Dylan Field
Appearances
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And I just feel like even as design is made more accessible, it doesn't mean that craft is made more ubiquitous. I suspect that there will be higher levels of craft that tools like Figma can help people reach.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
But the thinking around what to bring to market, when, how, and how exactly it should work in navigating these really complex systems trade-offs that could unfold over years is just non-trivial. I think those all remain constants.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Reasoning is a little bit different than LMs. We're conflating them right now, but they seem to be two different things. And I think it's pretty exciting to imagine what progress in math and science can be like with the help of reasoning models that are able to think for extended periods of time on a task. And very exciting to think about how that could create new technologies for everyone.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
In the Figma context, I wouldn't say that there's necessarily like new technical breakthroughs outside of the world of AI that I think are really changing a lot for us right now. That said, I think that markets and sort of preferences are ever shifting.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And I think people are getting a lot more sophisticated about the way they build applications, the way that they think about their internal systems. And that's exciting and stuff that we can think about as we work through our strategy.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
With WebGL, something like Figma became possible for the first time. In the past, you had to be desktop. in order to do complex graphics in application. And we were not sure where the limits of WebGL would be. Originally, Evan spent a lot of time building something that was more cross-platform, honestly, and could target desktop as well as web.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
We had to rip it all out later because WebGL worked out. But we even hedged our bets initially because we were believers, but it was like, oh man, there's some part of this that's not going to work out. And it turned out that you could do everything we dreamed of on the web and do it in a really production-ready way.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Whereas web GPUs, awesome, will create all sorts of benefits, but I'd say it's more of an extension of what you can do with a GPU than going from not being able to use the GPU to using the GPU.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
It's maybe counterintuitive at this point, but despite my excitement about Reason Engines, I think there's so much low-hanging fruit to dive into reasoning to make our product better with AI. And so we started off with the most basic of things, like let's go make diagrams better in FigJam.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And we went into, okay, how do we get it so that you can do stuff like name your layers automatically or create a first draft of a design? Or can we help you rewrite text in Figma slides? to match tone better and create an interface to explore that. Without talking more about where we're going next in our roadmap, I still think that there's so much low hanging fruit that we can explore.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And that's super obvious before we get to fancy stuff like reasoning engines. And I think that there's not many examples in the market as of today that are using reasoning at the product level yet. And I think the few that are trying are still struggling to productize it. doesn't mean it's not coming.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think it's harder to probably create a great experience around given just the nature of where that tree can branch out into versus it's even less deterministic than like an LM. If you conceptualize it as like an LM thinking and talking to itself for a long time and ending up in interesting spots down the logic tree.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I actually think it could be even more interesting, honestly, to expose the tree of possibilities rather than try to hide away from somebody. I think a lot of reasoning is an LM basically traversing that tree itself and then figuring out what do I tell to the user. Personally, I think that a lot of the value in design is actually seeing the tree.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Maybe. Yeah. It depends on the domain probably.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I have a few reactions. I think that the amount of software created will go vertical. I think that a lot of people make a lot more software. It doesn't mean it's good software. And I think that designers and people that are able to bring more craft to the equation, yeah, they bring that temporal, emotional, cultural context that can really differentiate something. And yes, I also believe that
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
There's more we can do to improve software development in general. That's why we, with Figma, have really tried to map out the process of software development. So we start with FigJam, brainstorming ideation. Then we go into Figma slides like alignment. We have Figma design for design and then dev mode for design to development and how to translate to developers.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Yeah, I definitely think that there's way more we can do to make it so that people are able to achieve even more and go through that loop of software development even faster. So that excites me a lot.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Say more. The transition to the next type of civilization that we might encounter, probably we like harness the energy of the sun by 2100. Or maybe it's not our sun, maybe we harness the energy of a neighboring sun. No need to mess with ours. But yeah, and you can do all sorts of interesting things. I think if you set that as the goal, maybe it becomes a lot sooner.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
But I think certainly by 2100, we should be able to get there.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
