The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 30 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Professional software tools must reject the 'move fast and break things' ethos
“I also hope that the tool team that's working on the editor at Figma, where we're supporting designers who have to put food on the table, and eight percent of our users are international, and many of them are living in third-world countries. This is bringing t…”
Silicon Valley will lose its tech monopoly by 2029, predicts Dylan Field
“I think the dirty secret of Silicon Valley is that no one in Silicon Valley thinks that Silicon Valley is going to be what it is today in 10 years. And so, I think we're in this period of change right now where more and more companies are coming up across the …”
Dylan Field: Reluctance to delegate means you haven't found the right person
“I think if you think you can do it better, you haven't found the right person yet.”
Dylan Field: Most colleges are not worth going into debt for
“I think a lot of places are not worth going in debt for in the first place, and I think that also debt as a society is holding us back a lot.”
Dylan Field: Scaling companies cannot operate fully synchronously or fully asynchronously
“I think to scale, you can't really be all sync, because then you have challenges around how you communicate and how you make decisions, but you also can't be async, otherwise you lack connection, you lack spontaneity.”
Dylan Field: Board members should praise founders when they admit mistakes
“I think it's important to reward and to praise people when they come to you with information about mistakes.”
Dylan Field: Silicon Valley is not dead as a major tech ecosystem
“I'm not one of those people that says Silicon Valley is dead. I don't think it is, but I really hope that there'll be more ecosystems like Silicon Valley in the world.”
Dylan Field: Figma aims to own the complete design lifecycle by 2030
“I think that there's an opportunity for us to totally own and support the design process and life cycle. So everything from idea to mock-up to research and consolidation to prototyping all the way production.”
Adobe killing Fireworks drove Sketch's early success, says Figma CEO
“At the time, there were not many competitors out there that were interesting. I think Sketch, it was launched at the time, but not many people were using it. Really, fireworks being killed was what put the wind and sketches sales.”
Dylan Field: Management is a distinct skill that must be practiced
“The reality is that management's hard and you really have to learn it just like a skill and craft like everything else.”
Dylan Field: Leaders can always find someone better than themselves
“I don't think I'm the best at anything. I think I'm pretty good at some things, but I always believe I can find someone better than me at most of my skills, if not all of them.”
Dylan Field: Platform-first strategy takes longer initially but scales faster later
“I think it might take a little bit longer to go platform route, but then you have this sort of opportunity to back into scale it faster.”
Dylan Field: Power-user features should never compromise basic user experience
“You keep things simple, and I think that especially later in your product life cycle, the requests you get are dominated by power users sometimes, and they're asking for more power. You can't forget that the reason that became a power user in the first place i…”
Dylan Field: Integrating workflow creates product defensibility
“I think that anytime you're able to introduce more workflow, that is a pretty inherently defensible thing that will help your product.”
Dylan Field: Cross-platform plugins must perform best on your platform
“That said, a lot of the plugins that we're seeing are across many different tools. And so it's not just enough to make it so that a plugin exists on your platform and people use it. But you also need to make it so that the plugin works best in your platform.”
Dylan Field: Balance competitive awareness with building unique product value
“I would say that it's important not to be too focused on competition. Otherwise, you're not building what's unique with you. At the same time, you have to listen to your users. And if users are saying, well, your competitor's better, you better make sure that …”
Dylan Field: Figma will permanently support remote work long term
“For Figma, internally, pre-COVID, we were entirely in person, and now we're supporting remote work, of course, just like, you know, everyone else does, but also we're permanently doing that long term.”
Dylan Field: Hiring top talent is a long-term relationship game
“One thing that people don't usually realize when they're hiring talent is that it's a very long-term game, and it's based in relationships.”
Dylan Field: CEOs always possess more context than board members
“As CEO, you always have the most context, more context than your board has.”
Tool-based software requires building a long feature tail before user adoption
“I think the reason for that is just that tool based businesses are hard. There's a long tail of things that you have to build before people will adopt a tool.”
Traditional VC should fund hard technical challenges to build deep moats
“I mean, I think the more, more traditional venture capital is about putting large sums of money to work on hard technical challenges that create a very large moat.”
Founders should reference-check VCs with founders of failed portfolio companies
“The same diligence they're doing on you should do on them. I think you shouldn't be afraid to ask, to talk to companies that haven't worked out and to reference founders that You know, maybe it hasn't gone so well with, and if they're not willing to give those…”
Young founders' biggest mistake is failing to hire senior talent
“I think one of the biggest mistakes is not hiring a senior enough talent. I think that especially younger founders, a lot of times I see them falling into the trap of hiring people that are their age or younger.”
IBM's engineer-to-designer ratio dropped from 72:1 to 8:1 in five years
“For IBM, for example, we saw a shift from 72 engineers to every one designer in 2012. Again, 72 engineers to every one designer. And then in 2017, five years later, they were at eight engineers to every one designer across the company. And on mobile, they were…”
Dylan Field's early existential uncertainty led him to micromanage and delegate less
“I think that early on, I wasn't empowering enough, and that was a really hard part for the team. I was at Henry Ports or so, and we hadn't launched the product yet, and everyone was going, gosh, will this ever be a thing? Will anyone ever even care? It was lik…”
Dylan Field: Figma spent two to three years recruiting its design director
“Our director of design, Noah, I think it took us like two or three years to get him in the door.”
Dylan Field: Figma plans to nearly double its headcount in 2021
“Well, we're still, speaking of board, we're still finalizing our twenty-twenty win plan, but I think we'll near double the team again, which is pretty wild.”
Benchmark's John Lilly rejected Figma's seed round before leading Series A
“I had met John Lilly, the seed, and he turned us down, actually. But he said, hey, look, like, if you want to keep talking, I'm down.”
Dylan Field: Angel investing provides energy that feeds back into operating Figma
“Well, I certainly learned from people that I invest in, so probably yes in that way, but I think mostly it's the value it brings to Figma is that it's just very energizing for me. I really like helping people. And helping people as an investor is just a very d…”