Transcript & Video: Fireside w/ Dylan Field
Figma, AI, Design, & Education
Below is video and transcript of a conversation Feb 13, 2023 with Dylan Field, cofounder and CEO of Figma. We covered Figma’s origins, AI, and education.
Tammy Winter (Stripe)
Hi. My name is Tamara Winter and I publish Stripe Press. Can you all keep a secret? Yeah. Okay, so everybody thinks that Stripe Press was this like elaborate part of the Collison's plan or maybe the most elaborate brand marketing play of all time. But the truth is it was kind of an experiment and so when Strike Press was born, Elad’s book was kind of the make or break moment and so it wasn't clear that five years ago when we started it that it would be something people cared about. Now it could have been Quibbe or CNN Plus, but thank you, thank you for that. But I think the fact that Highgrowth Handbook and Stripe Press now are a thing is really a testament to the fact that a lot really crafted, not just a book that's interesting to read, but really a tool that I hope you all find useful. And so I'm excited to host a lot here at Stripe. Thank you all for coming. But I'm also really excited for him to bring Dylan Field. I won't say too much about Dylan, I'll leave that for them. So without further ado...
Elad Gil
Thanks everybody for joining today. We're at Stripe today in South San Francisco, so it's very exciting to be here and congrats to Stripe on their new office, which is beautiful, by the way, a huge thanks to the Stripe team who help put this together. So many thanks to Edwin, Tammy, Claire on my side for organizing and of course a huge thanks to Dylan for.
Dylan Field
Joining, thanks for having me here. And this is a beautiful office. Wow.
Elad Gil
Yeah, it's kind of amazing. I think people can see it on the live stream of basically there's sort of these series of steps in like a big sort of atrium style area. So it's a really nice place.
Dylan Field
I heard this is the biggest external event that Stripe has had yet, so pretty cool.
Elad Gil
So first of all, I'll introduce Dylan. He's, as everybody knows, the CEO and co founder of Figma. He started the company at age 20, so he dropped out of Brown and did a Teal Fellowship. And I think he was already working on Figma before the Teal Fellowship. And we're going to talk about a few different topics, but I think one of the topics that we really want to touch upon, given his experiences as well as education. And what does a modern education look like, and what do the university systems look like in addition to talking about the history of Figma and sort of his journey? So, thanks so much for joining today.
Dylan Field
Yeah, let's do it.
Elad Gil
All right, great. And I should mention one other thing before we dive in. We have a celebrity in the audience. Claire Hughes Johnson, the CEO of Stripe, is here somewhere, and she has a book coming out on March 7, which is called Scaling People, and it's all about management and company building. I saw an early preprint of it, and it's fantastic. So hopefully everybody gets to check that out in about a month or so. I was just hoping to start a little bit with your founding story. So you took a reasonably unconventional path in terms of leaving Brown, starting a company. What motivated you to do that? A lot of people don't actually have that courage or conviction to go and do something like that.
Dylan Field
Yeah, I was lucky that it was kind of felt obvious because my co founder, his name is Evan Wallace, was my t at Brown, and he was the most brilliant person I knew. And I had a chance to do some great internships to that point. Hopefully everyone's okay. And Evan was just beyond brilliant. I felt like it was super obvious that I could learn more from Evan than any other context. And even if the company was, like, a complete failure, I thought it would be successful for me because I would learn from Evan.
Elad Gil
How did people react to that? Like, when you told your family and friends and were they supportive? Were they worried about it? Were they concerned?
Dylan Field
Well, it was gradual because I applied for the Thiel Fellowship, and it was like, I think right before New Year's or something like that. And I got the application super last minute. It was half an hour before it was due. My parents thought that it wouldn't actually be done on time and that it was kind of like this joke and that they're like, oh, well, you're not going to get it. Or as I kept going through rounds of interviews, you're like, we're not going to do it right? And then over time, it basically was like, oh, shoot, you might actually do this. And I see north in the audience, never mind. But I thought she was here for a second. There's other people from the Thiel Fellowship class I was in that they met in the interview process because there was, like it went from 40 to 20. And as they met all the people, I think they got a lot more comfortable. But then after we got the fellowship, I called Evan and said, hey, you know, we've got actually funding now. Hundred thousand over two years. Do you want to go do this thing for real? And he's a very reserved guy, and he was quite excited about that.
Elad Gil
Did you consider doing other things like YC at the time? Or is the Thiel Fellowship really the thing that you focused on?
Dylan Field
The TL fellowship is $100,000 for free. There's no dilution at all. And that was really attractive. YC has some dilution. Amazing program otherwise, but I feel like I had somewhat of a network and the TF Fellowship could help with more of network. In retrospect, I do think that YC is actually pretty helpful for Enterprise. I didn't even know what the word enterprise meant at the time, but now I'd probably say, yeah, you should consider YC because it will help you sell B to B and get some initial customers. Whereas I think we had to really work at that. So maybe I should have considered it.
Elad Gil
Yeah, I think at the time both programs are pretty nascent. Right? I don't know what year that was for the Thiel Fellowship. Maybe it was a couple of years in it.
Dylan Field
It was a second year. And why see, you been going since, is it 2008 or something like that? It's four years in for YC. But I remember when I was looking at colleges in the first place, I remember meeting someone who was part of the first YC class and they're like, oh, give me the new Harvard. Just like, don't go to college and go to YC instead. And they're very prescient.
Elad Gil
I think they're pretty accurate. Yeah, because I remember going to early YC demo days and there was like ten angels in the audience or 15 angels in the audience. And they had this whole program where they were trying to teach people how to be angel investors just so they could get more angels to invest in startups because they didn't feel there was enough money to fund people. And so it's interesting to think back to those times when things were actually very scarce in a weird way. What other ideas are you considering besides Figma and why did you choose that? Because at the time, design, even today, there's lots of different players in the market. There's lots of different people doing things like, how did you choose that idea or area?
