?

The best PMs, I think, again, create those frameworks that bring everyone else along. And those frameworks also have a point of view and a strategy associated with them. So you're able to kind of like take the strategy, take the point of view, wrap it all up in a framework, and then make it so that everyone knows what the destination is and how to get there.

Awesome. Okay, so kind of along these lines, something I've heard you're really big on is simplification. Somebody told me that when you're in a designer view and things just feel too complex to you, you furrow your brow, and insist there must be something simpler. Why is simplification so top of mind for you? Why is it so important for you? And just why is it so hard to do?

Oh, gosh. Well, I think probably anyone here who's worked on product knows how hard it is. I think the more that you add, the harder it is to create something that's coherent. One essay that Evan, my co-founder, introduced me to early on in Famous History I think from Stevie's drunken blog grants or something like that, it contains the term irreducible complexity. And it's basically this idea that 1 + 1 does not equal 3. It sometimes equals 1 1/2. And the more that you add and the more that you continue to put in something, the more complex it gets and the worse it gets. And I think this is definitely true for tools. So in the context of Figma, we can make it more powerful, but to do that in a way that's not making it more complex at the same time is extremely hard. And we have to always be paying attention to how complex or how simple things are, because if we don't, it just kind of becomes a monstrosity really fast. And there's parts of our product that I don't want to dive into that part of the conversation of self-critique, but Definitely, as I'm in conversation with a bunch of our product leaders at Figma, there's parts where it's like, okay, this thing is too complex as a system. And we made all the right local decisions, and yet together they're too complex and they're not working anymore. And let's go revisit the system now.

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I know you just redesigned Figma. I imagine part of that came from things are just getting too complicated, not as simple as we want. Is there anything that's been like the bugging you in the old Figma, the like, oh, this is way too complicated. I really want to simplify this thing.

Yes.

Okay. What's that?

Move on. But I, many things. Sounds good. Okay.

And in terms of how to keep things simple, so I had Dharmesh Shah on the podcast. He's the co-founder of HubSpot. And the way he described it is that you're always fighting the second law of thermodynamics of entropy, just the product getting more complicated. And he kind of sees it himself as part of the solution. If you top down, you have to be on top of that. Is that the way you see it? That's kind of your role to keep things simple. Do you think people further down the ladder can do that or I don't know?

Absolutely, yeah. Everyone's responsible for simplicity. And I think another quote that is not mine, but is a really good one is keep the simple things simple, make the complex things possible. I think that's a really important principle to hold as you're designing tools. And I'd say that it's really easy to make the simple things complex, unfortunately.

Okay, I want to pivot to talking about early days Figma. Sure. So I don't know how many people know this, but it took three and a half years to launch Figma from when you were beginning to work on it.

Way too long.

Don't do that. Okay, this is my question. So it took three and a half years to launch and then five years to get your first customer. Dylan, what the hell were you doing all that time?

I don't think it took five years for first, well, okay, hey, first paid customers, yeah, okay, fine. Slightly less, but we have approximately five years, I guess we round up. I think that if I had been probably better at hiring and recruiting, like if not, I see Nadia in the audience, making eye contact with her the entire time for some reason. She's our chief people officer. If she had been at Figma from day one, we would have hired probably faster and we would have gotten to market faster. But I think that, Yeah, it was a hard product to build and to get everything to come together with. I also see Show and I think for Show is joining us as a director of engineering. He's a VP of product now. Again, people can wear many hats. And he was someone that joined Figma and said, hey, y'all need to ship this thing. You're really close. And he really helped catalyze us to ship in that moment. And I think in week one, he gave a presentation. It was like, here's what we got to do. Here's the gap. Everyone agrees on it. Let's go.

And so you already said that you wish you shipped earlier. Is there any advice there for just people building something today of, get it.

Out as fast as you possibly can? Everything they tell you about making sure that you get a product out really quickly. is totally true. The faster you get out, the more feedback you get. That is a positive thing.

And.

Now I index on that when we try to build. And FigJam is a great example of that. We shipped it incredibly fast and it helped us get to market and get feedback faster. Figma Slides, great example of that too. Dev mode for what it's worth. It took us longer. We just had to keep iterating and building it and building it again. Certain directions we tried didn't work out. And we really had to get to a place where we were able to really believe that we were adding value and really understood the developer's user. And it just didn't happen for a long time. So it's interesting because I think people look at dev mode and sometimes they go, oh, this is quite simple to the point about simplicity. you know, Figma, is this simpler than FigJam? The reality was it took at least three times as long.

