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.
Dylan Field: Figma does not view Cursor as a competitor
“I really don't think of Cursor as a competitor. I think of them as someone that, I mean, we just launched our MCP server to explicitly make it so that you can get your designs into Cursor and Winsurf and all these other, and VS code, you know, all these great …”
Lawyers advised Dylan Field the Adobe acquisition would almost certainly clear
“Our lawyers said that it would almost certainly go through.”
Field: Software developers will soon call themselves designers
“I think people that call themselves developers today, and they call themselves designers, you know, in the near future. That doesn't mean they're not writing code. It just means that they're gonna be thinking more holistically about the product experience alon…”
Field: AI agents will lead to more user interfaces and software
“And I think that the interfaces will get more sophisticated. But also even if they don't, I suspect that it's just like any new media type when it's introduced, it's not like the old media types go away, right? Just because you have TikTok doesn't mean that yo…”
Field: Design requires iterative AI loops because prompts cannot capture full context
“In the design context one thing that really matters a lot is the iterative loop and being able to keep going back and forth to an agent and give more instructions over time. If you just kind of like go to first principles here, there's so much that you're not …”
Field: Engineers will spend more time on design than coding tasks
“Probably before you see potential replacement of any part of the design role, you instead see augmentation and you see access. You see efficiency so that designers can get more done. And I think probably a lot of engineers do more of their, put more of their t…”
Field: AI chat interfaces will create more UI and software, not less.
“Even if it's true that a new form of interaction is via chat interfaces, which I'm not even sure I believe, but if, even if we take that as a prior on the no priors podcast, then I think that you still have UI and actually I think you have more UI and more sof…”
Dylan Field: Fully autonomous AI coding remains a long way off
“We're not at full self-driving for code yet. Perhaps one day we will get there, but I think we're still a long ways off right now.”
Field: Code-based AI models will generate UI designs better than diffusion
“One outcome might be that we find more success with models that are similar to CodePilot than you do with like a diffusion model, for example, when you're trying to figure out how do you actually create designs using AI systems.”
Field: Figma did not spend years in development before contacting users
“I think that everyone that talks to me and says, hey we're trying to build our startup like Figma. We're going to take years to develop it. And we'll go talk to the, our first user. And I'm like, first of all, it's not what we did.”
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 …”
Field: Dismissing team roles due to AI is a temporary hype phase
“And I think that we're in a temporary phase of people really, you know, getting excited about what they can do with AI. But not yet realizing all the limitations that they have”
Field: Design AI evaluations are inherently non-verifiable and require human judgment
“And the evals we're running on stuff we're doing, stuff others are doing, like a lot of it is inherently non-verifiable. It's like, gotta be human judged at the end of the day. And you can set up more automatic methods for that, but you still have that human i…”
Field: Major AI companies will not become monolithic value-sucking black holes
“There's going to kind of be like a black hole and suck it all up. Which I'm sure that that's not going to be what ends up happening. I think that they're all going to get a lot smarter than that. And I think most don't even want to do that in the first place”
Field: Jailbreaking AI models requires conversational questioning rather than fancy JSON
“It's not like you have to do some fancy JSON thing.
Like, that's what people like to popularize it online with, but I mean, you can just talk to them and ask them questions.”
Field: Software companies will thrive despite prevailing market doom narratives
“Right now the narrative seems to be like software is, you know, kaput... But I think that a lot of software will do just fine, or actually even amazing.”
Field: VR is currently the only space creating fundamental new interaction paradigms
“I think the only place we're seeing it right now is kind of in VR where it's really seen the gaming context, but there are new interaction paradigms being created there, and that can exist in software too.”
Field: Coding without visual design exploration creates dangerously linear workflows
“Just being in code, I think, is very linear. You might be running fast, but you might be running towards the wrong direction.”
Field: Leaders must examine timeline padding from first principles
“If timelines are maybe not well reasoned through from first principles and perhaps there's padding that has been, you know, well intentionally added by, you know, different folks you have to kind of understand fully, okay, what are the assumptions of how long …”
Field: Founders should not always sort opportunities descending by TAM
“You can't constrain by always sorting, descending by Tam.”
Field: Eliminating table-stakes blockers directly drove Figma's retention and activation gains
“The journey of making thing design was a lot of table stakes features had to be built, as well as the shiny coolest new stuff. And we literally at some point had a team that would, that was called blockers. And they just went in one by one, struck them down. A…”
Field: Launching an MVP is not enough without an awesome feature
“I think it's not enough to have the MVP. You gotta have something that's a little bit awesome, at least.”
Field: Founders should avoid Figma's slow timeline and ship faster
“Don't do that. Go faster. And the lesson is not, okay, how do I make the awesome thing? I'm going to sweat every detail and I'm never going to ship. The lesson is you just got something that you can have that people can see the vision of where you're going. Bu…”
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 → |