Opinion
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lawyers advised Dylan Field the Adobe acquisition would almost certainly clear
“Our lawyers said that it would almost certainly go through.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Disclosure
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Supported
Dylan Field appeared on the Today Show before deciding what Figma was
“The actual, like, first or second day of doing the fellowship, starting to work with Evan, I flew out to New York with my mom to be on the Today Show, and I had no idea what we're doing yet, because we hadn't barely started.”
Assertion Supported
Facebook acquired entire design agencies to grow its internal team
“You know, Facebook was acquiring entire design agencies to try to make their design team bigger.”
Assertion Supported
Field: Coda, Notion, Microsoft, and Uber were early Figma customers
“So, early customers like Coda Notion, Microsoft, Uber, MindBody, you know, there was a bunch that, that started to really use the platform.”
Assertion Partly supported
Field: Figma scaled from 100 to roughly 240 employees in 2020
“Yeah, the start of twenty-twenty, about a hundred employees. End of twenty-twenty, we were two 32 40.”
Assertion Supported
Dylan Field reveals that 30 percent of Figma's users are developers
“It made it so that the 30% of our users who are developers, we could provide them with a much better experience in Figma.”
What-if
Starting Figma a few years earlier was impossible without WebGL
“I mean, if we had started this a few years earlier, we wouldn't have had WebGL.”
Disclosure
Field: Figma's first prototype was browser-based real-time face swapping
“The first thing we looked at was to the face swapping. So basically, you know, I got your face, I got my face, how can I take your face and swap it onto my face? Kind of a cool party trick. But with something called Poisson blending, which Evan found a way to …”
Disclosure
Field: Figma spent a week building a meme generator in 2012
“At some point later on, we literally create a meme creator. That was the darkest week of Figma.”
Assertion Supported
Field: Figma currently employs approximately 1,600 people
“That's where we are now, yeah.”
Dylan Field