Dylan Field
speaker
223 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 20 May
Dylan Field’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps it's some selection bias with the story of Figma.
Folks are going, oh man, I got to hunker down for a few years. I should talk to Dylan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was the founding vision, was eliminate the gap between imagination and reality.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing 121–140 of 223 · page 7 of 12
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