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: Broadening design participation expands rather than diminishes designers' roles
“In a world where design is the way you win, it's only natural that we need to get more people involved in the design process. That is not going to diminish, diminish the role of designers. In fact, I think it expands the role of designers because then you have…”
Field: Figma's strategy relies on AI improvements directly enhancing Figma
“Your strategy should always be okay. Assume AI models get better, and make sure that makes Figma better. As long as I believe that's true, I'm happy. If not, change strategy. Like, that's the algorithm.”
Field: The idea that software will live in LLM sessions is overblown
“I think that the idea that all software will, or lots of software will exist in a session with an LLM or any model, I think that's a little overblown.”
Field: Broad peer consensus on an investment thesis is a warning sign
“If you're investing in something, unless you're just going after momentum, which a lot of people do, but otherwise you need to have some point of view that like a lot of people would just blanket disagree with. And it should be scary to you if you're investing…”
Field: X's algorithm weights copy link far more than likes or bookmarks
“Not interested in this post seems to not do anything, you know, a like or a bookmark. I'm not sure how much that matters, but copy link turns out that really matters as a signal, or at least it did.”
Field: Intense user feature requests indicate product pull, not missing fit
“Like, I think everyone talks about product market fit, but product market pull is really important and you'll see signs of it when people are highly engaged. When they are obsessive about what you're doing, when they see the future of the vision that you're pl…”
Field: AI coding tools excel at 0-to-1 prototyping over legacy codebases
“I will say that I think that the models today are better at the earlier phases of development than they are at like late stage code bases. So if you have an established code base, I think you're gonna get less out of AI development tools as they currently exis…”
Field: AI user interfaces are currently in their MS-DOS era
“Yeah, I think that it feels intuitively like we're in the MS-DOS era of AI right now, and that, you know, if you look back 10 years from now, everyone's gonna go, can you believe that we just had this chat box?”
Field: The number of designer founders and design GMs will multiply
“I think that the number of designer founders will multiply. I think the number of designers that are leading Large areas and sort of GMs will grow as well.”
Dylan Field: More people will project consciousness onto AI
“My prediction is that we'll probably see an increase in people projecting consciousness onto AI, whether or not that's the right thing that, you know, you agree with or don't agree with. I think that the number of people that will do that will increase.”
Field: Internal product development should be collaborative, not based on agency-style grand reveals
“A lot of designers at that point were coming from an agency culture where, you know, you go explore, you come up with a few solutions for the client, you present, you know, three solutions. And then you have a grand reveal of, like, here's the big, amazing thi…”
Microsoft threatened to drop Figma unless it started charging for its product
“One of their design leaders came to our office and spent some real time with me, and he I think was sussing out, like, is, are they serious or not? And at the end, he goes, you know, your tool is free. I said, I know, I, we gotta make some improvements, I thin…”
VCs passed on Figma's Series B over InVision competitive concerns
“There were certain VCs that, you know, they take the meeting, but then they go at the end of the meeting, you know, look. Very impressed with what you've done, and, ah, great job, but I just cannot reconcile this with the work Envision's doing. Like, I, I'm so…”
Field: Good design will become an even bigger software differentiator
“I think what becomes differentiator is design. It's craft. It's how it works. It's brand. And as we look at the future, that's what I believe will still be the differentiator for software. It's going to be that craft. And I think that the value of design of go…”
Field: Prompting alone represents the Telnet era of AI
“I think, like, prompting alone is sort of like we're in the telnet days of AI.”
Field: As software gets easier to build, design becomes increasingly important
“And then we, you know, saw fireworks get killed, and went, wait a second, maybe there's an opportunity there, and started to form the thesis of, as software gets easier to build, design becomes more important.”
Field: Designers fiercely rejected Figma's 2016 multiplayer launch
“I remember when we finally launched the GA in October of 2016, I mean, the comments we got were like, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. You know, that person commented about it and said, a camel is a horse designed by committee. So it's li…”
Field: Product, design, and engineering roles will continue to exist
“Probably everyone's learning to do a bit more of everyone else's job in this current moment. That said, I definitely think there's still immense value in product, immense value in design, immense value in engineering, and so I think those roles will continue t…”
Field: Figma's local decisions created overly complex global systems
“As I'm in conversation with a bunch of our product leaders at Figma, there's parts where it's like, okay, this thing is too complex as a system, and we made, like, all the right local decisions, and yet, together, they're too complex, and they're not working a…”
Field: AI will augment designers before replacing any part of design
“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.”
Dylan Field: New modalities like voice and gesture will not become ubiquitous
“So I think that we get these new glimpses at interaction patterns that are really cool. And the natural inclination is to extrapolate and say they're going to be useful for everything. And I think that they have like sort of their role and it doesn't mean that…”
Field: OpenAI is aggressively hiring product and design talent
“Look at open AI. Like they're on a hiring acquisition spree trying to get product people and designers right now so that they're able to make great consumer products.”
Field: AI will lower the floor and raise the ceiling for design
“AI will make it so that all of us are able to do more design work in the first place. So lower the floor. For who's able to participate in the design process, but it also raised the ceiling of what you can actually do.”
Field: History shows tech platform shifts favor startups over incumbents
“Basically every platform shift that's happened, people have claimed that and then it hasn't been the case. And so I think that if you're a startup, this is a pretty good time to basically pick the area that you think could really benefit from the technology an…”
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 → |