Dylan Field
Yeah, I think that how many people here are founders? Just out of curiosity. Oh, cool. It's like half the room. And then how many people are planning to be a founder at some point? Okay, a few others. How many people have no intention ever founding a company? Okay, great. Sorry, this will not be as relevant, but I think when you're starting a company, it's really useful to ask the question, why now? And this is like, pretty cliche for startup stuff, so if you've heard of it already, apologies, but I do think it's a really useful framework. And that question of why now? Can be societal. Maybe there's some new cultural trend, perhaps it's regulatory. Some law has been passed or appealed. I like the technological version. And for us we saw drones in 2012 and WebGL as few technologies that were happening where because these technologies were happening, new possibilities were suddenly there. And on the drone side, we didn't get very far. Evan in particular was not that interested in doing hardware. He's like, hardware sucks, run debug cycles are really long and then we focus on WebGL instead. And addition to that, we were excited about competitional photography for a bit, but quickly realized that with photo that ends up leading to a consumer sort of application. And the entire purpose of WebGL was to be in the browser. But we're like, why would you do anything in photo editing if you're not on the phone? And so we felt like we were kind of building the wrong place and then eventually sort of shifted our attention to design, which I had been a design internet flipboard and that helped kind of help me realize what would be possible there.
Elad Gil
So you basically saw WebGL and you said this opens up new ways to interact with websites and make them richer in terms of collaboration, interactivity and things like that. Was there anything you would do differently now, given that looking back on all the success you've had and everything else in terms of those early moments in the White House statement? Or do you think it was pretty accurate in terms of the direction you all were heading in?
Dylan Field
I think the white now was one thing we got really right. The thing that maybe was harder was we had no idea how long it would take and it ended up taking quite a long time. So I think we believed the time that it would take maybe a year or two, ended up taking at least double that time to really build the first product. Yeah, and I think also we were worried about using the funding that we had attracted. I think it's natural to be conservative, especially in times like these. And I think that is sort of right. But as soon as you have that notion or some sense there's product market pull, you kind of do have to hit the gas too, which is scary. But I think if we had hired faster and been more willing to build a team quickly, it would have been very helpful and accelerated from the space even further.
Elad Gil
What was the moment when you felt that you believed that you had product market fit?
Dylan Field
I think again, it kind of goes that point of it's really easy to just deny that you have product market fit. I think I didn't admit it to ourselves until literally we had a customer, Microsoft, that told us, hey, you have to start charging for this thing, otherwise Rock Miller spread it internally and we really want to spread it internally. I was like, we might have product market fit. In reality we'd had it for like a year and I wish that I had recognized that sooner, because I think I would have acted differently. But I think as soon as you start hearing customers, just there's a point when the editor was so slow that if you typed text, it takes took forever to type the text. We didn't have multiplayer editing yet there was so much that wasn't there. And a potential customer wrote us a twelve page document saying, here are all the things I want you to go build. And I think in retrospect, that was like a moment of product market fit, or at least product market poll, where, okay, there's a market there. They're trying to get the product out of us, and it's about how fast can we go do it? And I think now I'd recognize that, but before I didn't.
Elad Gil
Yeah, I think that's a really key transition for many companies in terms of pre and post product market fit, and people who've never experienced it think that they have it. Even though every sale is a grind and every movement is a grind, and getting people to pay attention is really, really hard, and that's always true. But I think once it starts working, every customer shows up asking for stuff, or you get all this pull, and I think you feel it. And I think the second time you see it, you're like, oh yeah, of course it's kind of happening. But I think it's really hard to learn the first time around. Are there other things that you have felt were like, hard things to pick up or hard things to learn?
Dylan Field
Management. Apparently Claire's book is coming out soon, so you all should read it if you haven't been a manager before. I had never managed anyone before. Figma was an intern, so I didn't know anything. I was like, I think you're supposed to do one on one. So I wasted that. Didn't really know what to talk about during them. But yeah, it was tough, and I think it was especially tough as we scaled, and I had some personal challenges going on. My dad was was dying of cancer at the time, and it was it was like the emotional burden of that, plus, you know, getting to the point where you've got ten to twelve reports, that was a really hard moment for the company. And bringing our first manager was very catalytic because it meant that I could go learn from him, and I was still learning from him. Today, I consider Show, our first manager and engineering leader, to be a really great mentor of mine. And I think it's one thing that's kind of cool is you can recruit your own mentors to the company.
Elad Gil
Yeah, I know that Bill Gates was notorious for doing that, where he'd hire a COO, and then every 18 to 36 months, he'd replace that person as the company would scale, and then he'd learn off of that new person and then replace them with the next person. And so to your point, he almost had this like, staggered COO chain that people left behind, I guess in this.
Dylan Field
Case, show is still here like seven years later.
Elad Gil
Maybe you should reconsider the schro thing, but I think we could talk about a few opportunities you mentioned. Why now statements and things that are in transition or interesting areas. Are there specific areas you think are most interesting right now in terms of opportunities? Is it climate, is it biotech? Is it Ed tech? Is it other things?
Dylan Field
I think there's so much interesting. I have a hard time directing people to one thing because I think that the nature of entrepreneurship is that I hope you all will tell me afterwards what's really cool. And probably everybody here has a different point of view on that. I do think people move in herds a lot. And so right now everyone's excited about AI, for example, and that's great. There's going to be some awesome stuff that comes out of that. There's also going to be other things that come out that are other places and probably some of the really big companies will have some sprinkles of AI but are actually in a completely different realm entirely. And if you start with AI, you're not going to find them, I think just try to have that independent thought. Look at different areas that you think are interesting. One other thing I'll say, since a lot of people here are entrepreneurs, is that there are actually a lot of good ideas out there. It's kind of the weird part, especially if you're searching for one, it feels like it's not the case, but there's so many different markets that are underserved and I think that the more important thing actually is to find something that you are personally passionate about because basically any good company takes a long time to build. And if you are, let's say, three to four years in on an idea that you hate, you're just going to burn out and you're going to quit. Or maybe you'll have like a zombie company and you'll be able to attract some customers and some revenue, but it won't feel good and you'll be like hating life. And I've seen this with a few friends, it's real. And I would just say don't just go for an idea because it's kind of working. Go for an idea that you really care about because even if it doesn't work, you'll still learn from it and you'll still have one.
Elad Gil
Yeah, I think we're also moving back into a period where there won't be capital to keep things going forever. And so you really have to do something if you care about it in some sense, or at least you're desperate for it to exist. So you were very early to various areas of crypto and one of the things you became known for was being an NFT collector. Can you tell us more about how you got into NFTs and how you view the market now and how you think about the art that is involved.
