Post Earnings with Figma CEO Dylan Field

Bring him into the TV and I'll show him. Dylan, how are you doing?

0:00

Hey, good. How are you guys doing? Oh, sleep back.

0:02

We're doing great to see you.

0:05

Did you hear the news? America just won in overtime. We beat the Canadians.

0:06

I did not hear that news.

0:10

The Olympics in hockey. Yeah.

0:11

Oh, wow.

0:13

It's great.

0:13

There's a lot to celebrate.

0:14

Yes, but give us. But give us the news in your world. How are things going?

0:15

It's good. We're working hard, having fun. But yeah, we just did our earnings and really strong results. So we're super excited. 2025 was just a massive year for us and the fourth quarter was our best quarter yet.

0:20

So we had 40 year over year growth, right?

0:38

You got it. We did 304. 304 million in revenue. Wow. And then also, yeah, we, I mean, look at the whole year. I mean, we just shipped so much. Went from four to eight products, launched over 200 features, and most recently earlier this week, on Tuesday, we launched a quad code to Figma design pathway where you can go from code to the Figma canvas. And I'm really excited about how we can do this entire round trip. Yeah. And make it possible so that wherever you start, we can give you a way to go anywhere on the Figma platform.

0:42

Do you think people are sort of underappreciating that loop? Because so many of the experiences with agentic coding systems like Claude Code are very toy projects. Like the first time I used Codex on desktop, I just remade the TVPN homepage to look like Berkshire Hathaway's website. It's like I just took a screenshot. I didn't need to do any real work. It was a five minute thing. And I think a lot of people are amazed by the toy projects, but then they don't really think about what's happening when there's a design system. This is a large organization, this is an enterprise. This is going to be something that's enduring. And so can you share a little bit more about that flywheel and what it takes to actually put these tools to use in a serious way?

1:19

You know, I think it's actually really important. Even when you're. Maybe it's my mindset, I'm a perfectionist. But even for the toy projects, I want to go figure out like what is the best expression of my fun toy project.

2:03

Sure.

2:15

You know, maybe something like a Berkshire Hathaway website is a fairly constrained form factor. And so maybe that's not the best example.

2:16

Like HTML3.

2:25

I recently made, for example, my friend was like, I want to go viral in this year. And it was a birthday like my goal for this year of my life is to go viral. Okay, like that. Well, that's kind of weird, but cool. And so I made them a website.

2:28

A lot of space to explore there. There's a lot of ways to go viral. Some can be good, go on airplane, yell at people.

2:42

I probably should have done is hey, said, hey, go talk to these guys. But instead I made them a website with Figma make and made it really beautiful and tried a few different directions out and yeah, very quickly got to okay, here is sort of, with some custom prompting, like a list of ways for them to go viral given who they are and, and then it's all collected together in a nice way. But even for a fun project like that, that's just like, you know, I'm going to send to them, they're going to do whatever they do. I don't know if they're going to look at it more than a few times or even a few times, but I don't know. For me, I want to go explore wide on enterprise. Yeah, you absolutely need to go think deeply about what's going to make the best product experience for your customers. And that's not going to be just a we're going to go code it up and we're going to do whatever we come up with first. You're going to go actually think through the option space and try to figure out what it is that you want to go steer towards that is critical. And if you don't think about that as a system, if you don't actually use all the components you've standardized on the styles, then you're not going to appear the same way to your customer throughout the entire user journey. And it has to really tie together with brand as well as your product, as well as your point of view and your marketing, your messaging. So it's super important to make it so that you're able to have all that come together. And just being in code I think is very linear. You might be running fast, but you might be running towards the wrong direction.

2:50

Yeah. What's driving the Figma make growth is that the same archetype as the Figma user does diverge in any interesting ways. What can you share about how interesting ways people are using Figma make and also how you're thinking about growing that product?

4:28

Yeah. When you look at Figma Make, I think what's really cool is to see how many non designers are using it and that is something that we've really picked up on. It's not just designers that are going in and making really amazing prototypes through Figma Design, but also folks are coming in and making these files and prototypes and actually full working web apps and experiences. I mean, 60% of files created in Figma make are non designers at this point. Wow. Which is amazing.

4:47

Yeah. I mean, that was a big part of the original Figma thesis, was that there were going to be non designers using this tool from day one.

5:22

Basically, if you looked at the TAM of the business purely on a product designer basis, it didn't look, look like it would be business today.

5:30

I don't think you ever had a designer, right?

5:38

Yeah. And yet I've been Figma every day for a decade. Yeah.

5:41

So yeah, that's interesting. How do you think about the growth of that product in terms of adding plugins, features, hosting, deployment, uptime, edge distribution? Like that could grow into its whole thing, right?

5:45

Yeah. Or maybe a more simple question is like, where do you want to partner? Where do you want to build yourself?

