Dylan Field
Co-founder and CEO, Figma. On 9 shows, 13 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@zoink ↗LinkedIn ↗figma.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Dylan Field co-founded Figma alongside Evan Wallace in 2012 after receiving a Thiel Fellowship, pioneering web-based, collaborative user-interface design software. He is widely recognized for leading Figma into an industry standard, navigating an abandoned $20 billion acquisition attempt by Adobe, and steering the company through its expansion.
9shows
13appearances
202statements
25resolved
23supported
0contradicted
92%fully supported
326said about them ↓ Everything Dylan Field said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Field: AI romantic partners are 'actively poisonous' to society
“I think AI boyfriends and girlfriends, if developed and allowed to exist is a societal self-owned. I think it's like actively poisonous to society if this becomes the primary, a primary mode of relationship.”
Dylan Field claims Adobe is not a direct competitor to Figma
“They're really not. I mean... They're very focused on other aspects of their business, and that was made abundantly clear in the antitrust process to all the regulators, too.”
Field: Foundational AI models will eventually become commoditized
“On the question of sort of stars versus incumbents, it's hard to believe that Foundational models won't get commoditized, but I'm definitely being, I'm willing to be proven wrong there. But it does seem like, you know, over time, this should be something that …”
Field: AI judgment and design ability do not scale with IQ points
“All my experience with AI so far have shown that on formal domains, things that are verifiable you can get to amazing outcomes with enough IQ points, and yet judgment is like somehow not purely correlated with just adding IQ points to the model.”
Field: Figma engineers multiply productivity tenfold using specialized AI agent swarms
“We have plenty of people at Figma that are and are getting great results though.
And it's amazing how much we can do there when you have folks that really understand the infrastructure that they're trying to build.
And they go and you know, they're already 10 …”
Field: AI agents yield commoditized outputs without uniquely sophisticated inputs
“I think that 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 lik…”
Field: An artifact's lifespan is inversely proportional to AI generation likelihood
“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.”
Field: Expanding to a second product is harder than scaling to many
“I think for a second product, it's very hard to go from one to two. Going from two to N is much easier, but going one to two is hard.”
Field: Design is the main software differentiator as AI accelerates coding
“I think this is happening now too, even more in the age of AI, and the value is moving up the stack even more. That's why the design is the differentiator more than ever, because it's not just dev tools are a little better. It's, wow, you can create a lot of c…”
Field: AI coding gains are modest on established codebases versus zero-to-one
“In the zero to one case, it's extraordinary. In the one to a hundred case with a established code base, productivity gains are, I'd say, modest to moderate, depending on your code base. Not exceptional yet but they're improving all the time.”
Field: AI prototyping frees designers by letting PMs explore options
“It really changes the process once you have the ability to explore this option space in a bigger way, and PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they ne…”
Field: Role blurring across design, engineering, and PM will accelerate
“The trend that we've been seeing for the past five years is a trend that it's gonna accelerate the next five years. And that's a shift to emergent of roles. I just think that we're seeing more designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, kind of all th…”
Field: AI productivity gains have not reduced Figma's engineering hiring demand
“We are nowhere near, at least at Figma, ah, the point where our demand for development, for example, is satiated. Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah. Mild to moderate, but like, that is not something that has made our new head count we want for engineer…”
Field: Designers will be the future leaders as software creation becomes easier
“I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much, and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future, and I think that more designers need to step into that leadership role”
Field: Prompting will be remembered as the MS-DOS era of AI
“I think we'll look back on this era as like the MS-DOS era of AI, and the prompting and natural language that everyone's doing today, I think is just sort of like the start of how we're going to create interfaces to explore it in space.”
Dylan Field: Better AI Code Generation Makes Human Design Matter More
“It feels to me that the better code generation gets, the more design matters, and the more that actually the human pushing on design matters too, because even if you have a good starting spot from your design system, from, you know, AI generation, whether it b…”
Field: AI code generation will force developers to rely on visual abstractions
“I also think that it's going to be something that as we move forward in time with more Asians writing more parts of your code base, you will also be less familiar with the code. And so then you might want a different abstraction where you're able to work on th…”
Field: Front-end engineering will survive because translating design is merely mechanical
“That's not like a comment on oh, front-end engineering is dead. There's so much more to front-end engineering. Than just that translation step. That's kind of like the most mechanical part, and actually thinking through all the states, all the intended behavio…”
Field: Autonomous AI agents building complex software like Figma is a long way off
“I'm not saying, okay, go build Figma, and you, agent, are just gonna go figure out all the complexities of Figma. I think that's just not something I see happening in any near term future, even as longer range running agents start to occur and we've got better…”
Field: Vibe-coding will not easily replace complex enterprise software like Workday
“A lot of CIOs would, You know, you love to go, okay, yeah, I've vibe code workday and I just saved my company all this money or whatever, but okay, you actually peek into the hood of a workday or a rippling. These are very complex pieces of software that have …”
Field: The AI industry is showing get-rich-quick energy reminiscent of NFTs
“The parallel that I think is kind of interesting is, you know, you compare AI to that, and it's like, there's been a long era of people that I think are very on mission and thinking about the big picture, the risks, the opportunities, the possibilities. And th…”
Field: Design and craft are the primary differentiators in the AI era
“If you really believe that development gets easier and it's more simple to create software, it's faster to create software, then like, what is your differentiator? It's design. It's craft. It's attention to detail. It's point of view.”