Dylan Field
Sure, it's funny because I thought I was late to crypto, but now apparently I'm early, so I'll take it. I was really interested in cryptography in high school and I had put a talk out somewhere on hash functions and I started getting these emails in like 2009 from these weird people talking about this bitcoin thing and it was like crazy internet people with their internet money, magical money, like weird stuff, just dismissed it all. And then I joined the teal fellowship. And in the Teal Fellowship a lot of people were very excited about Bitcoin very early on and it was during one of the early price bubbles, I think, 2013, and kind of went up to $1,000 and crashed. And like, it serves them right. They shouldn't have wasted their money on that. But eventually kind of with Ethereum started getting more interested and was like, this is really cool, technically. My wife Elena started gained very interested in the events around Ethereum and ultimately started a company called Iron Fish. And we started talking sort of winter 2017 2018 about cryptoclexibles. And I was obsessed with crypto punk at the time. We didn't really have a word NFT yet. We called them crypto collectibles. But I think this idea that there could be items that were digital fascinated me. Partially because I was a kid who like Pokemon cards and stuff, but also partially because I really like Neopets. Anyone played Neopets out here? There's several of us. And Neopets was like a really cool virtual pets website that had flash games. But the more important part was it had an entire virtual economy. And so I think I had this mental model from having played Neopads of what that would look like. And it literally felt the exact same, like as Ethereum and FTEs took off. But yeah, I think that it's kind of a bummer because as an Ft used to take off, a lot of scammers came in as money came into it, the system attracted really bad behavior as well. And so I think that it's it's. I definitely have like a more formal definition of collectible markets now. An art is collectible, so I'm not making distinction of like, it's all collectibles. I think there is some art, but at the same time I think you'd be cautious of any market where as money comes into the market, prices go up, and as it goes out, prices go down, which scrubs a lot of marketplaces. But you do want something of fundamental value. And I think that you can argue that crypto with hash power and whatnot has some fundamental value trading activity, but collectibles, it's a little bit harder. And so I think you have to buy things if you're going to persist in the market. You have to buy things that you're going to want to keep forever. Basically, I've only sold like two NFDS my life.
Elad Gil
What do you think are other interesting areas of crypto right now are big unsolved problems?
Dylan Field
I think privacy is really important. My wife has worked on this, so I'm a little biased. I don't speak for her, but I think that it's a big security risk for people to hold crypto right now, unfortunately. And it's important that we get to a place where crypto is a bit more like actual physical cash in that I can be able to give you crypto. And that's not something that's going to be traced at the same time. You want to do that in a compliant way. You want to make sure that North Korea is not laundering a billion dollars through crypto. And so finding the sort of intersection of that I think is a really interesting and important research problem. But I do think that we need to find more privacy. Scalability is really starting to take off, which is awesome to see. I remember in the early days of Aetherium, it was like, what will make Aetherium work? And we're talking about stability and scalability. It's like both those check marks might be there. I think the third thing that's needed right now desperately is regulation. And I didn't expect to be talking about how we need regulation for crypto, especially given that crypto was such a libertarian idea. But I think that actually the lack of regulation right now is blocking crypto. And it's super important that the United States in particular is more crisp about what they expect from crypto companies. If we don't do that, we're going to lose the market and it's all going to go overseas. And there's such an opportunity for the United States to be like the home of crypto right now. So I really hope that the US. Regulators get on that.
Elad Gil
I guess another big trend that, to your point, a lot of people are looking at right now is AI and Generative AI and other areas of AI. How are you thinking about it outside of Figma in terms of the big changes that are coming due to this new technology?
Dylan Field
So much. And inside of Figma too. Like Ankur is here and he's exploring Ankurs over there in the corner. We're exploring a lot around what it can mean for Figma and for designers and how can we make it so that designers are able to collaborate with AI better. But I think that outside of Figma there's basically every industry probably will be touched by this. And I think it's super interesting the pace at which this is happening. Gosh. Even over the last three months, the number of papers that are coming out in different new fields using some of these models and ideas is staggering. And I just think it's a completely new tooling method. And even if we just pause it at the current technology we're at today, which obviously is not the case. That's already world changing for pretty much every single segment of every market.
Elad Gil
Are you somebody who views AI as like tooling or something that will eventually lead to AGI or both?
Dylan Field
Well, I definitely think it could be both. I think AGI is difficult to define, so let's just go with like I think that AI will make fundamental research contributions. For example, like, I think people are always checking to give like a prediction. So I'll put one out there. I think, like, by 2030, or at least 2033, there will be an AI co author of a paper for a pure math research journal. And if it's not coauthor, there should have been a chaotic coauthor in terms of it's not getting enough credit, basically. So where is the difference between tooling and AGI? Start and end. Like, if you talk to a chat bot, is that a tool? Or if it has sentience or some ability to remember some state when it become AGI? I think these are really difficult questions to answer, but I think that I was just saying to someone this the other day, I think maybe it's bology. And he was saying, if there's a multiplayer AI problem, how do you make it so that you're able to convince people in a multiplayer way that if there's many agents and many humans, which ones are the AIS and which ones are the humans? And if the AIS can fool the humans and make them think they're humans, that's kind of like the new version of the territory. Test that level. Like, is that AGI? I don't know.
Elad Gil
That's already happened too. So if you look at Cicero, which Facebook trained to play Diplomacy, which is a game where you have a bunch of people interacting, in this case over text, you had a bot that was basically convincing people that it was a person and based on that, it was manipulating them in the game. And it wasn't winning too. Yeah, and it was winning. And so a lot of people view that as kind of the last frontier on the gaming side of AI based developments.
Dylan Field
Yeah, I really want SIV but with that tech. So if anyone's looking for an idea that's one, I will be your customer and Figma might really be harmed by it. But.
Elad Gil
On a related question, since you care a lot about education, and we thought a lot about it, how do you think AI will impact education? I mean, the canonical or the really early book on it was the Diamond Age and the young girls of Illustrate Primer. And there's been a lot written, at least in Sci-fi, around how AI will help people learn at their own pace and sort of train humanity at scale. What are your views on the impact it'll have, when it will have it, how it will have it, how that will change things?