The beauty of digital right now is that it feels like anything is possible. And maybe that's the outlandish thing, period, is that we're getting to a place where I've kind of always felt like the approach should be, you can build anything that's not violating the laws of physics, given enough time. And now like the time portion of that even is decreasing on the digital side.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And certainly digital is not usually violating the laws of physics. So that's pretty exciting.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Whatever you're speaking to folks, I think you have to think about the audience. I would probably try to make this presentation for as general of an audience as possible. By definition, it wouldn't necessarily be graduate level in the first place, pushing us back into the premise. Sorry, I'm not your LM to prompt. Yum.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Yeah, I mean, I would try to basically encourage everyone to try to build design literacy and figure out how do you get better and increase your abilities in the field of design. And I think that if you look at the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders and certainly software, but also in hardware, they are becoming so much more design literate. And again, maybe it's selection bias.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I hear so many founders that tell me they start in Figma. And they're like in Figma design a lot of the time. They might not even have a designer on the team they aspire to, but they don't yet because they're just starting off. That's where a lot of folks live now is on this digital canvas trying to figure out how should something work.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And when I look at the future of people that will work in technology or folks that are going to be founders, when we look at the students that we reach with Figma through our EDU efforts. It's just incredible to see how advanced they are and how much they are deep diving on design as a discipline.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And I think that more than we ever could have imagined, it's becoming a skill that I hope one day it'll be more like listing Microsoft Word on your resume. Right now, people put Figma on their resumes. If you put Microsoft Word on your resume, it's kind of like a red flag. And I hope we get to that status. Because it's so obvious that you should know how to design things.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
That doesn't mean you're going to be a writer, but everyone should be able to engage in this point of design.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Design principles span UX, but also visuals. They're very different when you're thinking about product versus branding. And so it depends a lot on what context we're talking about right now. I think if you're talking more on the software UX side, I would say the first things I see people mess up are when to reuse versus when to be inventive. There are plenty of patterns that users already know.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And sometimes it's very useful to be inventive and create new patterns. And that's why something can catch on. And sometimes it's not. I would say that people fail to consider flows. So a lot of times they don't think about where a user is coming from. They think only about a certain state that someone's in right now. And that context, if they lack it, can hurt them and hurt their experience.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think that they often are too indirect. So they have complex ways of manipulating data where you have to manipulate it on maybe it's one screen over here and you have to go to a different screen to be able to see the effect or it's not all in one place. You can't get that call and response, that immediate feedback loop.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
That doesn't mean that you have to be direct manipulation like a tool like Figma, but the closer you can get the manipulation to the effect, I think is better. And then I think more than 20 is the stuff that we try to meme-ify inside of Figma. Make the simple things simple, the complex things possible. And that's not an original Figmaism that goes back a long ways. Famous design quote.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
But I would say that it's easy to just endlessly do what users want, add more power to applications, and then end up with something super complex that's not usable, not approachable. It's one of the biggest risks for Figma. that we're always trying to counterbalance is how to make sure that we're not too power user, despite people using us for powerful things.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
That's something that we work on a lot as an organization.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
So yeah, like all of them. VR for me is something that I've deeply enjoyed exploring because I think that it's an example of so many new patterns being created and tried. I still think that mobile, whether it's iPhone size screen or a iPad size screen, there's so many more patterns and interactions that could be explored than are being explored. is really limited by how much people can learn.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Just think about how hard it was for Apple to teach people how to long press on an iPhone in order to select text. There's an unlimited potential for how many of those interactions exist, but there's only a limited attention span to teach the consumer.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
But when you have something like VR, where you have a bunch of early adopters, and you can teach them through game mechanics, because it's mostly a gaming platform at this point, then you have this awesome ability to go and experiment. And yeah, a lot of the experiments won't work, but just early computing interfaces, some of them will, and some of them will be like really fasting.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
and maybe we'll see with other platforms like more augmented reality type glasses or eventually bcis bcis are kind of like the ultimate interface and if you can get to the point where your intent is an input and then you're creating something it's kind of the grail and so it's very exciting you strike me as open-minded and optimistic about all these things and curious about them all