So your advice is ship quickly. There's also this kind of push that.

Could hold a bar for sure.

That's kind of the question I have is there's also a lot of talk of just like the bar has risen. You need especially B2B software, craft is really important. Like Linear talks a lot about this, just like, the bar is very high for people to switch from something out there. Is there anything-- I don't know. I don't think you'll have here's the answer when you're ready to ship. But just any advice of just here's good enough versus no, you should probably wait?

Well, another thing that Evan taught me was that for any launch you got quality features, deadline, choose two. And I think that the beautiful thing about software is you can keep iterating on it. So it's not like a physical product where you have to always have quality in there, otherwise it's never going to have quality. you can ship it with features and deadline and then improve it iteratively over time. I'm not saying you should always do that. Sometimes you need to at least have a minimum bar of quality for the things you have and you're going to ship less features maybe. So you choose quality and deadline and sometimes you say, actually here's the minimum feature set and we're going to have this quality bar and you're willing to push it out. But I think you have to know when you're introducing a new thing, what it's going to take, and then to make that minimally awesome product. But also when you're, yeah, I think that when you're iteratively improving it, you shouldn't just be focusing on the features, you have to focus on the quality too.

I like this term, you use minimally awesome product. Love it. The, okay, so the way you got your early users for Figma is quite fascinating. I don't know how many people know this story, but you basically, Wrote a script to scrape Twitter and create a graph of the most influential designers on Twitter. And then you made it your mission to convince them to use Figma and make them evangelists. Is there anything more to the story there? And then I have a question about kind of along those lines.

Yeah, I mean, you can't do this anymore, first of all, because the Twitter API doesn't exist anymore. Rest in peace, Twitter API. But, I mean, look, I was intern at LinkedIn. And when I was there, I saw some really cool work people had done with Gephi, which was a sort of network visualization tool. And based on that, I thought it'd be interesting to try to, like you said, look at who the DNSi network was, who the central nodes were, which you can just run PageRank on and see. And you could do that for other communities too, which I have done in the past. I just, because I'm curious about social network dynamics and Social network analysis. And you could just do those things back in 2012, 2013 when Figma started. So yeah, so I kind of constructed this list of here are the most central designers in the graph, but also then I looked at their work and the ones that I was really inspired by and as a total fanboy and someone who wanted to learn as much as I could about design, was inspired by these folks. The ones I was inspired by, I reached out to and said, hey, can I buy you a coffee? And most of them were really kind. The design community is amazing. And they said yes. And then from there, I was able to learn from them, show them Figma, get their feedback. And I think it started honestly more as like a me fanboy and me getting feedback. I mean, one example is Tim Van Damme. I saw him on Dribbble, you know, Max Voltar, I'm like, oh my God, this guy is just genius. These icons are incredible. I think the first time I met Tim was at Dropbox and I had this total fanboy moment. I'm like, I've been tracing your icons. It's like, hi. And I had been working on vector networks with with a team. And my test cases were a lot of his icons. And because they were just beautiful and I liked looking at them and studying them and to now have Tim on the team and have him doing the icons for UI3 is such an honor and privilege to work with someone of that craft. But yeah, so reaching out to your hero sometimes works.

It's interesting because when people hear that story, when I've heard that story many times, it was always like, here's a growth hack. Find the most influential people in your field, go try to convince them to use your product. And the way you're describing it is you were using it more as feedback. I just want to show you the product, get your feedback, make this better.

And then ended up working. They're like, oh, I love FigJam. I'm going to use it. Well, I think it especially works for designers that way because designers are really good at giving feedback. It turns out that not everyone is good at giving feedback. But yeah, designers are awesome at that. So we're really lucky. And I mean, literally, early on in Figma's existence, folks, I think Payam Rajabi is here somewhere. I'm not sure if he's in this room, but I was hoping to see him before the end of Config. Payam wrote a very long doc for us about all the things that he wanted to see in Figma after we did a user research study with him with a bottle of wine because our text editing didn't work very Well then. Sorry, right into the user study. I knew we'd need a bottle of wine to finish. It took like hours because the type of sentence in Figma was so slow.

That reminds me of a story I've heard where one of your first customers was Coda, sponsor I think of Config. It used to be called Krypton. And there's a story where you installed Figma, you helped them get set up, you drove home, and then they called you like, Hey, Figma's not working anymore. and you drove back like yourself to help fix them and it ended up their Wi-Fi was down, right? Or there was a Wi-Fi issue. Is that the story?