SPEAKER C
Diamond age is amazing. So if you haven't read it yet? Definitely check it out. It's one of those books where it's like the early chapters. You turn a page and every new page has some like, crazy invention you've never heard of before or thought of, and it's just wild. But I think that the AI tutors will certainly be a thing. I think AI therapist will also be a thing. By the way, has another idea that I want someone to build, but make it local, not cloud based, please. Otherwise, make everything cloud based, not the therapist. But I think that AI tutors is a really exciting idea. It's really fascinating right now to read some of the college newspapers out there. They're all super scared of Chat CBT. What does this mean? Is everyone going to cheat? And it's like, no, I think this could help people learn. Sure, they could put their work into this and have them generate a paper, but if they're doing that, like, it's not a bigger issue. They could already like, hires them online to go write a paper. Right?
Elad Gil
Yeah. The state of New York, by the way, banned the use of Chat GPT in its schools, which means every person in high school now uses it instantly, overnight. So it's like the perfect marketing message for OpenAI.
Dylan Field
But yeah, I think that.
Elad Gil
Chat GPT.
Dylan Field
Is obviously an early example. I think there's going to be much better models in the future that hopefully will not just hallucinate information, they'll be more accurate and they'll remember more about you. They'll have be able to lots of things that will be different, but I think it can be a very useful tool. It's like a professor that you can go to office hours 40 time.
Elad Gil
Yeah, it seems like it's a very natural add on to a lot of the online courses that's emerging now from both Stanford, MIT, but also things like Khan Academy or others. And so I hope that sometime this year we'll start to see some interesting things there. In terms of AI based tutor, do you think that in certain parts of the world it'll eventually just subsume the education system, or do you think it's a compliment forever or ten years from now? To your point on, perhaps we have AIS that are smart enough to actually contribute to high level mathematics, and I actually think that could be sooner. I know two companies working on that, for example, except for the after, I think.
Dylan Field
Yeah, looking ahead, first of all, what is education system? I think the education system is a lot of things packaged into one and it's kind of a bundle right now. So if you're going to a university in physical meet space, it's definitely a sort of meeting system. Right. Nothing against that. I met Evan, my co founder in university. Right. Not to be sexual, I think it's obviously a grandchildren system. There's the whole learning thing too. But I think the physical community part matters quite. A bit. I think it's also a social club. You get into this university and then you're kind of like part of the social club for life. They try to involve you in alumni stuff and I think that there's a book, The Case Against Education which if you're interested in this topic is worth reading, kind of unpacks us more. But one of the things that it says on the topic of degrees is if you finish call it seven semesters out of eight you should have the same effective market value in the labor market as you finish eight but you don't. And so I think it's also signaling your agreeableness, your conscientiousness and how willing are you going to go with the program? It is also a training ground for academia right? It's kind of a funnel most people drop off but some of them make it through to a master's or PhD and then become professors and kind of join the cult, right? I don't say a cult in a pejorative way. I say it in just recognizing that it has its own values, it has its own social mores and whatnot and culture and point of view on a lot of different issues. So, yeah, I think that as you have AI come to be more, the credentialing part of that all gets messed up and sort of the funnel and dacamia probably gets messed up and the social club part probably increases in value, but the maybe credentialing part decreases in value. And I think it will start to make people question, okay, what was the crucial good for in the first place? So I think it's kind of interesting.
Elad Gil
Yeah, it seems like media kind of went through something similar, actually, where the internet was a big disruptive force for it. And really it meant that certain big brands survived. The New York Times, Washington Post, et cetera. And sort of the midtier or the mid tier news outlets were the ones that really got impacted in terms of business model and traffic and everything else. And so do you think the same thing happens in the university system where value continues to aggregate to the big brands, or do you think those brands are also subsumed by this change?
Dylan Field
That's my suspicion. I really hope that we get to the world where there are universities out there that you can just completely go to online. They're better than YouTube. In terms of YouTube, I think it's hard for me to learn on YouTube for the most part. I can go through a few videos but the discipline of a course structure that I'm signing up for I'm getting good feedback all the time. I can talk to somebody about questions as they arise. I think that YouTube is kind of lacking there but also doesn't require the physical presence of universities. So you can be wherever you need to be and still work towards learning a set of material. I think we can get there and you could have a scalable online system around that. There's kind of like a cartel around the credentialing of universities in the first place. But assuming you sort of sort through that in the United States or perhaps it's abroad, then you have to get to the point where it's like recognizing market value and that a lawyer's, I guess is fine because I think that kind of like a social reset that needs to happen there. And I think you get a lot of the lower tier universities wiped out by that, which will be savage because I think a lot of them are contained, some very good teachers, but probably not a lot of good ton of research is happening in those places. And perhaps you have think tanks and whatnot spring up to take the place for the researchers. And then from there, the ones that are left are like you described it's, these ones that have had a lot more reputation.
Elad Gil
And do you think those just become like primary for credentialing and then a little bit of research, but the rest gets disaggregated across sort of the middle tier, it sounds like.
Dylan Field
Yeah, I think that something like that. But there's also the social club aspect, and I think that it was a real thing and it's not a bad thing.
Elad Gil
So when you left Brown, what was your social club? Was it other founders? Was the teal followers. Was it something else?
Dylan Field
Basically also the people I work with, the Flipboard, there's like Stanford kids nearby for us, he was definitely part of it. I was like, Yo, you're working on cool stuff. Let's take out.
Elad Gil
We're also sitting there in the audience.
Dylan Field
Yeah, I saw him, so I got excited. I think the biggest thing, in addition to money the Tail Fellowship offered, was community. And I think a learning community, whether it's in the physical sense of university or it's Silicon Valley, has been great, that historically, maybe it's coming back. I hopefully have a lot of silicon, silicon Valleys around the world that you can move to that are sort of all these different hubs around the world that are close to you and have that infrastructure.
Elad Gil
How would you encourage people to find community today? So say that you're either a teenager and you're either going to college or not, but you're thinking about how do I plug into people who are like me? How would you approach that? And then relatedly, if you were to move to a specific geography, where would you go and why and how would you find your tribe?
