The Ledger
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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: Intense user feature requests indicate product pull, not missing fit
“Like, I think everyone talks about product market fit, but product market pull is really important and you'll see signs of it when people are highly engaged. When they are obsessive about what you're doing, when they see the future of the vision that you're pl…”
Field: Designers fiercely rejected Figma's 2016 multiplayer launch
“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…”
Field: As software gets easier to build, design becomes increasingly important
“And then we, you know, saw fireworks get killed, and went, wait a second, maybe there's an opportunity there, and started to form the thesis of, as software gets easier to build, design becomes more important.”
Field: Microsoft alerting Figma to viral internal adoption validated product-market fit
“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…”
Field: Figma restricts internal product roadmaps to one-to-three-month cadences
“When a team at Figma comes to me with a epic roadmap that they think is perfection, the first question I always ask is, how do we slim that down? How do we make it more bite-sized and test this earlier with our users? So it's absolutely the case that I try to …”
Field: Embedding designers into AI research teams is critical for Figma
“Embedding designers into our research teams, because obviously we're doing a lot of work on how do we make better AI tools for designers has been critical because researchers need that intuition of how designers think, and without actually having that close co…”
Dylan Field: Figma announced acquisition of Payload CMS
“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.”
Field: Figma should have scaled its team faster to launch sooner
“Looking back, we did have the capital. I should have scaled the team faster so we could move faster and get it out quicker.”
Blomfield: Product managers and designers are bypassing Figma for direct coding
“Many product managers and designers are actually going straight to implementation of a new idea in code, rather than designing mockups in something like Figma, just because it's so quick.”
Field: Founders should continuously hire to replace their biggest time-sinks
“Sort of the loop you're always in is be self-aware. What are you doing the most of right now? Then go replace yourself with that task if you've got the resources. If you don't have the resources, like, figure out how to get them either by being profitable, by …”
Field: Figma's earliest adopters chose the tool because it lacked features
“When I look back at the first people that used Figma for real design work, they were minimalist, because they liked how few features we had. So it's kind of interesting that there is, like, this group of designers that are minimalist out there that, like a min…”
Field: Reject nine-month roadmaps and aggressively de-scope to ship faster
“When my team comes to me and says, hey, we've got like a nine-month roadmap on this feature, I'm like, what the fuck? Like, what can we do to de-scope or figure out how to get us out faster to start talking to people and showing to people”
Field: Notion and Coda were Figma's earliest portfolio company adopters
“I think, like, in that entire summer, maybe two of them went in for it, and actually started using Figma. One was Notion. The other was the company that became Coda, then called Krypton.”
Field: 5% of Figma Design files were slides before dedicated product launched
“Or it's slides, where we saw, okay, five percent of files created in figma design are slides. So great, pull that out, make a slide tool, because there's all this stuff you need for slides, That if you put it in figma design, now you've got a complicated UI, a…”
Field: Figma's AI features primarily use third-party models
“Right now, a lot of the work we're doing is actually with third-party models, and so that's something that we have less control over.”
Field: Two-thirds of Figma users are non-designers
“From the start, it's been like one-third designers consistently, and the other two-thirds are non-designers.”
Field: Over 80% of Figma users are outside the United States
“So even from the start, over 80% of our weekly active users were outside the United States.”
Field: Figma's original seed pitch was murky and unfocused
“If you looked at the seed pitch for Figma in June it was all over the place. Like, we were saying we're gonna do, like, a million things. None of it made sense. It was all very murky. So, yeah, I'm pretty impressed that Danny at Index was like, yes, let's go. …”
Field: Figma's first customers were Notion and Coda
“You know, like our first customers were Notion and Coda. Coda was called Krypton at the time.”
Field: Figma's first text rendering came from a meme generator
“Our first text rendering in Figma came from the moon generator.”
Field: Figma Built FigJam and Slides From Observed User Behaviors
“You know, FigJam, brainstorming. It was a behavior people were doing in Figma. We saw it, especially as the pandemic hit. It's like, okay, let's pull it out into this new product. And slides. Like, people are creating all these slides in Figma design. Okay, gr…”
Field: Figma founders initially chose between building drones or WebGL software
“The two answers that we came up with that we also felt deep conviction in. One was drones and quadcopters. The other one was WebGL. And Evan, after about a month or so, said, hey, like, not into drones for all sorts of various reasons. That was kind of the one…”
Field: Figma's founders almost built a profitable meme generator in 2012
“I think it was, for sure, would have been the best one in the market. And I'm, my thesis was right, by the way. Look at the exponential curve of memes since 2012. Yeah we would have made some money there.”
Field: Figma CEO Dylan Field was a child actor before tech
“When I was growing up, I was a child actor, not like a child actor that got into like anything really cool that you know about, like commercials and some TV and stuff, but as part of that, you audition constantly, and basically you constantly get rejected.”
Field: Figma founders did not settle on core product until mid-2013
“We really started in earnest August whereas we started talking about it more December of 20 11. So it took a while to get to the point where we started. And then from there, I would say it was at least June or July of 2013 before we went all in on, okay, let's…”