Field: Critics should not dismiss Sam Altman and Jony Ive's hardware collaboration
“Sam is one of those people that, you know, he's right about a lot of stuff, so I would encourage you if you just dismissed it outright, To ask yourself what you might be missing.”
Field: Designers and PMs, not just researchers, should build AI evals
“As you're, you know, doing developing a model or you're developing research ideas, You have to have good evals, and usually the researchers are the ones building those, and I think that's kind of just the wrong model. For us, at least, designers, my point of v…”
The other half of the tape: Dylan Field's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 307 times in 100 episodes across the shows. 19 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 38Claire Butler 32John Coogan 31Lenny Rachitsky 28Molly O'Shea 20Jason Lemkin 12Alessio Fanelli 12Zach Lloyd 9
Statements about Dylan Field, by other people (19)
Clements: Accel is not in Figma, calls company oversold
“We are not a part of Figma, but have a lot of respect for that company. But I know that Dylan is a generational founder, and it's a very important company with an incredible financial profile, and it just feels for a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons, oversold…”
Halligan: Figma CEO Dylan Field decided IPO pricing, not bankers
“The founders make the decision on what the price is. So Dylan decided at the end of the day.”
Yamashita: Dylan Field mapped design Twitter graphs to recruit early users
“One of the first things he did was he took design Twitter, he visualized it as a graph, and then figured out which people designers are following the most, and then went to those designers to get feedback on Figma and get them excited about Figma. And that was…”
Field: AI expands ideation breadth, but product exploration requires human depth
“My point of view is you get more breadth now in terms of the things that you can try, but it still requires a lot of depth to fully explore it.”
CEO Dylan Field built a custom Twitter scraper to map design influencers
“Dylan is also a great engineer. If you don't know that about him or a scrappy engineer who can figure things out. And he had this idea and he built this tool or the script, this scraper where he identified a couple of influencers in the design community. Like …”
Yamashita: Dylan Field Needs to See End Implementations to Buy In
“For Dylan, I think it's very hard for him to really kind of like fully get bought in until he kind of sees like the end implementation to this really feel like if this is a good solution or not.”
Black: Dylan Field and CIV co-led Senra's Series A
“Ended up co-leading it with a CIV, which is another really great investor of ours, who's been incredibly helpful throughout this whole process, too.”
Morton: Figma CEO Dylan Field Is an Investor in Revel
“Dylan Field is actually a pretty big investor in, in Revel, and it's been super interesting.”
Simons: Figma's original pitch was a WebGL 3D demo, not a design tool
“When they, their first pitch for Figma,
Was not like a design tool.
They didn't have a design tool.
They had a demo, like a WebGL demo of a three D ball dropping.
And the pitch was what browsers have gotten powerful enough to do meaningful three D graphics…”
Kapoor: Figma Slides hackathon demo was rejected despite company-wide excitement
“The first was Maker Week, which is our internal hackathon at Figma. This was the forum where I initially tried to get buy-in for the idea. I worked with a team, walked around the New York office, and convinced a bunch of designers and engineers to work on this…”
Haisfield: Dylan Field tested generating Figma inside WebSim
“Dylan field actually posted this recently, like trying Figma in Figma or in web sim.”
Rachitsky: Figma founders drove hours back to Coda just to fix Wi-Fi
“They ended up working very closely with Coda. I don't know if you know the story where they just wanted to make sure the Coda team, and it was called Krypton back then was very happy with Figma. And so they went to the office, they set them all up. They starte…”
Users physically grabbing the demo laptop validated Figma's early launch readiness
“People, I remember, they were like, take the laptop out of Dylan's hands when he would start showing it because they wanted to play with it. And to me, when I started seeing designers do that, even if I wasn't sure if they'd use it as a team, even if I wasn't …”
Figma hosted an open Twitter Space to address the Adobe acquisition backlash
“And so I remember we decided that day that the next day we just had to have an open public forum where we could talk directly with our users and let them ask us any questions. And so we'd have the Twitter space the next day with Dylan and show Raji and Tom.”
Coda was Figma's very first committed enterprise user
“We had Coda. They were our first user and they were based in Palo Alto. Dylan and I drove down and demoed the product to them and they were the first ones. Their designer, Jeremy was like, yes, we'll take this on full time.”