I don't remember what the solution was, but I heard. But yeah, it was like we were like halfway home and somehow I saw, I'm sure I was not looking at my email while driving. Definitely is not something anyone here should do. But yeah, somehow found out that they were, had an issue and we turned the car around.

Yeah.

And they were, Shashir is amazing, by the way, and like has been a mentor for a long time to me and many people on our team. And he, I think at the time, did not know he was the first customer. And later on, he came over to Figma's office and I introduced him without really thinking about that. And I was like, yeah, this is Shashir. He's the, first, his team was really the first user of Figma as a team. And he goes, wait a second, I am?

Amazing. Okay, I want to talk about something totally different. Something I've noticed you are good at is you spot trends ahead of other people. So obviously WebGL, you were on early and that's what allowed Figma to exist, building it in the browser. I saw you tweeting about crypto punks way before they were worth millions of dollars. You're just like, I like crypto punks. Look, I got a few.

They're really cool. They're super cool.

Little pipe. I'm curious if there's anything these days you're really excited about that might become bigger in the future.

Yeah.

Well, we talked about WebSIM. I mean, we're just talking about them backstage. And I think before this conversation, too.

Yeah.

And that's an example of something where it's so interesting because it's like there's a generative UI component, and yet it's not what we're going for for Figma, it's totally different. So we actually invest in WebSim with Figma Ventures.

Amazing. Maybe explain what WebSim is for folks.

Yeah, WebSim is like a hallucinated internet, basically. If you go to websim.ai, you can use different models like Claude or GPT-4.0, and you can do that either through their defaults or you can use open router to get a bigger context window. And the more that you use it, the more you construct this context window of this almost universe that you're building up in Websem. And as you do it, it's almost like you're world building. And I just have gone deep and geeked out on this when I've had time. And they've evolved the platform a lot. So we were back there and they were showing me some new functionality that's really cool too.

Amazing.

But yeah, I think so interesting to see as this almost lean forward entertainment tool using the internet.

So I thought you would answer this. And so we're gonna have a picture come up here that I tried WebSim and played around with it and hopefully a photo comes up somewhere. Okay, so this is, so all I typed here was gmail.com/dylanfield. So this is in an invented Gmail, just came up with this using AI of what your inbox should look like. And it looks pretty accurate. I don't know. There's like Adobe stuff.

DOJ not FTC.

This is not actual information. Nobody buy stock based on this.

So it's pretty common on 75% year over year.

Yeah.

So like the way I had never tried Gmail before.

Yeah.

Did you try you? What was your inbox like?

I didn't do me. I don't think it wouldn't have anything.

If you Back but it does.

So yeah, the way it works is just you type a URL or a prompt in the URL field and it'll just invent what that website looks like. It's hilarious.

It's awesome.

It's awesome. So I think they're gonna get a lot of traffic right.

One time we someone posted in our random channel on Slack, they said, I had a dream last night. It's always a good start for the random channel. I had a dream last night that I was working on FigJam, but it wasn't FigJam, it was FrogJam. And so I, in WebSim was like figma.com/frogjam. And I came up with a whole marketing website complete with like toad puns for FrogJam. The sticky notes were LilyPads. And you were supposed to, like it had this whole metaphor of hopping from LilyPad to LilyPad to generate new ideas.

This is genius. Awesome, this is genius. Okay, so interestingly, before Figma, your only other job was an intern at three different companies. And now you're leading this juggernaut of a business, a thousand plus people. I imagine there's a lot you've had to learn over this time. So I'm not gonna ask you what you've learned, because I think it's probably a lot. I'm curious just what has most helped you scale and learn? Is it exec coaches? Is it CEO friends? Is it hiring execs? Like what's most helped you scale with the business and become the leader you are today?

I think all the above. And also just having like a mindset of you have to constantly adapt and grow and change and adapt. But yeah, I would say that mentors can come from anywhere. It can come from the community, all of you. Mentorship can come from the people you hire. It can come from folks that you actively seek out as investors or explicit mentorship and mentors. It can come from people that call themselves coaches. And what's interesting too is it can come from people you mentor as well. There have been plenty of people where they asked me a question at some point and I give them an answer and they think it's insightful for whatever reason. And then years later where we're talking again, and I asked them a question and they're like, well, years ago, you told me. And they repeat back what I told them, like, that's a really good point. Or they've grown and they've changed and they've learned and they tell me something completely different. They give me a new framework. And so I think that when you're, like, a lot of times when I talk with new founders, they teach me things that are totally things that I've just never thought about or interns at Figma have been mentors to me in many ways. so you really have to have a worrying mindset and just always be ready to absorb new information, I think.