Dylan Field
First of all, I think that a lot of people are limited by geography. And so I would say that given that if you're just trying to capture people virtually, don't ignore the power of a cold email. It's amazing how many people will respond to a cold email when you write it, especially if it's well written and has like a clear point of view or clear question. If you're just like, hey, let's hang out for a half hour, it'll be harder to get their attention. But if you have a very specific question, people do reply. And so I think that you can start to build relationships there. Finding out where the community lives online is really important. In the past, I think that it was Twitter. I think it's sort of fading at this point. And a lot of communities are finding their own niches that are outside Twitter. I worry a lot of them are going private now and it's going to be less accessible for people, probably better for the community and their health and probably not as many play wars and stuff, but harder to break into. But I think find out where it is, break into that community online and hang out and just learn the norms, learn the language and then start to find out, be helpful to people.
Elad Gil
I found that just doing something useful for a community inserts you into it almost instantly. And so it's like if you see an open source project and you contribute in a small way or you just help organize something, often that really helps. How do you think about Credentialing? Like, who's going to actually provide the credentials of the future besides the universities then? And it feels like there's different types of credentials. Like you mentioned, YC is almost like the new Harvard or something. So that's like a business Credential or a startup credential. Are there different types of credentials in your mind and do you know who will give them out?
Dylan Field
I don't know exactly where we end up there. I hope that people put less sort of weight on credentials over time. I think that that's a real way to create equity is to put less weight on credentials. But time will tell. But I think that the first thing that you all can do if you're founders is to not require credentials for your company.
Elad Gil
And I guess in the context of the Thiel Fellowship, could you describe a little bit more about your experiences there, what you thought you got out of it, and then maybe we can follow up with some questions around. Are there other programs that feel similar in terms of what they do?
Dylan Field
Yeah, the Thiel fellowship is awesome. I haven't found similar programs yet that kind of like find the world's most ambitious young people. I think there's something to that sort of gauntlet of dropping out that works the Thiel Fellowship. And it's interesting, I've been part of sort of selecting new classes for a while too, and.
Elad Gil
We have a lot.
Dylan Field
Of applicants, but when you kind of narrow it all the way down, it's actually sometimes hard to fill a class. And there's very few people that are both their risk on, they're willing to take that risk. They don't need to have the Credential right away and also have an idea right then, and they have the permission that they've granted self permission to do it. I think so many people just can't get in their heads that you have permission to go do whatever you want to do, and as soon as you got to have that unlock, it's so powerful. But I think that's another thing that we have to find a way to give people en masse, and the more people that can have that, the better. So, yeah, I feel like there's other.
Elad Gil
Programs that help identify at least extremely smart and driven people around the world. So, for example, the IIT University system in India, I think is a great example of a system where anybody can take a standardized test, and then a subset of people get in, and it's extremely selective. And so you know that the median person in there is quite exceptional in all sorts of ways. And so sometimes I wonder, what are other ways at scale to identify and nurture the people who can really help drive the future in certain ways?
Dylan Field
Yeah, I remember when I was applying to Brown or got into Brown, and I started to talk with someone who was coming from an IIT prep environment, and he was also into Brown. He sent me the questions that they were reviewing, and I was like, I can't answer any of these. I felt really dumb.
Elad Gil
Yeah, you also get local recognition. So a friend of mine was a gold medalist at IIT and the town. He did a literal parade with him. It was very strong recognition. He was in a lot of the papers. And so it's interesting to think about the societal accuse you can give to actually reward people who can be exceptional over time. What do you think, in general, about things like, there's a lot of debate societally around standardized testing or merit based testing, and does this work or not? Do you have any opinions on that?
Dylan Field
I have a lot of opinions. I probably diverge a bit from Silicon Valley consensus here. I think maybe the understated Silicon Valley consensus that doesn't get out there as much as IQ is real and standardized testing is squarely with it. Besides of the straw man that I'm arguing against, I think that actually, you can probably, if you have access to tutoring and you have access to resources, you can improve your score, like, a lot more than people think on Sat. So I actually am more aligned with some of the equity arguments that universities make there than I think a lot of folks are. But at the same time, I do think that just having no way to differentiate yourself other than grades or extra coolers that are kind of, like, easy to forge is not quite the right method either. So, yeah, it's a pretty hard problem. I don't know how to solve that.
Elad Gil
I guess the last sort of prepared question I have, and then we go to a mix of questions that people ask on both Dory, as well as the forum, as well as we'll go to a few live questions in the audience. We'll kind of alternate is just around longer term life goals. So you've had an amazing run, right? I think you're a 30, 31.
Dylan Field
Still running
Elad Gil
Yeah. You're still running? Yeah. I don't mean like anything's over. I'm just saying you've accomplished a lot, I should say, by as an aside, by the way, and all this topic of dropping out of school and things like that, I feel like people who have dropped out of school successfully and there's lots of people who've dropped out of school unsuccessfully, right? But people who dropped out of school successfully get another, especially if they start a company, they get like an extra eight years or something to their time in tech, because you lose a couple of years in terms of schooling, and then you lose a couple of years in terms of your first job. And so you gain like an extra generation in the technology ecosystem, which is a long time, like six or eight years ago. I can't even think back to what that was.
Dylan Field
Right?
Elad Gil
That was like Uber was kind of really ramping on demand. Everything yeah, on demand, everything was happening.
Dylan Field
You can get your laundry on demand, you can get your groceries on demand, car in demand, you can walk your dog in demand. And also besides by VC. Thank you. Wish those days were bad.
Elad Gil
So it was a very different era. And so you see like, an extra generation, and you have all this extra time. And I sometimes wish I could go back in time and drop out myself because I did a PhD. So I'm even worse, I stuck around extra. I actually took some night classes at Stanford and dropped out just so I could say as a Stanford drop out with I hope that that will increase my allure.
Dylan Field
I'm actually going back to school and taking a math class right now.
Elad Gil
Okay.
Dylan Field
So it goes down to that.