Figma leadership created a 'Concerning Tweets' Slack channel for Dylan Field
“So Chris, RCTL, and I kind of, like, intervened. We created this new channel, private channel called Concerning Tweets. And it's just, you know, for this small group of us that Dylan can kind of, like, drop those. And then these are tweets that aren't going vi…”
Devin Finzer: Figma founder Dylan Field is a close mentor on OpenSea
“Founder of Figma is a really close mentor of mine. I mean, what's great about Dylan is he is able to do so many different things. He's running Figma, but he's also extremely deep in the NFT space, so he's just been, like, very helpful from, like, mentoring us …”
Lian: Dylan Field of Figma was Common Room's first angel investor
“I think the first angel was Dylan Field at Figma.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 115
Lenny's Podcast 75
TBPN 49
Sourcery 38
Latent Space 16
No Priors 8
the a16z Podcast 5
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 1
2026 54 mentions in 23 episodes 2 per episode
- Senra Systems' $65M Series B: Fixing Aerospace & Defense's Biggest Bottleneck · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- "Dig Through Your Couches. SpaceX Needs It." Cyan Banister on Luke Nosek's Pitch · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Revel: The $1B Startup Rewriting Hardware Control · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- This is why I don't believe in sales quotas | Figma CRO · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The SaaSpocalypse Is Over
- AI’s third era: the rise of persistent AI coworkers | Tara Seshan (OpenAI’s product lead)
- Mark Pincus: How to Spot a Fake CEO · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 111 mentions in 40 episodes 3 per episode
- Figma's 250% Pop - The Greatest IPO Mispricing Ever? Meta & Microsoft Blowout Quarters: Broken Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Inside the $750B+ Thiel Fellowship · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
- 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
- Weekly Recap: Gwyneth Paltrow Saves Astronomer, Figma’s IPO, Top AI Researchers Ranked
- ⚡️Warp 2.0: the Agentic Development Environment - Zach Lloyd and Ben Holmes
- 20Product: Figma CPO on How Figma Builds Products: What Works, What Does Not | How Figma Does Testing and Product Reviews | The Future of Design, Engineering and Product with Yuhki Yamashita
- Index Ventures Partner, Martin Mignot: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index’s Decacorn Factory · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The US GOVERNMENT Files (Time for the Truth)
- 32 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 43 mentions in 21 episodes 2 per episode
- No Priors Ep. 95 | Best of 2024
- How BILLIONAIRES dress for XMAS (ep17)
- How To Do The Product Review Right (By Doing It Wrong) | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024
- Who's Getting Rich Off Ozempic? (e12)
- Thinking like a gardener, slime mold, the adjacent possible: Product advice from Alex Komoroske
- Mamoon Hamid: AI - Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws | E1217 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Danny Rimer: The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook | E1166 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- How we became the fastest growing podcast (ep20)
- 13 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 77 mentions in 7 episodes 11 per episode
- An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)
- An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
- Nikhil Basu Trivedi: Why 99% of AI Investments Will Go Bust | E1057 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Miles Grimshaw: The 5 Pillars of Venture Capital & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strategy | E1061 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Cris Valenzuela: AI Creators vs Hollywood Writers; How We Grew Runway into a $1.5B Company | E1054 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- No Priors Ep. 36 | With Hubspot's Co-Founder Brian Halligan
- Sarah Guo: On Her New $101M Fund; How AI Impacts Inequality; AI Startups vs Incumbents | E1007 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
- Jason Lemkin: Cold Email Tips; Why Only 15% of Founders Listen to their VCs | 20VC #954 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Des Traynor: How I Founded Intercom; Product Marketing Tips; Feature Creep | 20VC #907 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom
- 20 Sales: When To Hire Your Head of Sales/ First Reps, What To Look for in 10x Sales Candidates, How To Structure The Hiring Process, How To Onboard New Reps Efficiently, How To Set First Quotas and more with Kyle Parrish, Figma's VP Sales
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully
- 20VC: Notion's Fundraise with Index: The Most Anticipated Deal in The Valley: How It Came To Be | The Future of Remote Work |How Notion Approach The Balance of Growth and Profitability
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dylan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 2 | 43 | 100% 6/6 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 2 | 40 | 100% 5/5 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 2 | 30 | 100% 3/3 | full record on 20VC → |
| SOURCERYLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 1 | 21 | — | full record on Sourcery → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 1 | 20 | — | full record on Latent Space → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 1 | 15 | 83% 5/6 | full record on How I Built This → |
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 2 | 15 | — | full record on No Priors → |
| a16zLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 1 | 12 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| TBPNLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Figma | 1 | 6 | 100% 2/2 | full record on TBPN → |