The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Lawyers advised Dylan Field the Adobe acquisition would almost certainly clear
“Our lawyers said that it would almost certainly go through.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Conte: Bottoms-up employee adoption creates pressure on enterprise buyers
“As a CEO or as a head of engineering or a CTO, if you notice all your teammates are using Figma for their designs and they're asking to switch to Figma, there's bottoms up pressure for the management team or the buyer of the product to then use your product an…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Figma filed for an IPO after its Adobe acquisition deal collapsed
“Shortly after we did this interview, and about a year after the deal with Adobe fell through, Figma filed for an IPO.”
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 …”