Elad Gil
School is good. So my main question that was a long under way of asking, when I look at people who've had great success and yet are still running, they often start to do really interesting other things. So, for example, Patrick and John Collos and the founders of Stripe have set up this institute called Arc alongside other folks on the biology side. Silvana Koneman and a few other folks are driving it as well. In concert with them, or Brian Armstrong started a longevity company that he's involved with. Or Zuck has CZI. And so I'm just sort of curious, like, how you think about other areas of science or technology or the future that you kind of want to help contribute to over time.
Dylan Field
I mean, three examples you gave are like, bio and healthcare. So I guess that's the theme. But I think first of all, I'm super just focused on Figma right now and there's so much we can do still, and I think it's such a big leverage point and so I feel very grateful to be working on that and also to work with an amazing team that we have. But yeah, I think areas that are maybe underserved that are not exactly capitalist, one is data visualization. I think that there's different media outlets that try to do data visualization right now, but I think that there's probably an opportunity to bring people together to data visualization more and that's something that'd be cool to explore someday, but I don't feel like I have to do that urgently. I feel more urgent about all the Sigma things.
Elad Gil
Okay, great. Well, I was hoping I could open up to questions the audience and maybe alternate between a question from the audience and then a question that the audience asked a bit more discreetly. So I don't know if anybody wants to go first or I can kick off a question while we're please, I don't, sorry. Just wait for the microphone, please.
Audience question:
Okay, perfect. I guess when you were going through your journey of trying to get to the point of founding Figma, you mentioned the why now is important and what's going on in the world, but then also it being of meaningful substance so that way you don't burn out and kind of continue through it. I find this phase to be pretty.
Dylan Field
Illegible for most people.
Audience question:
It's really hard to be able to kind of go from one kind of idea to the next and figure out ultimately where that intersection lies. You mentioned starting off with drones and then got yourself to Figma, but what was that journey of life like? More concretely and how you kind of found the thing that you ultimately loved to do, but at the same time created real value for people?
Dylan Field
Yeah, I think that we didn't consider ideas that we were not interested in working on, so that was a good prior. And for Evan, he didn't want to work on drones. He was like, I already built drones, I don't want to build more drones. And he was especially didn't want to go into defense, which we thought was a potential place that you might get pulled into. For WebGL, we were varied or seen all sorts of graphics tools, but the first one we actually built was a scene converter. So basically you could take an image, annotate it, and it would transform into a 3D scene and you could then kind of place furniture or try to move objects around. It was pretty neat for 2012 in all in the browser. And at the same time we're like, what would we use this for? And maybe now you'd be like, Metaverse. But at the time it felt like it was kind of like maybe you could make like a better Craigslist housing section or something that just sounded not interesting, so we didn't go in that. And then we built, like, a face swap app. And it's kind of like a toy, really fun to use. I would show my friends and investors we met with, oh, here's your face. It swapped. And that didn't exist in an easy way then. I think Snapchat kind of did it later, but it was a few years later. But it was a one off. And while it was fun to use, fun to make, it didn't work systematically with everything else. And I think that kind of as we iterated through different things we built, and we really did explore through building. One thing that we did was photo editing, and we built in the browser. It was very consumer. It wasn't very professional, but I think had some interesting ideas in it. And it was this thing where after we built a lot of it, we took a step back and we looked at the trends and probably should have started there, but it was like, okay, what's the average megapixels per iPhone? It's just going up, concave up, and then, what are the number of digital cameras sold per year? And it's, like, concave down. And it's like, this is the same trend. Like, the best camera is the one you have in your pocket, which is the old photographer adage. And so, okay, maybe this is not the thing we should go into. And we scrapped that and started talking to all these designers and realized that, wait, fireworks was just killed off, and there's a big hole in the market for product design. We didn't have the word product design. We didn't know why design was evolving and growing so much. But I think what came back it was that the cloud was taking off, developer tooling was getting better, and there's less costs going to development, and so more costs were going to design. That's where you differentiate your product. And so more resources are getting pulled into design. And from 2012, when we started, IBM had, like, one designer to every 72 engineers. Five years later, it was one to eight. And so there's this massive growth that we're starting to see the very earliest hint of, and we just kind of charged debt and started working on that. I think once we started on that journey, it just kind of like, there's always more to do. And we kept going for it. And so even then, in the early days, it felt like we had that poll. I don't know if that helps, but it's a more expanded version.
Audience question:
Yeah, it definitely does. And would you find that, I guess when you got into it and you started going down this path, was it then that you kind of started saying, like, yeah, this is something that I enjoy, and this is something that I can, I guess, look forward to the future through this experience. This is something that I would want to say dedicate the next ten years to I've heard some people kind of try to figure this out beforehand or some way or another, but was that kind of like what you ended up finding out?
Dylan Field
I think we knew like days into working on any project, like whether we wanted to work on it or not. So example where we didn't feel that way at a moment where I tried to convince Evan to build a meme generator and we built it over the course of three days because memorators are not that hard to build. And this was maybe fall 2012, and it was like, memes are going to be huge on the internet and meme generator websites are going to have a lot of traffic. And it's like, I wasn't wrong, but we were a week into it and I'm kind of going, and fuck, I dropped out for this. And Evan's going, I think I'm going to quit if we keep working on this. And it was very obvious right away that was not something we wanted to work on.
Elad Gil
It's definitely gone both ways. Like, I've seen a lot of people start companies and the momentum of the company keeps them excited versus the specific product. And I think different people are motivated by different things. I'll go to a quick question that was input, and then we can go to another question from the audience. So this is something somebody input in a dory. Dylan has said many times that the Brett Victor talk inventing on principle had a big impact on him and was the reason why he started Figma. The most important part of the talk being that if you can make a shorter loop between inputs and outputs in a creative setting, it can help unlock and improve the creative process. I'm curious what Dylan thinks of how everything that's happening with generative AI will have an impact on creativity and the notion of further reducing the barriers to creativity by creating a closer relationship between inputs and outputs.
Dylan Field
It's pretty long, so there's a lot to that question. If you rush it out, feel free to meet me later. I'm intrigued. I think it's super cool to think about generative AI in that sense of how do you get to results faster? But also maybe the missing factor that people are not paying much attention to yet is BCI. And I think probably because BCI is not invasive, is not super useful. Yet.
Elad Gil
By BCI you mean brain computer interface?