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I mean, the obvious dark pattern for BCIs, if you are like a true believer, is wireheading where you basically have the fentanyl button. You just keep pressing it in a dark room in the corner. That's a bad one. Yeah. I mean, I guess like as dark as you can go.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
It's not an original idea. I mean, this is something that people have talked about for a long time.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Yeah, I do. I think that there's a bunch of ways you can break down the safety argument. And the one that I think is the highest risk in terms of lack of visibility and transparency, and also the potential for it to escalate quickly, is if you remove a human in the loop in the military context. I think there'll be great temptation to do that. And I think it can be very dangerous.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I don't know, but I hope smarter people than me can figure them out.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Yeah, I think there's also a pattern, though, of people becoming immune to things over time. If you look at the history of humanity, yeah, there have been times that broad swaths of the population have become addicted to things, and yet we've gotten through them. The Wirehead, in case I would not be as fearful of.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And I think for the military side, I think there's very thoughtful people there, too. So I'm actually very optimistic. But you asked me to go into the dark spot. I'm shining some light on them.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think it's important to do things from a perspective of you want them to exist. But yeah, like in any situation, if it's a game, then it's a game I want to win. It doesn't have to be business. It could be a board game. I like to win those too. I think it's fun to have that gamer mentality, especially when you're on a team.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I was never a team sports guy because I'm not very good at sports, but I really like Robotics Club. We're all together and trying to figure out in this sort of more intellectual activity, how do we win? My team didn't always win, but it was a lot of fun. And coming into Figma, I feel like we have the best team. So I feel very blessed.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Well, actually, my favorite prompt was not my own, unfortunately, but it was my friend who's an elementary school teacher. And her prompt was, write a story about a dinosaur for a six-year-old using only the first 10 letters of the alphabet. That was a really wild prompt. It thought for a long time on that one, but actually did give results in the end.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
If I told you to do that right now, it's hard.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think it's kind of funny how everyone's like, oh, is it AGI? Is it not AGI? Just no one seems to have a shared definition of what AGI is. I feel like being able to talk to someone at the level of depth that Owen Pro can answer, that feels pretty general and pretty intelligent to me. Is it doing work yet? Not just yet, but it feels like to me it's functionally AGI.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And plenty of people would debate me on that one. But when I sat on the line, I said, everyone's time to put down your definitions of AGI. Some people feel like it's already here. Some people, we can keep putting the definitions out there. We skated right past the Turing test. And I feel like the default is just to keep pushing on what that definition could be.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
When it comes to superintelligence, I actually get pretty excited because I think we'll see a lot of superintelligence first is actually in research domains. I think math in particular, we're going to see novel theorems proven, maybe not in the most elegant of ways, but they will be proven. And then maybe it's like from there, then people find the elegant proof because they know it's possible.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Just like someone runs a fast mile and then everyone else tries to one-up them because they know it's possible. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see the ways that humans and AI work together in these research domains.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I would argue that regardless of AGI or AI progress, that's already where you should be. If you're so lucky to get to choose what you do, then yeah, you should already be focused on the areas where you're driven and motivated and have vision. Did I map tier three? But I already argued that. I mean, it's so easy to find something that's novel.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Doesn't mean it's something that you're going to be driven and motivated by over time. Sadly, a lot of entrepreneurs fall into the strap of they find something and they go and they like go build that thing and they're making some money from it and they just keep going. But it almost always leads to burnout because it's not what they are truly motivated by.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And I think long term, probably the highest agency people will deliver the best results in the age of AI. Yes, currently agents don't have agency, despite the words being very similar.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
It's super simple. And by the way, I think that we're far away from what you're saying, although it's very generous. But I would say it's just any time that we can help a user achieve their goals. Anytime I get user feedback, whether it's constructive, it's like, I didn't like this thing. I'm like, oh, man, we got to improve the thing.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Or it's, man, I was able to do X because of Figma, any part of the product. That is the eternal fuel for me. And I just love interacting with customers.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think it's probably hardwired. I have notebooks from when I was a little kid about how would you go make the best bathroom? Because that was something I was really interested in as like a six, five-year-old, six-year-old or whatever. By the way, there's still a lot of improvements we can make to bathrooms. Lay it on me. What would you do?
