Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Dylan Field - Designing The Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.407]
Tue, 21 Jan 2025
My guest today is Dylan Field. Dylan is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and last joined me on Invest Like the Best in 2020. A lot has changed since then and we explore the evolving landscape of design and how Figma has been navigating AI while staying true to its founding vision of eliminating the gap between imagination and reality. Despite Figma's incredible success in becoming the default design platform, Dylan remains deeply motivated by helping users achieve their goals. He shares fascinating insights about the underhyped aspects of AI reasoning capabilities, the future of design literacy, and why he believes truly great design will always require human craft and creativity. Please enjoy my discussion with Dylan Field. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Ramp is the fastest-growing FinTech company in history, and it’s backed by more of my favorite past guests (at least 16 of them!) than probably any other company I’m aware of. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. – This episode is brought to you by AlphaSense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Imagine completing your research five to ten times faster with search that delivers the most relevant results, helping you make high-conviction decisions with confidence. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. – This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. I think this platform will become the standard for investment managers, and if you run an investing firm, I highly recommend you find time to speak with them. Head to ridgelineapps.com to learn more about the platform. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Learn about Ramp, AlphaSense, and Ridgeline (00:07:11) Current State of Technology and Optimism (00:09:21) Entrepreneurial Mindset and Long-term Thinking (00:10:23) Challenges of Building in Stealth Mode (00:12:44) AI and the Future of Design (00:14:07) Navigating AI Opportunities and Risks (00:17:05) Design Principles and User Experience (00:29:55) Future of Interfaces and Interaction (00:31:45) Dark Patterns and Ethical Concerns (00:33:42) Personal Motivations and Company Vision (00:40:04) Balancing Responsibilities as a CEO (00:41:54) The Future of Design and AI Integration (00:44:48) Speculating on AI's Impact on Design (00:46:26) Encouragement to Experiment and Innovate
Chapter 1: What insights does Dylan Field share about the current state of technology?
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Chapter 2: How has the entrepreneurial mindset changed post-pandemic?
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of building a product in stealth mode?
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Chapter 4: How is AI shaping the future of design?
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My guest today is Dylan Field. Dylan is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and last joined me on Invest Like the Best in 2020. A lot has changed since then, and we explore the evolving landscape of design and how Figma has been navigating AI while staying true to its founding vision of eliminating the gap between imagination and reality.
Despite Figma's incredible success in becoming the default design platform, Dylan remains deeply motivated by helping users achieve their goals. He shares fascinating insights about the underhyped aspects of AI reasoning capabilities, the future of design literacy, and why he believes truly great design will always require human craft and creativity. Please enjoy my discussion with Dylan Field.
Four years since we did this last, which is completely nuts. Terrifies me. I'd love to just get your state of the union on the world of technology today. What are you thinking? Like, what are you paying attention to? What do you think's going on?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What are the ethical concerns surrounding design practices?
There's a lot of those projects going on right now.
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.
One of the things that obviously distinguished Figma early days was this leap in ability to create things, like the gap between one's imagination and a realized output was collapsed by Figma. And the way that even the friction for how they used that tool in the browser was collapsed.
Again, it feels like you're in a very interesting position in that the enabling technologies that are coming out right now in and around AI most specifically are like this on steroids. They are further collapsing the potential gap between one's imagination and a realized output. How do you think about navigating that
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Chapter 6: How does Figma plan to integrate AI into its platform?
This was the founding vision, was eliminate the gap between imagination and reality.
Was that literally the founding?
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
Chapter 7: What does Dylan think about the future of design literacy?
Chapter 8: How can creativity and human craft coexist with AI advancements?
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.
I'm curious what you've experienced that makes you feel that way.
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.
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