6:01

Yeah, I mean, I think that we're going to see tons of partnerships for things like Figma make, where you need to be able to pull in context from whatever system people use and then with that, use it to help create and help access data. But more importantly, I think that it's really key that we both create a simple surface that if you're just getting started, you can use. And also we figure out how do we make it so that you're able to go above and beyond and go really professional and do two things that basically require a skill ladder to traverse. But visual first, that's the thesis is visual first. But yeah, make users grew 70%, quarter over quarter. I mean, we're seeing great adoption. I think people are really resonating with the product and finding all sorts of fun and awesome use cases for it. And I think there's such opportunity given the way that our active users of make are also using Figma design to bring these services closer together, which I think is back to that divergent point, because make is still too linear for my taste.

6:07

Oh, interesting.

7:23

What, what are, what feature requests are you prioritizing and most thinking about? And what are some maybe more wild feature requests you may, Figma may not get to?

7:24

Well, I mean, there's a feature request in this conversation to go do edge computing. I don't think that's going to happen.

7:37

Okay.

7:44

You know, all of our, all of the folks out there working on edge computing, you know, come Partner with us.

7:45

Hardware.

7:51

We're not in your space, don't worry.

7:51

Hardware. I want a hardware device. You mentioned taste. How have you been reacting to the taste discourse? Is taste a new.

7:53

How many different cycles of taste discourse have you ever.

8:02

This is the first time I ever

8:05

have happened since Figma was started. I think about companies like Linear, who to me exemplify a taste driven company and how many of these cycles where they're like, oh, they care about this Again, great.

8:07

I mean, look, I think that from the start of figma, the goal was not just to get everyone doing design or making design software usable by everybody and expanding the market. That wasn't the way we thought about it. It was like, how do we get people start on this journey where they can actually go and be more expressive, more creative and really start to solve problems? And maybe it was a bit of projection, but for me at least, I wake up in the morning, I'm like, I want to go create software, I want to go build stuff. And so how do I make it so that anyone with that impulse can just do that? That doesn't mean they're all going to have like taste and craft and epic design skills. I mean, I think for the rest of my life I can work on that. And many designers have made that a lifelong pursuit.

8:25

Yeah, yeah, there's something, there's something that's very real where you start on this creative journey and your taste level can be way above your skill level and it's incredibly frustrating. And some people start and they just stop because they feel like, like I have this idea for what I want something to look like or be like, and I'm kind of like trying to make things that match that and I can't. And that's part of why AI in general is like incredibly exciting, because it can help you close that gap faster and potentially help you close that gap almost instantly in some circumstances. But you might create a hundred different outputs before getting to the one that actually meets that, you know, level.

9:15

Yeah, I think that the key thing is that you really have to go wide and explore and then challenge yourself. If you find areas where you're going, hey, actually, I don't feel like I am liking this enough. I'm not happy enough with a solution. Then you got to go keep pushing. But the more you can sample the possibility space and see some things that you like and you don't like, it gives you something to react to. And I think that the constant thing is you need to be constantly critiquing and Thinking about what is it that you like, you don't like, et cetera. And people talk about agents all the time. And I'm obsessed with agents too. We all are. Right. Agents are cool.

9:58

How many Mac Minis do you have?

10:44

No comment.

10:47

No comment. He's the reason that Mac Minis sold out.

10:49

I swear I am not caught by. But anyway. But yeah, but like, I think the, the bigger point going back to taste is, you know, if an agent can do it for you, then unless you've got some amazing sophisticated prompting that's super unique, like an agent can do it for someone else. And so I think that this discourse on like, agents are just going to do all the things. Well, what is different about your setup than others? You just have to have something different there in order to not think that you're going to get the same thing everyone else is going to get. Yeah. Even then I don't know if it's going to get you sick. Extraordinary. Yeah.

10:54

Yeah. We read a post yesterday that was sort of trying to quantify the background that leads to taste. And he was basically saying that like Steve Jobs was incredibly high iq, but also had like varied training data in that he had been homeless and traveled the world and got all these bizarre experiences. And I'm wondering if that resonates with you or you think that it's too difficult to even quantize what makes for a great designer or great taste.

11:33

I think that the great designers I've met through my life have come from so many different backgrounds. A lot of folks have come through rigorous design training. They just, just went through a system.

12:07

Sure.

12:19

And other people. Wow. They went and created, you know, their band poster. Yeah. And that got them into like graphic design. And then somehow they like showed up at the right house and crashed on someone's couch and then became a product designer. And they never went back. You know, so everything in between and there's not really any pattern. Some people have traveled the world and, you know, gone on the meditation retreats and some people are like as buttoned up as you could get and just totally straight laced. I think that the nice thing about designers is they're so unique and there's no pattern matching.

12:19

Yeah. How do you think about variability of design going forward? Are we so excited? Are we at sort of a narrowing period? Because most people come with just a generic prompt or. Because I saw your figma make examples and I was like, I didn't even know that was possible. There were so. But I was like, I would never have gotten there so are there going to be tools to maybe help people, like be inspired by your background, which has a whole bunch of variation on it? I don't know. Yeah, I'm just wondering because, I mean, we were just talking about a company that it feels like the prompt was like, copy Jordy's website. Maybe it wasn't, maybe it's just coincidence. But it felt like, okay, there wasn't, there wasn't like a twist here where it was like, oh, just do something completely different that's never been applied to this particular category at least, like steal from a different niche instead of from the one that's like very, very similar. But I'm wondering how you're, how you're seeing like variation in design. Take, take, take hold in the world.