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I'm less germaphobic now than I used to be, but as a kid, he was a little bit of a germaphobe. I remember going to SFO for the first time and like, it just be this magical experience that you could like put your hands in the faucet and it would automatically, the water would come out.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Five-year-old Dylan was automatic sinks everywhere. It was a big deal. One clever importance is the ability to open a door with your foot. I mean, everyone's coming into the bathroom, going out of the bathroom, their hands may or may not be dirty coming in or coming out, and opening it with your foot is like a really good move. That should probably exist everywhere. Totos are great.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I'll stop there.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Yeah, it's my responsibility to make sure that everything's going well over Figma. There are some areas I'm gonna bring zero level of expertise to. Our compliance function. Do I have any unique insight on compliance? No, just that it should be done and done well. When it comes to design or the way that our products are built, my level of insight might go up a bit.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I try to be self-aware of what I'm bringing to a conversation, but ultimately, yeah, I have to have ownership of everything. And some things you know you've got the right leaders and you check on them very infrequently. In other areas, whether you have very high confidence in your leaders or not, the stakes are so high that you have to be always involved.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And my point of view is design is like that for everyone across the board. If you're building software, you need to be deeply, intimately working with your design team or anyone doing design on your product, because otherwise you might lose the business. This is the way you'll win or lose. And certainly I'd treat it that way for Figma.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I mean, look, it all comes back to people when you're talking about that. And I think when you maybe don't hire correctly or don't set the standard the right way and you have to reset a bit, that's always tough. But something you can work through. And I feel like as long as you hire people who have that self-awareness, they'll help you work through it. That's the positive part.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
It gives me like, make design bigger than design. How do you take it so that design is not thought of just as pixel pushing, but also is something that people are really considering and doing at all parts of the process of building a company? And how do you make it so that they have the tools to that and they're able to be intentional about that?
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I mean, I think that if you've got a point of view in the world and you're able to articulate it, how can we empower you with the tools so that you can create something? And then also, how do we empower you with the tools for you to make it great? That to me is super exciting.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And if you look at the number of people that use Figma and they're labeling themselves as designers today, I mean, it's like one third of the people that come into Figma label themselves as a designer. The other two thirds do not. But my belief is that those two thirds will get into the design process in various ways.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think that we're always curious by design systems. And the more that you've got people in the organization who are deeply thinking about user problems through the lens of design, you also have problem of consistency at scale. That's where design systems come in. How do you make sure that your product is speaking the same language as multiple people with multiple perspectives are working on it?