When you were just tinkering around with Figma 12 years ago, I think at this point, did you ever imagine you'd be running a thousand person company in an audience just spellbound by what you're building? There's like people lining up to take photos with your logo in the lobby. Like, that doesn't happen.

That's very rare.

Just to give you a chance to reflect on just how it feels to have built that over time, how does How does that feel sitting here right now?

I feel very, very lucky, but also very humbled by just the community that is around Figma. I mean, I mentioned the keynote, but just like the people that are in the Figma community are the people that are shaping the world's technology and the chance to serve them and to make software for them and hopefully improve their life in some little way is such a privilege. It's a responsibility. And when I don't take lightly, but also I try not to carry that as a weight, but rather as pump me up and get me excited to go build for them.

So, yeah, when we were talking about this idea earlier, the first thing you said is it's a responsibility, which I didn't expect. Is there anything more there just like, wow, I really have to help make--.

Well, again, it's going back to the simplification.

Point.

You know, it's very important that we continue to make Figma more and more simple. We make Figma as powerful as we can for the people that are in our community, that we figure out what people's needs truly are, and that we advance the state of the craft and make it so that we do that in a responsible way, and that we champion design. and champion quality. So we're trying to do all those things. We sometimes mess up, but people have been very patient with us and we're very thankful for that and thankful for the support of just everyone here and in our community that are giving us a chance to make this impact.

Is there anything else you want to, oh yeah, there's some applause. Love that.

Thank you.

Applause break. Is there anything else you want to share or anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very lightning round, very quick lightning round?

Well, no, I think one thing I'll share is I think we're so early on this journey of computing in general, and in our lifetimes, we're going to have the chance to just build such incredible technology and incredible products. And I'm really excited to see what everyone in this room builds, but also everyone on the internet that's Twitpic maybe also builds and send me cool stuff. So if you build something cool, like message me somewhere and share it with me.

What's the best way to message you?

Email's good. You can probably figure out my email if you use Twitpic for like five seconds or use WIP SIM. And, Twitter slash x is good. Those are two places at least. You can find me.

Dylan, with that we reached our very exciting late round. We only have a couple minutes left. It's a very short one. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love other than WebSim?

Well, I'll say that it's not like a favorite product, but I will say that if you get Like, not to, I'm trying to hesitate if I should say this or not.

We'll cut it out in post, don't worry, buddy.

It's so fast, I'll say this, it's so fascinating to look at all the different LMs out there right now and what each one is uniquely good at. And it's really fun if you can hack them the right way and get them in the right mood, what they'll do. That's what I'll say.

Whoa. What does that mean? Okay.

It's my diplomatic answer.

Okay, interesting. Okay. Do you have a favorite life motto that you come back to, repeat to yourself, share with friends or family that you find really useful?

I don't know if I've got a life motto, but one piece of advice I've always appreciated is When people give you advice, they're not giving you advice. They're giving themselves advice in your shoes. I think that's like an interesting one. So if I gave you advice here, I'd give myself advice in your shoes.

Final question. Not many people know this, but you're an actor, a child actor when you were five years old. Do you think you made the right career move? Do you feel like you sometimes regret acting?

Yeah, definitely. That's my mom. My mom's in the audience and she says yes. No, I mean, like, we've been talking about product. If you're an actor, you're a product in some way. And that's not to disparage actors. Actors are awesome. Acting is awesome. I loved it. But my differentiators when I was five, five and a half, I think, was that I could read and I could sit still. And I was decently cute. And I hit puberty and those things were no longer differentiators. And then it was like, let's do some computer science.

So to close, we're gonna play a, oh yeah.

Applause.

We're going to play a clip, something I found on YouTube to close and enjoy. 30 seconds clip.

Where will you find a world of ideas for your child? Only at E-Toys. From Barbie to Brio to Swimways. E-Toys, where great ideas come to you. That was a good find.

Thank you. Dylan, thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you. Can I make one comment about that commercial?

Okay, one comment.

Okay, one comment before we end that commercial made that company go bankrupt. Thank you all for joining in. Thank you for having me, Honey.

Good luck. Thanks, Dylan.

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