The Ledger, every show

“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 …”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Our lawyers said that it would almost certainly go through.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I just think that the interfaces for how you interact with models will evolve so much. And to the degree that models are part of software, we will see a ton of exploration there.”

“Designers are giving us the feedback that we used to get from developers now.”

“We did 304, three hundred and four million in revenue.”

“I mean, 60% of files created in Figma Make are non-designers at this point.”

“I think we're going to swing back to being way more expressive and draw as part of that story.”

“It's interesting for that survey we ran, I think it was 16 or 17% of respondents that were designers who said the development in tech tools, AI are a threat to my role. So only 17%.”

“Designers need to push us forward. And that's going to mean a exploration and explosion of creativity in so many different Visual styles that will be explored so much more dynamism in interfaces and new patterns emerging, especially as you start thinking about…”

“The person that we were doing the user test with, this guy named Payam, who's an amazing designer, then was working at Coursera. And the next day, he followed up with, like, this super long doc. I mean, it was eight to 10 pages. And it laid out basically a lot…”

“In reality, it took until Microsoft told us, hey, this is spreading like wildfire, and we're asking ourselves, should we shut it down? Or you know, should we keep going? And the reason we're asking ourselves that is because you're not charging us. Maybe you sh…”

“In terms of open source, we actually just announced today the acquisition of Payload CMS, which is an open source project, and I'm really excited about what we can do there and how we can support open source more.”

“The make design feature, you know, we, anything I said on the keynote, I was like, This is gonna give you the most obvious thing in the most obvious form possible.”

“What we can do to better serve developers, which are almost a third of our users.”

“There's no way that having to remember all these different sort of like magical phrases to summon the right image via diffusion model Is the end state, right? And yeah, maybe there's something where you draw some shapes and you add a prompt, but like, that sti…”

“If you look at every technological shift or platform shifts so far, it's resulted in more things to design.”

“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.”

“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…”