Field: Figma should have scaled its team faster to launch sooner
Dylan Field · Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design · Y Combinator · Aug 8, 2025 · at 9:16
Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma. Discussing Figma's multi-year pre-launch phase at Y Combinator, he reflects on what he would do differently in hindsight.
0:00 / 0:05exact quote · 6.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Looking back, we did have the capital. I should have scaled the team faster so we could move faster and get it out quicker.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dylan Field
Field: AI romantic partners are 'actively poisonous' to society
“I think AI boyfriends and girlfriends, if developed and allowed to exist is a societal self-owned. I think it's like actively poisonous to society if this becomes the primary, a primary mode of relationship.”
Field: Design and craft are the primary differentiators in the AI era
“If you really believe that development gets easier and it's more simple to create software, it's faster to create software, then like, what is your differentiator? It's design. It's craft. It's attention to detail. It's point of view.”
Field: Critics should not dismiss Sam Altman and Jony Ive's hardware collaboration
“Sam is one of those people that, you know, he's right about a lot of stuff, so I would encourage you if you just dismissed it outright, To ask yourself what you might be missing.”
Field: Designers and PMs, not just researchers, should build AI evals
“As you're, you know, doing developing a model or you're developing research ideas, You have to have good evals, and usually the researchers are the ones building those, and I think that's kind of just the wrong model. For us, at least, designers, my point of v…”
Dylan Field: Figma does not view Cursor as a competitor
“I really don't think of Cursor as a competitor. I think of them as someone that, I mean, we just launched our MCP server to explicitly make it so that you can get your designs into Cursor and Winsurf and all these other, and VS code, you know, all these great …”
Field: Software developers will soon call themselves designers
“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…”