Dylan Field
Exactly. But I think as we get sort of more signals and more degrees of freedom from BCI over time, you could imagine a great feedback loop going where you're able to kind of nudge a model in different ways and maybe that's an input that's addition to a prompt or something like that. I think it'd be really fun to explore. Imagine being like in a device and you have this real time feedback loop going. I think that would really get to some of the ideas that practice is mentioning, although I'd be curious what he would say about that. He might not like it.
Elad Gil
We'll take another question from the audience, maybe up there in the corner.
Audience question
What is the youngest viable age for Thiel Fellow, in your opinion, and why?
Dylan Field
Oh, man. I think we've interviewed people that are quite young. Laura, I think she was 16 or 17 when she had the fellowship, and she's gone on. She went basically, like, went out and, you know, studied for maybe a year while trying to raise money. And then she pulled it off and she raised a first fund. It's had historic returns, and she's raised fallen funds as well. And it's pretty incredible what she did. Speaking of generations, meaning for like, a biotech fund, that's what, probably three generations it would take you to get to that point. And so she's kind of, like, did a speed run and did 1716. So, yeah, I think if you have rigorous training, which Laura did, then you could do it that young. 1617. I think most people don't have that training that young. She had already been a few years in MIT. She had been home schooled. She worked at a bio lab with Cynthia Kenyan, I think. And so I think that you probably want to start even earlier than that and figure out, okay, what are the things that the life experiences I need and the sort of academic training I need in order to get to the point where I could start something that young and then we can separately debate the trade offs that you're making with your life of starting that young. But you asked the questions, so I'm trying to answer it.
Elad Gil
Another question on Dory was Figma was highly successful at moving design into the browser, while some other industry productivity apps like music, mechanical engineering, et cetera, mostly native. Do you expect that to change and what's blocking the switch?
Dylan Field
I think that basically all software will be browser based and collaborative. So, yeah, I sympathizes there. If you're building something cool, let me know.
Elad Gil
What do you think slowed it down?
Dylan Field
I think it's hard, and I think some of the stuff either has network effects or switching costs. I think it's best when you can find things that are not just going to be you're going to put them in the browser, you're going to make them collaborative. That's it. You have some other things that you're also doing, and if you can find additional differentiates on top of that, that's when I think it really shines. Another question also, one more thought. Is collaborative workflows really help as the.
Elad Gil
Collaboration part, maybe up there in the far back on the stairs?
Audience question:
You mentioned IIT students earlier, and I was curious what you think the difference. Between students coming out of IIT and Stanford is, and if there is a gap and what drives it if there is a gap?
Dylan Field
Well, Elad actually mentioned IIT students. So can I give him that question?
Elad Gil
I don't have a good answer to that. I mean, I haven't tried to assess some difference between Stanford and IIT. I think in both cases you have really smart people who have been selected across different criteria to attend. And I think it really depends on the university in terms of what those criteria are. IIT's traditionally just been like a giant test, effectively. Right? And while Stanford and I think a lot of the different sort of top universities in the US have more mixed criteria, and that criteria may include things like legacy, right? Did somebody's parents go there or grandparents go there? And some of those systems seem a little bit odd to me in terms of why is it a hereditary thing that you get to keep going to a certain school or something? If you think about it, that's a little bit odd. I've never done the full survey or the comparison or whatever. I do think that you can compare within US based universities and ask why are so many startup founders out of Stanford but not out of X other top university? And part of that is probably like a geolocation issue. It may be other things. And also students, I think, selfselect into certain pools based on what those pools lead into, if they're very motivated to be in that pool. And so I think one of the interesting things to think about is where do all the little clusters of the best people in a given field come from and why do they all seem to come from the same places? Why do so many great finance people come from Penn and Wharton while so many great founders come out of Stanford or whatever it may be? And so I think that's kind of different from what you're asking, but I think an interesting question. Cool. Maybe we can take a question right there.
Audience question
Hey Dylan, thanks for coming and thanks Elad and Cynthia for hosting the event. I had a question around product. So you mentioned that once you get product market fit, you inevitably get a lot of product feedback and feature requests. So I was wondering what's your framework to sort of separate the noise from the signal for figuring out what to build and what to take seriously and what to just ignore?
Dylan Field
I'm happy to give a general answer, although obviously there's a bit of an art to it and the specificity matters quite a bit, and also the type of product you're building matters. So let's say you're doing something in consumer, you probably want to figure out how to make it as simple as possible. And so just like doing everything that people came up with is probably a bad idea, even if you can. But in the context of Figma, where we're building something that there is more of like a particular target. User designer. And yes, there's other people that use it around the designer, and so we want to keep it not super complex, but the same time we have that person in mind, the obvious one is like, effort versus impact. And so you can kind of like, plot out Xaxis'effort Yaxis impact. What are the different features you can build? Obviously, if you find something like, super low effort, super high impact, like, probably go do it. And then at the same time, though, I think you have to have your sort of long term product framework in mind and think about how the roadmap will evolve over the next few years, how you imagine things changing, how you're going to keep things simple. One model that I love a lot is like, keep the simple things simple, but make the complex things possible. And I think that the more you can do that, the better your product will be and the more will be loved. I think that there's some things where no one will ask for them, but they're really important. So, for example, multiplayer for Figma was one of those we had maybe like one person or two people asked for it out of like hundreds we had talked to, because most people weren't working at the same computer at the same time. I had done my internship at Flipboard, and it helped me have a sense that it could be important. Evan and I had both done a lot of playing around with Google Wave, which was a thing at some point for a brief moment, but I think we've both had this sort of conviction around collaboration, multiplayer editing. But most designers, we asked, hey, do you want to do this activity with the browser in real time? And they're like, no, I have no interest in that at all. But nevertheless, we started building. Figma realized, okay, if it's last, edit wins. And we're both in the tab at the same time, and you make an edit, and my thing reloads, and I'm making edit your thing reloads, it just sucks. And so clearly when you do this thing and we went all in on it and took like nine months to go build. And so I think that when you kind of have those insights, even if no one's asking for them, you have to prioritize them sometimes. And then I'd be remiss if I didn't mention tech debt. If you're not constantly addressing tech debt, I think you're going to hurt later. At the same time, if you address tech debt so much that you're not building, you basically have a dead product. And so that doesn't work either. To find the right balance between all.
