The Exchanges

Q Does it feel like it's changing in a way the tools that you need to build? And how do you think about, yeah, you mentioned using AI for like, you know, editing the design and whatnot. Do you feel like natural language is becoming more and more the interface, even in design, that the work is going to be done? Or, yeah, what are like the pieces in your mind?

A Yeah, lots to unpack there. I'll start with just the, is natural language the interface? Yes, right now. I've said before, but I really believe it. 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. So I'm just like, cannot wait for an explosion of creativity there, because I kind of think of these models as like, they're almost like a, uh, N-dimensional compass that lets you explore this, this wild unknown fog of war in laden space, and you can kind of push the models in different directions through natural language, but if you have a more constrained end there and you're able to dimensionality reduce a bit so you can push different ways, there should be other interfaces available than text. These might be more intuitive, but they also might be more fun to explore. And I think sometimes constraints unlock creativity in ways people don't expect. So I'm excited for that. But right now, yes, natural language is where we're at. And while I'm excited to push that forward, meet people where they are, I think is usually a good model for product development before you get to the point where you've really refined. Going back to your triad, I think, uh, maybe we're going to start with the spec. Like, I t…

AI assessment note: “I'll start with just the, is natural language the interface? Yes, right now.”

Q think some people should have some sort of, like, personal stigma, almost. Whereas, like, you know, when you're generating images on ChatGVT or MidJourney, you should have some sort of, like, aesthetics to, to draw from. How do you think about that evolution? Because you're going from a world where, like, only designers work on your product to now it becomes a core part of, like, a lot more constituents.

A Yeah, I, I think, um, 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 to shepherd people through the design process and help them, uh, go from, okay, I mean, it's kind of a journey you go on, right? Like, not even being aware of design. You know, kind of, like, blindly going through the world to, oh man, aesthetics, uh, they, they matter. To, uh, okay, can we make it pop? Can we make it cool? And then people start to actually think about, oh, well, wait a second, like, I'm looking at one screen. What's the actual experience here? What is the entire flow? And then it's, okay, well, let's take mental models of how we can think about this experience And consider it in different ways. What are the potential different paths, metaphors, uh, and experiences that we can create here? And what are the abstractions that matter? And then from there, it's like, okay, wait a second. Well, this all exists in the context of like our brand, the greater culture of the moment, and, uh, business constraints and all sorts of other things you might be optimizing for. And I think, um, more people coming to the design process, that can help add in context as well. And there's no reason why so…

AI assessment note: “it expands the role of designers because then you have to shepherd people”

Q Figma, so you have this kind of, like, duality of, like, aesthetics and code. Were you first AI pilled by the Image generation, kind of like more creative things. Uh, I, I think early on in the podcast, most people would say Midjourney was their favorite AI product, and another half of people would say GitHub Copilot. What was your first product that you fell in love with, with AI?

A Not a product, but my first, like, AI pill moment was, I think it was, like, 2014 or so, maybe a little bit earlier. Uh, I was a Teal Fellow, and in my class was a number of amazing people, but one of which was Chris Ola. And Chris and I would be going to these retreats together for the Teal Fellowship every, you know, three to six months. And I remember one of them, Chris had been working on some Cool, like Haskell, three D generation stuff. And it was all a bit like out there and not clear how it would be productized at some point. He was just, like, deep learning neural nets. This is the future of everything, and I remember him, um, sitting down with me. We were at, like, a wooden table outside in some, like, Santa Cruz, you know, nature setting, and he's on the Wi-Fi, which is super slow, connecting to AWS, and he's like, look at this. I can go on AWS, and I can spin this up, and I can train this, like, tiny neural net To classify, you know, header and digits. I'm like, Chris, this is like a solved computer vision problem. Like, why are you excited? And he's like, no, you don't get it. It's a neural net, and there's, like, hyperparameters. I can tweak them, and I think I can actually make, you know, another neural net to, like, figure out how to tweak the hyperparameters, and I'm like, oh, that's all great, but, like, this is a solved problem. And I lacked the vision at tha…

AI assessment note: “Not a product, but my first, like, AI pill moment was”

Q How do you use X? Because I mean, you were famously on IPO day responding to product feedback on, on X. What's your routine for staying on top of that?