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And I think that the interplay between design systems and creativity is something that we're always fascinated by at Figma. And how do you both help people standardize while also giving them the room to innovate and be creative? And those two things are somewhat in tension sometimes, but are both objectives that Figma should hold.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I would hope within three years, and if we can do it within one year, then we should do another podcast on that.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
What we're seeing right now is the earliest tools and it'll evolve a lot the way that you build with them. And I also think that as you build with them in the context of design, people realize that it's not enough just to get out what's in your head at full fidelity, but you'll want to improve what's in your head too.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And you'll start to appreciate the work of professional designers as well, even more. And you'll be on your own journey to becoming one.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
That's the beauty of software products versus physical products. A physical product, it's so hard to be in an iterative loop for. Industrial design, it's all about, okay, you do all the iteration up front, and then you ship something, and this thing you ship is going to be around forever. You make your table, someone buys a table, you don't get to update the table.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
In digital design, we ship A-B tests all the time. We're constantly trying new things, seeing if they work. If they don't, you roll them back, no big deal. Completely different mindsets.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Well, my prompt on the design side would just be to make anything. If you don't have an original idea, literally go recreate something that you already know to get comfortable and familiar with the tools. If you have an idea, go try it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think when it comes to more of the AI side, this is the time to lean into your curiosity and to use these models to learn as much as you can about all the areas you've always wondered about, but never had a personalized tutor for. That'd be my prompt.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
It's funny. I can remember where we were the last time we had a conversation for just the podcast versus the last time we had a conversation. And I remember being in this like rental house with my wife and some of our friends, and it was like total lockdown. I remember around the same time, NFTs were just starting to take off if you were paying attention to them.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think we're pretty excited about the metaverse. Crypto bull cycle is just starting again. And we're all trying to figure out what COVID would do to the world and how that would change things and what the decade of the 20s would be like. And I feel like now we're like midway through that decade. Yeah.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
There was some tweet, I think Scott Belsky read it, and he was saying, I think that the 2020s will be like the roaring 20s. There was this period with COVID bubble in the public markets that everyone thought that might be the case. And then I feel like maybe we didn't think it was the case.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And certainly it feels like we're back in some strange bullish cycle right now, both with regards to public equities and tech in general and what people are willing to support and bet on. If you look at technology broadly, it feels like there's a lot of optimism about doing hard things right now.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And perhaps that's sort of on the back of all this progress with AI and folks knowing now that the predictions from not just 10 years ago, but like 30 years ago are pretty correct down to a T. Kurtzweil is right. Yeah. It's wild how some of these essays from like early 90s got it right on the money.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And I think that opens up the possibility for people to think a bit more long term and be more bold maybe. And with that, it feels like people are willing to do stuff that is a bit less traditional as well. So I feel like we broke out of the Overton windows across the board in social discourse, but also technology. And yeah, let's see where it goes.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I think that the best entrepreneurs have a level of certainty about them. And I think that same certainty exists in folks that I was spending time with in 2020, 2021 versus 2024, 2025, most of which I'm still in touch with. We're still trading emails. So it's not like these relationships fade. But I think that people starting things today... on average, are thinking a bit more long-term.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
It's less about what happens over the next six months and more about what happens over the next six years. That'd be my macro observation.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Perhaps it's some selection bias with the story of Figma.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Folks are going, oh man, I got to hunker down for a few years. I should talk to Dylan.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
When I look back, I go, man, I wish that we had gotten out earlier, first of all. I tell everyone that it's like, what's the smallest increment of the idea that you could get out in an inspiring form? I definitely look back and wish that we had found that smaller bit sooner. It would have made everything a bit easier. It's also way easier to say that now.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
We don't have the split test of what happens if we were to have launched with something very basic or incremental. Would it still have led to the Figma of today? We just don't know. But the hard parts were obviously just motivating the team, setting milestones. conveying product feedback. When I would give feedback to the team, it was often writing.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I'd write up notes from talking to customers I'd visited and put the product in front of. Until I got to the point where I started just literally recording user research sessions with people's consent, of course, and then playing those back to the team in group settings. And we'd just sit there and awkwardly watch people struggle with a product for five minutes.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
That was the way to get people motivated about like, oh, we got to solve these problems. But there's still a disbelief of, okay, if we actually solve them, will people care? And I think you don't know that viscerally until you get something out into the market or at least announce.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
If you make an announcement and it's big enough, then people will react to it and that can motivate an internal effort. But even that is hard. A lot of people without traction struggle to launch things in a way that's scaled. Gaining that reach and that scale, if you're doing something that's truly unique, that's tough.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
So even that, getting the right action, you have to be pretty clear about what you're building and why to the team. And people would be really fired up about the mission.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
This was the founding vision, was eliminate the gap between imagination and reality.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
That was the vision statement at the start. At some point, we made it more concrete about make design accessible to all because people were getting confused about the gap between imagination and reality. I'm looking at Time comp photo papers with my co-founder, Evan, and
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
We're seeing how many can use internet scale data to fill in regions of a photograph to basically do content fill, but do it in a way that is sourced from the internet rather than something clever. So we're looking at early machine learning approaches as applied to creative tools, and we were getting excited.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
But also starting to think about what's potential for something like a BCI in terms of human-computer interaction. And it felt like that was a vision statement that could last us a long time. And the feedback we got was amazing. This is so abstract. What the heck are you guys talking about?