Elad Gil
These things, I'll do one last question from here, and then we'll keep the audience from here on out. What is an experience where the company was at its highest risk, and how did you overcome it and what did you learn from it?
Dylan Field
It was basically what I mentioned earlier, where maybe twelve people. I was going through a lot of family stuff with my dad, and at some point folks took me aside, and they were kind enough to not invite the newer hires in the room. But it was like, you need two thirds of the team, if not more. Like maybe think nine or people or so at that point. And they said, hey, we think you need some help. And that was a pretty intense moment. I took a few days and was away from the office, but we ultimately did hire our director of engineering then. Now he's a VP product at Figma. And I also just took a moment to reset my relationships. And so many people who were in that room end up leaving. Some of them stayed at the company, but I think it was also a bit of a cultural reset moment, not just for me, but for the greater team as we went up to launch, because we weren't launched it either. It was like we had done so much work and had been going for so long and have not launched. I think people were really frustrated, and rightfully so. It's hard. I think one thing I'll just leave everybody with, if you're founders and you're working and going through challenges like this, don't feel shame over them. Talk to other people about them, and you'll be surprised at the amount of help they can give you. I think that peer groups and people that you can chat with are super important. And it turns out that there's all these challenges that are out there that people have been through before, and almost nothing is unique to your own situation, even though it seems like it is at the time. And so just highly encourage that question.
Elad Gil
Right there in the middle, if it's possible to get to that person. Okay.
Audience question
Thank you. Dylan, when you were speaking about the Thiel Fellowship, about education, you mentioned this notion of giving yourself the permission to do anything, to know that you can do anything. And I think you alluded to notions of, like, disagreeableness nonconformity as important traits for being a Teal fellow, being a founder. Do you think those traits are kind of are they nature or nurture? Can they be developed? And for yourself, how did you develop those traits or discover that you had them in capacities above the average person?
Dylan Field
That's a really interesting question. I would say that disagreeableness. I would unpack that bit more because I think that you can be agreeable and be a founder. I think I'm a pretty agreeable person. I don't know. What do you think?
Elad Gil
Sure.
Dylan Field
I'll just survey my team later. But no, I think it could be agreeable. You can have that, pleasergen. And also still go out and do stuff for me, like any sales lead company, for example. Most salespeople like to make other people happy. Otherwise they wouldn't really enjoy their job unless it's more of a competitive thing. They want to win, swing over on them and then that happens. But I think that actually you can be agreeable. I think on the nonconformist part, you have to have an insight that's nonconformist doesn't mean you have to be like nonconformist in every single way in your life. See, I wouldn't say it's nature, but instead I would say it's more about like train your brain to think in these ways. And then if you are a very agreeable person, you still have to be direct with your feedback to people. Otherwise you're going to have a terrible company culture. And so you have to get to the point where you're willing to have those direct conversations and be really clear with your team about like, here's where we're going here's what if something needs to change? Here's what needs to change in order to make sure that everyone's going the same way? What would you add or would you disagree or agree?
Elad Gil
I think ultimately it depends on how you define disagreeable. And it's funny, I was on a long text thread with a group of people about this a few days ago, literally this topic of disagreeableness and what does it really mean? And there's disagreeable and you pull that into your interactions with others and then you're kind of a jerk. And there's disagreeable in terms of thinking for yourself, thinking bottom up, making your own choices, doing unpopular things. And that's a different form of disagreeableness. And some people have both and some people just have one of those in either direction, right? And so I think the important thing is being willing to make your own decisions. And I think part of that is making your own decision and dropping out of school and starting a company like Dylan did. I think part of that and I think this is where I sort of consider a lot of sort of failed leadership over the last few years in tech has been that too many people have viewed leadership as popularity instead of leadership. And so they say, well, if all my employees want something, that's probably the right thing to do. And it isn't always right. It's kind of like a coach on a team. If all your players on your team is saying to something, maybe they don't want to run that extra sprint, but they should, right? And so I would separate out those things. And I think because in many people's minds those two things are the same concept, it really hurts people's willingness to do certain things that are bold because they're worried about also being a jerk when they don't realize it's just being bold or being a good leader or taking a stand or doing what they think is right. Last question right there, please.
Audience question
Can I ask a question? I wanted to ask you about generative AI in design and what you think would be some of the most impressive features that generative AI could bring. And specifically, do you think they'd be add ons or features in the current flow of design or something that would be radically different in kind of the workflow of how people do design?
Dylan Field
Yeah, it's not cheddar to AI, but actually I'm very excited about what does Copilot mean for design? And I think that there's a chance to really make it so that designers can explore new options and think through new possibilities and do that in an expedited way with some of the technology that we're seeing out there. But still very early days and I think that has to be proven out still, so lots ahead.
Elad Gil
Cool. I may go to the last question. Right here is the original last question, if that's okay.
Audience question
Thank you so much for being here. I really like and agree with your perspective that sort of deemphasizing the four year degree and instead focusing on skills can be like a huge benefit to companies. For example, do you have a point of view on how we can tease out and normalize a measurement of those skills? Especially when some of those are like domain specific skills that you can only learn in specific degrees? So, as an example, I was a biomajor, and it turns out that thinking about molecular systems is not dissimilar from thinking about software systems. But finding my first job as a software engineer without the four year degree was nearly impossible. So do you have a point of view on how we can sort of tease out those skill sets, especially when they can come from specific degrees?
Dylan Field
Yeah, I think that if there was some economic incentive to doing this, you could actually see a ton of innovation here. For example, what would be the biomedor? Perhaps if you had some series of simulations you could be in where you could prove out that you actually understood the material that could be useful for learning. It could also be useful for assessment, but I think that actually, there's probably like domain specific answers for basically every domain you could think of, and that would probably be a lot better at helping people learn than tests and homework would be, but also require a lot. And it's almost like a new field to get people to think that way and to develop that kind of material. So, yeah, hopeful that we can find some way to incentivize that behavior.
Elad Gil
Cool. Well, a huge thank you to all of you for coming to Stripe, for hosting, to Edwin, Tammy and Claire for organizing, and of course, to Dylan. Thank you so much.
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