A Oh, I mean, I try to just like search for Figma a lot and, um, see what people are saying, but also I've like trained my algo feed to show me a lot of stuff that's relevant to Figma. Yeah. And, and, uh, there were ways, I don't know if they still are, Has powerful signals with whatever algorithm shifts have happened, but it's like you kind of find out what signals matter, you know, like ironically, right? 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. So yeah, I wasn't always sharing the link, but I'd copy it whenever I saw something, I want a single boost in my feed. It's like, okay, the more you learn is nice for the algo feed. Better you can train it, better you can make it useful. And then, you know, I think feedback across any surface, not just social media, but support, sales conversations, conversations in our community, we gather people together, and then just talking to folks, research both qualitative and quantitative. These are extremely useful signals for our team. And, uh, I think of intuition as like a hypothesis generator, then you have to test the hypotheses. So, Using feedback to be part of that test is important, but also I'd always rather give feedback to the Figma team by surfacing the voice of a user rather …

AI assessment note: “I try to just like search for Figma a lot and... trained my algo feed”

Q it's like, well, how do you give it the right data? How do you ask for the right type of charts? How do you ask for like the right follow up questions? I think there's like a good question of at what point is a software piece of software at which point is just like, again, a latent space guide that just helps you project your interest into the model.

A Yeah. And it's, it's interesting. It's like, if you look at data analysis, Maybe break it up into a few things that have to go right. You need to have, first of all, trust that the right queries are being written in the correct way, and that's a lot of trust, because if you get that wrong, you know, you have a bad, bad, shaky foundation for the rest of your experience, and there's, okay, what's the next query? I'd probably be more bullish about AI predicting your next query, uh, or a follow-up than I am about like, you know, a hundred percent rate on the query being constructed correctly. Um, And I think if you were to show people some prompts around here, example, next queries you might want to run, that might spark other ideas they have for follow-up questions that further their analysis. Then there's also like, how do you display the data and the visualization itself? Yeah, there's canonical visualizations we're all used to, but I think visualization is, uh, fascinating, and we've only scraped the surface in terms of how we can visualize data. I think that, um, Especially to get to larger data sets, more complexity, and you're really trying to communicate data to people. That is one of the most interesting design problems out there. Like, how do you communicate how much money in the budget of the federal government is spent where? People have tried so many times. I've never …

AI assessment note: “if you look at data analysis, Maybe break it up into a few things”

Q One question I have from Zach from Warp was how do you position Figma in the universe of this, like, prompt to app, prompt to creation? Like, how should people think about how you fit? Do they feel like competitors to you? Does MIG just feel like an extension of the design team? What is, like, the competitor universe for you?

A You know, it's depends on how you define it, right? Like, I think, um, engineers Feel much more comfortable in an IDE than non-engineers. And as we get to more agentic environments, perhaps that's a different vibe. But still, I think most people feel like, uh, an IDE or cloud code, if they're not engineers, they feel like that's not made for them. And I think that with the platform we have and the visual metaphor, the opportunity for freeform exploration, ideation on an infinite canvas and being able to try out lots of things and then also see the big picture of what are the different paths I can go down. That is a metaphor that I think works for a lot more people. And in that sense, as we tie Macon Even further than just, okay, I can copy a state and put in figma design and tweak it. That's what we launched today, but there's so much further we can go. And the further you go, the more you're able to then, I think, bring more people into this sort of surface. So in that case, you know, it's, it's just like we're trying to brace against ourselves. I think, um, you know, if you evaluate make as it launched, we raced towards launch, you know, as prompt to code. And not a lot around that, not a lot of integration with Figma platform, then sure, there's a million other tools and more coming every day that you can evaluate against. But I don't know if that's the right way for us to t…

AI assessment note: “with the platform we have and the visual metaphor... works for a lot more people”