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
At some point, we made it more concrete, and now it feels like it's time to make it a bit more abstract again. But yeah, I think that in terms of how I think about what AI can do in the applications, I think that it's both underhyped and overhyped at the same time somehow.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I feel like the reasoning capabilities in my Go and Pro mode right now, when I'm recording this on January 10th, it's still underhyped. Yeah. In a week, everything can be different. It's AI timelines. That still seems underhyped as of right now. I've felt that way for the past month.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Well, there's a leap from O1 Preview to O1 Pro Mode in terms of just how much compute is used, I think. Or perhaps it's something about the way they've trained it. But the level of analysis and thoughtfulness that is now included in answers, the level of intent that can be detected from your prompt, You don't have to be as mechanical about prompting things, actually.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And the outcomes are just quite good. I mean, I use it for so many things now. It's the first time I felt like there's something that resembles intelligence on the other end. I get to work a lot with lawyers. And with O1 Pro Mode, I can often get a sense of what are the important things to cover in a legal call before I have the call. So I can have like a shorter billable hour. Yeah.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
How do you prompt it? If you can actually get conceptual material out in preparation for a conversation with somebody generates a lot of efficiency and lets you short circuit to the things that matter. It's been excellent as a learning tool. I can deep dive on concepts that are not ones I've encountered and it has very good knowledge broadly and is much more accurate.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
At the same time, I feel like it's overhyped to AI in general. It feels like there's still very much this outer loop that exists around AI. It's like it can do things for us much faster, and yet we have to help it maneuver. We have to give it guidance. Yes, it's getting better at predicting intent, but it's not all the way there at all.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
And so, yeah, it's this interesting period where I think people see where things could go if everything was perfect, but it's just not perfect. I don't expect it to be for a very long time. I think in the context of Figma, we really thought about our AI efforts as lowering the floor but raising the ceiling. One example of that is, how do we generate a first draft for you?
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
This isn't going to be a system that's going to generate the final output. But if we can make a first draft that then you can go off of, build off of, iterate on, explore the tree of possibilities with, then hopefully you can get to the point where you're able to deep dive on one of those possibilities, understand the trade-offs, and bring even more craft to your zine.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
My sense is that the amount of software that will be created will continue to go up exponentially. We've been on an exponential curve, but it's going to go more vertical. And so then what's the differentiator? It's design, it's craft. And it's really important to make sure that you bring that if you want to stand out in the market.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I saw a tweet recently and I wish I remember who posted it. I can't find it for the life of me, but sorry, whoever it was, I'm not attributing you. But it was something like, as a designer, I'm not worried about AI replacing my job because a product manager can't even prompt me the right way. Yeah. And I feel like that's super true.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Design is incorporating so many different aspects of culture, of user behavior, of alignment, of craft, of just knowledge about where people are in different flows and more. It's so much about like the almost debate of how it should work as well as the pixel perfection of what it looks like. It's something about creativity meeting problem solving in an interesting way.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
I feel like maybe design becomes much more accessible to people, which I think is a good thing. But I mean, if you work with a designer who is very new to the world of design versus somebody who is just incredibly experienced, knows deeply how every system works, is able to keep incredible state in their head around a complex systems problem, I mean, the latter is rare. You will see the difference.