12:56

Yeah, this is the moment, I think, where we're going to see the pendulum go from. I mean, let's look back, right? So we had the Flash era geocities, like not saying it was high quality era, but there was a lot of variation. And then iPhone comes down. It's like skeuomorphism and then like Swiss minimalist design and nothing wrong with Swiss minimalist design. Like that is a really cool and storied field and lineage, but it is just one part of the greater aesthetic realm. And we can go into such interesting places and try so many interesting patterns on the UX side too. It's not just UI and the visuals, it's also the structure, the ia, the way that people navigate through these things and interaction patterns. And I think there's innovation that's going to be flourishing on all of it. I'm just so excited to see the Internet get like really dynamic and really visual and people try things that they just. We haven't seen in a while and things that people haven't seen ever. Because I think that that's what it's going to take to stand out now. There's so much there. Like the exponential curve of software is just, it's taking off in a way that it's always been exponential, but now it's vertical. We talked about this before and in order to stand out, you guys have a show that you're managing to actually break through and get people to be watching this. Like this is not normal. Right. But you have worked very hard, very diligently to create the conditions under which you have this audience. Well, this thing that everyone has to figure out now is how are you going to actually get any attention in a world where there's constantly new information, even beyond America winning the Ice hockey match.

14:02

Yeah. I've been thinking about how Gen AI is impacting marketing. It's allowing somebody has like a unique idea and then it used to be like you had like at least a month to kind of like run with that unique idea. Maybe three months if it was like, you know, a specific campaign or something like that. And now somebody can literally fast follow you and your idea almost immediately. So good ideas always get copied, but they get copied even faster. Now another thing that I was thinking about when you were talking about kind of the explosion of ui, John had a post yesterday that he was sort of jokingly making like a BuzzFeed style listicle, like five features that could explode your LLM usage or something like that. And one of them was like caching. And people have had this idea of like generative UIs. UIs that's being made like on the fly. And I feel like we may get. We may like have products where that's happening. Right. Like you're in an LLM and a UI is being generated, but it will still make sense. Like if, if there's something that happens all the time, like thousands, millions of times a day, billions, like it does not. It really stops making sense to just generate it on the fly. It's like, hey, this happens a lot. Let's like make the best version of this and we don't need to like

16:01

light poster on this actually. Exactly this topic. I can send it to you if you want. But basically the post was about how the length of time that an artifact will exist for is inversely proportional to the likelihood it's going to be generated. And I think this is true across media. So basically, if you are writing a book, unlikely that you're going to have AI just generate your book.

17:23

Amazon booksellers would like to work.

17:50

Yeah, you can just say you don't read adult romantic fiction. We got it.

17:54

No, no, no. I think, I think continue.

18:01

Yeah, but like, I think, you know, something that's like a ad that will live for, you know, a few hours.

18:04

Totally.

18:10

Like, yeah, probably you're gonna have an agent that's gonna generate that.

18:11

Totally.

18:14

Yeah. The difference is like you're making an asset for to respond to with a meme format to news. Makes a lot of sense to like put that through a nano banana or chatgpt. But if you're putting making a billboard, maybe you're still using AI to some degree, but you're going to invest like significantly more.

18:16

I think if you're going to make a billboard that's going to cost money. And people can be up for a month and a lot of people are going to see it. I think you're going to have a human touch. We actually, with weavy now, female weave, we've been looking a lot at these kinds of use cases. And one thing that just we think about a lot is how you know this first prompt, but then you actually want to go and have it go through a process where you can transform and mutate it. And almost like clay that's being shaped, you can treat it like a medium to get to a final output. That's amazing. So, like, in our earnings call, we talked about how Nvidia, which they've actually done this, is a public case study. They put the entire making of this keynote online and they use weevy with it. And what they did was they had all these robots and they needed to basically get to a 20k image of this whole scene. Like, how do you create a 20k image with perfect lighting throughout? I mean, it's really tough. So they had a whole custom pipeline with Weepy. They did. And just like the amount of work to go do that at scale of that pixel density is immense. And I thought their workflow was super cool. So I'll share that with you too.

18:34

I love it.

19:50

Yeah, please send us that. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

19:51

Thank you for having me.

19:56

Always a good time.

19:57

We were so fired up seeing the results from yesterday. Really a testament to how locked in the team the team is.

19:58

Amazing.

20:06

Yeah.

20:07

They're working so hard and they're just an incredible team. I'm so grateful.

20:08

Yeah.

20:13

And I think it's a proof point. I mean, I think that we're going to see it over and over again, whether it's the taste discourse, just customers with Figma, but design is a differentiator. Like, figure it out. Go learn design. Hire your designer, otherwise you're gonna have a hard time. That's my last message.

20:13

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

20:31

Great to see you.

20:33

Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.

20:33